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Sugar, Spice and All Things Nice
The Picasso of Pastries, Chef Pierre Hermé Combines Flavors With an Artistic Flair
At fine Parisian bakeries, the chocolate éclair and tarte au citron are still holding down the fort, but at Pierre Hermé Paris—the ne plus ultra of the city's pastry shops, set up like a jewelry store on the Left Bank's rue Bonaparte—classic has a different meaning altogether.
In this vitrine, you might find an apparently familiar macaron, flavored not with traditional chocolate or raspberry, but with a mélange of mango, jasmine tea and candied grapefruit. In that vitrine, more macarons, called Mogador, shimmering orange and brown, are made with milk chocolate dosed with passion fruit. And taking pride of place throughout is the Hermé version of a classic—Ispahan, the chef's signature flavor combination of raspberries, litchis and rose petals, that is used in everything from a heart-shaped cake for Valentine's Day to a daily dose of pink luxury in the form of an Ispahan croissant.
At 51, Pierre Hermé has spent decades creating his pastries, and he shows no signs of mellowing. This month, in honor of Valentine's Day, he has introduced a supersweet macaron combining caramel and rose; the caramel prolongs the floral effect. Throughout the year, he plans monthly macaron launches, flavoring his biscuit-covered creams with everything from arugula and cucumber to cedar wood or olive oil. He might also offer a deep-green "Désiré" cake, flavored with lemon and strawberries, or a poundcake flavored with orange, cloves, vanilla and star anise.
The red-hot center of the Hermé empire, with nearly 30 points of sale in France, the U.K., Japan and the United Arab Emirates, is a discreet townhouse in Paris's 17th arrondissement, not far from Parc Monceau, and a short walk from Mr. Hermé's own home in the 8th.
On duty in his office, with its frescoed ceiling and easy access to a terraced penthouse test kitchen, Mr. Hermé is pointedly the brains of his operation, which includes 450 employees. But, after a few courtesy words, it becomes apparent that he is also the brawn.
Many of his flavor combinations seem like anything but crowd-pleasing, and some of his pastries—like a foie gras and chocolate ganache macaron—might strike some as downright disgusting. Does he make an effort to cater to his customers?
"We are not Procter & Gamble, PG 0.92 % " he says. "We don't make products that the customer wants—we make an offer to the customer." In fact, he adds, "the wishes of the customer don't matter to me at all."
"Pierre Hermé is really good at surprising you," says Paris-based American cookbook author and professional baker David Lebovitz. An alumnus of Chez Panisse, the Berkeley, Calif., restaurant that pioneered the locavore approach to cooking, Mr. Lebovitz admits to a private passion for traditional pastry, like a well-made lemon tart, but he saves a place for Mr. Hermé's white truffle macarons. "The French are not very good at thinking outside the box," he says. "But Pierre Hermé has shown that you can do something different and still be French."
Mr. Hermé opened his first boutique in Tokyo in 1998. His rue Bonaparte shop followed in 2001. But he was a pastry legend long before he put his name on the top of a store marquee. Born in Alsace into a family of bakers, Mr. Hermé came to Paris when he was only 14, for an apprenticeship at Lenôtre, a celebrated name in French pastry. After Lenôtre, he made his way to Fauchon, the Paris food emporium, where he overhauled the pastry, chocolate and ice-cream departments. And he began working with Ladurée, known world-wide for its macarons; it owes its recent cachet, in part, to Mr. Hermé's innovations.
Mr. Hermé's style has spread to other Paris pastry shops. A decade ago, only Mr. Hermé dared to present his pastries as edible jewels; now, it's not uncommon to see a similar effect at other pâtissiers.
'Pierre Hermé was a pastry legend long before he put his name on the top of a store marquee.'
Mr. Hermé doesn't balk at his imitators; when asked how often he notices other pastry chefs copying him, he says, "every day." And he isn't at all shy to reveal his secrets—the most surprising, perhaps, is that he doesn't make pastry anymore. He hasn't made anything, except for home-cooked meals, he says, in a decade. Instead, he sketches out his ideas, down to the gram of an individual ingredient, and then his team of chefs are left to execute his ideas. "I can taste ingredients in my head," he says, comparing himself to a composer who can "hear notes when he writes music."
He is also forthcoming about where he sources his products. His butter comes from Charente, in the west of France, and his flour comes from Chartres, southwest of Paris. He relies on cinnamon from Ceylon, and vanilla from Mexico, Tahiti, and Madagascar, which is then mixed in-house for just the right notes. He looks to southern Italy for lemons, except for a few winter months, when the French versions will do, and to Spain for almonds.
Mineral water is de rigueur. "We never use tap water," he says. "Never." But he is far less picky about what would seem to be his chief ingredient: "Sugar is sugar."
Macarons Chez Vous
Learn from the experts and make your own macarons at home. Here's a look at a few of the courses offered around Europe.
Lenôtre is one of France's most distinguished cooking schools and Pierre Hermé's alma mater. In Paris, special classes are devoted to flavor categories like chocolate and tropical fruit. www.lenotre.com
Lifestyle Vacations, the French-based company specializing in cooking vacations, offers both beginner and advanced classes in Paris, Sèvres and Versailles. www.vacationsandlifestyle.com
A combination gourmet shop and cooking school, Mmmmh! in Brussels offers pastry courses with an emphasis on macarons. www.mmmmh.be
Ganache Macaron in London specializes in off-the-wall macaron flavors, like Mojito and one called "Bubble Gum & Popping Candy." They offer a range of classes in macaron-making, and you can even arrange to have a class for a small group in your own home. www.ganache-macaron.co.uk
Mr. Hermé made a memorable cameo in "Kings of Pastry," a 2009 documentary about the 2007 crème de la crème of younger French pastry chefs competing for the coveted Meilleur Ouvrier de France, a commendation awarded every three or four years by the French Ministry of Labor. Mr. Hermé, a judge, was caught making a look of pure revulsion when tasting a finalist's creation.
Interestingly, Mr. Hermé admits that he doesn't always need to have the finest food when he is away from the office. He likes pizza, he says, and even fast food. "To understand what's good," he says, "you have to taste everything."
"Kings of Pastry" chronicles the fate of a Jacquy Pfeiffer, a Chicago-based Alsatian-born pastry chef, who gives over his whole life to the competition—and then loses. Mr. Pfeiffer, co-owner of Chicago's French Pastry School, doesn't bear any grudges. Mr. Hermé, he says, "is a great guy." The secret to Mr. Hermé's success, he believes, isn't just an ability to create new things, but to temper creation with tradition. "You always have to do both."
Back in Paris, Mr. Hermé is looking ahead to this fall, which will be a coffee-flavored one in Hermé-land. "Most pastry shops use instant coffee and coffee aroma," says Mr. Hermé. Instead, he will use coffee specially sourced in Brazil and the island of Réunion, and then ground in-house. His plan: to create a coffee Napoleon, coffee ice cream, coffee cookies, and two versions of a coffee tart. His goal: "the perfect coffee taste."
Pierre Hermé's Macaron Mogador
Makes about 2 kilograms of macarons
Milk Chocolate and Passion Fruit Ganache
280 grams passion fruit pulp
42 grams inverted sugar (trimoline)
575 grams Valrhona Jivara 40%-cocoa milk chocolate
105 grams butter
Cut the butter in cubes and leave at room temperature. Chop the milk chocolate and melt it partially in a bain-marie or microwave. In a pan, bring the passion fruit pulp to a boil with the inverted sugar. Pour the hot pulp over the chocolate gradually, stirring from the center outward to incorporate the liquid little by little. Check the temperature of the ganache with a thermometer. When below 40°C, add the butter and blend with a hand blender. Leave to set at room temperature.
Passion Fruit Macaron Biscuit
300 grams powdered almonds
300 grams icing sugar
220 grams egg whites, liquefied at room temp.
9 grams lemon-yellow coloring
1.5 grams carmine-red coloring
300 grams granulated sugar
75 grams mineral water
Sift the icing sugar with the powered almonds. Add 110 grams (or half) of the egg whites and colorings into this mixture. Add the granulated sugar in the water and heat to 118°C. When the syrup reaches 115°C, beat the remaining 110 grams of egg whites. Pour the sugar (heated to 118°C) over the beaten egg whites. Beat and let cool to 50°C. Once cooled, combine with the sugar, almond and egg-white mixture. Pour into a pastry bag with a No. 11 plain tip.
To bake: Pipe the mixture into circles (about 3.5 centimeters in diameter) spaced 2 centimeters apart on baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Tap baking sheets on work surface covered with kitchen towel. Sprinkle with cocoa powder. Let shells form crust for at least 30 minutes. Preheat convection oven to 160°C. Bake for approximately 12 minutes, opening the door quickly twice during baking. Once done, slide the sheets of parchment paper with shells onto work surface. Let them cool.
To assemble: Pour the ganache into a pastry bag fitted with a No. 11 plain tip. For each macaron, garnish one shell liberally with ganache, then cover with a second shell. Refrigerate for 24 hours; remove two hours before serving.


