Ok, before I go through the trouble of actually making these things available for folks to buy, would you for real purchase the Gonch shirt that I made for a laugh? Wouldja?

Designing and printing it was super fun. Saw some people tagging that they’d buy one. It might be a way for the shop to survive the lean months coming up.

Anyway, keep Gonching, Goncherinos.

Medieval Times invents a modern union-busting tactic

In the summer of 2020, I committed a minor heresy: I published a column that argued that — contrary to the orthodoxy of free culture and free software advocates — the term “IP” has a very crisp meaning: “IP” is any law or rule that can be used to control one’s critics, competitors or customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

In free culture/free software circles, the term “IP” is viewed as a smokescreen, one that indiscriminately blended a basket of unrelated regulations and laws (copyright, trademark, patent, trade secrets, anticircumvention, noncompetes, nondisclosure, etc) and then declared them to be “property” and thus sacred to the neoliberal religious doctrine.

In my column, I argued that the policies grouped under “IP” were not an incoherent mess — rather, they all shared this one trait that made them useful to those who had, advocated for, or tried to expand “IP”: they were tools that would allow you to reach beyond your own business’s walls and exert control over the conduct of others — specifically, competitors, critics and customers.

Take trademark: Apple engraves miniature logos onto the parts inside your iPhone, which you will likely never see. But these logos allow Apple to argue that when someone breaks up a dead iPhone for parts sells them to independent repair shops that compete with Apple’s repair monopoly, they are violating Apple’s trademarks:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/evk4wk/dhs-seizes-iphone-screens-jessa-jones

Or take DRM: DRM is useless for preventing copyright infringement (if you want to break the DRM on, say, an audiobook, you need only do a quick search). But because breaking DRM is illegal, Amazon’s Audible — the monopolist that controls the audiobook market — can prevent a rival like libro.fm from offering you a way to switch from Audible to its platform and move your audiobooks with them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

Anyone performing a security audit of a modern digital product most likely violates some IP — either terms of service, or DRM, or both, or some other right. When these security researchers criticize manufacturers for their insecure products, the manufacturer can silence them with IP threats:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/10/canada-chile-security-researchers-have-rights-our-new-report

IP rights also prevent you from using the things you own in the way you want — they can control customers For example, IP rights allow your printer to refuse to print with ink of your choosing — it’s not that your printer can’t use that ink, rather, it won’t:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Ever since I published that piece, I’ve noticed lots of examples of IP that fit within this box, and today, I found a particularly egregious one. Medieval Times has sued its workers’ union, Medieval Times Performers United, under trademark law:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/medieval-times-sues-union-trademark_n_63485fa5e4b0b7f89f54546b

Medieval Times argues that its workers can’t call themselves “Medieval Times Performers United” because this will fool people into thinking that the company endorses the union, and that is a source of “consumer confusion,” and thus a trademark violation.

This is, of course, bullshit. Trademark contains a broad “nominative use” exception: trademark doesn’t let Coca-Cola stop Pepsi from claiming, “Our drink tastes better than Coke.” It doesn’t let HP prevent companies from advertising “HP-compatible ink cartridges.” It doesn’t let Apple prevent shops from saying “We fix iPhones.”

The union is contemplating mounting a defense at the National Labor Relations Board — not in a courtroom — “arguing that the lawsuit itself violates workers’ rights.”

It’s part of a broad union-busting campaign from Medieval Times, including anti-union “consultants” who bill $3,200/day. The performers are unionizing over pay, respect and workplace safety issues caused by inadequate staffing, especially staff who police the audience to prevent them from spooking the horses during jousting tournaments. Some performers have been attacked by drunken audience members.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/medieval-times-workers-first-union_n_62bb1d29e4b0d26a9b14fa17

[Striking workers in front of a factory, being fired on by teargas. Between them and the factory are a pair of jousting knights in the style of a medieval tapestry. Behind the factory looms a giant, ogrish boss in a top-hat, chomping a cigar. He is pulling on a lever made from a stylized dollar sign. In one gloved hand, he holds aloft a medieval night, who is bent over in supplication.]

red herring press

is based in the easterly town of Great Yarmouth. It houses a risograph printer, used to publish and distribute local writing in the town.

Over the next bit of time, red herring press plans to run free sessions where people can learn to print (and use for their own projects), publish pamphlets of poetry and fiction by local people as well as on local history and currents, host readings and discussions and film screenings, start a multilingual collectively-run community newspaper/newsletter, open a (very small) local history and radical literature library, house a Writer’s Workshop group, and be a resource for local groups struggling against austerity and the consequences of capitalism.

* * * *

What does it mean to have ‘roots’ in a place? And what, and who, are those roots attached to?

There is immense focus on what has left Great Yarmouth over the years. The dwindling tourists, relocated art school, the closing of the last smokehouse, the diminishing fishing industry, shipbuilding industry, port; the high street increasingly derelict. Cheap studio and exhibition spaces are often used by artists living elsewhere, who rarely contribute to the town’s inner social or cultural life. 

Despite the omnipresence of shops and businesses with seemingly little economic viability (the stall that sells only mushy peas, junk shops that open only between 2-4pm, the club that plays only Ministry of Sound CDs), there are no bookshops in Great Yarmouth. Why? Maybe cause of this widespread idea that a working class seaside town has no interest in, or need for, literature. That it is irrelevant: both literature to the town, and the town to literature. For the state and its bourgeois backscratchers, the ‘problem’ is seen as an impossibility to persuade or ‘educate’ working people to read books, rather than, as a Centerprise youth worker wrote in 1977: “seeing the issue as a result of two centuries of active suppression of working class people becoming too interested in politics and literature… The incalculable years of imprisonment spent by thousands of individuals in the last 150 years for daring to publish, or distribute writings on economics, philosophy, literature and other oppositional categories of thought.” This conscious strategy is clear in the government’s response to illiteracy: mobility scooters. This idea, and condescending responses around ‘the education of’ working people, led working class readers and writers in the 70s and 80s to set up their own bookshops and publishing presses across the UK, as documented by the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers. 

And then the dangerous liberalism (disguised as militancy) of trying to claim that people don’t need books like they need food, housing, work, warmth - as if we can only aspire to what we ‘need’ and not beyond it. As if survival is all we’re asking for. As if reading, writing and distributing literature (whether read or listened to) wasn’t fundamental to struggles for better material conditions in apartheid South Africa, or 70’s Nicaragua, or the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados (Unemployed Workers Movement) in Argentina, or the Diggers’ occupations for common land in 1600s England, or liberation struggles led by communist peasants in Palestine. As if literature cannot be specific to our own lives.

But culture isn’t a ‘right’, it’s a real living force - one we’re already making and participating in daily. When workers in Argentina were faced with the shuttering of their factories, they occupied them - creating spaces inside for a cultural centre, theatre and printmaking workshops, a free health clinic, a people’s lending library, an adult middle and high school education program, and a University of the Workers. Yet the argument that ‘books are necessary too’ often goes hand-in-hand with gentrification and displacement, under the guise of ‘cultural development’.

With this comes the (western) assumption that much writing - particularly poetry - cannot relate to the conditions of a place where there is high unemployment, poverty, prison leavers, homelessness, precarious immigration, flats in which people die from easy-to-avoid fires and a lack of carbon monoxide detectors, a place in which Universal Credit was trialled and the number of people accessing foodbanks multiplied. Where one day you see neo-Nazi tattoos branded on arms, a car flashing Confederate flags, and a postbox address for the National Front; and the next, people shouting in the faces of racists, community meals where English is exchanged for Portuguese is exchanged for Lithuanian is exchanged for Guinensi, where people embroider quilted scraps of material with “No to austerity”, “No to immigration controls”, “No to the closure of women’s refuges”.

A real distinction does exist between culture and conditions, though: there is a difference between funding arts projects and funding housing. Books can’t house or feed us, but can’t we demand both? And it’s not difficult to separate the everyday practice of culture, to which everyone has a claim, from a literary establishment and industry that has, as the qualified arbiter of taste, its own reasons for trying to persuade us otherwise. That posits ‘craft’ over the political and social principles of a poem: who cares if a poem is racist or homophobic if it’s well written?

We are drawn to writing for our own reasons and histories - distinct from a literary industry that publishes writing from outside official state culture only if it can be labelled and sold as ‘prison writing’ or ‘crazy writing’ or ‘poverty writing’ or ‘exotic writing’. Its designated ‘otherness’ and ‘unprofessionalism’ becomes its selling point, its marketability.

When a distorted and dying culture cannot provide any hopes for living in a different way, how can we build our own sustainable, amateur structures to write and read and share one another’s work? 

Email: [email protected]

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/redherringpress/

Risograph printing: designed to be a high-volume, fast and low cost photocopier, riso machines work a bit like screen printing: a print image is burned onto a master sheet, which is then wrapped round a print drum. Ink is pushed through this stencil onto the paper. First produced in Japan in 1986, risos were popular with schools, churches, and political groups to mass produce posters, flyers, pamphlets and small books.

A risograph printer

Printers: Many printshops were set up in the 60s and 70s across the UK. Anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-hierarchy, anti-racist, feminist, queer, anti-state. The radical printshop itself was not a new thing: printers of 'controversial’ material have existed in the UK - often at the risk of imprisonment - since at least the 17th century. Their aim was not just to produce politically radical materials but also to enact those politics through their non-hierarchical and collective organisational and production practices.

Books from the Trade Union Congress Library’s collection of publications from the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers.

Welder/Fabricator/Repair/Assembly

Stage 3 Separation Need: Welder/Fabricator/Assembler

About Stage 3 Separation:

Stage 3 specializes in high quality solids control equipment designed for closed loop mud systems to effectively manage solids, reducing costs for the operator and providing limited or zero discharge solutions as necessary. But we don’t stop there. We also deploy trained technicians to assist and service your job site every step of the way. Additionally, Stage 3 uses a team of engineers and scientists to make intelligent and informed recommendations on how to best manage your job for efficiency and cost savings.

Stage 3 has made a name for itself in the solids control industry through continuous technological advancement and dedication to servicing our clients’ solids control needs through our people, equipment, and processes.

Job Description:

Stage 3 Separation (S3S) is currently seeking to fill a position in our welding department. The position has many responsibilities, not just welding. We are seeking someone with multi-tasking skills that can proficiently perform the following tasks: weld, fabricate, maintain fabrication equipment, repair broken/bent components, support Engineers in R&D mock-up, assist shop workers in final build-out of new equipment, and either has experience with CNC (or has the ability and willingness to learn if sent to Company paid training). Stage 3 is constantly improving processes, equipment, tools, and training to keep S3S one step above the competition. The job is fast-paced with everyday bringing new/different challenges than the day before, with tight deadlines for job completions and attentiveness to the details which make S3S and its equipment standout.

Job Duties:

Reads and interprets blueprints, sketches, or product specifications to determine sequence and methods of fabricating, welding, and assembly.

Lays out, positions, aligns, and fits components together.

Bolts, clamps, and tack-welds parts to secure in position for welding.

Sets up equipment and weld parts, using Stick, MIG, & TIG.

Works closely with management in “mock-up” stage of prototype and R&D equipment packages; understanding changes and additions are inevitable and works towards solving any design/usage problems that may arise.

Understanding of final assembly & necessary procedures to finish a task, using fastening techniques of bolting and riveting, as well as final assembly of completed items.

Installs and repairs piping runs by means of welding, screwing, Victaulic Clamps, Hammer unions. Additionally, understand what piping components are used for and how/where to be installed in a pipe run to complete a specific task (nipples, bushings, valves, flanges, flow meters, etc).

Repairs products by dismantling, straightening, reshaping, and reassembling parts.

Familiar with both SAE and Metric threads, including making new threads, repairing damaged threads, removing broken bolts from threaded holes, determining what an unknown thread is using a hand gauge.

Understanding of the machining processes and tools needed to make custom parts on a lathe and vertical mill. Working knowledge of CNC machines is a plus.

Adapts to changes in the work environment; changes approach or method to best fit the situation; able to deal with frequent change, delays, or unexpected events.

Observes safety and security procedures; determines appropriate action beyond guidelines; reports potentially unsafe conditions; uses equipment and materials properly.

Works within approved budget; develops and implements cost saving measures; contributes to profits and revenue; conserves organizational resources.

Exhibits objectivity and openness to others’ views; gives and welcomes feedback; Contributes to building a positive team spirit; puts success of team above own interests.

Identifies and resolves problems in a timely manner; gathers and analyzes information skillfully; develops alternative solutions; works well in group problem solving situations;

Focuses on solving conflict, not blaming; listens to others without interrupting; keeps emotions under control.

Requirements:

High School Diploma or Equivalent.

Must have good basic mathematical skills and be able to read a tape measure.

Setup, work, and maintenance knowledge of the following equipment: Miller Welders (MIG & TIG), 60T Hydraulic Ironworker (Shear, Punch, Nip, Bend, etc), Horizontal Bandsaw, Bridgeport Manual/CNC mill, Drill Press & Hand drills, Angle Grinder, Bench Grinder, Pneumatic hand tools.

Must be able to MIG & TIG weld Carbon, Stainless, and Aluminum, stick welding is a plus. Must be able to pass applied welding & fabricating test.

At least 5 years of Experience in Sheet Metal or Fabrication, in addition to assembly experience (work or hobby).

Must be able to work in a team setting, including: ensuring safety procedures are followed, providing help and knowing when to ask for help when needed, and aiding in developing solutions to design problems in a group environment.

Experience with hand tools and power-tools is required.

Knowledge of reading/interpreting fabrication drawings with multiple views and dimensioning, with the ability to fabricate to print.

Must be able to follow written and verbal instructions in English, as well as comfortable working un-directed on tasked projects.

Must be able to lift 75 lbs.

Must be able to pass a post-offer drug screen and background check.

Job Type: Full-time

Pay: $15.00 – $18.00 per hour

Benefits:

Dental insurance

Health insurance

Life insurance

Referral program

Vision insurance

Schedule:

10 hour shift

Day shift

Monday to Friday

Overtime

Experience:

Reading Shop Drawings: 1 year (Preferred)

Welding: 1 year (Preferred)

Sheet Metal: 1 year (Preferred)

Fabrication: 1 year (Preferred)

License:

Driver’s License (Required)

TIG Certified (Preferred)

MIG Certified (Preferred)

Forklift Certified (Preferred)

Language:

English (Required)

Spanish (Preferred)

Work Remotely:

An In-Depth, Too-Long, Somewhat Political Review of Venice

Many of you will know that my spouse and I recently went to Venice, Italy to celebrate our fifth anniversary. It's a place we had both wanted to go for a long time, and a dream come true for us to have been able to save the money for the trip. This review will take you on all the ups and downs of the travel, accommodations, touristy things, and quirky differences from America, sprinkled, of course, with important political commentary.

Day 1: We woke up at 5:30am PST to load the car, drop off the cat at my parents' house, and get to our airport parking. That presented our first issue of the day. When we arrived at the address where I had paid for parking at the exact time we had reserved, we found a sketchy looking parking lot at what looked like an auto repair shop that was gated and locked. I called the number on the reservation and there was no answer. I went back to the app where I had paid for the parking, touched the link to the address and it pointed up the road a bit. We went about half way there and the map app said it was back where we originally were. Called the number again and after several rings, it was finally answered. The man could barely speak English (I'm not exaggerating when I say that every single person IN ITALY that we interacted with spoke English more clearly). He had no idea what I was talking about and when I asked for clarification about something he said, he hung up on me. We were so mad.

At this point, I decided we would go into the first airport parking lot we saw. This was the best thing that happened all day. We pulled in to Jiffy Parking, got an automated ticket to leave on the dash, and found a parking place. Thirty seconds later, a shuttle arrived to take us to the airport, directly to our airline with one other family. Check in and baggage check at SeaTac was relatively painless. Our flight was easy to find and we boarded in a timely fashion. We had a nice flight crew and had chosen the part of the plane that has the most leg room. The flight went well and arrived slightly early to JFK, about 7:30pm EDT. That's when it all went wrong.

JFK Airport is just terrible. We stood in a HUGE line to get on a shuttle to go to a different terminal to catch our connection, causing us some anxiety, but we made it. For this flight, I had gone online and chosen seats by the window, where there are only two seats, so we would not have to be right next to any strangers. We were boarded and taxiing from the gate fairly quickly.

