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#he said in an interview that its about alienation and feeling distanced from your culture
memecatwings · 4 years
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we should really talk about Foreigner’s God by Hozier more its such an emotionally devastating song its a lamentation of the systemic destruction of Irish culture under English colonial rule but it also expresses a universal grief that every culture that’s been lost to colonialism can connect to the lyric “all that i’ve been taught and every word i’ve got is foreign to me” reflects so much yearning and loss Foreigner’s God is easily the most underrated Hozier song and is undoubtedly one of his best
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protectwoc · 4 years
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why all reylos are racist
y’all can go ahead and cancel me now because some of you are not going to like what i have to say and i am completely okay with that.
this recent gq interview with john boyega has incensed me. hearing all the things he went through, from disney and from “fans” and with no support from anyone… i’m livid. sometimes when i think about it for too long i start shaking, i’m so furious. and the response from the reylo fandom has infuriated me to a degree i honestly didn’t know was possible.
some of you may have seen my recent tumblr rampage. it’s reylo bullying hours here on my blog, and i’m not sorry either. one person threatened to post screenshots of my comments, which like… okay? i know what the fuck i said, it wasn’t that long ago. in fact i was going to include the screenshots in this post right here, but they blocked me before i had the chance. sorry. i’m sure somebody has them. anyway…
over the past two days in the star wars fandom we have seen something unprecedented: an outpouring of support for john boyega. both reylos and anti-reylos have joined forces to voice support for john in the wake of the gq interview (and the blm protests, let’s be real, some of y’all would not have given half a fuck if it wasn’t suddenly cool to be antiracist). and this showing of unity is one of the most rage-inducing things i’ve ever seen in a fandom (which is saying something; i have seen some shit).
reylo fandom, full offense intended, but where the fuck do you get off? you’re supporting john now? where was this support when tfa came out and you couldn’t stand the thought of him next to your white-girl-self-insert? where was it when tlj came out and your boy ryan completely sidelined him? where was it earlier this fucking year when y’all twisted a harmless joke (like yall haven’t spent years writing reylo-throne-room-sex-meta BULLSHIT) and ignored the vile racist shit coming from your own fav’s mouth? but you’re supporting him now? now that being antiracist is trendy? fuck outta here with that bullshit.
your fandom is the reason for the vast majority of the absolutely subhuman treatment john has endured over the last few years. your fandom influenced ryan (yes i know what his name is) to write tlj the way he did, you have behaved indefensibly here on tumblr.hell writing and drawing and fantasizing about all sorts of racist bullshit, and y’all have STAYED in his twitter mentions spewing hatred seven ways to sunday. but NOW, without a shred of self-reflection, you’re supporting him? now his experiences are valid?
the way that your fandom refuses to take accountability for its actions makes me see red. y’all stay on some “not all reylos” nonsense and i am SICK OF IT. i’m only gonna say this once, and i want you to hear me: you cannot be a reylo and be “antiracist”. you cannot participate in a fandom that has behaved the way yours has and say “blm, uwu acab.” you can’t. like do you think black people are dumb? that we can’t see right through you? we can.
“but rae,” i hear you whining. “you’re gonna say just because i like two characters together i’m a racist?” and of course not. that would be ludicrous. i think just because you knowingly engage and participate in a fandom that has racism encoded in its dna, you’re a racist. i think because y’all are in bed with racist harassers, racist trolls, and racist content creators, you’re a racist. that’s what the fuck i think. y’all lost the right to “it’s just a ship” me the instant you dragged john boyega into this.
here’s an example: i watched tfa about three days after it came out. i watched the first half, saw the obvious relationship set up between finn and rey, and thought, “aw, cute.” then i watched kylo and rey fight, watch him offer to teach her, and thought, “... interesting.”
when i got home i checked tumblr for finnrey content, saw the outpouring of love from black fans, all the cute fanart and fics blooming, and smiled. then, slowly, guiltily, i searched “reylo.”
BOOM. racism. the things i saw in the tag that night are tattooed on my brain. reylos rejoicing about the obvious rey/kyle pairing because “sw would never put her with that monkey finn”. calling him an “oaf”, “useless”, “bumbling”, “stupid”. reylos joking about how “when they talked about the Dark side, [they] didn’t think they meant that kind of dark.” “woke” reylos pretending to ship stormpilot in an obvious ploy to get finn away from kylo. and in between all of that, cute ship art. fun fics. talented gif makers. and nobody saying shit about the reprehensible behavior going on in their tag.
reylo is built on a foundation of racism. from that first week, racism has been woven into the fabric of your fandom, and it’s been going unchecked. and i don’t mean calling out other reylos. that’s not enough. i mean taking actual steps. y’all have been sitting in a cesspool of racism for five years, and its time for you to get the fuck out or shut the fuck up about being an “ally”. y’all need to leave this fandom.
don’t agree? here’s another story. in 2017, when i still watched supergirl (before i grew taste) i shipped karamel. for those of you who don’t know, karamel is the ship of kara zor-el (supergirl) and mon-el, her second love interest. when supergirl was moved to the cw for its second season, the decision was made to abruptly end her romance with jimmy olsen, played by mecahd brooks (a black man) and replace him with mon-el, played by chris wood, a white man, who was revealed to be, among other things, an alien slaveowner, as well as a playboy and all-around terrible person. and i shipped them. look, i’m not defending myself, but i never really bought the chemistry between jimmy and kara. even though mon-el’s introduction and the way that they carelessly disregarded kara’s feelings for jimmy made me uncomfortable, i thought the way melissa played her attraction to chris wood was more believable (and again, i’m not defending myself, but they are now married so it’s not like i was wrong). so i shipped them. simple as that, right?
well, no. not really. because the inherent racism in the way the writers wrote out her admittedly sweet romance with a black man in favor of a white slaveowner jerk kept bothering me. and finally i decided that it made me too uncomfortable to participate in. i never really reblogged any karamel fandom stuff, but i completely divorced myself from the fandom. i stopped reading karamel fic, and i switched to reblogging exclusively jimmy/kara content until the fandom died out/i stopped watching. i made a choice that real life racism is more important to me than a fucking fandom or a ship, and then i acted accordingly. simple as that.
and i’m not saying you have to stop liking the reylo dynamic. i still like the chemistry between kara and mon-el. i’ve shipped problematic ships before (bamon comes to mind) and i don’t think there’s anything wrong with that (to a point). but there’s a difference between liking a ship dynamic and engaging and contributing to a fan culture of racism. you have to stop participating in the fandom. y’all are in bed with people indistinguishable from confederate-flag-waving-all-lives-matter-touting racists and you don’t feel the need to get out of that environment? there comes a certain point where you have to decide if fandom bullshit is more important to you than fighting racism, and unfortunately, reylos have chosen wrong. that, ladies and gentlemen, is why all reylos are racist, regardless of what they say. roll credits.
except i have more to say, so i’m gonna say it. first of all, i’m not trying to hold myself up as some kind of paragon of virtue. i’m not holier-than-thou because all my ships are “woke” or whatever. chemistry is subjective, and we’re all going to be attracted to different ship dynamics, and there’s nothing wrong with that in theory. what matters is the execution. i finally had to say one day, “you know, this ship and the racist baggage it carries is actually less important to me than battling systemic racism on every level, including the fandom level”. y’all thought being antiracist was gonna be easy? that you wouldn’t have to make some actual changes, to make some actual sacrifices? sorry not sorry to disappoint. and if i, a normal-ass person with flaws and problematic thinking that i’m still dealing with and the whole ine yards, can make that decision, then other people should be required to as well.
(what really irks me is that the karamel fandom wasn’t even really that bad! i definitely could have gotten away with being a karamel stan in 2017. thankfully the supercat and supercorp shippers were doing the lord’s work and bullying them into submission (don’t think i’m letting y’all off the hook either, y’all have got some racism to deal with as well but that’s an essay for another day) but like most of the racism happened at the writing level; the fandom itself wasn’t engaging in racist clownery on the regular. but like the reylos are. y’all see racist bullshit coming from your neighbor, fav fic writer, artist, gif maker, whatever, and don’t say shit? don’t feel the need to distance yourself from them? gtfoh.)
i made this argument earlier when i was on my rampage (which i’m still on btw so don’t clown in my inbox, you will get your shit rocked) but i’m going to make it again because i feel like its important to note. when i pointed out that existing in the reylo fandom while you are aware of its racism makes you complicit in that racism, a white reylo told me earlier that (paraphrasing, my memory’s not as good as it used to be and i did mention that they’d blocked me) “you don’t solve a problem like systemic racism by ignoring it. leaving the fandom would be allowing it to happen.” when i pointed out that that’s police officer rhetoric almost verbatim, she (a white reylo) admonished me (a black woman) not to compare police brutality to a “ship war.” lmao.
look, clearly y’all need a refresher on what “systemic” means. it means, quite simply, that there are systems, large and small, allow for racism to exist, and it also means that allowing for racism to exist on the small scale means expecting it on a large one. like you think police officers spring fully formed from the head with racist ideals already ingrained? no! they learn it and learn to justify it with “well just because my friend made a racist joke doesn’t make me a racist” and “just because i laughed at my friend’s using a racist term in my video game doesn’t make me a racist” and “just because my friend is a racist doesn’t mean i’m a racist” and then we have people watching their coworkers kneel on a man’s back for 8 minutes with no remorse. i’m not gonna solve police brutality by fighting reylos on tumblr, but fandom racism is real racism with consequences on our world, and i don’t tolerate ANY type of racism. and the fact that you are so willing to not just tolerate it but justify it should say something to you.
and not all reylos are like this. similar to cops, good reylos don’t last. i have seen people grow so disgusted by the racism in the reylo fandom that they publicly turned their backs on it, and those reylos i respect. you’ve heard of “the only good cop is an ex-cop” well get ready for “the only good reylo is an ex-reylo”.
(and also like far be it from me to justify a cop but one could at least say they have their livelihoods to think about (not like they couldn’t just pick a nonmurderous profession but i digress) but you reylos can’t even choose between taking a stance against the hateful and unjustified bullying of a man who had the audacity to… get a job (?)... over a ship? come on now.)
the point of all this is, for all their posturing about “being antiracist” and “fuck 12” and “support john boyega”, reylos have decided that a relationship between two fictional people is more important than all the black and brown people who are hurt by that decision and the consequences of that decision. and before y’all pull some “b-but there are POC reylos!” (stop fucking using poc as an adjective, its a noun, it stands for person of color, please use it as such) internalized racism is a thing. busting out your token “reylo of color” (see how easy that was?) is not going to change my mind. all reylos are complicit in the racism of their peers, and being complicit makes you culpable. full stop.
and that is why the public support of john boyega from the reylo fandom has me seeing red. renounce your fandom or keep that man’s name out of your mouth. anyway, this was long and ranty and entirely stream-of-consciousness and i’m refusing to edit it so it’s probably completely incomprehensible to anyone besides me but if you made it this far thanks for reading ig. all reylos are racist, blm, fuck 12, acab, stan john boyega, don’t clown in my inbox unless you’re coming to bully me for being a karamel shipper, which i deserve (or do, i couldn’t give less of a fuck). good night.
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Brett Dalton on His Latest Hallmark Channel Movie, "Just My Type"
Author: Steve Gidlow 
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As an actor always looking for new challenges, three years ago Brett Dalton accepted a role in the Hallmark project Cooking with Love -- and he enjoyed everything about it. Three Hallmark movies later, he finds himself a #Hallmarkie favorite and is looking forward to this weekend’s premiere of his latest, Just My Type, a part of Hallmark’s Spring Fling programming event.  (Editor’s note: Spring Fling will be interruptedbeginning Friday night at 6 p.m. for another We Need a Little Christmas marathon, but Just My Type will still premiere on Saturday at 9 p.m. as originally scheduled.)
“I was doing Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which was a remarkable experience, and playing a villain who was still likable,” Dalton (pictured at top) explained when MediaVillage recently spoke with him.  “For people to connect [with the character], you can’t just twirl your mustache the entire time.  I was looking for something different and Cooking with Lovecame along.  The script had two people coming together who you wouldn’t necessarily think were meant to be with each other.  I found their paths so interesting.  That’s why I got involved.  It’s pretty hard not to fall in love with the Hallmark family because they take such good care of everyone and make you feel super welcome.
“I’ve been shooting one of these movies per year and this is the one I’m most excited about, and probably the proudest of,” he continued.  “There were a couple of things I enjoyed about it.  The characters were fleshed out and had a lot of depth.  I also got to keep my facial hair, which was cool.  Stubble is nice because I’m really not a particular fan of shaving in real life, so that was a huge plus!” 
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In Just My Type, Dalton stars as Martin Clayborne, a J.D. Salinger-type reclusive mystery writer who is done with the spotlight.  Along with his faithful canine companion Ernie, he retreats to rural Thompson Lake, where life is good until his idyllic existence is interrupted by a newcomer in town, pop-culture writer and aspiring novelist Vanessa Sills (Bethany Joy Lenz, pictured below with Dalton).  After recognizing him, Vanessa is very persuasive in trying to land an interview with the elusive Clayborne (one that could land her a big promotion), if she can only get him to agree. 
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“It’s a great story,” Dalton said of the film.  “They’re very different characters, but both share a passion for writing.  As jaded as my character might be about his career, he sees a spark in her.  It’s that passion that connects people.  Martin was a lonely kid and started writing as a great source of self-expression.  For me as a kid, it was art and drawing.  That never went away, and now I get the same passion from acting.  It’s something that never goes away.   While you could have a bad experience career-wise, the passion’s still there somewhere.”
One of the most likable things about Dalton’s portrayal of curmudgeonly writer Clayborne is that while he puts up a nonchalant veneer, the character never alienates the viewer.  It’s a fine line that as an actor Dalton likes treading.  “Maybe I’ve started to specialize in these characters because I played a curmudgeonly cook in Cooking with Love,” he laughed.  “I think you have to understand that nobody wakes up wanting to be a curmudgeon, it all comes from dashed hopes along the way or unmet expectations. Underneath it, there’s someone who cares more than your average person; they’ve just been burned along the way and developed a mask.”
