2016/06/30
女優・井上真央（29）が6月9日発売の文房具情報誌「趣味の文具箱」（Vol.38）で、愛用の万年筆や普段使いの筆記具などを紹介するとともに、文字を書く際の独自の練習法や手紙の良さについて答えている。
井上は連続テレビ小説「おひさま」（NHK、2011年上半期）で主人公を演じた際も黒板の板書や手紙で披露した美しい字が話題になったが、意外にも彼女はこれまでに習字やペン習字を習ったことはないようで・・・？
井上真央といえば2009年に明治大学文学部を卒業後、連続テレビ小説「おひさま」（NHK、2011年上半期）で主人公の教師・陽子を演じた際、黒板の板書や手紙で披露した美しい直筆が話題になった。なお同ドラマでは彼女の“箸使い”も上手だと話題になるなど、細かい部分ではあるが、作品の値打ちまで変えてしまうような、彼女の文字や所作に驚いた人も少なくなかったかも。
井上はこの「おひさま」での筆遣いが世間の関心を呼んだこともあってか、その年の“最も万年筆が似合う著名人”を表彰する「万年筆ベストコーディネイト賞2011」の“一般選出部門”を受賞したほど。そんな井上が、これだけの達筆を走らせるのにどのような練習をしているのだろうか・・・？
（以下引用）
意外にも井上さんはこれまでに習字やペン習字を習ったことはない。全て日々の練習によるものという。
「文字を見て、いいなと思った形を自分で書いてみることが好きなんです。それらを手本にして、いつも練習しています」。
（引用元：趣味の文具箱 Vol.38）
幼少期に習字を習ったり、昨今では大人でも趣味を兼ねて通信講座などでペン習字を習う人がいると思われるが、井上は意外にも習い事で字が上手くなったわけではないという。彼女はかつてインタビューで、小さい頃から字を書くのが好きだったことや、近所に住むおじいちゃんやおばあちゃん（血縁関係のある方かは不明）と手紙でやり取りをしていたと話していたこともあり（情報元：映画.com）、もともと筆まめなところはあったようだが、基本的に自己流で練習しているというから驚きだ。
上記によると、井上はまず字を見て「いいなと思った形」を見つけるというから、文字を絵のような美的感覚で捉え、それを「手本」にマネをしていくイメージなのかも。字間などのバランスを考えたり、丁寧に書いたりするだけでも読む人に与えるイメージは格段に変わってくると思われますし、そうした訓練の賜物が井上の字の基盤になっているようだ。
昨今はメールやLINEなどのコミュニケーションツールが浸透したことで、文字そのものを書く機会は減っていると思われるが、井上は（手書きによる）手紙によってしか得られない温かみを大切にしているようで・・・？
（以下引用）
「人から頂いた手書きの手紙は、その時間を自分のために割いてくれたのだなと感じられてうれしいものです。
それに、メールはすぐに内容を忘れてしまうんですけれど、人の字だといつまでも覚えている。書いた言葉が記憶に残る、思い出として残るってすてきだなと感じます」
（引用元：趣味の文具箱 Vol.38）
井上は（手書きの）手紙には書いた人の思いやりに加え、思い出として残るほどの強い力があると感じているようだ。手紙を書くためにはペンや便せんはもちろんのこと、場合によっては封筒や切手なども必要になるため一手間かかるが、どれ一つとってもその人の性格が出ますし、ましてや心を込めて直筆で書いてくれた手紙ほど格別なものはないはず。
メールにも独特の感情表現があるかもしれないが、手書きによる文字の形や筆圧、バランスなどからは書いた人の思いがより色濃く出るはずですし、井上が「人の字だといつまでも覚えている」と言う点もうなづける。もちろんきちんとした手紙に限らず、家や職場などでのちょっとしたメモのやり取りなどでも、丁寧な字を書くよう心がけるだけで相手に与える印象は変わってくるものでしょうし、意識してみたいと思う。
井上は女優として第一線を走り続けているが、その陰には繊細な感受性や独特な美意識があることをうかがわせます。なお同誌には、井上お気に入りのペンなども紹介されているので、興味のある方はぜひチェックされてみては。
not mine.credit and source: KOUSHINTARO
Thursday, June 30, 2016
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Food Wishes Video Recipes: Chocolate Energy Bars – Looking Good…Maybe Too Goo...
Food Wishes Video Recipes: Chocolate Energy Bars – Looking Good…Maybe Too Goo...: If you compare these chocolate energy bars to similar fruit/nut bars sold at the store, I think they taste better, are nutritionally super...
Monday, June 27, 2016
Brad Pitt Keeps It Low-Key as He Attends Motorcycle Event and Poses with a Bevy of Fans
BY JODI GUGLIELMI
06/27/2016 AT 10:20 AM EDT
Brad Pitt has a need for speed.
After wrapping filming on his upcoming film Allied, the actor indulged in another one of his passions over the weekend: his love for motorcycles. Pitt attended the Born-Free Vintage Chopper and Classic Cycle Show in Silverado, California on Sunday.
Pitt, 52, wore a white T-shirt and light-colored khaki jeans for the afternoon, pairing his look with a fedora and sunglasses. He was all smiles as he was seen enjoying a beverage while he strolled around the event.
“Brad walked around with a security guard checking out the show bikes in the sweltering heat," says an onlooker.
While Pitt was only seen perusing the bikes over the weekend, he has an impressive collection of choppers back home. The actor reportedly owns around 10 motorcycles, including a vintage World War II bike that he purchased last year.
The actor is frequently spotted riding around Los Angeles on his bikes.
During the event, he also stopped to congratulate Jake and Zach Hindes of Prism Motorcycles and Supply for winning the "Founders Choice" award.
"He was laughing, talking with bike builders and posing for pictures with fans,” says the onlooker.
not mine.credit and source: PEOPLE
06/27/2016 AT 10:20 AM EDT
Brad Pitt has a need for speed.
After wrapping filming on his upcoming film Allied, the actor indulged in another one of his passions over the weekend: his love for motorcycles. Pitt attended the Born-Free Vintage Chopper and Classic Cycle Show in Silverado, California on Sunday.
Pitt, 52, wore a white T-shirt and light-colored khaki jeans for the afternoon, pairing his look with a fedora and sunglasses. He was all smiles as he was seen enjoying a beverage while he strolled around the event.
“Brad walked around with a security guard checking out the show bikes in the sweltering heat," says an onlooker.
While Pitt was only seen perusing the bikes over the weekend, he has an impressive collection of choppers back home. The actor reportedly owns around 10 motorcycles, including a vintage World War II bike that he purchased last year.
The actor is frequently spotted riding around Los Angeles on his bikes.
During the event, he also stopped to congratulate Jake and Zach Hindes of Prism Motorcycles and Supply for winning the "Founders Choice" award.
"He was laughing, talking with bike builders and posing for pictures with fans,” says the onlooker.
not mine.credit and source: PEOPLE
Born Free Motorcycle Show
The BORN-FREE Vintage Chopper and Classic Motorcycle Show
The annual Born-Free Vintage Chopper and Classic Cycle Show takes place at Southern California’s majestic 17-acre Oak Canyon Ranch . Born-Free has quickly become “the” place for old and young from all over the world to ride in, see, and talk about old iron for one day. Born-Free brings together tens of thousands of eager spectators and participants as well as over 150 vendors and sponsors, live music, an AMCA regional swapmeet.
The Born-Free Show is a back to basics show built on this impromptu action of people building and riding their vintage Harleys, Hondas, Indians, Triumphs (and more) into the show which then becomes “the show”. This is a place where the classics take the spotlight. The show is open to all makes and models and is laid back with voluntary registration and a handful of awards and prizes, but Best In Show gets a trip for themselves and their motorcycle to the Mooneyes Hot Rod & Custom show in Yokohama, Japan this December!
Inside the show there is a special Invited Builder area where 25 up and coming motorcycle builders from all around the world will be debuting the bikes they’ve been building just for this event over the past year. These guys are craftsmen, small shop owners, and garage builders doing their best to push themselves to build something that is unique, well thought out, and finely finished.
not mine.credit and owner: BORN FREE SHOW
The annual Born-Free Vintage Chopper and Classic Cycle Show takes place at Southern California’s majestic 17-acre Oak Canyon Ranch . Born-Free has quickly become “the” place for old and young from all over the world to ride in, see, and talk about old iron for one day. Born-Free brings together tens of thousands of eager spectators and participants as well as over 150 vendors and sponsors, live music, an AMCA regional swapmeet.
The Born-Free Show is a back to basics show built on this impromptu action of people building and riding their vintage Harleys, Hondas, Indians, Triumphs (and more) into the show which then becomes “the show”. This is a place where the classics take the spotlight. The show is open to all makes and models and is laid back with voluntary registration and a handful of awards and prizes, but Best In Show gets a trip for themselves and their motorcycle to the Mooneyes Hot Rod & Custom show in Yokohama, Japan this December!
Inside the show there is a special Invited Builder area where 25 up and coming motorcycle builders from all around the world will be debuting the bikes they’ve been building just for this event over the past year. These guys are craftsmen, small shop owners, and garage builders doing their best to push themselves to build something that is unique, well thought out, and finely finished.
not mine.credit and owner: BORN FREE SHOW
Sunday, June 26, 2016
Saturday, June 25, 2016
Food Wishes Video Recipes: Buttermilk Panna Cotta – The Magic of Barely Cooke...
Food Wishes Video Recipes: Buttermilk Panna Cotta – The Magic of Barely Cooke...: For something called “cooked cream,” there’s very little cooking involved here. Actually, there is very little anything involved here. If ...
Friday, June 24, 2016
Brad Pitt Looks Smoking Hot in White Race Car Uniform -- See The Pics!
he oozes sex appeal.
dangerously dashing.
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
Rousquille
The rousquille or rosquille is a type of sweet-tasting biscuit particular to Catalonia, including the French region of Languedoc-Roussillon. It is a ring-shaped, soft and crumbly pastry often covered with a layer of sugar icing.
It originated in the south of Spain, its name coming from a Spanish word meaning "little wheel" (rosquilla).
credit and source: WIKIPEDIA
It originated in the south of Spain, its name coming from a Spanish word meaning "little wheel" (rosquilla).
credit and source: WIKIPEDIA
Food Wishes Video Recipes: “Gazpacho Verde” with Burrata Cheese – Swampy, in ...
Food Wishes Video Recipes: “Gazpacho Verde” with Burrata Cheese – Swampy, in ...: I’m not crazy about the name for this recipe, but I honestly didn’t know what else to call it, and I blame Twitter for that. Allow me to e...
Monday, June 20, 2016
Strawberry Moon Makes Summer Solstice Sweeter
A Strawberry Moon will coincide with the summer solstice for the first time in almost 50 years.
