Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/315672759?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Friday, June 28, 2013
Asia stocks rise after release of positive US data
BANGKOK (AP) ? Asian stock markets were boosted Friday by further proof that the U.S. economy is on the upswing.
Reports showing better-than-expected consumer spending, a jump in pending home sales and a drop in jobless claims emboldened investors to dive into riskier assets like stocks. Wall Street posted its third-straight gain of the week.
Japan's Nikkei 225 index surged 3.3 percent to 13,648.81. Hong Kong's Hang Seng advanced 1.3 percent to 20,708.18. South Korea's Kospi added 1.5 percent to 1,862.56. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.3 percent to 4,826.40.
Investors were also encouraged by comments from key U.S. Federal Reserve officials. The president of the New York branch of the Fed said the central bank would likely keep buying bonds if the economy failed to grow at the pace expected. Jerome Powell, a member of the Fed's board in Washington, said investors appear to have incorrectly concluded that the Fed will taper its purchases soon.
That brought a sign of relief to markets fearing that a pullback by the Fed would deflate stock and commodity markets, where investors have turned due to the low interest rates created by the bond buying program.
In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 0.8 percent, to 15,204.49. The Standard & Poor's 500 rose 0.6 percent, to 1,613.20. The Nasdaq composite index rose 0.8 percent, to 3,401.86.
Benchmark oil for August delivery was up 12 cents to $97.17 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose $1.55 a barrel to close at $97.05 on the Nymex on Thursday.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/asia-stocks-rise-release-positive-us-data-033121093.html
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Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Veterans' uphill road back, struggle with suicide
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Five years ago, Joe Miller, then an Army Ranger captain with three Iraq tours under his belt, sat inside his home near Fort Bragg holding a cocked Beretta 40mm, and prepared to kill himself.
He didn't pull the trigger. So Miller's name wasn't added to the list of active-duty U.S. military men and women who have committed suicide. That tally reached 350 last year, a record pace of nearly one a day. That's more than the 295 American troops who were killed in Afghanistan in the same year.
"I didn't see any hope for me at the time. Everything kind of fell apart," Miller said. "Helplessness, worthlessness. I had been having really serious panic attacks. I had been hospitalized for a while." He said he pulled back at the last minute when he recalled how he had battled the enemy in Iraq, and decided he would fight his own depression and post-traumatic stress.
The U.S. military and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) acknowledge the grave difficulties facing active-duty and former members of the armed services who have been caught up in the more-than decade-long American involvement in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The system struggles to prevent suicides among troops and veterans because potential victims often don't seek counseling given the stigma still associated by many with mental illnesses or the deeply personal nature ? a failed romantic relationship, for example ? of a problem that often precedes suicide. Experts also cite illicit drug use, alcohol and financial woes.
The number of suicides is nearly double that of a decade ago when the United States was just a year into the Afghan war and hadn't yet invaded Iraq. While the pace is down slightly this year, it remains worryingly high.
The military says about 22 veterans kill themselves every day and a beefed up and more responsive VA could help. But how to tackle the spiking suicide number among active-duty troops, which is tracking a similar growth in suicide numbers in the general population, remains in question. The big increase in suicides among the baby boomer population especially ? linked by many to the recent recession ? actually began a decade before the 2008 financial meltdown.
Compounding the problem, the VA ? which administers health and other government benefits for veterans ? has a huge backlog of disability, medical and other claims resulting from service in the military. Eric Shinseki, head of the VA and a former Army general, promises to have the backlog erased ? but not before 2015. The Pentagon and Veteran Affairs are working to install compatible computer systems to speed up the process. And the VA just reported it had cut the backlog of claims pending more than 125 days by 15 percent in recent weeks.
Jason Hansman, of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, says the problem among military men and women stems from a support system that falls far short of the needs of a military and its veterans.