For Dalton, being able to provide a little escape for people as a part of Hallmark’s Spring Fling gives him great joy.  As we all practice social distancing, he’s happy to in some way bring people together.  “I’m always happy to be able to provide a distraction and some enjoyment,” he shared.  “But particularly in these crazy times it’s even more important.  I’m not sure if the world will ever be the same, but at least for two hours we can enjoy a world where love wins, and I’d like to think it will continue to after this.  In some ways last December, when we shot this, was a simpler time.  But it’s nice to know that human connection, love, care, and generosity will get us through.
“I think our sense of community has, in some ways, gotten stronger,” he added.  “We’re realizing connection is important.  Social isolation doesn’t mean you just have to sit and watch [TV] all day.  Thankfully we all have technology connecting us.  So, call a loved one, talk or text a friend to make sure they’re okay.  Reminding people that you love them is what’s going to get us through something as crazy as the pandemic we’re all going through.”
With the majority of Hollywood productions halted due to the pandemic, Dalton considers himself fortunate.  “I have some voiceover campaigns and projects I’m still able to do and I’m thankful for those,” he shared.  “There was a pause where everything seemed to shut down, but now it seems it’s slowly starting up again.”  Currently, he can also be seen in Apple TV+’s Ghostwriter.
“If Hallmark knocks on my door around Christmas I’m not saying no,” he smiled in closing.  “I can’t think of a single household that doesn’t have Hallmark Channel playing from Thanksgiving through Christmas, so even if I’m not in one of the new movies, I’m in one of the replays and they’re always enjoyable.”
Just My Type will be telecast Saturday, March 28 at 9 p.m. on Hallmark Channel as part of its Spring Fling programming event. 
LINK HERE FOR ARTICLE AT MEDIAVILLAGE  
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dustedmagazine · 6 years
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The Dusted Mid-Year Exchange: 2018 Edition, Part 1
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In our fifth annual switcheroo, Dusted writers review each other’s favorite records, venturing out of the genres where they feel most comfortable to wrestle with excellence outside their frame of reference.  As always, assignments were made at random with the only rules being: a) you can’t review your own pick and b) you can’t review something you’ve already written about for Dusted.  
Unlike in past years, there was no clear favorite in 2018, although artists including Marisa Anderson, Olden Yolk, DJ Koze and Kacey Musgraves made multiple lists.  And perhaps most heartening, a number of writers amended their mid-year favorites after listening to other writers’ picks.  We hope you’ll also be able to find some new favorites among the artists we highlight.
Today, we’ll run the first half of the mid-year blurbs (alphabetically) from Marisa Anderson to Joelle Leandre & Elisabeth Harnik.  We’ll cover the second half of the alphabet tomorrow, then close our feature with individual writers’ best of lists through the first half.
Marisa Anderson — Cloud Corner (Thrill Jockey)
Cloud Corner by Marisa Anderson
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Who recommended it? Eric McDowell
Did we review it? Not yet, but it’s assigned.  
Ben Donnelly’s take:
"Slow Ascent" is one of the titles in Anderson's latest batch of profound electric guitar explorations. It's a good phrase to summarize her career and style, hiking higher with each release, wandering further from the trails. For the second time, she's tracking a few extra instruments into her miniatures without disrupting the solitude, keyboards and acoustic strings mostly matching the cracks and chime of her main axe. Her fingerpicking has a fractal aspect, where intricate and rapid patterns can create a cycle that's relaxed and gradual, as on the title track and other lilting numbers. "Lament," a slide blues with a dissipating tempo and skeletal keyboard notes is forceful in its minimalism. She's becoming a master of small contrasts. Nowhere better than the closer "Lift,” where folks sounds step aside for a plucky scale that spirals up, offset by sweeps that sound like brushing the harp of an open-lidded grand piano, but take focus as a harmonized electric. Her brilliance is ever more in focus.
 The Armed — Only Love (Throatruiner)
ONLY LOVE by The Armed
Who recommended it? Jonathan Shaw
Did we review it? Yes. Jonathan Shaw said, “The Armed will likely be delighted by the divisive responses Only Love generates.”
Ian Mathers’ take:
You almost wish for anyone who’s potentially up for the Armed’s pummelling, exuberant, often frantic, tremendously maximalist take on hardcore and assorted associated genres to come to the record totally blind, and not just because “Witness” comes leaping out of the gates so forcefully. It can be fun to start digging around and register all the distancing tactics, purposeful obfuscation, sense of play, and weird links (to everything from Converge to, err, Rubicam and Young), but the visceral impact of Only Love is powerful enough that all that context should be saved for later. It’s one thing to start filling in context, it’s another thing to hear something as ferocious and compelling as “Role Models” (“NO INS! NO OUTS!” yell-chanted in a way I’m pretty sure even little kids would find appealing, if you could sneak this synth-spiked bomb past their parents) in the context of trying to figure out the game, if there is indeed a game here. After the roiling chaos of the first few listens subsides the sheer number of hooks packed inside these songs really settle in your mind, anchored by Ben Koller’s incredible drumming (possibly commissioned on false pretences) and just as adept at etching out a multi-part climax like the seething “On Jupiter” as just full-on sprinting on the likes of “Heavily Lined.” And then there’s “Fortune’s Daughter,” maybe the strongest earworm I’ve encountered yet in 2018. Who are the Armed and what are they up to? It’s not that I’m not interested in the answer to that kind of question, it’s more that as long as they keep making records as good as Only Love I’m happy to believe whatever they tell us (or don’t).
 Bardo Pond — Volume 8 (Fire)
Volume 8 by Bardo Pond
Who recommended it? Jennifer Kelly
Did we review it? Yes, Jennifer said, “The sound, vast and muscularly monolithic as ever, seems more like a demon summoned periodically from a ring of fire than the product of any sort of linear development.”
Isaac Cooper’s take:
Like fellow travelers Yo La Tengo’s There’s A Riot Going On, Bardo Pond’s Volume 8 is stitched together from jam excerpts and spare parts, but unlike Riot, Volume 8 is remarkably cohesive and propulsive. Even at its droniest and spaciest, there is no shortage of momentum or sense that Volume 8 is a collection of barrel scrapings to tide over the diehards; it stands with any of Bardo Pond’s releases. The guitars on “Kailash” and “Flayed Wish” howl and wail like Lear on the heath, while the rhythm section pushes on, determined as Sisyphus. Two shorter pieces, “Power Children” and the gorgeous solo guitar piece “Cud,” act as a brief respite before the entropic and monstrously heavy closer, “And I Will”. Musical improvisation is one of the best means we have of tapping into the murky world of the unconscious, and Volume 8 demonstrates that while there’s plenty of chaos and darkness down there, it’s also the source of inspiration and transcendence.
 Cut Worms — Hollow Ground (Jagjaguwar)
Hollow Ground by Cut Worms
Who recommended it? Ben Donnelly
Did we review it? Not yet...
Patrick Masterson’s take:
“Amid all the noise nowadays, there’s precious little that still makes me feel the way those peoples’ songs do, and aspiring to reach that level is a big part of what makes me do this to begin with.” This is Cut Worms’ Max Clarke in a charmingly earnest Medium interview last fall on some of his biggest influences – John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed. Maybe you’ve heard of them; maybe you’ve heard of the level of cultural influence they have exerted on us all. And if you’ve heard the Alien Sunset EP that was released just after the interview ran, you’ll easily be able to see where Clarke was coming from in the time that he spent putting the homespun eight-track wonder together, splitting halves between Chicago and his current Brooklyn home. It’s a beautiful record that doesn’t overplay its hand, choosing instead to let the simplicity of his natural ear for a melody do the talking despite the humble recording quality. He was never going to reach the mythical heights of his influences plying away at that trade forever, of course, but his art was all the better for sounding so self-assured in its limitations.
Hollow Ground, however, is a Trojan Horse of the most exhausting variety. Those same reference points – the Beatles, Dylan, solo Reed – still apply, only here they spring forth in an aggressively augmented form with a backing band and a more fleshed-out sound that’s like saying, “Alexa, give me every pop music trend of the 60s at once” or, more accurately, like listening to someone too young to have experienced the decade but old enough to be familiar with its most basic cultural signifiers play an album’s worth of icons. How do we know? Check the new versions of Alien Sunset’s “Don’t Want to Say Good-Bye” and “Like Going Down Sideways”; they’re wholly different, coldly unlovable remakes of the intimate originals. Even his lyrics feel unconvincing; Clarke uses the pet name “baby” on 60% of the songs here, which, look: I don’t need to stare into a wordless void with Bill Basinski to feel something and there’s an evident surplus of genuinely touching heartache present, but that’s an affectation of the most irritatingly trite variety.
For a certain kind of person, Max Clarke is the perfect person; for that person, Hollow Ground will resonate simply, perfectly. I am not that person. I will never listen to this again – likely not individual songs, certainly not in full. Does that seem unduly harsh? Does it feel too personal? Does the cut worm forgive the plow? Guess we’ll see. Ask again when there’s a follow-up.
  Sarah Davachi— Let Night Come on Bells End the Day (Recital)
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Who recommended it? Bryan Daly
Did we review it? No
Bill Meyer’s take:
Sarah Davachi puts out albums often enough that it’s hard to catch up, so please cut Dusted some slack for not getting to Let Night Come on Bells End the Day until now. The Canadian composer and multi-instrumentalist has followed All My Circles Run, an all-acoustic minimalist chamber piece, with an overdubbed solo recording for electric organ, acoustic piano, Mellotron and synthesizers. Like some ecclesiastic initiate, she has followed a solitary path to arrive at a place that is one with the cosmos. Her slow-morphing tones, incremental melodies, and exquisitely voiced harmonies don’t just sound like they should be played in a chapel; they erect a virtual space around the listener that only lets the ineffable through.  If Andrei Tarkovsky was still around, he might be writing a movie to wrap around these sounds.
  DJ Koze — Knock Knock (Pampa Records)
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Who recommended it? Patrick Masterson
Did we review it? Yes. Jennifer Kelly said it “has a humid, organic air, even its most rigorously electronic tracks seething with jungle-y vitality and caressing warmth.”  
Ian Mathers’ take:
Like a lot of his peers, DJ Koze has been active and prolific for years without ever putting out that much in the way of “proper” albums, which probably goes some way towards explaining why Knock Knock, only his third, sounds so relaxed, confident and casually accomplished. With stellar vocal turns by everyone from Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner to folkie José González to Róisín Murphy (who’s rarely put her imperious purr to better effect than on the two perfectly-matched tracks she’s on here), 16 tracks in total and a lengthy running time, Knock Knock feels like a bit of a Statement from the producer. Which makes it maybe even more impressive that some of the best stuff here (like the sad jam “Pick Up” with its perfectly deployed vocal sample, or the almost-Avalanches style “Baby (How Much I LFO You)”) is just Koze without a high-profile guest vocalist. The whole thing has a friendly warmth and subtle propulsiveness that makes for compulsive listening; if this isn’t Koze at the peak of his powers, it sure feels like it could be.
 Tashi Dorji and Tyler Damon — Leave No Trace: Live in St. Louis (Family Vineyard)
Leave No Trace: Live In St. Louis by Tashi Dorji & Tyler Damon
Who recommended it? Isaac Olson
Did we review it? Yes, Isaac said, "While these performances are undoubtedly chaotic, they never feel purposeless.”
Justin Cober-Lake's take:
That guitarist Tashi Dorji and percussionist Tyler Damon have a limitless supply of ideas isn't surprising, but it's remarkable how well they've organized them into sensible packages on Leave No Trace: Live in St. Louis. Neither of the quarter-hour tracks here are exactly linear, but they do progress both coherently and unhaltingly. “Leave No Trace” offers the most noise, with the first half of the piece continuously crescendoing. The disappearance of one artist or the other simply means the soloist has more volume to cover. The pair spend the last two minutes together, Damon crashing away while Dorji sounds like two guitarists fitting blips together.
“Calm the Shadows” works differently. While not a suite, the song comes in sections, with Dorji and Damon filling in an outline as they go. The pair respond to each other, and work mutually on an unpredictable but discernable path. The slow build to the noisy section lets the chaos function as a thesis statement with the back half of the track the understanding of what to do with it. Dorji's pointed playing through that section answers the early rumble without making anything easier. Damon's sounds complete the thought. When “Leave No Trace” works so hard to slowly heap sounds before smashing through it all, the effect is amplified but the control of its predecessor. Dorji and Damon are a few albums in now and, while there wasn't much doubt from the start, they seem to be working in a rare place right now.
 Holland/Parker/Taborn/Smith—Uncharted Territories (Dare2 Records) 
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Who recommended it? Derek Taylor
Did we review it? Not yet.
Jennifer Kelly’s take:
It feels like a math puzzle. How many distinct ensembles including duos, trios and quartets can be formed out of four musicians?  But hearing it in practice as master bassist Dave Holland, free jazz titan Evan Parker, pianist Craig Taborn and drummer-vibe-ist Ches Smith assemble and disassemble into improvisatory groups is quite another thing. “Trio No Tenor” on disc one takes a luminous shimmer from jangling metallic percussion, abstract interpolations of piano and the shape-shifting tone of plucked, hanging bass tones. “Duo Bass Tenor” on disc two is far more fluid and contemplative, as long bowed bass notes underline the fluttering explorations of sax; its two old friends finding space in each other’s musings, darting in to challenge and interject and locating points of agreement even in occasional dissonance. The quartets, though, are the most astonishing, (I like #5 from Disc 2), as extraordinary, unruly energies careen off one another, extemporizing, reacting, reaching over and in between each other in a dense mesh of sound that seems, nonetheless, uncrowded and precisely choreographed. Only three cuts were composed ahead, the rest worked out in two days of live improvisation. Uncharted indeed.
