Moment Of Opening Research Articles

Seismic vulnerability of reinforced concrete knee joints under reversed cyclic loading

Reinforced concrete beam–column knee joints are generally located at the roof level of moment-resisting frame structures. Knee joints undergo significantly different closing and opening actions under seismic excitations. The complex and vulnerable behaviour of knee joints makes them considerably different from conventional exterior and interior joints. To understand this complexity, three full-scale knee joint specimens were subjected to varying closing and opening joint shear stresses produced from the variation of relative closing and opening moment capacities. Peak opening-to-closing joint shear stress ratios of 0·5, 0·6 and 0·8 were achieved for the three specimens. In addition, the effect of anchorage of longitudinal and joint transverse reinforcement was studied in terms of the enhancement of peak joint closing and opening shear stresses. This paper presents a detailed discussion on the effect of closing and opening actions on the overall joint performance of knee joints subjected to reversed cyclic loading.

Influence of structural distortion and bend angle on the collapse load of non-pressurized pipe bends under in-plane closing and opening moments

This research quantifies the implications of structural distortions and bend angle on the collapse load of non-pressurized different bend angle pipe bends. The analysis was carried out for two loading cases namely pipe bends subjected to in-plane closing bending (IPCB) and in-plane opening bending (IPOB). The method used was a three-dimensional (3D) non-linear finite element analysis with a large strain formulation. The chosen material was considered to be Elastic-perfectly plastic (EPP). Bend angle was varied from 30° to 90° with an increment of 30° while structural distortion (ovality) was varied from 0 to 15% at a span of 5%. The twice elastic slope (TES) method was adopted to determine the collapse load of all the considered pipe bend models from their rotation-moment curves. The results show that ovality impact decreased with an increase in the bend angle. When comparing pipe bends with smaller bend radii and smaller bend angles with those having larger bend radii, massive ovality impact was observed. This effect was found to be greater in IPCB compared to IPOB.

Introduction: Modernism and the Turn to Religion

This Introduction contextualizes the volume in modernist tensions between belief and unbelief, and subsequent debates about the nature of secularization. An opening moment considers Pound and Woolf’s rejection of T. S. Eliot’s religious conversion as emblematic of a “subtraction” theory of secularization, in which secularity and religious belief are taken as mutually exclusive horizons of understanding. Such thinking, it is argued, has precluded a more nuanced approach. Criticism has largely ignored more complex and fragmentary religious dimensions of modernist production; or, on the other hand, taken up religion only in the narrow and anachronistic sense of traditional Christianity. This volume attempts to explore the religious dimensions of modernism in a more modernist sense: taking modernist art as a critical liminal space for exploring new modes of religious experience in complex and resonant ways -- often in open rejection of traditional modes of faith, and in authors beyond the usual suspects.

Film Review – La Negrada

Film Review:La Negrada Javier Ramirez (bio) Directed by Jorge Pérez Solano, performances by Magdalena Soriano, Juana Mariche Domínguez, and Felipe Neri Acevedo Corcuera, Tirisia Cine, 2018. 104 mins. In preparation for the 2020 Census, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática, or INEGI) conducted the Intercensal Survey (2015), and for the first time ever, included an afrodescendiente (Afro-descendant) category, a watershed moment for afromexicanos (Afro-Mexicans).1 Prior to 2015, Afro-Mexicans lacked constitutional recognition. The Mexican government quite literally did not count them in census data. Afro-Mexicans's invisibility dates back to the 1917 Constitution, which erased African heritage from a nascent Mexican identity.2 A postrevolutionary Mexican government furthered the erasure of Afro-Mexicans by unifying the country's heterogeneous population under the umbrella of mestizaje, a term that celebrates the racial mixing of indigenous and European ancestries.3 In 2013, after nearly fifteen years of campaigning, two organizations, Huella Negra (Black Footprints) and México Negro (Black Mexico), successfully challenged Mexico's anti-Black, mestizo national identity.4 Such efforts proved historic when Afro-Mexicans were afforded the ability to self-identity in a census survey, thus officially acknowledging their existence. Even with the Mexican government finally recognizing them, Afro-Mexicans remained largely invisible. Nowhere is their existence more marginalized than in Mexican cinema, where stereotypical representations frame Afro-Mexicans and, by extension, Blackness, as foreign to the Mexican popular imaginary. Producer and director Jorge Pérez Solano sought to correct the cinematic neglect of Afro-Mexicans. His movie La Negrada (2018) marked the Mexican film industry's first-ever feature-length movie comprised of an all-Black Latinx cast. The studio-driven fiction film offers a fascinating portrayal of an Afro-Mexican coastal community living in Costa Chica, an area in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The story chronicles the romantic entanglement of Magdalena (Magdalena Soriano) and Juana (Juana Mariche Domínguez), two estranged friends who share the same [End Page 503] lover, Neri (Felipe Neri Acevedo Corcuera).5 Tears in the marital dynamic appear after Juana's hospital stay reveals a terminal diagnosis. Magdalena hopes for a future of just Neri and herself, but he is unwilling to forgo his polygamist view on relationships. Ultimately, Juana's inevitable death realizes a new path for Magdalena, proving there is a life without Neri. Despite its narrative simplicity, La Negrada's slow cinema aesthetic pronounces the everydayness of the Afro-Mexican community. The film's opening moments features two semi-long takes, one with Neri fishing with his son and another of Sara (Sara Gallardo), Juana and Neri's daughter, casually walking between her home and her grandmother's house. Such stillness in the everyday accentuates the tranquility, colorfulness, and beauty of the Costa Chica region—home to many Afro-Mexicans. The quietude of the uncompressed shots also foregrounds the area's coastal acoustics, and in doing so, offers a sharp contrast to the noise-filled and fast-paced urban environment. Perhaps more importantly is how slowness allows viewers to contemplate the Afro-Mexican experience. In an effort to help her ailing mother, Sara travels to a nearby city in hopes of finding medicine that will minimize Juana's pain. Her return trip takes a turn for the worse when, at a migration checkpoint, a Mexican immigration officer orders Sara and several others off the bus. Because they lack IDs, Sara and two other gentlemen must "prove" their Mexican citizenship by singing the Mexican national anthem from a specific starting point. Only Sara is able to "prove" her Mexican citizen status. Elongated cinematic time in the scene, to quote Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, "encourages a mode of engagement with images and sounds whereby slow time becomes a vehicle for introspection, reflection and thinking."6 In other words, temporal slowness urges viewers to contemplate the racist anti-Blackness that pervades Mexican societal structures. Linked closely to the film's slow cinema aesthetic is its borrowing of the cinéma vérité style. La Negrada is by no means a documentary, but the employment of an observational cinema technique serves the...

