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Enrichment and proteomic identification of Cryptosporidium parvum oocyst wall – Parasites & Vectors – Parasites & Vectors

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Gerhard Richter: The Master of Unknowing | by Susan Tallman – The New York Review of Books

Gerhard Richter: Painting After All

an exhibition at the Met Breuer, New York, March 4closing date to be announced; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, August 15, 2020January 18, 2021

an exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York City, February 28April 25, 2020

(The gallery is temporarily closed.)

In 2002 Gerhard Richter was included in a conversation about the restoration of the great gothic cathedral of Cologne. The building had survived the thousand-bomber raids that flattened the city in 1942, but the stained glass of the enormous tracery window in the south transept had been lost, and the cathedral chapter now wanted to replace the plain-glass postwar repairs with something that lived up to the buildings spectacular presence and spiritual purposeideally, a work by a major artist, commemorating victims of Nazism.

Richter was, in one sense, an obvious choiceone of Germanys most prominent artists, he had lived in Cologne for years. In other ways, the decision was curious. Richter is not religious, and while his work had made glancing references to the Third Reich, his position on the often reflexive commemoration of war crimes was not uncomplicated. For the cathedral, he considered, then rejected, the possibility of transmuting Nazi execution photographs into stained glass. Instead he turned to a 1974 painting of randomly arranged color squares, part of a series that had included paintings, prints, and a design for commercial carpeting. Colognes archbishop, who had wanted something demonstrablyeven exclusivelyChristian, did not attend the unveiling.1 But while Richters window is, in theory, a repriseits approximately 11,500 color squares were arranged by algorithm and tweaked by the artist to remove any suggestion of symbols or ciphersthe experience it provides is utterly distinct. The squares are made of glass using medieval recipes, they rise collectively some seventy-five feet, and are part of a gothic cathedral. When the sun shines through and paints floors, walls, and people with moving color, the effect is aleatoric, agnostic, and otherworldly. It should mean nothing, and feels like it could mean everything.

Decades earlier, fresh from two rounds of art schoolone in East Germany, one in WestRichter had made a note to himself: Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A good picture takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

Richter is contemporary arts great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation. Now eighty-eight, he is frequently described as one of the worlds most influential living artists, but his impact is less concrete than the phrase suggests. There is no school of Richter. His output is too quixotic, too personal, to be transferrable as a style in the manner of de Kooning or Rauschenberg. Though his influence has indeed been profound, it has played out in eyes rather than hands, shifting the ways in which we look, and what we expect looking to do for us.

In Germany he is treated as a kind of painterly public intellectualpersonally diffident and professionally serious, a thoughtful oracle especially as regards the prickly territory of German history. He was among the first postwar German artists to deal with pictorial records of Nazism, and his approach to the past might be summarized as poignant pragmatism, rejecting both despair and amnesia. One measure of his status is that visitors today enter the Reichstag flanked by two soaring Richters: on one side a sixty-seven-foot glass stele in the colors of the German flag; on the other, facsimiles of Birkenau (2014), the paintings through which he finally succeeded in responding to the Holocaust, abandoning earlier attempts across five decades.

The Birkenau paintings, which had never been seen on this side of the Atlantic, were among the eagerly anticipated inclusions in Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, the last exhibition to be held at the Met Breuer before the building is ceded to the Frick Collection in July. A streamlined, eloquent summa of Richters career, curated by Sheena Wagstaff and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, the show opened on March 4, nine days before being shuttered by Covid-19 (along with a concurrent exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery). Im one of thousands who missed that brief window. It is not yet known whether the show will reopen in New York before it travels to Los Angeles in August. In the meantime, we are left with an expansive website (the museum has posted images of all works in the show, installation shots, and some film clips), a weighty catalog, and memories of works seen in person. This is, of course, not ideal: many of the things shown depend on properties of scale and reflectivity that cannot be experienced in reproduction. But this is a retrospective about retrospection, and the situation is not without a certain resonance.

The opening wall is a preview of the elliptical path taken through Richters career. Table (1962), the first painting Richter put into his catalogue raisonn, is a mix of Pop-ish consumer culture (the titular subject was clipped from an Italian design magazine) and ersatz expressionism (it devolves at the center into circular sweeps of paint thinner). Eleven Panes (2004), forty-two years younger, is a leaning stack of eleven-foot-tall sheets of glass, individually transparent but collectively reflective, windows ganged up to make a stammering mirror. The small photo-painting September (2005) bears a discreet echo of Tables inchoate mess in the desolate cloud leaking from the South Tower on September 11; the brash colors of the source photograph have been drawn down, the orange of the explosion scraped away, time hovers like a bee, neither frozen nor moving forward. Even in reproduction, the arrangement of these works is affecting: three visions of the world being unmade and made again. In real life, this idea would be further extended by the ephemeral animation of passersby reflected in the glass. The installation photographs, however, were cleverly constructed to conceal the photographer in the mirroran uncanny absence that evokes the emptiness of public space in Covid-time.

American audiences came late to Richter. In the 1960s and 1970s the hegemony of American Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism tended to crowd out curiosity about what was going on elsewhere. Richters first solo show in New York in 1973 did not ignite great excitement, and for many years he was understood here primarily as a graphic artist; his first interview in the American press appeared in The Print Collectors Newsletter in 1985.2 By then, a series of influential exhibitions (as well as favorable exchange rates for American dealers and collectors) had stoked new interest in European art, but Richters reputation lagged behind those of Germans such as Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer who made raw work that spoke of war and atonement in no uncertain terms.

Richters oeuvre, by contrast, was measured and indirect and took a confusing variety of forms. His foggy photo-paintings suggested an oxymoronic lugubrious Pop, the random color squares an ebullient Conceptualism, and his soft-focus landscapes and portraits channeled both the Sturm und Drang of German Romanticism and the cool distance of contemporary photography. Uncertain terms were Richters mtier, and critics simply did not know what to do with it. Many concluded he was a cynic bent on invalidating art itself: Richter wars on poetries, declared a 1989 review in The Washington Post. When he depicts a cloudy sky, or a log fence and a red-roofed barn in the quiet countryside, he somehow makes you queasy. Even admiring critics like Peter Schjeldahl acknowledged Richters reputation for severity, hermeticism, and all-around, intimidating difficulty.

It was not until the 2002 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, organized by Robert Storr, that American audiences really warmed to Richter. He was then seventy years old, and the emotional hypervigilance of his early work had softened. American viewers had also matured: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of that hopeful experiment in peace and prosperity, the European Union, bathed Germany in a more benign light than it had enjoyed in the anglophone world for a century. The photo-paintings now looked plangent rather than snide; the multivalent shifting of styles was recognized not as sarcasm but as a defense against dogma; the portrait of his daughter turning from the camera (Betty, 1988), hushed and luminous, made no one queasy. His peculiar breadth was evidence of a patient regard for the world. Richter, it turned out, was a mensch.

Painting After All recapitulates this history (indeed, it features many of the same paintings), while extending the timeline both later and earlier. The shows interest in memory is visible through groupings and inter-gallery vistas that illuminate continuities and repetitions across time. The catalog takes a more didactic approach, and how you feel about it probably depends on how you feel about Buchloh, Richters long-time interlocutor (though the two have famously disagreed about some of Buchlohs conclusions) and an art historian deeply entrenched in Frankfurt School social theory and philosophical postulates. Perhaps because of the wealth of Richter literature already in the world, the text bypasses the usual career overview; each of its seven authors (all but one quotes from Buchloh) targets a specific subset of works. This has the advantage of illuminating some less-visited corners of Richters oeuvre (Hal Fosters discussion of the glass works and Peter Geimers pocket history of German abstract photography are particularly useful), though readers new to Richter may feel like theyve accidentally enrolled in the second term of a class in which every other student has taken the intro.3

Richters biography mattersnot because he has made it the subject of his work (he has not), but because the historical systems and events he has lived through have directly informed the way he thinks about art and about history. Born in Dresden in 1932, he grew up in smaller towns along the Polish border during World War II. In postwar East Germany he received a rigorous technical training at the venerable Dresden art academy, but had only limited exposure to modern art: We werent able to borrow books that dealt with the period beyond the onset of Impressionism because that was when bourgeois decadence set in. (Only one work from this period, a remarkably prescient series of monotypes, is included in Richters official catalog; it was on view in facsimile form at both the Met Breuer and Marian Goodman.) After some early success as a painter of affirming Socialist Realist murals, he was permitted to travel to West Germany in 1959 to visit the second Documenta exhibition in Kassel, where he encountered paintings by Lucio Fontana and Jackson Pollock that upended everything he knew about pictures. Two years later he defected to the West, writing to his favorite professor in Dresden, mine was not a careless decision based on a desire for nicer cars.

Dsseldorf, where he reenrolled in art school, was a world apart from the monoculture of official East German art: Beuys had recently arrived with his mystical cult of personality, the Zero group was developing its language of impersonal geometries, and Informel (Europes attenuated answer to New York School abstraction) was championed as the subjective antidote to totalitarianism and its instrumentalizing of soppy figuration. Even in the West, artistic style was a badge of political allegianceabstract/universalist vs. figurative/populist. And both Germanies, focused on building their respective new societies, chose not to ruminate on the unprecedented destruction perpetrated byand inflicted ontheir people. It would not be until the cusp of the millennium that W.G. Sebalds On the Natural History of Destruction anatomized the silence around the German civilian experience of the war: When we turn to take a retrospective view, Sebald wrote, we are always looking and looking away at the same time.4

Among the group of young, irreverent artists Richter met in Dsseldorf was Sigmar Polke, who for several years provided a crucial, puckish complement to Richters circumspection. Discarding the various high-minded models around them, Polke and Richter began painting from newspaper clippings and magazines, toying with the ways mechanical reproduction remakes its subjectsthe flattening and fragmentation of cheap printing and the unseemly croppings and juxtapositions of the commercial printed page. The stupidity of copying was part of the irreverenceserious modern art is supposed to despise the copy. But copying, done attentively, is a way into something. Academic art training depended on it as a means of internalizing the canon, but even as children we copy something when we cant get it out of our heads. Richter began keeping photographs, clippings, and sketches of potential source material that would become Atlas, his now career-long half-archive, half-artwork of things somewhere between art and garbage and that somehow seemed important to me and a pity to throw away.

Most of Richters subjects appeared affably Popfamilies by the seaside, tabloid perp walks, household goodsbut where Pop Art tended to ratchet up the volume with brighter colors and sharper edges, Richter turned the dial in the other direction, painting everything in plaintive grays with a subaqueous wobble. And the subjects were not all as banal as they seemed. Scattered amid the race cars and drying racks were bombers dropping their payloads and family members destroyed by the Third Reich: Uncle Rudi (1965), smiling jauntily in his enormous Wehrmacht overcoat, later killed in combat; Aunt Marianne (1965), shown as a teenager with the infant Richter, years before she was institutionalized as a schizophrenic and starved to death by the Nazi Aktion T4 euthanasia of the unfit. Richters paintings of Rudi and Marianne are no more or less anguished than his ones of kitchen chairs. But for German viewers in the 1960s they must have invoked numberless pictures of relativesvictims, villains, heroesremoved from display as markers of a world best not mentioned.

