Tag Archives: Accent

Global carbon emissions are on the rise, but don’t let that dash your hopes

by ClaraAgosto Posted on December 6, 2018

Subscribe to The Beacon

Carbon dioxide, that invisible, earth-warming gas you keep hearing about, is anticipated to hit an all-time high in 2018. Emissions are expected to rise by 2.7 percent this year, according to new research. That’s compared to a 1.6 percent rise in 2017 and a plateau between 2014 and 2016.

What’s behind this disturbing shift? A rise in coal usage, particularly in India and China, as well as the United States’ continued dependence on oil and gas. That’s according to two studies published Wednesday by the Global Carbon Project, a group of 100 scientists from around the world. Unveiled the same week as the United Nations climate change conference in Poland, the new research puts in sharp perspective just how far the world still needs to go to address carbon emissions, even with renewables booming.

“The growing global demand for energy is outpacing decarbonization for now,” Corinne Le Quéré, a French-Canadian climate scientist and lead author of the research, said in a statement. “This needs to change, and change quickly.”

There’s a lot a stake with this spike in emissions. Most recently, the United Nations IPCC climate report warned of a societal and ecological collapse if we don’t keep the world below 2 degrees C warming. When it comes down to it, climate change means the loss of lives — as emissions go up, we’ll see more intense heatwaves, hurricanes, and wildfires.

It all sounds pretty grim, but some of the same researchers behind these reports found things to be optimistic about. Le Quéré, along with former U.N. climate office head Christiana Figueres and other climate experts, authored an analysis in Nature of the Global Carbon Project’s findings. What we’ve achieved so far, they write, seemed “unimaginable a decade ago.” Here are the roses among the thorns:

  1. “If current trends continue, renewables will produce half of the world’s electricity by 2030.”

The future is renewable. This isn’t just a hopeful thought — it’s already poised to be. The cost of solar has dropped a whopping 80 percent in the past decade, and renewables are now cheaper than coal. We already have a lot of the systems in place to shift the world away from gas and oil. Worldwide, more than half of new capacity for generating electricity is renewables.

Developing countries are leading the way on this one; in many, renewables account for the majority of new power generation. Now, the world’s developed nations (the largest polluters) need to catch up.

  1. “Big batteries will spread beyond utilities.”

Renewables have some issues to work out — namely, how to keep delivering power even when clouds cover the sun and the wind stops blowing. The good news is that batteries offer a promising solution for beautiful, continuous power storage. They’ve certainly come a long way from the tiny, forgotten devices scattered about the catch-all drawer in your kitchen: Battery technology is quickly improving, and the price of battery storage is anticipated to halve by 2030.

Advances in battery technology have led to demand for electric vehicles, and many car manufacturers are shifting over. The transition to batteries will allow “developing regions to leapfrog the need for fossil-fuel power plants and conventional distribution grids, just as mobile phones overtook landlines,” according to the commentary.

  1. “Most U.S. citizens live in a jurisdiction that still supports the Paris goals.”

National governments in key countries like Brazil and the United States threaten to undermine global progress on climate change. The good news is that local governments and businesses are stepping up their game. After President Trump announced his intent to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, thousands of city officials promised to stick with the country’s original goals.

As the Nature analysis notes, “globally, more than 9,000 cities and municipalities from 128 countries, representing 16 percent of the world’s population, have reiterated their commitment to the Paris Agreement.” On top of that, more than 6,000 companies around the world have committed to the climate agreement, and 1,400 companies have factored a price on carbon into their business plans.

As global leaders now meet in Poland to determine how to hold onto a quickly destabilizing world, the task at hand is clear — at least in the abstract. The commentary states that the transition to renewables is “an economic imperative and an ecological necessity” and calls upon leaders to “accelerate that momentum and keep everyone on board.”

More:  

Global carbon emissions are on the rise, but don’t let that dash your hopes

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LeapFrog, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Global carbon emissions are on the rise, but don’t let that dash your hopes

What the Los Angeles Auto Show tells us about the future of cars

by maximoqfh2240 Posted on December 6, 2018

Subscribe to The Beacon

If you ask anyone about the future of the auto industry, it’s all about electrification, ride sharing, and autonomous driving. But in the short-term, at least for automakers, it’s pure anxiety.

Not only did General Motors recently reveal plans to discontinue six of its car models by the end of 2019 (including its only electric offering, the Chevrolet Volt), the Trump administration announced earlier this week that it intends to end automaker subsidies for electric cars after 2022. If pleasing the consumer weren’t enough, now car manufacturers have to worry about a president who clearly doesn’t grasp the complexities of their industry.

Caught between the consumer demands of today and the technology of tomorrow, American auto manufacturers are being pulled in two very disparate directions. Case in point, The Los Angeles Auto Show, which kicked off this weekend to packed crowds, has come to be about two, at times, contradictory concepts: luxury and the environment.

Always free, always fresh.

 
Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy

Finally for those awaiting an electric car that doesn’t look like a science experiment, there’s the Range Rover Plug-in hybrid, Jaguar I-pace (a hybrid SUV), and BMW i8 Roadster and Convertible. Despite the death of the Chevy Volt, nearly every manufacturer is making some sort of entry into electric vehicles, meaning there is more room for fun. EVs aren’t just econo-boxes anymore; the technology is reaching into all aspects of the auto industry, which offers (greener) hope for their future.

In the meantime, however, American car companies still rely heavily on sales of pickup trucks and SUVs. In recent years the balance in the car world has shifted from passenger sedans to SUVs and pickup trucks. When General Motors recently announced it was restructuring, laying off nearly 15 percent of its salaried employees and changing its production offerings, it wasn’t so much an industry shake-up as an aftershock. Ford and Chrysler have largely abandoned sedans, GM is the last of the big American carmakers to make the move.

So how can industry aficionados pursue both what we want (SUVs) and (what we need) new electric options, both snazzy and standard?

The L.A. auto show says as much about the city as it does the state of the industry. The City of Angels is one of the biggest and most important car markets in the U.S., and what happens at this auto show has consequences. As someone who’s been covering the industry for nearly a decade, there’s a lot on display beyond the shiny coats of wax and ginormous red bows.

Here’s what the auto show’s offerings say about the future direction of the auto industry:

SUVs are getting greener

In the U.S., more SUVs and pickup trucks are sold than cars. But that doesn’t necessarily mean people want to drive gas-guzzlers. Consumers are flocking to more fuel-efficient crossover SUVs, such as the Honda CRV. Companies such as Volvo are introducing hybrids, and Kia unveiled its Niro EV. SUVs are getting more fuel-efficient, though three-row SUVs are showing no signs of going away — Ford’s Lincoln brand debuted a new Navigator and BMW showed off its xDrive40i model.

Electric vehicles are still the future (globally)

At a time when other automakers are turning out new hybrid models, what are we to make of GM putting the Volt on the chopping block? It’s not the first time the car company has done away with its electric vehicle offerings. (GM killed the EV-1 back in the ‘90s, then introduced the Volt in 2011.)

