Radioman, Frisbees, and Dave Grohl

Sure, we’ve come to love and expect our high-flying celebrity encounters at SBIFF over the years, catching sight and sound of actors and sometimes directorsin the flesh in real time. But a funny thing happened this year when we ran smack into a celebrity as we hardly knew him, until we got the full story in Mary Kerr’s fascinating documentary Radioman. The former homeless man and reformed drunk from NYC who dubbed himself “radioman” is well-known in movie circles, as the avid pursuer of movie sets and screen ops at shoots around New York, mostly, a self-styled celebrity who was greeted as such when he showed up in person after the Monday afternoon screening, in all his funky, witty splendor.

Reportedly, for those of us heretofore sadly ignorant of this celebrity on the sidelines, Radioman has appeared in some 100 films, sometimes quite visibly, in countless movies, and stars know and often love him. Kerr gets passionate testimonials from the likes of George Clooney, Josh Brolin (who called him “very genuine and very adolescent, which is why I like him, he’s like me”), Johnny Depp (who described Radioman as “someone from another planet or an eccentric billionaire… or both”),and his fan and friend Robin Williams, among others. Scorcese and Spielberg have found bit roles for him, in The Terminal and Shutter Island. Kerr’s deft and disarmingly charming film tracks his movements, and touches on his own background, and follows him on a poignant trip to the Oscars in L.A., channeling questions about celebrity fetishism and other subjects along the way.

Post-screening, Kerr came down with Radioman, who got a standing ovation, and waved his box of Dots like a trophy, his signature portable radio strapped around his neck and an SBIFF cap on. He has been doing some touring festivals with the film, and has visited Dubai and is headed to Argentina, and has been tooling around Santa Barbara — by the bay and the “river” and elsewhere — on a Schwinn someone loaned him. “I’m staying at the Sandman Inn,” he told us. “I thought I was going to sleep forever.” He seemed to be soaking up the validating attention he’s receiving. “I’ve never gotten this kind of respect. Never….I think we’re all celebrities. We should all be famous.”

Later, as a random detour from the Q&A flow at hand, he made the observation that he noticed a lot of homeless people on the streets of Santa Barbara. “It’s sad to see,” he said, as one who has known that life. He then proposed the idea that the festival powers-that-be arrange a free screening of a film and invite in the homeless. At the end of the Q&A, some patrons started departing, and Radioman ended the session by saying, “Thank you for coming, and thank you for leaving.”

In another case of a documentary in which the real rubbed contextual elbows with the reel, Tuesday night’s screening of The Invisible String, German filmmaker Jan Bass’s fun and illuminating doc on Frisbee sports and lifestyle kicked off with the filmmakers lobbing film promotional mini-discs into the audience. In fact, Santa Barbara has figured strongly into Frisbee culture, via the world renowned ultimate Frisbee team the Santa Barbara Condors, and members of that team, and other Frisbee scene champions and notables were in the house.

Sound City, whose screening on Tuesday afternoon at the Lobero was the second U.S. screening after making a splash at Sundance, is one of the greatest rock documentaries I’ve ever seen, thanks to the passion and greater purpose of Dave Grohl’s directorial and personal vision. He brings a lot to the table here, tracing the history of the hit-factory-like yet funky Van Nuys studio which created classic albums from Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors to Nirvana’s Nevermind, with Tom Petty, Foreigner, Queens of the Stone Age, and countless others.

There is plenty of insider stuff here that musicians and fans of recording studios will slobber over, including a virtual protagonist role of a legendary mixing board, Sound City’s Neve Board, which Grohl eventually bought when the analog studio finally gave up the ghost, done in by Pro Tools and its digital ilk. The final segment of Sound City takes place in Grohl’s own studio, where he has gathered musicians to record an album in tribute to the grand old studio. His partners, recording live to actual analog tape through the godly Neve, include Rick Springfield (hey, that guy is surprising good!), Josh Homme, Trent Reznor, and the piece de resistance, a visit from Paul McCartney, which resulted in the spicy bluesy two-chord song heard on Saturday Night Live a few weeks back.

Voila! Grohl has his epiphanic moment, creating a new song with a Beatle who launched his passion for music as a kid, and using the board which he claims lured him deeply into music. In the sometimes dubious genre of rock films, Sound City rocks, big-time.

“The success of this project reinforces the value of teamwork across several departments and organizations,” explained Savastano. “The AMES project team expended many hours in preparation, detailed research, and work instruction document preparation including tooling and equipment planning.”

“ABX Air was very pleased with AMES’ performance on this project,” remarked ABX Air Manager of Engineering Joe Freese. “The engineering documentation, coordination of specialized equipment, and detailed planning that went into this project contributed significantly to the success.” Both ABX Air and AMES are wholly owned subsidiaries of Air Transport Services Group, Inc (NASDAQ:ATSG).

“Our extensive background with the Boeing 767 aircraft positioned us well to take on this [Aft Pressure Bulkhead] replacement project,” added Savastano. “With our first APB replacement completed, we are scheduling similar work packages in the near future.”

Obama must accept border security as part of immigration reform

President Barack Obama must be willing to accept border security measures as part of a comprehensive immigration reform package or else “there won’t be a solution,” Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, a leader of the GOP reform effort, said on Tuesday.

Rubio, who on Monday unveiled a blueprint for an immigration overhaul as part of a bipartisan group of eight senators, said Obama must embrace the principles in the outline. The president was announcing his own vision for immigration reform on Tuesday afternoon in Las Vegas.

“He can either decide that he wants to be part of the solution, or he can decide he wants to be part of a political issue and try to trigger a bidding war. I’m not going to be part of a bidding war to see who can come up with the most lenient path forward,” Rubio said during an interview on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program before Obama’s speech. “If he’s gone to Las Vegas to give a speech and try to trigger a bidding war, then no, it doesn’t bode well. There won’t be a solution. We’ll just continue to have what we have now, because that issue I think is a bright line for most of us that are involved in this effort. Unless there’s real enforcement triggers, we’re not going to have a bill that moves on.”

Rubio’s appearance on Limbaugh’s radio show, a program that boasts the largest audience of conservative listeners in the country, is part of a media campaign to urge conservatives to join his efforts to change the nation’s immigration system. Some prominent Republicans, including Limbaugh, have expressed concern that the bill will ultimately amount to “amnesty” for illegal immigrants. Rubio argued that it was important for Republicans to contribute ideas to the effort so their views won’t be “defined” by Democrats.

“I thought it was critically important that we outline the key principles,” Rubio said.

The eight senators leading the effort agreed that a major immigration bill would require that the country’s borders be “secured” before illegal immigrants already living in the country be offered a pathway to citizenship or permanent residency. During Obama’s first term, his administration deported more illegal immigrants than any other president, an effort that has drawn criticism from liberal immigration reform activists.