"One of the big problems now is that we are trying to play catch-up on 10-plus years of war. People have gone back and forth seven, eight, nine times. And now you have a force that is stretched to its limit," Hansman said.
"It's not just people who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan who are killing themselves. About 50 percent are people who've never deployed before. So there's this broader issue going on in the military. Are there even the health services in the military to take care of the troops who have deployed, who have no first-hand knowledge of war and trauma."
Miller had plenty of first-hand experience.
"I was really good at combat. I was really good at that job. It was when I was in the States that I had a problem," he said from his home in Old Town, Maine, where he and his second wife are working toward doctorates in history at the University of Maine.
He said symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome began building as did the effects of a number of concussions that caused mild traumatic brain injury. He had gone through elite Ranger training twice and became a jump-master in the 82nd Airborne. He ignored his symptoms because he didn't want to leave combat and his job as a platoon leader. When he finally sought help from the military during his last rotation in the United States, he found what he said was a "19th century" attitude.
"I remember a psychologist telling me 'officers don't get PTSD.' It was a real affront."
A few days after he nearly killed himself on July 3, 2008, Miller mustered out of the service and resumed treatment for PTSD at a VA facility in Richmond, Virginia.
The treatment was helpful but his feelings about the VA are "really mixed. My take is they are a bunch of really well-meaning people. I don't know that it's resourced for the tasks." Also huge numbers of veterans ? a tiny portion of the larger population ? live in small towns, far from the cities where veteran services are available.
The American public, largely untouched by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because an all-volunteer military did the fighting, is gradually becoming aware of the problems faced by active-duty troops and military veterans. Now, some in Congress and President Barack Obama are trying to improve on the country's ability to take care of those who have signed up to fight.
None of that, however, undoes the anguish of such people as Ashley Whisler, whose brother Kyle killed himself Oct. 24, 2010. He had been driving convoys of supplies to U.S. troops from Kuwait shortly after the American invasion in 2003. He hanged himself in his home in Brandon, Florida, seven years after leaving the military. He had returned to his family in Michigan then moved to Florida, married and had a daughter. He and his wife separated before reconciling. He worked in a tattoo parlor, tended bar and began showing increasing signs of PTSD. He hanged himself while his wife and daughter slept.
Ashley Whisler said her brother spoke of fears of being ambushed when he was driving to work in Florida. After Kyle killed himself, her brother's friends told her how Kyle repeatedly called to talk about the horrors he had witnessed in Iraq and of how he couldn't sleep if there was a thunderstorm.
While she and her parents don't directly blame the military or the VA for Kyle's death, she does not let the department off the hook.
"These guys are coming back from the war and just being thrown back into society without any kind of transition or any kind of support. It's very difficult," she said.
Joe Miller says his military training, in the end, kept him alive.
"I had a gun in my hand. The second I cocked the weapon, I was back in Ranger mode and Ranger mode is not to kill yourself."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/veterans-uphill-road-back-struggle-suicide-050711276.html
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Monday, June 24, 2013
When Gadgets Should Be Repaired, Not Replaced
When I was 14, my stereo broke. Opening it up, I found a small piece of metal had been disconnected from the circuit board at the base. I grabbed a lighter, and melted the piece back in place. I plugged the stereo back in, and turned it on. It worked. It was the first time I actually got something I tried to fix working.
It's a story most of us probably have. The pure joy that follows when you fix a gadget that was once broken is hard to match, and once you do it once it becomes an addiction. However, as time has moved on, gadgets have gotten smaller and harder to work on. They're harder, if not impossible to fix, and most of us decide it's easier to just buy a new one than it is to repair one.
But just because it's easier to move on to a new gadget doesn't mean we should. Last month, I had the misfortune of losing both a hard drive and a graphics card on a notoriously impossible to work on iMac. My first reaction was to just abandon it and move on, but after a little research I found that while it was going to be a huge pain in the ass, both of those parts were replaceable. The final cost of repair? About $400, and a lot of time. The cost of a new 27" iMac? At least $1,800.
