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In Pursuit of Cultural Hegemony
By Zombie Sep 02, 2010 3:35 PM ET
[This is Part IV of a five-part essay; if you haven't yet seen them, first read Part I, Part II, and Part III.]
While educators may be unconsciously relying on dubious theories of psychological modeling (as mentioned in yesterday's essay) to justify the unrelenting ethnic tokenism in our nation's schoolbooks, their official explanation revolves around the supposed need to boost students' "self-esteem." Those kids who do poorly in school, the theory goes, fail only because they have low self-esteem, leading to low expectations. Therefore, the best way to boost performance for struggling students is not to make their curriculum more challenging or to tailor it to their needs, but rather to use the curriculum as a mechanism to improve students' self-image. If kids love themselves, the educational theorists claim, they'll want to succeed, and if they want to succeed, they will succeed. Problem solved!
And so the entire educational system has systematically been re-tooled to focus on self-esteem building. In early grades this involves unsubtle classroom activities — assignments, songs, everybody-wins "contests" — directly informing each student how wonderful they are. In later grades, however, kids begin to grow more sophisticated and skeptical of such heavy-handed methods, so the curriculum designers "cleverly" embed self-esteem building hidden messages into the reading material where it can work on each student's subconscious. Usually this involves praising and glamorizing "heroes" who just happen to share some ethnic/cultural/gender/appearance attribute with kids in the class, the assumption being that the students' minds will internalize the message, "If this hero who looks just like me can succeed, then so can I!"
Needless to say, this is the biggest crock of baloney ever foisted on the American public. True self-esteem is not a precursor to achievement and success, it comes as the natural consequence of achievement and success. It's something you earn, not something you're given. And to the extent that one can artificially induce baseless self-esteem in someone who has not done anything noteworthy to earn it, one has only succeeded in creating a child with a personality disorder whose swollen ego and sense of entitlement will only later serve as a hindrance in adult real-world interactions.
All of that is brushed aside by the now-prevailing self-esteem mantra. And since statistics show that in most school districts there is a higher percentage of minority students struggling academically, the liberal curriculum designers invariably populate textbooks with inspirational minority heroes, thinking this will provide enough of a self-esteem boost to "eliminate the achievement gap."
The end result of this self-esteem paradigm (or at least the leftist implementation of it) is a complete abandonment of any pretense of historical accuracy, as the following example illustrates.
Carver and Maxwell: a Tale of Two Scientists
Like most students in post-WWII America, throughout my schooling I was taught repeated lessons about George Washington Carver, a famed African-American agricultural scientist. My teachers always remained a little vague about what exactly his scientific achievements were, but we learned in no uncertain terms that Carver was a Great Scientist who must be respected and admired now and forever.
Years later, while taking a History of Science course in graduate school, I learned about a 19th-century Scottish physicist named James Clerk Maxwell. Prior to taking that class, I had never heard of the guy.
Now, older and wiser, looking at all this in retrospect, something uneasy dawns on me. Waaaaiiiiit a minute. What was that all about? Why was I (and just about every other kid in America) endlessly instructed on the glories of Carver, but never even apprised of Maxwell's existence? Therein lies an instructional tale.
George Washington Carver, while perhaps being a good person, an altruistic person, and one of the first African-Americans to receive notoriety for his intellectual pursuits, was in fact not a "great scientist" nor one who made any significant scientific breakthroughs.
Just as with Roy Benavidez (the military hero mentioned in Part III of this essay), it's not that I seek to criticize Carver. Did George Washington Carver raise himself up by his own bootstraps and intellect during an era of harsh segregation to become a respected professor and researcher? Yes. Did he strive to help his fellow man? Yes. Was he among the first black men to achieve national fame? Yes. So: Should George Washington Carver be included in textbooks? Certainly. But…not to the exclusion of more important scientists. And his importance should not be vastly over-emphasized (as it currently is).
The problem with textbooks is that they have limited space in which to convey an infinitude of knowledge. So, for example with the history of science, there should be a triage system whereby the most important scientists are the first to be assured inclusion in textbooks, followed by the slightly less important scientists, and so on. But if a personage of comparatively minor importance gets elevated to a higher position in the prioritization, that necessarily means some other scientist, whose contributions on an objective basis were more significant, must get excluded.
So, if students only have time to learn about the contributions of just one scientist, you should probably start (for example) with Isaac Newton. If the book has space for just two, then also include Albert Einstein. If three or four, you toss in James Clerk Maxwell and Galileo. And so on down the line. This is important on a meritocratic basis, and also because the students are not just learning about these scientists' personal stories, but are in addition (hopefully) learning the fundamentals of science in the process.
Now, there have been many great scientists over the millennia. Hundreds and hundreds to choose from, in many different fields. And they are all (including George Washington Carver) worthy of admiration. Science is a noble pursuit. But, using purely objective criteria measuring the significance of what each scientist achieved or discovered, one would have to go through a thousand individuals of overwhelming historical importance before one came to George Washington Carver. He may have been a somewhat significant personage of social-historical note (i.e. as one of the first African-Americans of national stature), and he may have had good intentions, but he was not an important scientist. I fully realize that in this modern political environment it is simply not cool to point this out, but it's an essential component of the debate which remains unspoken.
George Washington Carver's reputation as a scientist is based on two things: advocating crop rotation, and developing alternate uses for the peanut. Let's look at each in turn.
Carver encouraged crop rotation to replenish soils in the South after decades of cotton monoculture had depleted the land's nutrients. Good idea, and an admirable economic suggestion — but it was not a scientific breakthrough, or even something particularly original. Many other people in Carver's era had been recommending the same thing for quite some time. And crop rotation (as a way to replenish soils) had been standard practice in Europe, the Middle East, China, ancient Rome and even ancient Mesopotamia for thousands of years. So, while it may have been a wise policy, it was not a scientific achievement.
Carver also supposedly developed hundreds of uses for peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans. However, he never kept lab notes, so we have no idea what any of his formulas were. Furthermore, not a single one of his novel agricultural products turned out to be be useful:
After his death the Carver Museum, which he had helped create at Tuskegee, credited him with developing 287 peanut commodities. One hundred twenty-three were foods and beverages, 68 were paints or dyes, and the rest were livestock foods, cosmetics, medicinal preparations, and miscellaneous uncategorized items. The catalog was inflated by much near duplication: among the individual entries were bar candy, chocolate-coated peanuts, and peanut chocolate fudge; all-purpose cream, face cream, face lotion, and hand cream; thirty cloth dyes, nineteen leather dyes, and seventeen wood stains. Many items were clearly not original with Carver–even "salted peanuts" was on the list (though peanut butter was not). Nor could the efficacy of every preparation, such as a "face bleach and tan remover," be taken for granted. Since Carver left no formulas for these products other than a single patented peanut cosmetic, later investigators were unable to evaluate or confirm his production of many of them.
Along with the peanut Carver championed the sweet potato, a nutritional complement also well suited to Southern soils. Man could live by the peanut and sweet potato alone, he asserted, for together they constituted a balanced ration. Again he publicized the crop's potential in quantitative terms. "The sweet potato products number 107 up to date," he told the congressional committee during his peanut presentation. "I have not finished working with them yet."
Working almost entirely alone, Carver was uncommunicative about his laboratory procedures. A visiting chemist from nearby Auburn University found that he evaded all questions about how his products were made. G. Lake Imes recalled as "enigmatic" his replies to inquisitive visitors to his laboratory. Robert L. Vann, a black journalist, asked him if he had recorded the formulas for his many discoveries. "To my amazement," Vann reported, "Dr. Carver looked at me and smiled and said, 'I have all of these formulas, but I have not written them down yet.'"
What explanation of his scientific achievements Carver did offer was not calculated to satisfy other scientists. Speaking in 1924 at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York, he declared that he never used books in his work and depended on divine revelation for his product ideas and methods. In later addresses he often repeated his laboratory conversations with "Mr. Creator," who told him what to do.
Now, compare Carver's "achievements" as a scientist with those of James Clerk Maxwell. For the purposes of this essay, I informally surveyed 20 friends and acquaintances; 19 out of the 20 had learned of George Washington Carver in school — but only 2 out of 20 had ever heard of James Clerk Maxwell. And yet, by most historical assessments, Maxwell was the third greatest scientist who ever lived, and the only one essentially on the same level as Newton and Einstein. Perhaps more than any single person, Maxwell paved the way for the modern world.