While the general outline of the priorities in the Senate immigration bill were made public on Monday, it will be about a month for a bill to be formally introduced to the chamber. The senators leading the effort expect the early language of the measure to reach the Senate by March, and they are aiming for passage in early summer at the latest.

Prior to the shutdown, the employees had been working amid the asbestos for almost two months, even though they had no training for handling the toxic substance, the union leaders said.

“They put people’s lives in danger,’’ said James Parker, president of American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, Local 2272. “We pulled them out and the director sent them back in.’’ Parker said Public Works Director Christopher Coke threatened the employees with insubordination charges if they did not go back into the shut-down location on the second floor of 133 Ellison Street.

Another official with the union, Michael Jackson, said the city failed to provide the workers with protective suits and gave them substandard masks. Jackson also said Coke used fans to air out the work area where the asbestos tiles were being removed from the floor before he went ahead conducted tests to check for the toxic substance.

Three departments of state government are investigating the situation. Also, Passaic County Sheriff Richard Berdnik is conducting his own inquiry because his office says it was never told asbestos was involved when he supplied the city with inmates from a community service work crew who were assigned to the office renovation project.

When asked about the union leaders’ assertions, Coke said, “As much as I would like to comment, I’ve been advised by the legal department not to comment because the investigation is still going on.’’

Paterson Business Administrator Charles Thomas said Paterson’s legal department was researching the case. Thomas said he had not seen a formal grievance filed by the labor union and declined to respond to comments made by union leaders until after he had read the grievance. Thomas said the city wanted to make sure that in the future all renovation projects were done in compliance with state law regarding asbestos. He also said the city planned to hire a firm with expertise in dealing with the hazardous materials to complete the work at the offices.

Jackson, the head of the union’s grievance committee, said seven employees worked on the renovations at the site. Workers initially raised questions about the asbestos in October, Jackson said. Officials told them not to worry, that there was no danger, he said.

Officials have said the type of asbestos at the site would only become a problem if the tiles were broken apart and the asbestos fibers became airborne. Jackson said that’s exactly what was going on at 133 Ellison.

The workers were using scrapers to chip the tiles off the floor, said Jackson. He asserted that the proper way to remove such tile is applying heat so that they slide off the floor. “None of these guys had ever been trained in how to deal with asbestos,’’ said Jackson. “They should have never been there.’’

Gulfshore Homes’ Jasmine model at Torino

Grey Oaks Realty announced that Gulfshore Homes’ Jasmine villa model in the Torino neighborhood within Grey Oaks Country Club is under contract. The 3,187-square-foot under air, one-story floor plan includes three bedrooms, three-and-a-half baths, a two-car garage and a golf cart storage area. The list price for the fully-furnished Jasmine model with optional features was $1.395 million. The residence will remain available for viewing through May.

The Jasmine’s interior was designed and executed by the team of Sherri DuPont and Jody Keene of Collins & DuPont Interior Design Inc. Their transitional design style conveys a unique, eclectic sense of fun driven by a color palette that includes pale mushroom, whites, emeralds, teals and daffodil daisy tones that play against white trim and light flooring with a running pattern. An interesting and visually captivating applied molding lattice treatment is repeated in the ceiling details throughout the home. Wall mirrors and furnishings with mirrored finishes combine with silver, chrome and nickel accessories and lighting fixtures.

Tall rectangular mirrors, accessories and a chandelier welcome visitors in the foyer. Columns define the entry to the great room space where three niches are set on the feature wall. A circular mirror is hung in the center niche above a credenza with deep Java trim and cerise wood insets. Polished nickel demilune consoles bedecked by crisp white urns and silver lamps are set in the niches flanking the credenza. Other furnishings in the great room include an off-white sofa that plays against accessories with strong pops of color, including textured emerald and aqua glass pieces placed on a mirrored coffee table and daffodil yellow accent pillows. Palm Beach style bamboo side chairs with green cushions, bronze metal end tables with lightly stained wood tops and glass lamps banded with bronze metal complete the look.

In keeping with the Jasmine’s great room design, DuPont and Keene created a kitchen that flows into the living space. Rather than incorporating the typical raised island bar, they chose to create a gathering space at a bar area made of dark, bronze-like finished wood that resembles a parson’s table. Three bubble type bar stools have open circular backs and a memory function that automatically returns the chairs to their original position. The granite in the kitchen is a subtle white, taupe and gray mix that is carried in the backsplash behind a Viking gas cook top. Emerald and teal color striping separates the granite from the light tile backsplash above the perimeter counter tops. The island includes a Blanco sink with satin nickel fixtures, including a gooseneck faucet. Two vertical cabinets have glass fronts with window pane mullions.

Collins & DuPont maintained a sense of geometry throughout the kitchen, including in the ceiling and in the six square art pieces displayed above the upper cabinetry. An adjacent built-in end-cap breakfast area features a contemporary table with an unusual base. The breakfast area opens to an outdoor living space with a fireplace, sitting area and outdoor kitchen.

A formal dining room off the Jasmine’s primary hallway is defined by square columns and a dropped, lattice work ceiling detail. The dark tone of the rectangular dining table is offset by six transitional chairs done in light upholstery. A side board with mirrored insets is set in a niche under a piece of art. The side board is a combination of wood and metal. The flooring in the dining room is a warm wood stained in a taupe-gray finish. The entire setting is enhanced by a platinum-finished chandelier with silk shades and flame finials.

A bar serves both the bar and master suite. The bar area has dark stained cabinetry, a granite counter top with a square sink and an under counter refrigerator. The bar is flanked by a pair of niches finished with glass tiles and geometric, contemporary platinum-colored lamps with Lucite bulb dishes. The adjacent study features a book case, credenza and desk, all in a dark finish. The navy leather desk chair, dark hardwood floor, beamed ceiling, linen colored recliner and navy and saffron accents complete a very warm look.

DuPont and Keene divided a found geometric screen and then hung the sections to serve as sentries when entering the master bedroom. The room’s light taupe and linen mix is accented with grayish blues that show up in pillows set against a framed upholstered headboard and footboard. A period map of Paris has been divided into eight pieces that serve as the focal art work for the space.

The master bath’s neutral palette includes granite counter tops, a marble floor with a small taupe colored banded marble inset and a glass mosaic pattern in the shower. The walnut toned vanity cabinetry plays against the neutral tones and the large rectangular mirrors mounted over each of the sinks.

Torino is an enclave that will include 55 luxury villas at build-out. One- and two-story residences line brick-paved cul-de-sac streets. Thirty-four homesites remain available for purchase in Torino.