By the 1970s Richter had also become intrigued with the possibilities of pictures that originated not in a preselected image, but in an a priori set of rules. The random color squares that later dappled worshipers in Cologne Cathedral were one result; a body of heavily impastoed canvases made by moving paint around in semi-predetermined ways was another. This edging toward Conceptualism did not mark an abandonment of representation, however. He continued making paintings from photographs, now usually his own, including color landscapes so refulgent they might, in thumbnail, be mistaken for Turners. Some of these were tricks, painted from photomontages that unravel as you look. Others, like his lit candles and misty skulls, balanced reality and Romanticism on a knifes edge.

Gradually Richters art-historical allegiances were laid bare: Caspar David Friedrich, Vermeer, Velzquezpainters with a gift for inviting us through the illusory window while showing us how the trick was played (the oversized sequins of light that Vermeer scatters on metalwork and bread rolls call attention to the materiality of paint as surely as any Pollock drip). In the portraits of his friends and family especially one senses the double desire to capture the emotional load of a moment and to reveal the means by which image turns into feeling. When things slip too far toward tender, he adjusts the surface with lateral swipes of paint or abrasions, pushing and pulling until that magical space between looking and knowing is reached.

Academic writers often view Richter as a master strategist plotting from on high, but his own statements suggest something less mandarin: It is my wish, he told Storr, to create a well-built, beautiful, constructive painting. And there are many moments when I plan to do just that, and then I realize that it looks terrible. Then I start to destroy it, piece by piece, and I arrive at something that I didnt want but that looks pretty good. In 1980 he began using squeegees to drag paint in broad, uneven swaths that partly obscure whatever lies belowphotographs, printed matter, prior paintings. Its the look of mechanical failuremachine parts wearing badly, jammed printers, skid marks, abraded film. When repeated over and over, it generates complex color fields full of fissures and pockets exposing older strata. Geological metaphors feel aptthe surfaces resemble landscapes shaped by the scouring and dumping of glaciers. Richter has limited control over what happens in any one layer, so composition becomes the joint product of accumulation and knowing when to stop.

Sometimes I think I should not call myself a painter, but a picture-maker, Richter remarked in 2013. I am more interested in pictures than in painting. Painting has something slightly dusty about it. I suspect it is not paintings long history that bothers him, but a more specific quality. Dust accumulates on things that are settled, immobile. And painting, in our culture, has the unassailable fixity of a monument. Its a property Richter has repeatedly undermined, cutting up paintings and distributing the pieces as editions, rereleasing finished paintings as photographic editions and digital facsimiles under Plexiglas. (The Aunt Marianne in Painting After All is not, in fact, a painting.) Like Jasper Johns, his near contemporary, he is fascinated by doubling, mirroring, and illusionthe same-not-same quandary of image and object. His many prints, facsimiles, and artists books are not so much spin-offs of his paintings (though that is how they are often regarded) but partners with painting in a bantering, ongoing conversation. Even the persistent doubling back and restructuring of earlier work can be seen as a corrective to the presumed finality of painting.

One squeegee painting from 1990, Abstract Painting (#724-4 in his catalogue raisonn), has been repeatedly reformulated: resized and defocused in photographic editions, digitally refracted as kaleidoscopic tapestries and stained glass windows for a sixth-century monastery in rural Saarland, and slivered in a Photoshop version of Xenos paradox for the series called Strip. (The image was digitally bisected and mirrored; those halves were each bisected and mirrored, then those quarters, and so on, to produce 4096 (212) segments, each less than 100 microns wide, that fuse together in the eye to produce a pattern of stripes. These patterns were then cut up, arranged in different orders, and printed at different sizes.) The Strip in Painting After All runs an optically dazzling thirty-three feet across.

The monumental painting sextet Cage (2006)also in the US now for the first timestarted out as photo-paintings of scientific images of atoms (resembling fuzzy photographs, these are records of particle behavior translated into light and dark to accommodate human sensibilities). Having committed the pictures to canvas, Richter found himself bored by the result and began adding color, painting in and scratching out. At the end of four months, the atom arrays were present only as an inherited rhythm within the complex accretion of paint. In its grandeur of agitation and resolution, Cage may be as close to the sublime as contemporary painting can get. Perhaps it was to knock the dust off that sublimity that Richter followed up with two facsimile editions, breaking Cage 6 into sixteen parts that can be carried in a flight case and hung in any configuration that suits the owner.

Everything, Richter demonstrates, is a derivative, everything is contingent, nothing is immutable. This has implications for how one thinks about history. Even about catastrophes.

The Birkenau paintings are also abstract responses to failed photo-paintings, but the underlying images are of a different moral order: four photographs taken clandestinely in late summer 1944 by Sonderkommando prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The ethics of using, exhibiting, or even viewing Holocaust photographs has always been complicated. Moving east with American troops in 1945, Robert Capa declined to use his camera: From the Rhine to the Oder I took no pictures. The concentration camps were swarming with photographers, and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect. As early as the spring of 1945, Peter Geimer explains in the catalog, the Allies began circulating camp photographs in Germany, but the anticipated ethical shock never materialized, and the pictures disappeared. Richter remembers being shown them for the first time by a fellow student in Dresden in the mid-1950s: It was like irrefutable proof of something we had always half known.

Shoah director Claude Lanzmann objected not just to the numbing effects of profusion, but to visual representation itselfthe illusion of a presence when the reality was one of appalling absence. The opposing view, voiced by Jean-Luc Godard and others, was that documents are our strongest defense against amnesia, and that images can be powerful agents of imaginative reconstruction. (Whether or not imagination should have a role here is the heart of the conflict.)

As the only pictures taken by victims of the killing system they document, the Sonderkommando photographs occupy a special place in this debate. In 2001 the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman wrote an essay for an exhibition in which they were shown and was roundly attacked in the pages of Lanzmanns journal, Les temps modernes. Didi-Huberman responded with a carefully considered book, Images malgr tout, which Richter read in Geimers German translation, Bilder trotz allem. In English the title is Images in Spite of All, but the German can also be translated as Painting After All.

The Sonderkommando photographs are unique not only because of who took them and what they show, but because of their appearance. They had to be shot secretly from a distance and are hard to read. Two of them look out through an angled trapezoid of doorway onto a landscape where people are working by a bonfire, smoke rising against silhouetted trees. It takes a moment to register the barbed wire and to understand that the things piled on the ground are not logs but bodies. The other two photos show tree trunks at a sharp angle. One is a misfirejust black trees and white sky. But one includes a wedge of land over which small figuresnaked womenare walking or running. Reconstructions show that they are headed to the gas chambers and that the bonfire pictures were shot from within one of the gas chamber buildings.

The human element is overwhelming once recognized, but it occupies only a small area and reveals itself slowly. The pictures initial impression is one of visual dynamism, modernist angles slamming into tropes of Friedrich-era Romanticism: soaring trees, billowing vapor, nature seen through a doorway. Perhaps because of the paradoxical way form and content cut across each other here, Richter felt it might be possible to make them into paintings. He flipped them left-right, projected them, and transcribed them onto canvas.

Their failure as photo-paintings has, I think, nothing to do with visual quality and everything to do with history. Richters photo-paintings work because, no matter how intimate the subjects, they function as types. Individuals and events are elided, commonalities revealed, through a concentration on form. Even his elegiac paintings of dead Baader-Meinhof members are as much about the dislocating formats of news as they are about the wasted lives in question. Given the Sonderkommando photographs singular status as historical documents, however, they cannot be stand-ins for anything elsenot for the look of clandestine photography, not for mans inhumanity to man, not for German accountability. They do not work as pictures in Richters sense of precluding the emergence of any single meaning or depriv[ing] a thing of its meaning and its name. Here, meaning and name are untouchable.

Richter did not abandon the images but, as with Cage, began working into and over them, pulling paint horizontally and vertically, layer upon layer. The Met website shows the progression from source photo to drawing, to photo-painting, to successive states of overpainting. The final canvases have the tenor of a forest after a firetwitchy, ashy crusts over an underworld of dun, crimson, and kelly green. They are complex, scarified, and alsoheres the rubbeautiful. In places the juddering repetition of fragmented color recalls, of all things, late Monet water lilies.

Max Glickman, the Holocaust-obsessed cartoonist in Howard Jacobsons novel Kalooki Nights, captures the moral vertigo induced by the collision of aesthetics and the Holocaust: A mass grave at Belsenthe bodies almost beautiful in their abstraction, thats if you dare let your eye abstract in such a place.5 Perhaps to brace us against that fall, Richter has gone to some lengths to structure how we experience the paintings. They do not stand alone. The original photographs are hung on an adjacent wall, in prints small enough to be understood as documents, and large enough to be legible. There are sources and there are commentaries, Richter tells us, events and reverberations of those events. More eccentrically, he has doubled the paintings themselves. The four canvases hang opposite four full-scale not-quite doppelgngers, each divided into quarters. Source, commentary, and gloss.

The events of 1944 are beyond our reach. The subject of these paintings is not that world, but our ownthe place where we actively choose to know or not know, see or not see. At the Met Breuer, the whole confab of paintings, facsimiles, and historical photographs is further multiplied by a thirty-foot-long stretch of gray mirrors at the backSebalds looking and looking away at the same time made inescapable.

The writer William Maxwell, who, like Richter, was a habitual spinner of fictions that were barely fictions, once had a (barely fictional) character observe:

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memorymeaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivionis really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.6

Richters oeuvre is, at some level, a six-decade-long disquisition on this lieits inevitability, its emotional utility, its shape-changing instability. His stylistic ticsthe hazy edges, overlaying, chopping into pieces, and reconfiguring of partsare visual reminders that you are not seeing everything, that availability to the eye is no guarantee of clarity. The story always changes with the telling. Uncertainty is truth.

Fair enough. But what is perhaps most remarkable about Richters art is its affirmation that this is not a bad thing. The story of the color-square painting that became a carpet that became a cathedral window (and now, undoubtedly, somebodys cell phone wallpaper) is not a tragedy, its an assertion of endless possibility.

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Gerhard Richter: The Master of Unknowing | by Susan Tallman - The New York Review of Books

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[OPINION] Longevity and Competitive Integrity: Fixing the health of Siege Esports – SiegeGG

Back at the 2018 Invitational in Montreal, Ubisoft announced that Rainbow Six: Siege would not be receiving a sequel. Instead it would continue on for a total period of ten years, emulating the "games as a service" model that is so prevalent today - but given the plethora of issues the game has had in the last six months alone, how viable is that ten year marker?

As we look forward to another five years of Siege, it's important to reflect on what has occurred for us to arrive where we are now: When Rainbow Six: Siege first released in late 2015 as a replacement for the ill fated Patriots project, it struggled to hit the ground running initially for a variety of reasons, such as network issues and problems with hit registration, amongst others. Through a combination of staunch community support for the game, as well as robust content updates in the form of seasons, the game persevered, steadily but surely growing into the top level competitor it is today.