A Strawberry Moon is not necessarily pink or red, however.
It is simply a name given to the full moon each June, which coincides with the start of the strawberry season.
But it has not happened on the longest day of the year since 1967 - and astrologers are excited to see the two coincide this year.
The name was coined by Native American tribes who used it as a signal to gather ripening strawberries.
It became known in Europe as the Full Rose Moon, and the Honey Moon.
The summer solstice is when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, providing the most daylight of the year.
The moment of solstice is when the sun hits its top level.
Thousands of people will be at Stonehenge in Wiltshire to mark the occasion, but conditions may be unfavourable.
Sky News weather producer Joanna Robinson said: "After a grey and rather wet start to the summer solstice in the south, there will be some improvement for the longest day of the year.
"This evening, there will be some pleasant sunny spells, best in the north and east.
"The sun is due to set at 9.21pm in London, about five minutes later in Stonehenge and then as late as 10.35pm in Stornoway, northwest Scotland.
"Unfortunately, increasing cloud will hinder our view of the Strawberry Moon.
"The clearest skies will be over northern and eastern Scotland and northeast England, but it will tend to cloud over there from midnight.
"Any breaks in the cloud elsewhere will be fairly limited, probably best over western and central Ireland."
not mine.credit and source: SKY NEWS
A Strawberry Moon is not necessarily pink or red, however.
It is simply a name given to the full moon each June, which coincides with the start of the strawberry season.
But it has not happened on the longest day of the year since 1967 - and astrologers are excited to see the two coincide this year.
The name was coined by Native American tribes who used it as a signal to gather ripening strawberries.
It became known in Europe as the Full Rose Moon, and the Honey Moon.
The summer solstice is when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, providing the most daylight of the year.
The moment of solstice is when the sun hits its top level.
Thousands of people will be at Stonehenge in Wiltshire to mark the occasion, but conditions may be unfavourable.
Sky News weather producer Joanna Robinson said: "After a grey and rather wet start to the summer solstice in the south, there will be some improvement for the longest day of the year.
"This evening, there will be some pleasant sunny spells, best in the north and east.
"The sun is due to set at 9.21pm in London, about five minutes later in Stonehenge and then as late as 10.35pm in Stornoway, northwest Scotland.
"Unfortunately, increasing cloud will hinder our view of the Strawberry Moon.
"The clearest skies will be over northern and eastern Scotland and northeast England, but it will tend to cloud over there from midnight.
"Any breaks in the cloud elsewhere will be fairly limited, probably best over western and central Ireland."
not mine.credit and source: SKY NEWS
Strawberry moon coincides with Summer Solstice for first time since 1967
By Sarah Knapton, science editor
20 JUNE 2016 • 10:46AM
As the sun sinks beneath the horizon on the longest day of the year on the evening of Monday June 20, it will be worth looking up.
For the first time since 1967 the summer solstice coincides with a rare ‘strawberry’ moon and, clouds willing, the 17 hours of sunlight will give way to a bright moonlit sky.
Despite the name, the moon will not appear pink or red, although it may glow a warm amber. The romantic label was coined by the Algonquin tribes of North America who believed June’s full moon signalled the beginning of the strawberry picking season.
Other names for the phenomenon in the Northern Hemisphere include Rose Moon, the Hot Moon, and the Honey Moon, while in the Southern Hemisphere it is known as the Long Night Moon.
“Having a full moon land smack on the solstice is a truly rare event,” said astronomer Bob Mernan of Farmer’s Almanac.
“By landing exactly on the solstice, this Full Moon doesn’t just rise as the Sun sets but is opposite the Sun in all other ways too.
“The Sun gets super high so this Moon must be super-low. This forces its light through thicker air, which also tends to be humid this time of year, and the combination typically makes it amber coloured. This is the true Honey Moon.”
Around 25,000 people are expected to gather at Stonehenge in Wiltshire to celebrate the solstice, which comes from the Latin solstitium meaning “sun stands still”
The day is considered to be sacred by many pagans around the world who celebrate the solstice among their yearly holidays and sometimes call he festival Litha, a term dating back to the Venerable Bede for the months of June and July.
English Heritage, which is charging people to park at Stonehenge for the first time this year, has asked revellers to respect the ancient monument.
“Stonehenge is an ancient prehistoric site which has been a place of worship and celebration at the time of the Summer Solstice for thousands of years,” said a spokesman.
“This important place is seen as many as a sacred site. Please respect it and please respect each other.”
The solstice occurs when the tilt of Earth's semi-axis, in either northern or southern hemispheres, is most inclined toward the sun.
The Sun will rise at 4.45am and set at 1.34pm. After tonight the days begin to shorten in the northern hemisphere
Although the meeting of the strawberry moon and solstice has no more significance than an interesting astronomical alignment, it has been causing excitement amid astrologers.
"There is a lot of stuff that is lining up to make this moon quite potent,” said astrologer Timothy Halloran.
“There is an explosion of energy that will go on with this full moon.”
The last strawberry moon occurring on the solstice occurred on June 22 1967. If you miss Monday's you'll have to wait another 46 years before you can see the full moon on the summer solstice with the rare event not happening again until June 21, 2062.
not mine.credit and source: TELEGRAPH
20 JUNE 2016 • 10:46AM
As the sun sinks beneath the horizon on the longest day of the year on the evening of Monday June 20, it will be worth looking up.
For the first time since 1967 the summer solstice coincides with a rare ‘strawberry’ moon and, clouds willing, the 17 hours of sunlight will give way to a bright moonlit sky.
Despite the name, the moon will not appear pink or red, although it may glow a warm amber. The romantic label was coined by the Algonquin tribes of North America who believed June’s full moon signalled the beginning of the strawberry picking season.
Other names for the phenomenon in the Northern Hemisphere include Rose Moon, the Hot Moon, and the Honey Moon, while in the Southern Hemisphere it is known as the Long Night Moon.
“Having a full moon land smack on the solstice is a truly rare event,” said astronomer Bob Mernan of Farmer’s Almanac.
“By landing exactly on the solstice, this Full Moon doesn’t just rise as the Sun sets but is opposite the Sun in all other ways too.
“The Sun gets super high so this Moon must be super-low. This forces its light through thicker air, which also tends to be humid this time of year, and the combination typically makes it amber coloured. This is the true Honey Moon.”
Around 25,000 people are expected to gather at Stonehenge in Wiltshire to celebrate the solstice, which comes from the Latin solstitium meaning “sun stands still”
The day is considered to be sacred by many pagans around the world who celebrate the solstice among their yearly holidays and sometimes call he festival Litha, a term dating back to the Venerable Bede for the months of June and July.
English Heritage, which is charging people to park at Stonehenge for the first time this year, has asked revellers to respect the ancient monument.
“Stonehenge is an ancient prehistoric site which has been a place of worship and celebration at the time of the Summer Solstice for thousands of years,” said a spokesman.
“This important place is seen as many as a sacred site. Please respect it and please respect each other.”
The solstice occurs when the tilt of Earth's semi-axis, in either northern or southern hemispheres, is most inclined toward the sun.
The Sun will rise at 4.45am and set at 1.34pm. After tonight the days begin to shorten in the northern hemisphere
Although the meeting of the strawberry moon and solstice has no more significance than an interesting astronomical alignment, it has been causing excitement amid astrologers.
"There is a lot of stuff that is lining up to make this moon quite potent,” said astrologer Timothy Halloran.
“There is an explosion of energy that will go on with this full moon.”
The last strawberry moon occurring on the solstice occurred on June 22 1967. If you miss Monday's you'll have to wait another 46 years before you can see the full moon on the summer solstice with the rare event not happening again until June 21, 2062.
not mine.credit and source: TELEGRAPH
Sunday, June 19, 2016
New Orleans Coleslaw
INGREDIENTS
Serves: 6
- 1 white cabbage (about 1kg / 2lbs before trimming)
- 2 carrots
- 2 sticks celery
- 4 spring onions
- 200 grams mayonnaise (preferably organic)
- 4 tablespoons buttermilk
- 2 tablespoons maple syrup
- 2 teaspoons cider vinegar
- 100 grams pecan nuts (fairly finely chopped)
- salt (to taste)
- pepper (to taste)
METHOD
- Trim and shred the cabbage, either by hand or with a food processor.
- Peel and grate the carrots, and finely slice the celery and spring onions.
- Whisk together the mayonnaise, buttermilk, maple syrup and vinegar and coat the shredded vegetables with this dressing.
- Season, and toss through the chopped nuts.
not mine.credit and owner: NIGELLA
Saturday, June 18, 2016
Food Wishes Video Recipes: Potato Roses – A Side Dish That's Stacked
Food Wishes Video Recipes: Potato Roses – A Side Dish That's Stacked: I saw a picture of something called “potato stacks,” online last year, on a blog called Home Cooking Adventure , and I thought to myself, ...
Friday, June 17, 2016
Why is violent crime so rare in Iceland?
16 May 2013
Even though I grew up in New England, there was something novel about seeing an Icelandic blizzard. It was paralysing, with epic wind gusts that made snowflakes feel like razors.
As I dragged my bags along Reykjavik's snowy pavement, an older man in a Jeep pulled alongside me.
"You want to get in?" he asked.
It sounded crazy. Why would I ever get in a stranger's car?
Despite everything I was taught about riding in cars with strangers, I climbed in the backseat. And I knew nothing bad was going to happen to me.
After all, I was in Iceland for a week to study the nation's lack of crime, my second trip there in six months.
I had spent the last three years in Boston at Suffolk University Law School, where I was studying international law.
Before my first visit to Reykjavik in August 2012, my law school thesis was settled - a study of cyber warfare and the Geneva conventions.
But a week in Iceland changed my perspective. I was pleasantly flummoxed by what I saw.
Violent crime was virtually non-existent. People seemed relaxed about their safety and that of their children to the point where parents left their babies outside and unattended.
I'd spent time in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, but those countries now appeared plagued with crime by comparison.
Once I got back to America, I changed my thesis topic.
I wanted to know what Iceland was doing right.
Frankly, there is no perfect answer as to why Iceland has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world.
According to the 2011 Global Study on Homicide by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Iceland's homicide rate between 1999-2009 never went above 1.8 per 100,000 population on any given year.
On the other hand, the US had homicide rates between 5.0 and 5.8 per 100,000 population during that same stretch.
After visits with professors, government officials, lawyers, journalists and citizens, the pie-chart breakdown became clear - though admittedly, it is impossible to determine how much each factor contributes.
First - and arguably foremost - there is virtually no difference among upper, middle and lower classes in Iceland. And with that, tension between economic classes is non-existent, a rare occurrence for any country.