After quite a while of waiting, we were finally in the air. Everything seemed to be going well for the first hour and a half and we had made it over the far eastern reaches of Canadian land when suddenly, our flight tracker changed to say we were going back to New York. We thought it was a glitch for a couple minutes, but then the captain came over the speaker and told us about a problem. One of the two navigation screens was not working properly and he didn't feel comfortable taking us over the Atlantic with it not working. We were returning to JFK, but we had to burn off a bunch of fuel first in order to be a safe weight to land. So, over four hours after leaving JFK, here we were again.

After taking my phone off of airplane mode, I read the panicked texts from my mother and father who had been watching the flight tracker that suddenly lost data and had spent over an hour on hold with Delta trying to figure out what happened, only to receive no answers whatsoever. We were then told that the maintenance crew would be boarding and we'd hopefully be on our way again soon. About 10 minutes later, we were informed that the problem was completely fixed and we would be on our way again soon. That was a lie. A few minutes later, someone who sounded like he was about 12 told us that they did not have a backup flight crew to run our plane and the current flight crew would be over their alotted time if we left now. As a result, we would be rescheduled on a plane tomorrow afternoon. We were livid.

At this point we were directed to a Delta help desk at another gate and stood in a non-moving line for over an hour, being repeatedly told conflicting things by different Delta employees, AND being told that if we wanted our checked bags, we would have to wait about two hours for them. As a reminder, Delta is the company that infamously spent advertising money to convince their workers not to unionize, and instead to buy a video game console. Clearly they don't want their customer service employees communicating too much, and it definitely showed.

We had received emails saying that we had been re-booked on a flight that was going to leave at 4:10pm EDT on the 25th to Frankfurt on Lufthansa and catch another layover to Venice from there. About that same time, a Delta employee who looked rather in charge ensured all of us that we would be re-booked for the 5:00 non-stop and that we would all be on it in our same seats that we originally chose. Customers around us in line received the notification that they were rebooked on the new flight, but we did not. Also in this line, I sent an email to our hotel in Venice saying that we would not be arriving until the following morning. They were very understanding and got back to me, in English, before I had moved 10 feet in this line.

When we FINALLY reached the front of the line, we received hotel and taxi vouchers for the night. We expressed our concern about the flight discrepancy. The agent looked us up and said we were booked on the flight to Frankfurt. We told him what the other guy told us and he said "they must be rebooking you then" as if that was supposed to make us feel better. We were given a number to call for the taxi, but not at all told where to go to find it.

We found another Delta agent who gave us vague, incomplete directions about where to go to find the taxi dispatcher. We spent at least another half an hour wandering around asking any random employee where we were supposed to go and getting different answers everywhere. We called the taxi company and the guy told us to "Go upstairs and out door 1". If you've ever been to JFK, you know how maddeningly unhelpful that is when you don't know where you are to begin with. Finally we ran across the same guy that gave us our vouchers and asked him where the hell we were supposed to go. He walked us upstairs, around the corner, and out the DEPARTURES entrance to where more people were waiting for taxis. We called the guy again to ask about our taxi and he said they were probably sending a shuttle or bus since there were so many of us going to the same hotel.

After a little while longer, a car showed up and we elected to share it with two other ladies (a mother and daughter I think) who were on our flight and going to the same hotel. Our driver must have been the most incompetent driver in all of NYC. He looked at our vouchers like they had come from another planet and he had never seen words before. Asked us where to go and didn't know the place. The younger woman we were sharing the taxi with and I both looked up the address and told it to him several times. He stared at his own GPS like he had never seen an electronic device before for about 2 minutes while we repeatedly told him the address. Finally, the younger woman asked if she could enter it. He said yes and handed it to her. Within seconds, we were on our way.

His car was equipped with a beeping sound whenever he drifted over a line. I can't tell you how many times it beeped. When we finally arrived at the hotel, the people who had left JFK after us, had already arrived. The man at the Holiday Inn Express in Lynbrook was the most efficient and competent person I had spoken with all day. Asked us how many people and how many beds, handed us a key, told us what floor, and what time breakfast was. Thank God. At 4:45am EDT, we went to bed. Keep in mind, we had been up since 5:30am PDT. What. A Day!

Day 2: I had been tossing and turning all night, worrying about our flights and our baggage, so luckily, I was awake and looking at my phone on the night stand at 9:30am when it started quietly buzzing as I was getting a call from Delta. I answered it and went into the bathroom to talk. The lady said we were booked on the 4:10pm to Frankfurt with a connection to Venice. I told her what the in-charge-looking guy had told us the night before and she said "You must have been auto-booked by our system." I told her that other customers were too, but they had received notifications rectifying it. I asked why I was being put on another layover in a country I was not planning to go to when I paid for a non-stop flight. She said she could get us on the non-stop that everyone else was on and that she would also be sending both of us $100 check from Delta for our trouble. I asked her about our bags and she said we would have to check with baggage services when we got to the airport in case they had been rerouted to Frankfurt.

At this point we were both pretty awake and decided to just call the car service to get back to the airport with plenty of time to spare so we could deal with all of the baggage things. The car arrived and our jaws hit the floor. It was the SAME DRIVER as the night before. Luckily this time, he was going to JFK, which every single driver in NYC knows how to get to. We got there in one piece and found a Delta agent. For our bags, we were directed to "Baggage Services", which was past a security point that we were not supposed to go into, but the guy let us in since he could see the entrance from where he was.

Baggage services told us that our bags would automatically be loaded onto the replacement flight and were not scheduled to go to Germany. Thank goodness. We left to go print our new boarding passes. When we did this, it said we had zero checked bags, so we printed the passes and asked an agent at baggage check about it. She told us the same thing that baggage services said, so we were set to go. Now for JFK security, which was sort of long and annoying, but I've been through worse at that airport. So we found our gate, hung out, had food and drink, and got to the plane on time. We were boarded and put in the middle section, where we were seated next to a stranger and had no window view, which is not what we were told would happen. Thankfully, this trip went smoothly and we arrived in Venice at about 7:30am CEST.

Here, we got off the plane and immediately into a standing-only bus that took us to the terminal. Customs were unfathomably easy. We walked up to a window, handed both of our passports to the guy inside, he opened them, stamped them, and handed them back to us. We then went immediately to baggage claim and found our luggage right away. We got our bus passes from a kiosk and hopped on the bus out front to go to our hotel.

We had made it to Venice! Our bus ride went well and was thankfully fairly air-conditioned, because the weather outside was both hot and insanely humid. Some ticket enforcement guys got on, looked directly at me and said "Ticket?" in English. I don't know what gave me away, but it was apparently obvious to these guys that we were not from Italy. Might have been how much we glowed in the sun with our bleach white skin. Italians are very tan, apparently because they walk EVERYWHERE. We walked about 25 minutes from where the bus let us off at the Mestre train station to Hotel Roma in Marghera. We were soaked with sweat and absolutely exhausted from the travel, heat, and humidity by the time we got there. We walked inside and the man at the desk said "Buon Giorno." I responded with the same and asked "Parli Inglese?" He said he knew a little and I thought he spoke it very well.

We got checked in and directed up to our room. It was a little old fashioned, but very nice. It had a physical key for the door, but also attached to this key was a card that you had to put into a slot in the room in order for any power in the room to work. After fighting to figure out the air conditioner for a couple minutes, we called the front desk because we couldn't figure it out. The guy arrived in seconds and flipped the switch behind the bathroom door to turn it on. We each zipped through the shower as the old A/C unit slowly cooled the room and went straight to bed.

When we woke up, it was close to 6:00pm CEST, and we were very hungry. Just down the road was a pizzeria called Al Calesse, so we got ready and headed out into the humid heat, finally arriving around 7:30pm. This place was hopping, super busy (though I guess it was a Friday night). The waitress looked at us and said something in Italian. When we looked back at her, wide-eyed, she switched to English and told us to wait a moment. When she took us to our table, it was extremely close to the table next to it, so it could be used as two groups of two or a group of four. The people at the other half of this table were a father and son. We sat awkwardly for a moment and looked at the menu, which had a union jack on it, clearly indicating English translations. It was then that we realized the two people sitting next to us were speaking English as well. We got to talking to the father. He was from Canada, though he currently lives in the UK, which explained his son's British accent. They were very nice and we had a good chat learning about each other.

Just before the waitress came back to take our orders, I noticed something about the English translations on the menu. Peperoni was described as sliced red peppers. I immediately looked it up on my phone. Sure enough, in Italy, peperoni is a red pepper pizza. What Americans call pepperoni is actually sliced spicy salami, commonly called diavola in Italy. I'm so glad I discovered this before we ordered. The meal and dessert were absolutely delicious, and we continued to have a good time with the Canadian man and his son, though, if you're somehow reading this, Canadian friend, we tried Aperol spritz a few days later, and it's absolutely disgusting, how do you have taste buds and drink that stuff? Anyway, happy actual anniversary to us that evening. We went back to the hotel room for the night, since we knew nothing would be open at that point and didn't want to deal with the night bus schedule. We attempted to nap a bit, but it didn't really work that well.

Day 3: I went down to breakfast in the morning and had delicious authentic Italian cappuccino, which was included in our hotel breakfast. We then got ready and headed out for the supermarket, which didn't open until 8:30am, and there is no such thing as a convenience store in Italy, it would seem. We were mostly in search of bottled water, which we found, but they have none of the same brands as America, which as we found out, does make a significant difference. People of Italy, what in the world do you do to your bottled water? Do you not filter it enough? Does it come from somewhere weird? It just plain doesn't taste good, and is somehow not as thirst quenching as American water, even when served ice cold. I really don't get it. We tried several brands of bottled water in Italy and they were all gross.

Anyway, we slept a little bit and got up around 11:00am to head into actual Venezia. We caught the bus and headed that way in the humid heat. There is one road in and out of Venezia, and once you get there, everything is walking paths and canals, you won't even find a bicycle.

Now, we had to find my friend from childhood, who happened to be in Venice at the same time on a completely separate and much longer Europe tour. After a bit of walking, we found her at the boat station and met her roommate from Brazil. Then we hopped on the boat for Murano, the island that is known for glass art. The boat was full, so we had to stand, and just as we stepped on, the lightning and rain started. Great. We got off at the first stop that wasn't a cemetery and started exploring. The first thing we found was a public bathroom, yay! Except, you have to pay to use it. 1 Euro 50 just to pee in a dang toilet and wash your hands afterward. We skipped it for now and went into a glass museum and gift shop. Here we found a really cool black and gold glass gondola that said "Venezia" on the side, which we decided to get. We kept walking and looking at glass things, but every demonstration or museum we went up to cost money, and my friend's roommate seemed morally opposed to spending money on anything she didn't get to keep. So we kept walking in the very humid heat.

At one point, the lightning and rain started again, so we went to a covered walkway between two glass gift shops (I'm telling you, there was nothing but glass on this island) and found a very dirty, but totally chill black cat that was hanging out staying out of the rain. He let me pet him, and even meowed at me when I stopped. It was the least scared stranger cat I've ever seen, and he was totally content to hang out between these two glass shops to stay dry.

We continued walking and walking and by this point, both of us were getting worn out, sleepy, dehydrated, hungry, and just all around not happy, so I got a selfie with my childhood friend, 5,500 miles away from our hometown, and parted ways. We paid 1.50 each to go to the damn bathroom, got some terrible bottled water, and got back on the boat to the main land. I should mention that all of these boat rides were included in our public transport pass. It was incredibly easy to use, and definitely worth it to just get a pass and never have to worry about paying. We got back to the bus station and on the bus back to Marghera. It was so hot and humid and we needed food. We decided to just go back to Al Calesse, but there is something odd about Italian restaurants. Everything is later. I mentioned that the supermarkets don't open until 8:30am. Well the restaurants close between lunch and dinner, which I guess isn't unheard of over here, but they don't open for dinner until 6:00pm at the earliest, if it's fancy, 7:30pm.

So here we are at 4:00 and nothing is open, so we just headed back to the hotel to chug some terrible water, eat some Oreos from the super market, which were largely the same, but came in different packaging, and recover and take a nap in the air conditioned hotel room. We were up, ready and at Al Calesse at 6:00pm on the dot and had the whole restaurant to ourselves. We had more delicious food and then headed to the bus to go back to Venezia. After a bit of a walk, we found our destination, the Venice Jazz Club.

This place was so cool. It was just a little hole-in-the-wall business that you wouldn't be able to find if you weren't looking for it. We had our own small table right at the front by the piano. Our tickets included our first drink, so I ordered a Negroni, a traditional Italian cocktail. They serve a simple dinner before the show for anyone who wanted to buy it, but we had just eaten, so I just ordered their tiramisu special, which was absolutely incredible. The show itself was fantastic. The host/pianist/server/possible owner was fantastic. The show was done in English and featured a tribute to Miles Davis. The pianist was out of this world incredible and the rest of the four piece band were fantastic. At the end of the night, I bought a t-shirt and we went back to our hotel. My feet were killing me and had blisters everywhere, but the evening was a treat and we had a great time.

Day 4: I woke up about 8:30, got ready, and went down to breakfast for more good food and delicious cappuccino. Got back up to the room and my love was still asleep, so I decided to lay down for a bit. Well, we woke up around 2:00pm. Jet lag is a real struggle, folks. We got on the bus and headed back to Venezia in, of course, the very humid heat. This time we got on the vaporetto (water bus) to San Marco, home to the famous St. Marks Basilica and Doge's Palace. Well, we looked around the square for a bit and decided we were very hungry, so we found a great pizzeria and had some more delicious food.

A side note about the restaurants here: customer service is very different. You are seated and given menus, the server comes back to take your order, and then your food comes out, when it's ready, regardless of anyone else at your table. Once you have your food, it is likely that you won't see the server again; you'll probably have to flag them down if you want dessert. In most places, you go up to the counter to pay, having never seen how much you owe, because, again, the server does not come to your table after they have brought food to you. To be honest, I absolutely love everything about this. No one is artificially nice, no one is asking how everything is when you've just shoved a bite of food in your mouth, no one is hounding you to order dessert. If you want something, you ask for it. If not, you are free to eat your meal in peace. It's amazing. The worst part about Venice restaurants is that, even though they all have air conditioning, they leave all the doors and windows open to let in all the heat, bugs, and pigeons. People. Close the windows. I promise it's a more pleasant experience.

Anyway, when we finished at that restaurant, we headed back to the square, which was now completely overrun with pigeons. I stood at the edge of a raised platform where the pigeons were gathered for a moment when a man came up to me and grabbed my arm, turning my hand palm up, and putting some rice in it. Suddenly my entire arm was covered in pigeons. We got a picture and then, and only then, did this man ask for money. I gave him 5 Euros to appease him, but it really rubbed me the wrong way (I believe this behavior is illegal in America). He forced a service on me and then demanded payment. Not cool, even if we did get a couple good pictures.

At this point, we discovered that St. Marks is only open for a very narrow window on Sundays and we had missed it. So instead, we went around to a couple of gift shops to get souvenirs for home, and then stopped for some delicious gelato. We also found a place that sold a small container of Espresso Merlot, which I had to have, and this Aperol Spritz, which we had heard about (I'm looking at you, Canadian friend). So we went back through St. Mark's Square to catch the vaporetto back to the bus station. Side note: there are signs everywhere asking that you respect Venice and please don't litter, but along most of the streets, there are absolutely zero garbage cans, we finally found a garbage can back at the square. However, it was high tide, and the entirety of St. Marks Square was flooded. We waded through the shin-deep water and got a picture of our feet. We posted it with the caption from the recent Spiderman movie: "In Venice, you get your socks wet."

This is a good time to talk about the water in Venice, and to get a bit political again, about something that shouldn't be political at all. If anyone visits Venice and tells you they don't believe in climate change, they are either completely blind, or completely stupid. All over Venice, at any tide level, there are stairways that disappear into the water, down to waterways that used to go alongside the canal, but are now a few feet underwater at low tide. Every water-side building, which is almost everything in Venice, has basement levels that are no longer accessible, slowly drowning because we can't seem to stop killing the planet. When we walked through that square, there was water that went right up to tables in the square. A raised platform with a grand piano and other musicians sat in front of a grand building, these wonderful musicians just playing away to the people sitting at tables with their feet in the water while others wade by. It reminded me of the scene in the movie Titanic, where the musicians just keep playing as everything around them is sinking into the ocean. Everything about Venice was a harsh reminder of how much climate change has done, and what we are on the verge of losing if we don't stop it. St. Mark's Cathedral was first built in the 800s. The water was up to the steps in front of it.

Anyway, we went back to the hotel for the evening and tried out our drinks. The Espresso Merlot was mediocre merlot that barely tasted like it had any espresso, and the Aperol spritz was absolutely disgusting. This stuff is everywhere in Venice and I have no idea why. We both agreed it was terrible. I drank it, of course, but it wasn’t good. So we tried to get a bit of a nap, because we had to start turning our sleep around for our return flight in a couple days. We set the alarms for 7:00am and tried to sleep after waking up at 2:00pm.