For the uninitiated: Maxwell revolutionized our understanding of the universe by discovering that electricity, magnetism and light were all manifestations of the same thing, the electromagnetic field; he was the first person to mathematically define the true nature of light itself; he overturned classical physics by finding a way to precisely describe matter (gas, in particular) using statistical models rather than individual measurements. Most of modern physics uses Maxwell as its launching pad; relativity and quantum mechanics are the direct descendants of his breakthroughs. Oh, and in his spare time, he invented color photography, among numerous other mind-boggling achievements.
Why mention Maxwell in this article? Because, despite his towering stature as one of the greatest and most influential geniuses who ever lived, he is rarely mentioned in any modern American K-12 textbooks, aside from a few Advanced Placement high school physics texts.
And yet George Washington Carver is nearly ubiquitous in schoolbooks for kids of all ages.
Now, if Carver was simply held up to students as an inspirational figure who overcame poverty and racism to achieve self-dignity, I'd have no quarrel with his ubiquity. But the problem is the endless insistence by the teachers and the books on Carver's greatness as a scientist. Because if he was simply (but more accurately) portrayed as an underprivileged black man who rose through his own smarts and diligence to become a run-of-the-mill professor and nothing more, then the fable would not be so inspirational.
And so the story of Carver has been embroidered and exaggerated over the years, until he has become this towering untouchable genius of major historical significance. Or, as one of the innumerable online instructional materials about him puts it, "He was one of the finest scientists the world has ever known."
Meanwhile, poor Maxwell, who really was "one of the finest scientists the world has ever known," is totally ignored.
Why? Because education is no longer about facts. It's about feelings. It's about self-esteem building. It's a group therapy session, a community-wide pep talk sprinkled with manufactured heroes and role models whose tales are carefully crafted to be uplifting, facts be damned. And since the dominant Left's ruinous insistence on identity politics insures that our selfhood is primarily defined by our ethnicity, we end up believing that George Washington Carver really must have been a great scientist — not because of his actual discoveries, but because it serves a purpose to believe so.
The Rise of the Special Interest Groups
The battle over textbook bias and falsehoods is not limited strictly to the left-right cleavage. All sorts of special interest groups, with varying degrees of success, insist that their version of reality be included in textbooks — often at the expense of the truth. For example, an influx of strings-attached Saudi money led to textbooks which taught that Muslims discovered America before Columbus, based entirely on wishful thinking. Islamic religious indoctrination, masquerading as neutral lessons about the Middle East, have become commonplace in American schools over the last decade.
The list goes on: Environmentalists, Native Americans, feminists, Hispanics, gay activists, the disabled, and many more groups have joined the fray to ensure that American educational curriculum does not give them short shrift. The end result is that much of our classroom time is spent reciting the grievance litanies of every self-defined social subgroup in America.
This fracturing of education into a million useless little pieces is not a bug of the leftist agenda — it's a feature. The goal is (and has been for years) to use the public schools to transform American culture, in order to make it ripe for a communist revolution.
That's right: communist. No more pussyfooting around. To quote from part of a photo-essay I published two years ago,
That's right, I said "commie." The word usually elicits one of two reactions:
Mainstream average Americans — who have been duped into thinking that communism is a relic of the past which disappeared with the fall of the Soviet Union — feel that anyone still battling against imaginary Cold War enemies must be some sort of Dr. Strangelove-esque kook who worries about Precious Bodily Fluids and builds fallout shelters in the basement; OR…
Communists themselves — who thought it was safe to emerge from the shadows now that the world's attention was drawn elsewhere after the fall of the Berlin Wall — react to the word with revulsion and fury, accusing anyone who says it of being a fascist McCarthyite intent on persecuting innocent Americans with hysterical witch hunts.
There's one little detail, however, that tends to get overlooked: The communists are still here, and they're just as dangerous as they ever were, and have not relinquished their goal of overthrowing the United States and bringing an end to the capitalist system. And the reason I'm aware of this fact perhaps more than the typical person is that I often attend anti-war rallies, which is where communists really come out of the woodwork.
And the other arena in which communist ideology never went away is academia, and in particular the educational world. The state sponsors of communism (i.e. The Soviet Union) have mostly ceased to exist, but the ideology remains as strong as ever.
Perhaps the most accurate word to describe the leftist takeover of education is Gramscianism, yet since so few people are familiar with the term, "communism" drives the point home more forcefully. But most Americans would be well-served to learn a bit about Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist philosopher whose ideas have grown to be as influential as those of Karl Marx himself.
Illustration by Buzzsawmonkey
Wikipedia actually has a fairly honest encapsulation of Gramsci's thesis, which I'll quote here to avoid accusations that I chose a biased source:
Hegemony was a concept previously used by Marxists such as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin to indicate the political leadership of the working-class in a democratic revolution, but developed by Gramsci into an acute analysis to explain why the 'inevitable' socialist revolution predicted by orthodox Marxism had not occurred by the early 20th century. Capitalism, it seemed, was even more entrenched than ever. Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the 'common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting.
The working class needed to develop a culture of its own, which would overthrow the notion that bourgeois values represented 'natural' or 'normal' values for society, and would attract the oppressed and intellectual classes to the cause of the proletariat. Lenin held that culture was 'ancillary' to political objectives but for Gramsci it was fundamental to the attainment of power that cultural hegemony be achieved first. …
Intellectuals and education
… [Gramsci] claimed that modern intellectuals were not simply talkers, but directors and organisers who helped build society and produce hegemony by means of ideological apparatuses such as education and the media. Furthermore, he distinguished between a 'traditional' intelligentsia which sees itself (wrongly) as a class apart from society, and the thinking groups which every class produces from its own ranks 'organically'. Such 'organic' intellectuals do not simply describe social life in accordance with scientific rules, but rather articulate, through the language of culture, the feelings and experiences which the masses could not express for themselves. The need to create a working-class culture relates to Gramsci's call for a kind of education that could develop working-class intellectuals, who would not simply introduce Marxist ideology from without the proletariat, but rather renovate and make critical of the status quo the already existing intellectual activity of the masses. His ideas about an education system for this purpose correspond with the notion of critical pedagogy and popular education as theorized and practised in later decades by Paulo Freire in Brazil, and have much in common with the thought of Frantz Fanon. For this reason, partisans of adult and popular education consider Gramsci an important voice to this day.
Translated into practical terms and updated from its early-20th-century Italian cultural setting, Gramsci's thesis is understood by the modern left to mean:
Socialist revolution will never happen in a nation if its culture continually reaffirms and enshrines middle-class capitalist values. Thus, in order to pave the way for the arrival of a communist state, radicals must first insinuate themselves into and/or influence the media and educational system, and from these positions of influence change public attitudes about the status quo. To achieve political hegemony, you must first achieve cultural hegemony.
This was a significant change from Marx's and Lenin's original ideas about communist revolution, which basically involved simply seizing power, public opinion be damned, and afterward propagandizing the masses to accept the new order. Gramsci realized that Marx had it reversed, and that the propaganda and indoctrination must happen first, in order to make the populace open to the idea of revolution; otherwise, rendered complacent by middle-class values and comforts, the populace would never consent to the upheaval of a revolution.
The media and public schools were correctly identified by Gramsci as the most influential cultural institutions, and it was therefore those that the left realized must be targeted.
It is this sophisticated Gramscian plan, and not the more brutish Marxist idea of simply seizing power by force, which has guided leftist thought in America since WWII. And it is why the media and education have, over time, been slowly turned into engines of leftist propaganda. Gramscianism matured into "critical pedagogy" which is the real-world application of his educational theories, and countless left-leaning young adults have for decades been nudged toward careers in education and the media. Some time ago, we crossed a threshold in which the Gramscian infiltrators no longer had to ply their trade surreptitiously, but became the majority in the media and in education, and after that point the process accelerated rapidly as they took over both fields and turned them into ideological weapons.
(As an aside: Note also that Wikipedia correctly identifies Frantz Fanon as a Gramscian thinker. "At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy." — Barack Obama, in Dreams of My Father.)
This explains the otherwise mystifying insistence by leftist educators on ignoring facts in favor of "politically correct" ideas and frameworks. I have little doubt that the majority of teachers and educators don't even know they're part of a Gramscian project but still plow ahead with their ideologically driven careers anyway, unaware that they are myrmidons paving the way for revolution.
Don't miss the final installment, with a way out of this mess:
Part V: Proposals for an Educational Renaissance
Part I: Ideological War Spells Doom for America's Schoolkids
Part II: What's the Matter with Texas?
Part III: Indoctrination Nation
Part IV: In Pursuit of Cultural Hegemony


