June 5, 2017

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Today in Movie Culture: 'Wonder Woman' Easter Eggs, 'Avengers: Infinity War' Set Video and More

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

Easter Eggs of the Day:

You probably saw Wonder Woman over the weekend. Now watch the spoiler-heavy Mr. Sunday Movies video highlighting all its Easter eggs and references:

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Cosplay of the Day:

Obviously we’re celebrating Wonder Woman in this section, especially because the little girls below are too previous to ignore. Click the THR link for more.

‘Wonder Woman’: Young Girls Around the Country Dress as the Heroine For Film’s Opening https://t.co/r1kIrmMBZqpic.twitter.com/JKhzXtzArh

— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) June 3, 2017

Redone Trailer of the Day:

It’s about time we got an obligatory Lego version of the Wonder Woman trailer from Huxley Berg Studios:

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Dream Casting of the Day:

How can DC keep Chris Pine in their extended universe 100 years following the events of Wonder Woman? How about, as BossLogic proposes, casting him as Green Lantern?

I had an idea – what if they make Hal a long distant relative of Steve Trevor both being pilots and WW is thrilled to see the resemblance pic.twitter.com/Y3pHAzuU2U

— BossLogic (@Bosslogic) June 3, 2017

Video Essay of the Day:

Speaking of Chris Pine, The Film Guy examines how Hell or High Water and other movies introduce their characters through tactics in this video essay:

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Vintage Image of the Day:

Ron Livingston, who turns 50 today, and Jennifer Aniston receive direction from Mike Judge on the set of Office Space in 1998:

Actor in the Spotlight:

The latest episode of the character actor showcase No Small Parts celebrates the career of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 actress Pom Klementieff:

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Set Video of the Day:

Speaking of MCU movies, here’s a video from the set of Avengers: Infinity War featuring Chris Hemsworth being hilarious as usual:

Charitable Act of the Day:

And here’s another MCU star, Tom Holland, visiting sick kids at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in costume as Spider-Man:

Classic Trailer of the Day:

Today is the 30th anniversary of the release of Harry and the Hendersons. Watch the original trailer for the classic Bigfoot comedy below.

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Apple Joins Smart-Speaker Race With Music-Focused 'HomePod'

Apple executive Phil Schiller introduces the HomePod speaker at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, Calif.

Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

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Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

And then there were three.

Apple has finally unveiled its answer to Amazon’s and Google’s smart speakers slash digital assistants — and it’s called HomePod.

This has been one major area in consumer electronics lacking Apple’s footprint. Amazon has heavily dominated the field with its home speaker called Echo, which uses the digital assistant Alexa. Google Home followed in October and Microsoft’s assistant, Cortana, is also finding a home in home speakers.

Both Amazon Echo and Google Home respond to voice commands to play songs, look up stuff online, check the weather, set a reminder or control Internet-connected home appliances.

Siri can do those things, too, but Apple’s pitch for Siri-powered HomePod is instead focused heavily on music — the company appears to bank on consumers paying for smart speakers that deliver high-quality audio sound as a sort of gateway into the world of smart home assistants.

“Just like we did with portable music, we want to reinvent home music,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the Worldwide Developers Conference, where HomePod was unveiled, becoming Apple’s first new device since the release of the Apple Watch in 2015.

The HomePod — due to launch in December — looks like a mesh cylinder. Inside is the same processor that powers the iPhone and an upward-facing 4-inch woofer. Pulling music from the Apple library, the speaker was presented as being able to recognize its placement and direct rich audio sound into the room.

The HomePod will be priced at $349, more expensive than Amazon’s $180 Echo or $50 Dot and Google’s $129 Home. The pricing of Apple’s device was shared at the conference in comparison to both smart home speakers as well as premium audio speakers. As The New York Timespoints out, that’s where one company might feel the competition the most:

“Though Apple appears to be playing catch up with Amazon and Google, the primary casualty here may be Sonos. That company offers a similar wireless multi-speaker system for listening to music throughout the home, similar to HomePod’s ability to chain together multiple speakers.

