Waching daily Jul 3 2018

Hannah Gadsby's 'Nanette' Is A Scorching Piece On Comedy And Trauma

Many Americans had little exposure to Australian actress/comic/writer Hannah Gadsby before a few weeks ago.

Maybe they had seen her in Please Like Me, an Australian comedy series in which she had a supporting role.

But statistically, they probably hadn't.

And then came Nanette, her Netflix special, which is a recording of a live show she's been doing for a while — it won awards at Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the Melbourne Comedy Festival — and brought to New York in March.

If you look at some of the tweets about Nanette, you'll see a lot of people using very strong words of praise for it.

Hannah Gadsby on NETFLIX - WATCH IT.

Don't read ANYTHING about it.

Just watch it. Trust me.

I promise.  — Wilson Cruz .

IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED HANNAH GADSBY'S NANETTE YET YOU ARE SO FAR FROM LIVING YOUR BEST LIFE YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW IT  — Inkoo Kang .

Well, Hannah Gadsby's "Nanette" special on Netflix lived up to all the hype my friends had given it.

Wow. — Alan Sepinwall.

This is extraordinary, must watch television.

Hannah Gadsby is a genius.  — Lydia Polgreen .

So what is Nanette anyway? It is stand-up.

sort of. It is comedy. partly.

Netflix has been producing a fire hose of content of all kinds over the last several years, and they have fixed their gaze hard upon the world of stand-up.

This has meant they've landed specials from the very famous side of American comedy — people like Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Patton Oswalt, and Amy Schumer.

But Netflix has also allowed space for comics who aren't yet superstars when they first arrive there: Ali Wong, Hasan Minhaj and others.

Still, this is different.

Not a little different, but totally different.

First things first: Gadsby says, when she walks out on stage in dark pants, a dark shirt, and a blue blazer with black lapels, that she called the show Nanette because she'd met someone named Nanette, and she hadn't yet written the show and she just figured she could get an hour of comedy from that person.

"Turns out," she says, "No.".

This little opening gag, while it's funny and gets a laugh, communicates something that will recur: a framing in which the show is being written, its themes discovered, as it's performed — which obviously is not so, and which you are not meant to literally believe is so.

But suggesting that the show disobeyed the name she gave it lays out one of Gadsby's themes with great economy: that writing and performing will sneak up on you.

Not just as the audience, but as the creator.

That you are not always doing what you think or hope you're doing.

Gadsby begins with a riff on what it was like, as a kid growing up in Tasmania, when she "found out [she] was a little bit lesbian." The general attitude, she says, was that gay people were not welcome: "You should just get yourself a one-way ticket to the mainland, and don't come back," she summarizes, and because of the way she delivers the line, the audience laughs.

And you begin to see a very particular look, which you'll see on and off over the hour: a tight grin, framed by Gadsby's dimples, topped by her upper lip almost baring her teeth, that is not quite a smile.

It's not the relaxed smile you see when she jokes about penicillin or something else less personal.

Once you've seen the entire special, this look makes sense, because it calls upon you to ask: What, exactly, is funny about feeling unwelcome in your own country because of who you are? What, as she continues in another anecdote, is funny about being angrily confronted by a man who believed she was another man hitting on his girlfriend? The humor is in the way she tells it; the humor is her choice.

She is making the decision to make it comedy.

She could make another choice instead.

She wanders, at times, into actually analyzing how jokes work: How they create tension (the set-up) and then release it (the punch line).

How she learned to be funny because she needed to release tension to survive.

It was not, at that time, tension she built as a performer, but tension that she represented for other people, because of who she was.

She talks about the mythology of trauma and pain as the ways to make art — not just comedy, but visual art, too (you will never hear so much about Van Gogh and Picasso in any other Netflix comedy special).

One of the things Gadsby is doing is exploring tools for telling stories, particularly stories of trauma.

She is questioning not the power of laughter or comedy, but the way in which queer performers and anyone else who feels different are encouraged to come to comedy, pain in hand, pain as punch line.

She is questioning what kind of art we accept from what kind of artist, and how creativity and pathology are romantically entwined in popular myth.

The special is funny, in many places, and when it isn't, it is not dully didactic but blisteringly insightful.

It is serious, but it is never dry — it is riveting throughout.

What happens, she wonders, to the things we make into jokes? How permanent is the relief of shared laughter? These are daring, fresh questions that demolish the very idea of reflexive glibness in comedy and art and fearlessly present not saccharine sincerity but unapologetic emotion as worthy of being heard.

It's part of the show to watch it bend and reshape itself, so I don't want to say too much more about it.

Suffice it to say there is a reason why people are so urgently telling the people they know to watch it.

It has all this, after all, plus what I suspect will be 2018's best fart joke.

Hannah Gadsby might tell you I said that last thing to release the tension of talking about how wrenching her show is, and that maybe I shouldn't have.

She might be right.

