The Age of Innocence centers on an upper-class couple’s impending marriage, and the introduction of a woman plagued by scandal whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assumptions and morals of 1870s’ New York society, it never devolves into an outright condemnation of the institution. In fact, Wharton considered this novel an “apology” for her earlier, more brutal and critical novel, The House of Mirth. Not to be overlooked is Wharton’s attention to detailing the charms and customs of the upper caste. The novel is lauded for its accurate portrayal of how the 19th-century East Coast American upper class lived, and this, combined with the social tragedy, earned Wharton a Pulitzer Prize — the first Pulitzer awarded to a woman. Edith Wharton was 58 years old at publication; she lived in that world, and saw it change dramatically by the end of World War I. The title is an ironic comment on the polished outward manners of New York society, when compared to its inward machinations.
The Age of Innocence
Mar 5
WASHINGTON — A baby born with the virus that causes AIDS appears to have been cured, scientists announced Sunday, describing the case of a child from Mississippi who’s now 2½ and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.
There’s no guarantee the child will remain healthy, although sophisticated testing uncovered just traces of the virus’ genetic material still lingering. If so, it would mark only the world’s second reported cure.
Specialists say Sunday’s announcement, at a major AIDS meeting in Atlanta, offers promising clues for efforts to eliminate HIV infection in children, especially in AIDS-plagued African countries where too many babies are born with the virus.
“You could call this about as close to a cure, if not a cure, that we’ve seen,” Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, who is familiar with the findings, told The Associated Press.
A doctor gave this baby faster and stronger treatment than is usual, starting a three-drug infusion within 30 hours of birth. That was before tests confirmed the infant was infected and not just at risk from a mother whose HIV wasn’t diagnosed until she was in labor.
“I just felt like this baby was at higher-than-normal risk, and deserved our best shot,” Dr. Hannah Gay, a pediatric HIV specialist at the University of Mississippi, said in an interview.
That fast action apparently knocked out HIV in the baby’s blood before it could form hideouts in the body. Those so-called reservoirs of dormant cells usually rapidly reinfect anyone who stops medication, said Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. She led the investigation that deemed the child “functionally cured,” meaning in long-term remission even if all traces of the virus haven’t been completely eradicated.
Next, Persaud’s team is planning a study to try to prove that, with more aggressive treatment of other high-risk babies. “Maybe we’ll be able to block this reservoir seeding,” Persaud said.
No one should stop anti-AIDS drugs as a result of this case, Fauci cautioned.
But “it opens up a lot of doors” to research if other children can be helped, he said. “It makes perfect sense what happened.”
Better than treatment is to prevent babies from being born with HIV in the first place.
About 300,000 children were born with HIV in 2011, mostly in poor countries where only about 60 percent of infected pregnant women get treatment that can keep them from passing the virus to their babies. In the U.S., such births are very rare because HIV testing and treatment long have been part of prenatal care.
“We can’t promise to cure babies who are infected. We can promise to prevent the vast majority of transmissions if the moms are tested during every pregnancy,” Gay stressed.
The only other person considered cured of the AIDS virus underwent a very different and risky kind of treatment — a bone marrow transplant from a special donor, one of the rare people who is naturally resistant to HIV. Timothy Ray Brown of San Francisco has not needed HIV medications in the five years since that transplant.
The Mississippi case shows “there may be different cures for different populations of HIV-infected people,” said Dr. Rowena Johnston of amFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. That group funded Persaud’s team to explore possible cases of pediatric cures.
There weren’t too many surprises from last night’s Oscars show, but there was one moment in the ceremony that was truly unexpected: although Jack Nicholson took the stage to announce the Best Picture winner—Argo, in case you missed it—he didn’t share the results. In fact, it was Michelle Obama, appearing via a live satellite feed, who opened the all-important envelope.
