The new comedic drama “Blinded by the Light” feels designed to be heartwarming, and does a depressingly good job of defining by example that innocuous quality. The movie tells a classic tale of immigrants seeking economic opportunity for their children, who, in turn, pursue precarious careers in the arts and make personal choices that conflict with family traditions. But fear not: nothing is irreconcilable, since all is bathed in the universal solvent of pop culture, specifically, American pop culture, embodied by the music and the persona of Bruce Springsteen.

“Blinded by the Light” is set in the U.K., mostly in the academic year 1987-88, mostly in the industrial town of Luton, where Javed Khan (Viveik Kalra), a sixteen-year-old high-school student whose parents emigrated decades earlier from Pakistan, is an aspiring writer. Since childhood, Javed has been filling notebooks with diary entries and sheets of looseleaf paper with poems—which also include lyrics for his best friend, Matt (Dean-Charles Chapman), a neighbor and an aspiring rocker, who’s white. Javed’s father, Malik (Kulvinder Ghir), works in a nearby Vauxhall car factory; his mother, Noor (Meera Ganatra), takes in sewing. Malik is the unchallenged head of the family whose word is law (though Noor’s behind-the-scenes influence on him is exerted quietly but decisively at critical moments), yet Javed secretly defies him from the start, studying English at school rather than an economics course that his father mandates.

Click Here: Gold Coast Suns Guernsey

Javed is both oppressed by his father’s rigid rules and cowed by the aggressions of local neo-Nazi youths, who chase him home, spit on him, and menace him and other people of color, daubing houses with slurs and swastikas. “Blinded by the Light” offers sharply crafted details of the Khan family’s life in England, depicting many forms and displays of hostility and casual insult that the Pakistanis face—including a National Front riot against a local mosque, white children peeing through a Pakistani family’s mail slot, a pig’s head stuck on a minaret, and a middle-aged man offering Javed a glass of wine (“I won’t tell if you won’t,” he says). It depicts the Pakistani community’s warm bonds, as in the mutual assistance provided at the mosque, and the joy and charm of a wedding ceremony, while also suggesting, glancingly, the oppressiveness of some of those customs, such as arranged marriages. The patriarchal control exerted by Malik on Javed falls even more firmly on Javed’s younger sister, Shazia (Nikita Mehta), who struggles for a margin of freedom while avoiding any overt challenges to her father’s authority. Above all, the movie sketches the politics of the time lightly but starkly—in particular, the devastating effects of Thatcher-era policies, such as high unemployment, which, when it affects Javed’s father, shakes his foothold of confidence in the future and puts increasing pressure on Javed to bear some of the family’s financial weight.

Yet what’s heartwarming about “Blinded by the Light” is its pursuit of easy unanimity, which it achieves by borrowing plot elements that have the ring of authenticity and then sweetening and contrivedly assembling them so as to denature them. Javed’s life is changed one day at school, when a classmate named Roops (Aaron Phagura), who’s Sikh, approaches him and, in an encouragingly friendly gesture, offers him cassettes of two albums of his musical hero: “the Boss.” Javed is puzzled. Roops clears up the mystery: “The Boss of us all.” When Javed listens to Bruce Springsteen, the lyrics swirl around him on screen and he is transformed. What’s odd about the way that the movie handles Javed’s awakening is that its result is a monomaniacal fixation on Springsteen. Javed’s discovery of the Boss’s music doesn’t unlock the door to music for him, or to rock music, or to personal poetic rock at large, the way that a discovery of Beethoven might open up a world of classical music, or a discovery of François Truffaut might spark the discovery of cinema, or that of Virginia Woolf might ignite the discovery of novels. Rather, the movie looks benignly, even beatifically, at Javed’s cult of personality, as he fills his room with Springsteen posters, imitates Springsteen’s way of dressing, and seemingly listens to nothing but Springsteen’s albums. Far from sparking Javed’s curiosity, Springsteen sparks his incuriosity.

