Hitchcock’s ‘The White Shadow’ Discovered

AUGUST 4, 2011,
By Lucy Craymer

New Zealand Film Archive/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesA still image from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The White Shadow.’

Alfred Hitchcock’s first film, “The White Shadow,” thought to have been lost, has been found languishing at the New Zealand Film Archives.
The first three rolls of the 1923 melodrama have been discovered in the Wellington, New Zealand, archives, where they have been held for safekeeping since their original collector Jack Murtagh died in 1989. It remains possible that the second half of the film is also in storage but yet to be restored.
The Film Archive described the film as a “wild, atmospheric” melodrama starring Betty Compson in a dual role as twin sisters, one angelic and one soulless.
David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and author of “The Films of Alfred Hitchcock,” called the discovery “one of the most significant developments in memory for scholars, critics, and admirers of Hitchcock’s extraordinary body of work” in a statement.
“At just 24 years old, Alfred Hitchcock wrote the film’s scenario, designed the sets, edited the footage and served as assistant director to Graham Cutts, whose professional jealousy toward the gifted upstart made the job all the more challenging,” Mr. Sterritt added.
Mr. Hitchcock went on to direct iconic movies such as “Psycho,” “Vertigo,” “The Birds” and “Dial M For Murder.” This is the second “lost” film later discovered in Mr. Murtagh’s collection. In 2009, the New Zealand Film Archive discovered John Ford’s 1927 comedy “Upstream.”
“From boyhood, my grandfather was an avid collector — be it films, stamps, coins or whatever,” said Mr. Murtagh’s son Tony Osborne. “He would be quietly amused by all the attention now generated by these important film discoveries.” The New Zealand Film Archive said the two films will be preserved over the next three years and made available internationally, including in the U.S.
TV reporting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To3TBCieA2c
Cameo appearances of Alfred Hitchcock:

Scurrying over spicy curry

Of late, the mainstream media seem to be bragging of how in two instances, two multilingual cops saved the day. One helped a senior citizen to write a police report (conversing in Hockkein) whilst the other helped to negotiate 2 warring factions who were at logger-heads via his skill in Hockkein. Big deal, kudos to the police for being community friendly, bullocks!

It might work in the 50s and 60s, but in 2011, 54 years after independence? Two bona fide Blue I/C holders and Malaysian citizens communicating like a chicken talking to a toad? You cannot blame the education system as Malaysia boasts of 98% literacy rate.
I remember a friend of mine relating the following true story in the 1960s in the interior of Kelantan (Kuala Krai) where and when literacy was low and many births were recorded by policemen for birth certificate notification purpose as home deliver was norm. This old farmer went to the police station proudly to register his first born son. Being illiterate that he was, he engaged the policemen to do the paper-work...
Cop: Pakcik, nah bagi nama gapa? (What name would you like to give?)
Farmer: Bagilah nama mudah-mudah. (Give a simple name! -in Kelantanese dialect)
And so the newborn was registered as 'Mudah Mudah bin Awang' and to his horror, friends and teachers called his name with full of glee for the rest of his life.
And in the late 80s when an elderly Malaysian Chinese lady complained complained to the attending doctor that they are many dogs in the tummy, nobody laughed. Everybody knew that she meant to say 'angin' (wind) when she said 'anjing' (dog)!
It was okay years ago but now after 40 years of introduction of National Education Policy, which single-handed murdered the mastery of the English Language in this country, there is little reason to substantiate the lack of competence in the National Language.
The reason of this discord is the non amalgamation, jealousy and distrust that occur between the various communities propagated by the self-centered politicians in the country. Maybe we need an Anna Hazare type of politician to be here to set things right.
Maybe, when the living becomes more difficult, when the pie becomes smaller, when they have a common enemy, various ethnic communities may congregate to fight together the common offender like in the case of Singaporeans who are up in arms against mainland Chinese immigrants who find the pungent odour of fellow Singaporeans' (who were there since the inception of Singapore in 1965) curry offensive. The internet is also rife with photos of mainland Chinese acting in an unacceptable fashion - bathing by the road-side, urinating in the park, drying laundry in the children's playground and even adults defecating in public drains!