M&M said that since the formation of the venture in 2009, with M&M holding 74 per cent stake and the rest with BAE Systems, both stakeholders recognise that `significant evolution has occurred in the Indian Land Systems market’.

The developments in the industry environment and in customer procurement frameworks and acquisition strategies had led them to `institute a strategic review of the business’. The review would assess changes required to address the evolving market and to meet emerging customer needs. The statement clarified however that `no decision has yet been taken on the way forward’.

After the formation of the JV, it was said that DLSI will be headquartered in New Delhi with manufacturing at a `purpose built facility South of Faridabad’ near Delhi. In a release issued by the Mahindra group then, it was stated that the JV was focused on the `manufacture of up-armoured light vehicles, specialist military vehicles, mine protected vehicles, artillery systems and other selected land system weapons, support and upgrades’. The intention was to become a `centre of excellence for artillery systems’.

However it is not clear what impact the latest decision with regard to the tie up between M&M and BAE Systems would have on the overall plans of M&M in the defence sector. This was because it was only recently that another defence foray of M&M with Rafael Advanced Defence Systems was rejected by the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) after the Ministry of Home Affairs declined to give security clearance to the JV which was to produce naval defence products.

In a communication to the stock exchanges on Dec 27, M&M said that FIPB which rejected the JV proposal between M& M and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems Ltd of Israel did not assign any reason for its rejection. The application for the JV was made by both companies to the FIPB in March 2012 for the development and production of naval system products.

The statement said `both Mahindra and Rafael are surprised and disappointed at this decision’ as both were reputed companies which have `extensive engagement with the Govt of India on projects related to Defence and Homeland Security’. The statement said that Mahindra and Rafael would `continue exploring ways’ towards forming a JV.

Mahindra said it chose Rafael as a JV partner because both the Indian and Israeli governments were `cooperating extensively’ in the defence sector. Rafael was involved in several defence projects including the Long Range Surface to Air Missile and Armouring Technologies with the DRDO at the government to government level, M&M said.

Marlow Mainship 32 will debut in Miami

“I am excited, filled with pride and enthusiasm to bring this fine brand back to the boating public with a new 32-foot sedan trawler filled with features that exceed today’s boaters’ demands,” Marlow said in a statement.

The Mainship 32 follows the all-new Marlow Hunter 40, which was introduced in October at the U.S. Sailboat Show in Annapolis, Md.

Last August, Marlow Acquisitions purchased all of the assets of Hunter Marine Corp. and selected assets, including the molds, tooling and branding rights to Mainship. The new Marlow Mainship 32 will be built by Marlow Hunter at its manufacturing facility in Florida; the Hunter sailboat brand has been built for 40 years without an interruption.

“We have maximized the prodigious talent in engineering, design and craftsmanship at Marlow Hunter to bring the new Mainship line to the boating marketplace,” Marlow said in a statement.

Since the purchase, the company’s strategic plan has been “to diversify into trawler production,” Marlow Hunter president John Peterson said. This first boat from “America’s Trawler” will begin the development of a full line of cruising trawlers from Marlow Mainship, Peterson said in a statement.

In addition to the Marlow Hunter sailboats, and now the Marlow Mainship trawlers, the company has continued to build the Gemini catamaran on an OEM basis.

“Bottom line — with these three brands under the Marlow Hunter roof the critical mass to achieve a superior level of quality at affordable pricing to boaters worldwide is cemented,” Peterson said. “The ingredients to thrive, if I dare use that word, are in place.”

The company said the Marlow Mainship 32 has a classical, yet sweeping line with a fold-down swoop transom, providing access and boarding to a large cockpit.

Featuring comfortable and attractive matching companion and navigator seats, which are equipped with a refrigerator and/or an ice maker, the company said this stylish, yet practical cruiser is ready for a day, a week or a month in complete comfort. The upper salon with sliding patio doors has seating for six.

Built on a 32-foot hull with a 10-foot, 2-inch beam, the trawler has the look of a nimble lightweight fighter with heavyweight features, the company said. The twin Yanmar engines use the technology driven by Marlow Yachts Velocijet Strut Keels for protection, stability and performance.

No less a figure that Prime Minister Julia Gillard expressed that opinion today in a speech billed as a landmark security policy pronouncement that had as its premise the assertion that “The 9/11 decade is ending and a new one is taking its place.”

To ready the nation for coming online battles, Gillard said Australia will combine the infosec functions of several agencies – the Attorney-General’s Department, the Australian Defence Force, ASIO, the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Crime Commission – in a single location to operate as the new Australian Cyber Security Centre. The new operation should be up and running by year’s end.

Gillard said the Centre will be “a hub for greater collaboration with the private sector, State and Territory governments and international partners to combat the full breadth of cyber threats” and will mean Australia has “an expanded and more agile response capability to deal with all cyber issues — be they related to government or industry, crime or security.”

Gillard’s speech made constant reference to a previous landmark utterance, namely one that launched the “Asian Century White Paper” that offers a long-term vision for Australia as a nation enmeshed with Asia and less engaged with European and North American nations when it comes to trade cultural influences and defence.

Today, Gillard said “our national objectives in the region can only be realised if there is sustainable security in Asia.”

It’s probably drawing too long a bow to suggest that’s a barbed message to China that Australia is keeping an eye on its online activities. But it does signal Australia considers its digital frontier something that needs strengthening as its Asian engagement deepens.

One signal missing from the speech is just how the Centre will engage with the private sector. One element of that sector – security vendors – has not been shy of approaching the Australian government to push their agendas and have not been rebuffed when the offer aid. McAfee recently helped to prepare a cyber-safety campaign for Australian children, while The Register is aware of a prominent security vendor’s involvement in lobbying for and formulating data breach laws due to go before Parliament this year.

How easy is it to write confessional poetry?

“Now I come to look at love,” says Sharon Olds, “in a new way, now that I know I’m not/ standing in its light.” She says this in her poem “Unspeakable”, in her collection Stag’s Leap, which last week won the T S Eliot prize for poetry. It’s just one poem in a whole book of poems which speak of the agony of lost love. The collection starts with the moment the man she has been married to for 35 years, whose love, she says, made her look “out at the world as if from inside/ a profound dwelling”, tells her that his love has died.

It continues through the days, and weeks, that follow: in the conversations about “when to tell the kids”, in the speech she has prepared for her mother, in the “last look” and the “last hour”. And everywhere, there’s the pain, and the shame. “If I pass a mirror,” she says in her poem “Known to be left”, “I turn away, I do not want to look at her, and she does not want to be seen.” It’s clear, and it’s sharp, and it’s forensic in its detail, and it’s lyrical, and it’s beautiful, and it’s devastating. You can’t be human and read these poems and not sometimes hear yourself gasp.