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What if YOU ran "La Suprema?"
Grant and Fr. Robert have re-ignited the discussion about Fr. Jon Sobrino below, so it will be interesting to see where that goes.
But I want to pose a slightly different question. How should the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith exercise its role of doctrinal oversight? Or if you want to ask the question more broadly, how should the Church make clear what its doctrinal boundaries are?
It seems unquestionable that there are times when making those boundaries clear is absolutely necessary. It is hard to see, for example, how Gnosticism or Arianism could have been tolerated as legitimate theological opinions without deforming the faith that had been inherited from the apostles.
It is also unquestionable that there have been times when the boundaries have been drawn too narrowly or prematurely. The actions taken in the mid-20th century against theologians like Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, and John Courtney Murray could serve as examples here.
Since the reorganization of the CDF in 1965 (which included changing its name), it has used a variety of means in making its point. The most dramatic cases involve sanctions against individual theologians (e.g. Kung, Curran, Haight). In other cases (e.g. Sobrino, Dupuis) notifications have been issued about the theologians work, but sanctions have not been imposed. The CDF has also issued statementslike Dominus Iesuswhich do not mention theologians by name, but which seek to define the boundaries of legitimate theological debate on an issue. In some cases, an even higher teaching authority is invoked for this purpose, as when Pope John Paul II issued his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, which was clearly an effort to narrow the range of permissible views within the domain of moral theology.
Needless to say, none of these approaches has proved particularly popular. No doubt there are many aspects of the CDFs procedures that could be improved. The fact that theologians who have devoted their lives to the Church emerge from the current process so uniformly embittered should give us pause. The experience of de Lubac, Congar and Murray also suggests that real harm to the Church can come from attempting to suppress theology that threatens merely because it challenges settled ways of thinking about things or the personal views of persons in authority. One must also note the irony that taking action against individual theologians almost always gives them a much broader audience for their work than would otherwise have been the case!
But at some point, the critics of any system must face the inevitable question: what would you do if you were in charge?
There are a few, no doubt, who would echo Voltaire in crying crasez l'Infme! Such a proposal is about the same intellectual level as calls for the abolition of the CIA or the Defense Department and should be taken about as seriously.
But most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, realize that there are dangers that must be faced. I have not read Fr. Sobrino, and cannot comment on his theology. But there is no question that there are trends in contemporary Christology (both Protestant and Catholic) that stand in severe tension with beliefs that are at the core of Christian faith. I, for one, would prefer not to wake up one morning and discover that seminarians and lay ministers in formation are learning their Christology from Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan.
So the question is one of means and the effective calibration of those means. My own inclination would be to rely more on statements like Dominus Iesus than on actions taken against individual theologians. As the discussion between Grant and Fr. Robert about Fr. Sobrino makes clear, the interpretation of the work of an individual author is always going to be fraught with ambiguity.
I also wonder whether the CDF couldto use a set of terms borrowed from the foreign policy fieldrely more on soft power than on hard power. There must be ways to shape the theological debate that do not require the explicit exercise of ecclesiastical authority.
I dont have a detailed set of answers and I know that this discussion has been going on for 30 years or arguably even longer. But I think we need some creative thinking. What say the rest of you?
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Peter, you hit on something when you noted that theologians on the receiving end of the CDF's corrections universally criticize the procedures--and sometimes the approach. Their testimony provides ample reason for readers of "notifications" to desire more argument and demonstration from the CDF as it exercises its role. The document on Sobrino clearly tries to strike a different tone, and it would be fascinating in this regard to see a copy of the draft the current prefect inherited when he took office (the document on Sobrino began under Ratzinger's tenure). And Levada has tried to make clear that his notification against Sobrino is about the theology and not the man. All good things. But there remains the problem of the text itself, which, I'm afraid, doesn't clarify much for the reader who lacks the time or resources to read Sobrino for himself. Sobrino has complained that the CDF misrepresents his work (he's not the first to make that claim). I found the CDF's translation of the one Spanish word they included (which itself sends up a flag) questionable at best. Given the nature of the document--to criticize as "dangerous" some of Sobrino's theological language--wouldn't it have made sense to provide more of the original wording? If, as the document claims, the CDF intends to aid the simple faithful in more fully understanding the truths of Christianity, then why not provide a fuller account? As has been pointed out by others, the lack of transparency hinders the CDF's credibility. Why, such critics have asked, does the U.S. Supreme Court enjoy respect even when large swaths of the public disagree with its verdicts? The process is open. What would be lost if the CDF had made available Sobrino's long response, which is judges for the reader as "unsatisfactory" (and that's all)? That would be unprecedented, of course, but improper? (If Sobrino disallowed it, that's another matter, but I find that unlikely.) There is also the matter of whom the CDF chooses to correct, the question of whether their actions are finaly counterproductive to their aims, as they describe them, and many others. But I've already gone on too long.
NCR has what is to my mind a balanced editorial about the CDF/Sobrino matter. There is recognition that a policing function is necessary in the Church as a whole, but that so is due process for an individual under investigation. As to the Sobrino case itself, the editorial notes his lifelong commitment to the poor, and it suggests that a creative solution might have been the issuance by the CDF and liberation theologists of a "joint document about the dangers to be avoided in Christological exploration." http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/archives2/2007a/032307/032307z.htm
I agree, this is an excellent question...Herewith a few rambling thoughts:For one thing, there will always be a keeper of rules, an institutional guardian (and this is not just the Catholic Church) and that is necessary. Unfortunately, that guardian will tend towards a rigid, reflexive conservatism that drives younger (usually?) creative (or so they believe) thinkers outside the power structure crazy with frustration. Hence the reaction of one young Father Ratzinger, who used to sit around with his mates during Vatican II in full Guy Fawkes mode, wishing the could "burn down" the Holy Office. But I agree with Grant, and Peter, that there could be better ways to do this. One request I could add to Grant's admirable wish list is that the "experts" who are charged with reviewing and--inevitably--finding heresy be identified. It is clear that the CDF is often out of its depth when reviewing many theologians. I also think Grant makes a good point about having the responder's full text out there, or at least citing it more liberally in any condemnation. Origen cited more of Celsus that the CDF does of Sobrino. Of course, if it weren't for Origen we'd know nothing of Celsus. So maybe the CDF is on to something...Style and process is important, and perhaps Cardinal Levada can improve that: E.g., the US bishops' note on Daniel Maguire--it didn't ocassion too much sturm und drang (though more than Sobrino's) and I thought was well done. Maguire clearly seemed to have gone beyond a line, and the bishops said so. The CDF and the Vatican will have to patrol those frontiers. But my final point (for now) is that this is also not all about theology, much as we would like it to be. It is very much about power and personalities. Ratzinger doesn't like liberation theology, and casts that in terms of ecclesiological and Christological concerns, rather than his personal preferences and experiences, which are very much at play. As are Sobrino's, and my own. But Ratzinger held, and Benedict holds, all the cards. I think as many concerns could be raised (as Sobrino has) about the CDF's Docetistic tendencies as about Sobrino's purported Arianism (or whatever he was accused of). Who guards the guardians? (Or, as Cathy Kaveny would have it, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?). This should be an open dialogue more thean a court proceeding with a pre-ordained verdict. As Paul VI (I think) said, the way to counteract bad books is to write good books. Basta.
The problems between the CDF and theologians are likely not of major (or any) concern to the broader Catholic community of folks in the pews. Nonetheless, in the interest of safeguarding official teaching, theological inquiry, and the broader church's right to be informed in this area, I would suggest that theologians and the CDF develop specific procedures that assure transparency, the opportunity for both sides to have their say, and dissemination of a final product that gives interested outsiders the views of both the theologian and the CDF.In practical terms, a theologian might prepare a draft, submit to Rome for comment, review any CDF critique, revise or not do so as the theologian thinks appropriate, and publish the final work, which, in the interest of intellectual integrity, would include the Vatican's comments.Any process should respect the writer, the reviewers, and the final audience.