It's not just the fact I saved a lot of money. It's that I didn't have to buy a new thing. I fixed the computer I already paid (too much) money for, and breathed life back into it. When that startup chime rang again, it made my heart skip a beat.
The point is that a quick repair like this can get you something that more than meets your needs. When you're done, you realize that the newest thing isn't necessary. For me, that new iMac was shiny, but totally unneeded. Once I was running again I was happy with the old one. It's not just about repairing, it's about making what you already have work, even when you think it shouldn't.
We talk a lot about the value of making things here and doing everything yourself. But as Wired pointed out recently, the maker movement is just half of the equation. We need a "fixer movement" too:
We need, in short, a fixer movement. This would be a huge cultural shift. In the 20th century, U.S. firms aggressively promoted planned obsolescence, designing things to break...
Today e-waste has become one of the fastest-growing categories of refuse. We chucked out 2.4 million tons of it in 2010 and recycled just 27 percent. And ?recycling? often means shipping electronics overseas, where the toxic parts pollute developing countries. It?s a mess. A fixer movement could break this century-old system.
One superb place to start is fixing computers?because these days old models perform nearly as well as new ones. As hardware hacker Andrew Huang has noted, cloud computing has artificially slowed Moore?s law: An older laptop runs a browser just fine. Plus, computers are often surprisingly fixable. Vincent Lai, a Fixer Collective volunteer, gets handed ?dead? laptops??and for $20 I can fix it. It?s a user-replaceable part! For $20 the user could have fixed it.?
And Wired's totally right. Computers and laptops are deceptively easy to fix, and their lives are a heck of a lot longer than most of us give them credit for. I fixed and cleaned up my seven year old laptop to pass on to my dad a few months ago and the thing's still kicking just as strongly as it did the day I bought it. All it took was a few hours of work
Of course, it's not just about computers. It's about every product we buy. From toasters to speakers, having the skill set (or the willingness to look online for repair guides, they're everywhere, I promise. You can also hunt down a local hackerspace for help
In some cases, companies are just making their products smaller and less user-serviceable. But the other problem is that if you try to fix something yourself you're going to void the warranty. All of these issues have prompted sites like iFixit and Sugru to post their own "fixer manifestos." Both boil down to a pretty simple set of ideas and rights, including:
- The right to open and repair our things without voiding a warranty.
- The right to choose your own repair technician.
- The right to troubleshooting instructions and documentation.
- The right to hardware that doesn't require proprietary tools to repair.
While it'd certainly be nice for companies to make repairs easier for us, more than anything it boils down to making the effort to fix and preserve things ourselves. The maker movement, and the idea of creating something from nothing is a lot easier to sell than just fixing up that 30 year old blender.
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Source: http://lifehacker.com/when-gadgets-should-be-repaired-not-replaced-534807800
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91% Gimme The Loot
All Critics (57) | Top Critics (23) | Fresh (52) | Rotten (5)
'Gimme the Loot' is ... meandering and a little shallow. And even at 79 minutes it feels a little too long for what's essentially the film equivalent of a short story.
A thousand-watt jolt of mischief, a spunky, funky, ebullient indie that packs its 81 minutes with cinematic exhilaration.
It may be a slight movie, but it has its sunny charms.
A movie about teenage taggers in the Bronx should be fast and raw, scruffy and loose, and Adam Leon's Gimme the Loot is just that.
As it lopes along, the movie offers a warm but very sharp portrait of New York's have-nots and their uneasy relationship with the haves.
"Gimme the Loot" shouldn't be as appealing and exuberant as it is, it really shouldn't.
First-time feature director Adam Leon's shots are precise and full of detail.
The film's strong suit is its use of locations.
The film is episodic and determinedly offbeat, funny at its best, boring at its worst.
Shot on the streets of New York in a loose, freeform style, this lively comedy-drama feels somewhat underdeveloped, leaving us doubtful about its realism.