But you can’t read quite a lot of Sharon Olds’s poetry and not sometimes hear yourself gasp. For more than 30 years, she has been writing poetry about love, and sex, and abuse, and childbirth, and death. She has been writing not just about the emotions that go with these things, but about blood, and sweat, and semen, and how you can, for example, be trying to breastfeed your baby, and then lie on the bathroom floor in the dark, with your “bared chest against the icy tile”, and slip your hand between your legs and ride “hard, against the hard floor”. Except that she doesn’t say “you”, of course, she says “I”.

Her poems are, among other things, a celebration of the human as animal. They are, as the poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje has said, “pure fire in the hands”. But they are, though very, very much her own, also in a tradition. “This,” said the poet Glyn Maxwell when he reviewed one of her early books, “is the sound the confessional hordes have been trying to utter since Lowell.”

It was the American critic Mack Rosenthal who first used the term “confessional” about a certain kind of poetry. It was in 1959, in a review of Robert Lowell’s collection Life Studies, which was about Lowell’s struggles with mental illness. “Confessional poetry”, said Rosenthal, is poetry that “goes beyond customary bounds of reticence or personal embarrassment”. And Lowell wasn’t the only poet to do it. John Berryman, in The Dream Songs, and W D Snodgrass, in Heart’s Needle, and Anne Sexton, in Live or Die, and Allen Ginsberg, in Howl, were all writing about aspects of their personal experience – mental illness, the suicidal impulse, unconventional sexual desires – that poetry hadn’t often covered before. But it was Life Studies which had the biggest influence. It was, said the American poet Stanley Kunitz, “probably the most influential book of modern verse since The Waste Land”.

When Sylvia Plath read it, she was “excited” by the “intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience” which she felt had been “partly taboo”. As anyone who knows anything about 20th-century poetry knows, she went on to write some “very personal” poetry of her own. In her poem “Stings”, which is ostensibly about beekeeping, she has, she says, “a self to recover, a queen”. Is she, she asks, dead? Is she sleeping? “Where has she been?” Now, she says, “she is flying”.

It’s quite hard today to imagine a culture where anything “confessional” was in any way new. It’s everywhere: in newspapers, on blogs, on Twitter, on websites, on radio, on TV. You really can’t get away from it. You might want to, but you can’t. In books, in interviews, in columns, and in journalism, the word that leaps out, again, and again, and again, and again, is “I”.

In poetry, this has led to an awful lot of what the poet Hugo Williams (who won the T S Eliot prize in 2007) has called the “I am a garden of black and red sausages” school of poetry. Anyone who has had anything to do with poetry will have seen enough of this to keep them going for quite a while. When I was running the Poetry Society, there was a steady stream: for poetry competitions, for poetry magazines, and, perhaps for my pleasure, in the post. Even here at The Independent, where we used to publish a daily poem, there was a stream: of poems, written by people who didn’t know how to write poems, but who thought that what Wordsworth called “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” was enough.

It isn’t. “Many collections,” said the poet Mimi Khalvati, when I asked her for her views, “seem to centre on a gripping issue, say the breakdown of a marriage, or the death of a partner, or infertility, but it would be a pity if this were to draw attention away from the way in which language itself is used.” Khalvati, whose most recent collection, Child, tells the story of her life from early childhood, is known as one of the best poetry teachers in the country. She founded a national training school for poets called the Poetry School to help poets develop the formal skills needed to write good poems. “The novice poet,” she said, “will try and express feelings they already know they have, but an experienced poet is one who knows that a poem is only a true poem if it reveals what you didn’t know you felt.”

The poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw, who’s Professor of Poetry at the University of East Anglia, agrees with her. “No one wants to be called a confessional poet,” she told me. “It suggests all you do is blurt your feelings. To work explicitly with the self requires extraordinary judgement, detachment and control. Sharon Olds, like Plath, has these qualities.”

She does. She certainly does. Very few poets match Sharon Olds in the discipline she brings to her best work. “My job,” she says in one poem in Stag’s Leap, “is to eat the whole car/ of my anger, part by part, some parts/ ground down to steel-dust”. The anger is there – everywhere – with the pain and the shame, but you feel it much, much more powerfully because, in the poems, it’s under such tight control.

“My poetry,” she said, when I interviewed her a few years ago, is “apparently personal. I’ve never said that the poems don’t draw on personal experience, but I’ve never said that they do.” With her latest collection, she has made it very clear that they do. She has said, in fact, that she wrote the poems when her husband left her, but promised her children she wouldn’t publish them for at least 10 years. For the reader, there may be an extra thrill in knowing that the things she writes about actually happened, but the thing is, it doesn’t matter. Whether or not they’re literally true, they’re true. “Beauty is truth,” said Keats in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, and he didn’t mean things that were literally true. Truth is what you find not in spilled feelings on a page, or in tearful confessions on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa. Truth is what you find in art.

Here’s to the brave ones

I remember watching Jodie Foster when I was much younger. She had these huge, expressive eyes and this memorably unpolished crunch in her manner of speech. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it then, but I remember thinking that she never seemed altogether there. It was as if her golden tresses shone to distract from some secret she kept hidden, away from the public’s eyes.

At the recently concluded Golden Globes, Foster came out in the same way many celebrities have as of late—award in hand, subtly acknowledging a partner, saying that those who matter in her personal life have always known, and talking about her right to privacy. It took her 47 years within the industry before coming out with it, with the support of many and to the utter surprise of no one. Ricky Martin, whose own coming out was on the same news flash level as “bears shit in the woods” and “the Pope is Catholic,” was one of many who tweeted out support of Foster’s “bold” move. He said, “On your terms. Its [sic] your time! Not before nor after. Its [sic] when it feels right!”

Now, just to be clear, I am actually straight. I do, however, have an inordinate amount of gay friends that I hold as close to me as I would my own heart. And while, all over the world, the dialogue has turned to whether or not it has become passé for celebrities to clarify what their sexual preferences are, I find myself envious for the ones that I love.

We come from a culture that relates to one another with almost distasteful familiarity, greeting one another with how much weight we think the other person has lost/gained since we last saw them. We are in each other’s business all the time, constantly sharing stories about people our friends don’t even really know. And because we are so familiar with one another, we are also incredibly prone to passing judgment on things we don’t necessarily understand, like same sex love.

Our society is patriarchal, traditional, and rather straight, as it were. We have allotted spaces for gayness. We’re fine with gay people being gay so long as they’re in the parlors or at the gym or making clothes or in the entertainment industry. So long as they’re being funny and don’t flaunt their relationships with their partners in public. So long as they aren’t making us uncomfortable by asking to be recognized as an actual civil union or to have children or to not be defined solely by their sexual orientation. The second we feel threatened by such unfamiliar territory, we are suddenly very quick to whip out words like “unnatural,” “abomination,” and “hate the sin, love the sinner.”