However, within the last six months to a year, there have been murmurs and rumblings of dissatisfaction around the state of Siege. Several have called for an 'Operation Health 2.0' of sorts, to combat the bugs, crashes, glitches and various issues that have cropped up as of late. With that in mind, I believe it's important to drive home some key points about Siege as a whole, that shed light upon the current position of the game:

Upon last update on the 7th of September, 2019 by Ubisoft, R6S hit the milestone of 50 million players - something that, according to Community Developer Craig 'ItsEpi' Robinson, caught the Siege team by surprise.

Speaking on the Hot Breach Podcast on the 6th of March last year, shortly after the game had surpassed 45 million players, Epi mentioned that "We didn't expect to have mainstream appeal. We anticipated it to be more of a niche game, for people that liked SOCOM and games of that nature."

As mentioned previously, Siege was given a lifespan of ten years and the goal of one hundred total operators. This was announced by then Brand Director Alexandre Remy during the Year 3 panel in order to serve as "not only a symbol but a testament to the longevity that we want to put in the game."

Originally applied into Ubisoft games in 2012 for Assassin's Creed III, AnvilNext was a refresh of the existing Anvil/Scimitar engine. R6S meanwhile, did not officially enter development until January of 2013. While the RealBlast team behind the destruction system worked closely with the rest of the development team, they had to include these features into the game whilst constantly working alongside established constraints, instead of having the engine suit the desired features. If anyone remembers the launch of AC: Unity, you may recall that the bugs and glitches made headlines upon release - well, Siege is running on the exact same version of the AnvilNext platform. Whilst Unitys issues are largely a thing of the past now, Siege still has glaring issues to this day.

Essentially, what all of this has meant is that the R6S team working on the game is constantly fighting an uphill battle. To continue to introduce the content and the concepts they want to see in the game, they must cooperate with an engine that was not built to specifications, that powers everything from the physics of objects, destruction mechanics, map layouts, rendering and so on.

In my humble opinion, the teams working to keep siege running have pretty much worked nothing short of black magic up to this point - but if Ubisoft truly wants Siege to compete at the top level with other FPS or esports titles, such as Overwatch and Counter Strike, they need to do so by reinvesting into the game, and that starts by building or using an engine that matches their vision. Otherwise, the integrity of the game, from casual to Pro League, will suffer.

Siege as an esport is fast cementing itself as one of the premier esports, globally. Now consisting of the North and Latin American, European and Asia-Pacific regions, Siege is attracting more attention with each passing year as the prize pools for professional tournaments continue to trend upward, with the Invitational pool increasing from $500k USD in 2018 to $2 million USD in 2019. The scene also continues to collect awards, with Team Liquid player Thiago 'xSexyCake' Reis scooping up Esports Play of the Year and R6 Esports itself taking the bronze for Esports Game of the Year at the 2019 Esports Awards, falling short only to CS:GO and League of Legends.

With a greater fanbase comes a greater need to maintain a game that looks and feels like it can compete with the titans of the industry. Not only that, but preserving the gameplay integrity of the professional scene is a must. As recently as the Raleigh Major, the importance of this need for integrity made itself apparent; not once, but twice as Team Empire and FaZe Clan were both victims of game crashes during rounds that were heavily skewed in their favour, requiring a round replay on both counts - a gaffe so embarrassing that it made it to5th place on theScore esports Top 10 Biggest Esports Fails of 2019 video.

After consulting with Peter James Palmer, Game Developer/Programming Lead, and Dominic Villarreal, Game Designer, who possess over two decades of combined experience in game development and programming, the cause of the crashes was most likely a piece (or pieces) of redundant code thats no longer needed to make the game function, causing a buffering loop and then a complete crash.

While you can argue that the crashes happened to either side and therefore did not hand one team an obvious advantage, whats clear is this: the downtime between restarting/setting up the lobby and getting back into game can seriously kill any form of momentum that a team has been building. Whats more, starting Siege on a new engine would essentially provide a clean slate of sorts, without the junk code that leads to things like game crashes.

Furthermore, pros in particular are extremely limited in what they can do when prepping for an upcoming match - as Slashug of Luminosity Gaming explains, having to remake an entire lobby just to practice throwing grenades is something that should have been left well behind by now. If given the opportunity and the tools required, Siege esports as a whole could be even more strategic, heartstopping and inventive than it currently is.

Ubisoft has also spent considerable amounts of time and money to invest more and more into Siege as a whole. Beginning with the team charms that first released in July of 2017, there has been a slow but steady supply of content that either supports competitive siege (such as the pilot program), or renowned content creators tied to the game, such as Macie Jay, Annemunition and Narcoleptic Nugget, to name but a few.

Not only this, but the inclusion of the BattlEye anti-cheat software into Sieges ecosystem communicated an intent by the development team that they were sticking around; If we were shutting the game down after the first year of content, we probably wouldnt invest into something like BattlEye (per Epi). Furthermore, with the recasting of a few voice actors for accompanying cinematics, its clear Siege is here to stay.

But if these problems continue to go unchecked, there may come a point where the game is, for want of a better word, unplayable. Siege is Ubisofts biggest esport, and also its first. Enough time, effort and energy has gone into creating and promoting these items, that it would be a disservice to all parties involved if Ubisoft were simply comfortable with the condition of Siege when there are obvious, nagging problems that are holding it back.

(an example of an error with mesh registration)

Fixing these issues can take us down one of two paths: The cheaper, but probably more time intensive option would be to extensively rewrite the base systems on the current engine and work at optimising the features currently in place. According to my sources, working within the boundaries of AnvilNext would be a bit of a hot mess, but most issues that the game currently encounters right now, such as the effects of improperly calculated client side physics and the registration of meshes (eg: walls) to the server viathe client can be fixed.

(an example of client side physics going wrong)

They gave Siege roughly a 60% chance of surviving through to the the 10 year mark, but stated that it would be difficult without new technologies to support that. This is without touching upon the fact that by the time we close in on the 10 year milestone, various other IPs from competing publishers will be one step ahead, as technology gradually improves and gains greater capacity for memory, processing power and the like.

The second option is to build a new engine from the ground up, or to use a tried and tested one that provides greater flexibility (compared to AnvilNext). This one requires a steeper cost in the short term, but pays off ultimately in the long run. It is not without its own challenges however, as all the current assets - all the maps, operators, animations, furniture, etc - on AnvilNext would need to be transferred across to the new system, which could limit options on an existing engine due to the compatibility of coding languages*.

(Gregor implores Ubisoft to update the engine and mentions the need for competitive integrity)

One potential existing candidate could be the Snowdrop engine used in The Division, providing a level of familiarity, given that it has been used on other Tom Clancy/Ubisoft titles, and more modern portability; Snowdrop has been used on the Nintendo Switch, as well as the other three major platforms (PC, Xbox and PlayStation), meaning it could be suitable for releasing R6S on the new, upcoming consoles.

Again, my helpful sources chimed in and mentioned that, although a lot of modern engines have their code modularized, meaning its basically as easy as drag and drop to move data from one place to another, AnvilNext may not share this trait, given its age. To solve this conundrum, an Identifier script would most likely need to be written, marking each asset with a tag to separate relevant data so it can be imported.

Alternatively, with a new engine built with Sieges pre-existing data in mind, greater freedom could be attained through newer tech, allowing the R6 developers to potentially revisit some shelved projects. Community requested features such as training ground facilities, rendering techniques to provide a clearer, sharper image in game ( la Temporal Filtering) and a reworked/improved observer system could also be on the cards, or investing in new ventures that are currently unattainable with the limits of AnvilNext. This is not to say that the replacements for AnvilNext would be perfect by any means, but they would certainly be a step up from where we currently sit now.

To anyone reading who has got to this point in the article, firstly: thank you for patience. Secondly, if you truly want to see tangible, positive change for this game moving forward, you need to act. When you submit a support ticket for something, and you are asked if there is anything else you would like help with - say you want a new engine for Siege. Let your feelings known to Ubisoft in a polite and respectful way. Because if BikiniBodhi can start an entire movement around a single gun optic, I see no reason why something can't be done to improve and enrich this game we all love.

---

In conclusion, I would like to make a few things abundantly clear: this article is not a set of demands, it is not me taking potshots at the Rainbow Six dev team, and it certainly is not a list of reasons why the game is dying or not a Tier 1 esport. Rather, it is an impassioned plea to those who make key decisions on the future of Ubisoft games as a whole:

I, like many others, have become a stalwart fan of Siege and Siege esports over the course of the games life. We can see the potential of what this game could be with more investment into improving the core systems and quality of life. Its never going to be flawless but it can at least be a lot better. If you truly want this title to still be standing tall after what could be 10 great years - at least consider if you want the remaining five to be good or if you want it to leave an indelible legacy in the history of esports.

*Footnote: this compatibility relates to the various functions and game code and how they translate from one engine to another. Imagine it like translating a phrase from one language into another - not everything can be translated literally, but the basic meaning still carries across. Whilst its not identical, that message still carries enough of the original meaning that it can serve its purpose.

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[OPINION] Longevity and Competitive Integrity: Fixing the health of Siege Esports - SiegeGG

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Afrofuturism – Wikipedia

Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and philosophy of history that explores the developing intersection of African Diaspora culture with technology. It was coined by Mark Dery in 1994 and explored in the late 1990s through conversations led by Alondra Nelson.[1] Afrofuturism addresses themes and concerns of the African diaspora through technoculture and science fiction, encompassing a range of media and artists with a shared interest in envisioning black futures that stem from Afrodiasporic experiences.[2] Seminal Afrofuturistic works include the novels of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler; the canvases of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Angelbert Metoyer, and the photography of Rene Cox; the explicitly extraterrestrial mythoi of Parliament-Funkadelic, the Jonzun Crew, Warp 9, Deltron 3030, and Sun Ra; and the Marvel Comics superhero Black Panther.[3][4][5]

Despite Afrofuturism being coined in 1993, scholars tend to agree that Afrofuturistic music, art and text became more common and widespread in the late 1950s. The Afrofuturist approach to music was first propounded by Sun Ra. Born in Alabama, Sun Ra's music coalesced in Chicago in the mid-1950s, when with the Arkestra he began recording music that drew from hard bop and modal sources, creating a new synthesis that used Afrocentric and space-themed titles to reflect Ra's linkage of ancient African culture, specifically Egypt, and the cutting edge of the Space Age. For many years, Ra and his bandmates lived, worked and performed in Philadelphia while touring festivals worldwide. Ra's film Space Is the Place shows The Arkestra in Oakland in the mid-1970s in full space regalia, replete with science-fiction imagery as well as other comedic and musical material. As of 2018, the band was still composing and performing, under the leadership of Marshall Allen.

Afrofuturist ideas were taken up in 1975 by George Clinton and his bands Parliament and Funkadelic with his magnum opus Mothership Connection and the subsequent The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, P-Funk Earth Tour, Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome, and Motor Booty Affair. In the thematic underpinnings to P-Funk mythology ("pure cloned funk"), Clinton in his alter ego Starchild spoke of "certified Afronauts, capable of funkitizing galaxies".