Day 5: After not enough sleep, we got up at 7:00, I had my morning cappuccino and breakfast, and we went back upstairs to plan the day. After hanging out for a while and chugging some water to help hydrate for the day, we ventured into the heat. We hopped on the bus to Venezia, determined to see St. Mark's today. When we arrived, the tide was out, which was great, but the line was horrendous. We elected to go for lunch first to see if the line died down.

I wasn't very hungry yet, so I ordered a chicken caesar salad, and lord let me tell you, Italy even does that better than we do. I'm not huge into bacon, but it's mostly because nowhere in America serves it the way I like. We tend to put dark, crispy bacon on anything that we can get away with putting it on, and it crunches and shatters and ruins the texture of everything. This salad had two strips of bacon, cooked lightly, not too greasy, with a wonderful chewy, but not floppy texture. Hands down best bacon I've ever had. This salad also came with fresh slices of parmesan cheese on it. Those were just the trimmings. The salad was fabulous and fresh and the chicken was tender and tasty. If I could go back to Italy, I would do so just for the food. Everything was somehow more delicious than it is here, but you could also tell it was way better for you. The food wasn't full of gross preservatives or any of the other crap we put in our food. It was all delicious.

After lunch, I realized that I hadn't done any wine-tasting yet, so we found a wine bar. This place was very interesting. I told the server I was interested in wine tasting and she brought me to a tall and wide round table with a machine on it. This machine held each bottle of wine and produced different sized tastes or glasses from a spout in front of the bottle. They didn't offer a flight, but you could get a taste, a glass, or a larger amount (third of a liter maybe?) for different prices, and of course, the bottle if you want. Different wines were priced at different levels for everything. The first one I tasted was from one of the oldest wine families in Tuscany. The taste alone was 3.50. The bottle? 75 Euros. The second wine I tasted was very good, but couldn't hold a candle to the first. I bought a 75 Euro bottle of wine, and I do not regret it at all. I'm looking forward to drinking it.

After this, we headed back out to St. Mark's, which still had a line, but it had died down a bit. We eventually reached the front and received our audio tour devices that we had paid for with our city pass. When we were about to enter, I was told that I needed to pull up my sleeves to cover my shoulders (I was wearing a cold shoulder dress). Apparently shoulders make Jesus cry in catholic or something. At least the guy was nice about it and didn't make me buy a "modesty shawl" for 2 Euros.

Inside the Basilica was incredible. It was so much quieter and darker than outside, but was lighted enough to see all of the incredibly detailed art. The domes of the basilica were humongous and every millimeter of them was covered in intricate gold and vivid colored paintings. There were statues of all of the apostles plus other biblical figures above the alter. Over the seating area, there was a huge 3D red glass cross candle chandelier. It wasn't lit, but you could see how incredible it would look if it was. The history of this place was fascinating. It was originally built in the 800s, which is mind-boggling. We stood inside this incredibly complex architectural structure with decades, if not centuries of art that is over four times as old as our country. We headed back out into the square and hopped the vaporetto.

It was at this point where the heat and humidity really started to get to me and I wasn't feeling very well. I'm almost positive I had some sort of heat exhaustion. So we went back to our hotel since it seemed to be the only place we could reliably find air conditioning. After chugging some more terrible water and laying on the bed for about an hour in the A/C, I felt so much better, and we headed back out for our evening activity.

After switching from bus to vaporetto, we realized that we were heading in the right direction, but the route we were on did not actually stop at the place we needed to go. So we got off as close as we could and pretty much power walked to our destination. We made it in time for the most iconic part of Venice, our gondola serenade.

We were on boats of 6 people, so there were 4 more people on our boat, plus our gondolier. Our six boats traveled together with one of the gondolas having a singer and accordion player who sang to us the whole way. We got to see some of the smaller canals instead of just the grand canal that the vaporetti and water taxis take all the time. I recognized two of the songs that were sung: Santa Lucia, and the finale and quintessential gondola song, O Sole Mio. I cried because the experience was so iconic. At the end of the ride, we headed back to the hotel for the night with the plan of getting up even earlier the next day, and we set our alarms for 5:00am.

Day 6: There were two more iconic things we hadn't done yet, so we got on the bus early. This is a good time to mention the ups and downs of the public transit and general attitudes in Italy. The busses and vaporetti were very convenient, ran regularly, and were incredibly easy to use and navigate. The downside is that literally everyone uses them and you hardly ever get to sit down on any of them, often being crammed way too close to strangers and sweating all over each other because, while they do have air conditioning, it is not adequate for that many people. Another note about group behavior in Italy, no one makes any attempt to get out of the way of anyone. Italians, particularly Italian men, will just plain walk at you and if they run into you, so be it. They will cross two inches in front of you without thinking anything of it, and don't really have personal bubbles. On top of that, lines are not much of a thing. They’re more like clumps. Patiently waiting in line for the vaporetto? Someone will push right past you and stand next to the person at the front of the line. This was true everywhere, even at the airport. Very strange.

Anyway, the first thing we did that day was go to the famous Rialto Bridge. 7:00am is the absolute perfect time of day to do this. We had been passing under this bridge on vaporetti all week and it was always packed full of people. Early in the morning, we were able to walk right up to the top, see the great view, get a couple pictures, and head back down. At the base of the bridge, we found a café that had pizza, so we stopped, had some diavola, tiramisu, and a fantastic latte macchiato. We bought some bottled water to go and hopped back on the vaporetto to St. Mark's Square one more time. We had to see Doge's Palace.

Since the Basilica doesn't open until 9:45am, the square was pretty calm and the line for the palace was almost nonexistent. We got through security easily and wandered into a giant courtyard, again full of incredible intricate sculptures and paintings at every turn. We went through some museum exhibits and found the only bathroom in the whole city that's just plain free. There was a huge, ornate working clock that towered over the square alongside many sculptures. The most high-class gondola we had ever seen was on display. It reminded us of carriages for royalty that you would see in movies, but in a gondola form instead of a horse-drawn vehicle. It clearly must have been for the Doge himself.

We grabbed a couple more souvenirs and mint slushies and headed back to the main bus terminal area. I had to get a couple more bottles of wine, so we found a little café/wine shop and bought a couple of fairly cheap bottles without tasting. I have now broken into the chianti I bought, and it is extremely good for the price. We headed back to the hotel and waited for the gelateria around the corner to open at 3:30 so I could get an affogato, which was exquisite. When we got back to the hotel this time, we paid our hotel bill (the city tax was not included in Expedia) since we were going to be leaving very early in the morning to catch a 6:00am flight.

We got everything packed up and planned to go back to Al Calesse one more time, but discovered that it was completely closed on Tuesdays. We instead went around the corner to a different pizzeria, but decided to order the food for takeout since this place had no air conditioning at all. We went to bed as early as we could stand, knowing we'd have to get up at an absurd hour.

Day 7: The one thing I didn't really like about the hotel besides having a hard bed (I never like hotel beds, it wasn't that bad) was that there was no clock in the room at all. We only had one plug adapter, so our phones were on the other side of the bed. Because of this, the only time indicator I had when I woke up on any given day was whether or not the sun was up, and since the alarm was set for 3:00am, that was not a good indicator of whether or not I needed to be awake. So I got up and went to the bathroom at 1:23am and couldn’t get back to sleep.

It didn't take long for both of us to be up and about after that, so we just got ready and I called the taxi company, which was honestly probably the scariest thing I did in Italy. The company had an automated menu that was completely in Italian and I couldn't keep up with it. Eventually it brought me to a real person and I hopefully asked, "parli Inglese?" to which she responded, "yes." I asked for the taxi, was put back on hold to an automated message, and then was brought back to the person, who said "five minutes." We hurried and went downstairs to turn in the key.

Once outside for approximately 15 seconds, the taxi pulled up and the driver confirmed, in English, that we were going to the airport while helping us with our suitcases. He drove us straight there with no problems. We checked in to the kiosk and then waited (in a clump, not a line) to check our bags. We were worried at first because there were no staff members anywhere, but that's because there were no  mid-night flights from this airport. The earliest departure was 5:50am, so the staff members didn't get there until about 4:30am.

Once through security, I found a café and got a double cappuccino and a croissant for breakfast while we waited for the reader-boards to tell us what gate our flight was leaving from (it wasn't on the boarding passes). We got to our gate and were taken out to a bus that would take us to the tarmac. We boarded from the rear of the plane and found our seats. For this Air France flight, I had paid extra to select our seats to be in the only row that had two seats instead of three. This is not where our seats were. We were next to a stranger on a flight, again, the very thing I had tried my best to avoid the whole time, and it just didn't want to work out for us.

The flight went fairly smoothly except the people speaking the English translations in French accents were too quiet and difficult to understand, so we basically had no idea what was going on. Also, our row got skipped for beverage service, so we were sitting there eating croissants with no liquid.

We got into Paris and had to go through customs. It was just as easy as Italy, only they made us go one at a time, which was slightly scary, but only for a brief moment. We found our gate after going through a huge fancy terminal. Everything was white, fancy, and expensive. Cartier, Prada, Coco Chanel, there was even a caviar bar in the middle of the promenade. I did, however, see one very familiar green logo that I couldn't pass up. I got my frappuccino from Starbucks and ate a sandwich while we waited near our gate.

When they started boarding, we started seeing the harsh realities of America rear their ugly heads. Before entering the line, we were stopped by security and asked questions such as, "Does everything in your bags belong to you? Did anyone approach you and ask you to bring anything on the plane for them? Have you seen anything suspicious?" etc. Once through that, we were led to an automated gate. You scan your boarding pass and it either turns green and lets you through, or it turns red and you go to the side for additional screening. We got through just fine. Every single person who was turned away for additional screening was some shade of brown. I was sad and disgusted with my white privilege in America, and I hadn't even left Europe yet.

We were boarded in our seats on the side of the plane with no one next to us for the longest flight of our trip. Everything seemed to be going fine, but then I tried to buckle my seat belt. Now, I am a plus-size woman, but I am literally one size larger than the average American woman. This was a Boeing 767-300 plane, made right in my home state of Washington, and this seat belt was not long enough for me to buckle it. I've never had to ask for a seat belt extender in my life, but I had to ask the nice flight attendant to get me one. She got distracted with a group of four kids and one mother who were not seated all together, and that was not going to work for the ages of these kids. So she forgot about my extender until I reminded her.

This was an 11-hour flight from Paris to Seattle, so it was the one flight on our trip for which we were planning to purchase the in-flight wi-fi from Delta, but once we were off the ground, it was announced that it would not be available on this flight. Ugh. So we tried to get a nap, but it just didn't work. That group of four kids were quite well-behaved, but 11 hours is a really long flight for four kids under 10, and they just got a little loud sometimes. It wasn't their fault and the mom did a great job of trying to keep them quiet, it was just tough, and I couldn't complain about my circumstances. This group of four kids and a mother were black as night and clearly Muslim, and they were traveling from a foreign country to the US during a time when ICE is stripping children from their mothers left and right. We've been back for two weeks and I still hope and pray they made it through customs as a family.

Speaking of customs, American customs absolutely suck. First they separate you into two giant lines, American and Canadian citizens in one line, and everyone else in the other. We were told it could be up to an hour to get through customs, and we had people who were trying to make connections that were told they had to wait. We finally got to the front of the citizen line and went to a kiosk that scanned our passports, asked a bunch of questions, and took pictures of our faces that were then printed out on receipts. We then had to take these receipts and our passports to a physical person, who asked us all of the same questions while stamping our receipts. Then we were let free into baggage claim, which was remarkably fast (thank you SeaTac). To leave the baggage claim area, we had to show our stamped receipts to yet another person before we could exit into the underground train that took us to the terminal.

Once out of that mess, we went straight to ground transportation. Within a couple minutes, a Jiffy Parking shuttle was there to take us to our car. It was simple and easy. We inserted the dash ticket into a machine and paid the amount for the time the car was there. We then headed to the Jack in the Box across the street where we got milkshakes and Dasani bottled water which we drank in an enclosed, air conditioned room and each of us used the free bathroom. We drove back, picked up the cat from my parents' house, and headed home. We managed to stay up until 8:30 that night, which amounted to about a 28 hour day for both of us if you don't count the couple minutes of dozing on the plane.

Overall: Venice is a beautiful, enchanting place full of history and incredible experiences. If you get a chance to go, you should go and take it all in while it's still above water. However, don't go in the middle of summer when it's crowded as hell and too hot and humid to breathe. Also, don't ever fly Delta. Ever. I guess I can be glad that I didn't find poop in my blanket. If you don't get that joke, go watch the Nicole Byer episode of Comedians of the World on Netflix. Shoutout to the unsung hero of our vacation, Jiffy Parking. If you need airport parking at SeaTac, they are fantastic. While I'm happy to be back in the land of free bathrooms and drinkable bottled water, I have to say this whole trip made me really not proud to be American. We need to do better, everyone. There are plenty of places in the world that are managing not to shoot each other, tear families apart, deny climate change, shove endless crap into their food, and bankrupt people who need medical care. We can do  better, and we have a responsibility to make sure we do. Buona Notte, Amici.

The Decision.

