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soundsof71 · 3 years

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Hey! Album: 'Fleetwood Mac' (1975) - Fleetwood Mac

Hey! Great to hear from you! You (and your previous blog) were my original inspiration for trying to raise my tumblr game to something intentionally curated, and more than that, personally creative. Sorry to have let you down. LOL

What a pleasure to talk about this one, though, an album I think is -- strangely enough -- one of the most underrated albums in the classic rock pantheon!

What’s that you say? An album with “Rhiannon” and “Landslide” underrated?!?! Well it’s true, seriously underrated, at least partly because those two stellar, nay, legendary songs are the first ones that most people think of. There's so much more! It's definitely my favorite Fleetwood Mac album!

My perspective is a little different than the standard rap that Fleetwood Mac didn't properly begin until those two California kids joined the band in 1975, because to me, they started taking off when their first American joined the band, Bob Welch in 1971 for Future Games, which I wrote about at some length here.

(For the record, Future Games is my second favorite Fleetwood Mac album. Anyone who hasn't checked it out really needs to.)

I’ll leave it at that for now, except to observe that to most of my music nerd friends at the time, I was a latecomer to Fleetwood Mac the band, having completely missed their earlier, bluesier lineups. Indeed, the 1971 lineup was their 8th! And they'd come to #9 in 1972, before landing on lineup #10 in 1975.

They had a bunch of hits on the five albums in this 71-74 range (”Hypnotized” is one that still slays me) that I think hold up as among their best ever. While the album before Fleetwood Mac, Heroes Are Hard to Find didn’t have a hit single, it rose to #34 on the US charts, and got plenty of attention.

My point is that Fleetwood Mac didn’t spring into existence out of nowhere in 1975. Nor was 1975 necessarily ground zero for the millions of people who bought the album Fleetwood Mac. It came out in the summer of ‘75, but took 15 months to hit #1 in the US! (It peaked at #11 in the UK.) This was a far bigger album in 1976 when all the singles came out, and the band was touring like crazy to support it.

They basically dragged the album to the top of the charts kicking and screaming by the end of THAT year with relentless touring, setting the stage for their true commercial breakthrough with Rumours in 1977, but artistically? I prefer everything about 1975′s Fleetwood Mac.

btw, the music nerds know that Fleetwood Mac was recorded at Sound City Studios, which makes all the difference in the telling of the tale. In 1974, the band had located to Los Angeles, and following the departure of Bob Welch in December, Mick Fleetwood went looking for both a recording studio and a guitarist.

While getting to know producer Keith Olsen at Sound City (a studio legendary for its drum sound, among other things), Keith played Mick some tracks from an album he’d recorded here a couple of years earlier with a local guitarist and his girlfriend singer, both of whom were also songwriters.

Mick said, I’ll book the studio to record my next album, I’ll book you to produce, and I’ll hire the guitarist....who famously informed Mick that he and his girlfriend were a package deal. All of this happened because of Sound City Studios.

(Here's Mick recording this very album in this very studio.)

Your friend and mine Dave Grohl directed a FANTASTIC documentary about Sound City Studios, a kind of a dump to be honest, but where tons of phenomenal records were made, from After The Gold Rush to Caribou, Damn The Torpedoes, Nevermind, Rage Against The Machine, and most recently, Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher. Lots and lots of stories about the making of Fleetwood Mac in this movie, and much more.

Here’s the trailer. The whole movie is available on YT, too! And Amazon Prime, and a bunch of other places. HIGHLY recommended!

youtube

So here we go taking directly about Fleetwood Mac.....

the first song from the album i heard: "Over My Head". This was the first single released in the US, remarkably, four months after the album was released! I dunno, did the label not want to sell any albums? Or did they just not get how catchy these tunes were? I have no idea.

And ironically, the band didn't like the choice of "Over My Head" at all, ranking it dead-last in their own considerations of likely singles! I think that this is evidence that they were using heavy drugs much earlier than we thought. LOL

"Over My Head" peaked at #20 in the US, their highest to date by far, although, in some defense of the band's reservations, didn't chart at all in the UK. Saying that it rose to "only" 20 in the charts doesn't begin to describe how heavily it was played, though. A LOT.

do i own the album: Did then, Spotify now. The answer for most of the albums in this round of Asks. :-)

my favorite song: "Over My Head". Look, I admit that this is insane when Fleetwood Mac also includes "Landslide" and "Rhiannon." "Landslide" in particular is maybe one of the greatest songs anyone has ever written, and every single person reading this knows somebody named Rhiannon because of that song. (I've met two.) And hey, "Say You Love Me" was a MUCH bigger hit at the time too... but I'm tellin' ya, "Over My Head" fucks.