Observers are skeptical about Siri’s ability to successfully compete against Alexa and Google Assistant, as CNET notes:

“A big question mark for the new speaker, though, is whether Siri is good enough to power its own dedicated device. Siri was introduced as a feature in the iPhone 4S in 2011, three years before Amazon came out with Alexa and the Echo. However, Siri has been slow to improve its voice-recognition technology and set of responses, especially compared with the more capable Alexa and Google Assistant. A smart speaker utilizing an underachieving voice assistant could dampen interest in the product.”

The conference is typically devoted to software updates and this year, Apple released a series of new features and updates for the iPhone, the iPad, Mac and the Apple Watch — including an augmented-reality kit for developers aimed at making the iPhone “the largest AR platform in the world.”

As Reuters points out, the augmented-reality push might be combined later with another push by Apple Maps indoors:

“New indoor maps of areas like malls and airports indicated that Apple might be laying groundwork to display information over images of those places in the future.”

The latest version of Apple’s Safari browser will be able to stop automatically playing videos as well as online trackers used for advertisers.

The company is also launching new models of both the iPad and the Mac computer.

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Wisconsin Family Stays Together With Help From Medicaid

Ben Gapinski, 10, (center) is greeted by his parents Dan and Nancy Gapinski after getting off the school bus. When Ben was a toddler, he was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder and needed constant monitoring to stay safe.

Sara Stathas for NPR

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Sara Stathas for NPR

Nancy and Dan Gapinski of Glendale, Wis., remember a time when they couldn’t really communicate with their own son.

“He used to not really have any kinds of conversations with us. He did a lot of echoing things that we said, and scripting from movies,” Nancy Gapinski says as she and her husband wait for their son Ben’s school bus to arrive. “A lot of times kids didn’t know how to respond to him then, and didn’t know what he was trying to say and conversations wouldn’t really go anywhere.”

But that’s all changed. On a recent Friday afternoon, 10-year-old Ben hops off the bus, greets both his parents and starts chatting about his day.

“So what I did today was I had an extra recess today, and also I had to do two star math tests,” he reports. He says he did pretty well on those tests.

When Ben was a toddler he was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. He barely communicated with his parents and needed constant monitoring to stay safe.

The Gapinskis needed help. They found a therapist to work with Ben for 24 hours a week, which cost more $50,000 a year. Dan’s workplace insurance paid for some of the costs, but not all.

So they turned to Medicaid.

Ben’s disability was severe enough – he was deemed by the state to require “an institutional level of care” — that he was eligible for Wisconsin’s children’s long-term care program, funded by Medicaid.

Nancy Gapinski waits for the school bus to drop off her 10-year-old son, Ben, at their home in Glendale, Wis.

Sara Stathas for NPR

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Sara Stathas for NPR

“They work with the child on basic language skills, trying to learn words, trying to do some intellectual exercises,” Ben’s father Dan recalls. “It eventually graduates into some back and forth conversation, and doing homework and doing things that are more like what normal kids do.”

While Medicaid is best known as a health care program for poor people, more than 80 percent of its budget goes to care for the elderly, the disabled and children, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Only 15 percent goes to health care for able-bodied adults.

The program has been growing in recent years and it now makes up almost 10 percent of federal spending. That’s why it’s the number one target in President Trump’s proposed budget, and figures prominently in the Republican proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act. Some estimates suggest the program could be cut by more than 1 trillion dollars over 10 years.

After three years of intense therapy, Ben now goes to his local public school and works on grade level in math and English. He no longer works with his private therapist or uses Medicaid benefits.

“We just decided not to reapply,” Nancy says. “The need had been met.”

President Trump and Republicans in Congress have proposed massive cuts to Medicaid’s budget over the next decade, and Nancy and Dan Gapinski worry that the services they used for Ben won’t be there if he needs them in the future, or be there for other families.

“I don’t know what Ben will need in his lifetime,” Nancy Gapinski says. “Our goals for him are very much like our goals for our daughter Zoe. We really want for them to be active, engaged citizens.”

Ben’s not the only one in the Gapinski home who has used Medicaid services. His grandmother Evelyn Benjamin is also a beneficiary.

Evelyn Benjamin, Nancy’s 84-year-old mother, wears a medical alert service device around her neck at all times.