The tycoon's children go to school with everyone else
Björgvin Sigurðsson, Social Democratic Alliance
A study of the Icelandic class system done by a University of Missouri master's student found only 1.1% of participants identified themselves as upper class, while 1.5% saw themselves as lower class.
The remaining 97% identified themselves as upper-middle class, lower-middle class, or working class.
On one of three visits to Althing, the Icelandic parliament, I met Bjorgvin Sigurdsson, former chairman of the parliamentary group of the Social Democratic Alliance. In his eyes - as well as those of many Icelanders I spoke with - equality was the biggest reason for the nation's relative lack of crime.
"Here you can have the tycoon's children go to school with everyone else," Sigurdsson says, adding that the country's social welfare and education systems promoted an egalitarian culture.
Crimes in Iceland - when they occur - usually do not involve firearms, though Icelanders own plenty of guns.
GunPolicy.org estimates there are approximately 90,000 guns in the country - in a country with just over 300,000 people.
The country ranks 15th in the world in terms of legal per capita gun ownership. However, acquiring a gun is not an easy process -steps to gun ownership include a medical examination and a written test.
Police are unarmed, too. The only officers permitted to carry firearms are on a special force called the Viking Squad, and they are seldom called out.
In addition, there are, comparatively speaking, few hard drugs in Iceland.
According to a 2012 UNODC report, use among 15-64-year-olds in Iceland of cocaine was 0.9%, of ecstasy 0.5%, and of amphetamines 0.7%.
There is also a tradition in Iceland of pre-empting crime issues before they arise, or stopping issues at the nascent stages before they can get worse.
Right now, police are cracking down on organised crime while members of the Icelandic parliament, Althingi, are considering laws that will aid in dismantling these networks.
When drugs seemed to be a burgeoning issue in the country, the parliament established a separate drug police and drug court. That was in 1973.
Even though I grew up in New England, there was something novel about seeing an Icelandic blizzard. It was paralysing, with epic wind gusts that made snowflakes feel like razors.
As I dragged my bags along Reykjavik's snowy pavement, an older man in a Jeep pulled alongside me.
"You want to get in?" he asked.
It sounded crazy. Why would I ever get in a stranger's car?
Despite everything I was taught about riding in cars with strangers, I climbed in the backseat. And I knew nothing bad was going to happen to me.
After all, I was in Iceland for a week to study the nation's lack of crime, my second trip there in six months.
I had spent the last three years in Boston at Suffolk University Law School, where I was studying international law.
Before my first visit to Reykjavik in August 2012, my law school thesis was settled - a study of cyber warfare and the Geneva conventions.
But a week in Iceland changed my perspective. I was pleasantly flummoxed by what I saw.
Violent crime was virtually non-existent. People seemed relaxed about their safety and that of their children to the point where parents left their babies outside and unattended.
I'd spent time in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, but those countries now appeared plagued with crime by comparison.
Once I got back to America, I changed my thesis topic.
I wanted to know what Iceland was doing right.
Frankly, there is no perfect answer as to why Iceland has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world.
According to the 2011 Global Study on Homicide by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Iceland's homicide rate between 1999-2009 never went above 1.8 per 100,000 population on any given year.
On the other hand, the US had homicide rates between 5.0 and 5.8 per 100,000 population during that same stretch.
After visits with professors, government officials, lawyers, journalists and citizens, the pie-chart breakdown became clear - though admittedly, it is impossible to determine how much each factor contributes.
First - and arguably foremost - there is virtually no difference among upper, middle and lower classes in Iceland. And with that, tension between economic classes is non-existent, a rare occurrence for any country.
The tycoon's children go to school with everyone else
Björgvin Sigurðsson, Social Democratic Alliance
A study of the Icelandic class system done by a University of Missouri master's student found only 1.1% of participants identified themselves as upper class, while 1.5% saw themselves as lower class.
The remaining 97% identified themselves as upper-middle class, lower-middle class, or working class.
On one of three visits to Althing, the Icelandic parliament, I met Bjorgvin Sigurdsson, former chairman of the parliamentary group of the Social Democratic Alliance. In his eyes - as well as those of many Icelanders I spoke with - equality was the biggest reason for the nation's relative lack of crime.
"Here you can have the tycoon's children go to school with everyone else," Sigurdsson says, adding that the country's social welfare and education systems promoted an egalitarian culture.
Crimes in Iceland - when they occur - usually do not involve firearms, though Icelanders own plenty of guns.
GunPolicy.org estimates there are approximately 90,000 guns in the country - in a country with just over 300,000 people.
The country ranks 15th in the world in terms of legal per capita gun ownership. However, acquiring a gun is not an easy process -steps to gun ownership include a medical examination and a written test.
Police are unarmed, too. The only officers permitted to carry firearms are on a special force called the Viking Squad, and they are seldom called out.
In addition, there are, comparatively speaking, few hard drugs in Iceland.
According to a 2012 UNODC report, use among 15-64-year-olds in Iceland of cocaine was 0.9%, of ecstasy 0.5%, and of amphetamines 0.7%.
There is also a tradition in Iceland of pre-empting crime issues before they arise, or stopping issues at the nascent stages before they can get worse.
Right now, police are cracking down on organised crime while members of the Icelandic parliament, Althingi, are considering laws that will aid in dismantling these networks.
When drugs seemed to be a burgeoning issue in the country, the parliament established a separate drug police and drug court. That was in 1973.
In the first 10 years of the court, roughly 90% of all cases were settled with a fine.
There's an inimitable make-up of Iceland which, ostensibly and ideally, could provide guidelines for people in other nations who are looking for solutions to their crime issues.
As I climbed into the back of that man's Jeep that morning, he smiled and asked if I needed help with my luggage. And even though I knew nothing about him, I felt safe.
not mine.credit and source: BBC
Wednesday, June 15, 2016
Food Wishes Video Recipes: Pourable Pizza – The Great Liquid Dough Experiment...
Food Wishes Video Recipes: Pourable Pizza – The Great Liquid Dough Experiment...: I once made a mini-pizza using a crumpet. No, I’m not starting a limerick. Anyway, I toasted it nice and crisp, topped it with sauce and...
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Is Brad Pitt the wokest white man in Hollywood?
June 14, 2016
SORAYA NADIA MCDONALD
How Brad Pitt’s production company is making marquee movies by and about black folks.
Folks, this isn’t fun. Just two years ago, after director Steve McQueen’s hauntingly beautiful masterpiece 12 Years a Slave won best picture at the Oscars, many hoped it would mark the start of continued and lasting change in the film business.
Then came two years of #OscarsSoWhite.
Discussions about meaningful diversity in Hollywood and how to achieve it have reached an impasse. News media and online masses continue to criticize the film industry for continuing to specialize in telling stories by and about white guys and catering disproportionately to the whims of teenage boys. Meanwhile, the Big Six (that would be film studios 20th Century Fox, Columbia, Disney, Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros., not these guys) and their subsidiaries keep soldiering through public-relations disasters that implicate their institutional sclerosis. See: Ghost in the Shell, Doctor Strange, Aloha, Pan, Gods of Egypt and Exodus: Gods and Kings, as the latest examples. Ghost in the Shell and Doctor Strange have yet to be released. But the others were box-office flops. With few exceptions, instead of making changes, the movie industry, and by extension, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, has responded with a mix of reflexive defensiveness, contempt and recalcitrance.
Hollywood’s ruling class could absolutely do with a shake-up to rid it of the homogeneity that plagues its ranks. As producer Effie Brown would say, we are well overdue for a cinematic landscape that “looks like America,” but, in the words of abolitionist Harriet Tubman via actress Viola Davis, we “can’t seem to get there no how.” In 2015, while promoting the weirdly entertaining, if polarizing, Chi-Raq, director Spike Lee proposed a Rooney Rule for Hollywood, citing the absence of black executives with green-light power, as a way to curb diversity blunders (disclosure: ESPN and The Undefeated are the home of Spike Lee’s Lil’ Joints). It’s a vital but incomplete solution. Lee’s argument absolves currently employed white executives, unlikely to be fired anytime soon, from responsibility to make their films reflect the fast-changing demographics of the country. It does nothing to hold them accountable for the current sorry state of affairs, continually documented in annual diversity studies from the University of Southern California and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, not to mention internal studies from the Writers Guild and Directors Guild of America. Surely, there’s something else to be done.
And there is. There’s an outfit run by three rich white folks that has proven it. In three years, Plan B, the production company run by Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, has gone from an eclectic studio offering up an array of really white, if mostly decent films (Running with Scissors, The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Kick-Ass) to a company that has produced a slate of profitable, award-winning marquee properties by and about people of color.
This is not to diminish the efforts of Lee Daniels, Will Packer, Oprah Winfrey, Reggie Hudlin, Nate Moore, Lee and other black Hollywood power brokers, but their labor and money alone is not enough to effect the sort of change that would move the needle on years-long stagnating diversity numbers. Otherwise, the revolution would already be here. It is to say this, however: White Hollywood, get it together. There’s no excuse for this.
The big studios thrive on exhaustively duplicating successful ideas, which explains the glut of vampire and werewolf-themed properties following the mania over Twilight. It explains the ubiquity of zombies, and the existence of the Divergent franchise following the runaway numbers of the Hunger Games movies. It’s the reason we now have two massive competing cinematic universes based on comic book series.
Not only does Plan B consistently put forth films by and about people of color, it hasn’t lost its shirt in the process. It picks winners, it makes money, and judging from its future projects, it’s going to keep doing it. Maybe the Big Six should be copying it.
The high point in Plan B’s history, of course, is when it won best picture for 12 Years a Slave and then film made history as the first work by a black director to claim the honor. The following year, its poignant civil rights heavy-hitter Selma, co-produced with Winfrey, dominated awards-season conversations, especially after both director Ava DuVernay and star actor David Oyelowo found themselves on the receiving end of Oscar snubs.
Now there’s already anticipation building for Moonlight, the sophomore effort from writer-director and Miami native Barry Jenkins. Moonlight, a coming-of-age drama set in Miami during the drug wars of the 1980s and ’90s, is based on the Tarell McCraney play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. Scheduled for release later this year, it stars André Holland, Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris. A24, the indie distributor behind last year’s Ex Machina and the recent The Lobster, is financing and distributing the project. Plan B is co-producing.
Jenkins, a former employee of Harpo Productions, made his feature debut in 2008 with the terrific Medicine for Melancholy, a contemplative, desaturated exploration of romantic and racial ennui that starred Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins. Jenkins is also set to adapt the soulful, wildly ambitious Atticus Lish novel Preparation for the Next Life with Plan B and HBO.