The First Lady’s involvement was kept secret up until the last moment — she wasn’t even included on the show production schedule, reports Deadline. The White House’s official statement on the event said that the First Lady, a big movie fan, was excited to take part in the presenting of such a significant honor. The idea to do the announcement via satellite came from Harvey Weinstein’s daughter Lily Weinstein, says Roger Friedman at ShowBiz411, after it became clear that there was no way the First Lady would make it to Los Angeles for the event; Sunday night was also the evening of the National Governors Association Dinner at the White House.
Many thing could have gone wrong in this complicated plan, but the show’s producers had a Plan B, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Although the chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers was in Washington to hand the Argo envelope to the First Lady—yes, even Michelle Obama has to find out the winner’s identity along with the viewers at home—there was a back-up envelope in a key location: as you can see in the video below, it was in Jack Nicholson’s hand.
(WASHINGTON) — Michelle Obama made a surprise appearance at the Oscars, opening the envelope that contained the name of the Best Picture winner, “Argo.”
Appearing via streaming video from the White House, Mrs. Obama said all of the nominees demonstrated that “we can overcome any obstacle.”
She said that message is “especially important for our young people” and thanked Hollywood for encouraging children “to open their imaginations.”
The first lady was introduced by Jack Nicholson, who noted that the Best Picture trophy is usually announced solo.
Mrs. Obama wore a silver, art deco-inspired gown by Indian-born American fashion designer Naeem Khan. It was the same dress she wore for the Obamas’ dinner with the nation’s governors at the White House Sunday night.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ang Lee has won the Academy Award for best director for his “Life of Pi.”
It’s the second Oscar for Lee, who won in 2005 for “Brokeback Mountain.” The Taiwanese director was also nominated in 2000 for directing “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” He becomes only the 19th director to win the honor multiple times.
The other nominees Sunday night were Steve Spielberg (”Lincoln”), Michael Haneke (”Amour”), David O. Russell (”Silver Linings Playbook”) and Benh Zeitlin (”Beasts of the Southern Wild”).
This year’s directing category was one of the most controversial, as it left out Ben Affleck for “Argo” and Kathryn Bigelow for “Zero Dark Thirty.”
THANKING THE ‘MOVIE GOD’
Ang Lee had his priorities in order when he gave one of his first thank you’s to the “movie god.”
The Taiwanese director pulled off a huge upset when he won an Academy Award for directing “Life of Pi.” He beat out front-runner and two-time Oscar winner Steven Spielberg.
Lee also gave a shoutout to the shipwreck story’s lead actor, Suraj Sharma, but didn’t thank the rest of the cast by name.
“I cannot waste this time talking about them,” he said sheepishly.
He did slip in a quick mention of his agent, his lawyer and of course his wife.
“I have to do that,” he said.
BEST PICTURE
Ben Affleck’s “Argo,” a film about a fake movie, has earned a very real prize: best picture at the Academy Awards.
In share-the-wealth mode, Oscar voters spread Sunday’s honors among a range of films, with “Argo” winning three trophies but “Life of Pi” leading with four.
Daniel Day-Lewis became the first person to win three best-actor Oscars, the latest coming for “Lincoln,” while “Hunger Games” star Jennifer Lawrence triumphed in Hollywood’s big games as best actress for “Silver Linings Playbook.”
The supporting-acting prizes went to Anne Hathaway for “Les Miserables” and Christoph Waltz for “Django Unchained.” It was Waltz’s second supporting-actor Oscar in a Quentin Tarantino film after previously winning for “Inglourious Basterds.” Tarantino also earned his second Oscar, for the “Django” screenplay, a category he previously won for “Pulp Fiction.”
From the White House, first lady Michelle Obama joined Jack Nicholson to help present the final prize to “Argo.”
“I never thought I’d be back here, and I am because of so many of you in this academy,” said Affleck, who shared a screenplay Oscar with pal Matt Damon 15 years earlier for their breakout film “Good Will Hunting.”
Among the wisdom he’s acquired since then: “You can’t hold grudges — it’s hard but you can’t hold grudges.”