Beginning of 2017, I was in Sacramento, still looking forwards for a chance to chase a dream and working hard and looking for a promotion. In early March, I took my talents back to the Bay Area and got hired for the new job. Then 2 months of licensing and another month of training, July 24, 2017. I made a decision. I'm leaving a job that I've had since April 13th, 2001 and I'm going to leave it all out on this blog. Reason being? I loved it for a lot of years and I want to remember what I can remember. So if there were anyone and anything that you can blame me for, then, here's my side of the story. 16 years at a company, I think I have the rights to say whatever I want to say. '''Twas was the day that was senior year in high school. I went and started looking for a job because I chose to go to Chabot College, a community college local to most of the East Bay. I went in, first one I met was the General Manager, Eric Martin. When anyone ever talks about first impression, that guy impressed me. I was a 17 year old, looking for a job with no resume in hand. He professionally told me to fill out an application and asked if I wanted to be interviewed immediately. "Sure, let's do it." Two days later I was sitting in the middle of a store front inside Bayfair Mall going through orientation with a bunch of other future co-workers. First person I met, Nam Huynh. We eventually even served popcorn and trained together in Union City. We took over the A side and we had tons of fun. If you want to teach your employees to upsell, just say "managers said if we don't make enough profit, they won't give us raises". Never not upsold ever since then. I met a lot of people like Yolanda, and later on "Army" (yeah I graced him that name) and also Soap, his friends, his family. Hell, we even joked and called ourselves a race team, "Century B16" as in Bayfair 16. The chance came around August, Rush Hour 2 weekend. One of the managers asked if I was interested in working in the booth, turned out to be one of my future best friends, Marvin Capistrano. On to the booth I went. Talking about building up movies, breaking down movies, hanging out with Duane talking about Pootie Tang. Man, crazy days. First time I ever built a movie was, Zoolander. Dry runs after dry runs, hot print break downs on Thursday. I slowly but surely deterred from going to school. Then, a GM put me on probation and wanted to fire me. I will never forget this, simply because I wasn't properly trained and this 30 day probation, I lasted longer than the GM and his crew. I learned one important thing, training. Which is also another thing that I've learned, to be a people's person. Next GM came, Charles, I breezed through it and apparently we were doing a bad job. Let me remind you, at the time, the ATM at Bayfair was stolen!!!! Then, during that time I met my little big sister Erica. Although we didn't exactly work together all the time but we were always close. I love Erica to death. She's definitely bff status. Meanwhile, supposedly the theater wasn't doing good, so this Latino dude name Lazaro came along, and this other Asian ricerocket driving dude name Anthony Tan came about... with Brian Pacquing.... The rest was history. Rios, if you ever get to read this, I still hate you for making me cry. But it was definitely tough love. I learned the most from him. I learned how to be tough on someone, but real. You can't yell at someone that consistently yell, nags and bitch about things. You MUST teach. For that, Rios, I forever owe you. To Anthony Tan, you taught a young kid what's right and what wrong. You taught me how to grow up and be a man. I might not always understand you at the time, but boy I sure received the message. Rios did good and took over and taught me how to be good, but when it was his time to leave, here comes Julius. David Wilson-Scott bka Julius Pirie Scott, you are way beyond a father figure to me and even more as a brother. You taught me how to trust my skills and be great. We went to see Usher, we saw Kanye, and we saw riots at the theater, but you taught me everything and you did not hold back any knowledge. I learned from you to give your knowledge out unconditionally. Thank you. Then, it was time for me to leave. Cinedome 8 East Fremont. Ben Lin, Montry Souvanthong, Ashley Perreira. You three were more than what I can ask for from a new GM, Ben knowing me the most by working with me at Bayfair but the other two kept me sane. Jeff Herzstein, thank you for trusting a 21 year old kid to tell you to spread your wings and trust your skills, thank you for helping me become a fair and smart GM. Adam Bebee and Adam Bauer, you guys were good and ya two taught me how to be a fair GM and I love the fact that you guys gave me respect. To the late Jane Benjamin, may you Rest In Peace, or well, keep going to forever create havoc! I love you Jane, I love the fact that you wanted to work and you love me and respected me. When everyone told me to avoid you, I didn't, I got close to you. Thank you for the countless meals of country way, Disneyland Mickey ears and the bottle of champagne for the holidays. I love you. I hope you look after me. Two years later, when Cinemark came running and bought out Century. I took my talents to Union Landing. Jacqueline Brooks, for the record, I hate you as a co-worker, but I love you as a brother. We never get along not because we have differences, but we don't get along because we all want to look out for each other. Two years at 25 made me love you like you're the big sister I never had. To Leticia Gonzalez Solis, you, you're a beast. Hug hug, kiss kiss, little hug big kiss little kiss. I taught you everything I got and you gave me all your effort every day. Out of all people that followed me, you were not the smartest but I know 100% you worked the hardest. Baby boy Ali, I know you got my back and I'm sorry I wasn't there for you when you needed me, but trust me, if you ever need anything, you know I for damn sure wish that was me that took that bottle to the head instead of you. The two years of 25 was so good, it exhibited my skills. Then I earned a promotion to open my own theater. For the fucking record. These years at Hayward, forever let me say what I feel, because I am, and still am very angry about the process on how and what happened. First, when the audit program happened, I was opening the theater. Second, my self destruction and choice of going back to school was directly affected by Cinemark. I opened the theater, the shopping complex and the recession hit hard, so the projected attendance was short by almost 40%. It was 2008. Then Cinemark gave all the managers in the Bay Area reduction in geographical allowance. Mind you, all managers in the Bay Area were "century" pat while I was "Cinemark" pay but the cut was all across, so I got less money. Not to mention, the first day the paycut happened was at a Cinemark conference, that's not encouraging to me. Not to mention, my superior discouraged me for getting higher education, simply telling me to focus more at work and talk about how great advancement is. Then came the budgeting process, I was compared to a 8 screen cinedome on payroll, to reduce payroll at a new location, I was told to also act as the MR guy and the GM 5 days a week during slow season. Then I was blamed for lack of production, bad audit scores, no bonus and also more paycuts. 1600 bi-weekly check to 1200 when I decided to leave. So I'm tired of people saying "you were never there" or "you fucked up the payroll", because I didn't. Snitches gets stitches and even if I blamed my regional manager or higher ups, the small potato in me would never win. The Cinemark algorithm on reduce cost of living in 2009, made us, the managers get a pay cut. I have yet seen the facts and studies. And the small potato in me never mattered. Cinemark, century pay grade, they didn't care. For the second time I'm mentioning it, you take 1/4 of my paycheck and decrease my pay within 3 years, trust me, you would be as mad as me. I did have a good time at Hayward because it was challenging, look at it now, not too shabby, but I hate it. While I was working at this location. I lost my girlfriend. I never get to see her and I was stressed all the time. Don't like Hayward. The city hall wanted the theater to play at least 2-4 art films every week, so they can "attract" people. I was invited to the city hall meeting to have almost 2 hours to answer the fine citizens of Hayward on how a movie theater should be ran. Same people that discouraged me to be around and just wanted things their way. Not a happy place. Then due to poor mid 80s audit scores, I was told that I would have no chance to survive as a general manager, for the third time, let me remind you that you lost 1/4 of your pay at the same time since the beginning. I chose to go to Fremont. I will end this chapter like this. Fremont. It was a time for me to leave the moment I got there. Jason Cardosa, I gave you my all. I don't like to belittle people and it doesn't make me feel good. Countless times I was reminded how poorly I ran Hayward and how much I wasn't trustworthy enough to run a department, while every single department I ran was the best that you ever got when I was there. Strange. Apparently because I have GM experience then it's expected. I know I got skills, but you never really cared and tried to find a solution to solve the issue. You provide patchwork and I provide solutions. We had our differences, but it was much like Jackie and I, because we care. You stuck with me for 2 more years and how ungrateful am I but to leave you so shortly and with pretty close to no notice. I popped my last batch of popcorn, sold my last ticket and used my last set of movie theater broom. I don't care what anyone says, you out of every one that I know have the best potential and you're definitely not too young for a regional leader role, but be personable. That's what Farley taught me. Be there for your people and understand how they feel. I got to know you so much more when we went to watch Oblivion in LA and that was a good trip. I was happy we made that trip because I feel like you actually do care about people, but try that on some other people, they respect you more that way. To every single person I've trained, thank you for listening. To everyone that I screwed over. 16 years later, I am 100% proud to say that I don't have any. So, boom. Cinemark, Century, thanks for the memories. Notice I put all the memories on people? The people made it for me. The lives that I made better and taught, I'm proud of that. I always said I'll go back to Bayfair and kiss the floor before I quit. Well, I'll officially do that on Friday, but 100%, my theater life is done and thank you all.

Reel after Seemingly Needless Reel

Writing his memoirs in 1946, two years before his death, Sergei Eisenstein declared that he had ‘been fascinated by bones and skeletons since childhood’. His first experience of film involved watching a flying skeleton horse pull a bewitched carriage across the sky, in Georges Méliès’s Les 400 Farces du diable. It was skeletons, he says, that made him go to Mexico:

I remember holding a German magazine. And I saw on its pages some striking skeletons and bones. A human skeleton astride the skeleton of a horse ... There were two other skeletons – a man, judging by the hat and the stuck-on moustache; and a woman, judging by the skirt and pompadour ... What could it be? A madman’s delirium, or a modern version of Holbein’s Danse Macabre? No! These were photographs of the Day of the Dead, in Mexico City ... This impression lodged in me like a splinter. My desperate longing to see this in reality was like a chronic sickness.

In December 1930, Eisenstein crossed the US-Mexican border to begin work on a film which, rather than curing his sickness, turned into a grandiose, heartbreaking failure. After 14 months, he was forced to abandon the project and return to the Soviet Union, having fallen out spectacularly with the film’s sponsors, the novelist Upton Sinclair and his wife, Mary Craig Sinclair. There followed years of acrimonious wrangling over the miles of film he had shot. By the time Eisenstein died in 1948, other filmmakers had carved two features and several shorts out of his footage, but he himself had been unable to edit the film as he wished.

The story of ¡Que Viva México! has been told many times by participants, bystanders, biographers and film scholars, most compendiously by Harry Geduld and Ronald Gottesman in their 1970 collection of correspondence and documents relating to the film, Sergei Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: The Making and Unmaking of ‘¡Que Viva México!’ Inga Karetnikova’s Mexico According to Eisenstein (1991) gives a briefer account and reproduces a selection of Eisenstein’s texts and drawings from his time there. More recently, Aurelio de los Reyes has made a detailed investigation into the origins of the project, El nacimiento de ‘¡Que Viva México!’ (2006). Masha Salazkina’s In Excess rereads the film against its Mexican backdrop, situating Eisenstein’s project within the artistic and anthropological discussions of the time.

The idea of making a film in Mexico came after a period of frustration and failure in Hollywood. Eisenstein had left the Soviet Union in late 1929, along with his assistant Grigory Alexandrov and cameraman Eduard Tisse, having received official permission to travel to the West for a year to study the techniques of sound film. In Europe, they were well received in leftist intellectual and artistic circles, but made far less welcome by officialdom: the French interior ministry sent gendarmes to the Sorbonne to prevent a screening of Battleship Potemkin – they feared the film might set a bad example for their own working class – and eventually had the Russians expelled from the country.

Rather than return home, however, in April 1930 Eisenstein signed a six-month contract with Paramount; he and his team sailed for the US the following month. He suggested making films of War of the Worlds, Ulysses and Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, but these were turned down by the studio’s executives, as were the scripts he subsequently drafted – including Sutter’s Gold, an adaptation of Blaise Cendrars’s L’Or, and a version of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. David O. Selznick praised Eisenstein’s Dreiser adaptation, but said that its critique of American society ‘cannot possibly offer anything but a most miserable two hours to millions of happy-minded young Americans’. ‘Let’s try new things by all means,’ Selznick wrote, ‘but let’s keep these gambles within the bounds of those that would be indulged in by rational businessmen.’ Over at MGM, Samuel Goldwyn had made his own calculations, telling Ivor Montagu, who collaborated with Eisenstein on his Hollywood scripts, to ‘please tell Mr Eisenstein that I have seen his film Potemkin and admire it very much. What we should like would be for him to do something of the same kind, but rather cheaper, for Ronald Colman.’

In the USSR, things had been very different: when Eisenstein restaged the storming of the Winter Palace for October, he had been allowed to close off parts of the city for hours at a time, and to deploy 8000 volunteers, many of them workers and soldiers who had taken part in the real thing; for Potemkin, he was given the use of the Black Sea Fleet for a day. Of course, working out a film’s budget is the job of the producer, not the director, whether in Hollywood or Leningrad; but Eisenstein’s financial innocence, combined with his sponsors’ ignorance, would have dire consequences when shooting began in Mexico.

Eisenstein’s contract with Paramount was cancelled in October 1930. Facing the prospect of an ignominious return to Moscow, he began to explore the possibility of making a film about Mexico. Like many members of the Russian intelligentsia, Eisenstein was both a leftist and an internationalist, and would have known a certain amount about the Mexican Revolution, which preceded the Bolshevik Revolution by seven years. By coincidence, the first play for which he designed sets, in 1920, was The Mexican, based on a Jack London story; it was while working on this that he met Alexandrov, who played an American boxer. But there is little in Eisenstein’s stage designs to suggest he was familiar with Mexican culture: that came later in the 1920s, through Russian literary depictions of Mexico – Ilya Ehrenburg’s Adventures of Julio Jurenito and Mayakovsky’s My Discovery of America – and then through his encounter with Diego Rivera, whose visit to Moscow in 1927 was arranged by Mayakovsky.

Rivera acquainted Eisenstein with his own work and with that of other muralists, above all José Clemente Orozco; he also reminded him of Posada’s popular prints, in which skeletons cavort, dance, ride horses and play instruments. In Hollywood, Eisenstein acquired more Mexican materials, including Anita Brenner’s Idols behind Altars, which emphasised the rituals and legends of pre-Hispanic civilisations; it was illustrated with photographs by Tina Modotti and Edward Weston that clearly influenced the composition of Eisenstein’s own images of Mexico.

The owner of the shop where Eisenstein bought these books was Odo Stade, a Hungarian who had known Pancho Villa, and fed Eisenstein’s interest with tales of the revolutionary campaigns. Stade told Eisenstein he would need around $25,000 to make his Mexican film. As it turned out, Stade’s sense of what films cost was little better than Eisenstein’s; the Sinclairs, whom Eisenstein approached for funding at the suggestion of Charlie Chaplin, knew even less, and gave him the money. In November 1930, Eisenstein signed a contract with Mary Craig Sinclair laying down Stade’s figure as the budget, and setting a schedule of three to four months. By the time Eisenstein left Mexico in March 1932 he had spent $60,000 and shot more than 200,000 feet of film; the final cut was supposed to run to no more than 10,000 feet. According to Montagu, this was no cause for alarm: the cost and ratio of raw footage to edited film for Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran were similar. Because the film had to be sent back to Hollywood for processing, Eisenstein never had access to rushes; so he filmed more takes than he would have needed, just in case. Never having made a film before, the Sinclairs could only look on aghast as the bills piled up and reel after seemingly needless reel arrived from south of the border.

Eisenstein and his crew were arrested on 21 December, less than two weeks after their arrival, by the Mexican police, who were worried they might exert a Bolshevising influence. After questioning, they were escorted back to their hotel, where the police kept a close watch on them: a man was assigned to share a bed with each member of the party. According to Hunter Kimbrough (Mary Craig Sinclair’s brother, who had come along to keep an eye on his sister’s money), Eisenstein’s escort ‘was as fat as he is, and they could get only a single bed. Tisse drew a man who was much interested in the plumbing in the bathroom.’ The police confiscated Eisenstein’s diaries for the six months prior to the arrest – they might have told us more about the precise origins of the Mexican project – but released him and his crew the next day; later that week, they were filming bullfights in Puebla.

They spent the first four months of 1931 travelling around Mexico, to Acapulco, Tehuantepec, around the Yucatán; in mid-January they rushed to Oaxaca to shoot the aftermath of an earthquake, and the resulting 12-minute short was screened in Mexico City to help raise funds for the victims. In early May they went to the state of Hidalgo, and spent the next four months at a hacienda at Tetlapayac, in the middle of a landscape strewn with maguey plants; the smell of fermenting pulque wafted through the air, volcanoes shimmered in the distance. Tensions had by then already begun to develop between Eisenstein and Kimbrough. In her 1952 biography of Eisenstein, Marie Seton claims that Kimbrough ‘despised the Mexicans and had a natural suspicion of strangers and foreigners’, inconvenient traits in a man who had to work with Russians in Mexico. Kimbrough complained to Sinclair that Eisenstein was wasting time, and that he ‘acts like a dictator’. Eisenstein wrote to Sinclair that ‘most of the time in lesser or greater degree Hunter is drunk’ – which added to the film’s budget the burden of ‘parties, girls and all other pleasures’. In July, one of the actors accidentally shot and killed his sister, another was bitten by a snake, and Eisenstein came down with a fever after filming a scene standing in a fountain.

Eisenstein seems to have been more than content that summer, however. He was reading eclectically – he sent for a biography of Stalin, a book on Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Webster’s Dictionary (he was disappointed with its ‘historical-etymological superficiality’) – and began to draw again, producing dozens of sketches with a recurrent focus on crucifixion, bulls and violent death. They were marked by an unabashed eroticism: he recalled in 1946 that ‘they were drawn almost automatically. But how obscene they were!’ Salazkina devotes several pages to Eisenstein’s sexuality, and reproduces a letter in which he strongly implies he had his first full homosexual experience in Mexico, crushing ‘the complex that had been weighing down on me for ten years (or more!)’. Mexicans seemed to appeal to him physically: his memoirs refer to them as his ‘beloved raza de bronce’, and speak of the ‘golden surface of bare skin’, ‘bodies knowing no shame, bodies to whom what is natural for them is natural’.

Eisenstein identified so deeply with the country that its landscape seemed to meld with his personality. In his memoirs he writes that ‘during my encounter with Mexico, it seemed to me to be, in all the variety of its contradictions, a sort of outward projection of all those individual lines and features which I carried and carry within me like a tangle of complexes.’ Jottings from February 1943 read: ‘Mexico, as outspreading of my innermost’; ‘Mexico as my interior monologue’. The coexistence of ‘monumental simplicity and unrestrained Baroque’, of bare rectilinear forms and decorative exuberance, amid riots of colour, made Mexico a kind of living montage, the components of which were arranged not ‘vertically’ in time, but ‘horizontally’ in space, simultaneously unfolding within a single landscape, like Rivera’s historical murals at the Palacio Nacional. In the work of the muralists, too, Eisenstein found echoes of himself: in an essay of 1930-31, he describes the paintings of Rivera and Orozco as incarnating a series of oppositions – masculine/feminine, action/contemplation, vertical/horizontal – and adds that he found ‘the same polarity at the core of myself and my cinema – of my moving frescoes (for we also work on walls!)’.

Seton believes that Mexico was the only place where Eisenstein felt ‘accepted as a human being’. She says he ‘could not speak of Tetlapayac without his voice breaking into tones of excitement and pain’. It was here that he produced the first substantial written scenario for ¡Que Viva México! Its terse, evocative prose effectively conjures the scenes: ‘The weary army enters the village and the soldiers in ravenous anticipation inhale the smoke of the bonfires. Clarions sound the call to “rest”.’ But it is certainly not a shooting script, and it isn’t as detailed as the storyboards Eisenstein was later to produce for Ivan the Terrible, for example. It consists of four ‘novels’, framed by a prologue and an epilogue, ranging across Mexico in space and time – beginning with the mythic eternity of the stone gods and pyramids of Yucatán, moving through the pre-modern idyll of Tehuana society and the iniquities of the late 19th-century porfiriato to the revolution of 1910. The epilogue was intended to bring viewers squarely into the present, with footage of contemporary Mexico – ‘highways, dams, railways’ – intercut with carnival scenes from the Day of the Dead. The opening would portray static faces at a timeless funeral rite, the conclusion would stage the victory of life over death, as ‘a gay little Indian carefully removes his death-mask and smiles a contagious smile.’