The vibrant, undeniable force that stands today is vastly different from the Plan B that began as a partnership between Pitt and his then-wife Jennifer Aniston and Brad Grey at Warner Bros. in 2001. The company was still in its infancy when it netted its first credit on Troy (2004), followed by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and The Departed (2006). There was no obvious creative through line and when Pitt and Aniston split in 2005, Aniston walked away from the company. When Grey became head of Paramount in 2005, Plan B followed.
Pitt and Aniston had met Gardner, the daughter of an investment banker and a nonprofit executive from Winnetka, Illinois, when they were interviewing candidates to run Plan B. Gardner, 48, had a literary background at William Morris Agency. A graduate of Columbia University, she’d spent her postgraduate years working on films in the art department or as a location manager.
“I knew [Pitt] was a kindred spirit when we talked about the company and we had a lot of crossover with our ideas: wanting it to be a safe harbor for filmmakers, a place where people might come where the energy and the protection felt singular. He also is a cinephile, so it’s a treat to work with him,” Gardner told Anne Thompson while promoting 12 Years a Slave. “He also really believes in the shelf life of a movie, which is to say he doesn’t put a lot of stake in opening weekends. He believes movies are found over a long period of time. He said to me one year after we made Jesse James and A Mighty Heart, ‘I couldn’t be prouder and those movies will find their place and their time.’ ”
Pitt and Gardner ran Plan B together and they promoted Kleiner, who joined as a creative executive in 2003, to co-president in 2013. In December 2013, Plan B’s contractual partnership with Paramount was set to expire and the company struck a three-year deal with New Regency (which co-financed 12 Years a Slave), and Brett Ratner’s RatPac Entertainment financing company. The deal punctuated a shift. An operation that had been dedicated to making a mix of starring vehicles for Pitt (including the bloated 2013 World War Z), and off-the-beaten-path films broadened its spectrum of offerings to include people of color, both onscreen and behind the camera.
The current Hollywood climate is one characterized by risk aversion and a widespread allergy to imagination. Yet Plan B landed on the Hollywood Reporter’s 2015 list of the town’s 30 most powerful film producers by doubling down on original voices and unexpected stories, earning it the label of “one of the most daring outfits around.”
Plan B doesn’t just want to work with minority filmmakers. Pitt, Kleiner and Gardner are interested in backing work that’s groundbreaking and exceptional, and once they find talent they like, they tend to return to the same wells. It’s not that Plan B has some secret, special sauce squirreled away in a vault in the studio’s Wilshire Boulevard offices. The company’s modus operandi seems to be:
Think of it this way: Pitt and Plan B are John Stockton. The filmmakers and actors of color with whom they work are Karl Malone. Pitt leverages his star power, access and reputation to get you the ball, and then he gets out of the way. In a perfect world, one in which people of color had the same access to the resources that Plan B enjoys, there would be no need for a Stockton figure at all. Alas, that world, as it currently stands, is about as real as Negrotown.
In the film industry, the ball comes in the form of access to capital and distribution, the requisite support to make a film successful in the form of press and advertising, and when appropriate, awards-season campaigning.
As a producer, Pitt understands the weaknesses and biases of the star system and has thrown his power behind countering, if not outright rejecting it. This is especially crucial in disproving the canard that there aren’t more films starring people of color because people of color aren’t capital-M, capital-S Movie Stars, who can guarantee butts in seats.
So, how do you become an A-List Movie Star if you’re never offered Movie Star roles? You need producers and financiers like Pitt to take a chance on you and to believe in you. And overwhelmingly, the people holding those purse strings are white. (Thanks generational wealth predicated on a bedrock of structural racism! You really are everywhere, all the time.) Before 12 Years a Slave, Chiwetel Ejiofor, 38, was an actor whose face you knew from something — he’s the guy from Love Actually! And Salt! And Amistad! And American Gangster! — but you’d probably have to scroll through his IMDb page to figure out which supporting role it was. But Ejiofor so utterly embodied his 12 Years a Slave character Solomon Northrup that it’s difficult to envision anyone else in the role. The movie made the case that he’s absolutely a leading man. But according to Ejiofor, that probably would not have happened had Pitt not agreed to be in the film.
“You know, without him, there wouldn’t be a film,” Ejiofor told Vulture’s Jada Yuan in 2013. “He was just so instrumental in making this film happen. He’s such a champion of filmmakers and the things that he believes in and can put his weight behind. … I don’t know what the full machinations are, but I imagine that him being around and lending that kind of support and weight to something is very freeing for [financiers]. They think, ‘OK, well, we can give the director some latitude.’ ”
Ejiofor is slated to star in a future Plan B property, Marching Powder. The film, based on the book by Rusty Young, tells the tale of British drug smuggler Thomas McFadden’s unexpectedly strange experience during a six-year sentence in a Bolivian prison beset by corruption. Plan B, like many operations, consistently mines the indie world for up-and-coming actors and directors. That’s essentially what Universal did with Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow, who leaped directly to the big leagues after making a splash at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival with his charming debut comedy Safety Not Guaranteed. The difference is that Plan B actually works with people of color. It takes so-called risks on relative unknowns, something the rest of the film industry, including the indie world, has been loath to do with nonwhite talent.
“The independent finance world is pretty, pretty bad,” Dear White People director Justin Simien recently told IndieWire. “That’s where ‘films don’t travel’ bulls— [comes from] — it really has its roots in the minds of financier, the obsession with the ‘bankable’ diverse star. Which is sad, because [the independent world] is where the people who are on the outside of the industry have to make their films. We can’t make our first films in a studio. It doesn’t really happen anymore.”
The result of Plan B doing what few of its counterparts will has been that its films have become a reliable place to see promising nonwhite faces who face a harder climb up the mainstream food chain. This extends to Plan B productions built around white protagonists such as The Big Short and the upcoming War Machine.
Some of the credit for this goes to casting director Francine Maisler, who convinced McQueen to hire actress Lupita Nyong’o after she saw her perform at a Los Angeles acting showcase when Nyong’o was fresh out of Yale School of Drama. Maisler then created an audition tape and sent it to McQueen, already on location in Louisiana. Maisler worked on 2015 best picture contender The Big Short, where she cast Adepero Oduye as a manager at a Wall Street investment bank. Oduye turned in a powerful, heart-wrenching performance in 12 Years a Slave as Eliza, the woman who is inconsolable after her child is ripped away from her at the auction block. And Maisler is responsible for casting Pitt’s upcoming military satire War Machine, which features Keith Stanfield (Straight Outta Compton, Short Term 12, Selma, Miles Ahead) and R.J. Cyler (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl).
“If I can change somebody’s life who may have never gotten a chance otherwise, that is the most exciting part of my job,” Maisler told the Los Angeles Times in 2013.
Because of its industry cachet, Plan B makes it possible for existing talent to be seen and recognized by many more eyeballs and therefore becomes a valuable career stepping-stone for people such as Stanfield, Nyong’o, Jenkins and the still-criminally underused Oduye.
The impact of working on one Plan B film has paid dividends for Oyelowo, though we can lay just as much credit for his ascendance at the feet of DuVernay. The two have both benefited from a fruitful, creative partnership, and it was Oyelowo who lobbied producers to hire DuVernay to direct Selma. Still, in 2014, Oyelowo signed on to co-star with Nyong’o in the film adaptation of the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie novel Americanah, which Plan B has optioned and is producing. The same year, his chops shone in the HBO film Nightingale, which also bears the Plan B stamp. This year, Nyong’o and Oyelowo are co-starring in a Disney property, Queen of Katwe, which opens in September. And for Nyong’o, this comes after roles in Jungle Book and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (full disclosure: Disney owns ESPN, and therefore The Undefeated).
When DuVernay made Selma for $20 million, it was the biggest film, in terms of budget and profile, of her career. And now? The woman is directing a major adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, also for Disney. DuVernay is so busy she just had to back out of the sci-fi thriller Intelligent Life, which Nyong’o is toplining, by the way. A freakin’ Barbie doll has been created in her image.
But what’s just as important as the fact that Plan B is providing a springboard for black talent to make the jump from indie obscurity is the mix of the stories in which it’s invested. Americanah, if done well, has the potential to be a moving, smart romantic drama that encompasses identity and immigration. Moonlight offers an important and rarely seen exploration of black gay sexuality.
As an actor, Pitt, 52, has been one of the biggest modern beneficiaries of the Hollywood star system. As writer Lucy Kaylin characterized his ascendance in 2005: he’s enjoyed “an all-star’s easy lope from obscurity to fame.”
He swaggered into the national consciousness as the larcenous, Stetson-tipping ladykiller in 1991’s Thelma and Louise and rose to the ranks of heartthrob thanks to turns in 1994’s Legends of the Fall and 1998’s Meet Joe Black. He’s the wisecracking wingman to George Clooney’s Danny Ocean and boasts films with David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club), Guy Ritchie (Snatch) and the Coen brothers (Burn After Reading).
He married quintessential girl-next-door Aniston in 2000. And then there was that famously bro-y quote that landed in GQ, from an interview with Kaylin that took place just days after Aniston filed for divorce in 2005:
Amid the chirps and tweets and the late-day sun squeezing hard through the branches, we small talk down the path — me telling him about a funny call I just got from my kid, which reminds him of a phone message he just got from his mom: “I’m disappointed in you, I’m angry with you, but whatever you do I’ll always love you,” Pitt quotes her as saying, which he clearly enjoyed. “All my bitches are mad at me right now,” he says with a laugh, declining to elaborate.
No matter. He was forgiven soon enough. Of course he was. He’s Eddie Fisher in the aughts version of the Eddie Fisher-Debbie Reynolds-Liz Taylor Hollywood love triangle, except this time Rachel from Friends was Debbie and Lara Croft was Liz. And Eddie? Well, Eddie’s just lucky.
His partnership with Angelina Jolie following Mr. and Mrs. Smith further increased the public’s fascination with him, though that’s finally settled somewhat, more than a decade into their relationship and six Benetton kids later.
Still. Who wouldn’t take a meeting with this guy, the one who’s inspired one of the most idiosyncratic and hilariously specific artifacts of internet fandom?
Pitt is uniquely positioned to upend Hollywood convention precisely because of the position he enjoys in it. In his quest to do so, he’s helped by his stardom, his wealth, his marriage to Jolie, his straight, white maleness, and of course, that pretty face. Depressingly, a recent study by two University of Colorado professors found that while the perception of white men in the workplace remains unchanged when they advocate for diversity, women and nonwhites are actually seen as less competent and are judged more harshly for doing the same.
In 2004, Pitt was guest on Oprah. Winfrey invited him to offer his thoughts on privilege.
Winfrey: “You have had these dashing good looks all of your life. Even when you were a little kid, even when you were a little boy, you were a dashing, good-looking little boy. Did you realize early on that dashing good looks worked in your favor?”