Quotation on Action
Dec 20
Hollywood usually reserves 3-D for very specific, box-office-friendly genres — superhero films like “The Avengers,” fantasies like the Harry Potter franchise and animated movies like “Toy Story 3.”
But in “Life of Pi,” which screens Friday as one of AFI Fest’s centerpiece galas, director Ang Lee charted some new depths thematically with the format — he used 3-D to shoot an adaptation of a soulful novel about a boy stranded at sea with a Bengal tiger.
“‘Life of Pi’ breaks the paradigm that 3-D has to be some big, action fantasy spectacle, superhero movie,” said James Cameron, whose 3-D production company, Cameron Pace Group, helped equip Lee’s set.
“The movie is visually amazing, inventive, and it works on you in ways you’re not really aware of. It takes you on a journey, and unless you’ve read the book — which I hadn’t — you have no idea where that journey is going. It does what good 3-D is supposed to do, which is, it allows you to forget you’re watching a 3-D movie.”
When he was first considering how to film “Life of Pi,” which is based on Yann Martel’s bestselling book, Lee visited what Cameron and his business partner, Vince Pace, call the “digital sandbox” at their company’s Burbank offices.
Cameron said he and Pace were eager to work with Lee, who won an Oscar for directing the 2005 cowboy romance “Brokeback Mountain,” in part to show how 3-D could be used on a very different film from Cameron’s own “Avatar.”
“Life is Pi” boasts plenty of action — a dramatic sea storm capsizes a ship full of zoo animals. But much of the film’s story centers on the lonely hours that Pi, an Indian teenage boy played by newcomer Suraj Sharma, spends at sea with his tiger companion. And there are lots of dreamlike shots of the natural world that feel light-years away from a comic book movie – botanical gardens in Pondicherry, India; a mysterious island full of meerkats; a school of flying fish.
“This is what drives me crazy about Hollywood right now,” Cameron said. “We’re five, six years into the 3-D renaissance and we’re sort of still at that stage they were in the ’40s with color where they said, ‘This is a B movie, this’ll be in black-and-white. And this movie’ll be in color.’ Everybody knows the movies that should be in 3-D, right? Except they’re wrong.”
SEOUL–South Korean rapper PSY’s “Gangnam Style” video has 220 million YouTube views and counting, and it’s easy to see why. No Korean language skills are needed to enjoy the chubby, massively entertaining performer’s crazy horse-riding dance, the song’s addictive chorus and the video’s exquisitely odd series of misadventures.
Beneath the antic, funny surface of his world-conquering song, however, is a sharp social commentary about the country’s newly rich and Gangnam, the affluent district where many of them live. Gangnam is only a small slice of Seoul, but it inspires a complicated mixture of desire, envy and bitterness.
Here’s a look at the meaning of “Gangnam Style” — and at the man and neighborhood behind the sensation:
The Place
Gangnam is the most coveted address in Korea, but less than two generations ago it was little more than some forlorn homes surrounded by flat farmland and drainage ditches.
The district of Gangnam, which literally means “south of the river,” is about half the size of Manhattan. About 1 percent of Seoul’s population lives there, but many of its residents are very rich. The average Gangnam apartment costs about US$716,000, a sum that would take an average South Korean household 18 years to earn.
The seats of business and government power in Seoul have always been north of the Han River, in the neighborhoods around the royal palaces, and many old-money families still live there.
Gangnam, however, is new money, the beneficiary of a development boom that began in the 1970s.
As the price of high-rise apartments skyrocketed during a real estate investment frenzy in the early 2000s, landowners and speculators became wealthy practically overnight. The district’s rich families got even richer.
The new wealth drew the trendiest boutiques and clubs and a proliferation of plastic surgery clinics, but it also provided access to something considered vital in modern South Korea: top-notch education in the form of prestigious private tutoring and prep schools. Gangnam households spend nearly four times more on education than the national average.