It's a great deal of fun, emotionally touching, and even surprisingly old-fashioned.
Some of the movie doesn't exactly convince, and some of the scenes have an actors-improv feel to them, but there's always plenty of humour and energy.
Endlessly entertaining, refreshingly light-hearted and bursting with summer soul, Gimme The Loot joins the pantheon of great New York movies.
It's a shaggy dog story with a certain amount of charm but not nearly enough drama.
The movie is unpolished, and it matters not a jot, because Leon has written super roles for these kids and invests their relationship with such sly feeling.
Hickson walks the line between bravado and vulnerability, while Washington has a charisma, spark and beauty that should ensure this won't be the last we see of her.
Bolstered by a low-key but assured aesthetic and a soundtrack of vintage soul and doo-wop, the film is infectiously enjoyable, with frequently amusing insights and an affable shagginess.
Out of nowhere, Adam Leon might just have delivered the first great New York film of the decade.
Charming and engaging low-budget indie with a witty script, likeable characters, a strong sense of time and place and a pair of terrific performances from its two young leads.
Funny and freewheeling, it's a joy.
A slim, low-budget coming-of-age tale whose richness lies entirely in its interstices. A keenly observed work that celebrates the unfettered joys of youth, and rewards by reminding of the power of a simple tale told well.
Simultaneously real and hopeful, "Loot" has almost no plot, but when the setting is so fresh and the characters feel so raw and alive, who needs one?
Ghetto laughs with a sophisticated point of view.
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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/gimme_the_loot_2012/
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Sunday, June 23, 2013
WikiLeaks: Snowden requested legal help to safety
LONDON (AP) ? Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks says it is providing legal help to wanted former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
It says Snowden is bound for an unnamed "democratic nation via a safe route for the purpose of asylum," and that he is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks said in its statement Sunday that Snowden requested the group "use its legal expertise and experience to secure his safety."
Hong Kong's government confirmed earlier that Snowden has left the territory, where he had been hiding for several weeks since he revealed information on highly classified spy programs.
Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency is citing an unidentified Aeroflot official as saying Snowden would fly from Moscow to Cuba on Monday and then on to Caracas, Venezuela.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/wikileaks-snowden-requested-legal-help-safety-122358140.html
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New record as haze chokes Singapore
21 June 2013
Last updated at 10:09 ET
Ashleigh Nghiem in Singapore: "This is the fourth day of choking smoke"
Pollution levels reached a new record high for a third day in a row in Singapore, as smoky haze from fires in Indonesia shrouded the city state.
The Pollutant Standards Index (PSI) hit 401 at 12:00 on Friday (04:00 GMT) - the highest in Singapore's history.
The index also reached 400 in one part of Indonesia, which is readying helicopters and cloud-seeding equipment in an effort to tackle the fires.
Schools in parts of Malaysia and Indonesia have closed temporarily.
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsieng Loong warned on Thursday that the haze could remain in place for weeks.
"We can't tell how this problem is going to develop because it depends on the burning, it depends on the weather, it depends on the wind," he said.
"It can easily last for several weeks and quite possibly it could last longer until the dry season ends in Sumatra which may be September or October."
'Life threatening' Continue reading the main storyAnalysis
Indonesia is struggling to contain the raging forest fires that are causing the thick smog which is enveloping Singapore, parts of Malaysia and some Indonesian cities.
On Friday, the government despatched helicopters to the worst affected areas, in a bid to create artificial rain. The plan is to seed the clouds once the temperature is a bit cooler to induce rain over the burning forestland.
It is a big challenge. Fire-fighters on the ground have been working around the clock to put out the blazes, but they have spread to peatlands and are proving to be very difficult to extinguish. Officials have complained about a lack of resources and say they desperately need some rain to help.