The first thing I would do is watch my language -- something it looks like Grant Gallicho was getting at with the quotes around "notification" and "dangerous." But in addition to these words there's a whole vocabulary that comes up in these documents that I find counterproductive -- "deficient understanding," "objective moral evil," "purely sociological," "problem," and that's without looking beyond a couple of Sobrino pieces. Plus language infects process -- what do "warning" and "notification" convey to most Catholics except that there's something going on that they're not privy to? And not wanting to harp on the sex abuse scandals or the bishops or whatever, but is Jon Sobrino really the danger to the faith of the simple Catholics in the pews that the CDF claims to worry about? My faith at any rate is far more threatened by looking back over the career of Martin Greenlaw since I first encountered him when we went to the same high school. I think that symbolism is very much a two-edged sword. On the one hand, critics of the all male priesthood are admonished that the modern world has lost a sense of the importance of symbolism (in fact the two areas where I have seen symbolism most overworked are German Geisteswissenschaft and interpretive essays by American undergraduates in Humanities courses) and doesn't understand how the priest has to be male to stand for Christ in his relationship to his bride the church, at the same time as we are told that we can't reduce our understanding of Christ to the purely symbolic or poetic. I don't think that hangs together.I'm am concerned, as I know other people on this weblog are, with the use of "mystery." To me it indicates that we need to humbly recognize that at some very real level our language about God must be inadequate; sometimes I think that some in authority use it to mean that my formulation must be accepted because it describes a mystery.Finally, I have concerns about the overall state of Catholic intellectual life. I first became vaguely and not particularly inelligently aware of serious Catholic debate at a time when one of the issues discussed was the inadequacy of blaming the Enlightenment or liberal Protestantism (a far more potent force it seemed at the time) for the errors of the Modernists, which of course some felt were actually relevant in the sixties. I remember hearing quite interesting and learned sermons attributing our predicament to Rousseau. Now it seems we're getting back to that overgeneralized critique of the modern world, which of course serves nothing so much as the avoidance of self-examination; I look at Cardinal George as the worst offender.But that's a long way from my real question -- which is what, in the life of the church, does theology exactly do? Certainly it has to do something more than police the boundaries. Perhaps the problem is with me -- from Augustine to Benedict XVI I seem to be more comfortable with memoir than tract.
A series of great posts:-initate more dialogue with theologians by CDF; -have CDF made up of not only known but also a respectable cadre of theological experts-keep to "patroling the boundaries" of faith and leave the political warts aside;-stop obfuscating in labelling others as "dangerous" and if "confusion" is raised as a cause for concern, spell out what's confusing and say what is clear;-make the process open (let's have transcripts.)I'd only add two related notions:1) there is currently a pre-CDF problem that is huge in out top-down Church of the North particularly - little dialogue between ordinaries and theologians;-At the Central Vatican level, a certain amount of de-Romanization is called for with lots of respect for, and inclusion of, theologians and theologies from the South and East.-
A quick thing that occurred to me on the difference between the Supreme Court and the CDF: the enforcement power .1. You can disagree, intellectually, with the Supreme Court all you want. You can yell at it, curse it, criticize it, stomp on pictures of the judges. But what you can't do is ACT in a way inconsistent with its interpretation of the law. So, to take a neuralgic issue, no matter how much you disagree, abortion is a constitutional right -- if you kill an abortion doctor you're not engaging in defense of human life, you're committing murder under the law.2. The CDF, with the loss of an established Church, well, it has no physical enforcement power. It doesn't even have much intimidation, at least for non-priests. There's no index of forbidden books, it can''t stop books from being published or read. In Catholic graduate programs, people read Protestant theologians all the time. So they'll probably keep reading Sobrino. In fact, it would be interesting to do a graduate seminar on Sobrino and the CDF statement. The very idea of doing a critical seminar on a condemned writer and the CDFcriticism would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago. Now, I don't think the people at the CDF would mind -- in fact, they might think it's a good thing --we'd inevitably talk about the importance of Christology. So what's the role of CDF, an institution founded in a society where the Church controlled the society, in a new culture that includes free exchange of ideas (which is pretty much expanded exponentially since the internet.)?
Peter, I don't know Borg that well but do agree with you on Crossan. Crossan has done some useful work but his worst mistake is that he does not preserve the church or the people of God. He is basically a non-believer who lectures in liberal circles and appears to be Christian. He really does not enter the conversation much and does not make himself available for engagement.Very notable how many of us have listed the many causes of the breakdown of the hierarchy and advancement in Christology to the Protestant Reformation, Rousseau, Voltaire and the French Revolution. We might consider that the invention of the printing press really started it all. Certainly it made the Reformation possible.The 2nd Vatican Council is a creation of democracy. In other times, De lubac, Congar, Rahner, Kung etc would have been jailed or killed.Cathy, you are correct in what you say about the church having no physical enforcement. Nevertheless, before the pedophilia crisis there was a terror in Catholic institutions about pursuing scholarship. The hammer of Ex Corde Ecclesia is waiting for things to quiet down when the pressure is off the bishops. Peter talk to your professors about that.The christological question is important because we are quite ignorant of the humanity of Jesus which Vatican II attempted to correct. If we got that right the rest of it would fall into place.
We tend to think that in the market place of ideas truth will prevail in the long run because it is the truth and falsity is itself only a kind of half-truth--sometimes much less than half. Perhaps that is excessively optimistic but we are very pessimistic about anyone who undertakes to force anyone to believe anything or proclaims something to be true without making a convincing case and rebutting opposing arguments. It seems to me that the CDF or whatever it might be called ought to be above all convincing and clear in what its says. It ought to avoid obfuscating jargon and try to be persuasive. Its members should not merely be well informed, but also convincing. Above all it should be honest.
I suspect that, in most cases, the writings under suspicion have been crafted for the few, the theologically learned, and the rarified thinkers (not a putdown.)If that is correct, then why can't the CDF engage one or more of its best IDENTIFIED thinkers to publish a rebuttal book for the few, the theologically learned, etc.Pronouncements from on-high that do not give the suspect a chance to engage in fruitful conversation and defense of his/her arguments, will ALWAYS be viewed with justified suspicion. The heavy hand of the Inquisition, etc. Just because the Church "isn't a democracy" doesn't mean that it does not owe a reasoned response to ideas reasonably advanced, said response being in the form of a dialogue rather than a diktat.
I agree with Karl Rahner that the Church is not a debating society, but when a declaration suposedly definitive is set out it would help if it were also plausible.
I'm no expert on the ways in which the CDF goes about its business, but openness and transparency do not seem to be among its virtues. Perhaps a good starting point would be for the CDF to dismiss out of hand any examples of anonymous delation, to use that friendly term describing the practice of disgruntled people making anonymous denunciations to Rome, presumably fearing to use their real names. Clifford Longley, former editor of the Tablet, has put it far better than I, in an editorial of 28 August 1999 in the Tablet. If he is accurate, Cardinal Ratzinger, as he was then, defended the practice "on the grounds, more or less, that his was a small department that could not possibly police the whole Church unless there were people prepared to rat on their priests and bishops. (But what does that remind us of?)"Longley's piece is to be found at his website:http://homepage.ntlworld.com/clifford.longley/main99.htmlThere are many pieces in there, but search for "delation" and you'll find it.Nicholas Clifford
During the Modernist crisis in the Catholic Church (roughly 1890-1910), a French priest got into trouble when he proposed a radical reform of the Roman Curia. He would reduce it all to two congregations. The first would be a congregation for the defence of the faith; the second would be a congregation to defend people from the first congregation!Not too long after the Council, a Yugoslav bishop complained to Pope Paul VI about certain works of theology that were causing harm in his country. The bishop was annoyed at what he thought an insufficient response to his complaint on the part of the pope who said: "The way to respond to a bad book is with a good book." Card. Ratzinger also thought that policy was inadequate as a response to real threats to the integrity of the Church's faith.The issue is crucial because faith in Christ is constitutive and defining of the Church. It's most basic self-designation is that it is the "congregatio fidelium," the assembly of those who believe, as we heard in the Sunday liturgy a week ago, that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself." That is the conviction that gave rise to the Church, and it is the fundamental task the Church has to perform in the world, as we will celebrate in a few days, to tell people about this good news.How best to go about preserving and defending and communicating that good news, which no one else keeps alive, is the matter under discussion.
"The issue is crucial because faith in Christ is constitutive and defining of the Church. It's most basic self-designation is that it is the "congregatio fidelium," the assembly of those who believe, as we heard in the Sunday liturgy a week ago, that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself." That is the conviction that gave rise to the Church, and it is the fundamental task the Church has to perform in the world, as we will celebrate in a few days, to tell people about this good news. How best to go about preserving and defending and communicating that good news, which no one else keeps alive, is the matter under discussion."The above by Joe K is very well phrased, the substance of which, I believe, we can all agree with. For sure it is a fitting center for the dialogue to revolve around.