The whole film was to be bound together by a score based on Mexican folk music; the first novel, ‘Sandunga’, set in Tehuantepec, is named after a Oaxacan song, and the 1910 episode was to take the revolutionary corrido ‘La Adelita’ as its refrain. Much of the footage used in the earlier episodes was shot in the first half of 1931. Tetlapayac was the setting for the third part, filmed that summer, and centring on the peón Sebastián’s failed quest for revenge after his betrothed is raped by a friend of the hacendado; Sebastián and two of his compadres are buried up to their chests in the soil and trampled to death by horses in a striking sequence of stylised violence. ‘Mexico is tender and lyrical, but brutal too,’ Eisenstein wrote in his memoirs, and much of the film he planned sought to combine these elements: the ‘Fiesta’ episode, for example, was to revolve around a bullfight, intercut with scenes from the festival of the Virgin of Guadalupe, linking the murderous skill of the matador to the experience of religious ecstasy.

The material for the epilogue was filmed in Mexico City. While the scenario called for a child’s face to be revealed beneath a skull mask, somewhere along the way Eisenstein added a satirical twist: figures dressed in the regalia of church, state and bourgeoisie – a bishop, a general, a lace-wearing grande dame – remove their masks only to reveal the grinning skulls of actual skeletons. The echoes of Posada are obvious, but perhaps the Oaxaca earthquake also played a role: in his 1976 memoir Epokha i kino, Alexandrov describes arriving at a cemetery where the tremor has opened up the walls of a mausoleum to show skeletons with ‘old Spanish clothes, lace collars, jewellery, hair untouched by time’. Eisenstein had to borrow skeletons from the medical school and dress them in finery. The targets of his satire were embodiments of the ancien régime, their double death – skull-mask on skull – signalling their obsolescence in the new Mexico being forged. Eisenstein also told Seton that he planned to include here, in a venomous montage, the footage he had taken of President Pascual Ortiz Rubio and of the archbishop of Mexico.

The authorities had been cautious, to say the least, when Eisenstein arrived, and appointed the artist Adolfo Best Maugard to act as what Salazkina, in a nice phrase, calls ‘censor and chaperone’ to the project. Indeed, the government provided an additional layer of interference, often seeking to blunt the film’s critical edges. Officials complained, for example, that Eisenstein’s portrayal of class struggle at Tetlapayac ignored the fact that peones and hacendados were united by being first and foremost Mexicans. By the time Eisenstein arrived, the ‘institutionalisation’ of the Mexican Revolution was gathering pace, as some of the 20th century’s most durable corporatist structures took shape in an increasingly authoritarian climate. The footage Eisenstein took of athletic parades, and of politicians and churchmen in particular, alarmed Sinclair, who later described it as ‘fascist in tone’. But he was seeing unedited film, and it is tempting to imagine Eisenstein doing for Mexico’s rulers what he did for Kerensky in the famous peacock sequence in October.

By September 1931, the Sinclairs were becoming increasingly concerned at the delays in the film’s schedule and its ever expanding budget. Relations between Eisenstein and Kimbrough were more fraught than ever. In late November, Stalin sent Sinclair an ominous telegram: ‘Eisenstein loose [sic] his comrades confidence in Soviet Union stop he is thought to be deserter who broke off with his own country.’ At the time, Sinclair leaped to Eisenstein’s defence; but in 1950 he told Seton that he and his wife realised Eisenstein ‘was simply staying in Mex. at our expense in order to avoid having to go back to Russia. All his associates were Trotskyites, and all homos.’ The crisis point was reached in mid-January 1932, when Sinclair ordered filming to stop – just as Eisenstein was about to shoot the episode on the Revolution, having convinced the Mexican government to lend him 500 soldiers, 10,000 guns and 50 cannon.

Eisenstein left Mexico for the US in mid-March. He spent just under three weeks in New York, where he was able to see some of the rushes for the film (Salazkina is mistaken in saying that he ‘never lived to see any of his footage’) before departing on the SS Europa on 19 April. Sinclair sent Eisenstein a telegram saying that the film would follow him ‘on the next boat’. The promise was never kept: in 1933 the Sinclairs instead hired Sol Lesser, producer of the Tarzan movies, to recut the footage into a feature called Thunder over Mexico, which essentially stretched the episode set in Tetlapayac into a conventional melodrama. The film raised an outcry among Eisenstein’s supporters: there were protests across Latin America and in Europe, including among a group of Romanian political prisoners; the journal Experimental Cinema called it ‘an unmitigated mockery of Eisenstein’s intention’. The British documentary maker John Grierson’s verdict on Thunder over Mexico was that ‘the clouds and the cactus will pass for great photography among the hicks.’

¡Que Viva México! has had a complex afterlife. The Sinclairs extracted two more shorts from the footage – Eisenstein in Mexico (1933) and Death Day (1934) – and sold some of the remaining film to the Bell and Howell Company, which produced at least two documentaries from it in 1940-41. The previous year, Marie Seton had been allowed access to the negatives to make Time in the Sun, a vain attempt to get closer to Eisenstein’s original idea. Eisenstein saw both this and Thunder over Mexico the year before he died, and told the French film critic Georges Sadoul that ‘the way they cut my film is more than heart-breaking.’ The negatives and prints of ¡Que Viva México! were eventually deposited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1954, and three years later Jay Leyda, a student of Eisenstein’s, put together 225 minutes of a ‘study film’. In the late 1970s, after an agreement had been reached between the Soviet and US governments, Alexandrov did his own edit of the film, with schmaltzy music and a lugubrious voice-over from Sergei Bondarchuk. This is the version most people have been able to see; it sticks fairly closely, if ponderously, to Eisenstein’s draft scenario. The film critic Oleg Kovalov re-edited the film in a more lively, lyrical spirit in 1998 as Meksikanskaia fantaziia, and the German film historian Lutz Becker is now at work on yet another version.

Salazkina notes that while ¡Que Viva Mexico! is ‘in some ways less than a film, in other ways it is more’. It accounts for a large part of the nine-year gap in Eisenstein’s filmography between The General Line (1929) and Alexander Nevsky (1938). He returned to a changed country in 1932, caught up in the frenzy of forced-pace industrialisation under the Five Year Plans. Control over the arts was being centralised, and the vanguard figures of the 1920s, including Eisenstein, were frequently attacked for their ‘formalism’. This was the main criticism levelled at Eisenstein’s other ‘lost’ film from these years, Bezhin Meadow, which he worked on from 1935 to 1937, after a period of being unable to get his projects approved. But even though he made a public self-criticism of his ‘mistakes’, the film was banned by the bosses at Mosfilm and subsequently destroyed. He was able to redeem himself only by making a 13th-century epic with obvious 20th-century resonance, as Nevsky defends the soil of Rus from invading Teutons.

Many critics have argued that in his later films Eisenstein abandoned his commitment to montage in favour of narrative continuity and ‘organic’ unity. The shift would have a political analogue in the contrast between his earlier revolutionary fervour and the seeming apologias for autocratic rule in Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. David Bordwell, in an article written for Screen in 1974, concluded that there were ‘not one but two Eisensteins’, and implied that the period in Mexico formed the ‘break’ between the two. But would ¡Que Viva México! have belonged to the earlier period or the later, or would it have been a transitional work? Salazkina argues the latter, insisting that in Eisenstein’s Mexican project ‘the dialectic is still at work, not completely subsumed by the organic principle.’ But the question is unanswerable – only if Eisenstein had been allowed to edit the film would we be able to gauge the state of his ideas concerning montage at the time. What little evidence there is points in both directions: on the one hand, his plans for satirical intercutting of the Day of the Dead footage with shots of Mexico’s temporal and spiritual grandees; on the other, his claim in a letter to his friend Seymour Stern of April 1932 that ‘I think I have solved (anyhow for myself) the montage problem (as a system of expression).’ The statement is preceded by the remark: ‘Viva Mexico in the theoretical research field is before everything a “shot” (camera angle) picture.’

Salazkina notes that Eisenstein made much more extensive use of low camera angles in ¡Que Viva México! than before, and that shots from similar positions recur in his subsequent films. The use of deep focus is another new development, continued in Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, and the composition of many shots in ¡Que Viva México! foreshadows these later works: the death of the Tetlapayac peones, for example, prefigures that of the Tatar prisoners slain with arrows in Alexander Nevsky; and the profile of an indigenous Mexican floating over the pyramid at Chichén Itzá is echoed a decade and a half later when Ivan’s head hovers in the foreground over a procession of supplicants stretching into the distance. The spirit of Posada also haunts Muscovy: in the second part of Ivan the Terrible, we see a large skeleton painted on the wall behind Metropolitan Filipp as he conspires with the boyars.

But ¡Que Viva México! also contains visual echoes of earlier films: the bared torsos of the peones recall the ship’s crew in Potemkin; the Aztec and Mayan stone gods of the prologue are distant relatives of the idols and icons in October, and of the statuary impassively watching the Revolution unfold in the streets below; the footage of the festival of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the ‘Fiesta’ sequence recalls the Orthodox procession in The General Line.

Yet there is one feature of ¡Que Viva México!, aside from its setting, that puts it apart from Eisenstein’s other works. The films he made before leaving the USSR in 1929 were all silent; the form of montage was exclusively visual, requiring precise arrangements of shot sequences and intertitles. The films he managed to complete after his return, by contrast, each had a soundtrack on which he and Prokofiev worked closely; at times, according to Eisenstein, the rhythm and dynamics of the music would determine the editing rather than the other way round. Where silent film involved a horizontal succession of images, the addition of a soundtrack demanded what Eisenstein called ‘vertical montage’, the interweaving of correspondences between music, words and images. ¡Que Viva México! was intended as a sound film: its visual architecture was to be underpinned by melodic structures which, in the process of editing, would have shaped and been shaped by the succession of images. But work on the soundtrack never began, and the scores that have accompanied the various reconstructions are inevitably distant from Eisenstein’s intentions. What should have been Eisenstein’s first sound film ended up being his last silent one. Of the many amputations suffered by ¡Que Viva Mexico!, its enforced silence is the least remarked but was perhaps the most damaging.

₹1.7 lakh cr. package with doubled food rations, cash transfers for poor

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/%e2%82%b91-7-lakh-cr-package-with-doubled-food-rations-cash-transfers-for-poor/

₹1.7 lakh cr. package with doubled food rations, cash transfers for poor

The Union government on Thursday announced a ₹1.7 lakh crore package, providing free food and cash transfers to support the poorest citizens who are most vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant countrywide lockdown. The foodgrain ration for 80 crore poor people will be doubled for the next three months, supplemented by a kg of local pulses as well.

Also read: Nirmala Sitharaman announces ₹1.70 lakh crore package for poor

The Centre will also provide ₹50 lakh medical insurance cover for the next three months for all “front line warriors” fighting the spread of the virus at personal risk, including ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) workers, medical sanitary workers in government hospitals, paramedics, nurses and doctors.

The Pradhan Mantri Gharib Kalyan Yojana had been announced within 36 hours of the lockdown and would take care of the needs of poor and migrant workers, farmers, women, pensioners, widows and the disabled, said Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, laying out the details of the package on Thursday.

“We do not want anyone to remain hungry, so we will be giving enough to take care of their foodgrain requirement, protein requirement in terms of pulses. On the other hand, they should also not remain without money in hand, so several measures through DBT are being taken so that money reaches them,” she said.

Also read: India coronavirus lockdown day 2 | March 26, 2020

Over the next three months, each person who is covered under the National Food Security Act would get an additional five kg wheat or rice for free, in addition to the 5 kg of subsidised foodgrain already provided through the Public Distribution System (PDS). One kg of pulse per household would also be provided for free, according to regional preferences. This would benefit about 80 crore people, she said.

Cash transfers — a mix of advances via existing schemes and additional sums — would also be given to vulnerable groups under the Pradhan Mantri Gharib Kalyan Yojana.

About 3 crore poor pensioners above 60 years, widows and disabled people would be given Rs. 1000 in two instalments over the next three months. The 20 crore women holding Jan Dhan Yojana accounts would get Rs.500 a month over the next three months as well. The 8.3 crore poor households, which received cooking gas connections under the Ujjwala scheme, would now get free gas cylinders for the same period.

Wages were being hiked under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act scheme, from ₹182 to ₹202 a day. Although the Minister said this would provide an additional ₹2000 a worker, many States have in fact closed down MGNREGA worksites to curb the spread of COVID-19, leaving it unclear how many workers would be able to benefit.

For land-owning farmers, there is only the promise that the first instalment of Rs. 2000 due to them under the PM-KISAN income support scheme will be paid promptly in April, the first month of the financial year.

EPF contribution

For small companies with 100 employees or less, of whom 90% earn less than ₹15,000 a month, the Centre will bear the cost of both employer and employee contribution (a total of 24%) to the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) for the next three months. This will benefit 80 lakh employees, and incentivise 4 lakh establishments.

In a move to provide relief to all 4.8 crore organised sector workers registered under the EPF, the scheme’s regulations will also be amended to allow non-refundable advance of 75% of the amount standing to the credit of the member, or 3 months worth of wages, whichever is lower.

Collateral free loans provided for women’s self help groups under the National Rural Livelihood Mission are being doubled to ₹20 lakh, potentially benefiting seven crore households.

The Centre is directing the States to use the ₹31,000 crore sitting with the Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Boards to provide support to the 3.5 crore workers registered under the scheme. The States can also use the money available under district mineral funds for medical screening, testing and treatment.

Responding to the welfare package, economist and social scientist Reetika Khera welcomed the doubling of PDS allocation. However, the cash transfers to Jan Dhan Yojana account holders and poor pensioners was simply too small, said the IIM-A professor. She added that the MGNREGA wage increase was due anyway, and was too little, pointing out that worksites could not be opened due to the risk of virus spread.

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This Labor Day, We Salute the (Arts) Workers

Before you start loading up your fall culture calendar, take a moment this Labor Day Weekend to reflect on those people who make sure that the city’s cultural events — concerts, Broadway shows and art exhibitions — go off without a hitch. In a culture center like New York, that means there are thousands of people to thank; here, we introduce you to several of them. These are edited excerpts from conversations. — Nicole Herrington, Weekend Arts Editor

The Dancer

Eric Parra, 23, member of the Limón Dance Company

On Saturday mornings during the summer, there is an open invitation from the Limón Dance Company to learn a modern technique typically reserved for dancers training in spacious mirrored rooms. The class is free and takes place in a grassy corner of Bryant Park. No registration is required, and anyone — from toddlers to retirees — can join.

“For all you know, you could be going out for a walk in Bryant Park and you end up taking a full body movement class,” said Eric Parra, who led last Saturday’s class.

He started with simple combinations to warm up the spine and legs, then transitioned into slightly more complicated movement sequences, all set to the rhythms of a live percussionist.

The class highlights core aspects of the Limón technique, which values movement that swings, releases and maintains a grounded connection to the floor.

“If you fall here, you’re going to fall on grass,” Parra said. “It feels safe. It feels fun. When you’re a kid, you love to play in the grass, so I think dancing in the grass lifts the spirit.”

The participants tend to be a mixture of locals and tourists making their way through the park. You could end up dancing with your neighbor, Parra said, or you could be dancing with someone who traveled from across the world. Often participants do not speak English, but luckily, the most important language here is movement.

“You don’t necessarily have to hear everything in order to understand what’s going on,” Parra said. “We try to cultivate a warm, welcoming space for everybody, where language isn’t a barrier to getting the most from this experience.” JULIA JACOBS

When: Saturdays at 10 a.m. through Sept. 28 at Bryant Park; bryantpark.org.

The Frame Makers

Bill Schunk, 64, and Rose Pappalardo, 57, owners of Frames New York

The work of Bill Schunk and Rose Pappalardo has been seen by thousands of people — and yet it hasn’t, because, as they put it, their work is best if it vanishes. “The frame sort of needs to disappear,” Mr. Schunk said. “If you’re noticing the frame, maybe something is wrong.”

The husband-wife team has quietly been supporting the art world since the late 1980s, giving prints, photographs and paintings a border, an edge.

Mr. Schunk works with individual artists who flutter in and out of their studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and Ms. Pappalardo works with galleries and corporations in New York and across the world, including the new Pace/MacGill Gallery. (She is currently working on its upcoming Peter Hujar exhibition.)