Sara Stathas for NPR

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Sara Stathas for NPR

Evelyn is 84. She’s had a few falls and depends on a walker to get around. She also has heart disease and uses three different inhalers.

“They take very good care of me,” Evelyn says, sipping tea in the living room surrounded by her family. “I’m very lucky to be one that can stay in my home, and know that I’m cared for.”

Evelyn has health insurance through Medicare. But after her husband suffered a stroke and needed constant care, she depleted her savings and now qualifies for Medicaid as well. It helps pay for her 12 prescription medications and, through a Medicaid-funded program called IRIS, she gets in-home help.

Wisconsin’s IRIS program is an example of how states tailor Medicaid to their own needs. It gives beneficiaries a budget to use for the services they need, and it allows people to hire whoever they want.

Nancy Gapinski organizes Evelyn’s medications into a plastic pill box case. Medicaid helps pay for her 12 prescription medications.

Sara Stathas for NPR

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Sara Stathas for NPR

So Evelyn hired her daughter, Nancy, who gave up her full-time career to care for her mother and son. She works part-time from home, and supplements that income with $11.50 an hour for 20 hours a week caring for her mother. She says it’s helped keep them out of bankruptcy. And her hourly rate is a fraction of the going rate for such services from an agency. According to a 2015 study by Genworth, home health aides and homemaker services in Milwaukee cost an average of about $22 an hour.

“It’s just a big, big help for not only me, but for my daughter who worries about me constantly,” Evelyn says.

Nancy Gapinski worries that help may disappear under the proposed budget cuts. That’s because the services her family uses are considered optional under the Medicaid law. The program is required to pay for doctor visits, hospital care and even nursing home care. But in-home support services that Evelyn uses and therapies like those Ben received aren’t.

Dan Gapinski says his children love having their grandmother around. When they have nightmares they climb into her bed and they giggle with her in the living room.

Three generations: Zoe, 8, Evelyn, and Nancy, sit on the couch of their living room. Dan says the children love having their grandmother live with them.

Sara Stathas for NPR

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Sara Stathas for NPR

“I don’t think we, as a society, appreciate the value of that,” he says. “There’s a lot of talk about entitlements and how that’s become a bit of dirty word. We don’t take the satisfaction in having made a greater society by making these kinds of situations possible.”

The day I visited the Gapinskis, Ben was excited to go on a sleepover at his aunt’s house. He was packing up pajamas, his Nintendo DS game, some comic books and Minecraft books.

As he heads for the door, his grandmother calls out for a hug.

“Give my love to Aunt Susie OK?” she says, while reaching her arms around Ben.

“Yeah, I’ll give your heart to Aunt Susie,” he replies with a laugh.

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David Lewiston, A World-Spanning 'Musical Tourist' Who Brought Old Sounds To New Ears

David Lewiston, making one of his field recordings in an undated photo.

Courtesy of Nonesuch Records

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Courtesy of Nonesuch Records

David Lewiston, a seminal producer of music from around the world has died. The force behind more than two dozen recordings for the Nonesuch Explorer series, Lewiston died May 29 in Wailuku, Hawaii, at age 88, from what the Nonesuch label has described as an “extended illness”; his longtime friend and colleague, Brian Cullman, told the New York Times that his death resulted from “complications of a series of strokes.”

Cullman wrote about Lewiston’s treks in a remembrance for Nonesuch:

“Sometimes by bus; sometimes by jeep or truck or caravanserai; sometimes by donkey, though not if he could help it; and almost always on foot, it always came to that, by foot across rickety bridges and footpaths, up the sides of mountains, through valleys and hills rife with goats and wayward sheep, over rocks and fences, across streams and rivers swollen by rain or dry from drought, carrying a small—but not that small—portable tape recorder; twenty or thirty reels of 1/4″ tape; a couple of microphones; cables; a week’s supply of batteries; a few packs of Fortnum & Mason tea, and a few spare shirts.”

