text:
Review - Rudo y Cursi
The credits for Rudo y Cursi read like a Who's Who of contemporary Mexican cinema. Listed among the producers are Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu; three directors who, between them, have been responsible for some of the decade's most acclaimed films. The central roles are taken by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, the actors who co-starred in 2001's Oscar-nominated Y tu mamá también, and who have since gone on to star in a variety of American and Mexican productions. And Rudo y Cursi has been written and directed by Carlos Cuarón, Alfonso's younger brother, who co-wrote Y tu mamá también and who is making his feature debut here. It has been almost a decade since these individuals first came to prominence on the crest of the Mexican New Wave, and Rudo y Cursi has the feel of a timely reunion.
Unfortunately, the film isn't an especially impressive or memorable effort, particularly coming from such a renowned group. Tato (Bernal) and Beto (Luna) are brothers living in the small coastal town of Cihuatlán, where they earn a living on a banana plantation. On weekends, they turn out for the local football team – Beto is the goalkeeper, while Tato is the star striker – and it is their good fortune one morning to run into a talent scout on their way to a match. His name is Batuta (Guillermo Francella), and although we can instantly see a shady side to this character, he offers both Tato and Beto a chance to sign up for rival teams in Mexico City. It's a pity Batuta's involvement doesn't end there, as we would have then been spared his incessant, grating voiceover, in which he tries to imbue various aspects of football matches with philosophical meaning, with his musings frequently straying into Swiss Toni territory ("Kicking a ball is very much like making love to a beautiful woman").
Batuta's redundant narration, repeatedly spelling things out for us instead of letting us discover them for ourselves, is symptomatic of the script's flaws. Much of what takes place in Rudo y Cursi feels dully over-familiar, with both characters following a predictable arc, hitting the brief heights before their fortunes downturn sharply. Tato, who cherishes pop stardom over footballing fame, becomes a star (earning the nickname "Cursi", meaning corny or vulgar), records a cheesy pop record and gets involved with a gold-digging TV presenter (Jessica Mas), who'll stay with him as long as he continues scoring on the pitch. Beto is much more serious about his career than his brother (he gets nicknamed "Rudo" or "Rough" for his aggressive approach), and he starts setting goalkeeping records before his chronic gambling problem lands him in trouble with some local thugs. You probably won't be surprised to hear that the film climaxes with the two brothers facing each other in a high-stakes match, which comes down to a last-minute penalty kick.
As a director, Cuarón doesn't do much to freshen up his own hackneyed storytelling on screen. Aside from the interesting decision to focus almost solely on crowd reaction shots rather than showing us the on-pitch action, he generally lets the film drift along in an easygoing, unimaginative fashion. Rudo y Cursi lacks the energetic rambunctiousness that characterised Y tu mamá también, and whereas that film's horny humour was carefully tempered by an increasing emotional depth, the darker elements of this story feel as if they have been clumsily shoehorned into the mix. The one area in which Rudo y Cursi doesn't suffer from comparison with Alfonso Cuarón's film is in the level of performance offered by the two stars. They both go for broad characterisations – Bernal as a naïve playboy, Luna as a tightly wound hothead – and they are both charming and often very funny. Given the amount of talent contributing to Rudo y Cursi, one might have expected a better showcase for their considerable abilities.
Review - Antichrist
Review - Moon
Review - Cloud 9 (Wolke Neun)
Review - Brüno
Review - Sunshine Cleaning
Review - Public Enemies