As You Like It

Reviewed by: As You Like It Cason Murphy As You Like It Presented by Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival. Streamed digitally at flag-shakes.org, 11–27 September 2020. Directed by James Cougar Canfield. Avatar and Sprite design by Nathan Leigh. Costumes by Hannah Fontes. Editing and original music by Sean Golightly. Stage management by Becki Zaritsky. With Bill Chameides (Duke Frederick/Duke Senior), Hannah Fontes (Celia), Gustavo Flores (Touchstone), Keith Hale (Oliver), Rapheal Hamilton (William/Brother Jacques/Lord), Ryan L. Jenkins (Orlando), Nick Marchetti (Charles/Phoebe), Jacob Nichols (Silvius), Suze St. John (Adam/Corin), Melissa Toomey (Jacques), Audrey Young (Audrey/Le Beau), and Becki Zaritsky (Rosalind). Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival’s recent virtual production of As You Like It gives new meaning to Jaques’s musing that “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” (2.7.140–1). In this case, these players are quarantined actors inhabiting 16-bit character avatars who navigate a pixelated Forest of Arden that evokes the nostalgia and aesthetics of role-playing video games from the early 1990s. This metatheatrical production concept, devised by director James Cougar Canfield, emerged in response to a need to shift Flagstaff Shakespeare’s repertory model online as COVID-19 rapidly spread during the pre-production period. With company members sheltering in place across the country, Canfield took cues from memories of watching his mother play Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past as a child, as well as his own daily practice of exploring the idyllic wilds of Animal Crossing: New Horizons during the early phase of quarantine. Here, the imagined vintage computer game As You Like It acts as a recursive metaphor for the production—becoming its own green world to provide the twelve performers of the ensemble an escape from the doldrums of self-isolation. [End Page 283] The opening moment of the production features a charming framing device focused on Becki Zaritsky, the actor who plays Rosalind. The audience, positioned as if watching from the screen of Zartisky’s computer, watches a largely silent dumb show as she enters her real-world bedroom and casually checks her phone, only to find a message that spurs her to plug in her gaming headset and log onto the game. After a few keystrokes, she slowly draws her eyes up to us and flashes a fourth wall-breaking smile before Sean Golightly’s pitch-perfect synthesized main theme fades in over the title screen of the game. Not only does this sequence effectively center Zaritsky-as-Rosalind as our primary focus, but it also provides a quaint analog frontispiece which will be bookended by her sublime delivery of Rosalind’s epilogue, delivered in the same setting. Following a genre-perfect scrolling text exposition detailing Duke Frederick’s usurpation and exile of Duke Senior, the production completes Rosalind’s digital transformation with the selection of her Renaissance-styled avatar. Moving into the narrative proper, Canfield’s vision nicely allows the company to similarly re-envision the major moments of Shakespeare’s text within the framework of RPG (role-playing game) mechanics. In Oliver’s first confrontation with Orlando, upon the utterance of “Wilt thou lay hands on me, villain?,” a traditional turn-based combat sequence launches and the performers strategically select from options including PUNCH, SLASH, and HEAL. This gameplay mechanic is expertly deployed at the playtext’s two other moments of danger—during the setpiece wrestling match pitting Orlando against Charles in 1.2, and later in a fully hilariously realized boss battle between Orlando and the lioness, which precedes Oliver’s melodramatic recollection of the event for Rosalind-as-Ganymede and Celia-as-Aliena in 4.3. With only a dozen actors at hand to cover the twenty-two named characters in the Folio playtext, many clever choices of doubling are made. Some of these pairings have precedent in the play’s performance history—Suze St. John brings wisdom and gentility to her doubling of Adam and Corin, both ready to serve to the “last gasp with truth and loyalty” (2.3.70); and Bill Chameides differentiates his stately Duke Senior from the dastardly Duke Frederick with a particularly wild, monitor-chewing...