Born in London in 1929, Lewiston studied composition at Trinity College of Music, and went on to study with the Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann — who was in turn a student of composer, mystic and author George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. De Hartmann got Lewiston interested in the music of Central Asia — and an obsession was born. Lewiston’s first music-collecting trip was in 1966, when he visited the islands of Java and Bali; recordings from that voyage became the iconic album Music From The Morning Of The World: Gamelan And Ketjak. As Lewiston later noted, he was very much a neophyte producer at that time, chalking up early shortcomings to ineptitude rather than intentional omission: “Since I was inexperienced,” he wrote in 2002, “I failed to list the musical groups when this album was first released.”

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Music From The Morning Of The World became the first of 28 albums which Lewiston produced for the Nonesuch label’s Explorer series, working with the imprint’s famed director, Teresa (“Tracey”) Sterne. Their albums were not meant as records for specific ethnic audiences (which labels like Columbia and RCA had already been churning out since well before World War II), or for academics; rather, they were squarely aimed at a general audience with adventurous musical tastes. In an often-repeated anecdote that Lewiston attributed to Sterne, late at night on New York radio station WBAI, the DJ would say “OK, light that joint, here it comes!” and then play the second side of Golden Rain, a 1969 Lewiston album of Balinese music.

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Over the ensuing decades, Lewiston’s ear took him all over the globe, capturing a scope of music that may seem unimaginably broad today. He made recordings across Asia including in Iran, Georgia, Tibet, Korea, China, Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Japan; throughout Central and South America in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil; and in Morocco.

Lewiston was always quick to separate what he did from the work of traditional ethnomusicologists, as he told writer Christina Roden in an interview for the world music magazine RootsWorld in 2000. “I prefer to be described as a ‘musical tourist,’ if a description is absolutely necessary,” he said.

It’s not that Lewiston objected to the label of “ethnomusicologist” due to concerns about bias or colonialistic thinking. Rather, as he told Roden,

“Tracey [Sterne] and I thought that most ethnomusicologists were pretty dim. We called them ‘ethnoids.’ I think of an ethnomusicologist as someone who takes wonderful music and analyzes it until all the joy has been lost. It’s as though a rather boring person who wanted to be paid for talking about music invented a teutonic-sounding, pseudo-academic title as a scam – and got away with it! Much better to just shut up and enjoy the music. I have a really hard time when I’m writing liner notes, because I feel that if a person is reading them, he isn’t enjoying the music.”

As a white visitor to these cultures, Lewiston certainly prioritized what he, and he alone, judged as the “authentic” music of a given place, rather than what the musicians themselves might want to share with foreign audiences. As he told Roden in 2000,”When I go to the Himalayas, which is an annual jaunt for me, I have to be very careful to remind the musicians: ‘Please! No film music from Bombay!'”

At the same time, Lewiston documented important traditions — and sketched out crosscurrents that might otherwise have been missed, or at least undervalued. As writer Chris Nickson has pointed out in a review of Lewiston’s South America: Black Music In Praise Of Oxala And Other Gods:

“The whole concept of strong African culture remaining among the descendants of slaves has become common currency these days, but in 1968 no one had done research into the phenomenon, making this quite groundbreaking in the way it connected the dots between continents. The scholarly work might have gone beyond this, but the music remains as vital as ever, as does its importance.”

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For those interested in music whose wellspring lay somewhere besides Europe, Lewiston’s work was — and remains — an aural primer. In 2006, composer Osvaldo Golijov poetically wrote:

“David Lewiston’s recordings are among the great testimonies in sound of our time. Anyone who hears them will be struck by the mysterious yearnings, the transcendental manifestations of joy, and the fragility and impermanence that unite wildly diverse cultures in our planet: ultimately, they give us a sense of how much and how little we humans are as a species. These records continue to inspire me as much as those by Stravinsky, Miles Davis and any of the other masters of the past century. They are a treasure: life as it is truly lived and dreamed.”

One of the most mesmerizing and mysteriously beautiful recordings Lewiston made in Chiapas, Mexico, became a sample in Golijov’s own music: his 2002 pieceK’In Sventa Ch’Ul Me’Tik Kwadalupe [Festival For The Holy Mother of Guadalupe].

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After Sterne was fired from Nonesuch in 1979, the label’s interest in the Explorer series dried up, and Lewiston went on to produce recordings for the Ellipsis Arts, Shanachie and Bridge labels, as well working with the BBC Sound Archives.