text:
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PDMS sponsors Alzheimer's Society Dementia Conference
PDMS is proud to support the Isle of Man's Alzheimer's society as a sponsor of their annual Dementia Conference.
On Tuesday 25th June the Alzheimer's Society (IOM) Dementia Conference was hosted at the Comis Hotel and Gold Resort.
A series of talks took place from UK researchers and Island health professionals around the issues faced by people living with dementia. Attendees also experienced a taster session of Singing for the Brain, a volunteer-run service for residents in the Isle of Man with Rachel Wild.
Adrian Burns, National Clinical Director for Dementia and Older People's Mental Health at NHS England and NHS Improvement introduced bringing mental and physical health care under one roof to improve continued care for patients.
For those unable to make the conference, an open information drop-in was held the following day at the Comis Hotel and Golf Resort where members of the public could attend talks by the Alzheimer's Society, Memory Clinic and DHSC with an opportunity to find out more information and ask the experts questions about their research and experiences.
One of the key themes of this year's conference was how the future of healthcare on the Island will be a person-centric, integrated approach across health and social care providers working in tandem to better help the individual.
PDMS' Lorna Trevethan also gave a presentation on the First Point Community Portal and its work to keep people with dementia safe in the Isle of Man.
The First Point Community Portal has been developed by PDMS in partnership with some of the Island's charities and emergency services to provide additional support to members of the island community who experience day to day difficulties.
It is aimed at people such as the older generation living alone or those living with dementia who may find themselves in emergency situations. Emergency services personnel can search through the registered profiles using a separate, password-protected, secure channel during emergency situations in order to more quickly identify a person, bring them to a place of safety, provide better care and contact loved ones sooner.
It is believed that about 100 incidents a month could be better addressed through this information.
PC Mike Griffiths, one of three police officers involved in the project, said the portal 'will ensure that we have all the tools available to us to make the person feel at ease and give the family peace of mind that their loved one is in safe hands.'
For more information visit firstpoint.signedup.im, email [email protected], call 664000, or like the First Point Community Portal on Facebook.
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This is a superb Aldo Tura Bar Cart that dates to the late 1950s/early 1960s. The car features the classic Aldo Tura hardware and deep mottled dark chocolate lacquered condition. This cart retains its original "Tura" decals. Please contact me using the link at lower left for additional information, photos and trade/retail pricing. All inquiries are welcome--thanks for visiting.