subset: commoncrawl


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The Jaffman hands out his year-end awards
As we finally conclude the 2013 season, we saw plenty of great things beyond the only undefeated 15-0 team in state history, Ansonia.
We saw the state's first 10,000-yard-plus career rusher in Ansonia tailback Arkeel Newsome (10,672 career yards, 187 career touchdowns). The Jaffman's Player of the Year is UConn-bound.
We saw a single-season state record set by Southington wideout Alex Jamele (29 touchdown catches).
We saw one of the premier three-sport athletes of this generation, Woodland quarterback Tanner Kingsley, throw for a state-record 8,393 career yards and 113 touchdowns in only three varsity seasons.
Other noteworthy players, coaches and moments from 2013:
Coach of the Year: Ansonia's 51-12 win over Woodland in the Class S championship game gave coach Tom Brockett his 100th career victory against only seven losses in just eight seasons.
Best offensive play: Backed up in his end zone, Kingsley lofted a pass to Mike Kenney, who caught the ball at the Hawks' 29 and sprinted the rest of the way for a 97-yard TD against Kennedy in Week 3.
Best defensive play: In Week 1 against Amity, Seymour defensive lineman Dan Hink batted down a swing pass with his right hand and dove for the ball before hitting the ground with the interception.
Best special teams play: In the same Woodland-Kennedy game, track standout Mike Lang returned the second-half kickoff 88 yards for a score. It was his very first opportunity on the varsity.
Most dramatic win: Holy Cross' Joe Kalosky's 41-yard Hail Mary pass to Gerron Pendarvis in the end zone to defeat Wolcott, 39-38, on the final play of the game Thanksgiving. Earlier in the season, Kalosky nearly pulled it off against Derby, but the ball was intercepted.
Runner-up status goes to Vincent Gambino's 21-yard TD pass to Jason Pelletier with 11.6 seconds left to rally the Eagles to a 48-41 win over Seymour.
Equally impressive was Wade Prajer's 12-yard TD pass to Steven Croce with 18 seconds left as Pomperaug
See AWARDS, Page 8B
beat Masuk, 35-32. Croce, Prajer, Kalosky and Pendarvis are all back next year, so stay tuned.
Best comebacks: Wolcott's 48-41 win over Seymour from a 21-point halftime deficit in Week 2. Derby's rally from an 18-point fourth-quarter deficit to beat St. Paul, 46-42, in Week 1 was nearly as dramatic.
Comeback player of the year: Hands down to Coby Vaccarelli, who underwent ACL surgery last year to become a two-way starter for Woodland. Coby injured his other knee in the semifinals against Bloomfield and will undergo surgery again. We're all pulling for you, Coby.
Best teamwork: The Housatonic-Wamogo team may have forfeited five varsity games due to a rash of injuries, but the players handled themselves maturely and understood the difficult decision made to insure their safety. Good for them, and good for coach Deron Bayer and his staff for keeping perspective. And credit the Mountaineers and Gilbert-Northwestern for keeping the Berkshire Bowl alive.
Best sportsmanship: After Oxford's win over Pomperaug on Thanksgiving eve, Panthers senior Sam Rubinstein praised the Wolverines and standout receiver Chris VanKamerik, saying that VanKamerik is not only a great player, but a super kid, too. So is Rubenstein, who earned a postseason sportsmanship award from the Colonial Referees Association.
Best assist: Gilbert-Northwestern quarterback John Lippincott picked up his phone on a Sunday afternoon in November and was willing to give me the number for his teammate, Ryan Ott, so I could write a story on Ott. It proves QBs do look out for one of their own.
Best quote I: "It's a privilege to play this game," said Wilby's David Hill after playing his final game Thanksgiving eve against Sacred Heart.
Best quote II: "Records can be broken, but our championships can never be taken away," said Ansonia captain Saiheed Sanders.
Best Tweet: Ansonia captain Matt Simon praised his teammates for creating great memories following the Chargers' final home game, a playoff quarterfinal win over Coginchaug. It was a class act by a classy kid.
A special message: Woodland assistant Jeff Scanlon told me this about two former players of his, David Hills of Wilby, a transfer from Naugatuck, and Jason Bradley of Naugatuck.
"As a coach, my goal is to not only develop football players, but to also be an influence in building the character of a young man. The best part of coaching is creating memories and building relationships. To this day, I remain close to these two young men. I spoke to both of them at some point on every Friday via text or phone wishing them well in that night's contest."
My sincere apologies to all whom I inadvertently left off the senior lists in our Thanksgiving section: Gilbert-Northwestern OL-LB Adam Issa, Wolcott WR-DB Michael Druan, Southington DB Matt Pellet and CB Mike Lange, and Wilby WR-DB Jason Chavis, and to Woodland junior offensive lineman Alex Varhol, whose last name was incorrect in a Class S championship follow-up.
And my appreciation to all whom I spoke with during the preseason during my tour of schools and throughout the season.
Please have a safe and healthy holiday season, and an even better 2014 and beyond.
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Edward Burne-Jones
Chiefly associated with the second generation of Pre-Raphaelites, Burne-Jones also worked closely with designer William Morris throughout his life.
Edward Coley Burne-Jones was born at 11 Bennetts Hill, Birmingham, on August 28 1833. Within days his mother, Elizabeth, died and the child was raised by his father, also Edward, a gilder and frame maker. While birth certificates were not introduced until three years later, a record of his baptism at St Philip's Church (now Birmingham Cathedral) on 1 January 1834 is stored in the Birmingham Archives and Heritage Service. He later designed the magnificent stained glass windows for St Philip's.
Burne-Jones spent the first 20 years of his life in Birmingham, then a grimy industrial town. His earliest memories are said to have been of the city's celebrations for Queen Victoria's coronation.
At the age of 11, the young Edward Burne-Jones was admitted to King Edward VI School, then situated in New Street. Demolished in 1936, the building was designed by Sir Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, the architects responsible for the Houses of Parliament.
According to King Edward's School's archives, Burne-Jones was regularly at the top of his class and won many prizes, particularly for mathematics. He also showed a talent for drawing - including caricatures of his teachers. Some years ago, the school's archivists discovered a series of small portraits and caricatures of masters and pupils which many believe to be the work of the young Burne-Jones, although experts have failed to reach a firm conclusion.
King Edward's School chapel; moved from the New Street school where it was the Upper Corridor.
In 1853, he went up to Exeter College, Oxford, and it was here he met William Morris. At that time, both men intended to go into the Church but, after a tour of northern France in 1855, Burne-Jones decided to become a painter and Morris to train as an architect. Both left Oxford without graduating. From November 1856 he and Morris shared rooms in London at 17 Red Lion Square, which previously had been occupied by Rossetti and Walter Deverell. Known to early friends simply as Jones, he adopted the name of Burne-Jones at about this time.
Enjoying the patronage of John Ruskin, who accompanied him and Georgiana on a second trip to Italy in 1862, Burne-Jones began to develop a personal style in which elements of Rossettian Pre-Raphaelitism were fused with the influence of classical art and Old Master painting. The discipline of drawing, preferably from the live model, was central to his art, and became a daily practice after he settled in The Grange, Fulham, in 1867. He had been elected an Associate of the Old Water Colour Society in 1864 - The Merciful Knight was one of his first exhibits - but he resigned in 1870 after criticism of Phyllis and Demopho, with its large nude male and female figures. In the same year he narrowly survived the scandal of an affair with one of his models, Maria Zambaco.
Concentrating increasingly on oil painting, Burne-Jones was a major contributor to the first exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, at which he achieved sensational popular acclaim. This was echoed in France with works shown at the Exposition Universelle in 1878. An appearance later that year as a witness for Ruskin in the notorious libel case with James McNeill Whistler was a less happy event.
His later work included many large oils, such as The Golden Stairs (1880) and King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1884) both in the Tate Gallery, London and several series of paintings, notably Pygmalion and the Image, Perseus (1875-1885) and The Briar Rose. In bringing these works to fruition, he was greatly aided from 1869 by his studio assistant Thomas Matthews Rooke (1842-1942).
Burne-Jones habitually reused preparatory drawings and designs for projects in different media, from decorated tiles and pianos to jewellery and theatrical costume, many of which are in Birmingham's collection. Two final collaborations with Morris led to outstanding designs for tapestries, dating from the late 1880s - the finest being the Holy Grail series now in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, where they are exhibited occasionally - and a plethora of illustrations for the Kelmscott Press, whose greatest achievement was the folio Chaucer of 1896. Reluctantly, Burne-Jones accepted an Associateship of the Royal Academy in 1885, but exhibited only once and resigned in 1893. In 1894, Prime Minister Gladstone offered him a baronetcy.
Sir Edward Burne-Jones died in Fulham on 16 June 1898 and was buried in the churchyard at Rottingdean, Sussex, where he had a country home.


