April 26, 2017

Business April 26, 2017

Trump Tells Canada And Mexico He Will Renegotiate, Not Withdraw From NAFTA

Trucks travel on an overpass to and from the World Trade Bridge which links Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

Eric Gay/AP

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Eric Gay/AP

Following news reports Wednesday that the Trump administration intended to begin the process of withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, the White House said President Trump reassured the leaders of Canada and Mexico by phone that the U.S. had no immediate plans to do so.

A White House statement issued late Wednesday night said that Trump had spoken by phone with both Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The full White House statement:

“Late this afternoon, President Donald J. Trump spoke with both President Peña Nieto of Mexico and Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada. Both conversations were pleasant and productive. President Trump agreed not to terminate NAFTA at this time and the leaders agreed to proceed swiftly, according to their required internal procedures, to enable the renegotiation of the NAFTA deal to the benefit of all three countries. President Trump said, ‘it is my privilege to bring NAFTA up to date through renegotiation. It is an honor to deal with both President Peña Nieto and Prime Minister Trudeau, and I believe that the end result will make all three countries stronger and better.’ “

The Associated Press reports:

“The White House announcement came hours after administration officials said Trump was considering a draft executive order to withdraw the U.S. from the deal — though administration officials cautioned it was just one of a number of options being discussed by the president and his staff.

“Some saw the threat as posturing by Trump to gain leverage over Mexico and Canada as he tries to negotiate changes to the deal. Trump railed against the decades-old trade deal during his campaign, describing it as a ‘disaster.’ “

The AP reports that both the Mexican and Canadian governments confirmed the conversations had taken place.

As first reported by Politico, White House officials had drafted an executive order to begin the process of withdrawing from NAFTA. The reports were followed by a sharp drop in the value of the Mexican peso against the U.S. dollar. The Canadian dollar also fell, though not as sharply.

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Entertainment April 26, 2017

Today in Movie Culture: New 'Alien: Covenant' Prologue, FaceApp Gets a Movie-Themed Parody and More

Here are a bunch of little bites to satisfy your hunger for movie culture:

Prologue of the Day:

Ahead of the release of Alien: Covenant, here’s a new prologue showing what happened to Elizabeth and David after the end of Prometheus (via /Film):

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Alternate Ending of the Day:

How might Star Wars: The Force Awakens have ended more happily? The Unusual Suspect presents a clever mashup with Raiders of the Lost Ark footage:

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Cosplay of the Day:

Speaking of Star Wars, awesome Star Wars Celebration cosplay is still coming in, like this trio as high school versions of Han, Leia and Luke doing the Breakfast Club dance (via Fashionably Geek):

Prank of the Day:

Also from Star Wars Celebration, here’s a video of John Boyega surprising fans to help promote Force for Change (via Geek Tyrant):

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Phone App Parody of the Day:

FaceApp is so popular now that we’re seeing movie-themed parodies like this one inspired by Face/Off:

I love this new FaceApp update pic.twitter.com/CgSr2gIyAn

— Super Deluxe (@superdeluxe) April 26, 2017

DIY Prop Replica of the Day:

Want to own Maui’s hook from Moana but you can’t becuase that’s a cartoon? Here’s AWE with a tutorial on how to make your own:

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Vintage Image of the Day:

Jonathan Demme, who passed away today, directs Anthony Hopkins on the set of The Silence of the Lambs:

Supercut of the Day:

Filmscalpel looks at great silent moment in the era of sound in this supercut featuring The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lost in Translation and more (via Film School Rejects):

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Location Celebration of the Day:

The old Penn Station in New York City is gorgeous and fortunately we can still see what it looked like in the movies collected in this Fandor video:

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Classic Trailer of the Day:

This week is the 20th anniversary of the release of Volcano. Watch the original teaser trailer for the classic disaster movie below.

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Entertainment April 26, 2017

First Listen: 'The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda'

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The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda is out May 5.