 Quin Kirchner — The Other Side of Time (Astral Spirits)
The Other Side of Time by Quin Kirchner
Who recommended it? Bill Meyer
Did we review it? Yes, Eric McDowell said: “ Kirchner sidesteps novelty and navel-gazing by putting pyrotechnics second to, well, music.”  
Jennifer Kelly’s take:
Kirchner leads from behind on this sprawling two LP solo debut, his drumming feverishly hot but held in check so that others — saxophonist Nate Lepine, bass clarinet player Jason Stein, trombonist Nick Broste and Matt Ulery — can take the spotlight. Interplay between the two reed players is intricately, acrobatically fine. In opener “Ritual,” Lepine jets off with Stein in hot, asynchronous pursuit, Kirchner executing a furiously syncopated undertow, part samba shuffle, part continually exploding roll. “Brainville,” the Sun Ra cover, swings and swaggers, bass and drums in arch, stylized conversation. Kirchner is, maybe a drummer’s drummer, but this is not a drummer’s record, except on two lovely, timbrally varied “Drums & Tines” tracks, where layers of kit rhythms and kalimba intersect in fascinating geometric patterns. Kirchner clearly reveres another band leader whose instrument didn’t always occupy the top of the mix; Mingus’ “Self-Portrait Three Colors” cuts the drums to brush-on-snares, while giving Broste a chance to wail, the two reedists to evoke lush dance-hall sensualism, the bassist to pluck out dark blots of body-moving tone. Kirchner is not the façade, but the architect and also the guy who holds up the building.
 Joelle Leandre & Elisabeth Harnik — Tender Music (Trost Records)
Tender Music by Joelle Leandre / Elisabeth Harnik
Who recommended it? Eric McDowell
Did we review it?  No
Isaac Olson’s take:
The best part of listening to improvised music is hearing the moment when the musicians lock in and the music takes on a life of its own, when the thrill of discovery dissolves the boundaries between performer and audience. There are many such moments on Tender Music, an improvised set from bassist Joelle Leandre and pianist Elisabeth Harnik. A few examples: the swelling tension that emerges at the one and a half minute mark of “Ear Area I,” the rising anxiety and tentative conclusion of “Ear Area IV”’s final minute, and the march that closes out “Ear Area VI”. Between these peaks, Leandre and Harnik evoke Cecil Taylor, Morton Feldman, blues, bop, classical and more, sometimes all within the space of two or three minutes. Fortunately, Leandre and Harnik are attentive enough players that their restlessness never comes at the cost of coherence. Leandre and Harnik are formidable soloists whose use of extended techniques coax ear-tickling, unexpected timbres from their instruments, but it is when they’re playing together, and more or less “normally,” that Tender Music is at its best, that the melodic and rhythmic invention of both players shines brightest, and that they’re able to speak to each other, and to us, most clearly.
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cactii-studies · 6 years
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To discover and learn more about different cultures and their traditions (@annikki-studies)
To make friends who speak a different language! (@annikki-studies)
To fully appreciate music in other languages (anon)
I have always thought that it was awesome to be able to call yourself bilingual (anon)
To communicate with so many different people (anon)
Being able to connect with a culture entirely different from yours and make new friends would be great. It is really eye opening and fascinating to see how other people in other parts of the world live. (anon)
You can meet and truly connect with amazing people you wouldn't have met otherwise (anon)
To enrich my perspective (anon)
To better communicate with my long-distance friends (anon)
To absolutely FLOOR the annoying people who inevitably go, "oh you're learning[...]? say something!" with a shakespearean monologue in your target language (anon)
Because I once read a quote that said that learning another language makes it possible to add more characters to your storybook (it's my favorite analogy ever) (anon)
I find that language comes easier to me than most subjects which is nice because I've always felt dumb and now I finally have something that I excel in :) (anon)
I find it so fascinating how a bunch of random noises make up something we basically use to live our lives by?? idk its so cool ^^ (@artemistudying)
The joy on people’s faces when you speak their language is so pure & fun haha (@artemistudying)
To embrace my heritage. I am a Chinese-American living in a city with a pretty small Chinese community. To learn my heritage languages would mean that I'm able to connect with my relatives who don't speak English and spread cultural awareness around my community. I am proud of where my family is from, and I am proud of the languages we speak. (@aspiringpolyglot)
Language learning is a lot of fun. Duolingo is a lot of fun. (@aspiringpolyglot)
I make friends because of language learning! I recently met a girl at a mock trial conference, and we bonded over languages. I met a guy from a different state at a model UN conference, and we have a Snapchat streak--but we only use Chinese with each other. I've made a surprising amount of friends just by geeking out over language learning materials. (@aspiringpolyglot)
I also make friends who speak my target languages! It's interesting to look at my Snapchat map and see all my friends from around the world. (@aspiringpolyglot)
It changes the way you see the world and its cultures! (@autumnteastudies)
Learning different languages requires us to think differently, because they're structured differently and have different cultural connotations, so the more languages a person speaks the more creatively they think. (@beenthiswaysincedayone)
Learning foreign languages allows us to communicate with people we'd otherwise have no way of communicating with. (@beenthiswaysincedayone)
I think it's the best way to open up your mind. You can learn about the history of another country, how they ended up with that specific grammatical rule, and their culture, from their customs to the little quirky local expressions; you can see how much it shares with your native language or how utterly alien it is by comparison, to the point where you have to reshape your entire way of thinking to understand. (@beevean)
I love being able to communicate and talk to people clearly. (@blithely-study)
I love words and the imagery that words create so through learning a new language there are new ways to describe and see the world. (@blithely-study)
For the work I want to do in the future, it would be beneficial to be bi, tri, or quadro lingual. (@blithely-study)
I’m learning German because my friend who is German can tutor me and one day I want to study abroad in Berlin. (@bluewire13)
I am learning Russian because I fell in love with the way it sounds.(@bluewire13)
I want to learn Icelandic because it sounds beautiful to me (@bluewire13)
I don’t want to fall into the “Americans / native English speakers are lazy and only speak English” stereotype. (@cactii-studies)
There are words in each language that are unique and untranslatable, and to me, that is beautiful. (@cactii-studies)
Learning a language leads to health benefits when you’re older. (@cactii-studies)
To prove people wrong. I’m tired of people saying that learning another language is stupid. (@cactii-studies)
Because every new language is a new way of thinking (@captaindoicaretoomuchornotenough)
To add new shows to your Netflix list. (@ccstudys)
To talk about your crush behind their back. (@ccstudys)
I'm learning the languages I'm learning for lots of reasons but they all come down to my art. I love graphic novels and I love creating them. Languages have different aesthetic properties to me that fit better with different stories and art styles. I want to be able to tell the stories and create the art I want to create authentically using the languages they're begging to be told in. (@chaquelangue) 
Your best friend could speak only your target language. (@erudite-gulch)
I feel encouraged to keep studying / learning when I connect with native speakers and am able to have casual conversations with them.  (@erudite-gulch)
There's a lot to learn from older people especially, but sometimes they aren't familiar with more than one language. Knowing how to speak with them is an amazing experience. (@erudite-gulch)
Exploring anything else related to culture through language? Art, music, food,.. the list goes on. (@erudite-gulch)
Knowing even a few phrases in another language can help you get the most out of your experiences with people who are different from you. (@erudite-gulch)
Pride for yourself. In my opinion, it's easy to impress others with your 'stunning language abilities' (even if you're a bit rusty), and those compliments can make you feel better about your skills. But the real show of success, to me, is when you surprise or impress yourself. That could mean unknowingly thinking in your target language, accidentally mixing words, or ending a conversation and feeling shocked at how easy it was to speak. I think that seeing that sort of progress isn't always possible day to day, but the end result is absolutely worth the time and effort. (@erudite-gulch)
I want to be able to read the literary works of my favourite foreign authors in the original version. (@goblissthings)
Knowing multiple languages improves your connection with and understanding of others, their lives and their experiences (@hinodestudies)
Learning a language is an invaluable life tool; it looks awesome on a resume :p (@hinodestudies) 
 You are capable of speaking to other people that are not from your own cultural background, and you can get more information on topics and other perspectives! (@ilostmyheartintokyo)
It's also calming. For example, to repeat vocab is like meditation - you can forget all problems around you and focus on this one thing...I hope this doesn't sound weird but when everything is overwhelming, studying is the thing I do to concentrate and is motivating to tackle other things after? (@ilostmyheartintokyo) 
Talking in a language I really love (@imcloser) 
Talking with different people (@imcloser)
Learning about different cultures (@imcloser)
Being able to understand what my favorite singers/bands post in their sns, reading their interviews or articles about them (@imcloser)
Being able to understand songs I like (@imcloser)
Watching movies, reading books, playing games in their original language (@imcloser)
I want to become a translator (@imcloser)
I want to be able to travel abroad alone and be on my own (@imcloser)
I love it when I see what big progress I made (@imcloser)
I love the feeling that is like OMG I NEED TO KNOW HOW TO SAY *ABSOLUTELY RANDOM AND USELESS WORD* IN A LANGUAGE I'M STUDYING I DON'T KNOW WHY BUT I HAVE TO, AND LATER I ACCIDENTALLY SEE THAT WORD SOMEWHERE AND I'M LIKE AHA! I KNOW IT! Though in most cases I never get to use them...But you know I just like learning vocabulary I'm gonna use like never (@imcloser)
I love it when I forget a word in my native language...And remember it in like two foreign languages (@imcloser)
I love making the dumbest and funniest mistakes (@imcloser)
I love it when I see a word in Japanese, for example, 存在. I know the first kanji from the word 保存 and I know that its reading is either “ho” or “son”. But damn it, I almost always get such words wrong!  (@imcloser)
I love the fact about foreign languages that there is always something new to study. My teachers say that they're still learning. (@imcloser)
I love the langblr community (@imcloser) 
I think a great reason to learn a language is to understand another culture better, and thus to understand the difference between your own culture's understanding of the world and another's. When you learn a language, you discover differences in expression that you never knew before. By understanding these differences, we can all be more open-minded and treat each other with the kindness and dignity we deserve. (@isitanylittlewonder)
When I'm learning a language I feel like it opens a door for me. I can understand the culture through the original language; so I get to know how the people living there think, talk or learn. This is all inspired by a quote of Nelson Mandela: If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. (@kleinemissawkward) 
You'll look smarter, like a scholar. (@kookyandrambles)
Experiencing your favorite foreign media in the words they were intended to be heard in. (@kuzupekos)
The love of your life / your soulmate might be a speaker of a different language (@languagesandshootingstars)
For me learning a new language is fun. (@lenekopf)
You jump into a new culture via the way people express themselves and you win the opportunity to talk to everyone that speaks your new learned language. (@lenekopf)
It means that you are challenging your brain all the time. (@lenekopf)
Whenever you can speak and understand it makes you happy and it makes people around you happy! (@lenekopf)
Learning a language means to learn a lot more than just words. (@lenekopf) 
To fit in with my friends (@lunasanguis1996)
To learn a useful skill (@lunasanguis1996)
To be able to help people if I can (@lunasanguis1996)
So you can read a book in its original language (@origami10)
So you can understand jokes (and make bad jokes) (@origami10)
Mostly because you can study in whatever way you think is fun!  Anything can be a language learning activity! (@origami10) 
I like learning Japanese because of how it looks and sounds. I may also include "Japan is so freakin' clean!" as a reason I would like to visit. (@ristray)
Also dabbling in Mandarin because, again, I just really like how it sounds. (@ristray)
I learn languages because it makes me feel happy and at peace. My anxiety is gone when I study! (@schneeloewe)
Getting to talk to natives and listen to their stories when you travel (@swooping--evil)
Meeting new friends (be it on- or off-line) who are also learning or speak your target language (@swooping--evil)
Understanding your favourite songs / reading books in the language they were written in (@swooping--evil)
To not let age stop you from learning. (@uninico)
To always improve yourself. (@uninico)
To be more interesting to others. (@uninico)
To have something new to share with those you know and love.  (@uninico)
To connect with a new culture. (@uninico)
To know the feeling of success when you share what you've learned.(@uninico)
To not have to read the subtitles. (@uninico)
To inspire others around you to try. (@uninico)
To learn new (old) traditions. (@uninico)
To express yourself in new ways, in new words. (@uninico)
To shift the way you think. (@uninico)
Because the fact that two people can express the exact same idea in two completely different ways, and still understand each other, is magical. (@uni-venture​)
Because knowing more than one writing system is AWESOME. (@uni-venture​)
To gain a better understanding of yourself. (@worldapprentice​)
I think it helps you develop an open mind in general. (@worldapprentice​)
It’s fun! (@worldapprentice​)
You “unlock” more content (e.g. you can read a book or watch a movie in the original language; you get to know more singers that sing in your target language and read articles about them; etc...)  (@worldapprentice​)
It can turn out useful later in life (@worldapprentice​)
It’s really cool when you meet a native speaker and have a conversation with them “showing off” your skills (@worldapprentice​)
I’d like to give a huge thank you to everyone who participated and sent in their reasons! I hope that you enjoy the final product, because I had a lot of fun doing this! I’d also like to thank everyone who reblogged & liked the post with the project info, and spread the word around. 103 is more reasons than I thought I’d get, so I’m ecstatic!
Here’s a list of everyone who participated:
@annikki-studies​ | seven wonderful anons | @artemistudying​ | @aspiringpolyglot​ | @autumnteastudies​ | @beenthiswaysincedayone​ | @beevean​ | @blithely-study​ | @bluewire13​ | @captaindoicaretoomuchornotenough | @ccstudys​ | @chaquelangue​ | @erudite-gulch​ | @goblissthings​ | @hinodestudies​ | @ilostmyheartintokyo​ | @imcloser​ | @isitanylittlewonder​ | @kleinemissawkward​ | @kookyandrambles​ | @kuzupekos​ | @languagesandshootingstars​ | @lenekopf​ | @lunasanguis1996​ | @origami10​ | @ristray​ | @schneeloewe​ | @swooping--evil​ | @uninico​ | @uni-venture​ | @worldapprentice​
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zi-tales · 6 years
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Interview: Phecda
1) Father
My mother sang praises of him. I had nothing to go off other than this. At the very least, I should have heard of him in my time living in Nashaba. Someone looking for my mother, asking what happened. Yet, I have heard nothing. Years of silence. I am under the impression perhaps he is too afraid to know the truth. A spineless fool like that never deserved my mother, and will not recieve any respect of mine. He could be dead for all I care.
