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RonPrice

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About RonPrice

  • Birthday 07/23/1944

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    http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/

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    George Town Tasmania Australia
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  1. ALICE IN WONDERLAND Part 1: The Secret World of Lewis Carroll was televised on ABCTV on 28/4/'15(8:30 to 9:30 p.m.). For fans of both literature and scandal The Secret World of Lewis Carroll (BBCTwo) was a wonderfully engaging portrait which showed both the scandalous and the imaginative side of Carroll. Martha Kearney, the presenter, left viewers with the question: "was Lewis Carroll a repressed paedophile?" The Alice in Wonderland creator Lewis Carroll invented the Alice story on a river trip with his 10-year-old friend Alice Liddell, a self-possessed little girl, we were told, with whom Carroll was entranced. This BBC documentary examined Carroll's relationship with children. He took photographs of Alice Liddell's two sisters in 1859. This enthusiasm for photography was a common, a mainstream and fashionable Victorian pastime. Carroll, though, seemed to be unusual at least insofar as his ceaseless pursuit of, and a passion for, juvenile feminine company and photographs. Some critics argue, though, that this personal idiosyncrasy of Carroll's was just a response to a prevalent aesthetic, artistic, and philosophical movement of the time. Part 1.1: The English author, journalist, political commentator and television personality Will Self, interviewed in this doco, described Carroll as being 'a repressed paedophile'. Classics and English expert Robert Douglas-Fairhurst argued, on the other hand, that however much it is "tempting to think of Carroll as a Victorian Jimmy Savile,1 in fact, there are dozens and dozens of records from girls whom he befriended. They all made it clear that there was a kind of ritual to their friendship. It involved kissing them chastely and that was it.” Savile(1926-2011), it may never be forgotten, and you may remember, was one of Britain's most prolific predatory sexual offenders. Part 2: Many people believe Carroll was an innocent who simply enjoyed the company of children, and there is no evidence of misbehaviour. Program presenter, Kearney, tried to end on a positive note: “Perhaps we’ll never find out the truth about Lewis Carroll no matter how much we delve.” But, after her programme, many viewers were likely to have decided that they now knew precisely what the damning truth was. It must have been tough for Kearney to do all that delving into her hero's life as she did.. The programme located a previously unseen photograph almost certainly taken by Carroll. It showed a girl stripped off, revealing her developed, adolescent body. And it seems she was Lorina, Alice’s older sister by three years. Carroll, who died in January 1898, befriended Alice Liddell and her two sisters when they were children. It was Miss Liddell who was the inspiration for the famous book. Researchers, working on this documentary of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the much-loved children's book, discovered these disturbing images.1 -Ron Price with thanks to 1Terry Ramsey, The Telegraph, 31/1/'15. Part 3: Dodgson1 was also keenly interested in adult women, it should be emphasized to all those who come to read this my prose-poem, and he had a sense of sin being the devout Protestant that he was. The year 1863 was a very big year for this famous author, a writer of some 100,000 letters, who took his Alice manuscript to Macmillan's. This work was published in the last year of the civil war, and the same year as the first Western book written in its entirety on the subject of the Babi religion3 was published by a university: '65 was a big year! 1The name of the author of Alice in Wonderland was Charles Dodgson better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll. 2 The American Civil War, 1861-1865; Congress passed the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in America, and Abraham Lincoln was shot & killed while attending the play "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre. 3 Mirza Kazem-Beg of St Petersberg University published Bab Babidy. Ron Price 1 May 2015
  2. Avatar and James Cameron...a comment-Ron Price, Australia ------------------------------ AVATAR Part 1: The film Avatar has been out for more than 6 years(12/09 to 1/15) after being in development since 1994. I have read many reviews, listened to many comments and discussed it’s style and content with many both in cyberspace and in our wide-wide-world. This prose-poem tries to encapsulate some of my initial thoughts on this blockbuster, its initial reception and some of its meaning drawing as I do on several sources of comment during these last six years. James Cameron, who wrote, produced and directed the film, stated in an interview that an avatar is an incarnation of one of the Hindu gods who takes on flesh-form. In this film, though, avatar has more to do with human technology in the future being capable of injecting a human's intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body. "It's not an avatar in the sense of just existing as ones and zeroes in cyberspace,” said Cameron; “it's actually a physical body." The great student of myth, Joseph Campbell(1), should have been at the film’s premier in London on 10 December 2009. I wonder what he would have said. Part 2: Composer James Horner scored the film, his third collaboration with Cameron after Aliens and Titanic. A field guide of 224 pages for the film's fictional setting of the planet of Pandora was released by Harper Entertainment in late November 2009. The guide was entitled Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora. With an estimated $310 million to produce the film and $150 million for marketing, the film has generated a myriad positive reviews from film critics as well as its share of criticism especially over what many reviewers refer to as the film’s simplistic content. Roger Ebert, one of the more prestigious of film critics, wrote: “An extraordinary film: Avatar is not simply sensational entertainment, although it is that. It's a technical breakthrough." Avatar has had overwhelming success as a work of cinematic-art. Its enormous visual power, its thrilling imaginative originality, its excitingly effective use of the 3-D technology seems bound to change permanently the nature of cinematic experience henceforth.--Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia, 5 April 2010. Part 3: Like viewing Star Wars back in ’77 some said/an obvious script with an earnestness & corniness/part of what makes it absorbing/said another/Gives you a world, a place/worth visiting/eh? Alive with action and a soundtrack that pops with robust sci-fi shoot-'em-ups... A mild critique of American militarism and industrialism.....yes the military are pure evil........the Pandoran tribespeople are nature-loving, eco-harmonious, wise Braveheart smurf warriors…….Received nominations for the Critics' Choice Awards of the Broadcast Film Critics Association & on and on go the recommendations for the best this and that and everything else. What do you think of all this Joseph Campbell??? You said we all have to work our own myth(1) in our pentapolar, multicultural-dimensional world with endless phantoms of our wrongly informed imagination, with our tangled fears, our pundits of error, ill-equipped to interpret the social commotion tearing our world apart and at play on planetizing-globalizing Earth.(2) Part 4: (1) If readers google Joseph Campbell they can find some contemporary insights in his many volumes of analysis and his comments on the individualized myth that Campbell says we all have to work out in our postmodern world. (2)The Prophet-Founder of the Bahá'í Faith, Bahá'u'lláh, has been presented as an avatar in India beginning, arguably, in the 1960s. There were only 1000 Baha’is in India in 1960 and now 2 million(circa). Baha’u’llah has been associated in the Bahá'í teaching initiatives with the Kalki avatar who, according to a major Hindu holy text, will appear at the end of the kali yuga, one of the four main stages of history, for the purpose of reestablishing an era of righteousness. There are many examples of what one might call a cross-cultural messianism at the core of the Bahá'í teachings. This applies in India and in/to many other countries and religious communities. This approach has included: (a) emphasizing the figures of Buddha and Krishna as past Manifestations of God or avatars; ( making references to Hindu scriptures such as the Bhagavad Gita, © the substitution of Sanskrit-based terminology for Arabic and Persian terms where possible; for example, Bhagavan Baha for Bahá'u'lláh, (d) the incorporation in both Bahá'í song and literature of Hindu holy spots, hero-figures and poetic images and (e) using heavily Sanskritized-Hindi translations of Baha'i scriptures and prayers. Part 5: Footnote: For an excellent analysis of James Cameron’s films and especially Avatar go to the following link and my quotes below: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/mar/25/the-wizard/ Cameron’s real attraction, as a writer and a director, has always been for the technologies that turn humans into super-humans. However “primitive” they have seemed to some critics, the Na’vi—with their uniformly superb, sleekly blue-gleaming physiques, their weirdly infallible surefootedness, their organic connector cables, their ability to upload and download consciousness itself—are the ultimate expression of his career-long striving to make flesh mechanical. The problem here is not a patronizingly clichéd representation of an ostensibly primitive people; the problem is the movie’s intellectually incoherent portrayal of its fictional heroes as both admirably pre-civilized and admirably hyper-civilized, as a-technological and highly technologized. Avatar ‘s desire to have its anthropological cake and eat it too suggests something deeply un-self-aware and disturbingly unresolved within Cameron himself. Cameron’s films depend for their effects—none more than Avatar—on the most sophisticated technologies available. Cameron tells himself that the technology that is the sine qua non of his technique isn’t as important as people think. In fact what makes Avatar special is the “human interest” story particularly the love story. But there is a large flaw in Avatar—one that’s connected to Cameron’s ambivalence about the relationship between technology and humanity. The message of what is now James Cameron’s most popular movie thus far, and the biggest-grossing movie in history—like the message of so much else in mass culture just now—is, by contrast, that “reality” is dispensable altogether; or, at the very least, whatever you care to make of it, provided you have the right gadgets. In this fantasy of a lusciously colourful trip over the rainbow, you don’t have to wake up. There’s no need to go back home to the grey world. If you are really lucky you can stay immersed in the wonders of modern technology with the end of effort and the triumph of sensation. Whatever its futuristic setting, and whatever its debt to the past, Avatar is very much a movie for our time. Ron Price 5/4/'10 to 24/1/'15.
  3. Just dropped in; I might post a little something.