Other musicians typically regarded as working in or greatly influenced by the Afrofuturist tradition include reggae producers Lee "Scratch" Perry and Scientist, hip-hop artists Afrika Bambaataa and Tricky, electronic musicians Larry Heard, A Guy Called Gerald, Juan Atkins, Jeff Mills,[6] Newcleus[7] and Lotti Golden & Richard Scher, electro hip hop producer/writers of Warp 9's "Light Years Away", a sci-fi tale of ancient alien visitation, described as a "cornerstone of early 80's beatbox afrofuturism".[8]

In the early 1990s, a number of cultural critics, notably Mark Dery in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future", began to write about the features they saw as common in African-American science fiction, music, and art. Dery dubbed this phenomenon "Afrofuturism".[9] According to cultural critic Kodwo Eshun, British journalist Mark Sinker was theorizing a form of Afrofuturism in the pages of The Wire, a British music magazine, as early as 1992.[10]

Afrofuturist ideas have further been expanded by scholars like Alondra Nelson, Greg Tate, Tricia Rose, Kodwo Eshun, and others.[2] In an interview, Alondra Nelson explained Afrofuturism as a way of looking at the subject position of black people which covers themes of alienation and aspirations for a utopic future. The idea of "alien" or "other" is a theme often explored.[11] Additionally, Nelson notes that discussions around race, access, and technology often bolster uncritical claims about a so-called "digital divide".[12] The digital divide overemphasizes the association of racial and economic inequality with limited access to technology. This association then begins to construct blackness "as always oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress".[12] As a critique of the neo-critical argument that the future's history-less identities will end burdensome stigma, Afrofuturism holds that history should remain a part of identity, particularly in terms of race.[12]

A new generation of recording artists have embraced Afrofuturism into their music and fashion, including Solange, Rihanna, and Beyonc. This tradition continues from artists such as Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott and Janelle Mone, who incorporated cyborg themes and metallics into their style.[13] Other 21st century musicians who have been characterized as Afrofuturist include singer FKA Twigs,[13] musical duo Ibeyi,[14] and DJ/producer Ras G.[15]

In more recent years, artists such as Rihanna and Beyonc have often been interpreted by the public as having some non-human elements about them, exhibited in both their performances, and in their day to day interactions. Because the tabloids have so much control over the way that information is digested, the public receives images of these women that are distant and controlled solely by the media, and thus, these women are often painted as angry or unfeeling. Scholars such as Robin James have interrogated and expanded upon the work of Kodwo Eshun, and coined the idea of the "robo-diva". These scholars both argue that the Black experience has always been more alien than it has been human, and James connects the mechanics of the middle passage to alien abduction through concepts of kidnapping, isolation, and bowing down to an unknown power. Kodwo Eshun also posits that perhaps the categorization of "human" has no use in the Black community, and that instead, the category of "robot" is not only more powerful, but more accurately representative of the positioning in the social hierarchy in which Black people exist in the present day. Because musical artists (Rihanna, Beyonc) exhibit such non-human qualities, they are often ostracized for being "cold" or "mechanical". The white patriarchy both fears and admires such artists due to their unapologetic displays of female sexuality and its interactions with technology. These fears then propel the virgin/whore dichotomy that stems from the trope of the Jezebel, and serves to further the racialized projections of stereotypes onto Black females in the music industry.

Janelle Mone has made a conscious effort to restore Afrofuturist cosmology to the forefront of urban contemporary music. Her notable works include the music videos "Prime Time"[16] and "Many Moons",[17] which explore the realms of slavery and freedom through the world of cyborgs and the fashion industry.[18][19] She is credited with proliferating Afrofuturist funk into a new Neo-Afrofuturism by use of her Metropolis-inspired alter-ego, Cindi Mayweather, who incites a rebellion against the Great Divide, a secret society, in order to liberate citizens who have fallen under their oppression. This ArchAndroid role reflects earlier Afrofuturistic figures Sun Ra and George Clinton, who created their own visuals as extraterrestrial beings rescuing African-Americans from the oppressive natures of Earth. Her influences include Metropolis, Blade Runner, and Star Wars.[20] The all Black Wondaland Arts Collective Society, of which Mone is a founder of, stated "We believe songs are spaceships. We believe music is the weapon of the future. We believe books are the stars." [21] Other musical artists to emerge since the turn of the millennium regarded as Afrofuturist include dBridge, SBTRKT, Shabazz Palaces, Heavyweight Dub Champion,[6] and "techno pioneers" Drexciya (with Gerald Donald).[22]

Chicago is home to a vibrant community of artists exploring Afrofuturism. Nick Cave, known for his Soundsuits project, has helped develop younger talent as the director of the graduate fashion program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Other artists include visual artists Hebru Brantley as well as contemporary artist Rashid Johnson, a Chicago native currently based in New York. In 2013, Chicago resident Ytasha L. Womack wrote the study Afrofuturism: The World of Black Science Fiction and Fantasy, and William Hayashi has published all three volumes of his Darkside Trilogy[23] which tells the story of what happens in America when the country discovers African Americans secretly living on the backside of the moon since before the arrival of Neil Armstrong, an extreme vision of segregation imposed by technologically advanced Blacks.[24][25][self-published source] Krista Franklin, a member of University of Chicago's Arts Incubator, is currently exploring the relation between Afrofuturism and the grotesque through her visual and written work with weaves and collected hair. Recently, she also created an audio narrative in collaboration with another Afrofuturist, Perpetual Rebel, called The Two Thousand and Thirteen Narrative(s) of Naima Brown, which explores the ideas of identity and transformation within the context of hair and African-American culture.[26]

The movement has grown globally in the arts. Afrofuturist Society was founded by curator Gia Hamilton in New Orleans. Artists like Demetrius Oliver from New York, Cyrus Kabiru from Nairobi, Lina Iris Viktor from Liberia, famed Nigerian American solar muralist, Shala.,[27][28] and Wanuri Kahiu of Kenya have all steeped their work in the cosmos or sci-fi.[29][30][31][32][33]

The creation of the term Afrofuturism in the 1990s was often primarily used to categorize "speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture,"[34] but was soon expanded to include artistic, scientific, and spiritual practices throughout the African diaspora. Contemporary practice retroactively identifies and documents historical instances of Afrofuturist practice and integrates them into the canon. For example, the Dark Matter anthologies edited by Sheree Thomas feature contemporary Black science fiction, discuss Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in her introduction, "Looking for the Invisible," and also include older works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, and George S. Schuyler.[35]

Lisa Yazsek argues that Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, Invisible Man, should be thought of as a predecessor to Afrofuturist literature. Yaszek illustrates that Ellison draws upon Afrofuturist ideas that were not yet prevalent in African-American literature. Ellison critiques the traditional visions of black people's future in the United States, but does not provide readers a different future to imagine. Yaszek believes that Ellison does not offer any other futures so that the next generation of authors can. Invisible Man may not be Afrofuturist in the sense that it does not provide a better or even any future for black people in the United States, but it can be thought of as a call for people to start thinking and creating art with an Afrofuturist mindset. In this sense, Yaszek concludes that Ellison's novel is a canon in Afrofuturistic literature by serving as call for "this kind of future-historical art" to those who succeed him.[36]

A number of contemporary Black science fiction and speculative fiction authors have also been characterized as Afrofuturist or as employing Afrofuturist themes. Nnedi Okorafor has been labeled this way, both for her Hugo Award-winning Binti novella series,[37] and for her novel Who Fears Death.[14] Steven Barnes has been called an Afrofuturist author for his alternate-history novels Lion's Blood and Zulu Heart.[14] N.K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, and Colson Whitehead have also been referred to as Afrofuturist authors.[38] Octavia Butler's novels are often associated with Afrofuturism;[39] this association has been somewhat controversial, since Butler incorporates multi-ethnic and multi-species communities that insist on "hybridity beyond the point of discomfort".[40] However, the fourth book of the science fiction Patternist series, Wild Seed, particularly fits ideas of Afrofuturist thematic concerns, as the narrative of two immortal Africans Doro and Anyanwu features science fiction technologies and an alternate anti-colonialist history of seventeenth century America.[41]

In recent years, there have been many museum exhibitions displaying art with Afrofuturist themes.

The Studio Museum in Harlem held a major exhibit exploring Afrofuturistic aesthetics from November 14, 2013 to March 9, 2014. The exhibit, called The Shadows Took Shape, displayed more than sixty works of art that looked at recurring themes such as identity in relation to technology, time, and space within African-American communities. Artists featured in the exhibit included Derrick Adams, Laylah Ali and Khaled Hafez.[42]

As a part of the MOMA's PS1 festival, King Britt curated Moondance: A Night in the Afro Future in 2014. From noon to six p.m. on April 13, people could attend Moondance and listen to lectures, live music or watch dance performances in celebration of Afrofuturism in contemporary culture.[43]

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture held a seminal group show of Visual Afrofuturists focusing on unambiguous science fiction and fantasy based art. The show, titled 'Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination' ran from October 1, 2015 - January 16, 2016. The closing night coincided with the Schomburg Black Comic Book Day. Unveiling Visions was curated by artist John Jennings (Co-founder of artist duo, Black Kirby w/Professor Stacey Robinson) and Afrofuturist Scholar, Reynaldo Anderson (founder of The Black Speculative Arts Movement).[44] The show featured artists such as Tony Puryear, Sheeba Maya, Mshindo Kuumba, Eric Wilkerson, Manzel Bowman, Grey Williamson, Tim Fielder, Stacey Robinson, and Shawn Alleyne. Unveiling Visions liner notes state: "exhibition includes artifacts from the Schomburg collections that are connected to Afrofuturism, black speculative imagination and Diasporan cultural production. Offering a fresh perspective on the power of speculative imagination and the struggle for various freedoms of expression in popular culture, Unveiling Visions showcases illustrations and other graphics that highlight those popularly found in science fiction, magical realism and fantasy. Items on display include film posters, comics, T-shirts, magazines, CD covers, playbills, religious literature, and more. "[45]

In April 2016, Niama Safia Sandy curated an exhibit entitled "Black Magic: AfroPasts / Afrofutures" at the Corridor Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.[46] The multidisciplinary art exhibit looks at the relationship between magical realism and afrofuturism through the Black diaspora.[47] In a description of the collection, Sandy stated: "There's a lot of looking back and looking forward happening in this work... [and there's a lot of] celebrating those journeys whether they are intentional or forced journeys."[48]

The exhibition Afro-Tech and the Future of Re-Invention is running from October 21, 2017 until April 22, 2018[49] at Dortmunder U in Dortmund, Germany and "looks at speculative visions of the future and current developments in the field of digital technology by artists and inventors from Africa and the African diaspora...."[50]

The exhibition,'Black Metropolis: 30 Years of Afrofuturism, Comics, Music, Animation, Decapitated Chickens, Heroes, Villains and Negroes' is a one-man show focusing on the career of cartoonist and visual afrofuturist, Tim Fielder. "[51] The show, designed to travel over multiple gallery spaces, opened at New York Gallatin Galleries from May 23-May 30th, 2016. Presented by Keith Miller and Curated by Boston Fielder, the exhibit featured both published and unpublished work ranging from independent comics art for alternative magazine, Between C & D and mainstream comics work done for Marvel Comics. Black Metropolis, revived at The Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta, GA for the museum's 30th Anniversary October 12-November 25, 2018 "[52]

Jared Richardson's Attack of the Boogeywoman: Visualizing Black Women's Grotesquerie in Afrofuturism[53] assesses how the aesthetic functions as a space for black women to engage with the intersection of topics such as race, gender, and sexuality. The representation and treatment of black female bodies is deconstructed by Afrofuturist contemporaries and amplified to alien and gruesome dimensions by artists such as Wangechi Mutu and Shoshanna Weinberger.