2) Mother
Her name was Najma. In the village, she was an incredibly skilled huntress, and the one designated to travel to places like Nashaba or Alshuba and establish trading relationships. This made her worldview much broader, and thus much more dangerous. The village was always hellbent on maintaining tradition, and keeping things as they were without outside influence. And yet, my mother respectfully continued to push this conviction, always bringing medicine, or magics, or what have you even at risk of trouble. Beyond this, she was a trainer for the village militia, apparently known as a skilled duelist for years. So, yes, my mother was an intrepid woman, and an incredible fighter. I only hope to be as accomplished.
3) Childhood
My childhood was full of isolation and self-restraint to not interact much. My mother's story for me was being an adoptee from the dunes, and to hide the fact that my ears were the only real tell for my abnormal status. Since the risk of someone noticing such a distinct trait was very high, I had to live mostly alone. This did not bother me much, as I accepted it as a norm eventually. My mother insisted we would move away at some point, so I shouldn't bond with anyone strongly. Until I was... I am unsure. 15? 14, perhaps? I believed it would happen easily. At around that time, I was made aware of our village's distinct xenophobic tendencies, after the subject never appearing until then. That was when I realized the implication of my existence, and when I began to question things. This prompted my mother to accelerate what training she could of vocational things like hunting and fighting, although she didn't manage to do it enough before I slipped up. Perhaps I am rambling a bit. Things happened so long ago, and it is a... A haze.
4) Hometown
My mother's actions and presumed death seemed to have caused a large rift between people within the village. She was influential due to her role as the sole link to the outside world, and without her, the connections fostered were severed. While I was expecting a decline from this, I did not expect self-destruction. No one seems to want to talk about what happened to my mother, either, so I cannot even say for certain that she perished the night I fled. I simply assume so, so I do not spend the trances distracted. It was not somewhere I would call home, regardless. Most people kept their distance from one another, and it was a place of quiet reverence and obeying the law. I cannot say I miss it.
5) Time as an Assassin
The Asterius League was truly a band of interesting folk. Individuals like Arista and Eltanin used to be such... Role models, I suppose? To see them fall so far... It continues to disturb me. We trained with a distinct intimacy that bonded us together as contract killers with meaning, with purpose. Constant reminders that we were not murderers, but forces by which to shape the nation, guided by the many sources of influence. I hardly see killing as a sport, but it comes close. It is an art form, in a way. Every combat is a blank canvas waiting to be used, to observe every detail of the opponent. To kill perfectly, with grace and professionalism. These tenants separated us from the shady, unwashed masses within the Ahlbaali. Anyone can kill for money. We could kill with unparalleled expertise. There were elders, instructors, and acolytes as the organizational structure. My mentor and the man who took me in from the dunes was Errai, an expert marksman and venerable warrior. He taught me everything my mother didn't, like the hidden elegance of Common, how to infiltrate, and anything else that assisted being a true killer. Although, he despised the title of killer. It was far too inelegant for what we were doing. Am I rambling again? Please, let me know. I do not often talk of these subjects, and it can get very messy for me.
6) Transitioning to normal life
Frankly, I was hardly an assassin. I hadn’t ascended ranks past acolyte, which usually gave you the authority to actually take assignments independently. I had taken support roles in contracts with veterans like Errai, but I was not truly an assassin. Simply trained in the disciplines of one. Regardless, losing the Derelict as my home and being alone did force me to carve out a name for myself in Nashaba almost immediately, although contacts of Errai’s recognized me and helped as best they could to establish me as a mercenary or courier. From then, it was a matter of self-sufficiency and living day to day in the organized chaos of the Ahlbaali capital. I was used to the culture already, only had to adjust to the lack of companions and the discrimination behind being a half-elf. People don’t trust knife-ears as much, I suppose. At least I’ve rectified that these days.
7) Sircius
Ebmeros is innately a good man, despite some shrewd behavior and hot-headed mannerisms.  Truly, I have never met a man with more insistence on hiding his own nature than Ebmeros. He is clearly a father at heart, and yet, refuses to let this out due to what I can only assume to be fear of attachment. His fixation on what he can lose seems to be almost overwhelming, although I suppose coming from myself, I cannot begin to criticize this. I have lost what I can, and simply seek retribution. He still stands to suffer, but I intend to stand by him to prevent that as long as I can. Other than this, the ferocity by which he commands his offensive magic is incredible, if only ever disappointing when attempts to put individuals to sleep consistently fails.
8) Roc
A warrior from another time that I incidentally discovered in an Ahlbaali ruin. I can say I have thought of many things to find within the dunes, but a companion is not one of them. The apparent pain of her history forces me to be cautious when I feel a need to inquire about it, as I am one who prefers privacy of those matters myself. Nonetheless, as it does not interfere with her ability as a fighter, I do not plan to push the subject. That being said, I am highly curious what possible circumstances could lead to such a state of being, and wonder myself how I will eventually cope with being in my own accursed state upon expiry. I should consider asking Roc about that, ah?
9) Eleniel
Eleniel... I hope she realizes what she is capable of. Her capacity for goodness is matches only by her desire to martyr herself in the name of personal redemption, to the point where it can be easily construed as suicidal tendency. I worry for her. Eleniel is proof to me that there are indeed selfless individuals in this world, and how dangerous such a devotion to those ideals is. While I cannot say I envy any such obligation, nor can I begin to comprehend the mental fortitude necessary to constantly seek charitable action, I respect her unerring faith in her dogma. It is a rarity in these times, truly.
10) Herself
What do I think of myself? What an odd question. I do not reflect on myself often. To do so feels vain, and my time would likely be spent better elsewhere. I suppose I am... Learning to be normal. So long have I been accustomed to being a wolf of sorts. Everything is a potential meal. I have to negotiate, push myself, ignore pleasantries. Efficiency, displays of skill, et cetera. I live every moment to advance as a person, or something of that nature. And now, I do not know. I continue to try and socialize, which is incredibly alien to me. I have much to learn yet still, clearly. The killing arts should not be all that matters in this life.
11) The Future
I am unsure. I seek to hone my skill with a bow to an impeccable fault, at the least. Perhaps even with a blade, if I can balance my practice that well. Perhaps I am to find a worthy successor to the Umbra? Re-establish the Asterius League once I’ve killed the remnants? Or maybe, I go back to Nashaba, and return to my humble life in the sands? Options wax and wane in appeal always. Nothing ever goes to plan anyway. For all I know, I may learn to romance someone, and I settle down and start a family like Belzer and Veii. I merely hope I am not alone in all of it.
12) The Vermilion King
Normally, I would not put him under concerns of mine. His dogma and apparent ambitions seem to fall more in line with something the churches should combat, not someone like me. But, he holds Eltanin in his employ, which speaks to his shrewdness. On that virtue, I seek the Serpent’s head, and so I may as well help topple this Vermilion King’s schemes. As for him as an opponent... I generally don’t fear dying. He is no exception. Whatever bleeds can die, and if he is a being of blood, then the statement remains relevant all the same.
13) The Umbra
The Umbra is, in short, mine. Only mine. I would not hand it off willingly to anyone unless I believe they will wield it responsibly. The latent power in this bow cannot be underestimated in the slightest. It burrows deep into your soul. Like cruel tendrils that drill into your heart, feeding off of you, but pulsing energy back. We are one. A single entity whose bond continues to grow stronger. It is strange, surely, and I am well aware it will devour me in the end, but... It is not evil, necessarily. It feels akin to an animal. Its instinct is to keep its wielder alive, and only devour them when they no longer matter. If this is my fate, so be it. As long as I make it worthwhile, I have no issues with a cursed death.
14) Malerus I only hope we do not have to tamper with such dangerous materials ever again. Resurrection is one thing, sacrifice is another. Rellus should not have had to make that decision.
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rayninsyde · 6 years
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Simpsonwave: the inkblot of a generation - by reddit poster NME24
Link to original post: HERE
It is a dark room, with a single-cushion sofa.
A sullen man walks in. Wearing a robe and a large pair of headphones, he sits and clicks his Walkman. As the camera slowly pans into his face – Homer Simpson’s face – melancholic synth chords usher us into a glitchy VHS world of shooting stars, childhood memories, frantic running, and unreal colours.
To the 3 million YouTube viewers of C R I S I S – even the hundreds in the comments who professed to crying – this so-called genre of Simpsonwave almost feels like a joke. And that’s because to anyone who knows its parent genre, Vaporwave, it is a joke. Isn’t it?
Origins
“Writing about vaporwave in 2016 is almost impossible” Scott Beauchamp would lament within a few months of C R I S I S being posted. Indeed, for the first web-grown genre to scratch mainstream recognition in music history, it remains awkward to write about. Critics such as Simon Chandler (2016) are prone to forgetting that Vaporwave the EDM movement is only half the story; vaporwave the meme is its other half.
In February of 2012, MACINTOSH PLUS released the online album Floral Shoppe, and with 10 million views in its first year, one song would become synonymous with the genre:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU8HrO7XuiE
The out-of-place Japanese title, the cover art’s surreal juxtaposition of ancient and digital, and most importantly, the soulless, disfigured Muzak-like samples left an impression on critics. To Jonathon Dean (2012), this was “one of the best single documents of the vaporwave scene yet”, which “carefully constructs its own meditative headspace through the careful accretion of defamiliarized memory triggers”. Critical theorists such as Grafton Tanner (2013) quickly saw more than a “meditative headspace”. As a trend of combining such eerie samples with grainy commercials was popularized by Saint Pepsi’s Enjoy Yourself and Private Caller, such critics saw an unspoken anti-capitalist satire, drowning the listener in Reagan-era consumer culture to subvert its appeal.
“Why any confusion?” you ask. Just interview MACINTOSH PLUS or Saint Pepsi and their motivations should be clear. Then you run into another uncanny aspect: the alien distance between the artists and their listeners. Vaporwave artists use corporate-inspired pseudonyms, avoid interviews, and make no effort to show their faces, let alone promote themselves. When Bandcamp finally got a hold of Ramona Xavier (Chandler, 2016), who used MACINTOSH PLUS as a one-time alias, she responded “the ideological and philosophical themes behind my work come from a personal place – kind of a quarantine zone in my brain that I don’t let people into”. Each artist is a ghost on the internet, the “non-place” so many of us were raised in, which like a shopping mall, looks similar wherever in the world you go. That they refuse to be more than avatars indeed suggests deliberate alienation.
If that was the intent, you wouldn’t know it from the comments either. With its S P A C E D O U T T I T L E S, grainy Japanese commercials and faceless marble statues, it’s only fair that an aesthetic intended to leave the listener empty, confused and nostalgic was ripe for being mocked. It was, as Sam Sutherland acknowledges, endless second-hand parodying of this aesthetic across Reddit, YouTube and 4chan, as much as Vaporwave’s first-hand parody of consumerism, that propelled it into virality.
The undercurrent
It needn’t be said that postmodernism, parody and self-parody go hand-in-hand. A complete scepticism of grand narratives leads to deconstructing the “sincere” into the detached or comedic, leaving irony as the only means of expression. This scepticism lends itself to (though is not limited to) globalization, pop culture, and the worship of laissez-faire capitalism that emerged in the 1980s. Such songs as MACINTOSH PLUS’s リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー are a thorough exercise in deconstruction. The song samples Diana Ross’s Make Your Move, and with it, the synth sounds, motorik pulse, and cutesy lyrics emblematic of an 80s pop song. Ross’s voice is then pitched down to become ostensibly male, and the song is slowed down to assume an air of mediocrity. The lyrics are chopped and repeated ad nausem until they take on different meanings: “do you understand that it’s all in your hands?” becomes “do you understand that it’s all in your head?”
Much as a song about serious love is undermined to become one about solitude and solipsism in the digital “non-place”, the seriousness of vaporwave is undermined by internet users who, in the spirit of irony and sarcasm, refuse to take it seriously. Thus the saying “vaporwave is dead – long live vaporwave” (Beauchamp, 2016).
“Postmodernism feeds off distance,” Seth Abramson observed in 2014. “Radios, and even the early years of technological industrialization, emphasized distance in a way that was unmistakable. The internet, by comparison, is a strange mix of distance and closeness, detachment and immediacy – our sense of ourselves and strangers’ varying senses of us – that postmodernism doesn’t really seem to describe well”.
The shift
What then, given the history of Vaporwave, is so significant about an edited Homer Simpson listening to Resonance on his Walkman?
That it reconstructs the comedic and the detached into the sincere.
The Simpsonwave subgenre is best explained by YouTube user JavCee (2016): “take footage of early episodes of the Simpsons… now edit some wavy music to the footage…next, add a dream-like filter and VHS distortion to the entire video to represent the adult longing for a childhood they thought they had… even alternative scenes to better showcase the brain synapses sometimes crossing in memories…creating phantoms of times that probably never existed in the first place.”
This is quite a turn to take from Vaporwave’s agenda as we’ve described it. There is, as Sutherland (2016) points out: “something to be said about a new emotional resonance being added to a genre of music that I would argue exists specifically to mock the commercial and corporate vibe of mall-type music”.
As Homer sits like us – alone at night, ears plugged, facial expression vacant – we enter his mind to find something different to the cartoon caricature of an overweight, suburban dad. We’re suddenly thrust in memories of Marge as a teenager, Homer driving alone, his mother embracing him in a dream – Homer bowling alone – visions of his children – Homer running alone – his wife in bed. The second memory Homer thinks about, perhaps his most recent, is him sitting on bed with a strange woman, and bursting into tears.