Indonesia's weather agency says rainfall is not likely until 29 June. Singapore and Malaysia have both urged Indonesia to do more to solve this crisis. Singapore has offered aircraft to help with the cloud-seeding operation, but there needs to be clouds in the sky for it to work. This time of year is typically the hottest and driest on the island of Sumatra.
A PSI reading above 300 is defined as "hazardous", while Singapore government guidelines say a PSI reading of above 400 over 24 hours "may be life-threatening to ill and elderly persons".
"Healthy people [may also] experience adverse symptoms that affect normal activity," the government says.
The PSI dropped down to 143 at 17:00 (09:00 GMT), although this is still classed as "unhealthy".
Before this week's episode, the previous air pollution record was from September 1997 during the 1997-1998 South East Asian Haze, when the PSI peaked at 226.
Singapore resident Nicole Wu told the BBC that she had stayed indoors for the past two days.
"It's terrible. In my flat the windows are all closed with the air conditioning on," she said. "My mother has to wear a mask to go shopping."
"I can't even see what's happening outside my house due to the smog. You can't see birds [or] moving objects," she added.
Philip Koh, a doctor, told AFP news agency that the number of medical consultations he had had in the past week had increased by 20%.
Continue reading the main story"My patients are telling me they are worried about how long this is going to last and how much higher this is going to go," he said.
In Indonesia's Riau province, where the fires are concentrated, the PSI went up to 400 on Friday, the head of the local health office told the BBC.
Schools are to remain closed until air quality improves.
The chief of the health department Zainal Arifin said there was an "increasing number of asthma, lung, eye and skin problems due to higher CO2 levels".
"I call for residents to stay at home and reduce outdoor activities," he said.
Diplomatic strain Continue reading the main story?Start Quote
End QuoteThe face masks which are in high demand in Singapore can protect against the worst of the smog... [but] are unlikely to provide total protection?
Singapore's National Environment Agency has started providing hourly PSI updates on its website, in addition to the three-hourly updates it previously provided.
Around 300 schools in southern Malaysia have now been closed as a result of the smog. Schools in Singapore are currently closed for the holidays.
There are also reports of flight delays in both Singapore's Changi airport and Riau province in Indonesia.
The fires are caused by illegal slash-and-burn land clearance in Sumatra, to the west of Singapore.
The smog has strained diplomatic relations between Singapore and Indonesia - two countries that usually share good relations, the BBC's Karishma Vaswani in Jakarta reports.
Mr Lee said Singapore had provided satellite date to Indonesia to help it identify companies involved and said that if any Singapore firms were involved, that would be addressed.
Indonesia's National Disaster Management Agency said it would deploy two helicopters to conduct "water-bombing" operations, as well as planes with cloud seeding equipment.
More than 100 Indonesian fire-fighters are attempting to put out the fires in Sumatra.
Continue reading the main storySlash-and-burn clearances
- Slash-and-burn farming is a technique that involves cutting down vegetation and burning to clear land for cultivation
- It is cheaper than using excavators and bulldozers
- The illegal burning of forests to clear land for palm oil plantations has long been a problem in Indonesia - particularly during the dry season in the summer
- Indonesia's Environment Minister Balthazar Kambuaya has said the government is investigating several palm oil companies in this respect
- Some producers have already denied their companies use slash and burn land clearance
However, an official in Riau province said they were "overwhelmed and in a state of emergency".
"We have been fighting fires 24 hours a day for two weeks," Ahmad Saerozi, the head of the natural resources conservation agency in Riau, told AFP news agency.
He added that the fires were in peat around three or four metres below the ground, making it particularly hard to fight them.
"It is still burning under the surface so we have to stick a hose into the peat to douse the fire," he said.
"We take one to two hours to clear a hectare, and by then another fire has started elsewhere."
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said "all the country's resources" would be mobilised to extinguish the fires.
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Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-22998592#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa
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Saturday, June 22, 2013
Emmys: Can an Adventurous 'Steel Magnolias' Put Lifetime in the Game?