Pitt: “Well — serious question, yes? No, it’s true. You certainly see — I was quite aware of certain advantages and disadvantages. I saw doors opening — ”
Winfrey: “What would be the disadvantage?”
Pitt: “Hubris is the disadvantage. And not being tested properly. I was painfully aware of some doors opening where they didn’t for others and I would ask my mother. My mother would come to our rooms when we were little and talk us to sleep … and I remember asking her about this at a very young age, Why isn’t the world fair? Why is it not fair? And she said to me that it’s not, but this means that you have more responsibility. And it’s something that’s always rung in my head. … There’s the true answer.”
Pitt then immediately deflected by turning to face the audience and mentioning how inspiring he found a recent trip Winfrey had made to Africa. He reached over for a beat and took her hand. “That really inspired me,” he said, “and sent me down some paths along those lines.”
Pitt seems to be drawing inspiration from his doppelgänger, Spy Game co-star and Sundance Film Festival founder, Robert Redford. Redford also directed Pitt in A River Runs Through It (1992). Both men parlayed early mainstream Hollywood success into creating specific, independent-minded lanes for themselves, and they’re both revered for doing it.
Like Redford, Pitt possesses a frankness and self-awareness that’s allowed him to sidestep the characterization of dilettante (that cringe-inducing attempt at an Austrian accent in Seven Years in Tibet notwithstanding), something that comes across even in his earliest interviews. Before his 1991 breakout role in Thelma and Louise, Pitt played Walker Lovejoy on a not-great Fox show called Glory Days. The promos for it were painfully earnest.
“Unfortunately, a lot of television to me is a fast-food fashion show and it’s because of money and time and I understand it has to be that way, but it gets kinda frustrating,” he said in an a 1990 interview with Entertainment Tonight, then 26 years old and still clearly unpolished.
The interviewer, who is off-camera, tees up an easy softy for Pitt to give the show some praise, noting how nice it is that Pitt has a “personal opinion”: “Maybe you’re quite proud then, to be involved in a show — ”
Pitt refused to take the bait.
“If it gets there, yeah,” he said. “That’s the plan. We’re not there yet.”
As he rose through the ranks to become a certified A-lister, Pitt maintained that no-B.S. sensibility. He seems to understand the off-putting nature of soliciting credit for something that should have been happening all along. The most profound example of this was at the 2014 Oscars, when 12 Years a Slave won Best Picture.
The best picture Oscar is awarded to a film’s producers. Pitt went up and, in 22 seconds, issued thanks on behalf of the production to the academy and to Solomon Northrup. And then, true to form, he got out of the way. He turned over the rest of the broadcast, and the last words of the night, to his director and fellow producer, whom he introduced as “the indomitable Mr. Steve McQueen.”
“There are a lot of people I need to thank, so I’ll just push on,” McQueen said, clearly overcome with emotion and stumbling through his words. “My wonderful cast and crew, Plan B … Brad Pitt — without him, this film would just not have been made.”
12 Years a Slave was a transformative film for Pitt and a testament to the power of what a brilliant piece of art can accomplish and the lasting effects it can have on its patrons.
“It’s why I got into film in the first place,” Pitt said in a TODAY show interview with Ann Curry. “It’s one of those few films that cuts to the base of our humanity. It’s not until I saw Solomon Northrup’s story that I fully, fully grasped the utter horror of losing your freedom or denying another their freedom, taking their freedom, splitting their family apart. It’s abhorrent.”
For all the effort Plan B has put forth in seeking quality stories about people of color and the actors and directors to bring them to life, the company is not particularly interested in shouting about it.
When I requested to speak to Pitt, Kleiner or Gardner about what drove the company’s pivot toward championing such stories, a Plan B representative called me from South Korea, where production was just beginning on Snowpiercer director Bong Joon-ho’s new film Okja (Plan B is co-producing with Netflix), to decline. These days, Pitt generally doesn’t talk to reporters unless he’s promoting a project. We didn’t feel like holding the story until press junkets for Moonlight or War Machine rolled around.
However, when Vanity Fair asked in 2015, as Plan B was in the depths of an Oscar campaign for Selma, Gardner had this to say:
“Everyone needs voices, you know. The fact that [white men] are such a singular source of people making the most popular form of entertainment — that makes zero sense. … If you care about history, which I think we do, then the bandwidth of story that is available to be told, and the bandwidth that is necessary to be thorough, just naturally encompasses people of all walks of life — all races, all cultures, all genders, all inclinations, all faiths. I think we come at it from that place.”
not mine.credit and source: THE UNDEFEATED
SORAYA NADIA MCDONALD
How Brad Pitt’s production company is making marquee movies by and about black folks.
Folks, this isn’t fun. Just two years ago, after director Steve McQueen’s hauntingly beautiful masterpiece 12 Years a Slave won best picture at the Oscars, many hoped it would mark the start of continued and lasting change in the film business.
Then came two years of #OscarsSoWhite.
Discussions about meaningful diversity in Hollywood and how to achieve it have reached an impasse. News media and online masses continue to criticize the film industry for continuing to specialize in telling stories by and about white guys and catering disproportionately to the whims of teenage boys. Meanwhile, the Big Six (that would be film studios 20th Century Fox, Columbia, Disney, Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros., not these guys) and their subsidiaries keep soldiering through public-relations disasters that implicate their institutional sclerosis. See: Ghost in the Shell, Doctor Strange, Aloha, Pan, Gods of Egypt and Exodus: Gods and Kings, as the latest examples. Ghost in the Shell and Doctor Strange have yet to be released. But the others were box-office flops. With few exceptions, instead of making changes, the movie industry, and by extension, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, has responded with a mix of reflexive defensiveness, contempt and recalcitrance.
Hollywood’s ruling class could absolutely do with a shake-up to rid it of the homogeneity that plagues its ranks. As producer Effie Brown would say, we are well overdue for a cinematic landscape that “looks like America,” but, in the words of abolitionist Harriet Tubman via actress Viola Davis, we “can’t seem to get there no how.” In 2015, while promoting the weirdly entertaining, if polarizing, Chi-Raq, director Spike Lee proposed a Rooney Rule for Hollywood, citing the absence of black executives with green-light power, as a way to curb diversity blunders (disclosure: ESPN and The Undefeated are the home of Spike Lee’s Lil’ Joints). It’s a vital but incomplete solution. Lee’s argument absolves currently employed white executives, unlikely to be fired anytime soon, from responsibility to make their films reflect the fast-changing demographics of the country. It does nothing to hold them accountable for the current sorry state of affairs, continually documented in annual diversity studies from the University of Southern California and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, not to mention internal studies from the Writers Guild and Directors Guild of America. Surely, there’s something else to be done.
And there is. There’s an outfit run by three rich white folks that has proven it. In three years, Plan B, the production company run by Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, has gone from an eclectic studio offering up an array of really white, if mostly decent films (Running with Scissors, The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Kick-Ass) to a company that has produced a slate of profitable, award-winning marquee properties by and about people of color.
This is not to diminish the efforts of Lee Daniels, Will Packer, Oprah Winfrey, Reggie Hudlin, Nate Moore, Lee and other black Hollywood power brokers, but their labor and money alone is not enough to effect the sort of change that would move the needle on years-long stagnating diversity numbers. Otherwise, the revolution would already be here. It is to say this, however: White Hollywood, get it together. There’s no excuse for this.
The big studios thrive on exhaustively duplicating successful ideas, which explains the glut of vampire and werewolf-themed properties following the mania over Twilight. It explains the ubiquity of zombies, and the existence of the Divergent franchise following the runaway numbers of the Hunger Games movies. It’s the reason we now have two massive competing cinematic universes based on comic book series.
Not only does Plan B consistently put forth films by and about people of color, it hasn’t lost its shirt in the process. It picks winners, it makes money, and judging from its future projects, it’s going to keep doing it. Maybe the Big Six should be copying it.
The high point in Plan B’s history, of course, is when it won best picture for 12 Years a Slave and then film made history as the first work by a black director to claim the honor. The following year, its poignant civil rights heavy-hitter Selma, co-produced with Winfrey, dominated awards-season conversations, especially after both director Ava DuVernay and star actor David Oyelowo found themselves on the receiving end of Oscar snubs.
Now there’s already anticipation building for Moonlight, the sophomore effort from writer-director and Miami native Barry Jenkins. Moonlight, a coming-of-age drama set in Miami during the drug wars of the 1980s and ’90s, is based on the Tarell McCraney play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue. Scheduled for release later this year, it stars André Holland, Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris. A24, the indie distributor behind last year’s Ex Machina and the recent The Lobster, is financing and distributing the project. Plan B is co-producing.
Jenkins, a former employee of Harpo Productions, made his feature debut in 2008 with the terrific Medicine for Melancholy, a contemplative, desaturated exploration of romantic and racial ennui that starred Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins. Jenkins is also set to adapt the soulful, wildly ambitious Atticus Lish novel Preparation for the Next Life with Plan B and HBO.
The vibrant, undeniable force that stands today is vastly different from the Plan B that began as a partnership between Pitt and his then-wife Jennifer Aniston and Brad Grey at Warner Bros. in 2001. The company was still in its infancy when it netted its first credit on Troy (2004), followed by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and The Departed (2006). There was no obvious creative through line and when Pitt and Aniston split in 2005, Aniston walked away from the company. When Grey became head of Paramount in 2005, Plan B followed.
Pitt and Aniston had met Gardner, the daughter of an investment banker and a nonprofit executive from Winnetka, Illinois, when they were interviewing candidates to run Plan B. Gardner, 48, had a literary background at William Morris Agency. A graduate of Columbia University, she’d spent her postgraduate years working on films in the art department or as a location manager.
“I knew [Pitt] was a kindred spirit when we talked about the company and we had a lot of crossover with our ideas: wanting it to be a safe harbor for filmmakers, a place where people might come where the energy and the protection felt singular. He also is a cinephile, so it’s a treat to work with him,” Gardner told Anne Thompson while promoting 12 Years a Slave. “He also really believes in the shelf life of a movie, which is to say he doesn’t put a lot of stake in opening weekends. He believes movies are found over a long period of time. He said to me one year after we made Jesse James and A Mighty Heart, ‘I couldn’t be prouder and those movies will find their place and their time.’ ”
Pitt and Gardner ran Plan B together and they promoted Kleiner, who joined as a creative executive in 2003, to co-president in 2013. In December 2013, Plan B’s contractual partnership with Paramount was set to expire and the company struck a three-year deal with New Regency (which co-financed 12 Years a Slave), and Brett Ratner’s RatPac Entertainment financing company. The deal punctuated a shift. An operation that had been dedicated to making a mix of starring vehicles for Pitt (including the bloated 2013 World War Z), and off-the-beaten-path films broadened its spectrum of offerings to include people of color, both onscreen and behind the camera.