The unexpected pain of watching this is both generational and personal; in the days that we curled up on the couch to watch The Simpsons after school, masculinity dictated that this was a side rarely acknowledged of not just cartoon fathers, but of our own fathers as well. Now, in one surreal moment, Homer Simpson runs through the woods from his thoughts, a tender victim of the passage of time.
In uploading this video, Lucian Hughes has injected meaning into not just a comedic cartoon, but a satirical genre that deliberately robs the listener of comfort. But should we allow him?
In 1993, author David Foster Wallace was a generation early in heralding “new sincerity”: “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles”
Such a feeling steps away from presenting the meaninglessness of the society we have, and instead focuses on meaning at either the personal level, or in the societal future or past. To Vermeulen (2010), this is termed “meta-modernism”, something which “acknowledges that history's purpose will never be fulfilled because it does not exist. Critically, however, it nevertheless takes toward it as if it does exist. Inspired by a modern naïveté yet informed by postmodern scepticism, the metamodern discourse consciously commits itself to an impossible possibility.” Simpsonwave acknowledges the fakeness of the series, and brings that fakeness up a notch through the creation of alternate scenes.
Such videos as C R I S I S and W H E R E A M I G O I N G? both admit their manufactured nature and press on in pursuit of emotion. They are beyond political agendas and seek to quench, rather than solely bring attention to, a deep generational starvation of meaning.
And that is for better or for worse.
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foxvslynch · 7 years
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Fox Vs. Eraserhead
“What’s the strangest thing anyone has ever said to you about Eraserhead?
I like to have people be able to form their own opinion as to what it means and have their own ideas about things. But at the same time, no one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the film the way I see it. The interpretation of what it’s all about has never been my interpretation.”
From Vulture.com’s interview with David Lynch, September 2014.
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There you have it. If you are searching for a ‘correct’ interpretation or analysis of David Lynch’s 1977 debut Eraserhead, you have come to the wrong place. Every place you could conceivably go is also wrong because, according to Lynch, no one has ever read Eraserhead like he does. In this write up, and in all the write ups to come, I do not ever want to claim I have gotten anywhere close to the ‘correct’ interpretations. However, I do want to write about the images Lynch presents, and where they lead me.
Image is the perfect jumping-off point to discuss this film. David Lynch’s formal training as a visual artist at the Pennsylvania Academy of Visual Art is oft-cited as a means of contextualizing the focus of his filmmaking. Eraserhead is ground-zero for David Lynch the painter creating David Lynch the filmmaker. The first thing I always notice when I watch Eraserhead is how consciously composed every frame of the film is. To the extent that this film has any clear precedent in filmmaking, it is reminiscent of very early impressionistic and experimental films of the early twentieth century. However, where those films necessarily lack a degree of self-consciousness or experience, Eraserhead uses the canvas of black and white film expertly. The film is deep and rich and grungy. Lynch’s keen interest in two-dimensional projection as his canvas always shines through. Frankly, Eraserhead can be enjoyed simply as an exercise in careful, beautiful framing and cinematography.
However, most people (including yours truly) do not go to the movies simply to marvel at the visual ingenuity of directors. That era of filmmaking and viewing died long before we, or even Lynch, were alive. We want to see images on the big screen that, in some way, speak to us about our own lives. Eraserhead on its’ face may confound that demand. It’s mysterious, and weird, and single-minded in a direction that we aren’t privy to. In my viewing of Eraserhead I’ve isolated quite a few interesting themes worth tugging on and stretching on which will make up the focus of this write-up.
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Eraserhead’s life begins at ejection. Specifically, the oral ejection of a horrific sperm-worm piloted by a barnacled man inside of a planet. This film is steeped in bodily violation. Henry’s nightmare gives a crash-course in the sort of horror Eraserhead specializes in. It is reminiscent of HR Giger’s work in Alien, but is even bulkier and more unreal.. Many of the creature effects in this film are either physical puppets or stop-motion animated. Escaping Henry’s dreams into the ‘real world’ (more on that later) gives us an understanding of the environment that produces these nightmares.
I often end up viewing Eraserhead as being about adolescence, and the ways that children have to try on the clothes of adulthood in preparation for the real thing. The sequence of Henry walking home with his sack of nondescript groceries provide tons of fodder for this interpretation. It’s worth re-watching this scene as if it were film of a child making their way home from school in typical suburbia. We can observe the common obstacles like mounds of dirt and thick mud; it’s not a stretch to imagine the sack as reminiscent of a backpack or a lunch sack. Another point for this interpretation is his ritual of checking the mail cubby. I can almost imagine Henry’s dejection every time he gets no mail. Henry’s extreme vulnerability is central to all of his scenes outside of his apartment. The world dwarfs him, it is cruel and industrial and uncaring, he has to establish a single route home just to exert some sense of stability and control (as evidenced by his very deliberate mound traversal). This manufactured comfort will be contrasted during his awkward visit to Mary X’s house.
Viewing Henry as somehow adolescent or childish, we can see many references to common childhood emotions in the film. Walking down his apartment hallway, he is stopped by his enticing neighbor (Judith Anna Roberts). Henry is obviously intimidated and confused by his own intimidation in the face of a confident adul, and he escapes the conversation with as few words as possible. This disparity or outclassing between Henry and the world of adults is another thread I’ve found particularly interesting.
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It’s worth making a note about the physical design of the lived-in spaces of this world. The most important space in the film is Henry’s apartment, and it’s incredibly dour and depressing. His attempts at sprucing up the place with plants go as far as piles of dirt with twigs stuck in them. He has virtually no real belongings. And the sound. Like most spaces in this world it is permeated by a constant vaguely industrial whirl and drone. To cover it up, Henry plays a record of atonal carnival music, but that only makes the aural assault even more troubling. An underlying aspect of Eraserhead is the results of industry on society. The rooms we see feel absolutely barren and devoid of what we would recognize as the human element. How do people get used to this? Is that a normal function of becoming a fully-realized human?
Eraserhead is often interpreted as a film about the fear of fatherhood. I see a lot of merit in this analysis. Henry is invited to dinner at the home of his on-again off-again girlfriend, Mary X (though, tellingly, this invitation is conveyed by someone much smokier and more seductive). His trek to her house is about as perilous as his walk home from the grocery store: the streets are now dark and muddled, exposed piping belches steam, dogs yelp in the distance, vines and semi-trees are growing up the exterior of the X household.
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Before we get to the meat of the dinner scene (no pun intended), let’s circle back around to the notion of dreams. As I mentioned before, Lynch takes a peculiar approach to the canvas of cinema. The observation is often made that film is essentially a mass hallucination or dream, yet, many mainstream filmmakers want to avoid the reality of how film is consumed as much as possible. The goal of set and sound design, acting, editing, and visual effects in many ‘standard’ films is to convince viewers that they are experiencing a version of reality, as opposed to watching a series of moving pictures projected on a screen. We will come to some examples later in Lynch’s canon where he plays with the idea of verisimilitude and what it means to trick an audience into believing in the unreal, but you have to remember that Lynch is always aware of the façade and is often either counting on you to forget or remember it. It is seductive to imagine Eraserhead as operating on two separate layers of reality; Henry’s dreamscapes and the dreamscapes presented as Henry’s reality (ostensibly). However, do not feel restrained by this delineation at all. This is a free-for-all, and you are always watching a dream.
The whole dinner scene (including the lengthy preamble) is wonderful and confounding. This could be its’ own essay, where we dissect (pun intended?) the dense relationships and symbolism on display. However, since this write-up isn’t meant to be a play-by-play, I’ll stick to my two favorite elements: man-made chickens, and Henry and Mary’s sex life.
The chickens are a fascinating piece of symbolism, in part because they may be the only time a character seems to note, out loud, the odd state of their world (with the possible exception of Bill on the subject of plumbing – people think pipes grow in their houses). The chickens are very explicitly stated to be the result of human genetic muddling. Bill believes them to be just like regular chickens, but once one starts writhing and bleeding on the plate, we are forced to either wonder about what chickens are like in this universe, or consider that perhaps we are not dealing with people who are fully there. There are so many things you can take from the chicken-carving scene and analyze, but I’m going to stick with the physical act. Carving a bird at a family gathering is a classic signifier of masculinity and adulthood in Western culture, hell, James Joyce wrote about it in The Dead. However, in Eraserhead, this mode of human existence, like music and agriculture, is also perverted and horrifying. It is drained of all it’s commonness and played fully for horror.
Is becoming an adult an exercise in desensitization? Is becoming a man, specifically? This dinner scene raises that question. We’ll get back to it. After the aborted dinner, the real point of this whole play comes out – “Did you and Mary have sexual intercourse?”
This entire evening, Henry has had to try on the clothes of adulthood. He’s been asked about his vocation (he’s on vacation, a very adolescent dodge that Mary’s mother does not waste time accommodating), he’s been asked to carve the chicken, and after dinner he is asked directly if he has been having sex with Mary. Henry cannot answer this forward question, just as he can’t handle the smoky siren next door. He might be having sex, but he is not even close to being in a place where he can understand it, or speak about it. In fact, as we have seen, his nights are haunted by immensely sexual imagery. Henry’s attempts at adulthood have been markedly unsuccessful so far, but he doesn’t have much time to get with the program – there’s a baby, and even in Eraserhead babies need fathers.
At this moment, I’m going to follow the somewhat obtuse structure of Eraserhead, and let myself off the hook for annotating every scene, and get into some broader discussions of the themes I’ve detected in the film.
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Fatherhood
Henry and Mary’s new infant is not human, even granting that sometimes babies are hardly human. It is small and reptillian. It rejects food, and very quickly contracts sores reminiscent of the barnacles on the face of the man in the planet from the beginning of the film. In a sense, this is the most hyper-charged way of talking about an issue that is common but not very popular: what if you have a responsibility to a baby that you did not want and cannot bond with?
Henry and Mary are neglectful parents to their quasi-baby. Mary ghosts Henry within days. Henry is not perturbed by the incessant crying of the creature, but it drives Mary crazy. This is a playful use and inversion of the instant perfect mom. Mary’s motherly instincts have not kicked in, she isn’t upset that the creature is crying because crying indicates some distress, she’s upset because it is annoying and robs her of her sleep. She does seem to try her best for a short time, but she’s paired with a man-child (a scene I’d like to draw attention to is when he arrives home on what seems to be the first day and lays lengthwise across the bed. It’s classically adolescent.) But within a night, she is gone, not to be seen in the *real* world again.
Henry also doesn’t find much in fatherhood to latch onto. When the baby becomes sick, he gets a radiator for it, but his concern is mostly centered on the fact that it would look bad if the infant died or got sick under his care, especially after an argument with his wife. Henry cannot accept his responsibility, in part because he cannot actually imagine this creature as having any meaningful relation to him, or even to the concept of a real child. The woman in the radiator suggestively points to filicide as a real option for Henry as she stomps on sperm worms. He further abdicates responsibility in the related dream where he pulls worms out of his wife, seemingly shifting the blame away from Henry’s troublesome sperm.
The real moment of Henry’s undoing comes with his affair with the woman next door. In an unbelievably intense scene, Henry is immediately seduced and (in a sense) liberated. Finally, we see Henry as a sexual entity, as he tries (in an outrageously symbolic manner) to keep his monstrous baby silent (though, in a telling moment that points to this being a dream of another sort, his neighbor apparently cannot retain focus on the infant for too long in the heat of Henry’s newfound prowess).
Henry’s lengthy post-coital dreams take him on a whirlwind psychic tour. He encounters the lady in the radiator again, is decapitated, his head is replaced with a leering sperm worm, and so on. There’s a lot to read into all of this. Henry’s head’s new use as an apparatus of his industrial world, the old man lying in the dusty street feebly watching a child collecting his head. All of it is dense and mystical and deserves another adjoining essay, which I haven’t written. Were these dreams about heaven, hell, suicide, guilt? I don’t have the answers, and again, I find the questions themselves more interesting.\
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Is Adulthood Just Desensitization?
          I briefly mentioned the sound design in Henry’s apartment, and I feel guilty that I don’t have the expertise on audio production to give this element of the film the gravity it deserves. Sound is so important to Eraserhead. The mixture of foley work and the otherworldly (though not entirely unfamiliar) industrial droning is iconic. Desensitization or failure to desensitize to sound is an important element of Eraserhead.. Henry has to put on a faded record to try and escape the constant drone of his apartment. Mary X cannot deal with the sonic stress of her crying creature/baby. Henry has to gag the creature to not alert his neighbor to its’ presence. The proliferation of unpleasant sound in this world is fundemental to its’ construction, and it seems like a big part of existing in the world of Eraserhead is simply dealing with intrusive sound.
          Another aspect of desensitization in this film is Henry’s apparent sexual awakening. I’ve struggled a little in my interpretation of what the film is trying to say about sexual maturity. Henry, despite the construction of the story and the fact that he got a woman pregnant, has an extremely virginal outlook at the start of the film. Remember back to how he describes his outings with Mary X “why don’t you come around anymore?” and his dodginess when faced with Mary’s mother and her frank questioning. Henry seems marginally more comfortable in making sexual advances by the end of the film, but it also seems to be a wellspring of guilt and fear for him. His desires, rather than being healthily realized either by Mary X or his neighbor, instead seem to be made manifest as a terrifying, spermic creature.
New watchers of David Lynch should get ready for lots of confusing depictions of sex and gender in general. Lynch can don the clothes of a turn of the century white American man or a bohemian, depending on what sort of imagery he chooses to create. I think it’s more helpful to simply ask the question - what is Eraserhead saying about Henry’s growing knowledge and desire for sex?