The notion that Gangnam residents have risen not by following the traditional South Korean virtues of hard work and sacrifice, but simply by living on a coveted piece of geography, irks many. The neighborhood’s residents are seen by some as monopolizing the country’s best education opportunities, the best cultural offerings and the best infrastructure, while spending big on foreign luxury goods to highlight their wealth.
“Gangnam inspires both envy and distaste,” said Kim Zakka, a Seoul-based pop music critic. “Gangnam residents are South Korea’s upper class, but South Koreans consider them self-interested, with no sense of noblesse oblige.”
In a sly, entertaining way, PSY’s song pushes these cultural buttons.
The Guy
More mainstream K-Pop performers, already famous in South Korea and across Asia, have tried and failed to crack the American market.
So how did PSY — aka Park Jae-sang — a stocky, 34-year-old rapper who was fined nearly US$4,500 for smoking marijuana after his 2001 debut, get to be the one teaching Britney Spears how to do the horse-riding dance on American TV?
“I’m not handsome, I’m not tall, I’m not muscular, I’m not skinny,” PSY recently said on the American “Today” TV show. “But I’m sitting here.”
He attributed his success to “soul or attitude.”
PSY, whose stage name stems from the first three letters of the word psycho, has always styled himself as a quirky outsider. But he is from a wealthy family and was actually raised and educated south of the Han River, near Gangnam.
He’s an excellent dancer, a confident rapper and he’s funny, but another reason for his breakthrough could be that less-than-polished image, said Jae-Ha Kim, a Chicago Tribune pop culture columnist and former music critic.
South Korean music has scored big in Asia with bands featuring handsome, stylish, makeup-wearing young men, including Super Junior and Boyfriend. But seeing such singers “makes some Americans nervous,” Kim said.
“People in America are comfortable with Asian guys who look like Jackie Chan and Jet Li, who are good-looking, but they’re not the equivalent of Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves,” Kim said.
Part of the initial interest in “Gangnam Style,” Kim said, was a kind of “freak-show mentality, where people are like, ‘This guy is funny.’ But then you look at his choreography and you realize that you really have to know how to dance to do what he does. He’s really good.”
The Song
PSY, at times wearing sleeveless dress shirts with painted-on untied bowties, repeatedly flouts South Koreans’ popular notions of Gangnam in his video.
Instead of cavorting in nightclubs, he parties with retirees on a disco-lighted tour bus. Instead of working out in a high-end health club, he lounges in a sauna with two tattooed gangsters. As he struts along with two beautiful models, they’re pelted in the face with massive amounts of wind-blown trash and sticky confetti. The throne from which he delivers his hip-hop swagger is a toilet.
The song explores South Koreans’ “love-hate relationship with Gangnam,” said Baak Eun-seok, a pop music critic. The rest of South Korea sees Gangnam residents as everything PSY isn’t, he said: good-looking because of plastic surgery, stylish because they can splurge on luxury goods, slim thanks to yoga and personal trainers.
“PSY looks like a country bumpkin. He’s a far cry from the so-called ‘Gangnam Style,’” Baak said. “He’s parodying himself.”
The video abounds with ironic, “not upper-class” images that ordinary South Koreans recognize, said Park Byoung-soo, a social commentator who runs a popular visual art blog. Old men play a Korean board game and middle-age women wear wide-brimmed hats to keep the sun off their faces as they walk backward — a popular way to exercise in South Korea.
PSY’s character in the video is modeled on the clueless heroes of movies like “The Naked Gun” and “Dumb & Dumber,” he told Yonhap news agency earlier this year. He has also said his goal is to “dress classy, but dance cheesy.”
Others see more than just a goofy outsider.
“PSY does something in his video that few other artists, Korean or otherwise, do: He parodies the wealthiest, most powerful neighborhood in South Korea,” writes Sukjong Hong, creative nonfiction fellow at Open City, an online magazine.