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Rabu, 14 April 2010

“A Look At Syfy's Pro Wrestling Increase In October - Airlock Alpha” plus 2 more

“A Look At Syfy's Pro Wrestling Increase In October - Airlock Alpha” plus 2 more

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

A Look At Syfy's Pro Wrestling Increase In October - Airlock Alpha

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 05:31 PM PDT

In a joint press release, Syfy president Dave Howe and WWE chair Vince McMahon announced that the WWE's long-running program, "Friday Night Smackdown," would leave MyNetworkTV at the end of September and move to Syfy starting Oct. 1. (full story)

This move will result in Syfy's popular Friday night lineup being moved to Tuesday nights starting in October. Shows that will be affected include "Stargate: Universe," "Caprica" and "Sanctuary." They will join "Warehouse 13" and "Eureka," which were already on Tuesdays. It also will be the end of the much heralded "SciFi Fridays," as many called the lineup on Friday nights.

WWE's "NXT" will leave Syfy at the end of September. According to numerous reports, "NXT" will possibly be moved to Bravo, but no deal is set yet. If there is no deal by September, the show will be canceled.

In the press release, Howe says the WWE is the "ultimate in imagination-based sports entertainment. The fantastical thrills of 'Friday Night Smackdown' provide an ideal addition to the Syfy slate, as it targets the younger male and female demographics, which are the fastest growing categories for WWE." Howe went on to say that, "With Tuesday night, a proven winner for our original drama series, including 'Warehouse 13,' there is bigger opportunity for series such as 'Stargate: Universe,' 'Sanctuary' and 'Caprica' to thrive on a night with a significantly larger number of viewers available to watch live."

McMahon said that Syfy is a "terrific partner, and we look forward to bring out proven ratings winner and 10-year television institution, 'Friday Night Smackdown,' to the network."

First off, in the interest of full disclosure, I want it known that I happen to be a wrestling fan, and at one time worked for a small wrestling company. I also write for another Web site about pro wrestling. However, being a science-fiction fan, my reaction to the above news was to do my best Stewie impersonation and say, "Oh ... my ... God!"

So this is the answer from Syfy to the many fans of science-fiction that have called for wrestling to leave Syfy: Increase the wrestling and ignore the fans. What is puzzling to me, especially as one who covers wrestling on another site, is the fact that this is a very bad move for the WWE as they will potentially lose a sizable chunk of their audience with this move from broadcast television to cable/satellite.

Now, in all fairness, I will say that "Friday Night Smackdown" has one character that clearly can qualify for the science-fiction/fantasy realm, which is The Undertaker. Beyond that, I'm sorry, but even as a fan of pro wrestling, I can not see the justification for it being on a channel dedicated to the memory of two of science-fictions greats, Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenberry.

Craig Engler, who tweets for Syfy, had this comment on the channel's Twitter account: "Sports bring younger viewers and drive live viewing, and they bring in a relatively broad audience ... more new viewers." That may be true, but I suspect that if it was clearly checked, most of the viewers for wrestling tune away from the channel when the show ends. Mr. Engler fails to note in that comment that professional wrestling is not a sport, but rather sports entertainment. I sincerely hope that was an oversight.

Several months ago, when SciFi Channel made its famous, (or infamous depending on how you look at it and study it), name change to Syfy, many writers on the Internet predicted that this was the first step toward turning the channel into another USA network and away from the vision that created it. I fear we are seeing it happen, one hour at a time.

It will continue until science-fiction fans unite and find a way to make their wishes clearly known to Mr. Howe and the management of Syfy.

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something left undone - Absolutearts.com

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 09:24 AM PDT

galerie bertrand & gruner is very pleased to announce the opening of its next exhibition, something left undone - a group show bringing together for the first time work from seven artists, some of whom have never been shown previously in Switzerland.

Encompassing a broad range of style and media, each of these artists weaves something of the obscured yet mysteriously recognizable into the artistic practice. The exhibition leads one to question the reservoir of symbolism that is inherent to mankind, that which inspired Carl Jung to describe as collective unconscious.

The key is to consider the role imagination has had on encouraging myth and legend. As shared fundaments of these fictions translate time and culture, one is challenged by the magnitude and multifaceted configurations they represent of reality.

The complex subtleties linking imagery with symbol and understanding remains a work in progress – it is open-ended and incomplete. Layered associations and allusion, however, when combined with personal account evoke interpretation.

Shannon Bool's new work, The Hanged Man, can be seen as a reference to man's drive to account for uncertainty in the potentiality of the real. The painting is derived from the Visconti-Sforza decks of tarot, a divination tool of mysticism that has influenced and inspired the actions of many throughout generations. Bool's subject matter, however, emanates from beneath the work's surface and is propagated by symbolic force. In his sculpture, Esagramma, Francesco Barocco can also be read to question the arbitrary and its symbolic force. The work provides form to results from consulting the ancient Chinese oracular tool, the I Ching or Book of Changes. As with the tarot, the many potentials of the real, the everyday, and the moment are manifested - delineated for deciphering.

In a new work that juxtaposes misplaced items forgotten in public library books with drawings that call to mind stream-of-consciousness, Jonathan Hartshorn conjures the playfully random magic of spontaneity underlining Orphic intuition. It is as if magic is also at play in the paintings of André Ethier. His carnivalesque figures appear to populate an enchanted world one best recalls from childhood, filled with fanciful figures.