text:
January 29, 2016 Corymbus
Ingmar Bergman's 1941 rosperoroduction of A Midsummer Night's Dream with his Sagoteatern Theatre Company, (Stockholm). Original photo here.
By Leah Broad
Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare. With the 400th anniversary of his death this year (following hot on the heels of his 450th birthday in 2014), it's difficult to go far before being confronted by the British bard. I am always a little nervous about anniversaries, because they run the distinct risk of becoming tedious. Repeated showings of Timon of Athens and Titus Andronicus set in Fascist Germany are enough to put anybody off Shakespeare for life. And Shakespeare hardly needs more advocacy — as one of my friends put it, 'Well, he can't live up to the hype. Just makes him seem a bit over-rated, doesn't it?'
In some ways, I'm inclined to agree. But it's because he's over-rated that Shakespeare can be so fascinating. Lauded as a universal playwright of the people, Shakespeare has been reinvented in the image of every generation — and not just in Britain. His plays are something of a geographical and chronological constant, enduring across continents and throughout changing political regimes. Shakespeare is a mirror which cultures have held up to themselves, reflecting fragments of history through his familiar words.
Take, for example, the Nordic countries at the turn of the twentieth century. Alongside the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, Shakespeare was seen as a touchstone for the "modern" director, continually staged in both the provinces and capitals of the Nordic countries. The Swedish director Per Lindberg staged Hamlet (twice), As You Like It, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice and Othello at the Lorensberg Theatre in Gothenburg; when he later moved to Stockholm, his first major production in 1926 was Antony and Cleopatra. Such was Shakespeare's popularity in Scandinavia that in Danish critic Georg Brandes' 1898 critical history of the playwright, Brandes wrote: 'Europe is still busied with him as though with a contemporary. His dramas are acted and read wherever civilisation extends.'
A watercolour sketch by Knut Ström for Romeo and Juliet at the Lorensberg (Stockholm), 1922.
And central to all these productions was music. Music is threaded into the fabric of Shakespeare's plays, from the opening of Twelfth Night ('If music be the food of love, play on') to Hamlet likening himself to an instrument ('there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak') and the witches' scenes in Macbeth ('I'll charm the air to give a sound / While you perform your antic round').
For a composer, Shakespeare is the gift that keeps on giving. In his lifetime, it is likely that music would only have been used when called for in the script — when the clown in Twelfth Night sings 'Come away, come away death', for example. This probably would have been a solo singer, perhaps accompanied by a single instrument (for, as Shakespeare was at pains to point out, musicians were expensive to hire).
Twentieth century composers provided music for these moments ('Come away death' was set by Jean Sibelius, in the Swedish translation 'Kom nu hit, död'), but they also wrote much more extensive orchestral scores to accompany these dramas. It was customary to commission incidental music for the largest productions of the early twentieth century stage, and Shakespeare performances fell squarely into this bracket. The Swedish composer Ture Rangström wrote no fewer than 50 short movements for Hamlet in 1942, and Sibelius produced 34 pieces for The Tempest in 1925-26, orchestrated for some of the largest forces he ever composed for.
Sadly, much of this music has never made its way into published, let alone recorded, format. At least part of the problem lies in the nature of incidental music — without the production that the music was meant for, it loses much of its context. Even setting aside the visual aspects, if you record theatre music, do you include the text? Another clue is in the terminology itself — "incidental" music. The sonic elements of the theatre are so often forgotten, assumed to be subordinate to a performance's visual and textual elements.
Gösta Ekman as Hamlet in 1934 (Vasateatern, Stockholm).
But these scores were the lifeblood of the twentieth century stage. In 1908, one reviewer wrote of Sibelius's music for Strindberg's play Swanwhite that it was 'needed so that the piece can work on stage.' And the theatre provided a vital platform for experimentation. Theatrical resources were often so limited that composers had to look for innovative new methods of scoring, and ways of being expressive in an extremely concentrated format.
We only have to turn to Sibelius's second song in his Twelfth Night settings, 'Hey ho, the wind and the rain', to hear this. It's a cheeky, modern setting that relies on having performers with a flair for the dramatic. It takes the ribald humour of Shakespeare's original setting and puts a twentieth century spin on it: and at a running time of just over 2 minutes, Sibelius has a very short amount of time in which to do so. Techniques honed on the theatrical stage were transferred across to concert works, and vice versa, the different genres enjoying a mutually symbiotic relationship.