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Robert Joffreyand the Joffrey Ballet(s)
Posted 16 November 2007 - 03:26 AM
First, let me say that if you want a biography of Robert Joffrey, this is not the article for you. Sasha Anawalt has already done a most creditable job of doing that in her excellent The Joffrey Ballet. Those seeking details will look there for attempts to pen this most mercurial of men into a corner, and still, like Stephen Vincent Benet's Robert E. Lee, there is a heart, "safe from all the picklocks of biographers." Second, I have to say that I was his secretary for a time (1975-76) and there are things which I will take with me to the grave. "Secret" is the essence of the secretary. But don't feel shorted. Those things are a lot like October 21, 1975, when he did NOT have an asthma attack (by the way, he used "asthma" to cover a lot, but I never saw him in acute episode), but was attending the Broadway opening night of Scott Joplin's opera, Treemonisha. There are some things so trivial that even now the only things I can remember about them is that they were trivial. When I undertook this project, I thought that I would make a catalogue raisonnée of his choreographic work, but there were so many "incidentals" as industrial shows, appearances a society events, opera choreographies and so forth, that I had to abandon that line of inquiry.
I have little familiarity, except in the most general terms, from having been a student at the Joffrey School, in and out for five years over ten years all told, and being given bits of quotations from the earlier works before "Gamelan" by dancers and teachers who had been part of the casts of some of those early works.
As I have said, this is not a biography of my former principal, and it is not a summary of his work as a director/producer. Anawalt has covered those capacities in great part in her work. Some crossover, however, must be allowed, as the function of one is so tied up in the other. Joffrey, as has been noted in many places, was an exceptionally private individual, who was able to commit affability and mystery simultaneously. There are things that I don't believe that even he could keep quite unconfounded himself. For one thing, he had told Anatole Chujoy that his "real name" was "Abdullah Anver Jaffa Bey Khan"; from the Dance Encyclopedia, this error was carried into tertiary sources and now appears as Gospel. At least the "Anver" is correct. According to his cousin Naïm, he invented it when he was about 12 years old, and tried to imagine himself in his father's home country of the Pashto area of Afghanistan/Pakistan, where so many interesting things are going on these days. The name that appeared on his passport was "Anver Robert Joffrey" and gave his birthdate as December 24, 1928. This passport was the one he was issued in order to visit Russia during the chilliest time of the Cold War, and the State Department, I suppose, checked its authenticity rigorously. The pseudonym he sometimes used for programming purposes, much as "George Spelvin" is used by actors. His father, known familiarly as Doulat Khan, had legally anglicized his name to "Joseph Joffrey" before Robert's birth. And he did not answer to "Anver". Neither did he answer to "Bob" or "Robert", at least to his subordinates. He was "Mister Joffrey", and those of us who witnessed others using an intimate form of address for him cringed inwardly at the effrontery, no matter who was the speaker. A dancer who left the company to found his own was speaking of the separation, and told a third party that "I talked it over with Bob...", and convulsed all of us. Maybe we wouldn't have minded it from family. I found Naïm to be as affable as his cousin, and rather more communicative. A "Bob" from him wouldn't send a shudder through my frame.
Articulating Joffrey's career as a choreographer is a somewhat tricky enterprise, for he reduced his own choreography for his company after the "Station Wagon Period". "Pas des Déesses" was a signature work, "Gamelan" provided movements for an often-forgotten fashion show and TV show of 1964 (an early infomercial) for the roll-out of Celanese fabric as a couture material. Diana Vreeland (doyenne of the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute) for years afterward would speak of "my divine Chel-a-NAY-say", as if it were Italian. Joffrey took the Lou Harrison score away, and the Joffrey dancers did passages from the Indonesian-inspired movements wearing costumes made from the new textile. Celanese nylon has very little "give" to it, yet spun fine, it is light and floaty, but other fabrics have since filled its niche in the fiber industry, and it is often found now as filler in nylon cordage.
His outlook on choreography was to fill gaps left by others, or to fulfil a programming need. At a time when everybody else was trying to do Balanchine Neo-Classicism with leotard ballets and movements based classically, but modified, Joffrey was a Neo-Romantic. If he wanted a Balanchine-like work, he got a real Balanchine. You can't get more Balanchine-like than that! If there were a similarity between Joffrey and any other choreographer of his time, I would have to place him more with Ashton than with anyone else. In part because of this affinity, the Joffrey Ballet ended up with more Ashton in its repertoire than any company outside of the Royal Ballet. He was very proud of his Ashton collection, and said so.
Some of his early works ended up influencing later works by Gerald Arpino, as "Within Four Walls" (1956) Stephen Foster score foreshadowed "Drums, Dreams and Banjos" (1975). He was also very conscious of audience taste. Arpino had wanted to call his ballet "Beautiful Dreamer", but Joffrey knew his audience. Whenever the sentimental old ballad was played in the overture, audiences giggled. On the whole, Joffrey's choice was better.
And we must address sex in here somewhere, so let's do it now. Arpino proved to be a lightning-rod, whose frequent subject was the erotic ("Jackpot" was about orgasms). Joffrey's approach was if possible more erotic by being less specific. "Astarte" was, after all, the name of a Levantine fertility goddess. (See "Ishtar", on second thought, don't, it was a lousy movie) In design, use of space, and the vocabulary of the pas de deux, Joffrey created a piece of psychedelia that was unforgettable. It was a work of its time, yet I believe it would be well-received if presented today. Joffrey's works, even from the very start, always seemed to have a lighting designer. He saw light as an integral part of the whole stage picture, and Tom Skelton and the ever-reliable and brilliant Jennifer Tipton were usually on hand to provide the needed part of the coordinated art. Even the ballets from the "Station Wagon Period" were wholly-produced items, even when it meant an offstage dancer had to run the lights, or move a piece of scenery.
Joffrey's Romantic sexiness even made it into the hothouse (one of the Wesendonck songs is "In the Greenhouse") bowers of "Remembrances". Much has been made of the dual role of "She". Who is "She, who Sings"? Donna Roll always made this part the motivator of the dancing which went on, usually to her left side. She was not a trained dancer in any sense, but her minimalist movement was always intense, and generated from within the music. Jan Hanniford, although a very fine dancer, also showed her acting skill as "She, who Remembers". Her vocabulary was very small in this ballet, but facial gestures, and the sinuous use of her arms and torso made her a foil for the dancers and her singing counterpart. Presumably, Francesca Corkle was Mathilde Wesendonck and her partners represented her husband and Richard Wagner himself, but who were the ensemble? Are they disengaged onlookers to the steamy-misty affair going on in the Wesendonck household, or are they having their own dramas, for one moment, the dramatic drop performed by Nancy (Yoko) Ichino and Robert Thomas from an overhead lift, or the significant looks by Joseph (Adix) Carman, sometimes inquisitive, sometimes assertive, but we don't know what he's saying there. Company members liked to say that "She" was Joffrey himself. Others felt that She was all the women in his life, his mother, his teachers, his co-workers, and that this was a love letter to them. One thing is certain. Robert Joffrey had his heart on his sleeve in this ballet. The one thing I carried away from this ballet was that the ensemble was all the rest of us, the company dancers, and the audience, too.
"Postcards" was a startlingly light ballet for an envoi, but in 1980, Joffrey was riding high, not a sign of illness, and all looked bright for the company only a year after a scary hiatus caused by a shortage of funds. The visually inventive Herbert Migdoll made a backdrop based on the interior view of the Eiffel Tower and clever setpieces referenced both Satie ballets in the Joffrey's history ("Parade" "Monotones" "Relache") and Satie himself. One poster stage left advertised "Le POIRE de SATIE".
But the most durable of all of Joffrey's own works is the redoubtable "Pas des Déesses" (1954), based on the central ensemble of Jules Perrot's old ballet "Le Jugement de Paris" as pictured by lithographer Chalon. As in the Keith Lester/Anton Dolin stagings of "Pas de Quatre", Joffrey essayed a riff on Romanticism in a beautiful series of pas de deux for the ballerinas and cavalier Arthur St.-Léon. The male role is extremely tiring, and when the company grew larger, some men asked that they not be asked to do another ballet on the same program. There are actually three versions of this ballet out there, somewhere, and while they are all blocked the same, the actual steps vary from fairly easy to very, very difficult. The version which premiered in 1954 was probably the hardest, and the one that reintroduced the Robert Joffrey Ballet after his spiking by Rebekah Harkness Kean, one of the easier ones. It was the first ballet I ever saw the Joffrey do in the early 60s, and I can recall John Wilson, having just danced in one ballet, rushing down into the pit to play the piano. The castings of this one show the versatility that was demanded of everyone in a Joffrey organization, with the first St.-Léon being Michael Lland, and his successor -- Glen Tetley?! My first St.-Léon was Nels Jorgensen, but he pulled up lame one day and was succeeded by -- Richard Gain?! And easy or hard, the St.-Léon part is always the same, almost brutally hard partnering, done with a velvet glove. There are lots of styles of dancing this ballet, too, and while I could describe them, you'd have to see for yourself. The 1965 Renaissance was the age of the Respectability of Camp, after Susan Sontag's ground-breaking essay, "Notes on Camp". Over-the-top was perfectly fine. The really hard and rather serious version returned and was on the program the night of the premiere of Arpino's "The Clowns". Both before and after, a more refined version was in place, and that is the version most people know today. Technically, it is about in the middle between the two extremes of difficulty. This is an important ballet, and should go on your must-see list, no matter who's dancing it. It contains much of the essence of Joffrey's æsthetic and work ethic.
As inner-directed as Mr. Joffrey was, the type of dancer he attracted to his companies was other-directed. I hesitate to use the terms "introvert" and "extrovert" here, as some Joffrey dancers were reticent about expressing themselves offstage, but all were real fireballs when they did go onstage. Joffrey would use the same formula with company-building that he did with repertoire-building - what are the other companies not using, I'll use that. The atypical body was often a Joffrey body, and he was able to mine a talent lode that many other companies either simply overlooked or even outright rejected. Boys too short or too tall? As long as they work hard, bring 'em on! Girls built with a blocky torso, or slightly shorter legs than was the fashion? They had their places in a Joffrey company. Of course, there were the "ideals", too, and they had a place, but the universal qualification for a Joffrey dancer seemed to be that they seemed to be telling a story while they danced even pure-dance works. A Joffrey dancer is a narrative dancer, among many other things.
Posted 16 November 2007 - 05:12 AM
Posted 16 November 2007 - 06:01 AM
Your writing is wonderful. Can we commission you to write an entire book about your Joffrey remembrances?
Posted 16 November 2007 - 11:30 AM
This is very helpful. Wouldn't it be wonderful if all ADs believed in getting the original work rather than producing dull, pale copies and/or variations of their own? (No names, please.)
At a time when everybody else was trying to do Balanchine Neo-Classicism with leotard ballets and movements based classically, but modified, Joffrey was a Neo-Romantic. If he wanted a Balanchine-like work, he got a real Balanchine. You can't get more Balanchine-like than that! If there were a similarity between Joffrey and any other choreographer of his time, I would have to place him more with Ashton than with anyone else. In part because of this affinity, the Joffrey Ballet ended up with more Ashton in its repertoire than any company outside of the Royal Ballet. He was very proud of his Ashton collection, and said so.
Somehow, that word "neo-Romantic" helps me to place the entire feel of the company -- the sense of a unifying spirit if not aestethic, even in the most diverse programs and despite its varied repertoire. It may explain the appeal of the Joffrey in a city in which the the top of the pyramid was already occupied by Balanchine and neo-classicism. The Joffrey of my memory was in no sense anti-Balanchine; it was more like a necessary companion to NYCB's neo-classicism. For me, if NYCB was the gold standard for ballet in New York, the Joffrey as the silver standard.
There are a couple of topics that I'd love to read your thoughts about.
Joffrey's Revivals
One thing that has always intrigued me is Joffrey's evident passion for reviving important 20th century works. "Green Table" made a huge impression on audiences. I'll never forget it and the feelings and thoughts it produced the first time I saw it. Ditto Rodeo, Parade, and the Ashton revivals. What explains Joffrey's passion for bringing such works back to life? Did the energy he devoted to revivals have any direct relation to his relatively small output of original choreographic work? How involved was he personally in the process of reconstructing these ballets? Any insights you might have sould be much appreciated.