Frankly speaking, however, Manila is teeming with card-carrying members of Team Rainbow, to the point where I cannot turn in any direction without running into someone who happens to be gay. There are public figures whose sexual preferences are of the “open secret” variety, or at least perennially in question. (Holler at me, Piolo Pascual.) It’s a case common for those who prefer not to risk their careers by making a big show of their preferences, but a practice so detrimental to a more realistic understanding of homosexuality.

In 1993, Michelangelo Signorile published “A Queer Manifesto,” a piece that not only pushed for those closeted to come out, but for anyone who knew someone closeted to convince these gay loved ones to come out. To some extent, it seems a bit much, but it is also beautifully determined at crushing the hate associated with the idea of being gay. One of the things to note about Signorile’s piece is that it discusses the responsibility of those who are gay to broaden the idea of what it means to be gay. Signorile writes, “We must all tell our parents. We must all tell our families. We must all tell our friends. We must all tell our coworkers… If they don’t know we’re queer—if they think only the most horrible people are queer—they will vote against us.”

There’s a responsibility to clarify that being gay is not just men who put on make-up or wear dresses, and that even men who do such things on their off days can handle business just as well as their straight counterparts do. We want people to understand that being gay doesn’t make you a sexual predator (unless you are actually a sexual predator, which has more to do with being sick than it does with being gay). We want people to understand that these emotions aren’t as unnatural as we’ve been told, that it’s not a choice someone would make if they really could, that you cannot be “turned” gay simply by being around someone who is. We want people to understand that you don’t have to be ashamed, because love is and will always be love, and not even straight people have the best grasp on what that actually means.

It is in this vein that I hope for the Philippines, for a Jodie Foster kind of enlightenment. For a moment where we can see someone with soulful eyes and a career filled with remarkable talent taking the stage to tell us how who she’s been attracted to hasn’t minimized or amplified her potential. I hold out hope for someone brave enough to be the equivalent of Neil Patrick Harris, a gay man who is not only exceedingly funny with such a beautiful family, but portrays characters believably and endearingly regardless of their sexual preferences. I pray that all those who are struggling because they don’t fit into some convenient homosexual stereotype find role models across local TV screens and in boardrooms across the land, of people who are successful and kind and decent and intelligent, but simply happen to love a different way. I pray that those with the kind of reach that enables one to at least question the mold, if not break it, do so.

Maybe for the rest of the world, a gorgeous woman coming out like this is passé, but for a country and a culture as young as ours, it seems almost like a distant possibility. I stand in steadfast hope for the day that brave souls are able to stand up and pave the way for a kind of acceptance that surpasses comfort, convenience, and tolerance. I stand in steadfast hope for the day that others see these brothers and sisters of mine as I do, as nothing less than beautifully, remarkably human.

Remember that wee little organisation I mentioned known as The Order? Well its head honcho is a rather spiffy looking chap by the name of Vergil who kind of looks a bit like Dante. Actually, he looks exactly like Dante (bar the hair). To be more precise, he’s Dante’s twin brother and he too is driven by an unquenchable desire to cleft Mundus in twain. So the bros join forces to demolish Mundus’ empire piece by piece and free humanity from the shackles of demonic slavery. Ain’t they a pair?

So the stage is now set, but it would be for naught without some solid performances and sexified graphics and Ninja Theory has got you covered. These guys and gals know their mo-cap. DmC has some true acting gloriously recreated digitally for your eye and earholes. All characters emote believably, move realistically (taking into account the setting) and have depth and subtlety to their performances. It really helps immerse you in a completely fantastical, brutal wonderland, and what a wondrous place it is.

Ninja Theory has come up with some of the most outstanding level designs I’ve ever seen. From a visual standpoint alone, colours burst through every section and the sense of scale at times can be positively daunting. Getting dragged into Limbo never gets old, it’s like watching the world Dante inhabits explode as Limbo breaks through shattering buildings and leaving a path of destruction in its wake.

That Was Fast

Everyone claims to hate Girls, but everyone watches it, even my commie boyfriend. So I figured the above title was appropriate. Like any young, politically minded, Brooklyn-dwelling female, I have a semi-fraught relationship with the show, but I also love it immensely, so let’s dive in.

Elijah tells George he “fucked” Marnie, hence ending their relationship, but he won’t tell Hannah because he knows it would upset her. What this says to me is that he likes to have drama in his love life but not with his friends. Or, conversely: he cares about Hannah more than he cares about George. Or possibly: he thinks Hannah is way more fragile. Did it even really count as sex? He wears it like a weird badge of pride, like being bi would make him special and exciting.

Even though I generally find her to be an exhausting, uptight bitch who hates her friends and tries too hard to fit some preconceived mold of what it means to be a grown-up, I feel kind of bad watching Marnie be told by the worst potential boss ever that she is too square for the art world. Then again: she could stand to stop buying suits the same place as my mom, who only wears them because she is a lawyer and has to.

Can we give Shoshanna and Ray a medal for Best TV Couple Of All Time? Their conversation about bathing a pig is just amazing. And the way they deflate Marnie’s looming ego re: actually being a model vs. having a “pretty person job” is aces.

Jessa is supposed to be a beautiful, flighty fool, yet she’s by far the smartest of the group politically. She accurately fingers Bill Clinton for precipitating the financial crisis by killing the Glass-Steagal Act in one breath, then says some dumb shit about astrology the next. In a previous episode, she had the “crazy” idea to unionize New York’s nannies (which would actually be a very positive development if anyone could pull it off), right before losing a whole child. Is this Lena Dunham’s way of getting radical politics onto a mainstream show via their only acceptable vehicle? Or are we supposed to think Jessa’s ideas are naive? Dunham’s widely known to be a bougie Obama liberal, so I’m guessing the latter, but who knows?

And then Jessa says something like “Thomas John looks at my paintings the moment I show them to him,” and all is lost in a sea of mean laughter. It is supposed to be the latter, isn’t it?

Yes, Sandy’s politics suck. But Hannah has no clear idea why, and this isn’t about that, anyway. It’s about the fact that he didn’t like her essay.

Sandy accuses Hannah of exoticizing him because he’s black, and she says several things in a row that basically amount to “you scan as white to me,” hence making things worse. The line “I don’t live in a world that is separated like that” especially makes me laugh, because duh, yes you do, it’s just more along class lines than color lines, and also, that is something that Stephen Colbert says, in character, to make a point about conservative hypocrisy.

And then Hannah says “you look like a slutty Von Trapp child” to Marnie, and we remember why we put up with her. And then Elijah says “you look like a slutty Von Trapp child” to Marnie, and we wonder how he could ever be confused about his sexuality.