At the same time that Javed has his sensibilities awakened by Springsteen, he has the benefit of receiving attention from a devoted and understanding teacher, Ms. Clay (Hayley Atwell), who discerns his nascent literary ambition, asks to read his poems, and pushes him in the direction of writing personal essays, recognizing his talent. Emboldened both by Ms. Clay’s practical enthusiasm and by Springsteen’s words, Javed writes an essay about Springsteen for the school paper (after contending with the racism and the snootiness of its editor); then Ms. Clay helps him get an internship at a local newspaper and submits his writing to a literary competition. Along the way, he manages to chat up a classmate named Eliza (Nell Williams), a young political activist whose parents are genteel-racist Tories, and the two begin an innocent romance. (He also gets crucial validation from a crusty old neighbor, a tight-lipped Second World War veteran who literally gets wind of one of Javed’s poems—on a sheet of paper that’s carried to his door by a gale.)

The movie, written by Gurinder Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges, doesn’t have much to do with musical enthusiasm in itself, but it does find dramatic ways of positioning Springsteen—and Javed’s Springsteen fever—within the world of music: namely, down the middle, between the glam rock of Matt’s aspirations and the proto-poptimism of school-d.j. rock intellectuals. Springsteen’s music isn’t Javed’s gateway to the Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, or Public Enemy; Springsteen, here, represents a rock musician who doesn’t scandalize or defy the elders of the previous generation but embraces them. The longing for belonging that drives Javed is represented by Springsteen’s preëminence, his centrality, his respectability. The most important symbolic aspect of Springsteen in the film is his success. Though Springsteen may sing about working-class struggles, family conflicts, the challenge of maturing, the weight of moral responsibility, and the drive for freedom, above all, in Javed’s eyes, the Boss has succeeded, has risen from his obscure background and straitened circumstances to become rich and famous, to do his family proud. Similarly, it’s no spoiler to say that the strait-laced young man rises quickly and prodigiously to prove to his parents that a career in writing can be quite as respectable—and as lucrative, if not more so—than the path that they’ve set out for him in business or law. It’s a dream of inclusion that feels narrow, a vision of liberation that feels constrained, a view of progress that feels like a lockstep into the future. The universal solvent turns out to be not culture but celebrity and money.

On Thursday afternoon, the New York Post published a picture that, the newspaper reported, was taken at an In-N-Out Burger in the San Fernando Valley, on Monday, and sent in by an anonymous source in Los Angeles. The photo showed Ghislaine Maxwell sipping a shake and munching on fries and a burger while sitting alone at one of the restaurant’s outdoor tables. Maxwell is the fifty-seven-year-old daughter of the British newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell, who embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars from the pension funds of his employees, and then drowned in 1991, under murky circumstances, off the coast of the Canary Islands. In the ensuing quarter century, she had been the confidante of Jeffrey Epstein, the multimillionaire hedge-fund manager and convicted sex offender, who, on Saturday morning, hanged himself in his jail cell, at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, in New York. Epstein had been held at the facility since July, when federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York accused him of running a sex-trafficking operation that involved dozens of underage girls. In court papers that were unsealed on August 9th, it was alleged that Maxwell had been Epstein’s central accomplice, first as his girlfriend, and, later, as his trusted friend and procuress, grooming a steady stream of girls, some as young as fourteen, coercing them to have sex with Epstein at his various residences around the world, and occasionally participating in the sexual abuse herself. In the documents, which stemmed from a defamation suit that was brought against Maxwell, in 2015, by Virginia Giuffre, one of the reported victims, and was settled out of court, Maxwell emerges as an ominous presence. She refers to the girls as her “children,” and, according to a deposition, calls one her “slave.” Maxwell, for her part, has denied all allegations, and has never been arrested or charged.