Joffrey and Tharp
Deuce Coupe was so wonderful (at least it seemed so at the time) and such a stand out in the new rep of the company: is there anything you can tell us about the hows and whys?
Mixed-Bill Programming
During this period, how involved was Joffrey in putting together the mixed bills (that is, selecting which ballets would share the stage on a given evening -- or the balance of the season as a whole -- and in what order)? Was there a definite "Robert Joffrey" philosophy in how to go about doing this?
Posted 16 November 2007 - 04:22 PM
Mel were you working for Mr. Joffrey when he did the Joffrey Workshops? I remember one of them being held at the Ruth Page Foundation School and being so surprised that Mr. Joffrey himself came to teach! I wasn't enrolled in the Workshop but I was at the school and I was working for Miss Page in her office at the time. Do you remember who else taught in them?
During my time with the company, we didn't do any "Joffrey Workshops" but whenever there was a "Joffrey" program of anything dealing with students, he wanted to be there and up front. He might bring along trusted associates from the company, like Diane Orio, Rebecca Wright, or Paul Sutherland, all of whom knew what The Boss was looking for. He was a presence at as many Regional Festivals as possible, talent scouting all the time. When the company came to Ravinia, for example, he'd already seen quite a few of the local students and asked them to come take company class, onstage.
Posted 16 November 2007 - 04:25 PM
Your writing is wonderful. Can we commission you to write an entire book about your Joffrey remembrances?
Thank you, thank you for the roses, but whole tell-all books are not for me. I still have to remember discretion, and I still retain my loyalty to Joffrey himself, and his memory.
Posted 16 November 2007 - 04:34 PM
Posted 16 November 2007 - 05:32 PM
There are a couple of topics that I'd love to read your thoughts about.
Joffrey's Revivals
One thing that has always intrigued me is Joffrey's evident passion for reviving important 20th century works. "Green Table" made a huge impression on audiences. I'll never forget it and the feelings and thoughts it produced the first time I saw it. Ditto Rodeo, Parade, and the Ashton revivals. What explains Joffrey's passion for bringing such works back to life? Did the energy he devoted to revivals have any direct relation to his relatively small output of original choreographic work? How involved was he personally in the process of reconstructing these ballets? Any insights you might have sould be much appreciated.
Joffrey and Tharp
Deuce Coupe was so wonderful (at least it seemed so at the time) and such a stand out in the new rep of the company: is there anything you can tell us about the hows and whys?
Mixed-Bill Programming
During this period, how involved was Joffrey in putting together the mixed bills (that is, selecting which ballets would share the stage on a given evening -- or the balance of the season as a whole -- and in what order)? Was there a definite "Robert Joffrey" philosophy in how to go about doing this?
Firstly, Joffrey had "outside" choreographers in to set ballets on the company even before the City Center days. Job Sanders, Brian MacDonald, Lew Christiansen and others had works in the Joffrey repertoire. The choreographers he chose were not represented, or at least well-represented in companies which could take them to the people, which is what the Joffrey companies did in spades. The artists he engaged did quality work in ballet, and demanded a large audience. He gave them that exposure. He early showed a fondness for Bournonville, and between him and Lillian Moore, who was the head teacher at the Joffrey School, they managed to secure the services of Hans Brenaa to come in and stage little Danish goodies like Flower Festival pas de deux. Later on, there would be the William Tell pas de six, and Act I of Konservatoriet. He had learned the virtue of variety early on, even, one could say, as a student of Mary Ann Wells, who gave him a daunting challenge as a high school senior to stage an entire program of ballet on his own.
"The Green Table" came about as happy circumstance, as the Chilean National Ballet had only recently come to New York, under the direction of Max Uthoff, who was, if I recall correctly, the original Standard Bearer in the great dance. In that company were Michael Uthoff, the director's son, and an impressively powerful dancer/actor, Maximiliano Zomosa. Michael was dancing his father's old part, and Max performed Jooss' own role as Death. To the best of my knowledge, New York had not seen Jooss' choreography since before World War II, and its effect was practically seismic. Joffrey signed Uthoff and Zomosa and was soon working with Anna Markard, Jooss' daughter, who staged the work on the Joffrey company. As he was a great presenter of ballets, so Joffrey was himself a great audience. He seemed to know intuitively what the audience wanted to see, and he went after it, especially if nobody else in this country was dancing it. He was doing niche marketing before it had a name.
Doing "Green Table" was a technical crossover for the Joffrey dancers, as the vocabulary is not classical ballet, but Central European Expressionist Theatrical Dance. It was one thing to take on a known work by a name choreographer, but you're right, doing "Deuce Coupe" was almost like speculation, as Twyla Tharp didn't have any track record at the time of setting her distinctive work on ballet companies. Alec Ewing had pushed, pulled, stretched, and generally manhandled the budget in order to have a "cushion" in case of a flop. And we all know that "Deuce Coupe" was far from that! Experimentation became easier thereafter.
I think that Mr. Joffrey had gained his liking for the Diaghilev ballets firstly through introduction via the Leonide Massine-led Ballet Russe which toured every whistle-stop town, and for ballet in the 1930s, Seattle was just that. Podunk West in the bigger producers' eyes. All the more reason for a young dancer to feel grateful that they came at all! He also read voluminously, and could sniff out movies of old ballets (this was the pre-video era) to enrich his knowledge and develop his taste. Massine looms large in his restagings for Joffrey, because Mr. Joffrey himself had been a crowd child in "Petrouchka" and Massine danced the title role. At the time we took on "Rodeo", it looked like ABT was going to give the old heave-ho to all the old Lucia Chase stalwarts (1980) to make way for Baryshnikov's stalwarts, and Mr. Joffrey did not want to have that ballet set out to pasture. Again, the self-imposed test of "What's not being done? We'll do that!"
As far as what can be done in a season's program, Joffrey liked to spread things out, so that if you missed, say, "Viva Vivaldi" early in the season, relax, it was likely to be there later in the season. One of the few programs he wouldn't put together was "Petrouchka", "The Lesson", and "Pineapple Poll", all set-heavy (the set for "The Lesson" literally weighed two tons!) and many, many light and other technical cues throughout. "Might bend the grid," he said. That, and Penny Curry, our stage manager would have come out at curtain calls and dived headfirst into the orchestra pit!
At the time, it made no sense at all to me to put "Deuce Coupe II", "Remembrances" and Cranko's "Jeu de Cartes" as a program. It wasn't until later that I realized that the free-wheeling Tharp, the smoldering, sultry "Remembrances" and then the smart, snappy Cranko just about covered the whole landscape of ballet as it existed in that time. There was always a wisdom in the way he built programs and seasons, and it wasn't a Gnosticism. There was no "secret knowledge" involved. You just had to think a little.
I hope that this starts to answer the questions you posed.
Posted 16 November 2007 - 08:20 PM
The story about Green Table is completely fascinating. it shows the power of accidents -- or, more accurately, the power of certain people to imagine possibilities and seize opportunities that many of the rest of us would not even have noticed.
Another quality I admire. Today you are all too likely to hear: "It's not being done because it wasn't popular, and that means it won't be popular here either. Let's do the same thing everyone else is doing." The Joffrey audience of the 60s and70s was adventurous because the trusted the company's adventurous leaders.
... the self-imposed test of "What's not being done? We'll do that!"
I love it.
It wasn't until later that I realized that the free-wheeling Tharp, the smoldering, sultry "Remembrances" and then the smart, snappy Cranko just about covered the whole landscape of ballet as it existed in that time.
It would be great to hear from others who remember the Joffrey company in these years -- or from others who have questions.
Posted 17 November 2007 - 08:00 PM
Having a school in town gave the early (1954) Joffrey companies a single, stable place to rehearse, to take class, and to call "home". Even with mass transit, a lot of Joffrey dancers had a pied à terre nearby, thus adding to the neighborly atmosphere.
A later addition to the Joffrey stable was the Joffrey II company. It was made up of company-ready dancers who received a small stipend and a number of company-supplied shoes for the right to exclusivity in where they would take class. Originally, the second company kids were under the direction of Lillian Moore, the eminent dance historian and teacher (later directors included Jonathan Watts and Sally Brayley Bliss). It was Moore who convinced Joffrey that the dancers should be performing real works in their own programs. His idea was that they should take class after class after class, and Miss Moore rightly saw that as a kind of treadmill, with no perceptible advantage obvious to the students, an exercise in frustration. So Joffrey II filled the niche that had been left by the main company's performing in more prominent venues, and carried on the Joffrey tradition of taking ballet into places it had never been seen live before. The second company phenomenon came as a byproduct of the Harkness skunking. Mrs. Harkness formed not only her own eponymous company, but also the cadre called the "Harkness Trainees", who would perform in NYC independently of her main company, and also serve as the necessary supers and corps-fillers when there was that need. She had sedulously avoided the term "apprentices" because that brought in union considerations, and Joffrey did the same. Some of the Joffrey II dancers were actual apprentices, were compensated therefor, and you could tell who they were by suddenly noting the new name among the fairies in "The Dream", or even in the procession in "Illuminations" or in the crowd of the Cranko Romeo and Juliet or, to a lesser extent The Taming of the Shrew. "Petrouchka" was another matter. Yes, the Joffrey II dancers were there to swell the crowd and dance the masquers, but the crowd was mostly from the school, and even sometimes just neighbors from the block! Once we recruited the manager of the bank next to the school and his wife to play a prosperous merchant and family, and one time we got Mr. Balducci (of the grocery store) to play a vendor. This kind of casting hearks back to the first point, that of the Joffrey acting as a kind of community theater. It all worked toward the Joffrey ambience that was so effective in building audience. Even when I was only being the bear in the last scene, I had friends from Tuxedo Park and New Haven who came in just to see me do that. (By the way, it was a terrific bear costume, made the dancer move like a real bear. Mr. Joffrey had seen it in Buenos Aires, and moved heaven, earth and the budget to get it. One time, I looked out of my "mouth" and there he was, being the bear trainer. He hadn't told anybody he was going to do that, and the astonishment onstage read well into the audience.)
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expert advice MORE
Timetable for Introducing Cereal to Infants
Q: When would you recommend starting to feed cereal to a newborn?
A: Although many grandmothers and neighbors may swear that a little cereal in their newborn's bottle helped him sleep better, the American Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend introducing cereal and other solid foods until four to six months of age. Before that age, young infants need only breastmilk or formula.
In the first couple of months of life, a newborn generally feeds every 2 hours. If you are breastfeeding, offer up to 10-15 minutes on each breast; for formula feeding, offer about 2-3 ounces at each feeding. As your newborn gets older, she will tend to eat more at each feeding. If your infant produces 6 wet diapers a day and is gaining weight regularly, then she usually is getting enough food calories. Discuss your infant's feeding and growth with her pediatrician at each check-up.
Once your infant is between four and six months of age, she may start showing signs of readiness for solid foods. These signs include being able to support her own head, having good tongue thrust (can push food out of her mouth) and showing interest in the foods you are eating. When you feel your baby is ready and your pediatrician gives the go ahead, you can then start feeding her rice cereal, by mixing the cereal flakes with her breastmilk or formula. The familiar taste will help her accept the new food and rice cereal tends to be less allergy-provoking than some other foods.
Infants are just beginning new tastes and textures, so do not be surprised if she initially rejects your attempts. Be sure to try again in a few minutes. Once she gets used to the rice cereal, increase the quantity slowly. After rice cereal is accepted, you can then introduce oat or barley cereal followed by vegetables, fruit, and then finally meat. Introduce new foods one at a time in order to watch for any food allergies. Always wait a few days before introducing another new food. By doing so, you can watch for any diarrhea, bloating, rashes, or other signs or symptoms that may occur because of an allergic reaction to a food.
Soon enough you will be cleaning up pureed peas and carrots from the kitchen floor. In the meantime, enjoy breastfeeding or formula from a bottle until she is ready for solid foods.
More on: Expert Advice
Henry Bernstein, M.D., is currently the associate chief of the Division of General Pediatrics and director of Primary Care at Children's Hospital, Boston. He also has an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School.