Beyonc's 2016 short film Lemonade included feminist afrofuturism in its concept. The film featured Ibeyi, Laolu Senbanjo, Amandla Stenberg, Quvenzhan Wallis, YouTube singing stars Chloe x Halle, Zendaya, 2015 Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year Serena Williams,[54] and the sophisticated womanist poetry of Somali-British writerWarsan Shire.[55] The through-line is the empowerment of black women referencing both marital relationships and the historical trauma from the enslavement of African-Americans from 16191865,[not in citation given] through Reconstruction and Jim Crow (18701965). The mothers of Trayvon Martin (Sybrina Fulton), Michael Brown (Lesley McFadden), Eric Garner (Gwen Carr) are featured holding pictures of their deceased sons in homage to the importance of their lives.[56] The novel Kindred by Octavia Butler also explores the empowerment of women though the story of her protagonist Dana. The book explores the idea of autonomy and having control over one's life/destiny. Through the exploration of women's power in the time of slavery to the more current time, Butler is able to demonstrate the endurance of women through the harsh social factors.

In the Afro-Surreal Manifesto, Afro-Surrealism is juxtaposed with European surrealism, with European surrealism being empirical. It is consistent with the New Black Aesthetic in that the art seeks to disturb. It samples from old art pieces updating them with current images. This technique calls to the forefront those past images and the sentiments, memories, or ideas around them and combines them with new images in a way that those of the current generation can still identify. Both seek to disturb, but there is more of a "mutant" psychology that is going on. Afro-Futuristic artists seek to propose a deviant beauty, a beauty in which disembodiment is both inhumane, yet distinct; Afro-Futuristic artists speculate on the future, where Afro-Surrealism is about the present.[57]

Afrofuturism takes representations of the lived realities of black people in the past and present, and reexamines the narratives to attempt to build new truths outside of the dominant cultural narrative. By analyzing the ways in which alienation has occurred, Afrofuturism works to connect the African diaspora with its histories and knowledge of racialized bodies. Space and aliens function as key products of the science fiction elements; black people are envisioned to have been the first aliens by way of the Middle Passage. Their alien status connotes being in a foreign land with no history, but as also being disconnected from the past via the traditions of slavery where slaves were made to renounce their ties to Africa in service of their slave master.[58]

Kodwo Eshun locates the first alienation within the context of the Middle Passage. He writes that Afrofuturist texts work to reimagine slavery and alienation by using "extraterrestriality as a hyperbolic trope to explore the historical terms, the everyday implications of forcibly imposed dislocation, and the constitution of Black Atlantic subjectivities". This location of dystopian futures and present realities places science fiction and novels built around dystopian societies directly in the tradition of black realities.[59]

In Afrofuturism, water in many different works symbolizes both erasure and the existence of black life. These dual meanings while seemingly contradictory actually play off and inform each other. For instance, the middle passage can be considered where the first erasure happened of African- American history. There are no stories that survived that passage. As Ruth Mayer states, in the United States, "black history is both there and not there, evident in countless traces, scars, and memories, yet largely submerged when it comes to written accounts and first person documentations of the past from the viewpoint of the victims."[58] Yet, it is through this erasure that Afrofuturism is able to craft histories. These histories live both in fact and in fiction, as the true history was lost in the waters of the Atlantic. Water erased the history, but it also allowed for the creation of a new history.

This is where Afrofuturism comes into play. To have a future, one's past must be defined. However, for African Americans, though their "history" has been drowned, Afrofuturism resuscitates this history. By its creation, it creates new possibilities for the future. In Carrie Mae Weems' triptych Untitled (Ebo Landing), the Afrofuturism piece crafts a space with two pictures that could be both African and America with its depiction of lush greenery. In this way, the piece highlights how the original space of water has given way in which Afrofuturism can imagine a past or future that lives in the space of truth and fiction, the Schrdinger's cat of African American past.

Another example of an Afrofuturist work that deals specifically with the theme of water is 2009 film Pumzi, which depicts an enclosed society in which water is utterly scarce and totally conserved. The film's ambiguous ending leaves viewers wondering whether there was a neighboring society with access to water the whole time, or if the main character has died a heroine by planting a tree that will eventually bloom into a whole forest.

Ostensibly, Afrofuturism has to do with reclaiming the lost identities or lost perspectives that have been subverted or overlooked. When Mark Dery first coined the term, he says Afrofuturism as "giving rise to a troubling antinomy". This means that the seeming contradiction of a past being snuffed out and the writing of a future sees its possibilities in Afrofuturism. Furthermore, this Afrofuturism kind of story telling is not regulated to one aspect of communication. It is in novels and essays, academic writings and in music, but by its creation, it is ultimately reclaiming some type of autonomy over one's story that has historically been restricted.

Therefore, when Afrofuturism manifests itself in the music of the 80's and beyond, it is under the Afrofuturist's sensibility. It is in this way that, as Mark Dery says, "African-American culture is Afrofuturist at its heart". Because the ancestors of African Americans were forcibly removed from their history, any culture that has found its way into the Black lexicon is at its roots an Afrofuturist notion. It is at its heart reclaiming a past erased and creating a future based on that reimagined past.

Afrofuturism 2.0 was coined during an exchange between Alondra Nelson and Reynaldo Anderson at the Alien Bodies conference in 2013; where Anderson noted that the previous definition was insufficient due to the rise of social media and new technology. Following the publication of the co-edited volume Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, in the late 2010s, the Black Speculative Arts Movement, a traveling art, comic, and film convention, released a manifesto called Afrofuturism 2.0 and the Black Speculative Arts Movement: Notes on a Manifesto.[60] The manifesto was written by Reynaldo Anderson at Harris-Stowe State University as an attempt to redefine and refit Afrofuturism for the 21st century. The 2.0 volume and the manifesto defines Afrofuturism 2.0 as "The early twenty-first century technogenesis of Black identity reflecting counter histories, hacking and or appropriating the influence of network software, database logic, cultural analytics, deep remixability, neurosciences, enhancement and augmentation, gender fluidity, posthuman possibility, the speculative sphere with transdisciplinary applications and has grown into an important Diasporic techno-cultural Pan African movement".[60] Afrofuturism 2.0 is characterized by five dimensions to include metaphysics, aesthetics, theoretical and applied science, social sciences and programmatic spaces; and in the twenty-first century is no longer bound to its original definition, as a term once dealing with cultural aesthetics and the digital divide, but has been broaden to be known also as a philosophy of science, metaphysics and geopolitics.[61]

In this manifesto, Anderson acknowledges and accounts for the changes in technology, social movements, and even philosophical changes in modern society while also speculating as to how the Afrofuturist narrative will be changed because of it. This is particularly in regards to the rise and boom of social media platforms.

In conjunction with this, Los Angeles-based artist Martine Syms penned an online article in 2013 called The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto that is composed of a list of tenets that, supposedly, all Mundane Afrofuturists recognize. Though the article is in part parodic and sarcastic, it aims to identify and make light of overused tropes within Afrofuturist works like "magical Negroes" or "references to Sun Ra". Through this identification of "overused tropes" and a later definition of rules to actually subvert these tropes entitled "The Mundane Afrofuturist promise",[62] Syms requests a new, updated vision for Afrofuturist works, which falls in line with the framework of Afrofuturism 2.0.

This list is in alphabetical order, by genre then by last name or by the first letter of a band/group name.

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Hackensack, New Jersey – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hackensack, New Jersey City City of Hackensack Motto: A City in Motion[1] Location of Hackensack within Bergen County, New Jersey. Census Bureau map of Hackensack, New Jersey Coordinates: 405322N 740245W / 40.889398N 74.045698W / 40.889398; -74.045698Coordinates: 405322N 740245W / 40.889398N 74.045698W / 40.889398; -74.045698[2][3] Country United States State New Jersey County Bergen Settled 1665 (as New Barbadoes) Incorporated October 31, 1693 (as New Barbadoes Township) Reincorporated November 21, 1921 (as a city under current name) Government[7] Type 1923 Municipal Manager Law Body City Council Mayor John P. Labrosse, Jr. (term ends June 30, 2017)[4] City manager Stephen Lo Iacono[5] Clerk Debbie Heck[6] Area[2] Total 4.346sqmi (11.256km2) Land 4.180sqmi (10.826km2) Water 0.166sqmi (0.430km2) 3.82% Area rank 287th of 566 in state 16th of 70 in county[2] Elevation[8] 20ft (6m) Population (2010 Census)[9][10][11] Total 43,010 Estimate(2014)[12] 44,519 Rank 46th of 566 in state 1st of 70 in county[13] Density 10,290.0/sqmi (3,973.0/km2) Densityrank 36th of 566 in state 10th of 70 in county[13] Time zone Eastern (EST) (UTC-5) Summer (DST) Eastern (EDT) (UTC-4) ZIP code 07601[14][15] Area code(s) 201[16] FIPS code 3400328680[2][17][18] GNIS feature ID 885236[2][19] Website http://www.hackensack.org

Hackensack is a city in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States, and serves as its county seat.[20][21] It was officially named New Barbadoes Township until 1921, but it was informally known as Hackensack. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city's population was 43,010,[9][10][11] reflecting an increase of 333 (+0.8%) from the 42,677 counted in the 2000 Census, which had, in turn, increased by 5,628 (+15.2%) from the 37,049 counted in the 1990 Census.[22]

An inner suburb of New York City, Hackensack is located approximately 12miles (19km) northwest of Midtown Manhattan and about 7miles (11km) from the George Washington Bridge.[23] From a number of locations, the New York City skyline can be seen.[23]

The Metropolitan Campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University borders the Hackensack River in both Hackensack and Teaneck. Hackensack is also the home of the New Jersey Naval Museum and the World War II submarine USS Ling. Astronaut Walter Schirra is perhaps Hackensack's most famous native son.