Environmentalists have long worried carmakers would abandon electric vehicles due to lagging sales (as they have before). And despite all the space on the show floor for electric cars, U.S. consumers have still not embraced them. Without the federal government incentivizing EVs, you’d expect carmakers to be running in the other direction.

But the good news is even if the current administration isn’t interested in the electric vehicles, California, China, and European nations surely are. China has followed the Golden State’s lead in pushing hard for electric vehicles. Air quality in China is an important political issue. On a tour I took of Chinese manufacturers last year, officials admitted that party leaders feel popular opinion about the environment could threaten their hold on power.

Because of the Chinese and European commitments to electric vehicles, the global market for EVs doesn’t appear to be facing extinction. But despite Tesla’s popularity, EV sales are not what they need to be domestically to make them major market winners.

Vehicles are getting more autonomous and more craaaazy

Veteran car journalist Jean Jennings told me, with a bit of regret in her voice, that the future of the industry is “shared rides, electric cars, and autonomous.” In many ways Jennings says the work that it’s going to take for GM to get to a cleaner, safer, profitable future demands rethinking how the cars are made — and that mean no driver instead of no gas.

A person driving a 2003 Honda Civic would barely recognize the driver-assist technology of today like automated braking and adaptive cruise control. Now, the most exciting tech geared toward driver-assist includes I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-magic features that allow a driver to essentially see through the engine block (making parking easier), and map-the-city visualizations that use the pipes and wires under the road to help autonomous vehicles find their way.

Tough air quality standards are likely here to stay

California’s Air Resources Board, soon to be led by California Governor-elect Gavin Newsom, is expected to fight a long battle with federal regulators to preserve the right for the state to set tougher emissions standards than the rest of the country. Trump being in office might seem like an opportune moment for the auto industry’s air quality standards to relax significantly; but China is the market driving these regulations now, and people there really care about air quality.

Politics and the auto industry typically do not mix well

The talk of this auto show was GM, in part because so many GM workers at the show only have months left at their jobs. It was these job cuts, after a bailout from taxpayers, that drew the ire of President “Tariff man” Trump, whose threats to discontinue electric car subsidies have not played well with industry professionals.

President Trump isn’t the first politician to try to use auto executives as a convenient punching bag. CEOs of car manufacturers haven’t done themselves any favors by, say, opposing airbags and fuel economy standards in the past. But this administration’s public feud is causing major road burn in the industry — and not only for GM. If the president intended to punish the Detroit-based company, he failed to grasp an important part of the electric vehicle rules from the Obama era: Because GM got in early on plug-in electric vehicles, it’s already used up most of its federally backed incentives to sell electric cars. (And its credits drying up is what made the Volt expendable.

Buckle up, because auto trends are part of a cycle

If the future of the industry were a race, it’d be the Indianapolis 500: fast and circular. Take GM’s cuts: The auto industry is cyclical, and layoffs are no surprise. Reshaping the current GM line-up also seems to this reporter (the child and grandchild of auto workers) to be a part of that cycle.

What’s interesting to me about this auto show is the feeling of déjà vu. American car makers are turning away from sedans, just as they did in the early 2000s The shift may not be forever — especially considering that some companies, such as Honda, are investing MORE money in its small cars. As Honda executive Sage Marie pointed out, the company is both investing in sedans and looking to emerging markets, while the American car companies stay wedded to pickups.

So when it comes to predicting the future of the auto industry, don’t get trapped by what’s just around the bend. Automakers are still, in general, looking toward a greener future… but there might be a few pit stops along the way.

View this article – 

What the Los Angeles Auto Show tells us about the future of cars

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Safer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on What the Los Angeles Auto Show tells us about the future of cars

David Attenborough’s dire climate warning: ‘Our greatest threat in thousands of years’

by GayAbdullah Posted on December 5, 2018

Subscribe to The Beacon

This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

David Attenborough, the famed naturalist and conservation advocate, issued a dire warning for the world during a speech at the United Nations’ annual climate summit on Monday: Act now, or the natural world, humanity included, may soon collapse.

“Right now we’re facing a man-made disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change,” Attenborough, 92, said. “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”

The comments came at the beginning of a two-week climate conference in Katowice, Poland, where emissaries from nearly 200 nations are meeting to determine how the world can dramatically scale back greenhouse gas emissions to abide by the landmark Paris climate agreement and, by doing so, stave off the worst effects of climate change.

“The world’s people have spoken. Their message is clear: Time is running out,” Attenborough said Monday. “They want you, the decision-makers, to act now. They’re behind you, along with civil society represented here today.”

The conservationist is serving in the “People’s Seat” during the conference, a role in which he will present comments from members of the public affected by climate change to the dignitaries and officials present at the summit.

The U.N. released a dire report in October that warned of severe, climate-related effects by as early as 2040 unless there is dramatic action to curb global emissions. The effects would include a mass die-off of coral reefs and an increase in extreme weather events. The world is working to implement the commitments made under the Paris Agreement but is still far off track from preventing catastrophic levels of warming.

At the same time, U.S. President Donald Trump has regularly denied the existence of climate change and its links to humanity. Following the White House release last month of a sweeping, 1,656-page report that warned of a bleak future for the country, Trump alluded that he was too intelligent to believe in the phenomenon. He has also moved to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris pact.

The U.N. has urged world leaders to unveil ambitious efforts to tackle emissions, calling this month’s summit the most important in years.

“Climate change is running faster than we are, and we must catch up sooner rather than later, before it is too late,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, said at the beginning of the event. “For many people, regions, and even countries, this is already a matter of life or death.”

View original post here:

David Attenborough’s dire climate warning: ‘Our greatest threat in thousands of years’

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, FF, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on David Attenborough’s dire climate warning: ‘Our greatest threat in thousands of years’

Arnold Schwarzenegger goes Yiddish on Donald Trump at COP24

by MarylynFollett7 Posted on December 3, 2018

Subscribe to The Beacon

According to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Donald Trump is meshugge, “crazy” in Yiddish.

That’s right, The Terminator had some choice words for The Donald about his decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. “Yes,” he said. “We have a meshugganah leader in Washington.” But the U.S. is “still in,” Schwarzenegger told attendees at the climate change convention in Poland. He also said he wished he could time travel back in time to stop us from digging up and using fossil fuels, Terminator-style.

For the record, other news outlets are reporting that Schwarzenegger called Trump “meshugge.” That’s actually incorrect. He called him “meshugganah.” Meshugge means crazy, meshugganah means a crazy person. Arnold Schwarzenegger called Donald Trump a crazy person. Glad we cleared that up.

“The states and the cities are still in” Schwarzenegger added, “Our financial institutions are in, our academic institutions are still in, the governors and the mayors are still in.

“Remember that America is more than just Washington — one leader,” he said. Is Schwarzenegger laying groundwork for 2020? Now that’s meshugge.