In years to come, I envisage, if things do not change for better, in Malaysia, there would  a further divide between the haves and have-nots as well as bumiputras and non bumiputras. This demarcation would be made more precarious when the newly immigrated Indonesians are easily accepted as bumiputras and the rest is best left to each other's imaginations and 'Nightmare at Elm Street' and 'Freddy Kruger' experience!

Singapore's 'anti-Chinese curry war'

What began as a quarrel over the pungent aromas wafting from one family's kitchen has bubbled up into Singapore's spiciest protest movement, with 40,000 people set to express their national pride this weekend by cooking curry.

The mediator ruled that the Indian family could only cook curry when the Chinese family was not at home 

AFP/GETTY IMAGES

By Malcolm Moore, Shanghai
16 Aug 2011
Curry is one of Singapore's national dishes, a dish that is equally loved, although in different forms, by the island's British, Chinese, Indian and Malay populations.
So there was an instant uproar when a local newspaper reported that one Chinese family, recently arrived from the mainland, had taken offence at their Indian neighbours' dining habits.
"The family resorted to mediation because they could not stand the smell of curry," reported the Today newspaper. "The Indian family, who were mindful of their neighbours' aversion, had already taken to closing their doors and windows whenever they cooked the dish, but this was not enough," it added.
Instead, the unnamed Chinese family took their neighbours to Singapore's Community Mediation Centre for a ruling on the matter.
Marcellina Giam, the mediator, eventually ruled that the Indian family could only cook curry when the Chinese family was not at home. In return, the Chinese family promised to try the dish.
The judgment incensed Singaporeans, many of whom have eyed a recent flood of mainland Chinese immigrants with some disdain.
Almost a million mainland Chinese have arrived in recent years, making up a fifth of the island's population. Singapore's native Chinese population have been particularly upset by the newcomers, many of whom do not come from the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong that provided the original wave of immigrants before the Second World War. Most also do not speak English, which remains Singapore's national language.
"I am incensed with a People's Republic of China family telling my fellowmen not to cook curry," wrote Rosalind Lee, one of hundreds of commencers on the Today newspaper's website. "Almost all Singaporean homes cook curry. The mediator should tell the PRC family to adjust and adapt to Singapore's way of life and not tell the locals to adjust to the foreigner's way of life!" she added.

Yet another case of plagiarism!

Still talking about Shammi Kapoor and his movies, here is another a-go-go type dance in a song which bears a surprisingly similar tune to the one strummed out by The Beatles 2 years previously! A pure coincidence?

Business: American way! (?Amway)

Thanks to GR for sharing this. Real food for thought! See what of mess this has led to..

It is the month of August, on the shores of the Black Sea... It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. It is tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.
Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town.. He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 Euro note on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to choose one.
The hotel proprietor takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher.
The butcher takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the pig grower.
The pig grower takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel.
The supplier of feed and fuel takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the town's prostitute that in these hard times, gave her "services" on credit.
The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the 100 Euro note to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there.
The hotel proprietor then lays the 100 Euro note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything.
At that moment, the tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his 100 Euro note, after saying that he did not like any of the rooms, and leaves town.
No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the United States is doing business today.

Come on Eileen!

This is one of my all time favourite songs of the 80s. We can see what makes the average working class English people in the 80s tick. Working for the weekend, burning all their wages on Friday and Saturday nights on booze and chicks (a hug, peck on the cheek and more, if you dare), lying in a stuporous state on Sunday and doing it all over again from Monday through Friday seem to work just fine for them. They know that the state would take of the nitty-gritty fine prints whilst they live their lives lively and discover their inner self and venture into the arts and art of living. Then came the immigrant wave of the Empire's subject with their values and their perception of life and how it should be lived. This immigrant suddenly were controlling the cash and dictating terms and demanding due recognition as per human rights demand. "Oh, bloody hell, you don't bite the hand that feeds!" and off they went looting and vandalizing....