Domains of Objects, Rituals of truth: Mapping Intersections between International Legal History and the New Materialisms

Across the arts, social sciences, and the humanities there is a growing interest in the materiality of everyday experience. Feminist engagements with the social studies of science laid the foundations for a new generation of critical thinking that took a break from the hegemony of discourse to embrace the material practices that underpin knowledge, science, and power. (International) legal history, however, has been conspicuously absent from these discussions. For many scholars and practitioners, law is still a discipline that revolves around written texts limiting our engagements with its diverse material manifestations. Instead of outlining a single approach to materiality and international legal history, in this article I review several trends of ‘new materialist’ thinking, showing how each might enrich legal inquiries. International legal scholarship, which is undergoing a moment of theoretical openness, has much to gain from the engagement with the overlapping, contradictory, and unstable insights of the renewed materialisms.

Examination of engine cylinder-piston group damages

Results of investigations of engine cylinder-piston group (CPG) damages and causes of their occurrence are given. The object of the study is the KIA Ceed engine, which came for examination due to a significant decrease in power, increased consumption of motor oil, violation of the dynamics of the car. The analysis of the technical condition of the disassembled engine showed that the parts of the crank mechanism and the cylinder head have no operational damages. Serious damages were detected only in the cylinder-piston group of the engine: abrasive wear of the working surfaces of cylinders, pistons and compression rings, coking of oil removal rings, deposits on the surfaces of all pistons of the engine. According to the results of the studies, the cause of loss of efficiency by the engine is the destruction of the ceramic catalyst, the products of which in the form of ground powdered substance enter the cylinders together with the exhaust gases. This occurs at the moment of simultaneous opening of exhaust valves of two cylinders having different exhaust gas pressure. A small amount thereof, together with the catalyst breakage products, penetrates the lower pressure cylinder through the manifold. A study of the substance of deposits on the pistons of the engine and the destruction products of the elements of the ceramic catalyst (cordierite Al4Mg2O16Si5), carried out on the powder diffractometer BRUKER AXS, showed the identity of their diffraction composition. This indicates that damage to the parts of the CPG and loss of performance by the engine is caused by destruction of the ceramic catalyst.

Microwave characteristics analysis of photosensitive material InP under weak optical irradiation

In this paper, the microwave characteristic of photosensitive material InP irradiated by different optical signals is studied based on the coaxial resonant cavity. The coaxial resonant cavity sensor has an operating frequency range from 1 to 4 GHz, an operating mode of TEMn/4, and a quality factor of 8000 or more. According to the theory of semiconductor and electromagnetic field, the equation describing the relationship between the irradiation power and the quality factor of the coaxial resonator is derived. Additionally, in the short-time irradiation experiment, the variation of microwave characteristics of InP with irradiation power of 10mW, 50mW, 100mW, and 250mW is studied by frequency-domain and time-domain scanning methods, respectively. The measurement results indicate that the microwave characteristic variation of the InP under short-time weak power irradiation is mainly caused by the non-thermal effect, while the thermal effect is not obvious. In order to investigate the influence of thermal effect on the microwave characteristic of InP under continuous illumination, taking the irradiation power of 100mW as an example, the irradiation experiment with a duration of 1 min is performed on the InP. The thermal and non-thermal effects at the moment of opening and closing of the monochrome light source and during irradiation are analyzed. Furthermore, the stability and response speed of the system are analyzed and tested, and the measurement results are in good agreement with the theoretical analysis.

Performance evaluation of different strengthening measures for exterior RC beam-column joints under opening moments

Devastating RC structural failures in the past have identified that the behavior of beam-column joints is more critical and significantly governs the global structural response under seismic loading. The congestion of reinforcement at the beam-column joints with other constructional difficulties has escalated the attention required for strengthening RC beam-column joints. In this context, numerous studies have been carried out in the past, which mainly focused on jacketing the joints with different materials. However, there is no comparative study of different approaches used to strengthen RC beam-column joints, from efficiency and cost perspective. This paper presents a detailed investigation carried out to study the various strengthening schemes of exterior RC beam-column joints, viz., steel fiber reinforcement, carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) strengthening, steel haunch strengthening, and confining joint reinforcement. The effectiveness of each scheme was evaluated experimentally. These specimens were tested under horizontal loading that produced opening moments on the joints and their behavior was studied with emphasis on strength, displacement ductility, stiffness, and failure mechanism. Special attention was given to the study of crack-width.