Each frame is created at their studio from locally sourced materials, like wood and glass. They finish it off with stains or layers of lacquer and, finally, they decide on a type of glazing.

Over the years, the couple has worked with the Irving Penn Foundation, Hudson Yards and artists like Chuck Close, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ed Ruscha. “It’s like we have our own private show with each piece that comes in,” Ms. Pappalardo said.

They agreed that seeing artists progress and develop is the best part. It’s “like watching them all grow up,” Mr. Schunk said. ALISHA HARIDASANI GUPTA

When: “Peter Hujar: Master Class” opens on Sept. 14 at Pace/MacGill Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, Manhattan; pacemacgill.com.

The Projectionist

Evelyn Emile, 32, film projectionist at Anthology Film Archives

For Evelyn Emile, a projectionist who has been working at Anthology Film Archives for more than three years, films aren’t just seen and heard; they are also something you touch.

“I love handling film,” she said. “I have some contact with reality when I’m projecting film that I don’t have when I’m doing something digital.”

Working with film prints, she explained, requires precision and constant attention: “If I move the focus knob a millimeter, I know it will come into focus. Small movements can make a big difference on the screen.” And that’s what’s rewarding about it, she added. It’s up to her to ensure that the sometimes fragile reels of film show up onscreen in the way they were intended.

This isn’t accomplished by simply pressing a button. Film prints have to be inspected and occasionally repaired, cue marks have to be added, and lenses, aperture plates and sound formats must be set properly. All that extra effort, she says, is worth it. “Working at a theater that continues to program and screen films in their original format is very important to me. I think that when the film gets digitally transferred, it does lose a little bit of its soul.”

Film projection, she said, keeps her grounded. “Everything that I do in the booth, especially with film, has a consequence for how the film is shown. If I make small movements with framing adjustments, it affects how people see the film.”

The tactile relationship that Emile has with the films she projects has only deepened her love of cinema. Emile is particularly excited to screen films by Carl Dreyer, including “The Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928) and “Ordet” (1955), over Labor Day weekend. “Each of his films is really extraordinary,” she said. “They have simple plots showing everyday people, not judging them, just showing their relationships and how they work through the problems of their lives.” PETER LIBBEY

When: Carl Dreyer’s films will be shown through Sept. 3 at Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, Manhattan; 212-505-5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org.

The Manager

Larry Siegel, 44, general manager of SummerStage in Central Park

Larry Siegel wears many hats at a venue that, this summer, has hosted performances by the British singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae, the indie-rock act Japanese Breakfast, singers from the Metropolitan Opera and others. Even Taylor Swift stopped by, for a live performance broadcast on “Good Morning America.”

This is what a typical day looks like for Siegel, before and during a show.

“I get in between 7 and 8 a.m., and that’s when we have our first production meeting. After that the band starts coming in. We make sure our hospitality teams are setting up coffee and tea and opening the dressing rooms. I make sure our delivery of portable toilets are coming in, that our turf is clean, and all the leaves and debris from last evening have been blown off.

“Then I check in with the union workers over at the stage. I meet with our production manager, then the front-of-house manager. That’s all in the morning. Then our security deployment arrives and we check them all in, make sure they’re all up-to-date with any threats or anything that we receive from the N.Y.P.D. or Homeland Security.”

This is the time in the day, Siegel said, when they get ready to open the doors to thousands of concertgoers. Then things get frantic.

“There’s a lot of running around. My radio is going off constantly. There was a medical situation last night, so I dealt with that. We tend to have a lot of fainting at shows. Taylor Swift, especially. We had her last week. That was a lot of little girls fainting.

“The best part of my job is knowing that people are coming to us to enjoy their lives, to take a few hours out of their grind. Once a show is up and running and the band is performing and there are smiles on the people’s faces as you’re looking out across them — that, to me, is worth every piece of sweat.” AS TOLD TO GABE COHN

When: SummerStage continues through Oct. 5 at Rumsey Playfield in Central Park; cityparksfoundation.org.

The Bingo Host

Linda Simpson, host of “Linda Loves Bingo” at Le Poisson Rouge and other locations

“I started hosting bingo in the late 1990s. And ‘Linda Loves Bingo’ as an entity started about 10 years ago at Le Poisson Rouge. That’s where my main residency has been and, yes, I have been there that long.

“What I’ve created, I hope, is a real escapist environment. It’s a no-political zone, which I find kind of important these days, and it’s just a great chance for people of all kinds — it’s a very mixed crowd — to enjoy themselves.”

“The challenges include always shopping for prizes because I offer discount-store delights, which means I scour the stores of New York City for fun stuff. I actually enjoy it, but it’s a lot of schlepping — it’s time-consuming. I do have a great crew that works with me — I have D.J.s and drag queens and burlesque girls that work as the Vanna Whites. I will say, even to this day, there’s a little preshow jitters, but I think that’s good.

“Some of the players, I’m genuine friends with them now. And it’s been really good affirmation for me. I always wanted to make a living doing drag, and bingo has just allowed me to live as a drag queen.” — AS TOLD TO ALISHA HARIDASANI GUPTA

When: Saturdays at 7.30 p.m. at Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, Manhattan; lindalovesbingo.com.

The Theater Guide

Ricky Jones, 35, TKTS patron services supervisor

Times Square isn’t a setting normally associated with well-informed conversation, but Ricky Jones says that’s what you’ll get if you come to the TKTS booth at 47th Street and Broadway to buy discounted theater tickets. “One of the big things about us,” he said, “is that you can really have a discussion with people about theater, which I think is really special.”

Part of his job, he explained, is to circulate among the customers waiting in line to go over the shows that have tickets available and that might be of most interest to them. For visitors not on top of the New York theater scene, these exchanges can reduce the stress of choosing among unfamiliar offerings. “When a lot of people come to New York City for the first time, they might know about ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ ‘Chicago’ and maybe ‘Wicked,’ but they probably don’t know about all the other shows on the board,” Jones said.

Instead of offering their opinions on shows, Jones and his team try to find the right play, musical or dance performance for each customer. “I usually ask what kind of show they are looking for, if they’ve seen a Broadway show before, and then I try to pair what they’ve seen before with what they’re looking for.”

For theater experts, these conversations can go deeper. “We can talk about the show you saw or want to see and geek out about it,” Jones said. He speaks from experience, having first come to TKTS as a theater-obsessed kid: “We would come to New York every year for Thanksgiving, and I remember there was a promoter, a British guy with purple hair. While my Mom waited in line, I would just talk theater with this guy, to the point that he has watched me grow up since I was about 8 years old.” PETER LIBBEY

When: Daily at the Times Square booth, as well as the TKTS outlets at Lincoln Center and South Street Seaport.

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Interface Zero Megabundle [BUNDLE]

Publisher: Gun Metal Games

This special bundle product contains the following titles.