(1982) Dexy's Midnight Runners are a British New Wave and Northern Soul band who achieved their major success in the early-mid 1980s. Kevin Rowland (vocals, guitar) and Kevin 'Al' Archer (vocals, guitar) founded the band in 1978 in Birmingham, England, naming the band after Dexedrine, a recreational drug popular amongst Northern Soul fans at the time. Big Jim Paterson (trombone), Geoff 'JB' Blythe (saxophone), Steve 'Babyface' Spooner (alto saxophone), Pete Saunders (keyboard), Pete Williams (bass) and Bobby 'Jnr' Ward(drums) formed the first line-up of the band to record a single, 'Dance Stance' (1979). The song only reached number 40 in the British charts, but the next single, 'Geno' -- about Geno Washington -- (featuring new recruits, Andy Leek (keyboards) and Andy 'Stoker' Growcott (drums)) was a British Number One in 1980.
The band members were disappointed with their share of the profits, and soon stole the master tapes of Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, their debut LP, in order to renegotiate the deal. The album was released later in 1980 and became a massive success. After the next single, 'There There My Dear' was a hit, Rowland insisted on choosing the uncommercial, 'Keep It, Part Two' for the following single. It was a failure, and most of the band members quit, angered over continual personality problems with Rowland. Archer eventually formed The Blue Ox Babes, while Blythe, Williams, Stoker and Mick Talbot (ex-Merton Parkas, who had recently joined on keyboards) left to form The Bureau. Paterson stayed with Rowland, who added Billy Adams (guitar/banjo), Seb Shelton (drums, formerly of Secret Affair), Micky Billingham (keyboard), Brian Maurice (alto saxophone), Paul Speare (tenor saxophone) and Steve Wynne (bass), releasing 'Plan B', 'Show Me' and 'Liars A to E' in 1981 without much success. Rowland then recruited fiddle players, Helen O'Hara (from Archer's new group, the Blue Ox Babes), Steve Brennan and Roger MacDuff, known collectively as 'The Emerald Express'. With the addition of new bass player, Giorgio Kilkenny this line-up recorded Too-Rye-Ay in 1982, a Celtic folk and soul hybrid. The first single, 'The Celtic Soul Brothers', was mildly successful but 'Come on Eileen' soon followed, and became a Number One hit in both the UK and the United States. Feeling that their role in the group had diminished following the arrival of the fiddles, the brass section of Paterson, Speare and Maurice left to form The TKO Horns, while Kilkenny was replaced by Johnny Edwards on bass and Billingham left to join General Public. With the singles, 'Jackie Wilson Said (I'm In Heaven When You Smile)' (a Van Morrison cover) and 'Let's Get This Straight (From The Start)' maintaining their popularity, the group continued to tour until 1983 with a nucleus of Rowland, Adams, O'Hara and Shelton augmented by other musicians.
After a two year break, Dexy's returned in 1985 with the critically-acclaimed album, Don't Stand Me Down, featuring Rowland, Adams, O'Hara and Nicky Gatfield together with various seasoned performers including Vincent Crane (ex-Atomic Rooster), Julian Littman and Tim Dancy (who had been Al Green's drummer). Rowland at first refused to issue any singles from the album, and by the time 'This Is What She's Like' was released, it was too late to save the album from commercial failure. The group disbanded the following year after a brief return to the charts with the single, 'Because Of You' (which was used as the theme tune to a British sitcom, 'Brush Strokes'), and Rowland became a solo artist with the release of 1988's poorly-received album, The Wanderer. Despite spending much of the 1990s suffering from financial problems and drug addiction, Rowland made plans to reform Dexy's together with Big Jim Paterson, although these resulted in no more than a solitary TV performance in 1993. Returning once more as a solo performer, Rowland signed to Creation Records, releasing an album of cover versions called My Beauty in 1999, which sold poorly. The demise of Creation meant that the planned follow-up album which would, once again have featured Dexy's Midnight Runners was never made. However, in April 2003 the group announced that they would be reforming for a tour and a new greatest hits album.

Getting back its mojo

Malaysia’s Penang state

After a slump, an early engine of globalisation is thriving again

Aug 13th 2011 | PENANG | 

IF YOU are going to have a heart attack, have it in Penang. So one might think, to the see the hospitals in George Town, the capital of this north-western Malaysian state. Patients are flocking in. Ted Mohr, the head of the venerable Penang Adventist Hospital says that he will admit 70,000 medical tourists this year. The hospital specialises in heart procedures and it will perform roughly 23,000 of them this year, including 550 open-heart operations. Such is the demand that the hospital is doubling its number of beds.

Mr Mohr gives two main reasons for Penang’s success with the coronary crowd. First, it is relatively cheap. Open-heart surgery that would set you back $100,000 in America costs only about $10,000 in Penang. Second, Penang’s hospitals are as well-equipped as many in the West.