Slow waters: Marco Berger’s Taekwondo and the queer erotics of boredom

In the opening moments of the short British film Baby (WIZ, 2000), the close-up image of a hand brushing slowly against a bare chest triggers the film’s interrogation of the erotic potential in screening touch. Accentuated by a shallow focus on the individual body hairs and bumps of the protagonist’s skin, this suggestively haptic introduction at once emphasizes the centrality of vision in the filming of the sensual yet denies its epistemological mastery through the textural quality of its image. The film’s slow narrative structure, composed entirely of a series of erotically charged flashbacks during an act of masturbation, is matched by a lack of dialogue and by long, static takes of the naked and semi-naked bodies in and around a public swimming pool. During these flashbacks, the protagonist – played by a twenty-year-old Ben Whishaw – negotiates the homosocial hurdles of gender-specific changing rooms and communal showers. As he does so, his constant proximity to water, which envelops bodies and distorts the senses, provides a now familiar backdrop for the exploration of a developing sexuality and its concomitant potency for queerness. Moreover, as the suggestive smirk from a confident, muscular diver implies when his gaze meets that of Whishaw, the cinematic spaces of Baby are conceived as sites not only where the queer subject is able to find pleasure in looking, but where the eroticism of being looked at can often prove to be similarly as pleasurable. When both narrative and protagonist climax in the film’s closing moments – after a flashback of Whishaw removing his swimming shorts in a crowded public shower – vision, sexuality and sensation collide through a scene that both formally embraces the spectatorial gaze and queers its relationship with the on-screen image.

A representação como herança: uma análise biográfica dos eleitos para as Assembleias Legislativas no Brasil em 2018

A agenda de estudos sobre democracia no Brasil esteve centrada até o começo do presente século em temas como a retirada do entulho autoritário e a construção e discussão institucional que, nesse momento, nortearia o novo momento de abertura política. Após esse momento, abriu-se espaço não mais para discutir tão somente sobre a recém (re)inaugurada democracia, mas, além disso, pôde concentrar em temas relacionados a qualidade democrática. Uma das linhas oriundas desse grande tema é, por certo, a análise da representação política. Diante disso, o presente artigo analisa a composição das Assembleias Legislativas eleitas em 2018 a fim de verificar em que medida há a reprodução da representação política dentro das famílias que detém ou detiveram poder em seus respectivos estados. As singularidades da proposta são quantificar o fenômeno a partir da análise biográfica dos eleitos em todos os Estados da federação a fim de verificar as Assembleias com maior incidência de “presença genealógica’ e, além disso, incluir a variável gênero, que possibilita discutir a maior incidência de “capital político herdado” nas representantes do sexo feminino.

& Juliet

Reviewed by: & Juliet Gemma Kate Allred & JulietPresented by Max Martin and Tim Headington at Shaftesbury Theatre, London. From 11 2, 2019. Music and lyrics by Max Martin and Friends. Book by David West Read. Directed by Luke Shephard. Music supervision, orchestration and arrangement by Bill Sherman. Choreography by Jennifer Weber. Set by Soutra Gilmour. Lighting by Howard Hudson. Costumes by Paloma Young. With Miriam-Teak Lee (Juliet), Cassidy Janson (Anne Hathaway), Oliver Tompsett (Shakespeare), David Bedella (Lance), Arun Blair-Mangat (May), Jordan Luke Gage (Romeo), Melanie La Barrie (Nurse), Tim Mahendran (Francois), and others. In 2018, Emiliahit the stage of Shakespeare's Globe. Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's protagonist became every woman, embodying their collective anger, and social media responded. Emiliawas established as essential viewing, working as a manifesto for a feminist revolution. The act of writing back across textual boundaries functioned as historical recuperation, placing the textual memories of the real Emilia Bassano into the [End Page 278]bodies of modern women. The West End show & Juliet—neon pink, glitter-accented, and set to a soundtrack of teen-pop classics—might seem to be an unlikely counterpart to Emilia. However, David West Read's jukebox musical, based on the chart-topping back catalogue of Max Martin, is just that. Asking "What if Juliet's famous ending was really just her beginning? What if she decided to choose her own fate?" & Julietraises questions about whose stories get told and by whom, and about who controls the narrative. Shakespeare's Juliet, with the assistance of a historically fictionalized Anne Hathaway, has the chance to rewrite her future without Romeo. Like Emilia, & Julietplaces early modern women in conversation with both a modern audience and Shakespeare himself. & Juliet's links to Baz Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet(1996) cannot be ignored, with clear nods to 1990s pop culture throughout. Juliet's soundtrack was predominately Britney Spears-based. She entered, slumped against Romeo's tomb, singing a mournful version of Britney's 1998 debut "… Baby One More Time," arranged by Tony Award-winner Bill Sherman. Francois de Bois, her new love interest—a replacement Romeo, if you will—entered playing a Nintendo Game Boy and shared a duet with Juliet, Britney's "Overprotected." The musical's marketing also draws heavily on 1990s nostalgia: a special edition Smash Hitsmagazine handed out at London underground stations marked the production's premiere. The clear target audience is women now in their mid-thirties who grew up reading the magazine, listening to Britney's early hits, and watching Lurhmann's Romeo + Juliet, willing Leonardo DiCaprio's Romeo to notice when Claire Danes's Juliet wakes and craving the fairy-tale ending Shakespeare denied us. & Julietoffers the target market a remix: a second chance at "happily ever after," this time centered not on the Hollywood heartthrob but, as West Read notes in the theater program, "the independent, empowered" Juliet. Inherently meta-theatrical, & Julietis as much a love letter to theater itself as it is to Romeo and Juliet. From the opening moments, I was aware that Juliet's story was a play within a play. Soutra Gilmour's set design was self-consciously based on Elizabethan theater (specifically, Shoreditch's Curtain). Gilmour took the idea of a disused theater space to frame her design. She created a clear timeline between Shakespeare's London and modern-day Shoreditch, taking inspiration from East London's street art tradition. Artist Vic Lee's text and maps provided backdrops that plotted the musical's journey from the theater in London (both Shakespeare's Curtain and today's Shaftsbury Theatre) to the play's settings of Verona and Paris. The musical's pre-set drew inspiration from the modern-day [End Page 279]Shakespeare's Globe. The Players entered gradually, interacting with the audience as they settled. Costume designer Paloma Young took her lead from actors warming up before a performance: the players wore dancewear with a hint of Elizabethan period costuming, and t-shirts and jackets referencing earlier Shakespearean performances. A spot-lit jukebox placed stage right provided warm-up music and kept & Juliet'sidentity as a jukebox musical at the fore. Shakespeare entered in rock...