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Over the years, a perception has grown of what Lifetime fare is supposed to be: prolific ripped-from-the-headlines television movies and biopics.
And then there's the perception of what Lifetime's programs aren't supposed to be: Emmy winners. In the almost three decades since the network was launched, Lifetime has only been nominated seven times in the television movie category, and it has never won.
But "Steel Magnolias", Lifetime's TV version of the 1989 movie about a group of Southern women who gather around a beauty salon, flies in the face of those perceptions and might give the network a strong chance to break through with voters as well as viewers.
Asked if the movie represents a departure for Lifetime, the network's executive vice president of programming, Rob Sharenow, told TheWrap that he "absolutely" thinks it is, adding that Lifetime worked to attract the caliber of talent to the project that doesn't normally appear in made-for-television movies.
Executive producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, who are also working on the Lifetime miniseries "Bonnie and Clyde", NBC's live broadcast of "The Sound of Music" and their second consecutive Academy Awards show, said they weren't worried that "Steel Magnolias" didn't fit the network.
"We never look at the network and say, ?Is this the kind of stuff they want to do?' We always look at what we want to do," Zadan told TheWrap.
The producers brought "Steel Magnolias" to Lifetime at a point when the network was looking for something special. "I think the original source material is timeless," Sharenow said of the 1987 play by Robert Harling, which was made into the hit feature starring Sally Field two years later. "It's one of the great pieces of American theater. It was a great movie. And we knew the story itself had enormous resonance with our audience. I think the big question for us was, How do you make it fresh and bring it into the new century in a different way?"
Zadan and Meron suggested an all African-American cast, an idea that Harling himself had floated years earlier as a way of showing how universal his play was.
"It immediately clicked as the right thing to do," Sharenow said. "I think it really speaks to the universality of the story - and it's exactly what we're trying to say about Lifetime. We don't want Lifetime movies to be factory-made. We want them to be acts of passion and love and creativity."
The project began to gain momentum after director Kenny Leon came on, followed by Queen Latifah in the role of M'Lynn, the mother who's desperately protective of her diabetic daughter. The executive producer, actress and rapper previously worked with Meron and Zadan on the Chicago and Hairspray movies.
"Kenny is a real actor's director," said Meron. "We said to Queen Latifah that he was going to direct her in a different way than she's had before, because he's very intense with actors. And she said, ?Good.'"
For the pivotal role of M'Lynn's daughter Shelby - a part that landed Julia Roberts her first Oscar nomination - the producers settled on up-and-coming Broadway actress Condola Rashad, the daughter of Phylicia Rashad. Condola was then joined by her mother, along with Alfre Woodard, Jill Scott and Adepero Oduye.
Other than small updates for advances in diabetes care and pop-culture references, the producers stuck to the source material for their movie, which they shot in Atlanta over only 18 days. The film earned praise from reviewers, and its premiere last October drew an audience of 6.5 million, Lifetime's third-best original-movie premiere ever.
"It's the perfect storm of good," Sharenow said. "It was incredibly high quality. It got incredibly high ratings. It was the highest-rated movie ever for women for us -- you can't ask for better than that."
But can it turn around Lifetime's typically tepid showing with Emmy voters? "I think we have an excellent chance," Sharenow said. "We've already gotten a lot of award attention. We had two NAACP Image awards for miniseries, and Alfre Woodard won. It was a little bit of an image game-changer in that we brought big talent and big stars to the network. It was a real win on all levels, and it set the bar for what we're trying to do going forward."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/emmys-adventurous-steel-magnolias-put-lifetime-game-001903890.html
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Thursday, June 20, 2013
James Gandolfini: He let his characters star
NEW YORK (AP) ? James Gandolfini would have hated all this fuss.
He was an actor who shrank from attention for anything but the roles he brought to life. No false modesty. He simply did his best to remain a private citizen behind his public characters. These included, of course, Tony Soprano, the fiendish, tormented mobster who the world came to know and revere as a towering dramatic achievement.