Penang was founded as a free port by the British in 1786. Occupying a position between India and East Asia, the island drew merchants and middlemen keen to make their fortunes. Chinese, Indians, Armenians, Arabs and more all traded alongside each other. With its racial and religious mix, and dedication to the pursuit of free trade, Penang was in many ways the first custom-made city of globalisation.The combination of low cost and high technology is the main reason why industries across the state of Penang, made up of the original island and a larger bit of the mainland, are prospering again after more than a decade of decline. Their revival is important to Malaysia’s economy—Penang and the surrounding region account for 21% of the country’s GDP. But the renaissance could also have important political consequences for the country. Since 2008 Penang has been one of only four states (out of 13) run by an opposition party. If its politicians can claim the credit for the recent success, that should greatly help the opposition in the next general election, expected within the year.

The island’s fortunes sank as it lost business to its arch-rival, Singapore. In the post-colonial period Penang fell victim to the rise of nationalism. The region’s freshly minted republics chose to develop their own ports. Penang enjoyed a revival during the 1970s with the setting-up of Malaysia’s first free-trade zone (a “free port” by another name); this attracted big names in electronics, like Intel and Bosch, which built some of the first offshore assembly lines. But this boom was founded on cheap labour, and as Malaysia became richer other emerging economies, such as China and Vietnam, drew the assembly work away.

To recover its prosperity, Penang has sought to reinvent itself. With the rise of India and China, Penang’s location again looks very handy to foreign companies as a place to invest, as in the 18th century. It is relatively close to both big markets—yet offers advantages that trump Asia’s giants’.

Penang’s own “Silicon Valley” companies know that the rule of law in Malaysia gives them the sort of protection for patents and intellectual property they would not enjoy in China, and an ease of doing business that they could not find in India. Wages are higher than they were, but no more so nowadays than on the Chinese seaboard. The federal government has also spent liberally on bridges and the airport, making Penang better connected to the rest of Asia. And old George Town has been smartened up, which helps to bring in foreigners to live, work—and have surgery.

The result is another boom. Last year more investment poured into the state than any other in Malaysia. Scores of new electronics firms have swooped in to join the pioneers, along with an expanding cluster of 20 or so medical-device manufacturers. Crucially, most of the new jobs are in research and development rather than assembly. An American chip-designer, Altera, has a new facility with 1,100 workers in Penang, 800 of them engineers. Its head says that almost all the engineers are locals—which is good for Malaysia.

Whom to thank?

When the Democratic Action Party won the state’s legislative assembly three years ago, it became the first opposition party to triumph in Penang in more than 40 years. The victory presented a direct challenge to the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition that has ruled the country continuously since independence in 1957. Penang’s new leader, Lim Guan Eng, says that the federal government has an “ambivalent” attitude towards him, cutting off some funding but not undermining his authority. “They don’t want us to get any credit, but they can’t afford to see us fail”.

The revival of Penang was already under way in 2008, but Mr Lim’s new policies have helped it along. He has become the first governor in Malaysia to open up all state tenders to competition. This has entailed dismantling the special preferences for ethnic Malays that have underpinned the BN’s rule since the early 1970s. That was when the Malay majority institutionalised affirmative action for themselves, to the disadvantage of ethnic Chinese (a majority in Penang), who were perceived to have got unduly rich. Mr Lim claims that by reforming the system he has ended the cronyism and corruption that wasted money under previous regimes.

Adapted to the national stage, such policies could transform the way that the Malaysian federal government conducts business. Mr Lim says that the savings he has made by ending the “old systems of patronage” allow him to spend money on new social programmes instead, such as modest handouts for the elderly. These policies are popular, and the assault on corruption pleases foreign investors. Little wonder, then, that Penang has become a political weathervane as much as a lesson in economic development.

Nothing kinky about the Kinks!

Another British invasion group that attained decent commercial success in the music world before the Americans took over! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kinks
Even though they belted out so many melodious tunes over so many years, they were never really up there amongst the stars. That is probably because they are British and not sexy enough for the masses. Or maybe you have to die young or be in the news for all the wrong reasons to stay on top (like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean or Amy Winehouse). If you want to slip into a time warp to Kinks' music, check this out!