Ispitivanje efikasnosti korišćenja pirofilita u siliranju biljke kukuruza

The paper presents the results of testing the effect of pyrophyllite shale (pyrophyllite) on the quality of maize plant silage, primarily on the production of organic acids, pH value, quality assessment and microbiological safety. The ensiling was done in plastic containers which allowed the storage of 10 kg of chopped green mass. Tested pyrophyllite doses were: 0% in the control treatment (I), 0.5 and 1.0% in experimental treatments (II and III, respectively). Granulated pyrophyllite (100 µm), originating from Parsovići, Konjic site, AD Harbi Ltd., Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, was manually incorporated. The chopped green mass of the maize plant came from FAO 600 hybrids. The green mass containing 37.17% of dry matter (final waxy ripening phase) was compressed in the same manner in all three treatments during the filling of the vessels. The containers were then covered with nylon foil (0.2 mm) above which a layer of fine sand (approx. 5 cm) was placed in toward the silage protection from air passage. The silages were opened after 7 weeks and organoleptic, chemical and microbiological analyses were performed. The organoleptic properties of silages (colour and odour) were better in silages containing 0.5 and 1.0% pyrophyllite. The silage temperature at the moment of opening of the containers was lower in the treatments with 0.5 and 1.0% added pyrophyllite (13.7 and 13.2 °C, respectively) while in the control treatment it was 14.6 °C. The addition of pyrophyllite to silage affected the production of volatile fatty acids (p ≤ 0.05). The highest amount of lactic acid was found in the silage sample without the addition of pyrophyllite, and acetic acid in the silage treated with 0.5 and 1.0% of pyrophyllite. The lowest amount of butyric acid was determined in the silage with the addition of 1% pyrophyllite. Based on the content and interrelationship of lactic, acetic and butyric acid, as well as the pH values, all three silages were rated as the highest (I) class. The number of aerobic mesophilic bacteria, as well as the number of yeasts, was lower in the silages with the addition of 0.5 and 1.0% pyrophyllite. In future, particular attention should be paid on the possibility of pyrophyllite enrichment (e.g. with nitrogen) and more appropriate physical formulation (e.g. granules) that would allow more efficient practical application.