A Facsimile of Death Regular price: $4.97 Bundle price: $0.50 Format: PDF A Facsimile of Death is meant as an introduction to the world of Interface Zero, as well as to the Fate Core version of the game. There are some firefights, but most of the adventure involves investigation, planning, social navigation, and trying hard not to be betrayed. It’s the story of Avery Price, a murder victim with nobody to look into her death…until the PCs come along. A Facsimile of Death uses a set of extra rules called the Whodunit System. In this adventure, there are four potential murderers, and any one of them could have done the deed. You, the GM, will figure out who the killer is along with the PCs, and the adventure will adapt to their choices. In the end, though, nothing is ever really what it seems.... Boston: The Broken Cradle of Liberty Regular price: $8.99 Bundle price: $0.91 Format: PDF NOT ALL CITIES ARE CREATED EQUAL... One of the hottest Hot Spots of North America, Boston was saved from the encroaching seas by a massive civic undertaking, and declared the capital of Atlantica. Now, in the face of riots and acts of terrorism, the American 'Cradle of Liberty' reels under martial law as dissidents protest unpopular decisions in an effort to stoke the flames of rebellion. With soldiers patrolling the streets and violence a way of life, Boston stands poised to either blossom into something greater or be wiped off the map and into oblivion. SOMETIMES YOU'VE GOTTA MAKE 'EM THAT WAY! Boston: The Broken Cradle of Liberty has everything you need to take your campaign into the highways and byways of Boston. Whether you're a GM who wants to know what's going on i... City Tiles Volume 1: The Sprawl Regular price: $3.00 Bundle price: $0.30 Format: PDF Looking for some cool city tiles to flesh out your modern setting? Need a street for that chase scene or gun battle? Well Look no further! Designed by Aaron Acevedo, City Tiles, Volume 1: the Sprawl provides you with a quality set of twelve tiles you can use for any modern game!... Cyberpunk Floorplans: City Street Regular price: $2.49 Bundle price: $0.25 Format: PDF Need a map of a City Street for your Interface Zero 2.0 game? We got you covered ami. This floor plan reveals a level of a generic apartment complex. This map is available for printing in two options: • A 24” x 36“or 36”x 48” map. These are "standard" miniature-ready maps, in which 1 square equals 1 inch, and each square represents 5 feet.  These maps are ideal for throwing on the table and instantly playing, but not many people have large format printers in their homes.  The maps can usually be printed at a copy shop relatively inexpensively. • A series of pages that, when laid out correctly, form a single, complete map.  This tiled version requires some invisible tape and scissors to put together.  To tile a single wi... Cyberpunk Floorplans: Run Down Tenement Regular price: $2.49 Bundle price: $0.25 Format: PDF Need a map of an apartment complex for your Interface Zero 2.0 game? We got you covered ami. This floor plan reveals a level of a generic apartment complex. This map is available for printing in two options: • A 24” x 36“or 36”x 48” map. These are "standard" miniature-ready maps, in which 1 square equals 1 inch, and each square represents 5 feet.  These maps are ideal for throwing on the table and instantly playing, but not many people have large format printers in their homes.  The maps can usually be printed at a copy shop relatively inexpensively. • A series of pages that, when laid out correctly, form a single, complete map.  This tiled version requires some invisible tape and scissors to put together.  To tile a si... Drip by Bloody Drip Regular price: $4.14 Bundle price: $0.42 Format: PDF The group is hired to grab some medical research files from an abandoned naval base on the Puget Sound. Seems simple enough, except nobody thought to deactivate the base’s security systems. Can the group survive military-grade security robots and drones long enough to retrieve the data? And why is another recovery team on the base? Drip by Bloody Drip is an adventure for 3 to 5 characters of Seasoned rank or higher. This PDF is layered for easy printing.... Extraction with Extreme Prejudice Regular price: $4.14 Bundle price: $0.42 Format: PDF The job seems simple enough; grab a high profile geneticist from Bio Solutions, and deliver him to the contractor. In, out, done. Easy Peasy, right? Wrong. Word spreads fast in the sprawl, and once the wolves hear about the dandy diaper baby coming down from his ivory tower, he becomes a huge payday, and everyone wants to cash in. Will the characters complete the job as promised? Or will they succumb to greed and sell the mark to the highest bidder?  Do they even have a choice?  Extraction with Extreme Prejudice is an adventure for 3 to 5 characters. This adventure also includes Fast, Furious and Fun rules for creating your own safe house!  There are two versions of this product; a layered screen version you can use to create a printer friendly PDF, and a versi... Extraction with Extreme Prejudice (Pathfinder Edition) Regular price: $4.14 Bundle price: $0.42 Format: Watermarked PDF The job seems simple enough; grab a high-profile geneticist from Bio Solutions, and deliver him to the contractor. In, out, done. Easy Peasy, right? Wrong. Word spreads fast in the sprawl, and once the wolves hear about the dandy diaper baby coming down from his ivory tower, he becomes a huge payday, and everyone wants to cash in. Will the characters complete the job as promised? Or will they succumb to greed and sell the mark to the highest bidder? Do they even have a choice? Extraction with Extreme Prejudice is an adventure for 3 to 5 characters of first or second level.... From Gaza with Love Regular price: $4.14 Bundle price: $0.42 Format: Watermarked PDF Welcome to the Middle East! The trophy wife of a brutish Russian-Israeli oligarch falls for a charming Arab taxi driver and the two elope to Gaza. Some time later, her kids are gone, snatched off the street by Bedouin thugs-for-hire. Dame wants her kids back and has the credits to make your time worthwhile. Classic story. First question to pop into your head -- are you willing to brave the radioactive Negev desert and the bio-horrors it spawned, the Israeli border patrol with its drones and bots, and the Russian Mafia with its Russian Mafia? Sure you are, that's all in the freaking job description. But then, there's a second question ringing in your brain -- on whose toes you gonna step if you take this job? Why are Israeli drones always buzzing above? What game is the Russia... Hostile Takeover Regular price: $4.97 Bundle price: $0.50 Format: PDF THE VIEW FROM THE TOP The Megacorp is a staple of cyberpunk literature. These titanic, inhuman forces of naked greed and lust for power are like the gods of the mythic age. Their aims are enacted in the realm of mortals through their employees; agents that are expected to further the ends of their corporate masters in exchange for the best gear, cash, and a lifestyle that is the envy of many. In most cyberpunk games, the ways that player characters interact with megacorps are strictly one-sided: the Corp hires the PCs to do a job, always with a looming threat of an attempt to screw the poor suckers over. In Hostile Takeover, we turn this relationship on its ear. With this book, the player characters are put in charge of a fledging corporation. Can they swim in the sea of dang... Hot Potato Regular price: $1.25 Bundle price: $0.13 Format: Watermarked PDF A streak of luck brings the heroes into possession of a package worth a lot of creds to the right buyer. The people who lost it want it back and are willing to do anything to get it, add in two corporations, a gang and a mafia hit team and the heroes have a hard time surviving, let alone getting paid.  Hot Potato is a one-sheet adventure for a group of seasoned characters, though it can easily be scaled to different levels. It uses the Interface Zero 2.0 setting for Savage Worlds.  ... I-zine vol. 1: Message in a Bottle Regular price: $3.32 Bundle price: $0.33 Format: Watermarked PDF Introducing  The I-Zine! Welcome to I•Zine, your interface to all things Interface-Zero. In the coming months we hope to give you a virtual tour of the world to come in 2088. The world is a big place and we plan on exploring every nook and cranny. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the regular features we have planned.  Risky Ventures • In my opinion the best way to learn about someplace new is to mingle with the sprawlies, have an adventure and maybe blow a few people away with that nickle-plated gat you’ve been itching to try out. I•Zine will travel globe looking for the hairiest messes to drop your troupe of intrepid raiders into. Every I•Zine adventure is hand-crafted by a sadistic game designer dedicated to making sure that y... I-Zine Volume 2: Wanted! Regular price: $3.32 Bundle price: $0.33 Format: Watermarked PDF izine2.indd Reality Deviant Publications is pleased to bring you I-Zine volume 2: Wanted! <o:p></o:p> Welcome to the first installment of Wanted! In this on going data feed you will find a catalogue of some of the most desperate individuals in the world as ranked by the prices on their head. In this installment we focus on the five most wanted individuals in the Great Lakes Union. Also, you’ll find more information about daily life in the GLU, brought to you by Worker Wendy! Learn about law enforcement, the latest Goth and Pop Goth trends, and pick up the newest designer drugs and upgrades from Doc Pango’s Emporium! Grab your copy today!   Want to learn more about Interface Zero? Listen to Atomic Array 005.... I-Zine Volume 3: Zeeks Expanded! Regular price: $1.66 Bundle price: $0.17 Format: PDF Yo fellow sprawlers, bit heads, script-kiddies, sims, blue platers and freeks, there's a lot of misinformation going around about Zeeks right now. I asked one of our frequent posters and confirmed Zeeks, "Smoke_And_Mirrors" to write something up for us, to get the skinny on just how Zeeks fit into the world. His words are below, as he says, pay attention and you might learn something. -Sysop Welcome to Zeeks Expanded! By Smoke_And_Mirrors (AKA David Viars) So you're looking for the straight skinny on Zeeks, Psions, Psychics, those weird people who can use their mind to do freaky things, well congratulations you've run across this guide! If you're a baby Zeek, you'll find all kinds of info in here left out of the mainstream publications. Lots of useful stuff to help you survive... Interface Zero Regular price: $16.53 Bundle price: $1.66 Format: PDF Welcome to the Future! Interface-Zero, is the first book in the Interface-Zero Cyberpunk Setting by Reality Deviant Publications. IZ brings your True20 game up to speed with the dark, frenetic world of 2088. Future sourcebooks and adventures will further add to the bleeding edge setting presented in this core setting book. Didja Bring Your Gun? Within the pages of Interface-Zero, you can match wits with ancient triad lodge masters, anarchist hackers and digitalized corporate moguls. Thwart the machinations of the New Chinese Mandarinate, or the Theocratic UCSA. Stare down the end of your gauss rifle at or match nano-woven steel with ganglanders, gene-spliced hybrids and borg shock troopers.  How About Your Hacker? Interface-Zero is 162 pag... Interface Zero (Pathfinder Edition) Regular price: $16.59 Bundle price: $1.67 Format: Watermarked PDF The Year is 2090. The Tendril Access Processor—or TAP—connects humanity to the Global DataNet, allowing interaction with Hyper Reality and all the Global DataNet has to offer, for better or worse. Malware, viruses, and hackers are as much of a threat as they ever were, and now your personal computer is woven into your cerebrum. The human genome is an open book to science, one that can be rewritten to order if you can afford it. If transgenics aren't to your liking, then chrome yourself with the latest cyberware and let technology improve upon the original model. The geopolitical landscape has been fractured and reformed by revolutions, nuclear exchanges, and economic collapse engineered by a rogue AI. This world is filled with new, wondrous people.   Bioroids are on t... Interface Zero 1.0 Regular price: $4.15 Bundle price: $0.42 Format: PDF Welcome to the Future! Interface-Zero, is the first book in the Interface-Zero Cyberpunk Setting by Gun Metal games. IZ brings your Savage Worlds game up to speed with the dark, frenetic world of 2088. Didja Bring Your Gun? Within the pages of Interface-Zero, you can match wits with ancient triad lodge masters, anarchist hackers and digitalized corporate moguls. Thwart the machinations of the New Chinese Mandarinate, or the Theocratic North American Coalition. Stare down the end of your gauss rifle at or match nano-woven steel with ganglanders, gene-spliced hybrids and borg shock troopers. Are ya Wired? Life is fast in 2088. If ya wanna survive, you need to be faster. Don't worry Ami, we got ya covered. Fast Furious and Fun cybernetic rules enable you to create any type o... Interface Zero 2.0 GM screen Regular price: $2.49 Bundle price: $0.25 Format: PDF Looking for a handy GM screen to run your Interface Zero 2.0 game? Here it is!  This product has four panels filled with quick references for attack options, gritty damage, injury tables, a step by step process for hacking, sysop countermeasures, Hyper Object difficulty ratings, engrams, Network stats, Street Cred bonuses and penalties, job payouts, and the full list of cybernetic augments, so you can know at a glance what a piece of cyberware does.  In addition, you’ll find six panels of artwork to insert in the front of the screen!... Interface Zero 2.0 Iconic figure flats Regular price: $2.49 Bundle price: $0.25 Format: PDF Need some cyberpunk-themed figure flats for your Interface Zero 2.0 game? Look no further! Enclosed is an assortment of paper models or “figure flats” intended to represent characters on the tabletop in skirmishes and other situations where it’s important to tell who is where. Just print out on regular copy paper (or on cardstock if you’d prefer a bit more weight), then cut out and assemble. The names on the tabs are just for inspiration purposes. Ultimately, the figure is whatever or whoever you want it to be! There’s a focus in this set on more unique individuals who might be useful for the heroes or their allies, but of course some of these could be just as useful as adversaries. This pack contains well over 80 figure flats for your Interface Zero... Interface Zero 2.0 Threats figure flats Regular price: $2.49 Bundle price: $0.25 Format: PDF Need some cyberpunk-themed figure flats for your Interface Zero 2.0 game? Look no further! Enclosed is an assortment of paper models or “figure flats” intended to represent Threats on the tabletop in skirmishes and other situations where it’s important to tell who is where. Just print out on regular copy paper (or on cardstock if you’d prefer a bit more weight), then cut out and assemble. The names on the tabs are just for inspiration purposes. Ultimately, the figure is whatever or whoever you want it to be! This set focuses on various threats your group might encounter on missions. This pack contains well over 80 figure flats for your Interface Zero 2.0 game!... Interface Zero 2.0: Fate Edition Regular price: $9.12 Bundle price: $0.92 Format: PDF Full Metal Cyberpunk action, now for the Fate game system! You’re hanging from the summit of a mile-high skyscraper, your cybernetic claws holding you in place while gunfire shatters the windows around you and a computer virus burns its way through your brain. When your network link to the rest of your team goes offline, you’re sure of one thing: You should have charged the client double for this mission. Interface Zero: Fate Edition has all the rules you need for cyberpunk action and adventure in the megacities and wastelands of the 2090’s. Inside this book you’ll find hackers, drone pilots, cyborgs, androids, cybermonks, human/animal hybrids, psychics, cybernetic implants, guns, armor, vehicles, agile powered armor and massive war robots. Pre-built aspects, ... Interface Zero 2.0: Full Metal Cyberpunk Regular price: $16.59 Bundle price: $1.67 Format: PDF FULL METAL CYBERPUNK! In a not-so-distant future, the world has been ravaged by global warming, subjected to the horrors of nuclear war and natural disaster, witnessed the collapse of the mightiest nation in the history of the world, and the rise of other nations to take its place. In East Asia, the Bear and the Dragon battle for control of the resource-rich continent, and an emergent A.I. known only as Charon has destabilized the whole of Europe, sparking revolution and chaos not seen since the Second World War.  On the North American continent, the prospect of conflict once again rears its ugly head as terrorist bombings in Atlantica, bring the nation to the brink of war with the North American Coalition. Is this the work of Charon, as well, or are other forces moving behind th... Interface Zero 2.0: Player's Guide Regular price: $8.29 Bundle price: $0.83 Format: PDF FULL METAL PLAYER TOOLS! Want everything you need to create a character, but don't want to get the entire Interface Zero PDF? Then Look no further! The Interface Zero 2.0 Players Guide gives you everything you need to create a character. Inside this book you'll find 16 cyberpunk archetypes, new races, edges, tons of equipment, and all the setting rules, including cybernetic rules, drone rules, gollemmechs, Hacking, and much more!  Interface Zero 2.0 is created by Peter J Wacks, David Jarvis, Hal Maclean, Matt Conklin jr. and Patrick Smith This E-book comes in two versions, a flattened file for viewing on your IPAD or Kindle, and a layered screen version so you can create a printer-friendly file. NOTE: THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS NO NEW MATERIAL. ALL OF THE INFORMATION IN THIS E-B... Interface Zero: 2090 World Map Regular price: $4.15 Bundle price: $0.42 Format: PDF Want to know what the world looks like in 2090? Now's your chance to see! This full color world map presents the world as it exists in the Interface Zero 2.0 uiniverse. It is 24x36, making it a great size for a poster, should you wish to print it out hang it on your wall! If you simply want to view it on your screen, this map is best viewed at 25 to 30%,  using Adobe Reader X™ (https://ift.tt/2GVrq7P;... Interface Zero: Modern20 edition Regular price: $16.53 Bundle price: $1.66 Format: Watermarked PDF Welcome to the Future! Interface-Zero, is the first book in the Interface-Zero Cyberpunk Setting by Reality Deviant Publications. IZ brings your Modern20 game up to speed with the dark, frenetic world of 2088. Future sourcebooks and adventures will further add to the bleeding edge setting presented in this core setting book. Didja Bring Your Gun? Within the pages of Interface-Zero, you can match wits with ancient triad lodge masters, anarchist hackers and digitalized corporate moguls. Thwart the machinations of the New Chinese Mandarinate, or the Theocratic UCSA. Stare down the end of your gauss rifle at or match nano-woven steel with ganglanders, gene-spliced hybrids and borg shock troopers. How About Your Hacker? Interface-Zero is 120 pages full of setting, history, rules, and... Japan: Empire of the Setting Sun Regular price: $4.98 Bundle price: $0.50 Format: PDF In the Empire of the Setting Sun, honor is everything...or you are nothing. Welcome to the Japan of 2090, nakama. You’re being given access to a secure data cache that reveals what the country and its people have truly evolved into. Here, “ronin” isn’t just a street nickname, but a dark legacy fraught with deadly peril and crushing burdens. From the highest Zen master to the lowliest yakuza thug, from bio-molded cities to ancestral cyberspace vistas, prepare to be plunged into an empire transformed by its unique cultural identity as much as the world’s rampaging technology. Delve into the DATAfeeds of the Chrysanthemum Corporation or have your appetites whetted by the orbital pleasure palace of Golden Heaven. Master stealth technology to join the shinobi o... Jericho Rose Regular price: $4.14 Bundle price: $0.42 Format: Watermarked PDF Managers and producers know the secret. It isn't what's hot now, it's what's next. That's the key. Not what they're listening to now, but what they're going to listen to tomorrow.  Lorna Jericho could be next.  A hot look, a new sound and lyrics that turn fans into fanatics. She's dangerous. She has no fear. She asks all the wrong questions, shouting them out loud to her loyal followers.  Shadows in tall buildings say, "She has to be stopped." They say, "She has to be silenced."  And perhaps, they've gotten her wish. Because like a ghost, she's gone. Vanished. And it's up to you to find out who stole the Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes.  Written by critically acclaimed author John Wick, Jericho Rose is a cyber-noir adventure for 4 to 5 ch... 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Dragged into gang warfare not of their making the heroes must survive and fight back. The gang are fighting for the real estate, the heroes are fighting for their homes, justice and a big pile of credits. Real Estate is a One-Sheet adventure ideal for introducing players and novice characters to Interface Zero 2.0. It can easily be adapted for any tier of heroes. It can be run on its own or lead into a more complex adventure for the heroes. One-Sheet adventures are designed to be run with minimal prep and contain enough content for a game session or two. These adventures are also great as filler in longer campaigns, to use as a spring board for a longer adventure, or... Road Rage: Figure flats! Regular price: $2.49 Bundle price: $0.25 Format: PDF Need some figure flats and markers for your next "Road Rage" jump race? Then Look no further! These figure flats and race markers are specially designed by Jordan peacock to work with the race rules in Road rage: Life in the fast lane! This pdf contains 80 race tokens, barriers, and 27 figure flats!... Road Rage: Life in the Fast Lane Regular price: $4.15 Bundle price: $0.42 Format: PDF Put the Pedal to the Metal…  Yeah, tomo, you've heard of Jump Bike racing, but do you really know what it is? It's one part Formula 1, one part Street Race, one part Demolition Derby, and possibly the most popular blood sport of the 2080s. Ever since Mickie O'Laragh demonstrated how weapons could determine the outcome of a race, the sport of 'Motorized Steeplechase' has never been the same, and Street Cred —or just plain Credits —often ride on the outcome of these events.  … and Rage Your Dream!  Road Rage gives you all the tools you'll need to enter the world of Jump Bike racing, Interface Zero style. It doesn't matter if you're a player looking to build the ultimate street racer, a GM looking to offer a different sort of challenge to your j... San Francisco: The Ruins by the Bay Regular price: $7.46 Bundle price: $0.75 Format: PDF NOT ALL CITIES ARE CREATED EQUAL... SOMETIMES YOU'VE GOTTA MAKE 'EM THAT WAY! Once one of the largest sprawls on the West coast, San Francisco was ravaged by war and natural disaster. Now, some twenty years after a major earthquake leveled the city, San Francisco is home to a wide range of hybrids and humans who eke out a meager existence in this harsh, post-apocalyptic ruin. Take care though, traveler, because as much as the people of San Francisco  can’t stand each other, they hate outsiders even more. These cats’ll gladly gut you and leave ya naked and bleeding out on the broken concrete if you so much as look at them the wrong way, tomo. So, if you stumble into the wrong zone or forget to pack extra ammo when scavenging in the ruins, well... Don&rsqu... Seeds of Discontent Regular price: $4.14 Bundle price: $0.42 Format: Watermarked PDF A Bitter Harvest The family farms of the King County Cooperative in late 21st Century Seattle are just trying to operate on their own to make ends meet. They're not prepared to deal with big agricorps or with marauding biker gangs raiding their property. That's where you come in. What starts off as a simple job protecting the little guy from trouble and finding out who is behind it gets complicated real fast, however. Someone has been preparing a bitter harvest indeed for the Cooperative and anyone working with them, sowing... Seeds of Discontent Seeds of Discontent is an adventure for 4-5 characters of Seasoned Rank or above. ... The Delivery Regular price: $1.25 Bundle price: $0.13 Format: Watermarked PDF The heroes are hired for a simple delivery job, some might even say a milk run. The team has two hours to deliver a briefcase across town, but not all jobs are as easy as they look. In order to make it in time, the heroes will have to overcome a few obstacles that threaten to keep them from making their deadline. One-Sheet adventures are designed to be run with minimal prep and contain enough content for a game session or two. These adventures are also great as filler in longer campaigns, to use as a spring board for a longer adventure, or just to mix it up.... The Exchange Regular price: $1.25 Bundle price: $0.13 Format: Watermarked PDF A corporate executive is being held for ransom by a local street gang. Management wants him back, but doesn't want to get involved, so the hire a group that can handle a delicate job like this. The heroes are hired to make to make the exchange, with a promise of a bonus if they return the executive alive and hold on to the ransom money.  A simple job, right ami? Just have to handover a case for the suit.  But this is 2090; every job is not always as it seems. This one page adventure is designed a 4 to 6 hour session of play, but easily can be extended for a longer session or used as part of an on-going campaign.  ... The New York Reclamation Zone Regular price: $4.98 Bundle price: $0.50 Format: PDF The best city money can buy! Once the greatest city on earth, New York was abandoned in 2038 after terrorists blew the levees protecting her from rising sea levels. Forgotten by America, the Big Apple became soggy, slowly rotting away, with only a brave few remaining within its bounds, refusing to give up their once-proud home. Yet in the half-century that followed, New Yorkers proved time and again just how adaptable they could be in the face of disaster, natural or otherwise. Now, the waters may still hold the Big Soggy hostage, but its denizens reject any notion of surrender. The city has changed, with flooded streets and ancient subways teeming with aquatic predators while human colonies scrape out a brutal existence on those skyscrapers that haven’t collapsed into the sea. ... The Republic of Texas Savage Worlds edition Regular price: $4.98 Bundle price: $0.49 Format: PDF Ask any Texan and they’ll tell you that life in the Republic is about one thing: freedom. Life here isn’t a cakewalk, but it’s far better to die on your feet than live on your knees. That’s Texas in 2090, amigo, better get used to it. Learn what it means to be a citizen in the Lone Star and how Texans remember the breakup of the old nation in order to form their more perfect union. This is a land where freedom reigns supreme because it’s surrounded by enemies and uncertain allies on all sides.  Engage in high-tech espionage in the new range wars. Go south and live lawless, or head to the Austin-Antonio sprawl and get closer to the center of power or trapped in an AI/gang turf war.  Plunge head first into the Runenberg Corporation’s financial...

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As a HR Head how would you convince the Union and workers

For Assignment Solution Contact

Casestudyhelp.in

9422028822

  International Business

 Case Studies

CASE STUDY (20 Marks)

Progressive Chemical Industries Ltd, is engaged in Manufacturing and export of specialty chemicals, having turnover of Rs 300 crores. The Company is growing and having good export orders. The CEO is in mood to expand the business and aiming to reach turnover of Rs 1000(thousand) crores in next 5 (five) yrs. The CEO is worried about the increase in input costs and workers’ demands. Union has threatened to go on strike indefinitely. Union has demanded 50% increase in salary and other benefits, but is not agreeing to link it to productivity. It has also raised issues like unsafe, hazardous working conditions, leakage of poisonous gases affecting the health of workers. The consultant has advised the CEO to be strict and take strict action against the erring employees and be ready to declare lockout if situation warrants.

 Answer the following question.

 Q1. What are the various laws which could be applicable in the above problems?

 Q2. Do you feel management policies/practices are right?

 Q3. As a HR Head how would you convince the Union and workers?

 Q4. Prepare a draft agreement for the above situation which could be acceptable for Management and union.

 CASE STUDY (20 Marks)

Big business is attractive, with huge profits for some. But there's something to be said about small business as well, with lower risk and the potential for creativity. Darren Robbins of Big D Custom Screen Printing in Austin, TX found success in his business by

pursuing customers with orders both large and small. Although Big D started out catering only to large orders, the shop sat idle in between orders, and through effective scheduling and transparent pricing, was able to fill in dead times with smaller orders. Big D found a profit in a market segment that other local screen printers weren't clamoring to fill. Experts believe this was a smart strategy, allowing Big D to spread out risk in their business and offer customized products. But at least one person is critical of the offering, pointing out that the niche has little upside potential, and may hurt the company's efficiency.