The city is known for a great diversity of neighborhoods and its land uses very close to one another. Within its borders are the prominent Hackensack University Medical Center, a trendy high-rise district about a mile long, classic suburban neighborhoods of single-family houses, stately older homes on acre-plus lots, older two-family neighborhoods, large garden apartment complexes, industrial areas, the Bergen County Jail, a tidal river, Hackensack River County Park, Borg's Woods Nature Preserve, various city parks, large office buildings, a major college campus, the Bergen County Court House, a vibrant small-city downtown district, and various small neighborhood business districts.[24]

The first inhabitants of the area were the Lenni Lenape, an Algonquian people (later known as the Delaware Indians) who lived along the valley of what they called the Achinigeu-hach, or "Ackingsah-sack", meaning stony ground (today the Hackensack River).[25] A representation of Chief Oratam of the Achkinhenhcky appears on the Hackensack municipal seal. The most common explanation is that the city was named for the Native American tribe,[26][27] though other sources attribute it to a Native American word variously translated as meaning "hook mouth", "stream that unites with another on low ground", "on low ground" or "land of the big snake",[28][29] while another version described as "more colorful than probable" attributes the name to an inn called the "Hock and Sack".[30]

Settlement by the Dutch West India Company in New Netherland on west banks of the North River (Hudson River) across from New Amsterdam (present-day lower Manhattan) began in the 1630s at Pavonia, eventually leading to the establishment of Bergen (at today's Bergen Square in Jersey City) in 1660.[31]

Oratam, sachem of the Lenni Lenape, deeded the land along mid-Hackensack River to the Dutch in 1665. The area was soon taken by the English in 1667, but kept its Dutch name. Philip Cartaret, governor of what became the proprietary colony of East Jersey granted land to Captain John Berry in the area of Achter Kol[32] and soon after took up residence and called it "New Barbadoes," after having resided on the island of Barbadoes. In 1669, a deed was confirmed for the 2,260acres (9.1km2) tract that had been given earlier by Oratem to Sarah Kiersted in gratitude for her work as emissary and interpreter.[33][34] Other grants were given at the English Neighborhood.[35][36][37]

In 1675, the East Jersey Legislature established the administrative districts: (Bergen, Essex, Middlesex, and Monmouth). In 1683, Bergen (along with the three other counties) was officially recognized as an independent county by the Provincial Assembly.[38]The seal of Bergen County bearing this date includes an image of an agreement between the settlers and the natives.

New Barbadoes Township, together with Acquackanonk Township, were formed by Royal charter on October 31, 1693.[39][40]

In 1700, the village of Hackensack was little more than the area around Main Street from the Courthouse to around Anderson Street. New Barbadoes Township included what is now Maywood, Rochelle Park, Paramus and River Edge, along with those portions of Oradell that are west of the Hackensack River. These areas were all very sparsely populated and consisted of farm fields, woods and swamplands. The few roads that existed then included the streets now known as Kinderkamack Road, Paramus Road/Passaic Street and Essex Street. The southernmost portions of what is now Hackensack were not part of New Barbadoes Township at that time.[citation needed]

The neighborhood that came to be known as the village of Hackensack (today the area encompassing Bergen County's municipal buildings in Hackensack) was a part of Essex County until 1710, when Bergen County, by royal decree of Queen Anne of Great Britain, was enlarged and the Township of New Barbadoes was removed from Essex County and added to Bergen County.[41]

In 1710, the village of Hackensack in the newly formed Township of New Barbadoes was designated as being more centrally located and more easily reached by the majority of the Bergen Countys inhabitants, and hence was chosen as the county seat of Bergen County, as it remains today. The earliest records of the Bergen County Board of Chosen Freeholders date back to 1715, at which time agreement was made to build a courthouse and jail complex, which was completed in 1716.[42]

During the American Revolutionary War, George Washington headquartered in the village of Hackensack in November 1776 during the retreat from Fort Lee via New Bridge Landing and camped on 'The Green' across from the First Dutch Reformed Church on November 20, 1776. A raid by British forces against Hackensack on March 23, 1780, resulted in the destruction by fire of the original courthouse structure.[43]

The Hackensack Improvement Commission was incorporated by an Act of the state legislature approved on April 1, 1868, within New Barbadoes township and including the village of Hackensack, with authority to develop sewers and other improvements in Hackensack.[44]

The New Jersey Legislature passed the Township School Act in 1894, under which each village, borough, town, or city in New Jersey was delegated responsibility for its own public schools through the office of the county superintendent. Hackensack established a local board of education in 1894, as required by the new law, which took over operation of schools located in the township and established Hackensack High School.[45] The 1894 act allowed local residents, by petition, to change municipal boundaries at will, setting off fearsome political battles statewide.

Portions of the township had been taken to form Harrington Township (June 22, 1775), Lodi Township (March 1, 1826), Midland Township (March 7, 1871) and Little Ferry (September 20, 1894).[39] After these departures, secessions, and de-annexations, all that was left of New Barbadoes Township was the village of Hackensack and its surrounding neighborhoods of Fairmount, Red Hill and Cherry Hill. In 1896, New Barbadoes acquired a portion of Lodi Township covering an area south of Essex Street from the bend of Essex Street to the Maywood border. That same year the Hackensack Improvement commission was abolished and the City of Hackensack and New Barbadoes Township became coterminous.[46][47]

The final parcel lost by New Barbadoes Township was the northeastern corner of what is now Little Ferry, which was incorporated in September 1894.[48]

An act of the State Legislature incorporated the Fairmount section of New Barbadoes with the Hackensack Improvement Commission, and eliminated New Barbadoes Township as a political entity. On November 21, 1921, based on the results of a referendum held on November 8, 1921, New Barbadoes Township received its charter to incorporate as a city and officially took on its name Hackensack, a name derived from its original inhabitants, the Lenni Lenape, who named it "Ackingsah-sack".[39]

In 1933, Hackensack adopted the Manager form of government under the terms of the 1923 Municipal Manager Law, with five Council persons all elected at-large and a mayor selected by the council from among its members.[49]

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city had a total area of 4.346square miles (11.256km2), including 4.180square miles (10.826km2) of land and 0.166square miles (0.430km2) of water (3.82%).[2][3]

The city is bordered by Paramus, River Edge, Teaneck, Bogota, Ridgefield Park, Little Ferry, South Hackensack, Hasbrouck Heights, Lodi, and Maywood.[50]

There are many houses of historic value, and some of these were identified in the 1990 Master Plan. The city does not have any registered historic districts, or any restrictions on preserving the historic facade in any portions of the city. Areas considered suburban single-family residential neighborhoods account for about one third of the city's area, mostly along its western side.

Unincorporated communities, localities and place names located partially or completely within the city include Fairmount and North Hackensack.[51]

As the initial destination for many immigrants to Bergen County from around the globe, Hackensack's ethnic composition has become exceptionally diverse. As of 2013, approximately 38.9% of the population was foreign-born. In addition, 2.5% were born in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico or abroad to American parents. 51.7% of the population over the age of five speak only English in their household, while 32.5% of the population speaks Spanish at home.[65] The South Asian and East Asian populations have increased most rapidly in Hackensack since 2000, with nearly 2,000 Indian Americans, over 1,000 Filipino Americans, and over 600 Korean Americans represented in the 2010 United States Census.[66] Hackensack's Hispanic population has also risen rapidly, to over 15,000 in 2010;[66]Ecuadoreans, Dominicans, and Colombians have become the top Hispanic groups in northern Hackensack.[67] The Black population dropped as a percentage although minimally in absolute numbers between 2000 and 2010.[66] The city lost approximately 10% of its Caucasian population between 2000 and 2010, which has stabilized and resumed growth since 2010 and has remained substantial, at over 20,000 in 2010.[66] The city has also witnessed greatly increasing diversity in its non-Hispanic white segment, with large numbers of Eastern Europeans, Eurasians, Central Asians, and Arabic immigrants offsetting the loss in Hackensack's earlier established Italian American, Irish American, and German American populations.

At the 2010 United States Census, there were 43,010 people, 18,142 households, and 9,706 families residing in the city. The population density was 10,290.0 per square mile (3,973.0/km2). There were 19,375 housing units at an average density of 4,635.4 per square mile (1,789.7/km2). The racial makeup of the city was 46.67% (20,072) White, 24.44% (10,511) Black or African American, 0.56% (241) Native American, 10.30% (4,432) Asian, 0.02% (10) Pacific Islander, 13.59% (5,844) from other races, and 4.42% (1,900) from two or more races. Hispanics or Latinos of any race were 35.31% (15,186) of the population.[9]

There were 18,142 households, of which 23.2% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 34.1% were married couples living together, 13.9% had a female householder with no husband present, and 46.5% were non-families. 39.3% of all households were made up of individuals, and 10.4% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.30 and the average family size was 3.11.[9]

In the city, 18.7% of the population were under the age of 18, 8.3% from 18 to 24, 34.6% from 25 to 44, 26.1% from 45 to 64, and 12.4% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 37.5 years. For every 100 females there were 98.0 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 96.4 males.[9]

The Census Bureau's 2006-2010 American Community Survey showed that (in 2010 inflation-adjusted dollars) median household income was $57,676 (with a margin of error of +/- $3,577) and the median family income was $66,911 (+/- $5,433). Males had a median income of $45,880 (+/- $4,012) versus $42,059 (+/- $1,681) for females. The per capita income for the city was $32,036 (+/- $1,809). About 8.9% of families and 10.7% of the population were below the poverty line, including 13.2% of those under age 18 and 11.7% of those age 65 or over.[68]

Same-sex couples headed 145 households in 2010, an increase from the 112 counted in 2000.[69]

As of the 2000 United States Census[17] there were 42,677 people, 18,113 households, and 9,545 families residing in the city. The population density was 10,358.3 people per square mile (3,999.4/km2). There were 18,945 housing units at an average density of 4,598.2 per square mile (1,775.4/km2). The racial makeup of the city was 52.61% White, 24.65% African American, 0.45% Native American, 7.45% Asian, 0.05% Pacific Islander, 9.71% from other races, and 5.08% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 25.92% of the population.[63][64]

There were 18,113 households out of which 21.9% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 34.8% were married couples living together, 13.0% had a female householder with no husband present, and 47.3% were non-families. 39.8% of all households were made up of individuals and 9.4% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.26 and the average family size was 3.08.[63][64]

In the city the population was spread out with 18.2% under the age of 18, 8.6% from 18 to 24, 38.4% from 25 to 44, 22.3% from 45 to 64, and 12.5% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 36 years. For every 100 females there were 98.7 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 98.5 males.[63][64]

The median income for a household in the city was $49,316, and the median income for a family was $56,953. Males had a median income of $39,636 versus $32,911 for females. The per capita income for the city was $26,856. About 6.8% of families and 9.3% of the population were below the poverty line, including 9.1% of those under age 18 and 10.3% of those age 65 or over.[63][64]

Hackensack operates under the 1923 Municipal Manager Law form of New Jersey municipal government. The City Council consists of five members who are elected to four-year terms on a concurrent basis in a non-partisan election held every four years in May.[7] This form of government separates policy making (the work of the mayor and city council) from the execution of policy (the work of the city manager). This maintains professional management and a City-wide perspective through: nonpartisan election, at-large representation, concentration of executive responsibility in the hands of a professional manager accountable to the Mayor and Council, concentration of policy making power in one body: a five-person Mayor and Council. In the several decades in which the City has used the Municipal Manager form of government, Hackensack has had only nine City Managers.