A Little Life

Reviewed by: A Little Life Mert Dilek A LITTLE LIFE. Adapted for the stage by Koen Tachelet. Directed by Ivo van Hove. International Theater Amsterdam, Netherlands. April 18, 2019. Since its publication in 2015, Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life has beguiled and challenged readers all over the world with its story of an unspeakable [End Page 102] trauma leavened with life-affirming compassion. The acclaimed Belgian director Ivo van Hove’s stage adaptation of the novel, written and performed in Dutch, deftly rose to the challenge of capturing the sprawling density of this psychological odyssey, as it was both loyal to the narrative intricacy of its source text and consistently imaginative in how it enriched its many layers. Thoughtful embodiments of the novel’s key episodes, propped by a clinically sharp approach to storytelling, allowed van Hove’s production to foreground and make concrete the visceral components of Yanagihara’s work. Click for larger view View full resolution Maarten Heijmans (Willem), Ramsey Nasr (Jude), and Marieke Heebink (Ana) in A Little Life. (Photo: Jan Versweyveld.) On the face of it, the 700-odd pages of A Little Life chronicle the intersecting lives of four friends from college: the actor Willem, the architect Malcolm, the artist JB, and the lawyer Jude. But the central focus remains on Jude, whose tragic childhood of abuse and suffering turns out to have left an indelible imprint on his adult life. Koen Tachelet’s adapted script and van Hove’s staging, although running to over four hours, economically replicated the novel’s plot, tonal swerves, and rhythmic modulations, with a fine sense of what to jettison and what to dwell upon. Just as Yanagihara’s novel begins in a lighthearted key, its attention dispersed evenly across the four friends, the play’s opening depicted their relationships in rather innocuous ways, showing them lounging together and dancing under strobe lights. The novel’s third chapter, hinting for the first time at its interest in zooming in on Jude by way of his self-destructive habits, had its onstage counterpart twenty minutes into the production: after the first spurt of blood coming from Jude’s forearm, the gentle conviviality of the opening moments could hardly be recovered. Jan Versweyveld’s design compartmentalized the novel’s primary locations across the ITA’s large stage, assigning a distinct but spare corner to each with an evocative set of props. The production’s scenic minimalism was conveyed particularly through the empty center stage; the locational non-specificity of this sizable area, which looked like a scar tissue, allowed it to function as a psychological realm. Raked seating on upstage center accommodated an audience of about 180, who could be seen clearly by those in the 550-seat auditorium: such mirroring enhanced the audience’s awareness of one another’s disturbed reactions to certain moments. The stage was bracketed by two sidewalls upon which were projected continuous, slow-motion shots of New York streets. Besides making much of the setting explicit, these projections infused the play with a sense of interminable, almost doom-driven, motion. [End Page 103] Click for larger view View full resolution Ramsey Nasr (Jude) and Hans Kesting (Brother Luke/Dr. Traylor/Caleb) in A Little Life. (Photo: Jan Versweyveld.) An overwhelming sense of continuity was pervasive, seamlessly stringing together a great number of scenes taking place in different locations, time periods, and theatrical modes. This was especially powerful in those moments when an event in the present-day timeline referred to or triggered a memory from Jude’s past. This intense interweaving of Jude’s extended flashbacks with scenes from his present often turned the stage into an embodiment of his tormented psyche. Live music from a string quartet provided a feverish accompaniment to many of these temporally fluid episodes. Ramsey Nasr’s agile physicality allowed him to switch between different periods of Jude’s life with ease and finesse: whether Jude was a naïve child or a weary adult, Nasr’s performance conveyed his character’s changing features—facial, bodily, and psychological—in subtle but effective ways. Even though scenes of Jude’s professional life were absent from the play, he always wore...

Improved performance of steel fibre reinforced beam-column joint- an experimental study

One of the main causes for devastating failures of RC buildings is the inadequate strength/ductility at critical locations like beam-column joint. The placement of closely spaced reinforcement at the beam-column joints together with the poor compaction of concrete further justify the necessity for effective structural measures to be taken at these joints to avoid such failures. In this context, numerous studies have been carried out in the past, which have mainly focused on the jacketing of joints with different materials. Some studies in the past have also tried to address this issue by internally strengthening the joint also. This paper presents an experimental study on the improved performance of steelfibre reinforced RC beam-column joints. The specimens were tested under horizontal loading that were capable of developing opening moments on the joints and their behaviour was discussed with emphasis on strength, displacement ductility, stiffness and failure mechanism. It was observed that introduction of steel fibres (1.5% by volume) increased the strength, displacement ductility and energy absorption of by 33%, 18% and 232%respectively, although there was a decrease of overall stiffness by 52%. The joint efficiency of the member was increased by a factor of 1.33 by introduction of the same.