Now that we’ve talked about race, it’s time for Hannah to demonstrate her shitty brand of Liz Lemonism! Marnie has gone and gotten herself a pretty person job, because what young and attractive person in New York city hasn’t wanted to make a ton of money in the service industry, and Hannah is jealous and judgy. Like many “liberal” feminists, she blames the individual women who use their sex appeal to survive in a patriarchal society for bringing all women down, as opposed to a more systemic critique that blames the patriarchy itself. This is painfully, myopically wrong. Maybe she has more in common with Sandy and his Ayn Rand-reading ways than she thinks.

But enough talk about politics, for Adam is back and being murder-y in a sexy way. Sure, he was not that nice to Hannah when they were dating, and sure, he should respect her wishes and leave her alone. But to let himself into the house, speak the line “as a man living my man life, my desire for you cannot be repressed,” and then demand a glass of milk before he goes? I can see why Hannah loves this weirdo. Maybe someday they’ll get over themselves enough to feel the same thing at the same time.

“Even coming into spring, I had a couple knee issues,” he said. “I had a couple surgeries coming into spring. I was trying to push the fast-forward button, making sure I was catching up and able to do everything I wanted to. This year, I’ve had a very productive offseason. I’m just excited coming in and being 100 percent and firing on all cylinders coming into spring right away.”

“I was confident that I’d be back here,” he said. “I thought I developed a good relationship with the coaches and the team. It’s not as cut and dried as everyone thinks, but I really thought that I had a good place here with the team and I’m excited to be back, for sure.

“It’s another chance to play in the big leagues and I’m excited. I understand the landscape of the team and what Matt Wieters’ role is with the organization. It’s always a blessing to be in the big leagues and my job is to just play the best that I can whenever that opportunity is. I’m happy to be playing here with Matt Wieters and to be playing on a winning team.”

“Ultimately, you want to be an everyday guy and be an All-Star and all those things, but sometimes the chances aren’t as often as you think,” he said. “It’s tough. So many teams have No. 1 catchers. That’s kind of the mold teams would like, to have a No. 1 catcher and a No. 2 catcher who plays 40 games, somewhere in that ballpark, but a lot of teams are built differently. A lot of teams split time. As for right now, I’m happy to be part of a winning team and we’ll see what happens in the future.”

Which Way Did the Taliban Go?

The village was abandoned. Streets deserted. Houses empty. Behind the central mosque rose a steep escarpment. Behind the escarpment mountains upon mountains. Up there — above the timberline, among the peaks — a white Taliban flag whipped in the wind. Several Afghan soldiers were admiring it when a stunted and contorted person emerged from an alley. Dressed in rags, he waved a hennaed fist at them and wailed. Tears streamed down his face. Most of the soldiers ignored him. Some laughed uncomfortably. A few jabbed their rifles at his chest and simulated shooting. The man carried on undeterred — reproaching them in strange tongues.

A truck pulled up, and Lt. Col. Mohammad Daowood, the battalion commander, stepped out. Everyone waited to see what he would do. Daowood is a man alive to his environment and adept at adjusting his behavior by severe or subtle degrees. He can transform, instantaneously, from empathetic ally to vicious disciplinarian. To be with him is to be in constant suspense over the direction of his mood. At the same time, there is a calculation to his temper. You feel it is always deliberately, never capriciously, employed. This only adds to his authority and makes it impossible to imagine him in a situation of which he is not the master. A flicker of recognition in the deranged man’s eyes suggested that he intuited this. He approached Daowood almost bashfully; only as he closed within striking range did he seem to regain his lunatic energy, emitting a low, threatening moan. We waited for Daowood to hit him. Instead, Daowood began to clap and sing. Instantly, the man’s face reorganized itself. Tearful indignation became pure, childish joy. He started to dance.

This continued for a surprisingly long time. The commander clapping and singing. The deranged man lost in a kind of ecstatic, whirling performance, waving his prayer cap in the air, stamping his feet. When at last Daowood stopped, the man was his. He stood there — breathless and obsequious — waiting for what came next. Daowood mimed the motion of wrapping a turban on his head. Where are the Taliban? Eager to please, the man beamed and pointed across the valley.

Several hours later, as I shared the bed of a pickup truck with an Afghan soldier who manned a machine gun mounted on the roof of the cab, it became evident that we were lost. The rest of the company was nowhere to be seen, though we could hear them, not far off, exchanging rocket and automatic-weapons fire with insurgents who had fled into the mountains and were hiding behind protective crags, shooting down. The driver sped up one narrow rutted path after another. The paths were hemmed in by rock walls — a labyrinth of cul-de-sacs — and the driver grew more panicked and reckless with each dead end. Aside from the occasional night raid, no Afghan or American forces had been to this place in more than a decade. Men stood on top of the walls, watching.

He offered the words I had heard time and again — so often, and so predictably, they could be the battalion motto. The words were invoked in response to such questions as: What is the plan? Who is shooting? Where will we sleep tonight? How many dead?

Soon we arrived on a bare ridge and found Colonel Daowood almost alone. Two young soldiers stood nearby with rifles. Daowood sat on a rock. A teenage boy knelt before him, kowtowing, wrists cuffed behind his back. Daowood was doing something to his head. As we got closer, we saw that he held scissors and was roughly shearing the boy’s hair. A neat pile of long black locks lay on the ground between Daowood’s feet.

While Daowood was giving the haircut, our driver, who it turned out was a company commander, yelled at a pair of intrepid young soldiers who had taken it upon themselves to scale the mountain and capture the Taliban’s flag. We were leaving soon, and the commander wanted them to come back down. The young soldiers, however, were too high. They couldn’t hear him. The commander yelled and yelled. If only they had radios. If only he had a radio. In lieu of one, the commander drew his sidearm, aimed in the general vicinity of the soldiers, then shot two bullets.

It was the third day of a four-day operation being conducted by the Afghan National Army (A.N.A.) in Chak District, Wardak Province. There were no U.S. forces in sight. Every so often, a pair of American attack helicopters circled overhead; otherwise, the Afghans — roughly 400 of them — were on their own. For the A.N.A. — which every day assumes a greater share of responsibility for the security of Afghanistan — the operation was an ambitious undertaking and a test of its ability to function independently. For years now, the U.S. military’s priority in Afghanistan has been shifting from effectively prosecuting the present war to preparing Afghans for a future one in which our role is minimal. But even as American troops return home and American bases across the country close, such a future continues to feel difficult to envision. How will the A.N.A. fare when it is truly on its own? Predictions vary, tending toward the pessimistic. To the extent that assessments of the competency and preparedness of the A.N.A. take into consideration on-the-ground observations, however, they are usually limited to the perspective of American forces working in concert with Afghan units.