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Question: Has Anyone Ever Drowned In The Dead Sea?
Can you walk on the Dead Sea?
Is the Dead Sea toxic?
How deep is the Dead Sea?
Why is the Dead Sea shrinking?
Can I drown in the Dead Sea?
How did the Dead Sea get so salty?
How long should you stay in the Dead Sea?
Is the Dead Sea clean?
Why dont people drown in the Dead Sea?
Why are there no boats on the Dead Sea?
Is the Dead Sea safe to visit?
Do you have to pay to go to the Dead Sea?
Can I swim in the Dead Sea?
Is there any life in the Dead Sea?
Can you cross the Dead Sea?
How old is the Dead Sea?
Will the Dead Sea ruin my bathing suit?
Floating is the preferred method of immersion at the Dead Sea.
Because of its salinity (about eight to nine times that of most sea water), the buoyancy is like nothing you've experienced before: You can't sink.
Walk in to a depth of about waist height and lean back..
The Dead Sea is the lowest point on Earth at about 1,400 feet (430 metres) below sea level. Its waters are 10 times saltier than regular sea water. While full of therapeutic minerals, the water is toxic to ingest. … The salty water is so buoyant that swimmers can't sink.
306 mDead Sea/Max depth
The Dead Sea is shrinking, and as it recedes, the fresh water aquifers along the perimeter of the lake are receding along with it. As this fresh water diffuses into salt deposits beneath the surface of the shoreline, the water slowly dissolves the deposits until the earth above collapses without warning.
2. Is it possible to drown in it? Although whoever enters the water immediately floats, you should keep in mind that it is still possible to drown in the Dead Sea. This happens when swimmers get caught in strong winds, flip over and swallowing the salty water.
NOAA estimates that the water in the Dead Sea is five to nine times as briny as seawater. … In the arid low-lying desert, the water that collects in the Dead Sea evaporates more quickly than water in the open ocean, leaving vast quantities of salt behind, the MDSRC explains.
10 minutesDo not stay in for more than 10 minutes. You can get out and then go back in again but each time should be no longer than 10 minutes. 3. Do not get in if you have any open cuts or sores.
Do: Go swimming in the Dead Sea And you legit don't need to do a single thing other than physically get in the water, which is the entire point: the Dead Sea has such high salinity that you'll effortlessly float, so there's no need for concern if you don't consider yourself a swimmer.
Anyone can easily float in the Dead Sea because of natural buoyancy. In this respect the Dead Sea is similar to the Great Salt Lake in Utah in the United States. An unusual feature of the Dead Sea is its discharge of asphalt.
At 9.6 times saltier than the ocean, the Dead Sea is so salty fish can't swim in it, boats can't sail on it, and animals can't survive around it.
A trip to Jordan is not complete until you visit the historic Dead Sea. But, you should be aware of the dangers. The first danger is to be aware of people who target tourists at the Dead Sea. … The other danger at the Dead Sea is the water itself.
Visiting the Dead Sea Popular beaches include the Ein Gedi Beach and the beach at the Ein Bokek resort (where many hotels offer private beaches – see below). Some beaches charge an entry fee. … The Dead Sea Day Trip runs daily and provides you with the whole day at the beach!
There is no such thing as swimming in the Dead Sea. When you sit your butt down in the water, it essentially feels as though you're floating in a pool with a plastic noodle. Only there's no noodle. Your feet and shoulders rise and bob, and it takes a few seconds of getting used to.
There are no plants, fish, or any other visible life in the sea. Its salt concentration is a staggering 33.7%, 8.6 times saltier than ocean water, which is only about 3.5% salt. … Yet, for now, life goes on. Biologists have known since the 1930s the lake is "not dead yet".
Around 30 swimmers from around the world made history yesterday by becoming the first people to swim across the entire Dead Sea. While the swim is only about 11 miles long, the dense salt content of the water makes it slow going and nearly impossible to swim normally.
About 3 million years ago, water filled the graben, forming the Dead Sea, which was then part of a long bay of the Mediterranean Sea. A million years later, tectonic activity lifted the land to the west, isolating the Dead Sea from the Mediterranean.
The salt concentration can discolor your bathing suit. On that note, wear an old one.
Question: Why Do Guys Act Like They Don'T Care After A Break Up?
Do guys hurt after a breakup? Many guys'
Question: Can You Develop Feelings Through Texting?
Can you develop feelings for someone online?
Quick Answer: How Much Does It Cost To Get Blood Type Tested?
How much does a blood type test cost without insurance?
Is 2 Ms Ping Good?
How do you Ping 100 times? Run a Ping TestHold the
What To Say Instead Of I Love You To The Moon And Back?
What does the phrase I love you to the moon and back mean?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Founded in 2016, Leechiu Property Consultants was already the third biggest firm in the brokerage business last year.
"This year I'm very confident that we will be the largest by revenue, by a very wide margin in the brokerage business," says David Leechiu.
Parents won't admit this to their children but sometimes doing badly in school can lead to something good. Just ask David Leechiu, the CEO of Leechiu Property Consultants, the country's leading commercial property brokerage founded only two years ago.
Leechiu seemed differently wired from his school mates. He preferred the company of older people to learn about practical matters in the world of business, and was bored by seemingly useless academic subjects.
His teenage years also coincided with a drastic reversal in his family's fortune after a fire wiped out his parents' appliance shop at the Araneta Center in Cubao, Quezon City, distracting him further. "That kind of burned in my memory—how painful it is to not have money and to lose. It's good when you're starting from scratch and then you're going up. That's okay because you don't know what you don't have. But it's very painful to go from having something to losing (it)," he said.
Because of his spotty academic record, he couldn't get into what were considered the country's top three schools—Ateneo de Manila University, De La Salle University and the University of the Philippines.
Only one school called him for an interview, rather than just look at his dismal high school grades, and eventually agreed to take him in. This was the Center for Research and Communication (CRC, which is now the University of Asia and the Pacific), which had just launched its undergraduate degree programs in economics and business back then. Before that, CRC, which was founded by members of Catholic lay order Opus Dei, was just offering graduate degrees in business economics.
Unlike his troubled stint in Xavier School, Leechiu thrived in CRC. Alongside the usual liberal arts subjects such as philosophy, humanities and social sciences, he was learning about the real world of business and the economy. Because of the school's close ties to business, students didn't just learn academically but got to interact with company leaders and executives. For the first time, he got to visit the stock exchange, and was immediately amazed by its potential. He wondered why he and other students didn't learn about it earlier in high school.
Leechiu attended CRC from 1990 to 1994, pursuing a degree in Entrepreneurial Management. In those four years, he learned so much from respected mentors, including the CRC founder Bernardo Villegas, one of the country's most brilliant economists. "It was a fantastic school. I would always, always, always encourage people to go to that school," he said.
He credits CRC for giving him a well-rounded education as well as meaningful interactions with the business world that gave him an uncanny ability to make a coherent sense of what's happening around him and spot emerging trends. "My strengths were never accounting or finance. I have a very short attention span. But my mom and my dad exposed me to the world of sales and marketing, and then CRC exposed me to the world of big corporates," he said.
Leechiu managed to get into the property industry shortly after it began booming in the mid-1990s. He had quit his first job in a paint manufacturing company and was visiting CRC when he ran into Ramon Cuervo III, son of the founder of one of the country's most established property appraisal and brokerage companies then, Cuervo Appraisers. The younger Cuervo invited him to join their company, which Leechiu readily accepted.
In Cuervo, Leechiu had the choice to make a lot of money immediately by going into sales or to make less money but learn a lot about the industry by working as an executive assistant of the CEO.
"I could've had a career just pushing flyers, which is fine, and I would do five deals a year, maybe and I would make some money, a lot of money. Or I can make less money, but I will be armed with a lot of information and a different kind of work ethic and a different way of doing things," he recalled his options then. "And that's what allowed me to differentiate myself against other people in the industry. And I had great mentors and a lot of people helped me along the way."
Though he was tempted by the money to be made, Leechiu opted to work as an executive assistant and try to learn as much as he could from the company's founder.