The current Hollywood climate is one characterized by risk aversion and a widespread allergy to imagination. Yet Plan B landed on the Hollywood Reporter’s 2015 list of the town’s 30 most powerful film producers by doubling down on original voices and unexpected stories, earning it the label of “one of the most daring outfits around.”
Plan B doesn’t just want to work with minority filmmakers. Pitt, Kleiner and Gardner are interested in backing work that’s groundbreaking and exceptional, and once they find talent they like, they tend to return to the same wells. It’s not that Plan B has some secret, special sauce squirreled away in a vault in the studio’s Wilshire Boulevard offices. The company’s modus operandi seems to be:
- Find people of color, usually in the indie world, whose talents might otherwise be overlooked or underappreciated.
- Facilitate and provide giant platforms for those talents to shine.
- Repeat.
Think of it this way: Pitt and Plan B are John Stockton. The filmmakers and actors of color with whom they work are Karl Malone. Pitt leverages his star power, access and reputation to get you the ball, and then he gets out of the way. In a perfect world, one in which people of color had the same access to the resources that Plan B enjoys, there would be no need for a Stockton figure at all. Alas, that world, as it currently stands, is about as real as Negrotown.
In the film industry, the ball comes in the form of access to capital and distribution, the requisite support to make a film successful in the form of press and advertising, and when appropriate, awards-season campaigning.
As a producer, Pitt understands the weaknesses and biases of the star system and has thrown his power behind countering, if not outright rejecting it. This is especially crucial in disproving the canard that there aren’t more films starring people of color because people of color aren’t capital-M, capital-S Movie Stars, who can guarantee butts in seats.
So, how do you become an A-List Movie Star if you’re never offered Movie Star roles? You need producers and financiers like Pitt to take a chance on you and to believe in you. And overwhelmingly, the people holding those purse strings are white. (Thanks generational wealth predicated on a bedrock of structural racism! You really are everywhere, all the time.) Before 12 Years a Slave, Chiwetel Ejiofor, 38, was an actor whose face you knew from something — he’s the guy from Love Actually! And Salt! And Amistad! And American Gangster! — but you’d probably have to scroll through his IMDb page to figure out which supporting role it was. But Ejiofor so utterly embodied his 12 Years a Slave character Solomon Northrup that it’s difficult to envision anyone else in the role. The movie made the case that he’s absolutely a leading man. But according to Ejiofor, that probably would not have happened had Pitt not agreed to be in the film.
“You know, without him, there wouldn’t be a film,” Ejiofor told Vulture’s Jada Yuan in 2013. “He was just so instrumental in making this film happen. He’s such a champion of filmmakers and the things that he believes in and can put his weight behind. … I don’t know what the full machinations are, but I imagine that him being around and lending that kind of support and weight to something is very freeing for [financiers]. They think, ‘OK, well, we can give the director some latitude.’ ”
Ejiofor is slated to star in a future Plan B property, Marching Powder. The film, based on the book by Rusty Young, tells the tale of British drug smuggler Thomas McFadden’s unexpectedly strange experience during a six-year sentence in a Bolivian prison beset by corruption. Plan B, like many operations, consistently mines the indie world for up-and-coming actors and directors. That’s essentially what Universal did with Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow, who leaped directly to the big leagues after making a splash at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival with his charming debut comedy Safety Not Guaranteed. The difference is that Plan B actually works with people of color. It takes so-called risks on relative unknowns, something the rest of the film industry, including the indie world, has been loath to do with nonwhite talent.
“The independent finance world is pretty, pretty bad,” Dear White People director Justin Simien recently told IndieWire. “That’s where ‘films don’t travel’ bulls— [comes from] — it really has its roots in the minds of financier, the obsession with the ‘bankable’ diverse star. Which is sad, because [the independent world] is where the people who are on the outside of the industry have to make their films. We can’t make our first films in a studio. It doesn’t really happen anymore.”
The result of Plan B doing what few of its counterparts will has been that its films have become a reliable place to see promising nonwhite faces who face a harder climb up the mainstream food chain. This extends to Plan B productions built around white protagonists such as The Big Short and the upcoming War Machine.
Some of the credit for this goes to casting director Francine Maisler, who convinced McQueen to hire actress Lupita Nyong’o after she saw her perform at a Los Angeles acting showcase when Nyong’o was fresh out of Yale School of Drama. Maisler then created an audition tape and sent it to McQueen, already on location in Louisiana. Maisler worked on 2015 best picture contender The Big Short, where she cast Adepero Oduye as a manager at a Wall Street investment bank. Oduye turned in a powerful, heart-wrenching performance in 12 Years a Slave as Eliza, the woman who is inconsolable after her child is ripped away from her at the auction block. And Maisler is responsible for casting Pitt’s upcoming military satire War Machine, which features Keith Stanfield (Straight Outta Compton, Short Term 12, Selma, Miles Ahead) and R.J. Cyler (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl).
“If I can change somebody’s life who may have never gotten a chance otherwise, that is the most exciting part of my job,” Maisler told the Los Angeles Times in 2013.
Because of its industry cachet, Plan B makes it possible for existing talent to be seen and recognized by many more eyeballs and therefore becomes a valuable career stepping-stone for people such as Stanfield, Nyong’o, Jenkins and the still-criminally underused Oduye.
The impact of working on one Plan B film has paid dividends for Oyelowo, though we can lay just as much credit for his ascendance at the feet of DuVernay. The two have both benefited from a fruitful, creative partnership, and it was Oyelowo who lobbied producers to hire DuVernay to direct Selma. Still, in 2014, Oyelowo signed on to co-star with Nyong’o in the film adaptation of the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie novel Americanah, which Plan B has optioned and is producing. The same year, his chops shone in the HBO film Nightingale, which also bears the Plan B stamp. This year, Nyong’o and Oyelowo are co-starring in a Disney property, Queen of Katwe, which opens in September. And for Nyong’o, this comes after roles in Jungle Book and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (full disclosure: Disney owns ESPN, and therefore The Undefeated).
When DuVernay made Selma for $20 million, it was the biggest film, in terms of budget and profile, of her career. And now? The woman is directing a major adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, also for Disney. DuVernay is so busy she just had to back out of the sci-fi thriller Intelligent Life, which Nyong’o is toplining, by the way. A freakin’ Barbie doll has been created in her image.
But what’s just as important as the fact that Plan B is providing a springboard for black talent to make the jump from indie obscurity is the mix of the stories in which it’s invested. Americanah, if done well, has the potential to be a moving, smart romantic drama that encompasses identity and immigration. Moonlight offers an important and rarely seen exploration of black gay sexuality.
As an actor, Pitt, 52, has been one of the biggest modern beneficiaries of the Hollywood star system. As writer Lucy Kaylin characterized his ascendance in 2005: he’s enjoyed “an all-star’s easy lope from obscurity to fame.”
He swaggered into the national consciousness as the larcenous, Stetson-tipping ladykiller in 1991’s Thelma and Louise and rose to the ranks of heartthrob thanks to turns in 1994’s Legends of the Fall and 1998’s Meet Joe Black. He’s the wisecracking wingman to George Clooney’s Danny Ocean and boasts films with David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club), Guy Ritchie (Snatch) and the Coen brothers (Burn After Reading).
He married quintessential girl-next-door Aniston in 2000. And then there was that famously bro-y quote that landed in GQ, from an interview with Kaylin that took place just days after Aniston filed for divorce in 2005:
Amid the chirps and tweets and the late-day sun squeezing hard through the branches, we small talk down the path — me telling him about a funny call I just got from my kid, which reminds him of a phone message he just got from his mom: “I’m disappointed in you, I’m angry with you, but whatever you do I’ll always love you,” Pitt quotes her as saying, which he clearly enjoyed. “All my bitches are mad at me right now,” he says with a laugh, declining to elaborate.
No matter. He was forgiven soon enough. Of course he was. He’s Eddie Fisher in the aughts version of the Eddie Fisher-Debbie Reynolds-Liz Taylor Hollywood love triangle, except this time Rachel from Friends was Debbie and Lara Croft was Liz. And Eddie? Well, Eddie’s just lucky.
His partnership with Angelina Jolie following Mr. and Mrs. Smith further increased the public’s fascination with him, though that’s finally settled somewhat, more than a decade into their relationship and six Benetton kids later.
Still. Who wouldn’t take a meeting with this guy, the one who’s inspired one of the most idiosyncratic and hilariously specific artifacts of internet fandom?
Pitt is uniquely positioned to upend Hollywood convention precisely because of the position he enjoys in it. In his quest to do so, he’s helped by his stardom, his wealth, his marriage to Jolie, his straight, white maleness, and of course, that pretty face. Depressingly, a recent study by two University of Colorado professors found that while the perception of white men in the workplace remains unchanged when they advocate for diversity, women and nonwhites are actually seen as less competent and are judged more harshly for doing the same.
In 2004, Pitt was guest on Oprah. Winfrey invited him to offer his thoughts on privilege.
Winfrey: “You have had these dashing good looks all of your life. Even when you were a little kid, even when you were a little boy, you were a dashing, good-looking little boy. Did you realize early on that dashing good looks worked in your favor?”
Pitt: “Well — serious question, yes? No, it’s true. You certainly see — I was quite aware of certain advantages and disadvantages. I saw doors opening — ”
Winfrey: “What would be the disadvantage?”
Pitt: “Hubris is the disadvantage. And not being tested properly. I was painfully aware of some doors opening where they didn’t for others and I would ask my mother. My mother would come to our rooms when we were little and talk us to sleep … and I remember asking her about this at a very young age, Why isn’t the world fair? Why is it not fair? And she said to me that it’s not, but this means that you have more responsibility. And it’s something that’s always rung in my head. … There’s the true answer.”
Pitt then immediately deflected by turning to face the audience and mentioning how inspiring he found a recent trip Winfrey had made to Africa. He reached over for a beat and took her hand. “That really inspired me,” he said, “and sent me down some paths along those lines.”
Pitt seems to be drawing inspiration from his doppelgänger, Spy Game co-star and Sundance Film Festival founder, Robert Redford. Redford also directed Pitt in A River Runs Through It (1992). Both men parlayed early mainstream Hollywood success into creating specific, independent-minded lanes for themselves, and they’re both revered for doing it.
Like Redford, Pitt possesses a frankness and self-awareness that’s allowed him to sidestep the characterization of dilettante (that cringe-inducing attempt at an Austrian accent in Seven Years in Tibet notwithstanding), something that comes across even in his earliest interviews. Before his 1991 breakout role in Thelma and Louise, Pitt played Walker Lovejoy on a not-great Fox show called Glory Days. The promos for it were painfully earnest.