Original article:  

Arnold Schwarzenegger goes Yiddish on Donald Trump at COP24

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, FF, GE, ONA, OXO, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Arnold Schwarzenegger goes Yiddish on Donald Trump at COP24

Fossil fuels are the problem, say fossil fuel companies being sued

by rosiemccorkle85 Posted on March 21, 2018

Big Oil and the cities suing them in federal court agreed on at least one thing on Wednesday: Human-made climate change is real.

In the country’s first court hearing on the science behind climate change, a lawyer for Chevron, Theodore Boutrous Jr., said the oil company accepts the scientific consensus. He quoted chapter and verse from the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change, the thousands of scientists assembled by the United Nations to figure out exactly what’s going on. “From Chevron’s perspective, there is no debate about the science of climate change,” Boutrous said.

Oil companies have recently started saying they’re on the side of science, but they’ve never said it so clearly in court.

San Francisco and Oakland are suing BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell, arguing that the corporations that profit from fossil fuels should pay for the seawalls and pumps needed to protect them from rising tides. But Boutrous, the only oil company lawyer to speak at the hearing, didn’t accept blame, pointing the finger instead at the people who burned the fossil fuels. In other words, oil doesn’t cause climate change. People burning oil cause climate change.

For five hours, the two sides tried to explain climate science, after U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup had asked for a tutorial. A gaggle of 100-some attorneys, climate advocates, and journalists packed the mid-century-modern courtroom. Alsup strode into the room dressed for science, wearing a smart-looking pair of browline glasses and a tie decorated with images of the solar system.

In the run up to this hearing, journalists compared it to the Scopes monkey trial in 1925, which found a teacher guilty of telling students about evolution, but Alsup shot down such comparisons. “We have these tutorials so the poor judge can learn some science — it helps to have science,” he said in a soft southern accent.

The big question going into the hearing: Would the oil companies try to cast doubt on the evidence that their business model is heating the earth? Climate skeptics have been trying to make their voices heard by sending in friend-of-the-court briefs with their own spin on the evidence, but Boutrous stuck to the scientific consensus unveiling a deft bit of legal jiu jitsu that could form the core of the oil company argument as the case moves forward. Alsup would occasionally raise some climate-skeptic argument, and both sides would explain why it didn’t make sense.

Big Oil’s POV

Boutrous started by citing reports from the IPCC as an unimpeachable authority. These reports are an “amazing resource” he said, before quoting them at length. Boutrous explained that the IPCC has found with increasing certainty over the years that humans fossil fuel use is the primary driver of climate change — but that’s not the only point Boutrous wanted Alsup to absorb. He twice read a quote from the IPCC that climate change is caused “largely by economic and population growth.”

Then, Boutrous added his interpretation. “It doesn’t say that it’s the production and extraction that’s driving the increase,” he said. “It’s the way people are living their lives.”

This appears to be the core of the oil companies’ strategy. First, believe everything the IPCC says. Second, the IPCC says the real problem is prosperity, economic growth! Therefore, blame the ones burning the oil — all we did was dig the stuff up.

To hammer it home, Boutrous showed an IPCC graph of emissions from the United States and China since 1970, with a scale that makes U.S. emissions look like a flat line.

“One thing that surprises me is that the U.S. has gone up, but not gone up much,” Alsup mused, leaning on folded hands. “But China has gone up dramatically.”

“Correct,” Boutrous responded. That’s because China’s population has grown, and its coal-burning economy has grown even more. The implication was clear: It is demand for energy driving carbon emissions, not the companies providing the fossil fuels.

Death by PowerPoint

While the oil companies just had one slick lawyer making a focused argument, the cities had three scientists scrolling through their very own PowerPoint presentations. The scientists hammered some simple points, aided by many graphs of temperature over time. They also skated quickly over some bewildering complexity.

Alsup didn’t let the tricky stuff fly over his head — he jumped in to make the presenters explain. At one point, he questioned Oxford scientist Myles Allen on the graph he was using: “Explain that graph there? I still don’t get it,” Alsup said.

Allen’s explanation only muddied the waters further. “I just don’t think your chart demonstrates what you’re telling me,” Alsup said. After a moment, Allen realized he must have grabbed the wrong figure. “You’re absolutely right,” he said.

At another point the court waited on tenterhooks as a scientist tried to get an animation of sea-level rise to work. It didn’t.

To be sure, the plaintiffs had a bogglingly complex task. There are hundreds of thousands of studies on climate change, and Alsup had asked them to boil it all down into a two-hour presentation, which just isn’t the way science works. Science advances through accumulation of evidence backed by piles of data, but law advances through argument.

After the final expert, University of Illinois scientist Don Wuebbles, had plowed through 20 minutes of facts and figures, Alsup tried to pull him from his PowerPoint. “Just in the last 10 minutes: You heard what the other side said right? What critique would you make?” But Wuebbles declined to respond and returned to his PowerPoint presentation.

The showdown that wasn’t

Alsup appeared to want to see some of the classic climate-skeptic arguments fought out, face to face, in his courtroom. But nothing doing. Each side agreed, for instance, that greenhouse gases are more important than water vapor in warming the planet. If nothing else, that seems like a victory for climate hawks: When all the Big Oil companies are willing to say, clearly and unambiguously, that humans burning fossil fuels are warming the planet, it means that the terms of debate have shifted.

Boutrous represents only Chevron, but Alsup held the feet of the other companies to the fire, too.

“You can’t just get away with sitting there in silence then saying, ‘He’s not speaking for us,’” Alsup told to the attorneys for the other companies. “You have two weeks to tell me if he said something you disagree with.”

This court tutorial was the first of its kind for climate science, but it’s not entirely out of the ordinary. Judges are frequently called on to serve as arbiters of scientific uncertainty, so it only makes sense that they sometimes ask for primers from scientists to get themselves up to speed. “In this age of science, we must build legal foundations that are sound in science as well as in law,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. “Scientists have offered their help. We in the legal community should accept that offer.”

Even if this tutorial persuades Alsup, the cities could still lose. The oil companies seem poised to argue that those who bought petro-products are just as responsible as those who sold them. And they will almost certainly argue that those suffering the ravages of climate change should try to fix things by passing laws rather than suing businesses. That’s a position even the most liberal members of the Supreme Court have held in the past.

Continue at source – 

Fossil fuels are the problem, say fossil fuel companies being sued

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, Down To Earth, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, Monterey, ONA, solar, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fossil fuels are the problem, say fossil fuel companies being sued

The "Pristine" Films That Got Snubbed by the Oscars

by StephenGalindo Posted on February 25, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Jackie Chan flicks are no longer the only place where you’ve seen an Asian or Asian American actor play a meaty role onscreen in the US: On TV, they’ve appeared in trail-blazing shows like Fresh Off the Boat, Master of None, and The Mindy Project. Director Jon M. Chu wants to assemble an all-Asian cast for a film adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s novel Crazy Rich Asians, making it one of the first films from an American studio to do so in years.

But the demographic still remains one of the most invisible groups in the media. In 2014, more than half of films and TV shows had no speaking or named roles for Asian characters, according to a recent study by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism. Controversies over the whitewashing of Asian characters took center stage last year, with several prominent actors and producers speaking out. For instance, the creators of Ghost in the Shell, a film adapted from a Japanese manga and anime film, faced backlash after casting Scarlett Johansson, a white actress, as the lead Japanese character.

