Gang culture rife in schools
The News Review:
- Gang culture rife in schools
- Don’t mention the war
- Coachella Music Festival Ready For Purple Reign
- Tracks of Time
Gang culture rife in schools
NEWS.com.au – Apr 27, 2008
The guys love them but they’re called Plastics because they’re so false. "The female schoolgirl obsession with good looks surfaced last week at St Patrick’s College in Mackay where students had ranked themselves from 1 to 21 – they write the number on their wrists – as part of Club 21 or Big 21. Gothics are identified by their dark clothing and heavy-metal taste in music and Emos (from "emotion") by being sensitive introverted types obsessed with depressing rock bands. But it is the group stealing the US gangsta-style culture with its love of violent rap music which students fear the most. A gang of suburban teenagers armed with bats machetes and a sword stormed a school assembly at Sydney’s Merrylands High School early this month injuring 18 students and a teacher. Queensland students told The Sunday Mail they were aware of similar gang members carrying pocket knives around secondary schools in southeast Queensland. "They all have baggy clothing they’re all bling they have the hats with the stiff shades worn backwards and the pants around their knees showing their undies" the 18-year-old said.
Don’t mention the war
The Australian – Apr 26, 2008
With the benefit of perspective these films were sharper in their focus and thus more palatable to the public. Much of that dramatic tension arose from a key difference between the wars: the US soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan volunteered for duty while the soldiers in Vietnam were drafted. The resulting reluctance informs the drama rendering the life-and-death struggles for survival that much more multifaceted and absorbing. Second says Wells who has wrangled these points repeatedly on his Hollywood Elsewhere site "there have been no surreal eye-popping epic-scaled Iraq war movies along the lines of Apocalypse Now or anything that has attempted to sum up the tragedy of the war except for one In the Valley of Elah which deserved a betterreception. " That it did: In the Valley of Elah is the most cumulatively moving and dramatically satisfying of the Iraq-themed movies to date. When his newly returned soldier son goes missing taciturn retired career officer Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) forms an unstable alliance with a local cop (Charlize Theron) to discover the truth. Though every bit as schematic as director Paul Haggis’s previous films Oscar winners Million Dollar Baby and Crash Elah rises above them by virtue of a multi-layered script and crisp performances… Once more during times of social upheaval nonfiction films have provided a valuable chorus of voices. Melbourne-born Eva Orner recently received the documentary Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side director Alex Gibney’s exploration of the mistaken capture torture and murder of an innocent Afghan cabbie by US forces in 2002. Other subjects range from the plight of an Iraqi rock band Heavy Metal in Baghdad to acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris’s examination of the Abu Ghraib scandal Standard Operating Procedure. Deborah Scranton’s The War Tapes is composed of filmed missives from combat soldiers while a pair of ambitious documentary features Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight and the exhaustively titled War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death offer well-researched theses on just how the US got into this predicament in the firstplace. Veteran rocker Neil Young has even chimed in breaking out his director alter-ego Bernard Shakey for CSNY Deja Vu which traces the supergroup Crosby Stills Nash & Young on their 2006 reunion tour as they perform a clutchof Young-penned anti-war songs with catchy titles along the lines of Let’s Impeach thePresident. To put this in historical perspective two Vietnam-themed documentaries won Oscars in that category: the French-made The Anderson Platoon in 1967 and Hearts and Minds in 1974. For the latter director Peter Davis took great pains to explore the Vietnam quagmire from both sides of the issue and at the time it was one of the few nonfiction films on the war to play theatrically in the US.
Coachella Music Festival Ready For Purple Reign
CBS 2 – Apr 26, 2008
com – Coachella Music Festival Ready For Purple Reign. All Rights Reserved… Many more are expected for Saturday. Although traffic is reportedly always a problem during the festival Indio police spokesman Ben Guitron said Friday’s congestion was less than last year’s adding that Monroe Street one of the festival’s main arteries was under construction at the time. He also said this was the third year in a row that “amnesty cans” large metal containers with slots were being placed at the festival entrance for concert goers to drop illegal drug contraband before entering. “It seems to work well” Guitron said. “We’re trying to give them (festival-goers) a chance to grow up and be responsible and make a conscious decision. Of course we’ll always have the ones who want the challenge of getting it (drugs) in but they’ve gotta get through security first. “The concert industry trade publication Pollstar reported that 62212 tickets were sold for last year’s festival which equated to an attendance of 180000 over three days.
Tracks of Time
Washington Post – Apr 27, 2008
Settling in for the ride to Brownwood I notice someone’s left a CD in the glove compartment: "A Month in the Brazilian Rainforest. " I pop it into the player and the car fills with sounds from the Amazon jungle. No Al Gore speeches or meaningful native music — just crickets chirping and tree frogs croaking all recorded live on location. It doesn’t take long to get hooked. Maybe we should be listening to Waylon Jennings or Willie Nelson but in the bone dryness of central Texas the rain forest CD stirring up memories of humid summer nights back in Washington — makes the perfect soundtrack for our expedition. An hour later not another car or truck in sight we spot our first freight train two or three miles down the road. When we’re side by side with the lead engine I lower my window to get the full impact of the deafening roar… If their station couldn’t communicate with other stations what message were they getting from the train company? "We don’t propose to live in a graveyard before we are dead" said the angry letter writer. "This is a big world and a man who had any ‘get up’ about him won’t stay somewhere the railroad tries to kill. "The disappearance of the railroad was a virtual death sentence to countless communities throughout the country. Abandoned train tracks tend to mean economic decline in rural America. The dilapidated storefronts and junked cars in Placid Mercury and other towns in central Texas don’t exactly forecast a bright future. The people we meet who remember trains at all talk about them as if they are something that vanished with the frontier. Outside a convenience store I run into retired ("but not too tired") businessman "Red" Miller.
Written by admin on April 27th, 2008 with
no comments.
Read more articles on News.