The operation to Chak District was nearly over before it began. Just hours before departure, during a briefing at Combat Outpost Dash-e Towp, the battalion headquarters, Daowood told his subordinate officers: “The only thing we’re waiting on is the fuel. If we don’t receive the fuel, we will not be able to do the operation.” A cohort of American advisers stood in the back of the room, silently listening. In the past, they probably would have offered to provide the fuel themselves. But that paradigm has changed. Increasingly, A.N.A. units must rely on their own supply lines, however inefficient they may be. Nevertheless, as the officers rose from their chairs, an Afghan captain pulled aside one of the advisers and told him the battalion lacked batteries for the metal detectors used to find improvised explosive devices. The adviser sighed. “Come over to our side,” he said, “and we’ll see what we can do.”

The American side of Dash-e Towp is separated from the Afghan side by a tall wall and a door that can be opened only with a code to which the Afghans do not have access. Whereas a close partnership between coalition and Afghan forces was for years considered a cornerstone of the overall military strategy, recently the Americans have distanced and even sequestered themselves from their erstwhile comrades. The about-face is a response to a rash of insider or “green on blue” attacks that killed more than 60 foreign troops in 2012, accounting for 22 percent of all coalition combat deaths. The Americans claim that many of the killings result from cultural differences; the Taliban claim to have infiltrated the security forces; the Afghan government claims “foreign spy agencies” are to blame. Whatever their provenance, the attacks have eroded trust to such a degree that NATO has begun designating some personnel as “guardian angels.” It is the guardian angel’s job to protect the NATO soldier from the Afghan soldier whom it is the NATO soldier’s job to train.

There’s no comfort like this kind of love

Well, I finally did it. I didn’t think it would happen for a very long time, but I recently decided I’d lived alone for long enough, and was tired of coming home to an empty house. I didn’t know if I was ready for that big step just yet, not sure if I was ready for that kind of commitment, but there are just times when you have to take that big leap of faith, and hope it all works out.

I’ve had dogs all my life, and I’ve always been very thankful for that. My family was always fond of dogs and my father was a sort of “St. Francis” when it came to animals. He could approach any pet – even a stray – and it would sense something there and just walk right up to him. I always thought that was pretty cool. I am a lot like my father, though I don’t have that particular ability.

My father was always busy doing something and was rarely home. I don’t have many memories of him just sitting around and relaxing. Having a dog helped him with that. He always seemed very happy whenever he was spending time with the dog, and that works for me as well. I don’t relax easily, and rarely just sit and do nothing. But once in a while I will just sit down on the floor and love the dog up, and the world seems absolutely perfect in those moments.

Dogs help us with a lot of things; processing emotion being one of them. And perhaps it’s one of the most important abilities a dog has, to simply accept and comfort those that care for it. When I was a junior in high school and my mother unexpectedly died, it left a big hole in my life. My father and I were not close then, so being home without my mother there was difficult. Our family dog offered comfort and solace that my father, deep in his grief, could not.

In my 20s, when I was in the middle of building my career, I was abruptly told one day to gather my things and leave. I didn’t see it coming whatsoever and it was quite a shock. My family was young and I felt like I had let them down in huge way. My world seemed like it was crashing around me. Stunned, I went home and collapsed on the floor and sobbed uncontrollably with the dog in my arms for what felt like hours.

Many years later, finding myself separated after more than 20 years of marriage, friends and family were suddenly scarce. I spent an entire summer alone in a big, empty house, struggling to make sense of it all. I spent countless nights lying on the floor crying while hugging the dog, trying to figure out where things went wrong.

And now, a magnet on my fridge proclaims “When all else fails, hug the dog.” Funny how dogs can be such good therapy by just being there. They are such good listeners.

Dogs are also good at reminding you of things you might forget about. Being an enthusiastic and driven person, I have a tendency to obsess about a project and getting it done within a certain amount of time. This can drive other people mad, or at least push them to the point of frustration.

People have the tendency to nag at that time, but dogs never do. They simply walk into the room, push their nose under your elbow, and look at you sweetly while happily wagging their tail. Who can decline such a ridiculously friendly invitation? We are told to try and live in the “now” but dogs are always there. How wonderful they know to come and rescue us from ourselves.

And who has more fun than a dog? The way they enjoy life is something we should all try to emulate. Exploring with abandon, greeting strangers without prejudice, getting all excited about simple, silly things, enjoying a good belly rub. We should all be so happy with so little.

Dogs are pretty important. They have a sense of humor and know how to use it. When I get home at the end of the day, the amazing happy dance we do together is so much better than just coming home and saying “Honey, I’m home!” to a mirror in the hallway.

There is much wiggling, wagging and heavy leaning, as she knows that we are heading out for an adventure as soon as I can clip on her leash. I have to say, I can think of few things as wonderful as an unsolicited face lick or two from a very happy dog.

We don’t know each other that well just yet, but we are on our way. She is choosing favorite places to lay down in each room, while I sit nearby and take care of chores. I’m not in any one room for very long though, so sometimes she will just chill out and wait for me to park it. And each morning she lets me know when the mailman has offended us by trespassing on the porch to deposit the day’s mail.

It’s lovely. The house doesn’t seem so big and empty, and having someone to care for again is fulfilling and comforting. She’s a great roommate and doesn’t seem to mind me “hearsing and rehearsing” my lines for a show, or playing music after 11 pm, and loudly singing along.

And if I stay up until 2 a.m. reading Stephen King, there are no complaints. Sometimes I hear her softly snoring, even if the TV show I’m watching is a noisy one. I think it’s safe to say she’s pretty happy and relaxed here in her new home. I am very thankful that we found each other, and to have someone to say good night to from now on.

He didn’t do focus too much one thing, but Wade was everywhere. With only 15 points on 12 shots, he was efficient, defensively hounding, and smart with the ball. He was four blocks away from that most neato of feats, the 5×5. He played like a superstar going 80%, which is what we’ve come to expect from this whole team. Perhaps Wade is finding his niche as that free safety-type player (remember that hit on Collison last year in Indy?) where he just kind of controls things as he can. Maybe the athleticism is slipping, but right now he’s just doing everything in all ways, and it helped lead to some dominance in Oakland.

TomTom review

I tested TomTom on an Apple iPhone 5 running iOS 6.0.2. The app boots quickly to a main menu that lets you navigate to a destination, modify your route options (if one is already in progress), browse the map, plan multi-segment routes, or change settings. Tap the Navigate To button, and you’ll see options for navigating to your home, favourites, recent destinations, specific street addresses, and so on. You can also navigate directly to contact addresses, geotagged photo locations, coordinates, or points on a map as well.