The Problem with Apu, Whiteness, and Racial Hierarchies in US Media Industries

The Problem with Apu, Whiteness, and Racial Hierarchies in US Media Industries Madhavi Mallapragada (bio) Hari Kondabolu's 2017 documentary, The Problem with Apu (Michael Melamedoff), revolves around the Indian American writer's mission to resolve what he conceptualizes as the derogatory representation of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the Indian immigrant character on the animated Fox television comedy series, The Simpsons (1989–). The problem is threefold. Apu is a racist stereotype of South Asian Americans; despite or perhaps because of that, Apu is a beloved and iconic character in mainstream American culture; consequently, Apu's legacy is oppressive as it continues to shape US media industries' expectations of South Asian American representations, people, and culture. As Kondabolu sees it, the only way to make peace with his decades-long struggle with the Apu stereotype is to interrogate the context of its production.1 This essay focuses on Kondabolu's production-related challenges—notably his (ultimately futile) efforts to get Hank Azaria, the white voice actor playing Apu, to be a part of the documentary—as well as the post-release responses from The Simpsons' team. Drawing from them, I argue for the urgency of centering the category of race in media production studies and, relatedly, for examining how racial hierarchies are operationalized and maintained in production cultures. Kondabolu's film takes aim at the politics of a highly influential mainstream, white American television show [End Page 148] and arrives at a time when the lack of racial diversity in mainstream media industries continues to be a problem, despite the recent trend of diverse casting. Over the last decade, US media industries have attempted to reframe their investments around race. Such efforts include racial diversity initiatives in the media workplace, casting decisions that consciously avoid the perpetuation of stereotypes, and targeting the key demographic groups of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans.2 But most of all, the reframing of the industries' relation to matters pertaining to racism, erasure, underrepresentation, and misrepresentation is a strategic ideological move. Here, the rhetoric that the twenty-first-century media industries' ethos is one of inclusivity, offering correctives to existing inequities and giving historically marginalized voices a proverbial seat at the proverbial table, is employed widely and often. In turn, it generates and maintains a narrative that is focused on the industries' intentions (often for the future) and individual practices (looking at casting on one show, for example). Such rhetorical moves function to obfuscate the structural factors that maintain racial hierarchies and recuperate whiteness as an institutional norm.3 My brief study of The Problem with Apu exemplifies the challenges racial minorities, including South Asian Americans, face in their efforts to engage the industry on its diversity platform and to offer their critical perspectives on the industries' Anglocentric production culture. Kondabolu, who wrote and stars in the documentary, draws on the reception of Apu by interviewing his family members and South Asian American celebrities. He focuses mostly on actors, comics, and writers, but problematically foregrounds male perspectives. In characterizing Apu as a stereotype, Kondabolu essentially revisits a long-standing critique about the representation of Apu.4 Critics have long pointed to the considerable evidence that Apu is a stereotype. The character owns a convenience store Kwik-E-Mart; is a devout Hindu; has an arranged marriage and eight children; is a "good" immigrant who espouses the values of hard work, tolerance, and not disrupting the status quo; and utters phrases like "Thank you! Come again!" in an exaggerated "Indian" accent. Shilpa Davé's groundbreaking theoretical formulation of "brown voice" posits that the production and repetition of a distinctive "Indian" accent in US popular culture functions as a racializing trait.5 She notes that the performance of this accent, or brown voice, is entangled with the racist histories of ethnic vaudeville humor and brownface performances.6 She argues that brown voice, as exemplified by Apu's "Indian" accent, ultimately "reinforces a static position for South Asians regardless of their status or occupation in the United States."7 In the opening moments of The Problem with Apu, Kondabolu reasons that while it is necessary to talk to The Simpsons' writers and producers to understand their thinking behind creating...

The Natural and Unnatural Histories of Patricio Guzmán

The Natural and Unnatural Histories of Patricio Guzmán Graig Uhlin (bio) The opening moments of The Pearl Button, the 2015 film from Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, frame a small block of quartz in close-up. The director's voice-over draws attention to a droplet of water encased inside the mineral unearthed in the Atacama Desert. The trapped water is an estimated three thousand years old. Guzmán offers no commentary beyond these factual observations before the opening credits appear, but this brief prologue introduces the film's extended attention to traces of the past as they are preserved by nonhuman nature. The difficulty and necessity of engaging with the past is a longstanding concern of Guzmán's exilic documentary filmmaking. In films such as Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), The Pinochet Case (2001), and Salvador Allende (2004), Guzmán returns to the democratic election of the socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1970 and his subsequent overthrow in a United States–financed coup d'état in 1973, which installed the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. These historical events also provide the basis for the director's three-part The Battle of Chile (1975–79), a documentation of Allende's nationalization agenda and the internal strife resulting from it. Guzmán's postdictatorship documentaries confront the national trauma of the Pinochet regime, and they emphasize the importance of sustaining collective memory in the face of its erasure. Accordingly, Guzmán draws on various strategies of remembrance, including personal testimony from survivors and historical records via photography and film. The Pearl Button and the film that preceded it, Nostalgia for the Light (2011), extend Guzmán's cinematic engagement with the fragments of memory to the historical traces preserved by natural elements. These elements—for Guzmán, [End Page 40] primarily earth and water—function as historical agents, and his films consider how nonhuman nature shapes the legibility of the past. In this regard, Guzmán's block of quartz is a media object—that is, an act of mediation that encloses, and thereby transmits, a trace of the past. Mediation is not an operation unique to technological media, as the natural elements, in their ceaseless interactions, continually mediate (act as a medium) for each other. As Sean Cubitt Notes, while human communication marks out meaningful distinctions within this "background hum," mediation itself "precedes the separation of the human and the environmental," which is to say, "precedes all separations, all distinctions, all thingliness, objects, and objectivity."1 Guzmán's block of quartz is itself an inscription of the past, an impression formed by the interaction of natural elements, and the political project of his recent documentaries is rooted in their attentiveness to and exploration of these nonhuman modes of mediation. Dipesh Chakrabarty has observed that from the vantage point of the climate crisis, the separation between human history and natural history is an untenable divide.2 The recognition that humanity acts as a geological force dispels the assumption that the environment is too large in scale and changes at a pace too slowly for human actions to affect it. Natural history is not the stable backdrop to human events. The entanglement of natural history and human history, rather, bridges the gap between temporal scales, placing, as Chakrabarty writes, "the geological now of the Anthropocene," designating a new geological epoch that acknowledges humanity's climatic influences, in contact "with the now of human history."3 Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button confront the problem of scale in narrating history. Of the former film, Nilo Couret argues that it understands nostalgia as a movement across time scales. "Toggling between the human, the geologic, and the cosmic," Nostalgia for the Light mediates historical events by emplotting them along spatiotemporal coordinates that traverse these scales.4 Couret writes, "Guzmán alternates between the small detail that unfolds in time and the unfathomable vastness enfolding in time, carrying an event forward and backward in a string of possible and impossible connections across space and time."5 Like Nostalgia for the Light, The Pearl Button places the national history of Chile in relation to nonhuman temporal and spatial dimensions. The Pinochet...