 Answer the following question.

 Q1. What strategy was adopted by Big D for profit?

 Q2. Give an overview of the case.

 CASE STUDY (20 Marks)

Another important retirement issue is one of lost knowledge. What happens when retirees leave the office, taking years of experience and knowhow right along with them? Businesses lose all of that knowledge, but according to American Express, it doesn't have to be that way. Through a pilot program, AMEX created a workforce transformation group that would allow retiring participants to gradually give up some of their day to day responsibilities. In return, the employees would spend some of this time mentoring and teaching classes to successors. This resulted in a phased retirement, allowing employees to leave gradually and enjoy more time while still enjoying a portion of their previous salary, and regular benefits. This also meant that some employees stayed a year or more past traditional retirement age. AMEX believes this program is a success, allowing senior employees to enjoy their last years of work in a reduced capacity, as well as educating the existing workforce for future success. Consultant David De Long agrees, citing this program as an example of how job handoffs should really work.

 Answer the following question.

 Q1. What are the issues involved with retirement of the employees?

 Q2. In your opinion how the smooth handing over of responsibilities can take place.

 CASE STUDY (20 Marks)

Lenovo Group Limited was founded in China ai Beijing in 1984 and within a span of 25 years it went global. While the company initially sold products of PC giants like Dwell and Compaq, it started sale of its own desk tops in 1990.Within 6 years it got its hold over domestic market. Before Lenovo went global, it acquired the PC division of IBM in 20042005. This gave Lenovo brand recognition in addition to increased sales. Lenovo’s low cost along with IBM’s skill and reputation made up a good combination for success. Lenovo emerged from east while IBM represented the west. Lenovo took some major steps to overcome the lingual and cultural barriers between the US and China. English was embraced as the corporate language and companywide campaigns were conducted to improve the English language skills of employees. The work culture was also changed so that the management focused on tasks rather than on people. Another step taken by Lenovo towards internationalization was becoming a partner sponsor in sports events like Olympic games, world cups, etc.

 Answer the following question.

 Q1. How Lenovo was benefited by acquiring the PC division of IBM? Discuss.

 Q2. How did Lenovo solve the problems of lingual and cultural barriers? Explain.

 For Assignment Solution Contact

Casestudyhelp.in

9422028822

As a HR Head how would you convince the Union and workers

Assignment Solutions, Case study Answer sheets

Project Report and Thesis contact

www.mbacasestudyanswers.com

ARAVIND – 09901366442 – 09902787224

 International Business

 Case Studies

CASE STUDY (20 Marks)

Progressive Chemical Industries Ltd, is engaged in Manufacturing and export of specialty chemicals, having turnover of Rs 300 crores. The Company is growing and having good export orders. The CEO is in mood to expand the business and aiming to reach turnover of Rs 1000(thousand) crores in next 5 (five) yrs. The CEO is worried about the increase in input costs and workers’ demands. Union has threatened to go on strike indefinitely. Union has demanded 50% increase in salary and other benefits, but is not agreeing to link it to productivity. It has also raised issues like unsafe, hazardous working conditions, leakage of poisonous gases affecting the health of workers. The consultant has advised the CEO to be strict and take strict action against the erring employees and be ready to declare lockout if situation warrants.

 Answer the following question.

 Q1. What are the various laws which could be applicable in the above problems?

 Q2. Do you feel management policies/practices are right?

 Q3. As a HR Head how would you convince the Union and workers?

 Q4. Prepare a draft agreement for the above situation which could be acceptable for Management and union.

 CASE STUDY (20 Marks)

Big business is attractive, with huge profits for some. But there's something to be said about small business as well, with lower risk and the potential for creativity. Darren Robbins of Big D Custom Screen Printing in Austin, TX found success in his business by

pursuing customers with orders both large and small. Although Big D started out catering only to large orders, the shop sat idle in between orders, and through effective scheduling and transparent pricing, was able to fill in dead times with smaller orders. Big D found a profit in a market segment that other local screen printers weren't clamoring to fill. Experts believe this was a smart strategy, allowing Big D to spread out risk in their business and offer customized products. But at least one person is critical of the offering, pointing out that the niche has little upside potential, and may hurt the company's efficiency.

 Answer the following question.

 Q1. What strategy was adopted by Big D for profit?

 Q2. Give an overview of the case.

 CASE STUDY (20 Marks)

Another important retirement issue is one of lost knowledge. What happens when retirees leave the office, taking years of experience and knowhow right along with them? Businesses lose all of that knowledge, but according to American Express, it doesn't have to be that way. Through a pilot program, AMEX created a workforce transformation group that would allow retiring participants to gradually give up some of their day to day responsibilities. In return, the employees would spend some of this time mentoring and teaching classes to successors. This resulted in a phased retirement, allowing employees to leave gradually and enjoy more time while still enjoying a portion of their previous salary, and regular benefits. This also meant that some employees stayed a year or more past traditional retirement age. AMEX believes this program is a success, allowing senior employees to enjoy their last years of work in a reduced capacity, as well as educating the existing workforce for future success. Consultant David De Long agrees, citing this program as an example of how job handoffs should really work.

 Answer the following question.

 Q1. What are the issues involved with retirement of the employees?

 Q2. In your opinion how the smooth handing over of responsibilities can take place.

 CASE STUDY (20 Marks)

Lenovo Group Limited was founded in China ai Beijing in 1984 and within a span of 25 years it went global. While the company initially sold products of PC giants like Dwell and Compaq, it started sale of its own desk tops in 1990.Within 6 years it got its hold over domestic market. Before Lenovo went global, it acquired the PC division of IBM in 20042005. This gave Lenovo brand recognition in addition to increased sales. Lenovo’s low cost along with IBM’s skill and reputation made up a good combination for success. Lenovo emerged from east while IBM represented the west. Lenovo took some major steps to overcome the lingual and cultural barriers between the US and China. English was embraced as the corporate language and companywide campaigns were conducted to improve the English language skills of employees. The work culture was also changed so that the management focused on tasks rather than on people. Another step taken by Lenovo towards internationalization was becoming a partner sponsor in sports events like Olympic games, world cups, etc.

 Answer the following question.

 Q1. How Lenovo was benefited by acquiring the PC division of IBM? Discuss.

 Q2. How did Lenovo solve the problems of lingual and cultural barriers? Explain.

 Assignment Solutions, Case study Answer sheets

Project Report and Thesis contact

www.mbacasestudyanswers.com

ARAVIND – 09901366442 – 09902787224

   i

Creative Getaway: What to See in Lisbon

Celebrate design around the world with an entry in the HOW International Design Awards, the competition that recognizes creative excellence globally. The Best of Show wins a free trip to Boston (round-trip airfare, hotel & HOW Design Live conference registration included)! Enter today!

Looking for your next inspiring getaway? This quick guide on what to see in Lisbon (excerpted from the HOW magazine 2017 International Design Annual) has you covered. 

The Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon; photo © EDP Foundation

The Lisbon creative scene isn’t just booming because publications like Fortune and The Guardian are calling it the next Berlin—though that certainly doesn’t hurt. The Portuguese capital is filling up with young entrepreneurs who are transforming it into a hub for tech startups. The historic city, crowned by a charming castle, offers low rent and an affordable lifestyle.

With a population of 600,000, Lisbon is recovering from an economic slump after Portugal turned to the European Union for a bailout in 2010. Over the past few years, a touristic buzz has overtaken the city—its Belém district opened the new $21 million Museum for Art, Architecture and Technology in late 2016. And along with its tech scene, the creative community has launched innovative projects and companies to help bring Lisbon to the forefront of international tech and design. Since 2016, the city has hosted the annual Web Summit, Europe’s biggest tech conference. And local startups, business accelerators and incubators are being co-funded by the government and venture capitalists, who pledged $550 million in donations.

In Lisbon, abandoned spaces are being turned into community hubs for art galleries, restaurants and cafés. Design exhibitions and triennials are bringing in public projects to the city, and abandoned factories are being turned into co-working spaces.

In the coming year, Lisbon will see its Belém district—rich with historical landmarks, a growing metropolitan scene and a variety of museums—bloom into a cultural destination. Now, before everyone jumps on a plane to Portugal’s stunning capital, check out some of the best art and design hotspots in the city.

What to See in Lisbon: 6 Inspiring Places to Check Out

Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology

This new museum opened in October, proving to be the city’s latest piece of sci-fi architecture, set in the Belém district. “It will draw people from the heart of the city to the panoramic views along a riverfront area that has long been neglected, but thanks to MAAT, will become a vibrant new destination within Lisbon,” says António Mexia, chairman of the EDP Foundation, which funded the new museum. The London-based architecture firm AL_A designed this $20 million building, and its inception is a sign of hope. It’s part of the urban revitalization  of Belém, a 40,000-square-foot, formerly industrial site. “It will be a hub for attracting people who come here to enjoy art and architecture,” Mexia says. The building is covered in 15,000 glazed white tiles that are meant to reflect the water, according to Amanda Levete, principal of AL_A. “Our design draws on the context of the site, creating both physical and conceptual connections to the waterfront and back to the heart of the city.”

MAAT Central Tejo; photo © EDP Foundation

“The World of Charles and Ray Eames” Exhibit at MAAT; photo © EDP Foundation

MAAT photo by PauloCoelho © EDP Foundation 

LX Factory

Built in 1846, this brick building was once home to a fabric company. Today, the factory has become a “creative island” where design studios, photographers, architects, musicians and advertising executives share studio and office space. That’s not where it stops, however. It moonlights as a lively creative hub with theatrical plays, art exhibitions and film screenings lighting up the space after office hours. Even if you don’t have a meeting here, it’s worth a visit for the in-house restaurant A Cantina, which offers a modern twist on traditional Portuguese dishes (it’s a great place to network, too). Here you will also find a three-story book shop called Ler Devager. To peruse the offices and studios as a visitor, drop by during their Open Day, which is held every May and November, to see the workspaces and cutting-edge projects of the local startups.

LX Factory, a co-working studio, office space and creative event hub

Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa

Set in the 16th-century Pombal Palace, walk in to find peeling walls, vintage chandeliers and hand-painted ceiling murals, as the curator of this project space has left it unfinished. Founded in 2009, the concept is to invite artists from abroad to create site-specific, special projects for the exhibition space, which has 17 rooms and 30 workers who operate the space daily. Now owned by the city, it’s a World Heritage Site that won’t allow any further refurbishment. All in all, it remains a place of play. This is truly the place to see divine experiments in contemporary art in Lisbon.

Carpe Diem Arte e Pesquisa, an experimental art exhibition space

O Apartamento

This concept shop is set inside a five-room apartment in a residential building with programming that changes every three months. Since May 2015, project manager Vasco Águas de Oliveira and his team have been bringing together creative minds to curate this empty space—their goal is to connect people through their network. Some of the events they’ve hosted in the past include pop-up shops, curated dinner parties, art exhibitions, workshops, the launch of Brownbook magazine, gastronomic events like tastings led by local chef Marlene Vieira, and artistic how-to workshops. They even host live-in creative residencies where artists stay in their guest room for a period of time to make new work. The design pieces here, both prints and objects, blend into the décor. It’s a pretty free-flowing space where, as Águas de Oliveira puts it, “The only rule is sharing.”

O Apartamento, a space for pop-up shops, curated dinner parties, art exhibitions and workshops

Museu Colecção Berardo

This contemporary art museum has an epic presence—set in Belém, this is where one can find some key pieces of 20th-century art by Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. There are exhibitions by local artists, too, such as Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Helena Almeida, who is famed for her conceptual painting from the 1970s. With a collection valued at over $300 million, the museum was founded by Portuguese business tycoon José Manuel Rodrigues Berardo, who started collecting art in the 1980s. Berardo opened the doors of the museum in 2007, and it proved to become one of Europe’s best art collections, and in turn, a fascinating cultural attraction that walks one through modern art history. 

Museu Colecção Berardo, a contemporary art museum in Belém

Museu Do Design E Da Moda (MUDE)

This design museum will soon shine in the Belém district. Set in a former bank that is now on its third renovation, this museum showcases design and fashion from the 19th century onward. Currently closed and working toward a new eight-floor building, it will host a permanent collection and rotating temporary exhibitions. The MUDE also plans to implement designer residencies, educational workshops and a design documentation center, showing that the ongoing revamp of Lisbon’s design scene is neverending.

Proud of your latest design work?

The judges of the HOW International Design Awards want to see it!

Early-Bird Deadline: Monday, August 14 @ 11:59pm EDT

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The post Creative Getaway: What to See in Lisbon appeared first on HOW Design.

Creative Getaway: What to See in Lisbon syndicated post

As a HR Head how would you convince the Union and workers

Assignment Solutions, Case study Answer sheets

Project Report and Thesis contact

www.mbacasestudyanswers.com

ARAVIND – 09901366442 – 09902787224

 International Business

 Case Studies

CASE STUDY (20 Marks)

Progressive Chemical Industries Ltd, is engaged in Manufacturing and export of specialty chemicals, having turnover of Rs 300 crores. The Company is growing and having good export orders. The CEO is in mood to expand the business and aiming to reach turnover of Rs 1000(thousand) crores in next 5 (five) yrs. The CEO is worried about the increase in input costs and workers’ demands. Union has threatened to go on strike indefinitely. Union has demanded 50% increase in salary and other benefits, but is not agreeing to link it to productivity. It has also raised issues like unsafe, hazardous working conditions, leakage of poisonous gases affecting the health of workers. The consultant has advised the CEO to be strict and take strict action against the erring employees and be ready to declare lockout if situation warrants.

 Answer the following question.

 Q1. What are the various laws which could be applicable in the above problems?

 Q2. Do you feel management policies/practices are right?

 Q3. As a HR Head how would you convince the Union and workers?

 Q4. Prepare a draft agreement for the above situation which could be acceptable for Management and union.

 CASE STUDY (20 Marks)

Big business is attractive, with huge profits for some. But there's something to be said about small business as well, with lower risk and the potential for creativity. Darren Robbins of Big D Custom Screen Printing in Austin, TX found success in his business by

pursuing customers with orders both large and small. Although Big D started out catering only to large orders, the shop sat idle in between orders, and through effective scheduling and transparent pricing, was able to fill in dead times with smaller orders. Big D found a profit in a market segment that other local screen printers weren't clamoring to fill. Experts believe this was a smart strategy, allowing Big D to spread out risk in their business and offer customized products. But at least one person is critical of the offering, pointing out that the niche has little upside potential, and may hurt the company's efficiency.

 Answer the following question.

 Q1. What strategy was adopted by Big D for profit?

 Q2. Give an overview of the case.

 CASE STUDY (20 Marks)

Another important retirement issue is one of lost knowledge. What happens when retirees leave the office, taking years of experience and knowhow right along with them? Businesses lose all of that knowledge, but according to American Express, it doesn't have to be that way. Through a pilot program, AMEX created a workforce transformation group that would allow retiring participants to gradually give up some of their day to day responsibilities. In return, the employees would spend some of this time mentoring and teaching classes to successors. This resulted in a phased retirement, allowing employees to leave gradually and enjoy more time while still enjoying a portion of their previous salary, and regular benefits. This also meant that some employees stayed a year or more past traditional retirement age. AMEX believes this program is a success, allowing senior employees to enjoy their last years of work in a reduced capacity, as well as educating the existing workforce for future success. Consultant David De Long agrees, citing this program as an example of how job handoffs should really work.

 Answer the following question.

 Q1. What are the issues involved with retirement of the employees?

 Q2. In your opinion how the smooth handing over of responsibilities can take place.

 CASE STUDY (20 Marks)

Lenovo Group Limited was founded in China ai Beijing in 1984 and within a span of 25 years it went global. While the company initially sold products of PC giants like Dwell and Compaq, it started sale of its own desk tops in 1990.Within 6 years it got its hold over domestic market. Before Lenovo went global, it acquired the PC division of IBM in 20042005. This gave Lenovo brand recognition in addition to increased sales. Lenovo’s low cost along with IBM’s skill and reputation made up a good combination for success. Lenovo emerged from east while IBM represented the west. Lenovo took some major steps to overcome the lingual and cultural barriers between the US and China. English was embraced as the corporate language and companywide campaigns were conducted to improve the English language skills of employees. The work culture was also changed so that the management focused on tasks rather than on people. Another step taken by Lenovo towards internationalization was becoming a partner sponsor in sports events like Olympic games, world cups, etc.

 Answer the following question.

 Q1. How Lenovo was benefited by acquiring the PC division of IBM? Discuss.

 Q2. How did Lenovo solve the problems of lingual and cultural barriers? Explain.

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