A third type of desensitization present in Eraserhead is related to the lived-in environment. I touched on before how unflattering and unkempt Henry’s apartment is, but we should also retain sight of the fact that, well, David Lynch is working with late mid-century Philadelphia as his canvas. He seems to delight in the factory town in a way that I cannot fully understand, but if you read interviews with him about Eraserhead, he states that he loves the universe they created for the film and would live in it if he could. He’s an industrialist. But it’s also clear that these characters are not made whole by their environment. No one seems worried that all their plants die, and that all their music is atonal and garish This desensitization to an abjectly gross living situation isn’t an active process in the film- Henry never seems to be that upset by the shabbiness of his apartment, the concrete caverns of his apartment building, or the dead factories of his city. But we, as viewers, not accustomed to it, do have to take note of the circumstances, and eventually we come to internalize them as well. People are moulded by their environment, and Eraserhead wants to see what shapes they can take. 
Adolescence
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          To wrap up my analysis, I want to think a little bit about the ending of the film. I come to it with a simple question: what direction is Henry going?
          I’ve made previous mention to many instances of Henry’s evident childishness and naivete, but I perhaps haven’t been explicit enough.
          I consider Henry’s sexual encounter with his neighbor to be almost purely adolescent fantasy (which isn’t to make a statement on it’s level of truth in the layered structure of this film, it seems to reside on the same layer as any other concrete event in the film, which is to say, it’s one layer down from planet man, and half a layer down from Henry’s head being used to make erasers, but also my layered structure is also completely just my own invented heuristic). My statements on the levels of narrative in this film are almost certainly undercooked, but I don’t necessarily think that we are meant to ever get any further than we want to on the question of what is real).
           Adolescent impressions of sexuality are often eclipsed by real experiences later on, but in this scene the moments feel very raw and expectant. They are the impressions sustained by a preceding lifetime of unexperience. Every word in this scene hangs heavy. It’s incredible straight male wish fulfillment, and an intensely frank depiction of what children imagine sex to be: enticing and cosmically terrifying. What are we to see in this encounter? It seems like it is a source, or reincarnation, of guilt that Henry has created in the past and cannot escape, an interpretation that is bolstered by the violent imagery that follows as a consequence, and the fact that the two characters literally sink into a pool of goo. 
Also, as a forward-looking note, this is not the last time Lynch creates impossible sexual encounters that feel positively inescapable. It’s one of the things that really draws me to his work.
          But does all this - change Henry? Does it change us? What, by observing his dreams, are we meant to understand about him? I have impressions, but they are not concrete enough to try and write out. I consider the last twenty-five-ish minutes of Eraserhead to be a true litmus test. How they make you feel, what worlds they conjure and what possibilities are included and excluded in them is entirely personal. Frankly, writing about Eraserhead is somewhat quixotic because the film succeeds in a realm beyond words. There’s a reason telling someone else about your dream is so boring, after all.
So there we go! That’s the first post in my series. I cannot believe I’m going to write one of these every week for the next few months, but it’s immensely exciting and a new type of challenge. If you don’t like my take, or if you have your own, comment it. If you like this project and are excited for more, I’d really appreciate you subscribing or sharing this post!
Next week: The Elephant Man! 
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aion-rsa · 4 years
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William Shatner Explains The UnXplained
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The UnXplained will premiere on History on July 11, confounding viewers with impossible tales improbably told. But the most inexplicable thing about the paranormal-and-beyond series is its host. William Shatner is not just an actor or a star, he is almost public domain. His breakthrough character, Captain James T. Kirk, was recognized and claimed by popular culture, the counterculture, and the subculture of Star Trek aficionados. 
Shatner started his career as a workaholic actor who never said no. He took big and small parts on great TV shows and movies, and awful ones. He’d go on to continue his work in popular TV series with appearances in indie and B-movie films which have become cult classics. Who can forget his creepy crawl up the basement stairs in Kingdom of the Spiders or his pentagram brand and dis-gouged eyes in Devil’s Rain? In their own way, they are as influential as Star Trek on a generation of low budget filmmakers. 
As a recording artist, he defied odds. Even Spock, with his ultrasensitive Vulcan ears, would be hard pressed to find a logical correlation between Shatner’s first album, The Transformed Man, and his persistent appearances in pop charts. There is no explanation.
History’s The UnXplained explores mysteries with eerily familiar coincidences. An escape from Havana, Cuba, carried out by a man hiding in the frozen wheel retraction compartment on an intercontinental flight, feels like classic Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” A survivor of a scuttled World War II era submarine survived an equal measure of chance as the crew members of Star Trek‘s “Balance of Terror,” itself based on the WWII naval suspense film The Enemy Below. 
Shatner has spent much of his career in the outer limits of entertainment but maintains, in interviews, he’s never actually experienced a paranormal incident. But this is the man who found the strength to walk away from the cursed fortune teller machine on The Twilight Zone. When he performed on Broadway, he dared do it in a show called Shatner’s World: We Just Live in It, and he did it as a solo act.
William Shatner took the com in an interview with Den of Geek. His ever-inquisitive mind offered more questions for each answer on things which remain unexplained.
Den of Geek: I really enjoyed the three episodes of The UnXplained I got for the season. I didn’t get “The Truth About UFOs” yet. Do they at all discuss the 1967 incident where the Enterprise was picked up on radar?
William Shatner: There is a phenomenon that I read about and suggested it since I didn’t know about it until I stumbled across it. I suggested it to the producers of the show, Kevin Burns, of The UnXplained, but I also put together an autobiographical album. During this coronavirus time, I worked with a composer in upstate New York, with a lyricist in New York City. I recorded a good number of the songs on my iPhone, here. It’s autobiographical. There is a phenomena that I suggested to both those people. To the lyricist, we discussed what the song would be, and to the producer of The UnXplained, what the magic of this phenomenon is. It’s called Fata Morgana. There’s a song we wrote called “Fata Morgana” and there is some activity on whether it’ll make an episode of The UnXplained.
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Kiss Guitarist Ace Frehley Claims UFO and Ghost Encounters
By Aaron Sagers
Fata Morgana is the phenomenon of a layer of hot air inversion over cold air. In Los Angeles here, we get heat inversion quite often. That is where hot air traps the cold air underneath it. As a result, like it does in the ocean where different currents of different temperatures overlay each other, that sound and, in this case, sight, are reflected off these currents so that that layer of hot air acts like a mirror. Things that are going on on Earth a thousand miles away might be reflected, like a mirror, to someplace near you. You think you’re seeing something but it’s actually happening a thousand miles away or a hundred or next door. It is a phenomenon that has not been recognized until recently. It’s the explanation of mirage in the desert.
So, when you and I talk about UFOs and we see cameras taking pictures of entities that are going at speeds unknown by man, what in heaven’s name is that? Fata Morgana is a possible explanation. The song is about trying to explain things that we see that have no explanation: Ghosts, objects, things that are mysterious to us that might have a scientific explanation.
When will this song come out?
Well, it’s an album that we’ve finished. I’ve got two albums. I’ve got a blues album which will be released by the end of the summer and then we’ll bring the other album out after that. We think it’s going to be accompanied by a book. So, it’ll be a book and an album together. It’s an autobiographical album. I don’t think it’s ever been done before. These are stories that happened in my life that the lyricist and I have talked about and made.
For example, I was in England approaching the Apollo Theater. I was there in London. I had a sold out audience on a Monday night at the Apollo Theater, 3,500 people. That afternoon, I’m in the hotel room resting, waiting to go on. In the hotel room, on television comes Boris Johnson who says, “What we had thought was herd immunity, we’re rescinding that and now no more than 10 or 15 people,” I forgot what he said, “can meet at one time.” That’s Monday afternoon and I have this theater filled with people in four or five hours.
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Can Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Avoid Rebooting Captain Kirk?
By Ryan Britt
Several hours later, I get in the car that takes me to the theater and I don’t know whether there’ll be anybody there or whether there’ll be 3,500 people there. I get in front of the curtain and I’m hearing a voice. When I stepped out, almost everybody who’d decided to come was there. A large number of people risked their lives to come and see me. We wrote a song called “Monday Night in London.”
I can’t wait to hear it. You’re Shakespearean trained. Do you think that William Shakespeare was as influential on how we see things like the paranormal and witchcraft as mystical writers?
What a fascinating thought. You just asked me something unique. What a great question. “Is this a dagger I see before me?” The concept of ghosts and visions and tears running down a painting and tears running down a statue, what is that phenomenon? It brings up the nature of reality. What is reality? Where are you right now?
I’m in front of a computer.
You’re in front of the computer in an area in your house?
Yes.
Do you know how a computer works? I mean, really works. I don’t mean you speak into it and you see an image and you can access knowledge. Do you know the mechanics of a computer? Could you make a computer?
No, I could not.
Nor could I. Nor could anybody but 10 people. It’s magical. You know this one, right? You slice a crystal and that crystal that vibrates here and another piece of the same crystal is vibrating 1,000 miles away at the same intensity. It’s the beginning of radio. Are you aware of that? Okay. Nobody’s ever explained how, faster than the speed of light, two crystals vibrate all that distance apart, but that’s radio. What is the magic? What is the fucking magic that a computer is issuing? And the crystal. Right in front of us, every day, right now, an unexplained miracle is happening right now that we have no explanation for. Why is the universe expanding and not contracting? We don’t even know what gravity is. There’s a law of gravity. It’s a basic law of nature, gravity. It doesn’t work in the universe. Why?
These are fundamental mysteries. It’s as big a mystery, really, as is there a God and is there life after death. It’s inexplicable, so in some minor way we examine phenomena that have no explanation. How did this guy in a coma, as he comes out of the coma, become a piano player? What the hell is that? The mystery of the human brain, it’s as big a mystery as a vibrating crystal. It may very well be a vibrating crystal in that we’re electrically charged, anyway.
These profound things are exemplified by what is reality. What is your reality and my reality, they’re different. They may not be greatly different. We see the same object. But you’re seeing it differently than I am, colored by your filters. Literally colored by your eyes and figuratively colored by your experience. All our realities are different. Then, the question is how different can the extreme differences be in reality? Does that conjure up ghosts? Or, is that a Fata Morgana?
Has anyone ever asked you to hit them in the head so they could play the piano?
No. I’ve hit people on the head. They didn’t ask me to play the piano. They hit me back. Very strange behavior. 
Along those lines, I’ve asked everybody who can do it to hypnotize me and I’ve never been hypnotized. I’ve tried to have people hypnotize me again and again and I’ve never had it happen. You see these guys go snap their finger and five people go to sleep onstage? How is that possible? And yet, I have no explanation for that. That’s unexplained, as far as I’m concerned. 
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Culture
Rhys Darby Examines Aliens Like Us In New Podcast
By Aaron Sagers
Are all those five people playing a role? And why would they do that? Why wouldn’t one of them poke their head up and say, “See, I was only kidding! He paid us 50 bucks to act like this.” What a sensation that would be. And if the hypnotist is paying them off, he’s got to live in fear that somebody’s going to do that. So, he wouldn’t risk it. I want to fall asleep like those guys and go through the manifestations of the sensation of burning and acting in a peculiar fashion because he or she suggests it. That’s never happened.
I agree with you and I envy people that are able to let it all go like that.
That’s the same with me. I envy, and yet part of me says, “It’s unreal. Why can’t they do it to me? Those people are faking,” the way you did and the way I would.
I loved the Houdini episode.
Houdini is incredible! I saw something on television last night. A magician doing something and there’s no explanation. It isn’t occupying your attention one way, disguising your eye and varying your attention so you don’t see the magic trick. This had nothing to do with that and there’s no explanation of how it happened. I’m sure there is, but I don’t know what it is.
What does the child in you want to believe is true? That he was an expert in his craft, he was really magic, or that he had a transporter?
Everything that you can imagine is real. You can make it real. You mentioned transporter. Can you take an entity and beam it somewhere? Well, yes, you can. They’ve done it already. On two electrical posts, they’ve beamed a molecule. But of course, we’re composed of billions upon billions of molecules. And what is it you’re transporting? Are you physically transporting the molecule? Or, do you bring its qualities, as well? I don’t know. Everything that you can imagine, that we, little insecure bereft human beings, everything we can imagine we can bring into being if we just apply ourselves long enough.
You’re a performer. Houdini was a performer. Could you give that kind of a performance if you studied and mastered those tricks?
I would love to be able to do magic tricks, plural, and especially, I don’t even want to call it a trick, an event in which the explanation is paranormal.
After hosting the episode on bizarre rituals, how much research do you think went into The Devil’s Rain?
A lot. In my mind, it’s the mind/body connection. We know that it exists. We don’t quite know why it exists. I’ve been reading about the vagus nerve. Do you know about the vagus nerve? Behind your throat. It’s a means of communication. The means of communication between your brain and your body is many-fold.
We know about the central nervous system. What has not been talked about a lot is the vagus nerve behind your throat and these little nerves that extend all through your body, connecting every organ. It’s a whole other system that seems to work on vibration. With vibration, you activate this part of your body. You never hear about it. I’ve just been reading about it recently. What’s the explanation behind that? I don’t know.
Do you ever use sense memory?
Absolutely. Sense memory exists because your whole body has memory. We know each cell has the intelligence of the other cells so that the cells of your brain, I believe, have the same information as the cells in your left toe. All your cells have the same intelligence. And so, you have emotional memory, you have physical memory, because the body remembers more, better, than the brain. We know that the sense of smell evokes memory better than any other cells. So, why not sense of touch and sense of sight? “I’ve seen this before. I’ve been here,” and you have, somewhere, some time. Something like it. Sense memory is absolute.
But sometimes we get a sense memory and déjà vu, which you think, “Wait a minute. Was this in another life?” because something, the color of the sky, the sound of something, or you’re next to somebody, some cue has given your body a reason to think this has happened before. It did, but you’re just not aware of it.
Have you ever gotten a sense memory from an earlier performance? And is a performance just as real as something that you’ve done in action as a person?
There are times in a performance in front of an audience, in front of an audience is the key, when I have been absolutely at one with the audience. Some mysterious connection happens between me and an audience. In a one man show that I was doing, prior to the coronavirus, I would sometimes experiment with the audience and work up a moment in which I send my entertainment spirit, my being, out into the audience and want theirs back. The audience and I work at it to when the moment of this connection is palpable.