Sibelius's Overture for The Tempest — his study of a storm with its whirling, destructive aeolian sonorities — generates the sound-world for his final tone poem Tapiola, composed only a year later. Musicologist Daniel Grimley has suggested that Sibelius's interest in The Tempest is fundamental to understanding both Sibelius's late works and his later silence; that he was drawn to the play because of the character of Prospero, and because of all Shakespeare's plays, it is the one most motivated by music. Sibelius himself wrote to the critic Gunnar Hauch that 'The Tempest [is dearest to me] because of its musicality.' He seems to have identified strongly with Tempest's cast of exiles, especially the creative castaway Prospero.
At the time, Prospero was broadly interpreted as Shakespeare's autobiographical character, and that the character of the creative castaway was Shakespeare's meditation upon his own late years and artistic process. This no doubt resonated with Sibelius at a period when he was struggling with his own self-criticism, struggling to justify his place on an international stage that was increasingly attentive to the angular sounds of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Scriabin. Sibelius's setting of The Tempest, then, holds invaluable keys to his later compositional years.
On the other end of the spectrum lies Lars-Erik Larsson's orchestral piece En vintersaga. This is not incidental music per se, but was commissioned in 1937 for a radio broadcast of A Winter's Tale. Larsson is an eclectic composer difficult to pigeon-hole in to any one specific "style", but En vintersaga is a lush, romantic score that emphasises the pastoral elements of Shakespeare's script. The Prologue opens with lilting, low strings over a bass drone, the gentle melody passing between the winds before culminating in a statement in the brass. The rippling wind motifs capture the fluidity of Shakespeare's text, such as when Polixenes says 'Nine changes of the watery star hath been/ The shepherd's note since we have left our throne/ Without a burden.'
Within Sweden, only Larsson's contemporary Hugo Alfvén could rival him for popularity, and Larsson undoubtedly drew on the sound world of his most popular work, Midsommarvaka, ('Midsummer vigil'). This is an orchestral rhapsody that depicts the gaiety of the Swedish Midsummer festival, using Swedish folk tunes and dance rhythms. By transferring these sounds to Twelfth Night, Larsson set Shakespeare's play in a place that is both timeless — Midsummer has pagan associations, seen as a liminal space between past and future, the real and the imaginary or mystical — but also identifiably Swedish.
Nearly twenty years later, in 1951/2, the sound of 'Swedish Shakespeare' had changed considerably. Titled Symphony Shakespeariana, Gösta Nystroem's 4th Symphony was composed in the wake of his music for both The Tempest (1934) and The Merchant of Venice (1936). Shakespeare clearly stayed with him, subtitling the symphony's movements with quotations from the sonnets and from The Tempest.
Nystroem's Prelude to Tempest bears some remarkable similarities to Sibelius's, but it is an altogether more mechanical storm, with undertones of music such as Alexander Mosolov's Iron Foundry underlying the wordless chorus. His symphonic version is less pictatorial, but retains the idea of nature tempered by a destructive militaristic pulse. Moving away from Sibelius's almost symbolist concerns about the individual in nature, Nystroem's Shakespeare seems to occupy an altogether more politicised landscape, emerging fragmented from the wreckage of the 1940s.
Whether it was by providing a vessel for compositional anxieties, or acting a vehicle for nationalist expression, Shakespeare has continually been cast simultaneously in the roles of the most abstract and specific of playwrights. Performing Shakespeare carries with it a formidable weight of tradition, but it is through the continual reinvention of this tradition that Shakespeare is at his most vital. He continues to find new political and spiritual guises across the world today — as in, for example, Thomas Adès's opera The Tempest. For as long as Shakespeare continues to be the canvas upon which musicians, actors, artists, and poets can inscribe their passions and anxieties, thank goodness for over-rated Shakespeare.
Leah Broad is a DPhil at the University of Oxford. As the founder and editor of The Oxford Culture Review she writes extensively on the arts, and won the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Best Arts Journalism Essay 2015. She is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker 2016, and co-leads Oxford's Nordic Research Network. More of her work can be found on her website. She tweets as @leahbroad.
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text:
Q: Python pandas error in removing stop words Using the following code, I am getting an data type not understood error. Help much appreciated.
train["item_description"] = train["item_description"].str.lower().str.split()
train['item_description'].apply(lambda x: [item for item in x if item not in stop])
train["item_description"] = train["item_description"].astype(str)
print(train["item_description"][:10])`