Ever since Epstein’s arrest, in July, his story has generated intense public interest. How was his criminal operation able to function essentially in broad daylight, at such a scale, and for so long? Did any of the prominent and powerful people in his circle know? Far from ending the speculation, Epstein’s death, as my colleague John Cassidy has written, only increased the frenzied fascination with the affair. James B. Stewart noted in the Times that Epstein claimed to be privy to the dark secrets of many powerful and wealthy individuals. Conspiracy-minded people began to wonder whether Epstein had been murdered by accomplices to silence him. (Donald Trump retweeted a post that seemed to imply that the Clintons were behind it.) On Thursday, the Washington Post claimed that an autopsy had revealed broken bones in Epstein’s neck, which, though consistent with suicide by hanging, were more typical of death by strangulation. Medical experts have since questioned this analysis. On Friday, the autopsy findings were released, and the official ruling is that Epstein’s death was a suicide. Most of the conspiracy theories regarding Epstein’s death are likely to be untrue, but they have clearly been stoked by the fact that the crimes the financier committed in life appear to have, for once, involved a real conspiracy.

But the central figure of the Epstein affair in the past week has been Maxwell. The youngest of Robert Maxwell’s nine children, and reportedly his favorite, Ghislaine attended Marlborough, a boarding school in England, and Oxford. Her father sent her to New York as his emissary, in 1991, to foster the Daily News, which he had recently purchased. After his ignominious death, she was left with a mere hundred thousand dollars per year to live on. She began to sell real estate, and soon started dating Epstein, who was well connected. A multitude of pictures from the past three decades in which the socialite is seen beaming, cheek to jowl, wearing gaudy Upper East Side-lady finery, with a variety of bold-faced names at various galas, give the impression that she would have attended the opening of an envelope as long as it was gold-embossed. But, in 2016, not long after Giuffre’s defamation suit, Maxwell abruptly disappeared from public view. On Wednesday, the Daily Mail reported that she was residing in a mansion outside Boston, in Manchester-by-the-Sea. But before the surprise of that revelation had abated, the picture from Los Angeles delivered a new jolt.

Twitter, of course, had a field day. One user attempted to divine her order (“she did not go protein style”). Another joked about her attire (“Ghislaine Maxwell spotted at In N Out Burger wearing ‘NOT INVOLVED IN HUMAN TRAFFICKING’ t-shirt”). A meme account Photoshopped Maxwell’s figure onto a background featuring the Americana mall in Los Angeles, which made about as much sense as her presence at In-N-Out, and emphasized what seemed to be the arbitrariness of this particular mise-en-scene. The disgraced socialite had become a living iteration of “Where’s Waldo?,” apt to pop up at the unlikeliest of places. This almost surrealist unexpectedness seemed to spark viewers’ interest. A day later, Business Insider reported that punters were rushing in person to the In-N-Out location to take pictures of the table where Maxwell had dined.

The photograph was gripping in other ways too. In the picture, Maxwell seems not caught unaware but rather poised and, perhaps, posed, as if for a twisted “Wish You Were Here” postcard. (Some even speculated that the photo was orchestrated by Maxwell, but to what end?) With her calm eyes directed toward the camera, and wearing a light-blue top, her right hand adorned with an oversized cocktail ring, her short hair ruffled around her smooth face, Maxwell appeared chillingly serene. Before her was a burger, perhaps served “animal style,” which, in In-N-Out parlance, means topped with all the fixings. The anonymous photographer told the Post that Maxwell was reading “The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of C.I.A. Operatives,” which, if true, seemed to suggest her awareness of people’s fascination, and also their conspiracy-theory-mongering. There appeared to be, in other words, a distinct possibility that Maxwell was fucking with us. An ultra-wealthy cohort had allegedly committed a series of heinous crimes, in plain sight, with a kind of entitled shrug, and a general sense that they were above the rules of society and would never be caught. In Maxwell’s impenitent gaze, we could see the broader audacity of the Epstein affair.

Click Here: Geelong Cats Guernsey

To follow the shadowy mire of this saga, which potentially implicates scores of individuals and involves layers of misdirection, is to yearn for an ever-elusive clarity. As I looked at Maxwell’s photograph, it seemed to me as if she were cognizant of this, and self-consciously leaving a trail of signifiers to be close-read, only to have their sum total stop, maddeningly, just shy of meaning. As she posed against the mundane Southern California landscape—road signage directing drivers to the 101 freeway, a billboard advertising a medical-marijuana treatment center, a bus-stop ad for the comedy “Good Boys”—I felt as though Maxwell was daring us to make sense of the evil muddle in which she was allegedly a chief actor. “Here I am,” her face seemed to say. “Figure this out.” I am looking forward to the day when we do.