For the most part, keying in street addresses was a smooth process in my tests. Just as with the company’s standalone navigation devices, you input the city first, followed by the street name, and then the street number.

Searching for points of interest (POI) is also standard fare. However, TomTom’s POI database isn’t the greatest, and the category breakdown continues to make little sense. Food stores, hardware stores, electronics stores, and more are all lumped together in one overcrowded category labelled “shop,” while there are dozens of top-level categories for things like veterinarians, water sports, tennis courts, and tourist information offices, which is misguided to say the least. Another issue: TomTom has removed its Google local search feature, so it’s not possible to get around the internal POI database anymore as you could in earlier versions of the app.

Once on the road, TomTom’s app is easy to use but not particularly attractive, with bland graphics and choppy animation that’s more reminiscent of a three-year-old standalone GPS. That said, TomTom still leads the pack when it comes to displaying route information. You get all manner of data across the bottom of the screen, all of which updates in real-time.

The main display shows the current street, the next turn off, how far away it is, your current speed, the speed limit of the current road, and the estimated time remaining, distance remaining, and estimated arrival time. You also get 3D lane assistance views, which help with complex motorway or inner city street layouts, although TomTom’s iPhone 5 optimisations missed this screen, as it’s blurry and appears with black bars to either side.

One annoyance is that clearing a route still takes three taps on three separate screens, which is at least two too many. Rival Garmin, in contrast, offers a clear “End Trip” button at the bottom right at all times. That makes it easy to end navigation if you’re looking for a parking spot near your destination, or decide mid-route that you no longer need guidance. The latter is a common occurrence if you’re coming back from a new place and need navigation just to get to a major motorway, at which point you know the rest of the way home.

In a series of route tests, TomTom performed exactly as expected, which is to say very well. The company’s IQ Routes feature adapts estimated arrival times and matches them to real-world data collected from drivers. Combined with daily Map Share updates, which you can download right from the phone, TomTom’s app is arguably more “plugged in” to current road conditions than the competition.

Voice prompts were clear, crisp, and loud. They were also well timed, and the app pronounced street names correctly in almost all cases. TomTom includes several dozen voices in roughly two dozen languages; most don’t say street names, but a few do. You can also purchase celebrity voices for the app via an in-app purchase, with options for the likes of Homer or Mr Burns from the Simpsons, or Darth Vader or Yoda from Star Wars.

The HD traffic plug-in deserves a special mention. It places a bar on the right side of the screen that represents traffic conditions for your route along the way. It’s very impressive, and the traffic readouts update very frequently, and always accurately reported what was ahead – even on secondary routes, which was a nice surprise.

In one particular case, it insisted I exit a normally empty motorway earlier than usual. As I thought, “nah, let me ignore it and see what happens,” right past the exit, I saw brake lights as everyone ahead came to a stop. I exited just in time. The only downside is that HD traffic is an in-app purchase so you’ll be paying extra for the service.

The November election did not change the balance of power in Washington, but committee leadership in Congress is in flux and trucking lobbyists are alert for what that might mean.

Hill committee assignments are particularly important. During the next couple of years, trucking will have to track implementation of 2012’s highway law and prepare for the drafting of the next version, due in 2014.

Infrastructure funding already has come up for discussion during negotiations over the “fiscal cliff,” a combination of tax increases and spending cuts designed to be so unpalatable that legislators will be forced to come to terms on long-term debt reduction and tax reforms.

Transportation experts look to the several high-level infrastructure commissions that have called for more highway money, and to the 2010 Simpson-Bowles plan for solving the fiscal crisis, which recommended a 15-cent fuel tax increase. The idea is not dead on arrival, said Peter Ruane, president of the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, at a Bipartisan Policy Center forum.

“Politicians should have to have the debate,” he said. “The fuel tax is the most efficient, proven form of financing. The only time we’ve gotten any increase in funding has been as part of a grand agreement on deficit reduction. It should be considered, and it is being considered.”

When Carrie storms into her sister Dorrit’s room and demands the purse, the brooding 14-year-old denies any knowledge of its whereabouts. While rifling through her younger sister’s drawers, Carrie comes across a bag of pot. This leads to accusations of jealousy and spying and ends with hair pulling. As the girls tussle, a voice over informs us that the year is 1984, that Ronald Reagan is president, and that the family matriarch died of cancer three months earlier.

The fight is broken up by the girls’ bland looking father Tom. Carrie insists she has nothing to wear, because she didn’t have her annual shopping trip with mom. In an effort to comfort his eldest daughter, Tom lets her have access to her mother’s closet that has been left in exactly the same condition as it was when she was still alive. In awe, Carrie’s eye catches a green sundress, but her father holds too much of a sentimental attachment to it, “Not that dress. She wore it on her last birthday,” he says. Instead he hands her a pair of sunglasses which prove useful on the first day of school.

When Carrie arrives at school, we find out she’s a junior with three close friends: Mouse, Maggie and fashion-forward Walt, who give her the gift of normalcy while the rest of her classmates whisper and stare as she walks down the hall. The other big news on campus is the arrival of Sebastian. As he appears all heads turn. It is hard to understand why, because he isn’t especially appealing.

Turns out he does know Carrie from spending summers at the swim club when he was home from boarding school. That news pales in comparison to the fact that Mouse got herself an older boyfriend and lost her virginity over the summer, or as she puts it, “It was like putting a hot dog in a key hole.” Even for a high-school girl, that is uninspired dialogue. In addition, Carrie finds out from Maggie that she too had her V-card punched.

Emboldened by her friends’ sexual escapades, Carrie approaches Sebastian. It turns out that swimming isn’t the only thing the twosome had done at the local pool. Sebastian and Carrie had shared a steamy kiss. It was also her first kiss, and she hadn’t seen him since. While trying to work up the nerve to ask Sebastian out, Carrie spots her father coming down the hall. The only other time he had come to the school was when her mother took a turn for the worse.

Frozen and unable to speak, Carrie elegantly faints into Sebastian’s arms, and he lays her gently on the floor. When she regains consciousness, Carrie finds out her father was here to meet with her guidance counselor. They decide that Carrie might benefit from an internship that would take her out of her snug little suburban town and plop her into Manhattan.

The night before starting her new internship, Carrie again confronts Dorrit about their mother’s purse. It doesn’t take Carrie long to find it and see that it has been ruined; covered in nail polish. Carrie accuses her sister of destroying the beloved bag on purpose, but Dorrit denies the accusation. She tells her sister she just wanted something of their mother’s because Carrie got everything, “You got the purse, your 16th birthday, the start of high school; I got nothing.” Carrie has one of her famous revelations, “I never thought of myself as the lucky one, but I had precious extra years that Dorrit would never have.” The damaged purse offers a glimpse at creative Carrie as she creates her own custom bag.