The audience feels it. I asked them, “Do you feel it? Do you know what I mean?” In that moment, that spiritual thing happens. That can happen in a performance where the lines, the words, the intention, the emotional meaning, the joke, we’re absolutely one. That’s the best. And then I’ve done that enough to recognize it in myself. Something I’ve done, I don’t know what it is, is able to make a connection with the audience. It’s magical. For example, you’re listening intently. Over these phone wires, I can hear you intrigued as hell. I’ve captured you as my audience.
Oh, yes, absolutely. Leonard Nimoy and Zach Quinto both hosted In Search Of, but they’re out of their Vulcan minds. What do you bring to a show like this that a science officer doesn’t?
What I bring to it, and what I’ve attempted to do with my wraparounds, is two things. One is my total involvement in it, so that I’m looking askance and yet I’m believing. I’m trying to tread, at different times, the audiences’ feelings. Like, “Oh, shit. This can’t be true. Oh, my God. Maybe it is true, or, “You’ve got to listen to this, because I’ve had…” I’m sort of in between that. I’m not just saying, “And a strange thing happened. People believe. It’s not academic.” I’m trying to actually involve you in it.
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Movies
The Wrath of Khan Producer Hints at New Potential Star Trek Movie
By Don Kaye
The second thing is that I did the first time I got onstage with this background. This background is giant screens. They’re 20 feet high and 10 feet wide. There are three of them. They’re giant screens playing film. As a performer, I’m sitting in front. As a performer, when I first started, I looked behind me and I saw something happening in the screen. That giant screen is what is used in movies for trick things so that the actors in front of the screen, they’ve already filmed what’s happening on the screen and then the actor reacts to what’s happening on the screen. I started reacting to what was happening on the screen, like, “Oh, shit. I hope it’s not coming towards me,” sort of thing and got a laugh from the crew. I realized I was on to something.
So now I’m taking into account, and we’re beginning to film for it, what’s happening behind me. So, if there’s a curse and there’s a dance and I’m looking back a little apprehensively, I’m in the scene and I’m telling you, “My God, there’s a curse.” So, I’m totally involved and I’m hoping that I’m involving you. It seems to be successful.
Everyone knows about the historic interracial TV kiss on Star Trek‘s “Plato’s Stepchildren”, but I recently re-watched the 1962 Roger Corman movie The Intruder. At the time you were doing it, and I know that you said you would have done it for free, did you know you were taking that kind of stand?
Oh, yeah. We went down South. We were in Cairo, Illinois. They pronounce it Care-oh. At the time, it was the toughest city, the most dangerous city, in the United States at that time. It’s right on the Mississippi River. It was at the time of integration. A large segment of the population didn’t want the white kids to go to school with the Black kids. I don’t have to tell you there was murder and mayhem and we were in the midst of it. 
It was well known that we were there to make a movie about integration. I had escape paths. I knew that if something happened at the motel we were all staying at, I was out this window in the bathroom and into the cornfields that surrounded us. We had police protection all the time. We knew what we were doing.
By the way, that is one of the scariest performances I’ve ever seen. You’re so smiley in that movie.
It was an interesting role to do.
The show covers the unexplained and one of the most inexplicable things in recent years is conspiracy theories. Do you think it’s possible we can really be ruled by some sort of congregation of extraterrestrial reptilian overlords or Gorns?
Well, there are two elements to that question. One is conspiracy and the other is aliens of some kind guiding in our destiny. The conspiracies: We seem to need to be able to relate things that are a little weird to humans, a little different than are naturally in our ken, like people wanting freedom who say they haven’t got freedom, and the people who do have the freedom can’t imagine they don’t have the freedom, and therefore disbelieve it.
We in the States here, we white people, can’t really imagine. We can pretend we imagine “Black lives matter,” but we can’t put ourselves… And I’m Jewish. I know what anti-Semitism is. I lived with anti-Semitism as part of my upbringing. So, I know what it is to see a sign saying, “No Jews allowed,” which is the equivalent of no Blacks allowed, and feel the shame of: “There’s something wrong with me because I’m not allowed there.” 
That’s diminished a lot, anti-Semitism in Canada and in the States. You don’t see signs like that anymore, although in the boardroom it may be the same. But African Americans live with that 24 hours a day. We can’t imagine what it’s like. So, we spin conspiracy theories to explain it because otherwise, there’s no explanation.
Read more
TV
Star Trek Season 3: What Went Wrong?
By Don Kaye
People think that the coronavirus pandemic, which has happened all through mankind, now you’re getting people who say, “Oh, it’s part of a plot.” You say, “A plot by whom?” “Oh, the overlords. The people who are guiding all our destiny. They’re doing it either part of an untold plot or it’s part of a plot to disparage Trump.” I mean, the bizarreness of the conspiracy theories is only equaled by the bizarreness of people willing to believe it.
And yet, it’s an explanation for something in their lives that is less than wonderful. Something in their lives needs an explanation. They need an explanation why things aren’t going better in their life. They need an explanation why they’re homeless. They need an explanation why they don’t have the riches they see on the ads on television. 
People are saying, “Oh, yeah, I need a shade on my house so I’ve got this shade,” or, “You need this furniture. You need this bed in your house,” and these 40 million people barely have a bed or a room to put the bed in. They’re wondering why the rest of the people, the 300 million, have a reason to buy that bed, put it in that room, and we 40 million, we don’t have it. There must be an explanation and the explanation’s got to be, “It’s not my fault.”
The UnXplained season 3, episode 1, “The Greatest Escapes,” premieres July 11 at 9 p.m. on History.
The post William Shatner Explains The UnXplained appeared first on Den of Geek.
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thissurroundingall · 7 years
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Athar Jaber
A conversation with a sculptor about his work and curiosity for violence.
Nederlandstalige versie
Date of interview: March 5, 2017
Estimated reading time: 17 minutes
Athar Jaber (° 1982), the Iraqi sculptor, was born in Rome in the artistic nest of two painters from the Iraqi diaspora. At age six, he and his mother settled in Florence, where he bloomed as a teenager, driven by the splendor of the city and its classical treasures. After drawing the many hundreds of old marble sculptures Florence has to offer, it is not surprising his work manifests in white Carrara marble. His work Opus 4, which consists of four enormous marble statues, with which he graduated from the Academy of Antwerp heralds a harmonious picture of a body trapped in stone. With surgical precision the young sculptor composed a surreal birth in this work. Where oddly placed limbs seem to predict the later recurring theme of entropy. "I can not just make beautiful sculptures," Athar warns.
The weather was gloomy the day we planned our visit. It’s a drizzly Sunday early March, but the light is graceful and almost pretty in its glow. Photographer (Tom Peeters) and I met Athar in his home in the north of Antwerp. There we drank coffee and talked about the artist's book and art collection. Facing the window, in the middle of the living area is an impressive matt-brown grand piano. The coffee is somewhat too intense for our delicate Sunday stomachs and so we, resounding with caffeine, find ourselves in our car following Athar as he drives towards his studio in the west of Antwerp. Athar leads us, as he hosted us, and indeed as he seems to do everything: distinguished, courteous, controlled.
We talk with the artist about the alienation he felt as a young child, the homeland of his parents, his heroes, violence, artificial intelligence, and his quest for freedom.
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Both your uncle, your mother and your father are known painters. Growing up in Florence in the midst of such an artistic family seems romantic. Was that so?
No (laughs). Although not terrible, it was quite difficult to be a second generation child. Not like the terrible images of refugees that confront us now, but there was a certain alienation that has shaped me. Italian was my first language and I was born in Italy, but you have a strange name and ‘otherness’ that makes you a target for negative attention. As a teenager, it was romantic. From my early teens onwards I visited daily the numerous museums and simply hung around the city to draw marble statues. I grew up with painters and artists around me, so drawing was easy.
After your parents left Iraq for studies, three successive waves of war flooded the country of your origin and your parents could never return to it as a result. How was that growing up?
When they left, they said goodbye to their family and environment for a short period. Then the war broke out. The Iraqi diaspora, a whole generation of artists, musicians, directors, writers who left to study in the 70s, have all been forced to leave their homeland behind. Those who were homesick enough to return haven’t survived. Some have been tortured and were able to flee. Some of them got a better situation, some worse.
Although not terrible, it was quite difficult to be a second generation child. Not like the terrible images of refugees that confront us now, but there was a certain alienation that has shaped me.
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When they (my parents) left, they said goodbye to their family and environment for a short period. Then the war broke out.
Did you grow up with that sadness?
Yes. Even if you listen to older Iraqi music, you feel much sadness and melancholy. It is inherent to the culture. If you wake up in Italy as a child, with full knowledge of the facts and consequences of a war in the country where the rest of your family still lives, you simply have a different view of the world than your peers.
Your work has a bright, beautiful and light side. In your material, the anatomical beauty, the refinement of the result, I see examples of that lightness. But as a spectator you also catch a darker side. Is that derived from your past?
Content wise, my work settles closer to the dark side of life. The bodies and heads are unclear, ambiguous, distorted and broken. An identity crisis is at play. Who you are and where you belong are problems that concern me.
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The bodies and heads are unclear, ambiguous, distorted and broken. An identity crisis is at play. 
You mentioned earlier in interviews that your national identity no longer affects your current identity, but you are mostly raised by an Iraqi woman who could never return to her homeland. I'm genuinely wondering how and where that distance starts and ends truthfully.
I obviously hate to see what is happening in Iraq. But by now, no more than when I see destruction, war or injustice elsewhere in the world. Syria, Tibet, South America, Africa. After a while you see universal connections and boundaries start blurring. The national parochialism doesn’t fit this time anymore. The world exhibitions, biennales and sports competitions, arisen to affirm boundaries in a healthy way, are also changed and the world has opened up. There are Algerians who represent Germany at biennials, people of African descent to play in European football teams. I really try to think beyond borders and time. In my work you will therefor find few references to time. No clothes, no objects, only the naked body.
The national parochialism doesn’t fit this time anymore.
You have previously studied piano. As a twenty year old you moved to Antwerp to study sculpture and have moved away from music. Why?
With pain in my heart I chose to become an artist. I felt I did not have enough talent to be the pianist I wanted to be. Because of my background I had more talent for visual arts than for music. It has taken me years to make that decision.
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With pain in my heart I chose to become an artist. I felt I did not have enough talent to be the pianist I wanted to be. 
You refer to music in your titles. Your first four sculpting began with the title Opus 4, after which each respective image was given a number from 1 to 4. Does music remains to be a great inspirator for you?
I practically named those works, but with a wink to my previous study. People need names, but I do not want to force the spectators to see all things like me. I could have given numbers or codes as scientists do with stars.
But indeed, music may still be one of my biggest influences to date. When listening to certain music, feelings just overwhelm you. Listening to John Coltrane's later recordings gives you absolute freedom for instance! With my work, I of course want to appeal to those feelings. Important feelings, such as prostration, anger and freedom.
Now that you mention a certain 'search for freedom', your first sculptings come to mind. The four works of  Opus 4, to me, seem ‘caught’.
Every material has its spatial limitations. I chose to work exclusively with marble. In a later stage of my production, as in my main series (Opus 5), I learned to take more of an acquired freedom. This translates into technique as well as concept: drill holes, chisel tracks and broken fragments remained. Now I dare to let things go: put a sculpture in acid or shoot at it with bullets. I no longer  chain myself to traditional sculpture techniques.
When I chose to study art, I instinctively chose this discipline. I didn’t doubt it for a second.
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Why marble then?
I think it's rooted in my teenage Italian walks. Then and there a bond with sculpting emerged. You have a more direct and intimate contact with a sculpture than with, for example a painting. When I chose to study art, I instinctively chose this discipline. I didn’t doubt it for a second. Much later, I could explain this rationally: a sculpture takes up our dimensional space and threatens our freedom. It takes away space.
I produce my works directly in marble, they are improvisations. Most sculptors first build up something in clay or plaster and then put that image in marble. I am inspired by what is happening around us. A book, the light, the stone, my state of mind at the moment. It also becomes more personal this way.
I am inspired by what is happening around us. A book, the light, the stone, my state of mind at the moment.
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Why do you still work according to the craft’s old techniques in a time of 3D printers and robots?
Exactly because of what I just stated! Many artists work with marble because it fits a certain classical tradition and it is prestigious. Therefore, if you have the economic ability to make it happen, it can, indeed, be done by machines as well. But these artists are no sculptors. What I do is different. I myself work with the material and this action, which today is more and more rare, adds something to the work. It gives it another, almost metaphysical, dimension.
The reproducibility of the sculpture in these times has created enormous freedom for sculptors. Thanks to the technological developments, I can now express my emotion and thoughts in a more abstract way. I can be guided by my state of mind. How I feel at one point affects how I work on another. It is comparable to the moment in history that photography took over the task of painting. This resulted in the creation of abstract art, Dadaism, Expressionism and Surrealism, just to name a few.
The reproducibility of the sculpture in these times has created enormous freedom for sculptors. 
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So you believe in the aura of an artwork. What does that look like to you?
What impact does the way you make something have for the perception of an image? Creating a sculpture with your bare hands, hammer and chisel, calls for a different interpretation than when it was shot at with firearms and bullets. I sometimes feel a like a torturer. Hammering, chiselling, knocking and removing material with brutal violence while making something beautiful: it is a contradiction. Withall I have experimented with other materials recently, trying to introduce the idea of patinating again. I only use "pigments" that carry a lot of meaning: wine, blood, crude oil, gold. But this is a new project and I don’t want to tell too much about it yet.
Withall I have experimented with other materials recently, trying to introduce the idea of patinating again.
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Hammering, chiselling, knocking and removing material with brutal violence while making something beautiful: it is a contradiction.
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What is it about art that attracts you as an observer?