For more infomation >> Hannah Gadsby's 'Nanette' Is A Scorching Piece On Comedy And Trauma - Duration: 10:08.

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Is having a joint bank account important? - Duration: 1:04.

So having a joint bank account is not the magic bullet that's going to get you a Partner Visa grant as much as we

would like for that to be. The Department is

after evidence showing that the both of you are in a genuine and ongoing relationship.

Meaning that they want to see both of you are jointly involved in making financial decisions together.

So, having a joint bank account is a good idea BUT

you need to utilize it a little bit. You need to use it to pay for bills like electricity, water bills

phone bills... Things like that. You need to ACTIVELY engage with it

so as to present to the Department a very convincing piece of evidence.

At the end of the day, if you're still confused as to what's there to provide and what you can't provide

you can always speak to one of our Registered Migration Agents here at Freedom Migration.

For more infomation >> Is having a joint bank account important? - Duration: 1:04.

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Is Thomas Hardiman Democrat or Republican? | Heavy.com - Duration: 6:32.

Is Thomas Hardiman Democrat or Republican? | Heavy.com

President Donald Trump will be announcing a Supreme Court nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy soon, and Thomas Hardiman is believed to be one of the top people on his list.

Because Justice Anthony Kennedy was a bit unpredictable in his opinions, sometimes siding on conservative rulings and sometimes siding on more liberal decisions, many are wondering if a Hardiman choice would change that significantly.

Is Hardiman more liberal or conservative?.

Hardiman has been described by FiveThirtyEight as "more ideologically enigmatic," but supported by Trump's sister, Maryanne Trump Barry.

In fact, some say there is evidence to suggest that Hardiman might vote more liberal once he was on the Supreme Court.

This is partially because he is not always outspoken in his decisions, leaving questions about his viewpoints.

(However, in 2017 SCOTUS Blog pointed out that most of Hardiman's decisions on the more hot-button topics, while he was a federal appeals court judge, were conservative.).

As far as gun rights go, he defends the Second Amendment and believes gun owners should not have to demonstrate "justifiable need" to qualify for a gun.

However, he also has defended preventing violent felons from having guns.

They can appeal their status, but only in very rare situations would a felon be allowed to have a gun, he has said.

But as far as marijuana legalization is concerned, he hasn't said much, if anything, about that.

Hardiman started from a working class background and slowly worked his way up.

He speaks fluent Spanish and was an exchange student in Mexico.

He has worked at an immigration legal aide office.

But he has also, at times, affirmed decisions against noncitizens in unpublished opinions, SCOTUS Blog pointed out.

But he's also vacated opinions by the Board of Immigration Appeals, such as ruling in favor of an asylum applicant who wanted to come to the U.S.

so he wouldn't be involuntarily recruited into a violent gang in Honduras.

But that won't mean he'll always side with the underdog.

Liberal groups have pointed out that some of his opinions have sided on limiting the ability of citizens to hold police and other authorities accountable.

In Florence v.

Board of Chosen Freeholders, Albert Florence had been searched twice while in New Jersey jail for seven days.

He was arrested on a traffic warrant that he had actually already paid.

He said the searches were unreasonable because he was being held for not paying a fine, and that actually wasn't a crime in New Jersey.

Hardiman sides against Florence, saying that jail strip searches were reasonable "on balance," although he did not say they would always be reasonable.

The Supreme Court affirmed Hardiman's decision.

Hardiman also wrote another highly controversial opinion in 2010, Kelly v.

Borough of Carlisle.

He said there was no clear First Amendment right to record police officers during a traffic stop.

Hardiman hasn't weighed in directly on abortion decisions yet.

He did join an opinion that vacated a conviction of an anti-abortion protester who was arrested for not moving away from a sidewalk in front of an abortion center where he was leafletting.

But that seemed to be more of a First Amendment question rather than an abortion question.

Hardiman's tougher to pin down on religion.

He has ruled in favor of students' ability to express religious beliefs in public schools, such as siding with a mother and son who were barred from reading their Bible during a kindergarten show and tell.

But he has also sided with prison officials when prisoners filed lawsuits saying their ability to exercise religion was restricted, SCOTUS Blog pointed out.

Hardiman also allowed a gay man's gender-stereotyping claim to move forward, reversing summary judgment for the company.

He said the plaintiff was harassed because he didn't conform to the company's vision "of how a man should look, speak, and act.".

In summary, it seems that although Hardiman leans conservative in many of his rulings, he's been known to rule on a more liberal side depending on the specific case.

For more infomation >> Is Thomas Hardiman Democrat or Republican? | Heavy.com - Duration: 6:32.

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Brazil's Joy Is Mexico's Heartbreak in World Cup Knockout - Duration: 6:53.

Brazil's Joy Is Mexico's Heartbreak in World Cup Knockout

SAMARA, Russia — There are no curses, Mexico Coach Juan Carlos Osorio had insisted, no reasons to be superstitious about the team's apparent inability, one World Cup after another, to advance to the quarterfinal round.