"It was a very good environment, fantastic training," Leechiu recalled. Cuervo Appraisers partnered with foreign company Richard Ellis (now CBRE) during that time. "I saw two worlds exist and, you know, sometimes they would clash. But they existed quite well and that's where you saw the need for competence, information and relationship," he said.
Young and a local, Leechiu felt disadvantaged vis-à-vis expatriates also doing property deals in Manila. "At that time, 1992 to 2000, if you weren't an expat, if you weren't a Westerner, [it was] so hard to penetrate and win the confidence of other expats," he recalled. "They would do deals in the bars, talk about cricket and football and rugby. It's like, I don't even play golf, I don't even play tennis."
He added: "At that time the locals were very, you know…it's a very colonial mindset. I would go to functions at the American Chamber (of Commerce and Industry) and nobody would even mind us because, one, we were young, and two, we were locals."
However, his boss, Mark Townsend, one of the expats sent by Richard Ellis to work with Cuervo, encouraged him to persevere. "It doesn't matter how old you are, how young you are, how inexperienced you are," he recalled Townsend telling him. "But you have to know your stuff, because without that stuff, you won't introduce any value."
Because of these kinds of stretch assignments, Leechiu gained confidence despite his young age and local background. He learned that the most important thing was to be thoroughly knowledgeable about the industry. "It's not enough to be a nice guy, it's not enough to be honest and sincere. You have to be brutally competent, hardworking and you're always questioning, always asking yourself what's changing," he recalled the factors that helped him become successful as a property broker.
After three years, Leechiu left Cuervo Associates to join another property brokerage firm—the Philippine unit of international property brokerage Savills, which at that time was under First Pacific Ltd. of Hong Kong, the parent firm of Metro Pacific Investment Corp.
The timing was inauspicious as it was just the year after the Asian financial crisis erupted in 1997. He was just 25 years old.
The company survived the regional currency crisis even though the peso-dollar rate fell sharply from Php29.5/$1 to Php51/$1 between 1997 and 2001. By then, Leechiu was even appointed general manager of Savills' Philippine unit.
However, a second bout of massive currency depreciation then hit the Philippine economy, triggered by the ouster of former President Joseph Estrada in 2001 and the attempted coups against his successor, former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, in 2003. It was too much for Savills, which was losing from the currency depreciation even though its Philippine unit was quite profitable in peso terms.
In 2003, Savills made the decision to exit the Philippine market and sell the entire business to Leechiu. "Our (Savills') revenues were climbing but the currency was falling so fast. We were making money but the moment you convert everything back to dollars, they were losing money," he explained.
So, together with his father-in-law and another partner, he bought the Savills franchise and put up Php3 million to start Leechiu & Associates. For the first time in his life, Leechiu wasn't working for somebody else but was working for himself. Finally, he was a full-fledged entrepreneur.
It was an exciting time, but it was not easy. From Savills' original employee count of 50, Leechiu had to reduce the staff to 17. They also went from a 350-square-meter office to a 75-square-meter workspace. "We had to cut everything. Cut all the costs, cut to the bare minimum and then maximize the margins. We tried to make that stretch as much as we can," he recounted.
Through such painful cost-cutting, the company began to make money. The company's cash flow turned positive by the sixth month, and they were already giving dividends by the 18th month.
More importantly, the Philippines then was at the cusp of the call center and business process outsourcing (BPO) boom, though it wasn't apparent to anybody then because it was masked by the political instability throughout the entire term of former President Macapagal Arroyo.
So, when the BPO industry boomed in the following years, he already knew what to do. "From 2000, we were doing a lot of deals with these call centers because we were familiar with the needs," he said.
By all accounts, Leechiu's first foray into entrepreneurship was a big success as it coincided with a prolonged property boom fueled by the rise of the BPO industry in the Philippines.
From annual demand of around 90,000 square meters of office space in 2000, it has since grown to 775,000 square meters today. Leechiu said this growth has been continuous and unbroken. "In fact we were the only country in the world that didn't contract in demand," he added. He said Metro Manila is, in fact, one of the top four markets in the world in terms of real estate demand volume after Beijing, Shanghai and Tokyo.
Even the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008 didn't dampen demand for commercial property in the Philippines, which continued to grow as US companies located some functions offshore in a bid to cut costs and remain viable. Though American companies were downsizing in the US itself, the BPO industry boomed in the Philippines and other countries.
In a sign that the global financial crisis didn't hurt the country's outlook at all, international property brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. (JLL) offered to acquire all the shares of Leechiu & Associates from Leechiu and two other partners in 2008.
The offer was too good to pass up, and so Leechiu, his father-in-law and another partner agreed to accept JLL's acquisition offer. In addition, they also agreed to stay with the company and run its operations.
That created a minor resentment among JLL's local staff in Manila. They asked: "Hey, we bought your business. Why are you now our boss?" The answer was clear in Leechiu's mind though it may have been hard to accept for others. "They bought the business so that they can hire all of us," said Leechiu.
In the end, there was really no reason for JLL's local staff to be apprehensive. Though both JLL and Leechiu & Associates competed in at least two segments of the property consultancy business, Leechiu decided he didn't want to fire anybody from both companies for redundancy. "The market was big enough to have all those people under one roof," he said.
True to Leechiu's words, JLL's business grew even more, expanding four times between 2008 and 2016. Revenues surged from Php300 million to about Php1.2 billion during the eight-year period. "We went from an insignificant organization to just barely in the Top 1,000. I gave that company the best years of my life, actually," said Leechiu.
Today, the 45-year-old businessman is now doing his own thing again. He put up Leechiu Property Consultants (LPC) shortly after leaving JLL in 2016.
Leechiu shared LPC was already the third biggest firm in the brokerage business last year, which was only their second year of operations. "This year I'm very confident that we will be the largest by revenue, by a very wide margin in the brokerage business," he said.
Perhaps it's just as well that Leechiu decided to set up an independent property brokerage operation at this point when the property market is facing both exciting and challenging prospects.
On one hand, sustained economic growth and the government's ambitious infrastructure building program are seen to drive demand for both residential and commercial property in the years to come. However, one of the main drivers of property demand, the BPO sector, also seems to be going through a slow patch due to domestic policy uncertainties as well as technologicial shifts, particularly the rise of AI and automation.
Indeed, BPO take-up of office space fell for the first time in 2017 in both relative and absolute terms. Fortunately, the slack from BPOs was offset by demand from a new and emerging sector—Chinese offshore gaming entities—making it possible for overall demand for office space in Metro Manila to grow in 2017. "If not for online gaming the market would have collapsed big time," said Leechiu.
While demand for office space from BPOs seem to be recovering this year, rising by 35.5 percent in 2018, the challenges remain as the Philippine government seems determined to push through with legislation sharply reducing if not removing the sector's tax holidays and incentives. The House of Representatives is currently considering proposed bills, the so-called Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) II, that would cut corporate income taxes and overhaul tax incentives.
In addition, the spread of AI technologies in the BPO sector, particularly robotic process automation (RPA), could dampen the demand for additional office spaces as the technologies reduce the number of people needed to do the same amount of work as before.
It remains to be seen how the BPO sector will fare amid these emerging policy and technological challenges.
But Leechiu is not leaving things to chance. Already, he is investing in an AI company that is developing a technology that makes it possible for Philippine-based call center agents to work with AI algorithms and take on higher value jobs. Though he is sparing with the details of the investment, he confirmed he is entering the space in part to learn how AI will impact businesses in the Philippines.
It all fits well with his view that only three industries will shape Philippine economy and business in the next three decades or so. These are today's counterparts of the stock market and property sector that were on the rise when he graduated from college in the 1990s.