Melissa Powers and Matthew Eng, both 23 year-old NYU graduates, decided they’d had enough of the whitewashing. Last year, they began producing Asian Oscar Bait, a podcast entirely devoted to Asian stories that, they argue, deserve to be on everyone’s television. The podcast has gotten a few nods from indie publications and it caught my eye for the specificity of its approach: In each episode, Powers and Eng take a story about Asians or Asian Americans and pitch it as a film, suggesting actors, directors, and even writers who could possibly take on the work.

The podcast retells lesser known stories in history, such as Fred Korematsu vs. United States, a Supreme Court case in which a Japanese man, Fred Korematsu refused to go to an internment camp in 1942. Another episode, “The Donut King,” digs into the story of Bun Tek “Ted” Ngoy, a Cambodian refugee who made a fortune selling donuts in California, until he lost everything—a “Wolf of Wall Street meets Krispy Kreme” kind of tale, says Powers. The podcast is a response to the notion that there aren’t enough Asian directors or actors in Hollywood, she says. “Our tagline is: There are no excuses.”

I spoke with the Eng and Powers to get their take on Asian representation at the 2017 Academy Awards.

Mother Jones: What got you interested in Asian representation and diversity?

Melissa Powers: I am Singaporean American, but I grew up in China. I never realized there was a lack of Asian representation in media until I came to the US for university. One moment in particular stuck out me: I was watching Tomb Raider 2, which is a very mediocre film, but there’s a scene where Gerald Butler interrogates a family of Chinese fishermen and speaks to them in Chinese. Obviously his accent is terrible, but I just replayed that scene over and over because I was like, “Oh my God, someone is speaking Chinese in a big Hollywood film.” I just watched it for hours. That really showed me how starved I was for Asian representation, without actually realizing it at the time.

Matthew Eng: I’m half-Chinese—my dad grew up in America and is Chinese—and I don’t look Chinese at all, but it’s a part of my background, undeniably so. While I was in a screenwriting course and producing my own screenplays for class, I began to notice this inclination to create characters who were always white. That’s not an accurate representation of the world I grew up in or the types of stories I think should be told, but it was something I tended to do anyway.

Going off of that, I became more attuned to the film industry and the entertainment world. I began to notice that whenever an Asian actor would appear in a film, they would only be playing roles that could only be played by Asian actors, and those roles weren’t necessarily the meatiest parts of the films or TV show.

MJ: You tackle the Oscars in one of your episodes. How was representation this year when it comes to Asians?

MP: Atrocious! Ai-Ling Lee is the first Asian woman to be nominated for sound editing for La La Land, which is cool, but at the same time, Dev Patel is one of the very few Asian people ever to be nominated for an acting role in Lion. It’s very distressing. But hopefully it won’t be worse than last year’s Oscars with Chris Rock and Sacha Baron Cohen making fun of those poor Chinese kids.

If you consider Iranian people to be Asian, which I do, though not everyone does, Asghar Farhadi is nominated for best foreign language film for The Salesman. He won’t come into the US because of the Muslim ban, and I think he says he plans not to. I think his absence will be felt and I hope people will acknowledge that.

ME: Dev Patel is fairly good in Lion, but I think there’s a lot of other Asian actors who I would have liked to see get nominated. It really fucking boggles me that Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden was not nominated in any technical categories, when that film could not be any more pristine a piece of filmmaking. The actress, Kim Min-Hee, is totally phenomenal. In an ideal world, her performance would be an Oscar contender.

I also talk about Andrew Ahn’s independent film Spa Night a lot, which is a story about an Asian man’s queer sexuality. It’s something I’ve never seen portrayed before with that remarkable detail and attention. But it’s not going to be on the radar of Oscar voters.

Melissa and Matthew with their producer, Caroline Pinto. Asian Oscar Bait

MJ: So what Asian films should have been at the Oscars this year?

MP: We’re both in agreement that The Handmaiden should have been there. But in the future, I’d like to see the Academy’s be more generous towards genre films like sci-fi and horror, because I think those genres tend to be places where people of color get to do more in the role.

ME: The Handmaiden is my number one egregious absence from the Academy. But there’s another film that came out last year called Dheepan by Jacques Audiard. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes but completely disappeared when it came to the States. It’s about a Sri Lankan couple who are refugees, and find this young French girl and pose as a family to get into France. It really reflects the times, and the performance by this first-time actress, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, is just beyond words for me. If an American director made this story, it would have received a modicum of attention. There’s amazing cinematic craftsmanship that’s going on in all corners of the world, and you just have to look beyond your backyard.

MJ: If you could make one of your episodes into a film, which episode would that be, and why? And how likely would that story get an Oscar nomination?

MP: I think the Fred Korematsu story would be a shoo-in for an Oscar nom. However, the one I’d be more interested in seeing is the Mazher Mahmood story. His name is going to be familiar to most Brits—he was a tabloid journalist involved in a ton of scandalous stories for News of the World, and is currently in jail for tampering with evidence.

He’s the kind of anti-hero that enthralls Hollywood critics and audiences. Think of Wolf of Wall Street—you have drugs, celebrities, and this razor sharp focus with being number one. At the same time, his story has more than a traditional rise and fall narrative. Mahmood has a strange relationship with his own background (British Pakistani) that no one seems to address. Even though he grew up amongst South Asians, he consistently used his minority status to put other people of color at ease and weasel stories from them, usually putting them in jail in the process. There was an incident where he collected buses of illegal immigrants under the guise of giving them jobs, and instead drove them straight to a detention center. As an Asian person, it really amazes me that he could betray “us” like that.

We don’t really see this kind of betrayal onscreen. In fact, we rarely see Asian antiheroes onscreen. This would easily score Best Actor, Best Screenplay (Mahmood has a book so possibly Best Adapted Screenplay), and potentially Best Director. This would require a minority screenwriter and director, to navigate how Mahmood used and abused the fact that he was an Asian man. And I’m just saying, Riz Ahmed needs that Oscar vehicle.

ME: I would definitely love to see Merle Oberon’s story, chronicled in our second episode, as the basis of a film. It’s such a fascinating, eye-opening, and totally dramatic story of lifelong deception, but it also intersects with the golden age of Hollywood history, making it the type of film the Academy loves to honor any chance it gets. Oberon concealed her half-Indian origins in order to attain cinematic stardom in the 1930s, concocting an entire back story that involved a false upbringing in Tasmania and forcing her Indian mother to pose as her live-in maid in order to ward off any suspicions from her famous friends and consorts. Insane, right?

That being said, I’m not sure it would score any nominations beyond Best Actress for whoever plays Oberon (and, I don’t know, possibly a costume nomination) because the Academy has an annoying tendency of under-rewarding films that could traditionally be described as a “women’s picture,” meaning any movie that puts a woman at its forefront.