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Monadnock Community Hospital impacted by proposed federal budget cuts
�We pay about $4 million in taxes. We only get $3 million in DSH. That amount in one year will be a hit to our budget,� Gosline said.
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(There are a few existing questions on Photoshop alternatives, but none seem to focus on reading PSD files specifically)
Say I'm a programmer working with a web designer and would like to implement a design she's produced as a PSD file using Photoshop. It's a fairly complicated design using overlays/animating layers, so the ability to examine the PSD file and turn individual layers on and off is necessary.
Is there an app available in Ubuntu that can read PSD files created by Photoshop?
Alternatively, is there a more linux-friendly file format that Photoshop can export to and still preserve layers?


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SWBattlefront.net Code of Conduct [UPDATED 8/11/04]
It has occured to me, among many others, that these forums warrant a set of rules. The following are heavily based upon forums from other subsections around LucasForums, so a quick glance for the regulars should prove useful for oldbies, and a thorough-read is absolutely a must for newbies.
v.1.1, August 11th, 2004
The Rules of SWBF.net Forums
The Consequences for Disobeying the Rules
And the staff's favorite rule, which will be enforced heavily (:D)...
Don't be stupid.
Rules drafted by Jed, and perfected/edited/approved by the SWBattlefront.net faculty. We thank other communities such as GalacticBattlegrounds.com and JediKnight.net for having great rules to base these on.
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Every viscous, hard to reach, and messy product you think of can be used in Jar~with~a~Twist.
It really does solve your container problems.
Standard containers enclose a lot of air or more importantly oxygen, the chemical that eats away at your content and causes a faster expiration.
In Jar~with~a~Twist, you encapsulate almost nothing but your product, therefore enclosing much less oxygen and extending the life of your product.
Jar~with~a~Twist allows you to measure exactly how much content you want.
Baking and dieting are much simpler with our twist up container.


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I think, the wordpress plug-in architecture is not MVC. So I want to use/do the MVC architecture in WordPress plug-in development (like cakephp, codeIgniter ). How can I use them in plguin development. Does WordPress support CakePHP, or other frameworks?
You asked multiple questions at once:
Q: I think, the wordpress plug-in architecture is not MVC.
A: Yes, that's true. It's not MVC in the Design Pattern Sense. It's MVC in a more general view: Model: Mysql, View: HTML/CSS, Controller: PHP. Main Frontend Controller is index.php, Commands are HTTP requests. The router is .htaccess (if you use pretty permalinks), the 404 controller (if you use that one) or index.php if you use the standard setup.
Q: So I want to use/do the MVC architecture in WordPress plug-in development (like cakephp, codeIgniter ). How can I use them in plguin development. Does WordPress support CakePHP, or other frameworks?
A: No, Wordpress does not support CakePHP or CodeIgniter out of the box. You can write an adapter for codeIgniter or Cake so that you can re-use an existing MVC (e.g. by encapsulating the HTTP Request and removing the slashes from request variables / the superglobals). But you can overrider Wordpress as well to just run any other PHP Framework Application as well, e.g. by adding rewriterules to the .htaccess and adding php files. It just depends on what you want to do.
You could definitely use an MVC philosophy in the development of a plugin, but you would be really silly to try to incorporate CI or Cake in addition to WP.
For instance, you could build out a plugin using the following pseudo structure (FYI, there are a ton of ways to build this, depending on your interpretation of MVC. This is just the quick example that pops into mind):
This might be a horrible example of a plugin structure, or even of MVC, but it is simply to illustrate that
I had this same question a while back, and at the moment, unfortunately, the only way to do MVC in a WordPress theme or plugin was to role your own.
So that's what I did, and I've been using it in my plugins and themes for a few months now. You can view the source on github here: https://github.com/philipwalton/PW_Framework It's called PW_Framework, and it's loosely based on the Yii Framework, a very good MVC framework for PHP.
At it's core, PW_Framework is a quick and easy way to create options pages complete with client and server side validation. It handles the ajax validation as well as all the WordPress security issues (like nonce), so you can focus your development efforts on what your plugin actually does.
All you have to do is define your model with the attributes, attribute labels, descriptions, and options:
Then you define the validation rules:
And the view would look something like this:
Then in the controller, you simply write all of your code functionality.
Here's a working example of it in live use: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pw-archives
The plugin architecture of wordpress by itself has nothing to do with MVC. But if you wanna do MVC WITHIN your own plugin why not. You're not obliged to use a framework, MVC is a concept which could be implemented without hevay framework see http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/38-The-no-framework-PHP-MVC-framework.html
WordPress is pretty much framework for itself, it takes care of stuff that is usually covered by framework with own (or bundled) code. Well, technically parts of it is BackPress framework but it's really very internal and not too relevant.
WordPress extensions (plugins or themes either) use provided WP APIs to retrieve and modify data. It doesn't matter for WP what your extensions uses, as long as it uses proper API to interact with WP itself.
So basically you can include and use any framework, library or whatever in your plugin. As long as you use WP API properly and it makes sense for performance and licensing constraints.
WP MVC (an MVC framework for WordPress) is the best plugin. We are using it now, maybe it will suit your needs.
I assume you mean using MVC as cakePHP and codeigniter do, not 'use an MVC framework' to create a plugin or theme. The second option would require users to download the framework you used as well as the extension files.


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Virtue and Vice: A Dictionary of the Good Life (Hardcover)
A Pocket Guide to Goodness
Few writers have inspired more readers than author C. S. Lewis -- both through the enchanting volumes of his children's series and through his captivating adult classics such as Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and numerous others.
Drawn from many works, this volume collects dictionary-like entries of Lewis's keenest observations and best advice on how to live a truly good life. From ambition to charity, despair to duty, hope to humility, Lewis delivers clear, illuminating definitions to live by.
About the Author
Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably the most influential Christian writer of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English literature at Oxford University until 1954 when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. His major contributions in literary criticism, children's literature, fantasy literature, and popular theology brought him international renown and acclaim. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include The Chronicles of Narnia, Out of the Silent Planet, The Four Loves, The Screwtape Letters, and Mere Christianity.


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Is there a way of taking a number known to limited precision (e.g. $1.644934$) and finding out an "interesting" real number (e.g. $\displaystyle\frac{\pi^2}{6}$) that's close to it?
I'm thinking of something like Sloane's Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, only for real numbers.
The intended use would be: write a program to calculate an approximation to $\displaystyle\sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{1}{n^2}$, look up the answer ("looks close to $\displaystyle\frac{\pi^2}{6}$") and then use the likely answer to help find a proof that the sum really is $\displaystyle \frac{\pi^2}{6}$.
Does such a thing exist?


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Our house has no bathtubs, only showers. We have very active 17-month-old twins that love the tubs at the grandparents' and we'd love to be able to have one at home. Unfortunately all the inflatable tubs are pretty small at this point and we'd rather avoid the cost of installing an actual tub. Is there such product that's large and we can just place in the shower as is?
When my son was 2-4 years old, we had this issue and used a large plastic storage box (without the lid!) for this, and it worked very well. They're cheap (and since we had just moved had many anyway, and when he didn't need it any more, it went back into service as a box), have no sharp edges, and completely watertight. Ensure that it's the high quality strong plastic (the ones you could pack dozens of books into) and not the stuff that breaks when you barely touch it.
If I recall correctly, the one we used had a 120L capacity, and it was only when he got to 4 that it started being a bit cramped (we moved to a house with a bath at this point, so never looked into alternatives).
The worst part was that when full it's heavy, so lifting it to empty the water was something I or my wife had to do (i.e. not grandparents when visiting), although this does mean that it doesn't get knocked over and spill everywhere. There's also some care needed to empty without overflowing the shower.
If you're strong enough to carry it, there's an added advantage of any tub in that you can reuse the water (e.g. in the garden) much more simply than with a real bathtub.
We picked up a tub at BabySam here in DK for our son - he's 3 and he still fits in it perfectly:
Volume: 90 liter. Dimensions H33, B69 og L82 cm.
They also have a new sort of bathtub, one that's foldable:
Its dimensions:
Unfolded: L:67 cm, B:39 cm, H:24 cm Folded : L:67 cm, B:8 cm, H:24 cm Weight: 1,3 kg.
We just have the tub on its side against the wall of the bathroom when it's not in use; the folding ones would take up even less space.