text:
Q: Doing some calculations in mysql, numbers off when using GROUP BY Im running the following query to get the stats for a user, based on which I pay them.
SELECT hit_paylevel, sum(hit_uniques) as day_unique_hits
       , (sum(hit_uniques)/1000)*hit_paylevel as day_earnings
       , hit_date
FROM daily_hits
WHERE hit_user = 'xxx' AND hit_date >= '2011-05-01' AND hit_date < '2011-06-01'
GROUP BY hit_user

The table in question looks like this:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `daily_hits` (
  `hit_itemid` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `hit_mainid` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `hit_user` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `hit_date` date NOT NULL,
  `hit_hits` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `hit_uniques` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `hit_embed` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `hit_paylevel` int(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT '1',
  PRIMARY KEY (`hit_itemid`,`hit_date`),
  KEY `hit_user` (`hit_user`),
  KEY `hit_mainid` (`hit_mainid`,`hit_date`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

The problem in the calculation has to do with the hit_paylevel which acts as a multiplier. Default is one, the other option is 2 or 3, which essentially doubles or triples the earnings for that day.
If I loop through the days, the daily day_earnings is correct, its just that when I group them, it calculates everything as paylevel 1. This happens if the user was paylevel 1 in the beginning, and was later upgraded to a higher level. if user is pay level 2 from the start, it also calculates everything correctly.

A: Shouldn't this be sum(hit_uniques * hit_paylevel) / 1000?

A: Like @Denis said:
Change the query to
SELECT hit_paylevel, sum(hit_uniques) as day_unique_hits
       , sum(hit_uniques * hit_paylevel) / 1000 as day_earnings
       , hit_date
FROM daily_hits
WHERE hit_user = 'xxx' AND hit_date >= '2011-05-01' AND hit_date < '2011-06-01'
GROUP BY hit_user;

Why this fixes the problem
Doing the hit_paylevel outside the sum, first sums all hit_uniques and then picks a random hit_paylevel to multiply it by.
Not what you want. If you do both columns inside the sum MySQL will pair up the correct hit_uniques and hit_paylevels.
The dangers of group by
This is an important thing to remember on MySQL.
The group by clause works different from other databases.
On MSSQL *(or Oracle or PostgreSQL) you would have gotten an error

non-aggregate expression must appear in group by clause

Or words to that effect.
In your original query hit_paylevel is not in an aggregate (sum) and it's also not in the group by clause, so MySQL just picks a value at random.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


ESA's National Training School has some level of course approval by the following regulatory agencies. Approvals depend upon the licensing requirements and may not include all ESA NTS offered courses. Please check the specific 'state' page on our e-catalog site to see a full list of ESA NTS courses approved.


Diana Ross performs onstage during the 61st Annual GRAMMY Awards on February 10, 2019 in Los Angeles, California.
HBO's Leaving Neverland provided space to two of Michael Jackson's accusers, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, to fully share their stories documenting the alleged abuse they suffered at the hands of the pop star. And once it was released, many people—fans, friends, and family alike—took their own space to express their emotions surrounding it. Some of it was agreeable, some of it was disagreeable. None of it was pretty.
One person especially close to the late King of Pop, Ms. Diana Ross, decided to share her own thoughts. On Saturday, Ms. Ross took to Twitter to release something that had apparently been weighing on her heart.
"I believe and trust that Michael Jackson was and is a magnificent, incredible force to me and to many others," she tweeted. No other words on whether or not she believed the victims in the documentary, but how she felt about him as a person and performer. Of course, there can be certain implications involved when you consider the timing of this expressed praise.
As The Guardian noted, the end of her tweet, "Stop in the name of love," appeared to be a directive to those criticizing Jackson, based on the documentary (as well as a reference to her hit with The Supremes).
The dichotomy—it's hard to fathom, yet it happens all the time.
Barbra Streisand recently came under fire for her comments regarding Robson and Safechuck, but has since attempted to clarify and has apologized.


Finance manager Michelle Lee, 38, did not realise that her marriage was going south until her 6-year-old daughter Chloe asked if she and daddy were getting a divorce. She had noticed that her parents hardly spoke to each other.
However, it was then that Lee realised how little she interacted with her husband. After spending the entire day at work, they'd either be on their mobile devices when they returned home, or he'd watch soccer on TV, while she read.
Lee acknowledges that they'd speak to each other for only several minutes a day, even on weekends. The couple would de busy ferrying their three children to different enrichment classes, or he'd go for golf while she attended Zumba classes.
Clinical psychologist Dr Sara Delia Menon of Alliance Counselling explains that it is common for couples to experience a dip in satisfaction or closeness when manoeuvring transitions such as having children, changing jobs or homes.
Noting that each partner's ideas on the roles and responsibilities in their relationship can evolve over time, Dr Menon points out that when they do not talk about the changes in expectations, it can lead to frustration and resentment.
Couples counselling should not be a last resort and the myth that the relationship should be bad before seeking help should be debunked.
If you or your spouse aren't comfortable sharing their problems in front of a stranger, learn ways to strengthen your marriage before deciding that you need couple's therapy.
Typically, when a couple faces a tough situation, they react instinctively on emotions alone, which might cloud good judgment. Nazar notes that this is likely to aggravate the situation and compound relationship stress.
"Effective communication is key in maintaining a strong relationship, and even more so in the situation when a couple is facing relationship issues. The first course of action is to call a 'time out' to reflect on the situation, before coming back together to discuss a holistic solution," she explains.
Setting aside time to reflect is a useful method to make sure that you and your spouse are focused on understanding each other's concerns and coming to a compromise.
Checking in with your partner during the day signals interest in what he or she is doing. Take the initiative to send simple messages such as "Have you eaten your lunch??" or "Did the meeting with the client go well?"' or "What would you like to have for dinner tonight' to keep the communication channels open and flowing.
"Research shows that 'small things often' make the most sustainable difference in a relationship, rather than the occasional 'wow'' event/ occasion. Everyday gestures such as checking in with your partner, showing interest in his/ her day, responding to his/ her invitations to connect go a long way to building a relationship with longevity," states Dr Menon.
Most parents, especially mums, tend to relegate their spouse to second place once children come along. Changing the baby's diaper, midnight feeding, cooking and cleaning for the children, guiding them in homework, doing their laundry ― kids have a way of taking over your marriage, leaving no time and mood for romance or couple time.
So, it is important to put your marriage first ― make your spouse feel as important as your children, carve some uninterrupted time out each day to catch up with each other, find a caretaker for your kids and go for date nights.
Dr Menon suggests that you try and instil in the relationship a sense that you think about your partner and demonstrate these in ways that your partner will recognise and respond to. This is where Gary Chapmans work on love languages comes in handy. Figure out what your partner's love language and invest in words/actions/gestures of affection that will let him/her know that you are attentive and loving.
It is also important to eat together, as "A family that eats together, stays together". "Your relationship as a couple can be strengthened through shared commitment to your children and fostering a strong home for them. You can also use this opportunity over meals to catch up and reconnect with each other," Nazar notes.
Find an activity that you enjoy doing together and set aside time to do it.
Nazar says that she enjoys trying new eating places on date nights with her husband, as well as watching TV together ― especially laughing over comedies.
It may take up several hours or even a day, but going for marriage talks, seminars and bonding programmes lets you both explore other ideas and advice, so that you can better navigate the ups and downs of marriage for a stronger relationship.
There are also loads of relationship self-help books you can enjoy reading together, then applying the expert advice from these. Or even explore online relationship courses and quizzes.
Couples need to develop a strong commitment to making their relationship work and stick to it. There is no one-method-fits-all formula for a good relationship. What's essential is that you and your spouse are on the same page and both put in effort to get over this speed bump in your shared lives.