As of 2015[update], the mayor of the City of Hackensack is John P. Labrosse, Jr., whose term of office as mayor ends June 30, 2017, along with those of all other councilmembers.[70][71] Other members of the Hackensack City Council are Deputy Mayor Kathleen Canestrino, Leonardo 'Leo' Battaglia, Deborah Keeling-Geddis (elected to serve an unexpired term) and David Sims.[71][72][73] John Labrosse, who had served as councilman since 2009, and the entire council were elected in May 2013 under the "Citizens for Change" party, which replaced the mayor and three council members who had been supported by the Zisa family. The mayor and deputy mayor will serve four-year terms. In the previous council, mayors and deputy mayors served one-year rotating terms.[71][74]

In April 2015, the city council selected Jason Some on an interim basis to fill the vacant seat of Rose Greenman, who had resigned the previous month citing claims that her council colleagues had discriminated against her.[75] In the November 2015 general election, Deborah Keeling-Geddis was elected to serve the balance of the term of office, edging interim councilmember Jason Some by 24 votes in the final count.[76]

In a move to eliminate past Zisa family political influence, the 2013 city council did not reappoint Joseph Zisa, the city attorney; Richard Salkin, the municipal prosecutor; and Scirocco Insurance Group, the citys insurance broker where former city mayor Jack Zisa is an insurance agent.[71]

City Council candidate Joseph DeFalco, principal of Hackensack High School, died of a heart attack the day of the municipal election in 2005, but was elected despite his death.[77] His running mates agreed to create a rotation under which each of the four surviving members of the New Visions for Hackensack slate would serve for a year as Mayor, creating a series of firsts for the City. Townes took office in 2005 as the city's first black mayor, and Sasso became the first female mayor in 2006. Meneses became Hackensack's first Hispanic mayor when he was sworn in on July 1, 2007, and Melfi took the reins as mayor in 2008.[78] Four of the same five officials were re-elected in 2009 (Townes, Melfi, Sasso, Meneses), along with one opposition candidate, LaBrosse. The city council continued to rotate the mayor's seat, with the exception of Labrosse, and Melfi became mayor again in 2012.

Frank Zisa served as mayor from 1977 to 1981,[79] Fred Cerbo from 1981 to 1989,[80] and John F. "Jack" Zisa (son of Frank Zisa) from 1989 to 2005.[81]

Former Assemblyman Charles "Ken" Zisa served as chief of the Hackensack Police Department from his 1995 appointment to replace John Aletta until May 2010 when he was suspended without pay on charges of official misconduct and insurance fraud. Tomas Padilla was appointed the acting police chief while the police department was being monitored by the Bergen County Prosecutors office. In May 2012, a judge ordered Zisa out of his position as police chief, a decision that cost him his police retirement benefits.[82][83][84] In January 2013, Mike Mordaga was appointed the new civilian police director, which replaced the previous position of police chief.[85]

Hackensack is located in the 5th Congressional District[86] and is part of New Jersey's 37th state legislative district.[10][87][88] Prior to the 2010 Census, Hackensack had been part of the 9th Congressional District, a change made by the New Jersey Redistricting Commission that took effect in January 2013, based on the results of the November 2012 general elections.[89]

New Jersey's Fifth Congressional District is represented by Scott Garrett (R, Wantage Township).[90] New Jersey is represented in the United States Senate by Cory Booker (D, Newark, term ends 2021)[91] and Bob Menendez (D, Paramus, 2019).[92][93]

For the 20162017 session (Senate, General Assembly), the 37th Legislative District of the New Jersey Legislature is represented in the State Senate by Loretta Weinberg (D, Teaneck) and in the General Assembly by Valerie Huttle (D, Englewood) and Gordon M. Johnson (D, Englewood).[94] The Governor of New Jersey is Chris Christie (R, Mendham Township).[95] The Lieutenant Governor of New Jersey is Kim Guadagno (R, Monmouth Beach).[96]

Bergen County is governed by a directly elected County Executive, with legislative functions performed by a seven-member Board of Chosen Freeholders.[97] As of 2015[update], the County Executive is James J. Tedesco III (D, Paramus; term ends December 31, 2018).[98] The seven freeholders are elected at-large in partisan elections on a staggered basis, with two or three seats coming up for election each year, with a Chairman, Vice Chairman and Chairman Pro Tempore selected from among its members at a reorganization meeting held each January.[99] Bergen County's Freeholders are Freeholder Chairwoman Joan Voss (D, 2017; Fort Lee),[100] Vice Chairman Steve Tanelli (D, 2015; North Arlington)[101] Chairman Pro Tempore John A. Felice (R, 2016; River Edge),[102]David L. Ganz (D, 2017; Fair Lawn),[103] Maura R. DeNicola (R, 2016; Franklin Lakes)[104] Thomas J. Sullivan Jr., (D, Montvale, 2015; serving the unexpired term of office that had been occupied by James Tedesco before he was sworn in as County Executive)[105][106] and Tracy Silna Zur (D, 2015; Franklin Lakes).[107][108] Countywide constitutional officials are County Clerk John S. Hogan (D, Northvale),[109] Sheriff Michael Saudino (R)[110] and Surrogate Michael R. Dressler (D, Cresskill).[111][112][97]

As of March 23, 2011, there were a total of 19,123 registered voters in Hackensack, of which 8,630 (45.1% vs. 31.7% countywide) were registered as Democrats, 1,993 (10.4% vs. 21.1%) were registered as Republicans and 8,492 (44.4% vs. 47.1%) were registered as Unaffiliated. There were 8 voters registered to other parties.[113] Among the city's 2010 Census population, 44.5% (vs. 57.1% in Bergen County) were registered to vote, including 54.7% of those ages 18 and over (vs. 73.7% countywide).[113][114]

In the 2012 presidential election, Democrat Barack Obama received 11,335 votes (78.6% vs. 54.8% countywide), ahead of Republican Mitt Romney with 2,835 votes (19.6% vs. 43.5%) and other candidates with 113 votes (0.8% vs. 0.9%), among the 14,428 ballots cast by the city's 20,971 registered voters, for a turnout of 68.8% (vs. 70.4% in Bergen County).[115][116] In the 2008 presidential election, Democrat Barack Obama received 11,711 votes (75.7% vs. 53.9% countywide), ahead of Republican John McCain with 3,498 votes (22.6% vs. 44.5%) and other candidates with 102 votes (0.7% vs. 0.8%), among the 15,461 ballots cast by the city's 20,616 registered voters, for a turnout of 75.0% (vs. 76.8% in Bergen County).[117][118] In the 2004 presidential election, Democrat John Kerry received 9,815 votes (71.0% vs. 51.7% countywide), ahead of Republican George W. Bush with 3,870 votes (28.0% vs. 47.2%) and other candidates with 88 votes (0.6% vs. 0.7%), among the 13,818 ballots cast by the city's 19,013 registered voters, for a turnout of 72.7% (vs. 76.9% in the whole county).[119]

In the 2013 gubernatorial election, Democrat Barbara Buono received 59.7% of the vote (4,268 cast), ahead of Republican Chris Christie with 39.0% (2,790 votes), and other candidates with 1.2% (89 votes), among the 7,327 ballots cast by the city's 19,506 registered voters (180 ballots were spoiled), for a turnout of 37.6%.[120][121] In the 2009 gubernatorial election, Democrat Jon Corzine received 6,247 ballots cast (70.9% vs. 48.0% countywide), ahead of Republican Chris Christie with 2,194 votes (24.9% vs. 45.8%), Independent Chris Daggett with 288 votes (3.3% vs. 4.7%) and other candidates with 31 votes (0.4% vs. 0.5%), among the 8,812 ballots cast by the city's 19,819 registered voters, yielding a 44.5% turnout (vs. 50.0% in the county).[122]

The Hackensack Public Schools serve students in Kindergarten through twelfth grade. As of the 2011-12 school year, the district's six schools had an enrollment of 5,166 students and 391.0 classroom teachers (on an FTE basis), for a studentteacher ratio of 13.21:1.[123] Schools in the district (with 2011-12 enrollment data from the National Center for Education Statistics[124]) are four K4 elementary schools Fairmount Elementary School[125] (633 students), Fanny Meyer Hillers School[126] (549), Jackson Avenue School[127] (451), and Nellie K. Parker School[128] (501) while Hackensack Middle School[129] serves grades 5-8 (1,292) and Hackensack High School[130] serves students in grades 912 (1,740).[131][132]

Hackensack High School serves high school students living in neighboring communities as part of sending/receiving relationships with the respective districts, including about 250 from Maywood, 120 from Rochelle Park and 250 from South Hackensack as of 2012.[133] In addition, Teterboro residents had been able to choose between Hackensack High School and Hasbrouck Heights School District's Hasbrouck Heights High School.[citation needed]

Public school students from the borough, and all of Bergen County, are eligible to attend the secondary education programs offered by the Bergen County Technical Schools, which include the Bergen County Academies in Hackensack and the Bergen Tech campus in Teterboro or Paramus. The district offers programs on a shared-time or full-time basis, with admission based on a selective application process and tuition covered by the student's home school district.[134][135]

The First Baptist Church runs Hackensack Christian School, a K-12 school that was established in 1973 and is located at Union Street and Conklin Place.[136]

The YCS George Washington School is a nonprofit private school for classified students ages 514 in grades K-8 who are experiencing behavioral and/or emotional difficulties. Its population consists of students who reside at the YCS Holley Child Care and Development Center in Hackensack and students within the surrounding communities whose needs cannot be adequately met in special education programs within their districts.[137]

Padre Pio Academy is a defunct K-8 school that had operated under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark until its closure at the end of the 2012-13 school year in the wake of declining enrollment and a deficit approaching $350,000.[138] The school had been formed in 2009 by the diocese through the merger of St. Francis of Assisi School with Holy Trinity.[139]

The Metropolitan Campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University straddles the Hackensack River in both Hackensack and Teaneck.[140]

Bergen Community College has a location in Hackensack. The Philip Ciarco Jr. Learning Center, is located at 355 Main Street at the corner of Passaic Street.[141]

Eastwick College is located at 250 Moore Street.[142]

As of May 2010[update], the city had a total of 79.69 miles (128.25km) of roadways, of which 62.10 miles (99.94km) were maintained by the municipality, 15.10 miles (24.30km) by Bergen County and 2.49 miles (4.01km) by the New Jersey Department of Transportation.[143]

Interstate 80, Route 17, Route 4, and County Route 503 cross Hackensack, while there are many other main roads in Hackensack. Several bridges, including the Court Street Bridge and the Midtown Bridge span the Hackensack River.

The city is served by three train stations on New Jersey Transit's Pascack Valley Line, two of them in Hackensack, providing service to Hoboken Terminal, with connecting service to Penn Station New York and other NJ Transit service at Secaucus Junction.[144]Anderson Street station[145] serves central Hackensack while Essex Street station[146] serves southern portions of the city. The New Bridge Landing station,[147] located adjacent to the city line in River Edge also serves the northernmost parts of Hackensack, including The Shops at Riverside.

New Jersey Transit buses include lines 144, 157, 162, 163, 164, 165 and 168 serving the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown Manhattan; the 175, 178 and 182 to the George Washington Bridge Bus Station; the 76 to Newark; the 83 route to Jersey City; and local service on the 709, 712, 751, 752, 753, 755, 756, 762, 770, 772 and 780 lines.[148] Many of the bus routes stop, originate and terminate at the Hackensack Bus Terminal, a regional transit hub.[149] Route 1X jitney of Fordham Transit originates/terminates at the bus terminal with service Inwood, Manhattan via Fort Lee Road.