Even so, I would love to see this movie made and, preferably, with an actual Indian actress playing Oberon. If this actress were nominated, she would become only the second Asian performer to ever receive a Best Actress nomination. The only other Asian nominee in this category happens to be Oberon herself, for 1935’s Dark Angel, which means that yes, the only Asian woman ever nominated for Best Actress in Oscars’ nearly ninety year history didn’t even want people to know she was Asian! You truly can’t make this stuff up.

More:

The "Pristine" Films That Got Snubbed by the Oscars

Posted in Accent, alo, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LG, mixer, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The "Pristine" Films That Got Snubbed by the Oscars

The Uncomfortable Truth About Children’s Books

by MaynardMcnutt Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Shannon Wright

One afternoon last fall, I found myself reading my picture book The Sea Serpent and Me to a group of schoolchildren in the island nation of Grenada. The story is about a little girl who befriends a tiny serpent that falls out of her bathroom faucet. I had thought it would appeal to children who lived by the sea, but as I looked at their uncomprehending faces, I realized how wrong I was. It wasn’t just my American accent and unfamiliar vocabulary, but the story’s central dilemma: The girl wants to keep the serpent at home with her, but as each day passes, he grows larger and larger.

“What do you think she should do?” I asked, holding up an illustration of the serpent’s coils spilling out of the bathtub.

“Kill him and cook him,” one kid suggested.

It took me a few seconds to understand that he wasn’t joking. If an enormous sea creature presented itself to you, of course you’d eat it! Talk about first-world problems.

I think of that kid from time to time when I need to remind myself that my worldview is pretty limited. Within five years, more than half of America’s children and teenagers will have at least one nonwhite parent. But when the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison looked at 3,200 children’s books published in the United States last year, it found that only 14 percent had black, Latino, Asian, or Native American main characters. Meanwhile, industry data collected by publisher Lee & Low and others suggest that roughly 80 percent of the children’s book world—authors and illustrators, editors, execs, marketers, and reviewers—is white, like me.

Writers and scholars have bemoaned the whiteness of children’s books for decades, but the topic took on new life in 2014, when the influential black author Walter Dean Myers and his son, the author and illustrator Christopher Myers, wrote companion pieces in the New York Times‘ Sunday Review asking, “Where are the people of color in children’s books?” A month later, unwittingly twisting the knife, the industry convention BookCon featured an all-white, all-male panel of “superstar” children’s book authors. Novelist Ellen Oh and like-minded literary types responded with a Twitter campaign—#WeNeedDiverseBooks—that spawned more than 100,000 tweets.

Most hashtag campaigns go nowhere, but Oh managed to harness the momentum. We Need Diverse Books is now a nonprofit that offers awards, grants, and mentorships for authors, internships aimed at making the industry more inclusive, and tools for promoting diverse books. Among the first batch of grant recipients was A.C. Thomas, a former teen rapper who sold her young-adult Black Lives Matter narrative in a 13-house auction. (A feature film is already in the works.)

Problem solved? Not so fast. For years, well-meaning people up and down the publishing food chain agreed that diverse books are nice and all, but—and here voices were lowered to just-between-us volume—they don’t sell. People of color, it was said, simply don’t purchase enough children’s books. But after studying the market last year, the consumer research firm Nielsen urged publishers to embrace “multicultural characters and content.” Nielsen found that even though 77 percent of children’s book buyers were white, ethnic minorities purchased more than their populations would predict—Hispanics, for example, were 27 percent more likely than the average American bookworm to take home a kids’ book. Yet the market for diverse books “can’t just be people of color,” says Phoebe Yeh, the Chinese American VP and publisher at Crown Books for Young Readers. “It has to be everyone.”

In an essay this spring, the book-review journal Kirkus revealed that its reviewers had started mentioning the race of main characters in young-adult and children’s books. The goal, its editor wrote, was to help librarians, bookstores, and parents find stories with diverse characters—and to challenge the notion of white as the default. Many applauded the move, but others were incensed, among them author Christine Taylor-Butler. For The Lost Tribes, her book about a kid who discovers his parents are aliens, she and her editor consciously chose not to reveal upfront that her main character (like her) is black. Highlighting the race of a nonwhite protagonist, she believes, will lead many buyers to conclude that the book isn’t for them—or the children they cater to.

Last year, after Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover won the Newbery Medal and Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming was selected as one of the two runners-up, a white school librarian named Amy Koester blogged about the sotto voce grumbling she heard from other librarians who felt these books, with their black protagonists, would be a “hard sell” in their white districts. “If we argue that only black youth will want to read about black youth,” Koester countered, “we are really saying that the experiences of black youth have no relevance or meaning to youth of any other race.”

Color-coding our bookshelves doesn’t just shortchange the black kids. It is well established that reading literary fiction enhances our empathy and our ability to gauge the emotions of others, so what happens to white kids who are raised solely on stories about white kids? Economists note that the ability to grasp the perspectives of people who don’t look like us is increasingly crucial in a nation riven by race and growing more heterogeneous by the day. In a recent TEDx Talk, Chinese American author Grace Lin recalled hearing from a school librarian whose students stopped teasing an Asian classmate after they read Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Lin’s adventure story starring a Chinese girl named Minli. The book, Lin said, had made being Asian “kind of cool.”

Ellen Oh, the Korean American founder of We Need Diverse Books, points out that librarians don’t fret over whether kids will relate to a title like The One and Only Ivan, told from a gorilla’s perspective, yet faced with a book about a Chinese kid, the literary gatekeepers—from agents all the way down to parents­—may balk. “Some of our most popular books deal with worlds that aren’t Earth and people who aren’t human,” Oh says. “But the people you walk beside on this Earth have stories too.” To complicate matters, a shrinking publishing world has consolidated its marketing budgets. “Readers are led by publishers into fewer and fewer books,” observes Kevin Lewis, a black picture-book author who spent 23 years as an editor at major publishing houses. The result, he says, is that publishers often use a single narrative to represent an entire group’s experience.

A page from A Fine Dessert by Emily Jenkins, illustrated by Sophie Blackall

This puts intense pressure on authors to get it exactly right, even though nobody can quite agree what that means. Over the past year, the creators of two picture books were harshly criticized for their failure to convey the grim brutality of slavery. A Fine Dessert, written by Emily Jenkins and illustrated by Sophie Blackall, both white, showed the same dessert (blackberry fool) being made at different times in history. The book received standout reviews, but after it was eviscerated on social media for its portrayal of a slave woman and her daughter serving the dessert on a South Carolina plantation, a contrite Jenkins donated her writing fee to We Need Diverse Books. (Blackall stood by her work.)

Scholastic recalled this picture book amid criticism that it glossed over the horrors of slavery.

A Birthday Cake for George Washington—written by Ramin Ganeshram and illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton, both women of color—told the story of Hercules, the late president’s enslaved household cook, but glossed over the horrors of captivity and consigned to an author’s note the fact that Hercules eventually ran away (on Washington’s birthday, no less). In the face of internet outrage (#SlaveryWithASmile), Scholastic made the controversial choice to recall the picture book, because “without more historical background on the evils of slavery than this book for younger children can provide, the book may give a false impression of the reality of the lives of slaves.”