text:
Q: How to fit entire 2D world map on iPhone screen iOS? I  want to scale the entire 2D world so that it fits in an iPhone screen in landscape.  As you can see below, the map does not include the US and South America, or the north or south poles.   This is the most zoomed out view I can get.
I want to be able to see the entire earth from north to south, east to west.
It doesn't matter that there may be some white space at the left and right of the screen to fit the entire world in the view.
I have tried all the different map types (.hybrid, .satellite, .satellitehybrid etc ) but no solution.
It makes no difference using UIKit with MKMapView() or SwiftUI with Map(), you get the same results.
Any ideas how to do this ?
Here is my code (using SwiftUI):
struct MapExample: View {
@State private var region = MKCoordinateRegion(
    center: CLLocationCoordinate2D(
        latitude: 25.7617,
        longitude: 80.1918
    ),
    span: MKCoordinateSpan(
        latitudeDelta: 90,
        longitudeDelta: 360
    )
)

var body: some View {
    Map(coordinateRegion: $region)
    }
}


text:
April 21, 2015 - Albany, N.Y.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Issues the final Siting Approval for the Project
With this approval in hand, the Project has secured all of the federal and state siting permits necessary to proceed with construction. The permit authorizes TDI to construct the project pursuant to Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act and Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. The action taken by the Department of the Army caps the federal environmental review of the Project.
TDI CEO Donald Jessome said, "We are extremely pleased that the Army Corps has issued the final federal permit necessary in order for our project to move forward. The approval comes after an extremely thorough and detailed review, and we want to thank the management and staff of the Corps for their professional approach to processing the application. The terms of the permit reaffirm that our project will take appropriate steps to protect New York's environmental and commercial resources, and we are excited to have moved substantially closer to the moment when we will begin to deliver cleaner, lower-cost power to New York's residents and businesses."
The terms and conditions of the permit provide for cable installation practices and burial depths that are fully compatible with project plans, as well as the 2011 coastal zone consistency determination issued by the New York State Department of State, the 2013 Article VII state siting approval issued by the New York State Public Service Commission and the 2014 Presidential Permit issued by the Department of Energy.
About the Champlain Hudson Power Express
The Champlain Hudson Power Express Project is a completely buried, 333-mile HVDC transmission line that will be installed underground and underwater, originating at the U.S.-Canada border and running the length of Lake Champlain and through parts of the Hudson River to New York City.
In development since 2008, the project will bring 1,000 megawatts of clean, reliable energy to meet growing needs and is at the forefront of America's emerging "smart grid" revolution. The project is projected to reduce energy costs for consumers and businesses by $650 million a year once complete. These savings are estimated to create 2,400 new jobs across a wide spectrum of the economy and will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 2.2 million metric tons per year.
The project will also diversify the state's energy portfolio and increase the electric grid's safety and security by creating new, hardened infrastructure that is less susceptible to damage from natural disasters.
About TDI
TDI is a Blackstone portfolio company with offices in New York City and Albany, N.Y. that develops unique energy transmission projects in an environmentally responsible manner. The company is currently developing the Champlain Hudson Power Express (www.chpexpress.com). More information on the company is available at www.transmissiondevelopers.com.


text:
Home » Travel » Avoiding the royals: See less of Harry and Meghan in these remote New Zealand escapes
Avoiding the royals: See less of Harry and Meghan in these remote New Zealand escapes
With two members of Britain's most renowned family of state beneficiaries in the country, Jane Jurgens looks at the best places to avoid them
The royal couple started their tour in Wellington, before heading to Abel Tasman National Park, also visiting Auckland and making their only public appearance in Rotorua. If you're keen to avoid hearing about their every move, head for one of these boltholes.
With limited cellphone reception, New Zealand's northernmost point is the perfect location for a digital detox. Located at the tip of the Te Paki Recreation Reserve, it's a significant area to Maori, marking the point from which the wairua (spirits) of recently passed loved ones depart for the afterlife. At the edge of the cape, an iconic lighthouse overlooks as the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean. Cape Reinga is a three-hour drive from Paihia and DOC operate two campgrounds in the area, at Tapotupotu Bay and Kapowairua (Spirits Bay).
Stewart Island/Rakiura
The Duke and Duchess won't be going any further south than Abel Tasman National Park, so you're bound to avoid it all by heading to New Zealand's southernmost island. Mobile coverage is limited here, but it's the last thing you'll be thinking about when holed up in this remote and rugged location. Lose yourself on one of the island's many walking trails and keep an eye out for some of New Zealand's most endangered birds, or get out on the water for a spot of fishing. The royal couple won't even be a blip on your radar.
Surround Sound: looking down the majestic Milford Sound in New Zealand's Fijordland, in stunning #VR #panorama taken by Sito
Earlier this year, software engineer Hamish Campbell calculated the most remote place in New Zealand — using various data tools, he pinpointed the place furthest from any buildings and found it in Fiordland, in an unmade area at the south end of the bay of the Coal River mouth.
So I'm calling it to +/- a km – the south end of the bay of the Coal River mouth (not sure if that's the official name), some 29.8km north west of the Supper Cover Hut as the crow flies. -45.499,166.696 https://t.co/Evmv351jbJ pic.twitter.com/nxmtzxvtEX
For those looking to escape royal mania, Fiordland will have you covered — or rather, not covered as the area is bereft of mobile signals. It's also home to some of our most stunning landscapes, including the fiords of Milford Sound and Doubtful Sound, as well as the beautiful lakeside towns of Te Anau and Manapouri. It's almost a shame Harry and Meghan won't be visiting… almost.
Nor'easter Impacting Travel at Major Airports
Passengers 'wasting millions' on 'unnecessary' allocated seating fees
Lindblad Expeditions pledges carbon neutrality
Florida Removes Quarantine Mandate for New York Travelers
Forget Kobe beef – this is Japan's most expensive (and tastiest) steak
Discover the history-soaked destination offering FREE COVID insurance
Regenerative Farming Dinner features award winning produce ·


Peter Leitch, chairman of Motion Picture Production Industry Association of B.C., says the low Canadian dollar is good news to the local film industry.
Canada's low dollar vis-à-vis the U.S. greenback should give B.C.'s film and television industry a boost, says Peter Leitch, chairman of the Motion Picture Production Industry Association of B.C.
"It's obviously good news for us because the bulk of the work we do comes from Los Angeles," said Leitch.