I am often more moved by music. As an observer I approach art more intuitively and it is difficult to accurately identify what plays then. Last week I visited an exhibition of Cy Twombly. From books I never had a good idea of his work. Actually if you want to talk about the aura of an artwork, he might be a good artist to discuss. His work really touched me. It must have been years since I was so impressed. In front of certain pieces, I was literally ‘resonating’. Probably because of what interests me at the moment. It was about violence. Mainly the series about Achilles and Patroclus and those about Commodus really moved me.
Last week I visited an exhibition of Cy Twombly. (...) It must have been years since I was so impressed. 
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You told me that you want to get rid of the 'marble block’ in a search for freedom. That, and some other things you told me, reminds me of a book by Hermann Hesse, about the encounter between the intellectual Narziss and the artistic Goldmund, also a sculptor. How do you see yourself in that regard?
I believe I've read that book at the right age. Of course, we always have both characters in us, but maybe sometimes one takes over. On the one hand, I create something that comes from inside, but there is also another side. I'm here for hours, sometimes working for months on one slab of stone. There are days that I don’t say a word. Certainly in my performative works, where the aim is to reach a kind of meditative, transcendental state, I am much more the monk than the emotional artist.
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Certainly in my performative works, where the aim is to reach a kind of meditative, transcendental state, I am much more the monk than the emotional artist.
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Do you have a fixed rhythm?
I do not like busy places and in my limited free time I like to be at home. Reading, drawing, playing or listening to music. I would rather be in my studio day and night actually, but sometimes I have to rest. It's physically heavy work. In addition, I have to divide my time between my other activities. I teach at the Academy of Antwerp, recently started a doctorate in the arts, am a member of the Young Academy in Brussels, and I often have to travel abroad for my exhibitions and projects. Those things must happen and it keeps you going steady as an artist, but first of all I'm sculptor. I prefer being in my studio.
Being an artist is not a pastime, it is a luxurious but serious activity that carries responsibilities. It has to be taken seriously.
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What are you trying to teach your students?
At the academy I teach ‘portraits' and ‘stone sculpting'. Especially that last course comes down to hard work. I can teach them relatively little. In the end students have to do it themselves. I can only show them and give small tips. As a teacher I set the bar high. Whatever you do, you have to work hard. Being an artist is not a pastime, it is a luxurious but serious activity that carries responsibilities. It has to be taken seriously. I do not want to discriminate between expressions, anything is possible. It is important that young artists take their freedoms and develop their own language and not be influenced by the teachers too much. Many times I speak with curators and directors of museums and they often contradict each other. Ultimately, you have to decide what you want to do and go for it.
What will your doctorate be about?
It’s a "Doctorate in the Arts" that will develop over the next four years. It is practice-oriented so my artistic research will be emphasised and the PhD will also be mainly conducted in that language. It gives me the chance to be in the studio.
As a sculptor you show the same violence as a torturer.
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My doctorate will deal with violence and beauty and the tension between the two. Removing material as a concept is already violent. If I take something from you, it's violent. Taking stone away from a block of marble through hammering is quite a violent action. As a sculptor you show the same violence as a torturer. During the doctorate, I will develop and apply new techniques to remove material. Techniques that refer to other realities.
When I saw how Isis broke sculptures, I was appalled. In consequence, I decided to start using their methods for creating images instead of destructing them. For example, I want to drag a block of marble behind a car and see what that causes. It leaves behind traces on the marble and at the same time, I keep adhering to the classic definition of sculpture: to create by removing (material). Such and other similar actions will be developed and documented to investigate the relationship between violence, destruction and creativity.
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When I saw how Isis broke sculptures, I was appalled. In consequence, I decided to start using their methods for creating images instead of destructing them. 
A recurring idea in your work is that the world automatically tends to disorder or entropy. What are your thoughts about this today?
I can explain that best with music. An injury or deformation is similar to me to a dissonance. A dissonance occurs when two elements that don’t belong together are put side by side. A dissonance in music arises when notes do not belong together. It creates tension. You need moments of pauze to recreate harmony. Harmony is a utopian ideal. However, as music history progresses, those dissonances have become more and more important and have prevailed. Music has become more abstract, and  many loose their affinity or starting point with contemporary classical music. I consider this to be a metaphor for the concept of entropy. Like the stars in the universe always accelerating to further disassemblage. In my work that translates, for example, in strange physical combinations, like ears beside a mouth, an arm ending in a foot, strange deformities, disorder, tension, blurriness, abstraction. Marble is relatively eternal, but we know that it also will eventually be pulverised. I want to prove that nothing is wrong with that. Learn to accept our finality and appreciate it.
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So is working with an 'eternal' material an attempt to let go of your existential ‘angst’ of dying?
Disorder or the metamorphosis to another state is natural. We do not give ourselves over when we say that's okay. Death is coming anyway. That realisation confronts me during the creating process. I try to gradually accept it and do something with it. Ultimately, it is the driving force that engages us all. I work with a material that stays "forever", while I am aware that also the heritage of ancient civilisations is doomed to disappear. Isis or not. That confronts our existential life questions. History shows that murders and war are part of our nature. We shouldn’t welcome that but accept it as a hard truth and yet aim for a better harmony. Even though it is hopeless. To show this issue, I'm doing it myself, on marble, without too much impact on our world. Marble allows me to do so.
I work with a material that stays "forever", while I am aware that also the heritage of ancient civilisations is doomed to disappear. Isis or not. 
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Are you a violent person?
We are all violent. But there are ways to channel this. If I take off material with a hammer and a chisel for hours and hours, I come across a kind of trance, and I enjoy it. That raises questions. Why does a human being do things like that? Sculpting is extremely physically heavy. In winter it's freezing cold in here, my body and my hands hurt, it's dusty and dirty, yet I enjoy every moment. I'm not just doing this for the result, I also enjoy the action. My body and my brain are addicted to it. Otherwise, you can not keep doing it. I can’t just make beautiful statues. Leave that to some other artists and the machines. The question you asked about the new technologies and aura in art leads us to talk about the action and the human motive. Why do you do it?
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I can’t just make beautiful statues. Leave that to some other artists and the machines.
In your production you choose for slowness, so that you can incorporate personal emotions into the stone. That's your conceptual choice. A next step in artificial intelligence however is to create a being that will be able to imitate that more and more. Have you seen the "Westworld" series?
Yes. Have you seen the 1970's film on which the series is based? It is darker, and simpler. You know there are already robots making art in an intuitive way? But A.I. can not think independently yet. If that ever can, those will be other thoughts than ours. Now more than ever we must keep our humanity.
Interview: Merel Daemen
Revision English text: Gary Leddington
Photography: Tom Peeters
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yourmotivationguru · 7 years
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Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam’s Inspirational Speech At IIT-Hyderabad (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); I have three visions for India. In 3000 years of our history, people from all over the world have come and invaded us, captured our lands, conquered our minds. From Alexander onwards, The Greeks, the Turks, the Moguls, the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Dutch, all of them came and looted us, took over what was ours. Yet we have not done this to any other nation. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and Tried to enforce our way of life on them. Why? Because we respect the freedom of others. That is why my first vision is that of FREEDOM. I believe that India got its first vision of this in 1857, when we started the war of Independence. It is this freedom that we must protect and nurture and build on. If we are not free, no one will respect us.   My second vision for India’s DEVELOPMENT. For fifty years we have been A developing nation. It is time we see ourselves as a developed nation. We are among top 5 nations of the world in terms of GDP. We have 10 percent growth rate in most areas. Our poverty levels are falling. Our achievements are being globally recognized today. Yet we lack the self-confidence to see ourselves as a developed nation, self-reliant and self-assured. Isn’t this incorrect? I have a THIRD vision. India must stand up to the world. Because I believe that, unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. Only strength respects strength. We must be strong not only as a military power but also as an economic power. Both must go hand-in-hand. My good fortune was to have worked with three great minds. Dr. Vikram Sarabhai of the Dept. of space, Professor Satish Dhawan, who succeeded him and Dr.Brahm Prakash, father of nuclear material. I was lucky to have worked with all three of them closely and consider this the great opportunity of my life. I see four milestones in my career: Twenty years I spent in ISRO. I was given the opportunity to be the project director for India’s first satellite launch vehicle, SLV3. The one that launched Rohini. These years played a very important role in my life of Scientist. After my ISRO years, I joined DRDO and got a chance to be the part of India’s guided missile program. It was my second bliss when Agni met its mission requirements in 1994. The Dept. of Atomic Energy and DRDO had this tremendous partnership in the recent nuclear tests, on May 11 and 13. This was the third bliss. The joy of participating with my team in these nuclear tests and proving to the world that India can make it, that we are no longer a developing nation but one of them. It made me feel very proud as an Indian. The fact that we have now developed for Agni a re-entry structure, for which we have developed this new material. A Very light material called carbon-carbon. One day an orthopedic surgeon from Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences visited my laboratory. He lifted the material and found it so light that he took me to his hospital and showed me his patients. There were these little girls and boys with heavy metallic calipers weighing over three Kg. each, dragging their feet around. He said to me: Please remove the pain of my patients. In three weeks, we made these Floor reaction Orthosis 300-gram calipers and took them to the orthopedic center. The children didn’t believe their eyes. From dragging around a three kg. load on their legs, they could now move around! Their parents had tears in their eyes. That was my fourth bliss! Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam’s Inspirational Speech continued Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why? We are the first in milk production. We are number one in Remote sensing satellites. We are the second largest producer of wheat. We are the second largest producer of rice. Look at Dr. Sudarshan, he has transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining, self driving unit. There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters. I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert land into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news. In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime. Why are we so NEGATIVE? Another question: Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? We want foreign TVs, we want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported. Do we not realize that self-respect comes with self-reliance? I was in Hyderabad giving this lecture, when a 14 year old girl asked me for my autograph. I asked her what her goal in life is. She replied: I want to live in a developed India. For her, you and I will have to build this developed India. You must proclaim. India is not an under-developed nation; it is a highly developed nation. Do you have 10 minutes? Allow me to come back with a vengeance. Got 10 minutes for your country? If yes, then read; otherwise, choice is yours. YOU say that our government is inefficient. YOU say that our laws are too old. YOU say that the municipality does not pick up the garbage. YOU say that the phones don’t work, the railways are a joke, the airline is the worst in the world, mails never reach their destination. YOU say that our country has been fed to the dogs and is the absolute pits. YOU say, say and say. What do YOU do about it? Take a person on his way to Singapore. Give him a name – YOURS. Give him a face – YOURS. YOU walk out of the airport and you are at your International best. In Singapore you don’t throw cigarette butts on the roads or eat in the stores. YOU are as proud of their Underground Links as they are. You pay $5(approx. Rs.60) to drive through Orchard Road (equivalent of Mahim Causeway or Pedder Road) between 5 PM and 8 PM. YOU come back to the parking lot to punch your parking ticket if you have over stayed in a restaurant or a shopping mall irrespective of your status identity. In Singapore you don’t say anything, DO YOU? YOU wouldn’t dare to eat in public during Ramadan, in Dubai. YOU would not dare to go out without your head covered in Jeddah. YOU would not dare to buy an employee of the telephone exchange in London at 10 pounds (Rs.650) a month to, “see to it that my STD and ISD calls are billed to someone else.” Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam’s Inspirational Speech continued YOU would not dare to speed beyond 55 mph (88 km/h) in Washington and then tell the traffic cop, “Jaanta hai sala main kaun hoon (Do you know who I am?). I am so and so’s son. Take your two bucks and get lost.” YOU wouldn’t chuck an empty coconut shell anywhere other than the garbage pail on the beaches in Australia and New Zealand. Why don’t YOU spit Paan on the streets of Tokyo? Why don’t YOU use examination jockeys or buy fake certificates in Boston? We are still talking of the same YOU. YOU who can respect and conform to a foreign system in other countries but cannot in your own. You who will throw papers and cigarettes on the road the moment you touch Indian ground. If you can be an involved and appreciative citizen in an alien country, why cannot you be the same here in India? Once in an interview, the famous Ex-municipal commissioner of Bombay, Mr. Tinaikar, had a point to make. “Rich people’s dogs are walked on the streets to leave their affluent droppings all over the place,” he said.” And then the same people turn around to criticize and blame the authorities for inefficiency and dirty pavements. What do they expect the officers to do? Go down with broom every time their dog feels the pressure in his bowels? In America every dog owner has to clean up after his pet has done the job. Same in Japan. Will the Indian citizen do that here?” He’s right. We go to the polls to choose a government and after that forfeit all responsibility. We sit back wanting to be pampered and expect the government to do everything for us whilst our contribution is totally negative. We expect the government to clean up but we are not going to stop chucking garbage all over the place nor are we going to stop to pick up a stray piece of paper and throw it in the bin. We expect the railways to provide clean bathrooms but we are not going to learn the proper use of bathrooms. We want Indian Airlines and Air India to provide the best of food and toiletries but we are not going to stop pilfering at the least opportunity. This applies even to the staff who is known not to pass on the service to the public. When it comes to burning social issues like those related to women, dowry, girl child and others, we make loud drawing room protestations and continue to do the reverse at home. Our excuse? ‘It’s the whole system which has to change, how will it matter if I alone forego my sons’ rights to a dowry.’ So who’s going to change the system? What does a system consist of? Very conveniently for us it consists of our neighbors, other households, other cities, other communities and the government. But definitely not me and YOU. When it comes to us actually making a positive contribution to the system we lock ourselves along with our families into a safe cocoon and look into the distance at countries far away and wait for a Mr. Clean to come along & work miracles for us with a majestic sweep of his hand or we leave the country and run away. Like lazy cowards hounded by our fears we run to America to bask in their glory and praise their system. When New York becomes insecure we run to England. When England experiences unemployment, we take the next flight out to the Gulf. When the Gulf is war struck, we demand to be rescued and brought home by the Indian government. Everybody is out to abuse and rape the country. Nobody thinks of feeding the system. Our conscience is mortgaged to money. Thank you Abdul Kalam
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