The Passaic-Bergen Rail Line is a planned light-rail system that will have two stops in Hackensack.[150]

The City of Hackensack is protected by a force of 99 paid, professional firefighters of the city of Hackensack Fire Department (HFD).[151] The HFD was first established on April 1, 1871 as Bergen Hook & Ladder Co. 1. In 1911, the full-time fire department was organized.[152] The Hackensack Fire Department responds to, approximately, 5,600 emergency calls annually.[153]

The Hackensack Ford dealership fire on July 1, 1988, resulted in the deaths of five firefighters after a bowstring truss roof collapsed. A message issued a minute before the collapse ordering firefighters out was never received due to defective communications equipment and two firefighters who had survived the initial collapse could not be rescued as their calls for help were not received.[154]

Nine firefighters from Hackensack have died in the line of duty.[152]

The Hackensack Fire Department currently operates out of four Fire Stations, located throughout the city, under the command of a Deputy Chief/Tour Commander per shift. The HFD also operates a fire apparatus fleet of four Engines, one Ladder, one Rescue, one USAR Collapse Shoring Unit, two Special Operations Units, one Air Cascade Unit, two fireboats, one Fire Alarm Maintenance Bucket Truck, two Reserve Engines, one Reserve Ladder, a Reserve Rescue, as well as several other special and support units.[152][155]

The Hackensack Volunteer Ambulance Corps provides emergency medical services to Hackensack and other nearby towns through mutual aid agreements. The Corps operates nightly from 6pm to 6am, and 24 hours on Saturday and Sundays.[156] Daytime EMS is provided seven days a week by the Hackensack University Medical Center's ambulance service, overlapping volunteer coverage on weekends. Both the Hackensack University Medical Center and Hackensack Volunteer Ambulance Corps are dispatched by MICCOM, the Northern New Jersey Mobile Intensive Care Communications. MICCOM provides dispatch and emergency medical call taking with pre-arrival instructions and updates.

The city historian is Albert Dib. Walking tours are conducted of historic markers in downtown Hackensack, in and around The Green and lower Main Street, and a virtual historic walking tour is available as far north as the Pascack Valley Line crossing at Main Street.[157][158]

The First Dutch Reformed Church (Church on The Green) was built in 1696. In 1696 Major Berry donated land for the First Dutch Reformed Church,[159] erected in that same year, which still stands in Hackensack today as the oldest church in Bergen County and the second oldest church in New Jersey. The following is list of notable people buried in the Church's adjoining cemetery:

Bergen County's largest newspaper, The Record, a publication of the North Jersey Media Group, had called Hackensack its home until moving to Woodland Park. Its 19.7-acre (8.0ha) campus is largely abandoned and has been sold to be redeveloped for a mixed-use commercial project that would include 500 residential apartments and a hotel, in associated with the river walkway project.[164]

The New Jersey Naval Museum is home to the World War II submarine USS Ling, a Balao class submarine, and several smaller water vessels and artifacts. The museum is open select weekdays for group tours.[165]

The Hackensack Cultural Arts Center, located at 39 Broadway, is the city's leading theater arts institution and houses many local arts groups such as the Teaneck Theater Company and the Hackensack Theater Company. The facility also serves as the summer indoor location for the Hudson Shakespeare Company in case of rain. Otherwise, the group performs outdoors at Staib Park, with two "Shakespeare Wednesdays" per month for each month of the summer.[166]

The Shops at Riverside (formerly known as Riverside Square Mall), is an upscale shopping center located at the intersection of Route 4 and Hackensack Avenue at the northern edge of the city along the Hackensack River near its border with River Edge to the north and with Teaneck across the river. The mall, which has undergone a significant expansion, is anchored by a number of high-end department stores and restaurants, including Bloomingdale's, Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany & Co., Pottery Barn and Barnes & Noble, offering a gross leasable area of 674,416 square feet (62,655.3m2).[167] The mall is known for its marble floors, and attracts a great many upper income shoppers from Manhattan and Northern Bergen County.

Hackensack's Main Street is devoted to shopping and includes some of the city's iconic landmarks, including the United Jersey Bank headquarters building and the former Woolworth site that is now a housewares store. The only remaining major store on Hackensack's Main Street is Sears Roebuck and Co. The historic Sears building is located on the corner of Main and Anderson Street and is still in operation today. The site is close to the Anderson Street train station, and has been open since the 1930s.[168]

Bergen County Jail is a detention center for both sentenced and unsentenced prisoners. It is located on South River Street. The County is in the process of moving the County Police from the northern end of the city to a new site across from the Jail. The former site will be redeveloped as a "transit village" complex associated with the New Bridge Landing rail station in adjoining River Edge.[169]

The city's Johnson Public Library at 274 Main Street is a member of the Bergen County Cooperative Library System. The library opened in 1901 using a gift from State Senator William M. Johnson.[170]

Ice House is a complex with four full-sized skating rink that opened in 1996, which is home to the New Jersey Avalanche mainstreamed and special needs hockey teams and several high school hockey teams, in addition to being the home rink of gold medalists Sarah Hughes, Elena Bereznaia and Anton Sikharulidze.[171]

Other points of interest within the city include the Hackensack University Medical Center, Hackensack River County Park, Bowler City Bowling Lanes, Borg's Woods Nature Preserve and the Bergen County Court House and the Bergen Museum of Art & Science.

Radio station WNYM at 970 AM, is licensed to Hackensack and has its transmitter in the city. The station is currently owned by Salem Communications with a Conservative Talk format.[172] During the 1970s, it played a Top 40 music radio format for several years, competing (unsuccessfully) with Top 40 powerhouse 77 WABC (AM).

Hackensack has been mentioned in the lyrics of songs by several musical artists, many of whom have lived in New Jersey or New York City. The town was home to the original Van Gelder recording studio at 25 Prospect Avenue[173] where the jazz musicians Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk recorded some of their landmark work. Monk recorded a tribute to Rudy Van Gelder entitled "Hackensack". Other notable examples of Hackensack in songs include:

Hackensack also appears in movies, books and television.

People who were born in, residents of, or otherwise closely associated with Hackensack include:

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Hackensack, New Jersey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Rebecca Wisocky Dishes on "Delicious" Devious Maids

Murder and mayhem mix as the class divide between the wealthy elite and close-knit group of maids working for the rich collides. Sex, secrets and murder combine with a fun outlandish tone that's sure to make Devious Maids the new guilty pleasure of the summer.

I recently spoke on the phone with Rebecca Wisocky about her character Evelyn Powell, a haughty member of high society Beverly Hills, and the employer of a murdered maid that sets the series in motion.

The actress enthusiastically dished on her "delicious" character, the fun, over the top tone of the season and what's in store for Lifetime's new show.

Read on for excerpts from our Q&A…

Rebecca Wisocky plays Evelyn Powell

TV Fanatic: How'd you end up coming about Devious Maids?

Rebecca Wisocky: It was a very busy pilots season last year, and I was really excited when I got the script and read the breakdown. She's a pretty delicious and juicy character that's been tremendous fun to play. So, yeah, I was pretty excited to meet [Show creator] Mark Cherry. I'm a fan.

TVF: Did you go in for Evelyn Powell initially?

RW: Yes. I went in for Evelyn, tested the next day and got the job. I could not have been happier.

TVF: How would you say Evelyn describes herself compared to how the maids would describe Evelyn?

RW: I'll say that I describe Evelyn as an evil bitch with a broken heart of gold. So, I think that answers both sides of your question. I think the challenge I find really fascinating in playing a villain is you can't judge her character, you can't believe that she's just an evil person, you know? I think Evelyn thinks that she has good intentions. I think she's morally questionable to say the very least. I think she walks through the world with a great deal of armor that appears to be very slick, regal and cruel, and both terrifying and ridiculous to people that cross her path.

But over the course of the season, you see her soften a bit and you see the reasons why the way she is … at least I hope you do because that's what we tried to bring to it. All of the characters become more complex as they intermingle, and you'll know more about them throughout the season.

TVF: What's it like playing Evelyn and getting to say such great lines like, "But who's going to clean up the mess?"

RW: You know the tone of the show you're dealing with, right off the bat with Mark Cherry. It's a soap, it's a satire. It's dangerous, it's campy, it's fun and I think relevant as well. He came in primary colors and then he lets them all bleed together. To say the very least, I have some delicious lines and dialogue with Tom Irwin who plays my husband, [Adrian Powell].

But yeah, I think the character begins in a very hard arch-way and then you'll see her soften.

I may have a slightly masochistic streak because I really enjoy playing those characters that are punished for their hubris. I like that. I think it's interesting. I'm a character, so I don't mind being unlikeable or unattractive to be the foil for someone else's story.

I think in Evelyn's outrageousness she can be delicious as well. I hope she will be a character that you love to hate.

TVF: Why does a tone like this work for the show?

RW: I think it allows you to flip the script a little bit. It's a satire. You can say absolutely outrageous things and put people in incredibly extreme over the top sexualized situations in order to tell a story, in order to teach a lesson, in order to show something from a different angle and get a conversation started.

TVF: Can you talk about Evelyn's relationship with her husband and then working with Tom Irwin?

RW: Well, I love Tom Irwin. He's one of the best scene partners I've ever had. He's become a very good friend, I love this relationship [between our characters]. It's kind of classic. You don't see a whole lot of this in the pilot, but he actually has a great deal of power of Evelyn. It's a love, hate relationship. I think you find out through the course of the season what keeps them together. They're their own worst enemies and the source of the greatest pain for one another. They are also the only people that can comfort one another.

TVF: Evelyn and her husband clearly have a lot of secrets. Is that something we're really going to delve into this season?

RW: Oh, yes. That house is big and has a lot of secrets inside of it. Lots will be revealed in that house, I'll say that.

TVF: Do you personally already know who the maid murderer is?

RW: You will know by the end of the season who killed Flora. The murder will be solved.

TVF: What's been the best part about working on the show?

RW: The cast. It's really true. It's been so fun and I hope we get to do more. There's so many people on this cast. I mean, Ana Ortiz [who plays Marisol Duarte] just raises the bar. She's so tremendously talented. Judy Reyes [who plays Zoila Diaz]? These people are incredibly talented and all so unique and from so many different backgrounds. I mean, there a lot of theater people that are on the cast. Tom is from the theater world, I come from the theater world, as well as Ana and Judy. That adds a lot.

TVF: Has there been anything that's surprised you?

RW: I've done a bunch of pilots. I've recurred on a bunch of shows. I've guest starred on a bunch of shows. I've been pretty lucky to play a wide range of characters, although I've often played a villainess. It's been my first experience in television having a role that can build and change throughout the course of the season.

TVF: What can you tease about the premiere?

RW: A lot of fun. A lot of mouths will be agape. A lot of outrageous behavior. Some comeuppance for people who deserve it and some for the people who do not. A lot of style and I think it's beautifully shot. The look of the show is gorgeous. … It's pure escapist heightened satire.

Dive into the delicious Devious Maids when it premieres Sunday, June 23 at 10 p.m. on Lifetime.

Source:
http://www.tvfanatic.com/2013/06/rebecca-wisocky-dishes-on-delicious-devious-maids/

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