“Unfortunately, a lot of television to me is a fast-food fashion show and it’s because of money and time and I understand it has to be that way, but it gets kinda frustrating,” he said in an a 1990 interview with Entertainment Tonight, then 26 years old and still clearly unpolished.
The interviewer, who is off-camera, tees up an easy softy for Pitt to give the show some praise, noting how nice it is that Pitt has a “personal opinion”: “Maybe you’re quite proud then, to be involved in a show — ”
Pitt refused to take the bait.
“If it gets there, yeah,” he said. “That’s the plan. We’re not there yet.”
As he rose through the ranks to become a certified A-lister, Pitt maintained that no-B.S. sensibility. He seems to understand the off-putting nature of soliciting credit for something that should have been happening all along. The most profound example of this was at the 2014 Oscars, when 12 Years a Slave won Best Picture.
The best picture Oscar is awarded to a film’s producers. Pitt went up and, in 22 seconds, issued thanks on behalf of the production to the academy and to Solomon Northrup. And then, true to form, he got out of the way. He turned over the rest of the broadcast, and the last words of the night, to his director and fellow producer, whom he introduced as “the indomitable Mr. Steve McQueen.”
“There are a lot of people I need to thank, so I’ll just push on,” McQueen said, clearly overcome with emotion and stumbling through his words. “My wonderful cast and crew, Plan B … Brad Pitt — without him, this film would just not have been made.”
12 Years a Slave was a transformative film for Pitt and a testament to the power of what a brilliant piece of art can accomplish and the lasting effects it can have on its patrons.
“It’s why I got into film in the first place,” Pitt said in a TODAY show interview with Ann Curry. “It’s one of those few films that cuts to the base of our humanity. It’s not until I saw Solomon Northrup’s story that I fully, fully grasped the utter horror of losing your freedom or denying another their freedom, taking their freedom, splitting their family apart. It’s abhorrent.”
For all the effort Plan B has put forth in seeking quality stories about people of color and the actors and directors to bring them to life, the company is not particularly interested in shouting about it.
When I requested to speak to Pitt, Kleiner or Gardner about what drove the company’s pivot toward championing such stories, a Plan B representative called me from South Korea, where production was just beginning on Snowpiercer director Bong Joon-ho’s new film Okja (Plan B is co-producing with Netflix), to decline. These days, Pitt generally doesn’t talk to reporters unless he’s promoting a project. We didn’t feel like holding the story until press junkets for Moonlight or War Machine rolled around.
However, when Vanity Fair asked in 2015, as Plan B was in the depths of an Oscar campaign for Selma, Gardner had this to say:
“Everyone needs voices, you know. The fact that [white men] are such a singular source of people making the most popular form of entertainment — that makes zero sense. … If you care about history, which I think we do, then the bandwidth of story that is available to be told, and the bandwidth that is necessary to be thorough, just naturally encompasses people of all walks of life — all races, all cultures, all genders, all inclinations, all faiths. I think we come at it from that place.”
not mine.credit and source: THE UNDEFEATED
Monday, June 13, 2016
Saturday, June 11, 2016
One-Pot Lemon Garlic Butter Pasta
Cook Time 13 min
Total Time 13 min
Ingredients
not mine.credit and owner: ASIAN AT HOME WITH Seonkyoung Longest
Total Time 13 min
Ingredients
- 2 Tbs / 30g unsalted butter
- 4 cloves garlic, chopped (approximately 1 Tbs)
- 1/2 tsp / 2g salt
- 1/4 tsp / 1g pepper
- 2 cups / 500ml chicken stock
- zest and juice from 1 fresh lemon
- 8 oz caserecce or any other short pasta
- 1/4 cup / 20g grated parmigiano
- 5 to 7 fresh basil leaves, sliced
Instructions
- Heat a medium size pot over medium heat; add butter, garlic, salt and pepper. Sauté for 1 to 2 minutes until garlic is soften but not brown.
- Pour chicken stock along with lemon zest, lemon juice and caserecce. Stir to combine everything. Cover, increase heat to high and bring it to boil. Reduce heat to medium and simmer for 9 to 10 minutes or until your pasta is cooked as you desired. Stir occasionally so pasta won’t sick to bottom of pot.
- Stir in parmigiano and basil and remove from heat. Serve immediately with extra cheese and basil if you want. Enjoy!
CHINESE STEAMED BUNS RECIPE (MANTOU 馒头)
INGREDIENTS
- ½ cup Warm milk
- ¼ cup Warm water
- 2 Tbs. Vegetable oil
- 1 Tbs. Active dry yeast (3/4 tsp. more than 1 individual package dry yeast)
- 2½ cups All purpose flour (use blenched flour if you want complete white buns)
- ¼ cup White sugar
- 1½ tsp. Baking powder
- 1½ tsp. Salt
INSTRUCTIONS
- Combine warm milk, water, oil and yeast in a mixing bowl and whisk to let yeast dissolve. Let it sit for 5 to 10 minutes and let yeast to activate and grow.
- Meanwhile add flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a large mixing bowl and whisk to combine. Make a well middle of dry ingredients(flour mixture) and pour wet ingredients(milk mixture).
- Slowly incorporate dry and wet ingredients together with a spatula. When enough flour has been incorporated into wet ingredients , begin to use hands to forms a dough.
- When dough came together and there are no dry bits left in mixing bowl, take out dough from mixing bowl to a work surface; start kneading dough with both hands. Knead dough about 5 minutes until it’s elastic, really soft and very smooth.
- Form dough as a bowl and put it back to mixing bowl; cover with a plastic wrap and let it rise for 1 hour or become its double of size at warm place.
- Push middle of dough with your index finger and reshape dough; cover with a plastic wrap and let it rise another 45 to 50 minutes at warm place.
- Roll out dough to ¼” thin on a work surface. Roll now-flat dough 2” wide long log. Sprinkle flour as needed, but keep it less as possible or if it’s not necessary don’t use it at all. Cut into 1” wide pieces, you will have 10 equal pieces of Mantou.
- Place buns on paper cupcake cups. (you can also use parchment paper or coffee filter as well)
- Arrange on a bamboo or steel steamer. (you might need 2 depending on the size of your steamer) Cover them with a clean damped kitchen towel. Let it rest for additional 30 minutes.
- Meanwhile, fill a wok or steamer pot with water and bring it to boil over high heat. Place steamer with buns into wok or steamer pot; make sure water is not touching buns. Cover with a lid and steam for 12 to 15 minutes or until buns are fluffy and fully cooked.
- Tilt lid tiny bit for a slow air circulation for 2 to 3 minutes before open lid. If you open lid right away, nice fluffy buns will sink down on you and you don't want that happen.
- Serve hot, enjoy!
not mine.credit and owner: ASIAN AT HOME WITH Seonkyoung Longest
How to make Chinese Steamed Buns (Mantou 饅頭)
Yields 8
This traditional Chinese recipe is already vegan; using only flour, yeast, water and, in this case, sugar. Plain steamed buns are a staple food that can be eaten with both savory and sweet accompaniments. Mantou originated in northern China as wheat was the major crop as opposed to rice in the south. This recipe can be multiplied to created larger batches. Mantou is best served fresh, but they can be frozen after cooking and re-steamed to heat up.
Ingredients
- 1/3 cup and 2 tablespoons warm water, about 105F [100 ml, 40C]
- 1 cup all-purpose flour [150 g]
- 1 teaspoon sugar [7g]
- 1 teaspoon traditional or instant yeast [4g]
Instructions
- Combine the water, sugar and yeast. Let sit for 5 minutes for the yeast to bloom.
- In a large bowl, combine the liquid and the flour. Stir with chopsticks to combine, then use clean hands to form the dough into a ball.
- Knead the dough until it is smooth; about 5 minutes.
- Place the dough into a bowl, cover with a moist towel or floured plastic wrap and let rise for one hour or until doubled in size.
- Remove the covering and punch down the dough, knocking out any large bubbles in the dough.
- Knead lightly and form into desired shapes. You can make small 1 1/2" balls, shape the the dough into a log and cut in to pieces, or roll the dough out into a long rectangle, roll it up and cut across the length to make snail shapes.
- Cover the dough balls with a moist cloth or floured plastic wrap and let rise for 20 to 30 minutes until puffed up.
- Prepare your steamer. Bring the water to a boil. To prevent the buns from sticking to the steamer basket, line it with parchment paper or oil the bottom lightly.
- Carefully place the puffed dough into the steamer basket and steam on medium-high to high heat for 20 minutes. If you make larger buns, you may need to add more time. Try to avoid over steaming as this will result in a denser, tougher texture.
- Removed the steamer basket from the heat but keep the lid on; let rest for 5 minutes before removing the buns.
- Serve immediately with savory or sweet accompaniments.
By Mary Lin
not mine.credit and owner: MARY'S TEST KITCHEN
Food Wishes Video Recipes: Bacon & Asparagus Dutch Baby, Baby!
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Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Strawberry Meringue Layer Cake
INGREDIENTS
Serves: 8
METHOD
Serves: 8
- 125 grams plain flour
- 25 grams cornflour
- 1½ teaspoons baking powder
- 100 grams very soft unsalted butter
- 300 grams caster sugar
- 4 eggs
- 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
- 2 tablespoons milk
- 50 grams flaked almonds
- 375 millilitres double cream
- 250 grams strawberries
METHOD
- Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6. Line, butter and flour 2 x 22cm Springform tins.
- Weigh out the flour, cornflour and baking powder into a bowl.
- Cream the butter and 100g of the caster sugar in another bowl until light and fluffy. Separate the eggs and beat the yolks into the butter and sugar, saving the whites to whisk later. Gently fold in the weighed-out dry ingredients, add the vanilla, and then stir in the milk to thin the batter. Divide the mixture between the two prepared Springform tins.
- Whisk the egg whites until soft peaks form, then gradually add the remaining 200g caster sugar. Spread a layer of meringue on top of the sponge batter in each tin, and sprinkle the almonds evenly over.
- Bake for 30–35 minutes, by which time the top of the almond-scattered meringues will be a dark gold. Let the cakes cool in their tins, then spring them open at the last minute when you are ready to assemble the cake.
- Whip the double cream, and hull and slice the strawberries; that’s to say, the bigger ones can be sliced lengthways and the smaller ones halved. Invert one of the cakes on to a plate or cakestand so that the sponge is uppermost. Pile on the cream and stud with the strawberries, letting some of the berries subside into the whipped whiteness. Place the second cake on top, meringue upwards, and press down gently, just to secure it.
- If you’ve got any more strawberries in the house, hull and halve them, and serve them in a dish on a table to eat alongside; it gives the cake a more after-lunch, less afternoon-tea kind of a feel, but it’s hardly obligatory.
not mine.credit and owner: NIGELLA
Food Wishes Video Recipes: Thai-Style Sweet Chili Sauce – Nam Jim for the Win...