  4. On hearing of the passing of Leonard Simon Nimoy(1931-2015), and learning also about his funeral on 1 March, I put together some of my writing about him and his Star-Trek fame to serve as a sort of quasi-eulogy. I have also integrated his life and my own since both he and I have had a keen interest in autobiography, and a find such synthesis and integration of lives provides an interesting, a heuristic, base for my personal and speculative writing. Some readers may find this personal synchronicity annoying, and for this I apologize before readers get going here with the following prose-poetic work. Readers who prefer short and pithy posts are simply advised to either skim or scan or stop reading now.-Ron Price, Australia ---------------- Go to this link, FYI, at: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=544124
  5. Being Poirot ----------------------- This afternoon I enjoyed Being Poirot,1 a 50-minute television documentary in which the actor David Suchet attempted to unravel the mysterious appeal of Hercule Poirot, and how he went about portraying him. This doco was broadcast in the United Kingdom on the same evening as the final episode of Poirot, Curtain, 13/11/'13. Suchet visited Greenway, Agatha Christie's summer home, and recollected how he met her daughter Rosylyn and her husband Anthony Hicks for their approval before he began filming. He met Christie's grandson Matthew Pritchard who also recounted how his grandmother, Agatha Christie, found the character amongst Belgian refugees in Torquay.
  6. Since the year 2014 is now in its 10th month, I have no idea how many films I've seen on TV in all that time.-Ron Price, Australia
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