A: There seems to be some issue with the data types in your input data. Make sure to explicitly convert everything into strings before doing any operations on the data. You can do everything on a single line like this:
train['item_description'] = train['item_description'].apply(lambda x: [item for item in str(x).lower().split() if item not in stop])

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
'Truth' junkies: using evaluation in UK public policy
Helen Sullivan
This article explores the relationships of policy makers and academic evaluators with each other and with evaluation over the life of the United Kingdom's (UK) New Labour. Drawing on experience of central government-funded evaluations and employing insights from governance and governmentality theories, it illustrates how the idea of evaluation as a source of 'truth' was valorised by policy makers as a means of dealing with emergent doubt, delineates the competing manifestations of 'truth' that were negotiated in the context of 'new governance', and reviews the contribution of new evaluation approaches to uncovering evidence of 'the truth'. The article concludes that, despite considerable investment in UK policy evaluation, a disconnection between 'evidence' and 'argument' has limited the role of academic evaluators in the policy process
https://doi.org/10.1332/030557311X574216
10.1332/030557311X574216
Dive into the research topics of ''Truth' junkies: using evaluation in UK public policy'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.
public policy Social Sciences 100%
public Earth & Environmental Sciences 88%
policy Earth & Environmental Sciences 80%
central government Earth & Environmental Sciences 33%
New Labour Social Sciences 30%
governmentality Social Sciences 29%
Sullivan, H. (2011). 'Truth' junkies: using evaluation in UK public policy. Policy and Politics, 39(4), 499-512pp. https://doi.org/10.1332/030557311X574216
Sullivan, Helen. / 'Truth' junkies: using evaluation in UK public policy. In: Policy and Politics. 2011 ; Vol. 39, No. 4. pp. 499-512pp.
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abstract = "This article explores the relationships of policy makers and academic evaluators with each other and with evaluation over the life of the United Kingdom's (UK) New Labour. Drawing on experience of central government-funded evaluations and employing insights from governance and governmentality theories, it illustrates how the idea of evaluation as a source of 'truth' was valorised by policy makers as a means of dealing with emergent doubt, delineates the competing manifestations of 'truth' that were negotiated in the context of 'new governance', and reviews the contribution of new evaluation approaches to uncovering evidence of 'the truth'. The article concludes that, despite considerable investment in UK policy evaluation, a disconnection between 'evidence' and 'argument' has limited the role of academic evaluators in the policy process",
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doi = "10.1332/030557311X574216",
journal = "Policy and Politics",
publisher = "Policy Press",
Sullivan, H 2011, ''Truth' junkies: using evaluation in UK public policy', Policy and Politics, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 499-512pp. https://doi.org/10.1332/030557311X574216
'Truth' junkies: using evaluation in UK public policy. / Sullivan, Helen.
In: Policy and Politics, Vol. 39, No. 4, 2011, p. 499-512pp.
T1 - 'Truth' junkies: using evaluation in UK public policy
AU - Sullivan, Helen
N2 - This article explores the relationships of policy makers and academic evaluators with each other and with evaluation over the life of the United Kingdom's (UK) New Labour. Drawing on experience of central government-funded evaluations and employing insights from governance and governmentality theories, it illustrates how the idea of evaluation as a source of 'truth' was valorised by policy makers as a means of dealing with emergent doubt, delineates the competing manifestations of 'truth' that were negotiated in the context of 'new governance', and reviews the contribution of new evaluation approaches to uncovering evidence of 'the truth'. The article concludes that, despite considerable investment in UK policy evaluation, a disconnection between 'evidence' and 'argument' has limited the role of academic evaluators in the policy process
AB - This article explores the relationships of policy makers and academic evaluators with each other and with evaluation over the life of the United Kingdom's (UK) New Labour. Drawing on experience of central government-funded evaluations and employing insights from governance and governmentality theories, it illustrates how the idea of evaluation as a source of 'truth' was valorised by policy makers as a means of dealing with emergent doubt, delineates the competing manifestations of 'truth' that were negotiated in the context of 'new governance', and reviews the contribution of new evaluation approaches to uncovering evidence of 'the truth'. The article concludes that, despite considerable investment in UK policy evaluation, a disconnection between 'evidence' and 'argument' has limited the role of academic evaluators in the policy process
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JO - Policy and Politics
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Sullivan H. 'Truth' junkies: using evaluation in UK public policy. Policy and Politics. 2011;39(4):499-512pp. https://doi.org/10.1332/030557311X574216


text:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""Make sure fixtures are in place before running tests."""
import gzip
import shutil
from pathlib import Path

import click

IMAGE_DATA_DIR = Path(__file__).parent.parent / "tests/fixtures/image_data"

def pack_image_fixture(root_dir=None):
    """Gunzip tif images for image tests."""
    if root_dir is None:
        root_dir = IMAGE_DATA_DIR
    matches = Path(root_dir).glob("**/*.tif")
    print("Gzipping the images, this will take some time...")
    for path in matches:
        gz_path = f"{path}.gz"
        with open(path, "rb") as f_in:
            with gzip.open(gz_path, "wb") as f_out:
                shutil.copyfileobj(f_in, f_out)
        path.unlink()

def unpack_image_fixture(root_dir=None):
    """Unzip gunzipped tif images for image tests."""
    if root_dir is None:
        root_dir = IMAGE_DATA_DIR
    matches = Path(root_dir).glob("**/*.gz")
    for gz_path in matches:
        path = gz_path.parent / gz_path.stem
        with gzip.open(gz_path, "rb") as f_in:
            with open(path, "wb") as f_out:
                shutil.copyfileobj(f_in, f_out)

@click.command()
@click.option("--pack/--unpack", default=False)
def main(pack):
    """Pack or unpack the images for test fixtures."""
    if pack:
        pack_image_fixture()
    else:
        unpack_image_fixture()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()  # pylint:disable=no-value-for-parameter

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