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Why did G-d not stop the holocaust? Is there anything written to explain why He would not have stopped it? or why He would have allowed it?
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This is a very broad and deep topic; the whole book of Job struggles with bad things happening to good people. After a lot of talk (and Job's friends trying to be helpful by saying "oh Job, obviously it's punishment for some sin you did, silly boy", and both Job and G-d telling them to go jump in a lake), the conclusion appears to be that it's beyond human understanding. But faced with the brilliance of G-d, the questions disappear.
Rabbi Joseph Soloveichik referred to questions about the Holocaust as "an exercise in futility." His colleague Rabbi Menachem Mendel Shneurson (the 7th Lubavitcher Rebbe) said that anyone believing in a merciful and omnipotent G-d is obligated to be challenged by what happened, yet we have no good answers.
The simplest answer here is that G-d gave humans free will; if people can choose to do good or evil, that means they are able to do good or evil. Humans chose to do a great deal of evil 1939--1945. Still we're left with asking when G-d interferes with human plans and when not, which is again beyond our comprehension. We do have the notion that once it was decided that an entire community will perish, that applies "wholesale"; even a few good people within it may not be saved, barring exceptional merit or Divine purpose. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein escaped Europe in 1937 and became the rabbinic backbone of post-Holocaust American Orthodoxy; he viewed his escape from the Holocaust as a sign of his calling to serve the people. People would ask why he wasted so much of his time answering all sorts of questions from all sorts of people; he replied "the rabbis who took themselves seriously aren't around anymore." But that explains one person, not the group effect.
To claim it's a punishment for sin is quite complicated, put mildly, and immediately leads to finger-pointing. Some have claimed it was the sin of Zionism; others, the sin of opposing Zionism. As Job told his "friends", let's not go there.
I've heard survivors say they have no questions, it was massive punishment just as the Bible says may happen. I've heard non-survivors say it can't be explained. We may not have better answers than that.
A helpful thought I heard on the subject from Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein is from Maharal; that sometimes G-d lets great evil grow quite large, to show it can still be defeated.
With all that in mind, we move forward.
(Much of this is summarized from a talk on the subject from Rabbi Adlerstein I heard several years ago, as well as an mp3 from yutorah by Rabbi Shneur Leiman on theodicy.)
The meshech chochmah, writing decades before the holocaust, describes the pattern of Jewish History. He explains how the Jews first arrive at a place and focus on Torah and mitzvos, but then later generations become comfortable, and begin slacking off in observance and forgetting they're in exile. Eventually this reaches the point that they are exiled again. He predicts that a similar pattern will happen in Germany, for "they say Berlin is Jerusalem", and abandoned the Mitzvos. The actual 'exile' that happened was far worse than the previous exiles in history, but there it had also been a much greater change in society. Though no one in this world can fully understand how God runs the world or why bad things happen to good people.
The meshech chochmah is available here: http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/vl/mhochma/mhochma15.pdf (p. 244-245)
You are asking why bad things happen to good people if God is omnipotent and could therefore stop it. But if He does, then what happens to free will? This is too big a topic for a Q&A site. The topic you're looking for is called "theodicy".
The simple reason is that we don't know why because we have limited human intellect (like the parable the Rebbe gives of a person who never heard of modern technology showing up in an operating room).
It can be compared to why Hashem punished Pharaoh for enslaving the Jews if it was Hashem who made them slaves in Egypt in the first place? The answer is that even though Hashem decreed that the Jews would be slaves, Pharaoh of his own free will treated them excessively harsh and that was what he was punished for. So even though Hashem put the Jews at the German's mercy, it was the Germans who decided to use that control for horrors.
Why didn't Hashem stop it? He did, in 1945.
There have been many tragedies which have befallen the Jewish people throughout history, and it is one of the weightiest theological questions. I won't address the holocaust directly, but just provide a short general response.
The Torah itself spells out with a large amount of detail the terrible things that will happen to the Jews if they do not keep the Torah. It also refers to the concept of 'hester panim', that if the Jews sin, God will 'hide' so-to-speak. This means that He will remove any form of protection from them, and not prevent terrible things from happening. In fact, even the righteous are not protected when this happens. Only when the people are at a high level do they merit Divine protection.
I heared that G-d gave us the holocaust because we broke the "Contract" with him through the: 1)assimilation 2)Secularism 3)Masterbation
I heared these some time ago so I am not sure that Secularism is one of them but I am positive about the other two.


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Last year's number five overall was deemed worthy of United's secound-round selection in 2014The Chivas USA garage sale continues, as the Goats sent second-year forward Casey Townsend to D.C. United in exchange for the capital club's natural second-round SuperDraft pick in 2014.
Townsend, 23, returns to an area where he's familiar with, having played college soccer for the University of Maryland. He is the sixth player to leave Chivas USA since Jose Luis Sanchez Sola was named manager last month, and veteran star Shalrie Joseph could be next to follow.
Townsend recorded one goal and two assists in 17 games for Chivas in his rookie season.
Follow GOAL.COM USA on


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I have plotted 30,000+ points in QGIS by postcode, various data items for each. How do I resize these plots based on the activity at each of these points i.e. small dot for <100, larger dot for 100-200 and larger dot for 200+?
If you only have a few categories you want to map, then the rule-based rendering (Style tab under Properties) can give you different symbols based on values of an attribute.
You'll want to make three rules, each of which has a different symbol size and a rule for how to classify it. For example, in the Rule Properties dialog:
Then for the next category:
... and so on for other categories.
Proportional symbols are something I really miss as an automatic function in QGIS - it's probably the only function that ArcGIS has that I really need anymore.
Update I assume you have a spatial point file with one point for each of PC1, PC2, etc? Given the data in your comment:
You will need to summarise the number of rows where each locator appears and join it to your point shapefile.
While this is an ideal situation to use a database (sqlite, postgis, mysql), here's a way to do it with tools you'll have (or can get easily):
You will now have a new column in your point shapefile called 'Activity' which you can use to create different symbol sizes, as above.
Note: if you're doing this a lot, it's definitely worth developing a database to store both your activity data and point file!
Update the second (and last) ... using sqlite
I find the spatialite-gui application the easiest and often quickest way to deal with spatialite dbs - it does all the spatial refs / geometry columns by default and it's easy to import shapefiles and other tables. In spatialite-gui, create your example.sqlite and:
In QGIS, I like to use the DB Manager plugin to run SQL commands (you'll need to install it). After you've added the example.sqlite points layer, you'll have access to the .sqlite database in the plugin. Open it, then select the example.sqlite db in the tree and click 'SQL window'. You can use something like:
Where: bna_pts is your imported shapefile and bna_acts is the activity CSV, and 'Loc' is the locator name. Execute it, select 'load as new layer', give it a name, and you have the points file with 'Activity' as the total number of activities at each point.
You can set this up far more automatically - read up on sqlite!
As far as I know, this is not supported by default.
The feature that comes closest is the "Point Displacement Renderer". With some modifications, it should be possible to to change it to your desired behavior.


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A large cock, often used to deflower virgin holes. Usually belongs to a stud.
Tonight was going to be a typical Friday for Duke. He'd have a few beers, meet someone, and - before the night was over - his cherrybuster would deflower another virgin ass.
作者 OhMarySunshine 2007年4月05日
Trending Now
Top Definition
The lucky guy who was the first to have sex with a virgin.
"Yes, if you had sex with a virgin, you definitally are a cherry buster!"
作者 truckintim87 2009年4月29日


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Graphic Design
These courses will deal with the fundamentals of generating two-dimensional design as a specific visual communications tool. The underlying premise of these courses is the making of art and design intended for specific messages. This discipline differs from the limitless boundaries of fine art where the message is made purely as personal expression. In the graphic design industry, the maker is challenged to communicate a specific message to a viewer or multiple viewers (audience).
The study of graphic design will develop necessary skills and experiences with both the making and the reading of visual languages.
Skills alone do not make one a graphic designer. Design is based on communicating a concept or idea to one or many people. A student's skills will develop through their understanding and appreciation of applied concepts and visual relationships. It is the intention of these classes to get students to not only learn the skills and methods of graphic design, but to instill in each student a perspective from which they will see the world around them in a new, more interesting and more intelligent way.
Studio: 6 hours
Catalog Course Description - PDF file* (for online versions, see Available Courses)
This page developed and maintained by Department of Art. Send comments and suggestions to firstname.lastname@example.com.


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Today I upgraded from 12.04 to 12.10. My only problem was the system update messing with my fonts settings (which was relatively easy to solve with some 5/10 minutes of tinkering around).
Kamals PPA also supports the 12.10.
My wireless is acting very weird. When I'm at home, my computer is always connected to my router. It's fast, and works fine. However, when I am at school, or far away from my router at home, the internet works for only a short amount of time. Then, it disconnects. I have to delete the connection, and restart the computer to get the connection back. Very frustrating. Any ideas?
Last edited by Mr. Picklesworth; November 17th, 2012 at 09:56 PM. Reason: I wrote "turn off wifi power" originally, but I meant "turn off wifi power saving." Oops!
I followed the instructions there:
The idea is to disable the "n" protocol ( = very high speed )Code:echo "options iwlwifi 11n_disable=1" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf sudo modprobe -rfv iwlwifi sudo modprobe -v iwlwifi
So, yes, you don't get top speed (max is now 54Mb/s)
but it seems much more stable
hope this helps
So I have just received my xps 13, and I'm going to have a few questions.
So far it works pretty well.
First question: is there a way to get the "middle button" from the touchpad ?
Last edited by sanette; November 17th, 2012 at 11:19 AM.
I'm on 12.10 since a while, and I just experiencing a couple of annoying issues.
First one: disk is checked at every boot. Looks like shutdown is not so clean (at least, I found a bug on launchpad mentioning it) and so the disk is not unmounted properly.
Second (and more annoying) one: sometimes lightdm crashes on start. So, I have to go in tty1, login and make it start by hand (sudo start lightdm).
Hi everybody,
I have just bought a brand new Dell Xps 13. I made a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.10 and added the sputnik ppa.
Everything works very well (trackpad, wifi,..) the only problem I have is that I can't change the brightness.
It seems that the brightness is fixed when I switch on the computer (low brigthness if using battery, high brigthness otherwise) and I can't change it inside Ubuntu. Has someone any idea how I could solve this?
Thank you very much