Steve Bishop's transmutations of everyday objects – also laden with the stigma of the found object – appear as spontaneous reassessments that provoke the viewer into considering the relay of information through imagery embedded with cultural significance. Jeff Ono's sculpture resonates a lyrical consideration of its materiality. The elements combine to give form to ethereal sentiments. It is in the viewer that this sentiment resonates. That very relationship of responsibility between artwork and its viewer as participants in the promotion of collective cultural understanding is what Christodoulos Panayiotou orchestrates in his work.

There is an emotional familiarity resounding from these artworks that one can relate to. While viewing them can be both difficult on the eye and the mind, they bring together manifestations of the real that have deep roots in mankind's unconscious. From such a position of universality we are able to recognize and decipher their collagings of symbolic association. They provide mass to that something which Longfellow objectively described in his poem from which the exhibition lends it's title, and shed light on the nether regions of the mind's eye – its uncompromising imaginative source.

Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China, By Hilary ... - The Independent

Posted: 09 Apr 2010 01:31 AM PDT

At 11, on holiday in a small Indian town, I found, hidden away among the Moravias, Murdochs and Sartres on my aunt's bookshelves, Pearl Buck's fictionalised account of the reign of China's last empress. An inveterate reader of historical fiction, I was familiar with Vidal's Julian and Graves's Claudius, and on a lower level Irwin's Mary Stuart and Plaidy's Lucrezia Borgia. Imperial Woman was a rich narrative that combined the documentary power of the former with the boudoir histories of the latter, while chronicling a period, and place, closer to my own.

Buck was a perennial on family bookshelves and in old volumes of Reader's Digest. Though she also wrote America, her fictions always returned to Asia - Korea, India, China. Unlike her Raj contemporaries, she attempted to do so with an insider's eye, or from a perspecive split between native and foreigner, the two sides of her divided self.

In my teens, living in England, I came upon her late work Mandala, set entirely in India. I was old enough to recognise a foreigner's distanced perspective in her attempt to portray Asian reality. It was China, though, with which Buck was associated: who could forget the Chinese drag of the stars in the Hollywood melodrama The Good Earth, based on her Pulitzer-winning bestseller, and the exotic floral names the characters in her Oriental novels bore? Or the loping-gazelle prose of her early fictions, in which the near-present was enveloped in the brocaded language of legend and fantasy?

Yet when I read Marina Warner's factual account of the Dragon Empress, I was still reminded of Buck's compelling fictional version. Then, before the discovery of post-colonialism, I was studying the fictions of Westerners unable to abandon Asian settings, notwithstanding the liberation struggles and revolutions that had transformed the world they knew. Buck was renowned as a figure who, from her American vantage point, had struggled against racism and denounced the Vietnam war. She was a paradox: unpopular with conservatives, but a former missionary who praised feudal, Confucian norms and the women who practised them in late books that displayed her disconnection from Mao's China. Her peasant narratives perpetuated, it was thought, a foreigner's resistance to radical change in fatalistic rural Asia.

An illustrious Chinese writer I asked for an opinion dismissed her: "Orientalist! She couldn't even read Chinese! Her translation of The Water Margin was based on cribs and dictation." This disconnection placed her with Western writers - Kipling, Godden, Duras, Masters - who attempted to deal with their own fractured bicultural realities after the countries that nurtured them had disowned them. But Buck's reality was other: American, the child of missionaries, implicated in imperialism of a very different ideological sort.

Reading Hilary Spurling's elegant, timely biography, we learn that Buck was, in fact, well-versed and immersed in the despised "vernacular" of her adopted language. She loved traditional Chinese novels, but also devoured, and advocated, the modern fiction of the great Lu Xun and other Chinese contemporaries. Sadly, Spurling reports, Lu Xun was condescending to the American missionary woman.

Rumour also attributed a link of a very different sort between Buck and Chinese literature: an affair with the Chinese Shelley, Xu Zhimo. Spurling brusquely discards this story as Buck discarded the literary poseurs of Chinese society, parodying them in fiction and praising the politically engaged.

Buck's magnum opus, The Good Earth, was her attempt to fill what she perceived as the absence of the peasant from Chinese fiction. However, critical realism is a writer's minefield. Too much authenticity, and she's accused of pessimism and condescension; too much hope and compassion, and she's in the dock as an upholder of tradition and class division.

It wasn't only Buck, as a white outsider, who faced this dilemma, though this is beyond Spurling's span. Young native Marxists who made similar forays into the lives of women and the dispossessed were also criticised for subjectivism or bourgeois failure to understand feudal oppression.

Though the 1930s were years of extreme productivity and international acclaim, guaranteeing Buck a lifelong position as a bestseller, they were also the period in which she, who had moved between her two countries as an act of volition, was forced by political turmoil to choose America. She divided the rest of her life between churning out populist fictions (which Spurling sees as worthily issue-based but increasingly unrealistic) and working hard for the unfashionable and visionary causes she endorsed and supported.

Spurling's focus is on the triumphant years in which Buck, in spite of exile, felt fulfilled both as woman and artist. Buck's twilight decades, in which she wandered away from real life and became involved in a symbiotic relationship with a trickster, are summarised in an epilogue as interesting as the fertile period this biography chronicles with sympathy and grace.

Aamer Hussein's 'Another Gulmohar Tree' is published by Telegram

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