(Since this article went to press, two more books—by award-winning children’s authors—have been subject to allegations of racial insensitivity. Lane Smith’s There Was a Tribe of Kids was viewed by some observers as demeaning to Native Americans. The other title, When We Was Fierce, by e.E. Charlton-Trujillo, initially drew high praise, only to have its publication date pushed back indefinitely in response to online outcry.)

Some diversity advocates fear that the vitriol of the internet attacks will give pause to skittish writers and publishers. “For me, the biggest issue is the chill on diversity that is happening because of the feeling that it is okay to destroy people on social media,” Taylor-Butler told me. “We have lost the perspective that these are books and they are going to be imperfect.”

The questions roiling the children’s publishing world are among the pressing cultural questions of our time: Whose story gets told, and who gets to tell it? How do you acknowledge oppression without being defined by it? And to what extent should writers bow to popular opinion? There are no simple answers. But what seems clear to me, as a writer struggling to find the best way to tell stories to kids, is that my inevitable mistakes are well worth making. Children, it turns out, are the best critics of all. They read carefully and passionately, and when they sense you have missed an essential aspect of the story, they will be more than happy to point it out to you.

Source: 

The Uncomfortable Truth About Children’s Books

Posted in Accent, Crown, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Smith's, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Uncomfortable Truth About Children’s Books

This Is The Best "Letter To The Editor" You’ll Read All Summer

by AkilahCollits8 Posted on July 12, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Oh, Britain!

With their accents,

Harry Potters,

and balls (both “foot” and “net“).

Oh, Britain!

With their insane political choices,

badger culls,

and questionable condiments.

Oh, Britain!

Is from where

this funny thing comes.

Have a nice day.

See the original post: 

This Is The Best "Letter To The Editor" You’ll Read All Summer

Posted in Accent, Badger, Brita, Broadway, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on This Is The Best "Letter To The Editor" You’ll Read All Summer

How I Got Arrested While Reporting on a Private Prison

by MilanBurges Posted on June 23, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Read Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s firsthand account of his four months spent working as a guard at a corporate-run prison in Louisiana.

One of the best parts of my job at Mother Jones is teaming up with colleagues to shoot and produce video for our investigations. In March 2015, I traveled to Louisiana to work with Shane Bauer, a reporter who was in his fourth month as a guard at Winn Correctional Center, a medium-security private prison operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

It was Friday the 13th, around 7:45 p.m. The night was warm and overcast when I set out to collect “B-roll” of the prison, a 20-minute drive from Winnfield, the nearest town. Between the prison and the Kisatchie National Forest was a wide, unfenced field. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was prison property. I walked into this open field with a telephoto lens, intending to get a shot of Winn from about 1,000 feet away.

Why We Sent a Reporter to Work in a Private Prison

Then I stepped deep in mud. I used my iPhone flashlight to check out the muck. About two minutes later I saw searchlights coming from the direction of the prison. I walked back to my rental car parked on the side of the road. A powerful light swept the trees, emanating from a prison patrol vehicle that pulled up about 150 feet behind me. I called out “Hello? Hello?” and waited for an answer. When no one addressed me, I got into my car and drove away.

I wound my SUV back through the dark forest—and straight into several police cars and prison vehicles blocking the road outside Winn. I stepped out of the car and was surrounded by three sheriff’s deputies and five or six men dressed in black from head to toe. I saw their faces as they passed in and out of the light from their headlights and flashers. Shane had told me about them: They were members of the prison’s Special Operations Response Team (SORT), the tactical squad called in to restore order when things got out of hand.

I handed over my Australian driver’s license. In my panic, I told the cops I’d stopped to go to the bathroom beside the road. I quickly realized things were getting serious, and I told them I was a photographer working in the area.

Police body camera footage that I later obtained captured part of my arrest (and gloriously, for a videographer, from two angles). “What kind of pictures you got there?” asked the main arresting officer, Winn Parish deputy Kelly Fannin, a paunchy man with a white mustache.

“They’re my pictures,” I replied. I knew they probably couldn’t look at the images on my cameras or memory cards without a search warrant. I don’t remember acting this defiant at the time, but there it is, on video. Still, I wore a worried grin on my face and I sounded scared.

“Now, wait a minute. Let me explain something: What you took here don’t belong to you,” Fannin said, stabbing the air with his finger. “When you come here in this country, when you get around a prison, you don’t fuck around, okay?”

With my camera gear now strewn on the road by the SORT officers, my profession seemed obvious. But the cops and guards were amped up like I was a big catch. I heard them talking repeatedly about the threat of ISIS and the possibility that I was an actual terrorist. “An Australian with a Texas license plate in Louisiana runs some red flags,” Winn Parish Sheriff Cranford Jordan later joked to CNNMoney.

Fannin demanded my camera’s memory card. His temper was rising: “Let’s have it.”

“No, sir, I’m not going to show you that,” I said.

“I will take everything you’ve got!” he said.

I reached down to grab my camera from the pile of gear, setting off a bout of tussling and yelling. “Whoa, come here!” Fannin grabbed my arm in a stiff grip.

“You can’t take my camera,” I protested. “I know that.” The cops said they would get a search warrant. But, Fannin warned, “If you don’t want to give it to me, I will take it. It’s just that simple.”

“Do you want me to charge you for going on that property?” he continued. “And put you in jail tonight and show you what a jail is?”

“I mean, no sir, I do not want that,” I replied.

Going through my gear, the officers pulled out an aerial drone I’d brought along—a discovery that ratcheted up the tension even more. Never mind that it was broken and I was planning to return it to Amazon.

Deputy Tommy Chandler told me to “go ahead and turn and put your hands behind your back.”

“I’m cooperating,” I said.

“No, you ain’t,” he shot back.

After a Miranda warning, I was put in the back seat of a patrol car next to a police dog in a cage. The door slammed.

The deputies’ body cameras continued to roll after I was taken into custody. “We’ll just book him for trespassing,” one said. “I know what it was: He was out here looking for kangaroos!”

“Apparently they’ve got different laws over there in New South Wales, Australia,” an officer can be heard saying. “Welcome to the Free State of Winn!”

The footage also shows one of the prison’s SORT members scrolling through the contents of my camera, without a warrant, while the deputies looked on. The Winn Parish sheriff later said he was “not aware” of anyone searching my belongings; his office declined to comment further for this article. CCA’s spokesman said that the company was “not aware of the camera footage or what it contains.” Yet months later, Winn’s former assistant chief of security emailed Shane what looked like a photo of a screen showing an image of him. The image’s geolocation data suggested it had been created on the premises of the sheriff’s office. There’s only one place the original image of Shane could have come from: my memory card, which contained a video of him that I’d made shortly before my arrest.

I arrived at the Winnfield jail sometime around 10pm. I was charged with simple criminal trespass, a misdemeanor. (In Louisiana you can be charged with trespassing even if you didn’t know that you were on private land.) The computer system couldn’t compute the address on my Australian drivers’ license, which gave one guy plenty of time to brag about how he once made it with an Aussie girl with hairy armpits.