text:
package tv.savageboy74.usefulthings.common.init;

import cpw.mods.fml.common.registry.GameRegistry;
import net.minecraft.item.Item;
import tv.savageboy74.usefulthings.common.items.*;

public class ModItems
{

    public static Item usefulSword = new UsefulSword();
    public static Item usefulHoe = new UsefulHoe();
    public static Item usefulAxe = new UsefulAxe();
    public static Item usefulShovel = new UsefulShovel();
    public static Item usefulPickaxe = new UsefulPickaxe();

    public static Item usefulHelmet = new UsefulArmor(0).setUnlocalizedName("usefulthings:usefulHelmet");
    public static Item usefulChest = new UsefulArmor(1).setUnlocalizedName("usefulthings:usefulChest");
    public static Item usefulLeggings = new UsefulArmor(2).setUnlocalizedName("usefulthings:usefulLeggings");
    public static Item usefulBoots = new UsefulArmor(3).setUnlocalizedName("usefulthings:usefulBoots");

    public static LumberAxe lumberAxe = new LumberAxe(4.0F, Item.ToolMaterial.IRON);

    public static void init()
    {
        GameRegistry.registerItem(usefulAxe, "usefulAxe");
        //GameRegistry.registerItem(usefulPickaxe, "usefulPickaxe");
        //GameRegistry.registerItem(usefulHoe, "usefulHoe");
        //GameRegistry.registerItem(usefulShovel, "usefulShovel");
        GameRegistry.registerItem(usefulSword, "usefulSword");
        GameRegistry.registerItem(usefulHelmet, "usefulHelmet");
        GameRegistry.registerItem(usefulChest, "usefulChest");
        GameRegistry.registerItem(usefulLeggings, "usefulLeggings");
        GameRegistry.registerItem(usefulBoots, "usefulBoots");
        GameRegistry.registerItem(lumberAxe, "lumberAxe");
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