Welcome to George’s Boutique Beans! We’re no typical coffee shop—we offer way more than those other places. We have a four-page menu of herbal teas; twelve types of scones; and a giant bin of cool, used jazz records. Also, we’re now a gourmet chocolatier and a house of sadomasochistic pleasures!

Try our ninety-nine-per-cent cacao Himalayan-salt-infused truffle. Our house mistress, Dominque the Cruel, will make you eat it through a zippered leather mask while she yells at you about how pathetic your preference for milk chocolate is. It’s a popular choice!

Our coffee shop is also a tiger sanctuary. We’ve rescued dozens of Javan, Siberian, and Bengal tigers from abusive circuses, plus two cheetahs and an ocelot. We do it because it’s the right thing to do. And we pay our tigers a living wage. Please support our big cats! Also, sorry, cash only.

Just a green tea? That’s fine. But I want you to understand that no other coffee joint beats us on variety. Ever. After those jokers across the street at La Tazza started doing an improv night and stealing our business, we made damn sure of that.

Could I interest you in a knee surgery with your tea? Or a Roman gladius sword? All of our weapons and surgical equipment are a-hundred-per-cent locavore, barrel-aged, and urban-Zen. Real quick: our Tuesday night poetry slam has been bumped from 7 P.M. to 8 P.M. to make room for our new workshop on defusing a land mine.

Click Here: Geelong Cats Guernsey

Hey, if you’re not into truffles or gladius swords or ocelots or being beaten with a bag of artisanal light-roast beans, no worries. Here are some other things we’re now super psyched to offer in our coffee shop:

A wishing well
A karate dojo
A library of freecycled occult books
A hypoallergenic bee farm
A commercial 747 airliner simulator
A Volkswagen-certified camper-van repair service
A build-your-own-gingerbread-house after-school program
A cursed old piano that plays only zydeco
A museum of communism
A Gary Busey-themed haunted house
A Taiwanese embassy
A coin-operated time machine
A minotaur’s labyrinth
And we now offer gluten-free zucchini bread!

Nah, we don’t have power outlets. Sorry. It’s against our philosophy.

Oh, those giant nets you see lying around? They’re out because Gertrude, one of our Bengal tigers, got loose and ran onto our Olympic ice rink and ate a giant cardboard standee of Oksana Baiul. Then all the skaters freaked out and skated into our apiary, which scared the bees, so the bees swarmed into one of the Volkswagen camper vans. But, funny story, the van was full of gingerbread and land mines and a minotaur. Then Dominique the Cruel panicked, because she loves the minotaur—she calls him “boo bear”—and she started yelling at him in her “angry voice” to get out of the VW immediately, which spooked him, and he started swinging his axe at a pile of bee-covered land mines.

So long story short a camper van full of bees and gingerbread and a minotaur exploded, and we’ve had to close our attractions early, and now people can’t get their Taiwanese passports renewed or learn about communism or be freaked out by Gary Busey until we catch Gertrude—that’s the tiger—in our small, cute, local, indie coffee shop.

Hey, did I mention we do paninis? No panini? Just a bottled water? That’ll be eight dollars.

One more thing: our Wi-Fi is down. Sorry.

Despite gyrations on Wall Street this week and an associated rise in recession fears, Donald Trump is still ballyhooing the state of the U.S. economy. In private, however, the President sounded “nervous and apprehensive” when he called a number of business leaders and financiers from his New Jersey golf club to get their opinions, the Washington Post reported.

Small wonder. With his personal-approval ratings stuck in the low forties, Trump’s 2020 reëlection campaign hinges on a healthy economy. He can be pretty confident that his core supporters will turn out for him, but he also needs to win over some less committed voters. His pitch to them is one that the British Conservative Party used successfully in 2015, during a general election, when it talked up the U.K. economy and issued dire warnings about the consequences of a victory for the opposition Labour Party.