The Corrections Corporation of America, by the numbers

“Are kangaroos good for hunting?” the old jailer asked me. “Perhaps we’ll all have to go there when Hillary Clinton becomes president.” After I was made to strip and show my asshole (just to make sure I wasn’t carrying any contraband), I was put in handcuffs and leg shackles and made to wait in a small office surrounded by three or four guards.

I mostly observed my right to remain silent. But I also wanted to be a good cultural ambassador, so I told them kangaroos are eaten for meat and sometimes are regarded as pests that need to be shot. They seemed to like that.

Maybe it was the stress, or the adrenaline, or the accents, but I understood only every fourth or fifth word the cops and prison orderlies were saying to me. The bewilderment was mutual. I do know that I was threatened with an FBI investigation, immigration detention, and deportation. I asked to speak to a lawyer, but that never happened. I was allowed to call my editor, who started working like hell to get me out.

A couple of hours later, around midnight, my mugshot was snapped and my fingerprints were taken. My arrest records indicate that CCA said that night that it wanted trespassing charges filed against me. The jailer finally led me to a small cell separated from rest of the prisoners. The sheriff had told me earlier that, “They’d whoop you bad.” A 23-year-old named Alex was put in there with me, but he was too out of it to really talk, apart from telling me everything was gonna be okay. My standard-issue orange jumpsuit swam on me. “I wish I could keep it and wear it out in Brooklyn,” I thought.

The next morning, I felt grateful to be protected by prison bars. “Hey girl, hey girl,” someone shouted from the next cell. “You ever slept with a man? Do you want to?” It wasn’t an invitation; it was a threat.

This went on sporadically for hours. “No one’s letting us rape that girl’s hole.” I was scared I might do something to really out myself—I’m gay. I was hoping that just as being an Aussie threw a curve ball at the cops’ ability to identify a real terrorist, it also might scramble their gaydar.

Sheriff Jordan, a big man with a comb-over who liked to make jokes, came by to tell me the judge had denied me bail. It was Saturday, which meant it would be two days before I could get a hearing. Worse, it meant two nights of threats and snoring and unpredictable meals and gawking. I asked if I could call my parents. “Tell them we didn’t shoot you at dawn,” Jordan said.

I tried to start reading the the third volume of Game of Thrones, taken from the jail bookshelf. I wrote a letter. A prisoner sang a top 40 tune, but in a slow, sad baritone—”So baby now, take me into your loving arms, kiss me under the light of a thousand stars…” The prisoners and guards all began to call me “Australia.”

I started to resign myself to several days in this shithole, even though Jordan told me Mother Jones‘ lawyer had been “hollering” down the phone line, a fact that made him displeased.

Then suddenly, at about 4:30 p.m., I was shackled again and taken to be interrogated by two state police officers, a local deputy, and—you’ve got to be kidding me—a Homeland Security agent. These new guys already knew everything about me, and seemed bored that I was just a journalist. “Write all the exposés about CCA you like,” one told me. After about 45 minutes, I shuffled from the room with promises that the judge would soon set bond.

About five hours later, I heard that I’d made bail—for $10,000. “How cool are drones! I really want one!” said an officer, a professed camera buff, as he took stock of my equipment and processed me out of the jail. “Send me a copy of the article when it’s done.”

The old jailer came down to say good-bye. “I’m so sorry you had to see that,” he said. “Some of these places I wouldn’t put my dog in.” I thought about my cellmate Alex and wondered about the people who would never see the outside of Louisiana’s criminal justice system. I felt good to be walking free, unscathed.

Everyone shook my hand as I left to meet the bail bondsman, who turned out to be the son of the local lawyer hired to kick-start my defense, the fabulously named Bobby Culpepper. (Culpepper died suddenly several months later at age 74. My case was eventually concluded by a criminal defense lawyer named Marty Stroud.) The bondsman drove me to a gas station at the edge of Winnfield where Shane and his wife Sarah were waiting for me, tired yet relieved. We embraced, then we got the hell out of there.

News of my arrest broke not long after we left town, first in the local paper (the Winn Parish Enterprise called me a “renowned international journalist,” which I will treasure forever), then in CNNMoney, the Washington Post, and Gawker. I didn’t comment publicly, but the police account of was over-dramatized: The sheriff claimed I’d run from my vehicle toward the prison’s fence, which never happened. “You don’t go to a prison at night. You don’t violate the law when you’re doing a story,” Sheriff Jordan told CNNMoney. CCA issued a statement about Shane and me. It said that trespassing “is a security threat that we take very seriously” and noted that a drone “could be used to transport contraband or provide detailed imagery in a way that could create a security risk.”

Seven months later, I entered a no contest plea on a criminal trespass charge and paid a $500 fine. The alternative was to face down a maximum sentence of 30 days in prison and a trial that could have potentially compromised our investigation. The court then dismissed the conviction under a state law that allowed me to have my criminal record expunged.

I recall one prisoner yelling out to me during my night in orange: “You’re gonna get Winnfield on the news.”

We did. I’m really proud of our work.

More: 

How I Got Arrested While Reporting on a Private Prison

Posted in Accent, alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How I Got Arrested While Reporting on a Private Prison

Meet the Star of Judd Apatow’s New Netflix Series "Love"

by ThelmaPeyser Posted on February 28, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It sounds so familiar. Nice guy meets self-destructive girl. Guy falls for girl, who refuses to be loved. Yet, Love, the new Netflix dark comedy created and co-written by director Judd Apatow, comedian Paul Rust, and Girls writer Lesley Arfin, transcends the usual clichés with complex, smartly written characters.

Rust, 34, stars as Gus, an aspiring TV writer who finds himself suddenly single. Mickey, played by Community star Gillian Jacobs, is a party girl as desperate for love as she is unhinged. Hilarious, tender, and laced with moments of cringe-worthy humiliation, the series is a darkly funny and fairly realistic portrayal of the awkwardness of the human experience—an introspective look at two lost souls as they navigate Los Angeles and bumble through their difficult intimacy in a painfully relatable way.

Rust needed his sense of humor growing up Catholic in Le Mars, Iowa (population 9,826). In his early 20s, after graduating from the University of Iowa, he moved to Los Angeles, where he began acting and performing with the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and writing on shows from The Very Funny Show to Arrested Development, and the popular podcast Comedy Bang! Bang! He also landed a leading role in the 2009 comedy film I Love You, Beth Cooper.

His other recent escapade—not counting his marriage to co-writer Arfin last October—has been co-writing Pee-wee’s Big Holiday (a.k.a. Paul Reubens’ big comeback), a film due for release March 4. I caught up with Rust to talk Catholicism, how parking affects LA hookups, and why he named his old band—he plays guitar, too—Don’t Stop Or We’ll Die.

Check out the Love trailer, and then we’ll talk.

Mother Jones: Okay, let’s have you describe these characters.