A Moon for the Misbegotten

A Moon for the Misbegotten opened in Columbus, Ohio, in 1947, under the auspices of the Theatre Guild as part of an abortive national tour meant to culminate on Broadway. The play soon came under assault from critics and spectators who lambasted it as a crude valorization of a libidinous drunkard wallowing in a sexually charged relationship with an unmarried woman even as he mourned the passing of his mother. The Detroit venue canceled its engagement following the police department's denunciation of the play as “obscene” and “a slander of American motherhood” (qtd. in Gelb and Gelb, By Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O'Neill [2016], 644).Controversy was of course not new for O'Neill, whose work had long been under attack from reviewers, peers, and audiences but whose nuanced investigations of the psychological and emotional complexity of his characters remain the signature attribute of his dramaturgy. The Kansas City Actors Theatre's production generated a bit of controversy from a local reviewer who branded the production “troubled” in the context of misogyny and the ethics of high-canonical scheduling (Liz Cook, The Pitch, Sept. 20, 2018); but the company honored and illuminated O'Neill's complexity, thanks to a strong cast, an excellent design team, and the poignant direction of Mark Robbins. Ashley Pankow and Brian Paulette brought an electric connection to the play's central characters. Their Josie Hogan and Jamie Tyrone were deeply human and commanded the stage with all the subtlety that the play warrants. Pankow struck an uncanny balance between Josie's “brazen and brass” exterior and the vulnerability and sensuality lurking beneath: she weaponizes drink and sexuality while casting a spell over her counterpart. Indeed, Pankow anchored the production with a mix of power and grace that proved to be a fitting complement to Paulette's wonderfully understated Tyrone, whose distraught amalgam of self-loathing, drunken shame, and emotional emptiness was palpably apparent. Nowhere was this complexity more beautifully presented than the self-punishing aria in which Tyrone searches for psychological and emotional resolution after his “Mama's” death: “I know I ought to be heartbroken but I [can't] feel anything …. She's dead. What does she care now if I cry or not, or what do I do?” Paulette weaved his way through Tyrone's pained remembrance with ease and dignity while Pankow cradled him in her arms under an appropriately rendered moonlit set, the work of designers Shane Rowse (lighting) and Gary Mosby (scenic), whose contributions supported the performances through a poetic realism that echoed the dramatic imagination of O'Neill's erstwhile collaborator Robert Edmond Jones. Jon Robertson's haunting soundscape and Emily Stovall's detailed costumes completed KCAT's fully realized production.Robbins's staging was telling in its simplicity, as allowing the actors to command the space through organically expressed action. Victor Raider-Wexler's charming Hogan led a strong supporting cast. The troupe's mastery of Irish dialects and O'Neill's poetic prose was especially impressive. From Pankow's opening moments with Charlie Spillers (Mike Hogan) to Raider-Wexler's lighthearted exchanges with Chris Roady's T. Stedman Harder, the evening was steadily paced to Josie's final—if problematic—offering to her beloved Tyrone: “May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace.” A Moon for the Misbegotten's ending suggests redemption for O'Neill's emotionally torn protagonist. Yes, as the aforementioned reviewer charged, Tyrone is a “philanderer” and perhaps “a sad-sack aspiring rapist with Mommy issues.” And I concur in the critic's observation that theatre professionals bear responsibility for selecting and presenting material that reflects the values and identities of our increasingly diverse population. But the winner of four Pulitzers and a Nobel is not so easily dismissed, and balancing contemporary and familiar offerings is surely part of a repertory theatre's charge. Locals can take pride in the fine work being offered by the Kansas City Actors Theatre, of which this production provided a splendid instance.

From Depletion to Regeneration: Addressing Structural and Physical Violence in Post-Conflict Economies

AbstractDrawing on depletion through social reproduction and political economy of violence against women (PEVAW) approaches, we show how the context of violence intensifies the depletion of women’s lives as they labor to meet their household needs; and how this depletion heightens their vulnerability to violence in conflict-affected contexts and inhibits their roles in peacebuilding. We propose the concept of the “regenerative state,” as a post-conflict moment of openness when state policy underpinned by attention to issues of depletion, social reproduction, and violence against women can help reshape gendered power relations in post-conflict transitions.

Character on Autopilot

I'm a creature of habit. When I wake up, I go to the bathroom sink, fill the orange plastic cup next to it with water, drink it, brush my teeth, pad downstairs, turn on the electric kettle, grind coffee, and check my email while waiting for the water to boil…. This is a pretty complex routine, but I've repeated it so often that it's second nature. You probably have your own morning ritual, and it surely differs from mine (unless you, too, are still using the unbreakable cup you bought at Ikea for your toddler ages ago). What we have in common is that we're getting through the opening moments of the day on autopilot. It turns out that nearly half of what we do, think, and feel in the course of a day is habitual.