In the last three-plus decades of his life, Lewiston became more devoted to focusing his efforts on conserving the music and ritual traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly among the communities living in exile in India. (Brian Cullman told the New York Times that Lewiston’s archive contains almost 400 hours of recorded material, with much of it dedicated to Tibetan music, and that he is currently working with the label Dust-to-Digital to make a boxed set available.)

Despite that devotion to Tibetan music, Lewiston also made return trips to Bali in 1987 and 1994, spending a total of eight months collecting more music; in the late 1990s, he also went to Morocco to record music of the Sufi Muslim brotherhoods in the city of Fes, and to the Caucasus to record the region’s polyphonic singing traditions. As ever, Lewiston just couldn’t be tied down to a particular place.

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Alex Honnold Scales El Capitan Without Ropes, And The Climbing World Reels

A post shared by National Geographic (@natgeo) on Jun 3, 2017 at 12:18pm PDT

Alex Honnold has shocked the sport of climbing by reaching the peak of El Capitan without using ropes, climbing one of the world’s largest monoliths in less than four hours with little gear other than a bag of chalk.

“So stoked to realize a life dream today,” Honnold wrote on Facebook on Saturday. He shared a photo of himself on the Yosemite National Park landmark taken by Jimmy Chin of National Geographic, which is basing a new documentary on Saturday’s climb.

“Speechless,” wrote the American Alpine Journal in its response to the news that Honnold had tackled the imposing 3,000-foot granite wall in a “free-solo,” ascent, climbing alone and without safety gear.

Honnold raced up the wall in 3 hours and 56 minutes, prompting Alpinist magazine to say, “This is indisputably the greatest free solo of all time. Congratulations, Alex!”

“This man,” Honnold’s friend and fellow climbing star Conrad Anker wrote on Facebook. “Respect. Life goal realized.”

After his climb, Honnold told National Geographic that the first challenge was simply to walk up to the California monolith, sit next to the base and put his climbing shoes on.

“Because you look up and go, ‘that’s a f****** big wall,’ ” he said. “It’s like, pretty crazy.”

Alex Honnold smiles after scaling El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, in a photo provided by National Geographic. Honnold became the first person to climb alone to the top of the massive granite wall without ropes or safety gear.

Jimmy Chin/National Geographic via AP

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Jimmy Chin/National Geographic via AP

A lighter moment came later, Honnold said, when he passed some climbers who had spent the night on a ledge. He did his best not to wake them.

“I woke up one guy and he sort of said, ‘Oh, hey.’ Then when I went by, I think he discreetly woke up his buddies because when I looked down they were all three standing there like ‘What the f***?’ “

By conquering El Capitan, Honnold fulfilled a goal he had worked toward for years. He first wrote about the potential record-setting climb in his journal in 2009 — but he repeatedly found reasons to set it aside, as he said last year on the Basecamp podcast with Gripped editor Brandon Pullan.

“Obviously, that’s like, the thing to do,” Honnold said when discussing El Capitan with Pullan in 2016, adding, “it’s always seemed really scary.”

Honnold, 31, has become famous for eye-popping ascents that rely on his unique blend of athleticism and mental focus, ascending Yosemite’s Half Dome and Zion National Park’s Moonlight Buttress. But Gripped says of Honnold’s El Capitan free-solo climb, “this is by far the most groundbreaking.”

While Honnold said in the podcast that he found the idea of free-soloing the monolith “out of the question,” he also told Pullan that he’d been studying it for years and “El Cap is definitely doable.”

“I mean, there are two routes that you could potentially do, like Freeride or Golden Gate — they’re the two easiest free routes,” Honnold said, in a statement that only makes sense coming from someone who’s often called one of the greatest rock climbers the world has ever seen.

The challenges on El Capitan, he said, start early, no matter which route you take.

“They all start with Freeblast, which is like a 10-pitch slab,” Honnold said, adding that large sections of the granite slab are “basically like walking on a sheet of glass.”

The crux of one pitch, he said, is “like this no-hands, foot traverse thing, where you’re just like, shuffling across a blank wall.”

Honnold added, “That’s before the [main] wall even starts, that’s just like getting up there.”

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