"Here you go!" Knowing that the other party would surely have to check the artifact in order to ensure the fairness of the assessment, Zhang Ziqing flicked her wrist, and the Wu Dao Mirror flew over.
A book materialized in the Library of Heaven's Path, and a swift glance through it allowed him to confirm the capability of the artifact in assessing the level of a painting.
"This Wu Dao Mirror you have over there was created by 9-star Painter Zhi Yang three hundred years ago. It was forged out of the Golden Pearl Ore, and there are thirty-seven formation marks harnessing the power of painting conceptualization inscribed on the mirror. The spirit infused into the mirror embodies Elder Zhi Yang's deep comprehension of paintings, so it will indeed be fair to use this artifact as the judge for this competition!" Zhang Xuan nodded.
NineAnime is the best site to reading Late Night Tales Of The Capital Late Night Tales Of The Capital Chapter 36 The Song of Fire and Ice free online. You can also go Novels Genres to read other novel or check Latest Releases for new releases.
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text:
Noel Fielding: Madcap Shambleton
The Mighty Boosh's Noel Fielding talks about self-portraiture and seeing the funny side of life in his new art book, The Scribblings of a Madcap Shambleton
Tim Maby
Tags: Books Art and design Noel Fielding guardian.co.uk Editorial
René Magritte: enigmatic master of the impossible dream
On the eve of a major Magritte exhibition, artists with an eye for the peculiar reveal why they love the witty Belgian surrealist
TERRY GILLIAM Film director and former member of Monty Python
It wasn't until I'd seen Magritte's work collected together in an exhibition at the Tate, at the end of the 1960s I think, that I realised just how incredibly funny his stuff was. People walk around these exhibitions in a religious state of awe and I just walked round this one laughing uncontrollably. Until then, I'd always thought of Magritte as having an interesting and intriguing mind – the way he would turn things inside out or make that which was solid suddenly not solid. But suddenly here he was, this wonderfully dry joke teller. The work that really struck me that day was The Man in the Bowler Hat [1964]. He'd spent months painting a guy in a bowler hat and then, for his last brush strokes, paints a dove flying in front of the man's face. What's happened there could happen only in a photograph and he's done a painting of it. What a comedian! I thought he was so clever. If it wasn't for the ideas I wouldn't say he was a great painter because others have a better technique. But he does what he needs to do and does it so well.
All of the surrealists got into my head, but Magritte was so direct. I liked how immediate his work was, whereas the others were more abstract. His work can be complex but in a sense he takes cliché images and puts them together in ways that surprise you. There's a night scene, but the sky is day [The Dominion of Light, 1953], there's a pair of shoes that are actually feet [The Red Model, 1934]. His work has an initial gag, but the stuff sticks with you because it's in some ways profound.
He is so firmly lodged in my brain that frequently I'll see something and think, "Oh, that's a bit Magrittean". I'll look out of my window at dusk and see the house across the street catching the last bit of sunlight, except the sky behind it is already night. He captures moments of light in the day that are just odd. I used to think it was a fantasy of his, but I now find it happening all the time. Like every good artist, he makes us see the everyday differently but he does it without the pretension of so many other artists. That's another thing I like about him, that he didn't have this serious "I am an artist" approach. He went to work with a suit and a briefcase, everything about him was taking the piss out of art yet at the same time he was a wonderful artist.
In my work, I can never find a direct line between what I've done and where it's come from, but I do know where the influences are and they all end up in a kind of Irish stew in my brain. I would never want to say: "I nicked that from Magritte", because that's criminal investigation time! But it would be fair to say that with the landscapes and blue skies in the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus I could've been stealing from either Magritte or Microsoft Windows. What Microsoft did was a direct steal from Magritte! Other people paint more elaborate skies, but it's the clarity of his painting – the perfect blue sky with the perfect clouds floating in it – that's just so appealing.
Were the other Pythons influenced by Magritte? No. I'm not sure what the word is for being illiterate at art. Maybe blind. That's what they were. Years ago, we were in a hotel in Munich and John [Cleese] called me and said: "I'm going over to the Pinakothek. Do you want to come and explain art to me?" So I went along and I didn't explain art to him because that's not what I do, but I did get him looking at a thermostat on the wall and discussing it in great detail. We managed to gather quite a crowd.
I suppose with my work I'm always trying to get people to see what the world is capable of, to show how it can be seen in a very different way and Magritte did that all the time. When you start thinking differently like that, reality becomes a kind of game. In the 60s, people took drugs to achieve that state, but for a lot of people it was enough to go and look at a Magritte painting.
JEFF KOONS Artist
Whenever I drive in any mountainous region and look at the line against the sky, I think of Magritte. And whenever I see beautiful, perfect clouds in the sky, he's the first thing that comes to mind. I think there is a humanity, a generosity and a kindness to others in Magritte's work. He takes the viewer into account. And I have always found the economy of his images very moving. They communicate very purely and directly. One of the most profound pieces of Magritte's is Discovery [1928]. It is an image of a woman whose flesh resembles the grain in wood. There is this aspect of Magritte which is about dealing with the world around us, and there is a certain materiality, a reality about that world that he creates, even though he makes these strange juxtapositions.
It is hard to imagine a lot of the computer programs that we work with in daily life, such as Photoshop, without the influence of Magritte. We owe to Magritte the many ways that we see the world through transparency or gradation. So I hold him in high esteem for showing us how images can be overlapped, or how they can be gradated into each other. I wouldn't say I've ever made a piece in direct response to his work, but I can see there are works that show an interest in what he was doing. Take Les Idées Claires [1955], one of the two Magritte paintings that I have loaned to the Tate exhibition. Here, you see a rock hovering over the ocean underneath a cloud. I can associate that with one of my Equilibrium Tank sculptures of basketballs suspended in vitrines of water.
© This is an edited extract from Tate ETC magazine
NOEL FIELDING Artist and co-creator of The Mighty Boosh
I love how Magritte's paintings initially look quite normal. He lures you in with the colours and compositions and shortly after the concept blows your mind. You think: "That's just a normal… aagh!" They're like Trojan horses.
I've still got the first book I had of Magritte's work. It's stolen from the library, that's so bad! I was about 12 years old and looking at the paintings was a bit like taking drugs. They're such strong, stimulating images for a child because at that age you don't drink, you don't take drugs and you're not really interested in girls.
The first painting that made me think, "Oh my god, that's something amazing" was Young Girl Eating a Bird [1927]. I liked how enigmatic Magritte's work was, how you didn't quite know what was going on. Surrealism and absurdity, Monty Python and Vic Reeves, they were the first things that I really buzzed off and thought, "wow, that's what I want to do". The fact that there was a surrealist movement really appealed to me too, that they met up and drank crème de menthe in weird Parisian cafes. I loved that these grown men like Breton and Magritte would really seriously discuss poems, automatic writing and painting and then put things in their magazines like a man throwing a rock at a priest. I guess it was quite punk at the time.
Magritte's paintings always make me laugh. I don't care if other people say they're not funny. I find it ridiculous when you walk around a gallery and people are just looking at something obviously funny and stroking their chins. A Magritte painting such as the reverse mermaid [Collective Invention, 1934] is like a stand-up joke. Comedians do those reverse jokes all the time. When I was quite young, I did a painting of a cat phoning the fire brigade and an old lady stuck up a tree.
It's the juxtaposition in the paintings that is also very stimulating. I think it was Terry Jones who said something about two disparate ideas coming together and creating a star. And that's what it's all about for me. In The Mighty Boosh, we have a character called Old Gregg who is a merman but he's also a bit like [musician] Rick James. Those two things shouldn't ever go together. But when you get it right it's perfect.
Some of my own paintings are definitely influenced by Magritte. The stillness and the weirdness of Bryan Ferry with a Kite, in which Bryan Ferry has got a kite for a head, that's one of them. But he was also one of mine and Julian Barratt's joint favourites and that's apparent in the Boosh. For ages, we even wanted to have a pipe as an actual character who floated around and talked. But it was too difficult. You can see from what Julian wears that he likes the whole Magritte aesthetic – the bowler hats, the trench coats and the weird city-gent-gone-wrong look. Together, lookswise, we're like Dalí and Magritte. Dalí was more my type: flamboyant, a mad freak.
My new show for E4 has even more references to art. It's set in a place that's supposed to be my house, I look like a Bollywood Elvis and my cleaner is a robotic Andy Warhol. At one point, Warhol borrows a rucksack from Magritte to go on holiday with Jackson Pollock and Keith Haring and when he turns around a train comes out of the rucksack, like the train coming out of the fireplace in Time Transfixed [1938].I say to Warhol: "I bet that gets a bit annoying", and he responds, in his robotic voice: "No, you can get loads in there."
Magritte's paintings are insane, but they're often really good one-liners so they're a great source for a surreal comedy show.
ALICE ANDERSON Artist
When Magritte was 13, his mother committed suicide and, apparently, when the police retrieved her body from the river Sambre, Magritte was there and he saw how her face was covered by her dress. My own art and the research I do around it is all about neuroscience, how brains function, how memory functions, so this episode in Magritte's life and the way it subsequently influenced his art really intrigues me. If you look at The Lovers [1928], where two people have clothes over their face, I think that work specifically draws on that episode with his mother. But more generally, his work explores memory, his funny perception of reality and for me that all comes from his memory of that event. In Le Blanc-Seing [1965], for example, which features a woman on a horse in a wood, there are almost two paintings. The way his paintings constantly shift between what is real, something he can see or saw, and something he really wants to see is what draws me into his work.
GAVIN TURK Artist
One of the great things about Magritte's work, especially The Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe) [1921] is it dismantles the idea of pictures themselves. It makes the audience consider what they're looking at and take a step back. You can see that Magritte painted to experiment with his own thinking. His work is a thinking through pictures. I probably first came across the work when I was on my art foundation course and I remember my sense of relief to find that his work was immediately gettable. Some people today don't identify with the themes he's exploring or perhaps can't see past the cliché. But the way he suggestively starts to make the audience question how they see things is something that I try to include in my own art.
There are two works of Magritte's which I've more or less directly appropriated in my works Oscar and Cripple. They are The Ellipsis [1948] and The Cripple [1948], from his vache period, when he started painting more loosely, almost in a semi-expressionistic style. This period was a disaster for Magritte: the critics panned the work and the collectors ran away. But I love that he was fed up with being expected to be a certain kind of artist and was challenging his signature style. This new style almost allowed the audience in slightly closer, to get more of an insight into Magritte himself. I made two sculptures, three dimensional self-portraits, that were then reconfigured to look like these two paintings by Magritte. I was dealing with the idea of my own personal representation, my own ideas of authorship.
I also like the happy oddness, the sense of the uncanny in Magritte's work. In a way, there's a non-threatening but uncomfortable sensation. In an era before Photoshop, he slammed together things from different worlds and played with scale. If I were to draw parallels between his work and mine it would be that we combine disparate ideas or use this sense of the uncanny to make proposed alternatives. A work of mine like the bronze binbag sculpture is a good example – it seems straightforward, it's a shiny binbag, but then it starts to make you ask questions. It's a painted bronze sculpture, so there's this sense of permanence when actually a black plastic bag is probably a key symbol of impermanence.
JOHN BALDESSARI Artist
A Magritte work that I always return to is The Treachery of Images, because we have it at the LA County Museum. It's a kind of touchstone of his. He's affirming the slipperiness, or as he calls it the treachery, of images, of language – that a word and an object have no necessary connection other than that we collectively assigned that word and that object to go together. I really appreciate his word play.
He also does a lot of the things I try to do with my work, making life a little difficult or a little challenging for the viewer who would like things to be comfortable. I think the reason Magritte has been so influential on popular culture is because he deals with images that we know – a person or a house or a street or a horse.
The images aren't misshapen or distorted – he just puts them together in combinations that we don't usually think about. And in terms of advertising, Magritte and Dalí probably have been the most influential artists, so much that we don't even see it anymore. Take, for example, CBS TV's logo, the eye. I believe that comes directly from him [from the work The False Mirror, 1928]. He's everywhere.
EDWARD HALL Theatre director
In the theatre you try and create a sense of mystery. You're raising questions, putting ordinary situations in front of people and shining new light on them. Magritte does that in his paintings, using objects that you know really well. When I directed Twelfth Night, there was a moment in my production where Viola, disguised as a boy, looks in the mirror and sees herself for the first time as a man. That's always made me think of The False Mirror. Both of those things are about seeing something you've never seen before in a reflection of something familiar.
I had a picture of The Human Condition [1933] on my wall when I was a teenager which I'd cut out of a magazine because it looked interesting. My favourite now is The Treachery of Images. That's about not boiling things down to their lowest common denominator or about looking beyond what you think something is. The pipe expresses that idea in its simplest form. Of course it's not a pipe! Try and smoke it!
When you're working on a play, you're constantly trying not to make assumptions. As soon as you make assumptions, you stop investigating – what a story might mean, what the possibilities are within a scene. Go back to Greek drama, where the principle is that the opposite is always true, that raises as many questions as it answers. Shakespeare also challenges your expectations of people's behaviour in all sorts of ways. That's why his plays are constantly intriguing to watch. And in essence that's what Magritte does, too.
DAVID SHRIGLEY Artist
When I first became interested in art, at the age of 13 or 14, I was drawn to the otherness of art, the peculiarity and anarchy of it. For me, Magritte really represented that. Then, when I went to art school in the late 80s, I realised that his paintings were not very good, technically speaking. His work seemed a bit kitsch. But later I became interested in them again, as a vehicle for ideas. I've always loved the simplicity of his work and I think it becomes more profound the more you consider it.
In Magritte's oeuvre there are quite a few odd paintings that are jarring. One of my favourites is Young Girl Eating a Bird, an image of a girl eating a bird in front of a tree full of exotic-looking birds. As soon as I saw it, I thought, that's a really strange, perverse picture, whereas a lot of the others seem quite sanitised.
Growing up in provincial England, I lived a long way from London so my introduction to contemporary art was through Thames and Hudson books. Magritte is illustrative in style, so you can get it without necessarily having to see the physical object of the painting, because you're still invited to think about the idea.
It's hard to trace an artist's influence, but I think Magritte is a important image maker, a conceptual painter. He's more like Duchamp or Picabia. For me, he is the quintessential surrealist.
Additional research by Gemma Kappala-Ramsamy
René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle is at Tate Liverpool from Friday until 16 October
Imogen Carter
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