Now, out of the blue, this flood of tributes to Gandolfini upon his untimely death? This would likely have struck him as excessive and needless, upstaging for a moment his lifetime of work.
In a too-brief career that ended Wednesday at age 51 while he was vacationing in Rome, Gandolfini can be celebrated for performances on TV, on stage and in films that reached beyond the obvious triumph of "The Sopranos" and the unsought celebrity it brought him. Before, during and after "The Sopranos," he remained defiantly a character actor, by all indications spared a leading man's ego as he tackled roles that piqued his interest, not roles meant to guarantee the spotlight.
"I'm much more comfortable doing smaller things," he declared not long ago. And in the past year, his film appearances included supporting (or smaller) roles in Kathryn Bigelow's Osama bin Laden manhunt docudrama "Zero Dark Thirty," ''Sopranos" creator David Chase's '60s period drama "Not Fade Away," and Andrew Dominick's crime flick "Killing Them Softly."
It was all part of an acting career as unlikely to which TV has given rise.
How to account for the providential choice of Gandolfini to headline a high-profile HBO drama series playing an anguished mob boss and family man? Balding and beefy, he seemed the antithesis of an actor who could sustain viewers' interest, amusing them, horrifying them and compelling them to love him in a way they had never loved a TV hero before.
Gandolfini made the character monstrous yet sympathetic, a man with a murderously chilling gaze yet a mischievous smile. Thus did Tony Soprano become part of the culture, taking Gandolfini, reluctantly, with him.
By the end of the series' run, Gandolfini was suitably grateful for the role he had embodied for six seasons. But he had lent such authenticity to Tony that the character by then weighed heavily upon him. No actor stops identifying with the character he plays, no matter how repellant or villainous. An actor is required to be complicit with the man he portrays.
And yet, Gandolfini said he struggled to like Tony.
"Let's just say, it was a lot easier to like him in the beginning, than in the last few years," he told The Associated Press a few days before the series' finale in June 2007.
It was a remarkable admission by Gandolfini as he looked ahead, brightly, to new challenges.
"I don't even think I've proven myself, yet," he said. "I have yet to begin the fight, I think."
In that rare interview, Gandolfini, famously press-shy ever since "The Sopranos" blindsided him with stardom, was as gracious as he was uncomfortable discussing himself.
There was one too many questions delving into his acting process.
"Oh, please! Who gives a crap!" he scoffed (though he didn't say "crap"). Then he quickly apologized. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to be abrupt."
Despite his formidable presence in person as on film, there was no confusing him with Tony Soprano. He was his own man, down-to-earth, accommodating ? and no-nonsense when it counted. Once glimpsed by a reporter filming a scene on the set of the Soprano family's plush New Jersey home, he bobbled a line of dialogue, whereupon he let out a growl, not at anyone else but directed unsparingly at himself before the cameras rolled again.
On the other hand, he clearly knew the difference between what was serious as an actor ? and what was deadly serious.
Marshaling his unbidden clout as a star, Gandolfini produced (though only sparingly appeared in) a pair of documentaries for HBO focused on a cause he held dear: veterans affairs.
"Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq" (2007) profiled soldiers and Marines who had cheated death in war but continued to wage personal battles back at home. Four years later, "Wartorn: 1861-2010" charted victims of post-traumatic stress disorder from the U.S. invasion of Iraq all the way back to the Civil War.
"Do I think a documentary is going to change the world?" Gandolfini said about the latter film. "No, but I think there will be individuals who will learn things from it, so that's enough."
There were no grand pronouncements that day. No lofty goals voiced. No showboating by an actor who will never be forgotten as Tony Soprano, and then some, for the work he leaves behind.
___
EDITOR'S NOTE ? Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at fmoore@ap.org and at http://www.twitter.com/tvfrazier
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