There are simply good game plans, he said, and good players.

Hoodoo or not, Mexico on Monday had its World Cup run ended spectacularly, maddeningly, by one of the world's very best players, Neymar, who scored a goal and assisted on another to lead Brazil to a 2-0 win in a round of 16 game at Samara Arena.

It was a depressing finish for Mexico, which has now crashed out of seven consecutive World Cups in the round of 16.

In a multidimensional performance showing all the light and dark of the game, Neymar, 26, was the hero, the villain, the most graceful player in the stadium and, for many, the most vexing.

"I think we controlled the game, mostly," said Osorio, who repeatedly criticized Neymar, without calling him out by name, for what he perceived to be an unacceptable amount of playacting in the second half: "I think this is a very negative example for the world and the world of football and all the children following this game."Heading into the tournament, Mexico had invested in their mental well-being.

They hired a psychologist to bring a level of lucidity to the players' collective mental state.

The players and fans rallied around the phrase "imaginemos cosas chingonas" (a distinctly Mexican sentence that translates roughly to "Let's imagine amazing things") uttered by striker Javier Hernández in a fit of passion before the tournament.

A thrilling 1-0 win over Germany, the defending champions, helped the team start the tournament on a euphoric note. But Brazil, with its overflowing talent, was a challenge too difficult to overcome.

"We're sad, disappointed, obviously, with a dream that has ended," Hernández said after the game.

The Mexicans looked ambitious through the first 20 minutes, dominating the ball, excavating little channels through the Brazilian defense, bringing danger to the Brazilian goal mouth.But the game took on a different tone in the 25th minute, right about when Neymar turned two defenders inside-out with a head fake and a deceptive dribble and then drilled a shot toward goal that required a fingertip save from goalkeeper Guillermo Ochoa.

Ochoa made a number of crucial saves through the night. But from there to the final whistle, it was Brazil's match.

Neymar orchestrated Brazil's opener six minutes into the second half, cutting menacingly from left to right across the 18-yard line, tugging three defenders along with him, before smacking a blind, back heel pass to Willian, reversing the play.

With the defense discombobulated, Neymar abruptly did a U-turn into the box like a Russian cabdriver evading traffic and glided unfettered into the open space just in time to slide a cross from Willian across the goal line with his yellow cleat.

The incident that enraged Osorio came about 20 minutes later. Neymar, as he had on a few occasions already to that point, was taking his time getting back to his feet.

Mexican midfielder Miguel Layún came over to collect the ball and pressed his cleat onto the Brazilian's ankle. Neymar reacted theatrically, assuming a fetal position and writhing on his back, like a turtle flipped onto its shell.

The game was paused for several minutes, and the Mexicans watched in frustration, as he was examined. Tite, the coach of Brazil, put the blame on Layún: "There's nothing to say," he said. "You just have to look at the video.".

Layún delivered an underhanded critique: "I think he's a player with a lot of talent who hopefully one day dedicates himself to playing a little more. Osorio was unsparing: "It's a man's sport. I think there shouldn't be so much acting.".

Neymar was cryptic: "I don't much care for criticism, not even praise. Osorio had every reason to be frustrated.

The team's heroics in the group stage had inspired Mexico's horde of traveling fans to sing his name from the stands — a remarkable turnaround for a coach pelted with criticism in the weeks heading into the tournament.

But the good feelings withered in the heat of Samara.

It was Neymar, again, who conjured Brazil's second goal, finishing a powerful dribbling run down the left wing with an outside-of-the-foot cross pass to Roberto Firmino, who needed only to tap the ball into the net.

Mexico's fans, who had turned every game in Russia into a virtual home game for their team, were quiet for perhaps the first time this month.

The final whistle, minutes later, signaled the end of the road. There was no curse to blame, only Neymar — brilliant, exasperating Neymar.

For more infomation >> Brazil's Joy Is Mexico's Heartbreak in World Cup Knockout - Duration: 6:53.

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What is Tragicomic? || The Candle Wasters - Duration: 0:55.

Nova: Explain 'Tragicomic' to someone who hasn't watched it yet.

Sam: Oooo, good question.

Liv: 'Tragicomic' is part webseries part webcomic all about Hannah

(N: All about me) L: and her, kind of, everyday struggles.

S: Her sneaky ways.

N: It's a bit dark, a bit scary.

S: Little bit freaky.

It's super fun and quite exciting.

L: For most of the time it's like, trying to solve this mystery

of where he dad went. I was bros and my character was um the

S: I was Rose and my character was the cooler kid at school.

You know, like a little in on everything. And your character was

like Hannah's best friend but you were kind of not really a fan of

what she was up to.

N: She's kind of starts involving like her

social life and her family in the comic, and it gets a bit like unhealthy

L: I don't know what it looks like so I'm really excited to see it.

You should be really excited to see it! N: Yeah.

Both: You really, really, really, really should.