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Tuesday, June 7, 2016
Chocolate Olive Oil Cake
INGREDIENTS
Makes: 8-12 slices
Makes: 8-12 slices
- 150 millilitres regular olive oil (plus more for greasing)
- 50 grams good-quality cocoa powder (sifted)
- 125 millilitres boiling water
- 2 teaspoons best vanilla extract
- 150 grams ground almonds (or 125g plain flour / 3/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour)
- ½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
- 1 pinch of salt
- 200 grams caster sugar
- 3 large eggs
METHOD
- Preheat your oven to 170°C/gas mark 3/325ºF. Grease a 22 or 23 cm/ 9inch springform tin with a little oil and line the base with baking parchment.
- Measure and sift the cocoa powder into a bowl or jug and whisk in the boiling water until you have a smooth, chocolatey, still runny (but only just) paste. Whisk in the vanilla extract, then set aside to cool a little.
- In another smallish bowl, combine the ground almonds (or flour) with the bicarbonate of soda and pinch of salt.
- Put the sugar, olive oil and eggs into the bowl of a freestanding mixer with the paddle attachment (or other bowl and whisk arrangement of your choice) and beat together vigorously for about 3 minutes until you have a pale-primrose, aerated and thickened cream.
- Turn the speed down a little and pour in the cocoa mixture, beating as you go, and when all is scraped in you can slowly tip in the ground almond (or flour) mixture.
- Scrape down, and stir a little with a spatula, then pour this dark, liquid batter into the prepared tin. Bake for 40-45 minutes or until the sides are set and the very centre, on top, still looks slightly damp. A cake tester should come up mainly clean but with a few sticky chocolate crumbs clinging to it.
- Let it cool for 10 minutes on a wire rack, still in its tin, and then ease the sides of the cake with a small metal spatula and spring it out of the tin. Leave to cool completely or eat while still warm with some ice cream, as a pudding.
not mine.credit and owner: NIGELLA
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Sunday, June 5, 2016
bucaio: Bibingkoy
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Saturday, June 4, 2016
Friday, June 3, 2016
Korean Stir Fried Potato Side Dish
INGREDIENTS
* 1 Tbsp = 15 ml
INSTRUCTIONS
not mine.credit and owner: MY KOREAN KITCHEN
- 3 medium potatoes (600g/1.3 pounds), julienned – I used my mandoline slicer.
- ½ medium onion (75g/2.6 ounces), julienned
- (Optional) ⅓ small carrots (20g/0.7 ounces), julienned – you can use other colourful vegetables such as bell peppers/capsicum alternatively.
- 1 tsp fine sea salt (or more to taste)
- A few sprinkles of ground black/white pepper
- Some roasted sesame seeds to garnish
- Some cooking oil (about 2 Tbsp) – I used rice bran oil
* 1 Tbsp = 15 ml
INSTRUCTIONS
- Soak the julienned potato in cold water for about 15 mins to remove excess starch. Drain the water and pat dry the potatoes with kitchen paper or clean cheese cloth.
- Preheat a large skillet/frying pan over medium heat and add some cooking oil. Add the potato and stir gently and often until it starts to soften. Add the onion and carrots and sprinkle with the salt (I used my fingers to spread it evenly around the potatoes) and stir often until all are cooked. (You can also cover with the lid to speed up the cooking process. Just make sure you stir them often as potatoes very easily stick to the pan.) Ideally, the potatoes should retain a firm shape and slightly crunchy texture. You can cook longer if you prefer a softer texture.
- Season with black pepper (& more salt to taste if required but I didn’t use it). Garnish with some roasted sesame seeds. Serve with steamed rice and other Korean side dishes.
not mine.credit and owner: MY KOREAN KITCHEN
Korean Deep Fried Seaweed Spring Rolls
INGREDIENTS
MAIN
SAUCE – MIX THESE IN A BOWL
BATTER – MIX THESE IN A BOWL
not mine.credit and owner: MY KOREAN KITCHEN
MAIN
- 8 seaweed sheets, cut into halves
- Korean glass noodles 1 fistful, boiled and cut into little finger size
- ⅓ a carrot (small size), julienned
- 10 stalks of garlic chives, chopped in little finger lengths
- Some cooking oil for deep frying
SAUCE – MIX THESE IN A BOWL
- 1 Tbsp soy sauce
- 1 tsp fine sea salt
- ¼ tsp sesame oil
- A few sprinkles of ground black pepper
BATTER – MIX THESE IN A BOWL
- ½ cup all purpose flour, sifted
- ½ cup starch powder (potato or corn), sifted
- ¼ tsp fine sea salt, sifted
- ¾ cup water
INSTRUCTIONS
- Put the noodles, carrots and garlic chives into a mixing bowl. Add the sauce and mix it well with your hands.
- Place a small amount of glass noodle and vegetable mixture (from step 1) onto a seaweed sheet. Roll the seaweed up. (If you brush some water on the edge of the seaweed after rolling it, it will stick better.) Repeat this step for the remaining ingredients.
- Put the rolled seaweed into the batter bowl to coat. (I put 4 rolls at a time. If you put too many in at the same time, they can squash each other.)
- Pour some oil into a wok. Once it starts to boil, add the battered seaweed rolls. Fry them until fully cooked (about 2 to 3 mins). Take them out and put them onto a kitchen paper towel to soak off any excess oil.
- For extra crispiness, fry the seaweed rolls once more.
- Serve. (They can be enjoyed on their own or mix in with Tteokbokki or Rabokki.)
not mine.credit and owner: MY KOREAN KITCHEN
Rolled Seaweed And Egg Omelette
INGREDIENTS
*1 Tbsp = 15ml
INSTRUCTIONS
not mine.credit and owner: MY KOREAN KITCHEN
- 5 extra large eggs
- 1 Tbsp rice wine (mirim)
- ¼ tsp fine sea salt
- 1 and ½ dried seaweed sheets – 1 sheet size is about 19cm x 20.5cm (7.5 inch x 8 inch).
- Some cooking oil
*1 Tbsp = 15ml
INSTRUCTIONS
- Break the eggs in a medium sized mixing bowl and beat the eggs lightly. To give a smooth texture, sieve through the eggs into another bowl. Add the rice wine and salt and whisk them well. Move the egg mixture into a measuring cup with a handle so that it’s easier to pour it out.
- Cut two dried seaweed sheets into half. So you should have four 9.5 cm x 20.5 cm (3.75 inch x 8 inch) seaweed sheets at hand but we will be only using three of these sheets.
- Heat the pan on medium low heat and add some cooking oil. Spread it throughout the pan. Reduce the heat to low.
- Pour out a thin layer of egg mixture onto the pan and spread it by tilting the pan. Once the edge of the egg is cooked and the top of the egg is about 80 to 85% cooked, add one seaweed sheet on top of the egg and start rolling the egg with a spatula or chopsticks. Push aside the rolled egg (to the right) and brush some cooking oil in the empty space (left side of the pan).
- Pour out another thin layer of egg mixture on the empty space and when the top of the egg is about 80 to 85 % cooked, add one seaweed sheet on top of the egg and start rolling the egg with a spatula or chopsticks. Repeat this step until the egg mixture is used up. (Probably just one more left if you’re using the same sized pan as me.)
- Take out the rolled egg and cool it down for 5 to 10 mins on a cutting board. Slice it into bite size pieces. Serve.
not mine.credit and owner: MY KOREAN KITCHEN
Thursday, June 2, 2016
No Contact Traffic Apprehension Policy (11 Things You Need to Know)
1. What is the No Contact Traffic Apprehension Policy?
The No Contact Traffic Apprehension is a policy that utilizes CCTV, digital cameras and/or other gadget or technology to capture videos and images to apprehend vehicles violating traffic laws, rules and regulations.
2. What is its coverage?
The No Physical Contact Apprehension covers the apprehension of violators in areas within Metro Manila that are covered by MMDA CCTV cameras.
3. Will the policy rid Metro Manila roads of MMDA Traffic Enforcers?
No. It was conceptualized to supplement the presence of MMDA Traffic Enforcers. Aside from the fact that there are still places not covered by CCTVs, the No Contact Traffic Apprehension was designed to catch moving violations, thus leaving the apprehension of administrative offenses to MMDA constables.
4. How will the No Contact Team know about the records of the vehicle?
The MMDA No Contact Apprehension Team will search for the motor vehicle records of violators in coordination with LTO.
5. If I’m the registered owner and the current owner hasn’t processed the vehicle’s transfer of registration yet, will I still be penalized for a violation I did not commit?
The first notice shall require the owner of the vehicle to identify its driver at the time and place indicated in the notice and his/her address. It is the responsibility of the current owner to have the vehicle registered under his/her name. If a previous owner receives the Notice, he or she may file a protest at the MMDA Traffic Adjudication Division and show a notarized Deed of Sale as evidence, as well the name and address of the current owner.
6. How will the MMDA send the Summon to violators?
Notices shall be sent thru personal service by MMDA Personnel, registered mail or courier services through government or private service providers.
7. What if the violator refuses to receive the Notice?
Traffic violators who refuse to receive or accept the notice issued to them without any valid reason shall be deemed to have received it by leaving a copy and submission of an affidavit of service or report attesting the refusal of the violator to acknowledge receipt of the Notice.
8. Within how many days should a driver settle his/her violation under this policy?
Payment of fines and penalties shall be made within seven days upon receipt of the first notice to any authorized accredited payment centers unless a protest is filed before the MMDA TAD, in which case, the fines as finally adjudicated shall be paid at the Collection Division of the MMDA Central Office.
9. Where should I pay to settle my violation?
The violator may pay either in the MMDA Main Office or in any branch of MetroBank.
10. If I don’t agree with the violation given to me, how do I contest it?
The First Notice contains a statement that the traffic violator shall have the right to file a protest before the MMDA-Traffic Adjudication Division or TAD within seven days from receipt of the Notice, and that failure to do so within the prescribed period shall be seen as a waiver of such right to contest the violation or present evidence as a defense.
Within fifteen days from receipt of an adverse TAD resolution, the driver may file a Motion for Reconsideration. Within thirty (30) days from receipt of the denial of the Motion for Reconsideration, the driver may file an appeal at the Office of the Chairman where the Decision shall be final and executory.
If no protest is filed within the 7-day prescriptive period and the fines remain unpaid, a Final Notice to settle the violation shall be issued.
11. What will happen if I don’t pay at all?
If a violator fails to settle the assessed fines or penalties from the receipt of the Final Notice, the vehicle license plate number shall be included in the Alarm list and be reported to the LTO with a request that its registration not be renewed until the penalties or fines are fully settled.
credit and owner: MMDA
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Wednesday, June 1, 2016
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