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Multi-instrumentalist, composer, spiritual leader and the wife of John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda (1937-2007) long stood in her husband’s shadow. Some certain number of more casual jazz fans, if they have known her name at all, only know it from sidewoman credits on some of his albums, and not for her own performances and recordings.

But even many more ardent fans who know her string of recordings for Impulse and Warner Bros. in the 1970s don’t know the music she created in the last two decades of her life — music that was not necessarily meant for widespread consumption: the Hindu devotional songs that she recorded as a spiritual leader and the head of an ashram near Los Angeles.

John and Alice had fallen in love in 1963; in short order, they married and had four children together: Michelle, John Jr., Ravi and Oranyan (also known as Oran). Within four years of their marriage, however, John Coltrane died of liver cancer. He was just 30 years old. Like her husband, Alice Coltrane was a spiritual seeker; not long after his death, she met Swami Satchidananda — the guru who opened the Woodstock festival — and became his disciple. Her own compositional language evolved during those years into an intoxicating, highly unusual blend of jazz, blues and Indian instruments and tonalities. Her life as a spiritual leader also grew during those years, and she founded The Vedanta Center in 1975.

Coltrane’s life took another sharp turn when, in 1982, their eldest son, John Jr., was killed in a car accident at age 18. With her religious beliefs for sustenance after that tragedy and with a growing following of her own, she founded the Sai Anantam Ashram the following year, which became a 48-acre compound in Agoura Hills, Calif.

Despite Coltrane’s withdrawal from her secular career, music was still at the heart of her religious practice. Even the Hindu name she took on — “Turiyasangitananda” — has music embedded in its core. Sangit, or sangeet, is “music” in Sanskrit; she translated her adopted name as “the transcendental lord’s highest song of bliss.” (Her followers and friends simply called her “Turiya” or “Swamini,” the title for a female teacher.)

It was a good match between spirit and spiritual path. In the Hindu tradition, the entire universe, the cycles of birth, life, destruction, silence and renewal are all encompassed with the sound of “aum” (or “om,” as it’s more commonly transliterated into English) — and there is a deep, long tradition of expressing love for the divine through songs, whether bhajans (individual songs of devotion), kirtans (call-and-response worship songs) or even in the classical tradition, in which ancient devotional songs are the texts for sung ragas.

In the music she created for her religious community, Coltrane – unsurprisingly – did not simply mimic Indian tradition when it came to singing praises to Hindu deities at her ashram’s mandir, or temple. She created something wholly new, and completely her own. The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda are a powerful and indelibly personal mix of the soulful gospel cadences that Coltrane had been steeped in since her church-going childhood in Detroit, and the brimming, collective energy of the call-and-response kirtans. At the ashram’s Sunday services, “She would start playing music and everyone else would join in and they might go two, three, four hours of doing that,” recalls Coltrane’s nephew, musician and producer Flying Lotus (birth name Steven Ellison), in this collection’s extensive liner notes.

The songs on this compilation are culled from four recordings Coltrane made in the 1980s and ’90s on a series of self-released cassettes that were meant primarily for an audience of her followers. (The label for this reissue, Luaka Bop, calls it the first volume in a series called World Spirituality Classics.) Texturally, these compositions exist on several planes simultaneously: they are grounded by Coltrane’s rich, darkly hued, deeply resonant voice (which she had never deployed on her secular recordings); swept along in the currents of her followers’ voices, their hand-held percussion, and her harp and organ; and lifted straight into the cosmic stratosphere by the synthesizers that she had come to love in her later years.

It’s already been argued that a new generation of listeners will be tempted to delve into these devotional songs as zone-out sounds, “ambient music with a purpose” that squares nicely with our era of yoga studios and pressed juices for sale on every block. But this is music that – just as in both the traditional gospel and Hindu devotional styles – demands participation: The particulars of what or who you believe in (or don’t) may not even matter. Either you’re going to be using your voice to sing along, or your heart.

The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda comes out May 5.

Courtesy of the artist