Paul Rust: Mickey is from New Jersey. She works at a satellite radio station, and she’s a cool person. She dresses cool and has great taste. She’s also struggling with addiction and substance abuse problems, but deep down she realizes she’s at a point where she doesn’t want to keep doing that, and she wants to improve her life.

Gus is a guy from South Dakota who’s an on-set tutor for child actors. He’s a people pleaser who’s motivated by his fears and anxieties. The two of them meet, and for Gus there’s this sort of attraction: “Maybe if I date this person who’s dangerous, it’ll get me out of my shell.” Conversely, Mickey is like, “I feel reckless, so maybe if I date this person who seems to be grounded, that would give me something I’m missing.” In the show we’re trying to deconstruct that idea. Mickey, under her rough exterior, there’s actually something very tender about her. And for Gus, somebody who looks sensitive on the outside is maybe angrier on the inside.

MJ: How does Los Angeles itself shape the narrative?

PR: Just the way LA is laid out—30 miles of disparate neighborhoods—adds to the loneliness of the characters. There’s a lot more space to feel isolated in. In Los Angeles, you have to meet the person, then walk out separately to your own cars, and follow the person to their neighborhood, and then pray that street parking isn’t going to mess things up. I think a lot of nights together have been spoiled by somebody not being able to find a parking spot and saying, “Why don’t we just go home?”

MJ: What did comedy mean to you as a kid?

PR: Growing up in a small town, in the Midwest, and Catholic: Those are sort of three layers of repression. My mom was my English teacher in high school. So to be able to bend the rules and be the class clown and get to take on my religion, my mom, and my town all at the same time was glorious. I think the desire to be funny was a mixture of wanting to be liked but also wanting to throw your elbows a bit. If you’re cracking a joke in school, it’s sort of anti-authority, but it’s in the nicest, “Please like me!” way.

MJ: Do you mine your upbringing for comedic fodder?

PR: In the writers’ room, we like this idea that Gus presents himself as a nice person, but is it really nice if it’s coming from a hostile place? I’m sure that had to do with my upbringing in the church. You do feel these kinds of hostile feelings, and it’s like, as long as you put these feelings way down, it means you took care of it. But I gotta say, the Catholic Church has churned out a lot of great artists and directors and actors, so if that’s all they do, that’s fine by me. If they’re good at churning out tortured artists, that’s great! Laughs.

MJ: The show almost seems to debunk the “nice guy” archetype, because Gus seems so nice, and then he’ll do things that really aren’t.

PR: The term we use is, “How do we scuff up Gus?” Because Mickey is presented as this self-destructive person, we were really conscious of not wanting this to be the story of, “Hey, if this girl could just realize to accept the love of this kind man, who could solve all her problems and fix her…” To suggest that that’s not healthy was important to us.

MJ: So, what’s it like co-writing with your wife? I mean, what if you had a fight the night before?

PR: Because I think so highly of Lesley and her writing, I fully trust her take and her opinion. She’s very sharp and intuitive. If there is a disagreement, we can usually work through it because the relationship stuff is the real work. Anything to do with the show is fun and entertainment.

MJ: In a recent interview, you said you didn’t want to call this show “honest,” but maybe “truthful.” What did you mean?

PR: Maybe it’s splitting hairs. I think “honest” sometimes gets used to describe a real depiction of real life. I don’t think that’s necessarily what we’re doing. We created these fake characters and we’re just trying to figure out what they would do in situations they enter into. We don’t want people to necessarily think that Mickey and Gus are related to Lesley and me, because it’s not true and I don’t want people to think that. If I heard there was a new show, and the creators were writing about how they met, I would be like, “Pass! No thanks.” Instead of watching, I’m going to go off and barf.

Netflix

MJ: Well, how much do the characters mirror your own relationship?

PR: It was just sort of a jumping-off point. These characters were more based on the years before we met each other—we didn’t really meet each other as damaged as they are in the show. Judd, correctly thinking, said that more sparks will be able to fly if these people are in more toxic times in their lives. If Lesley and I did a show that was really about us, it would be extremely boring.

MJ: Lesley has been open about her past struggles with addiction. Has it been difficult for her to revisit the subject as a writer?

PR: I think because she considers Mickey an older part of herself that’s far, far back in her history, it’s not particularly challenging for her.

MJ: I know you lost a friend, the comedian Harris Wittels, to heroin last year. Has that rubbed off on your writing?

PR: Really the effect is all life-affirming stuff. You know, Harris was one of the funniest, most creative people I know. The greatest quality Harris had was his ability to—he would tweet stuff that I would never be able to admit to another person, let alone tweet to thousands of people. This is a guy who really held the torch for being honest.

MJ: You and Harris had a band together called Don’t Stop Or We’ll Die. You also had a band with comedian Charlyne Yi, who appears in Love, called Glass Beef. Where did these band names come from?

PR: Glass Beef came from just putting these words together. We had different understandings: Charlyne saw it as a piece of beef with chunks of glass in it, and I saw it as a glass figurine of beef. Laughs. Don’t Stop Or We’ll Die came from a line in Back to the Future that’s often misheard by people. There’s a part where Michael J. Fox tries to flag down a car, and an old couple starts slowing down, and the elderly woman says to her husband, “Don’t stop Orvel. Drive!” A lot of people think she’s saying, ‘Don’t stop or we’ll die,’ which is such a hilarious, bizarre thing to say to somebody. We started performing music with comedy because it makes it a little easier to get a response that doesn’t require a wig and a funny costume and an accent.

MJ: The archetypal “struggling” TV characters are often in their 20s, but Mickey and Gus are in their early 30s. Does that make for richer comic fodder?

PR: A lot of the day-to-day, minute-to-minute struggles are a bit more taken care of, so it allows you to start asking more existential questions like, “What do I want in life? What’s going to make me happy?” In your 20s, you’re checking your bank account to make sure you’re not broke. In your 30s, you’re looking at yourself and realizing you’re broken.

MJ: What was it like working on Pee-wee’s Big Holiday with Judd and Paul?

PR: Awesome. Paul sensibility is silly and fantastical, Judd’s is more grounded in reality and real feelings. So much of what Judd writes about is some sort of stunted adolescence, and there’s no greater poster boy for that than Pee-wee Herman. Judd is just such a fan of comedy that he likes all parts of it. It was a dream getting to work with Paul because even before I started working with him, I considered Pee-wee’s Big Adventure my favorite comedy. I would try to write a script like that, and I couldn’t, and it would be terrible.

By luck and chance, I was able to get paired with Paul. And I basically got a tutorial in how to write a script like that. The thing I learned most from him is that the more simple and straightforward and stripped down something is, the better it can be. If I took 25 words to write something, Paul could write it in five. His gift of simplicity and minimalism is really what I learned, and I consider him a friend now. As a 10-year-old fan, getting to be friends with Pee-wee is a dream come true.

The first season of Love is now available on Netflix for your binge-watching pleasure.

View original – 

Meet the Star of Judd Apatow’s New Netflix Series "Love"

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, ATTRA, Citizen, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Meet the Star of Judd Apatow’s New Netflix Series "Love"