One of the Conservatives’ campaign slogans was “DON’T LET LABOUR WRECK IT.” Substitute “THE DEMOCRATS” for “LABOUR” and you have Trump’s campaign strategy in a nutshell. Addressing a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Thursday night, he portrayed the Democratic candidates for President as “a bunch of socialists or communists” and asked the crowd, “Does anybody want to pay a ninety-five-per-cent tax?” He also suggested that a Democratic victory would lead to a crash in the stock market, adding, “You have no choice but to vote for me, because your 401(k), everything is going to be down the tubes. Whether you love me or hate me, you have got to vote for me.”

The mere fact that Trump’s strategy is based on scaremongering (under Barack Obama, the Dow more than doubled) and outright lies (Joe Biden is a socialist?) doesn’t mean that it can’t work. In 2015, the British economy wasn’t doing great at all. Held back by five years of Conservative austerity policies, it hadn’t even fully recovered from the Great Recession. But the Conservatives, aided by their allies in the British media, managed to raise enough doubts about Labour’s economic competence to gain an over-all majority in the House of Commons. As long as the U.S. economy looks strong, the possibility of something similar happening in November, 2020, can’t be ruled out entirely, despite Trump’s unpopularity.

But, if the economy turns south between now and the election, Trump will almost certainly be defeated, and he knows it. Hence his delay, earlier this week, on expanding tariffs on Chinese imports, and his increasingly frantic efforts to scapegoat the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Jerome Powell. As the Dow plunged on Wednesday, Trump took to Twitter, calling Powell “clueless” and retweeting guests on Fox Business who were criticizing the Fed’s recent policy moves.

In the two days since the big fall in the stock market, we’ve received some new economic data, and it has been mixed. On Thursday, the Commerce Department reported that retail sales expanded by 0.7 per cent in July, the strongest figure since March. Economists responded by raising their estimates of third-quarter G.D.P. growth to about two per cent. That’s a long way short of the four-per-cent growth that Trump promised, but it’s also well above recession levels.

At the same time, the Fed confirmed that the manufacturing sector is in a slump. Manufacturing output fell 0.4 per cent in July, the central bank said, and it is now about 1.5 per cent below its December, 2018, level. For a President who promised to restore manufacturing to its former position of prominence, that can hardly be reassuring. Neither can the news, on Friday, that the University of Michigan’s survey-based index of consumer confidence fell sharply in August, reaching its lowest level since 2016.

The fall raised concerns about whether strong consumer spending will continue to underpin the economy, and it also illustrated that Trump’s aggressive tactics in the trade war are backfiring. “Consumers strongly reacted to the proposed September increase in tariffs on Chinese imports, spontaneously cited by 33% of all consumers in early August,” Richard Curtin, the chief economist at the Michigan survey, noted. The White House has now postponed the higher tariffs until December. That may reassure some consumers, but this week’s fluctuations in the stock market are likely to add to their jitters.

To be sure, none of this means that a recession is imminent. Most economists are predicting that the G.D.P. will continue to rise, albeit at a modest pace. Citing continued growth in jobs and household incomes, Curtain said “it is likely that consumers will reduce their pace of spending while keeping the economy out of recession at least through mid 2020.” The most recent statements from the Fed indicate that it agrees with this assessment.

As I pointed out a couple of days ago, though, economic predictions are often wrong, and nobody can be sure where things are heading. On Wall Street, there is a wide range of opinions, but there is also a general agreement that the risks of a serious downturn are rising. Ray Dalio, the head of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, said, on Wednesday, that there is a forty-per-cent chance of a recession before the election.

Click Here: Geelong Cats Guernsey

Despite all his bluster, Trump seems spooked. According to the Washington Post report, he has been “telling some confidants that he distrusts statistics he sees reported in the news media and that he suspects many economists and other forecasters are presenting biased data to thwart his reelection.” These sound like the ravings of an egomaniac who sees the world closing in on him.