It's the single version that fucks hardest, though, no doubt about it. I was disappointed when I finally bought the album that the version there fades in (NO! THIS IS WRONG) and has a wide mix that diffuses the impact. The radio version is so tight that it's practically mono, and it punches you right upside the head.

One of my favorite things about listening to "Over My Head" in the past couple of weeks for this Ask is that it's Old School Fleetwood Mac. Chris on piano, Mick on drums, and John McVie with what might be the best bassline that anyone stroked out in 1975. My god, it's a fucking monster, and it just gets hotter as the song progresses. By the end, it's on fire, and you hear it so much better in this tight single mix.

The new guy adds a nice little solo on top of a nice rhythm lick, and he and Stevie add background vocals, but they're not front and center. "Over My Head" is really Christine McVie's showcase, although Fleetwood and Mac really shine too. This would have been a monster hit without the new kids, as indeed it pretty much was. You could say the same thing about "Say You Love Me", which is also all about Christine's songcraft, and a voice like no other, then or now.

Here's my edit of a lovely Mick Putland photo of Christine McVie from a couple of years earlier.

I guarantee that it's been way too long since you heard the in-your-face single version of "Over My Head". On Spotify, you can find it on the couple of Deluxe Editions of Fleetwood Mac (here's one), and it's also on the anthology, The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac, which I've embedded here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw-lIt1ILzk

youtube

least favorite song: "I'm So Afraid." I'm so afraid not. LOL

a song I didn’t like at first, but now do: Hmm, I might put "Sugar Daddy" in that category, but honestly, the main thing I don't like about this song is the title. LOL But it's the 4th best Christine McVie song on an album where the best three of hers were all released as singles, so I guess it all works out.

a song I used to like, but now don’t: Anything by the new guy. I'm not going to go into detail here because what I love about this album, I still love. At the time, I dug two of his songs here (you can guess which two, surely), but I started to really despise this guy a few years later. Now, I can't listen to anything where he's prominent at all, on any Fleetwood Mac records.

Fortunately there are more than enough Christine and Stevie songs, and Mick and John's playing, plus all those earlier albums like Future Games, to keep Fleetwood Mac in the rock good pantheon. I'd have fired the new guy 30 years earlier than he was.

favorite lyric:

Mirror in the sky

What is love?

Can the child within my heart rise above?

Can I sail through the changin' ocean tides?

Can I handle the seasons of my life?

Well, I've been afraid of changin'

'Cause I've built my life around you

But time makes you bolder

Even children get older

And I'm getting older too

Like I said, the two Stevie Nicks tracks on Fleetwood Mac deserve every bit of the love they've gotten over the years. You can also see with just a quick glance around my blog that she's one of my most-posted artists. Please don't take me repping Christine as any disrespect for Stevie!

Do I like "Landslide" a little more than I otherwise might because it's specifically about outgrowing the aforementioned new guy? Maybe. Or do I like it a little less than I otherwise might because I can't hear it without thinking of him? Maybe that too.

overall rating out of 10: Then: 9.4. Now: 9. The new guy went 2-for-4 for my money at the time, and the two that he whiffed on are genuinely terrible...but as bad as those two clunkers were, the rest of the album seemed perfect to me. Certainly among my most-played mainstream rock records into the early 80s. I was perfectly fine skipping one song on each side.

Even though nowadays I can't stand any of the songs he sings lead on, you take those off, and you STILL have "Landslide", "Rhiannon", "Say You Love Me", "Over My Head", and "Warm Ways". No album with ALL THOSE on them gets less than an 8.5, right?

I'm adding a few tenths each for how tightly Fleetwood and Mac are locked into each other and these songs on rythm (easily the most underrated duo of the era, sez me), and Keith Olsen's immaculate production. The score of 9 is therefore objectively correct and mathematically unassailable. LOL

I'm going to end where I began, by talking about Christine McVie. Instead of listening to this first and foremost as an album with a couple of giant Stevie Nicks songs, listen again to Fleetwood Mac as Christine McVie really lighting things up. She deserves so much more credit for the band's success than she gets, and seriously, "Over My Head" fucks.

Now looky here, @aluacrescente . I know that YOU have strong feelings about this record, so spill! And the rest of you, too! I don't intend to have the last word on the albums in any of these Asks! Just the first one. :-) So lemme know what YOU think!

PS. Apologies for any formatting weirdness! I started this on desktop, where I do all my writing, saved the first few paragraphs to come back to later, only to be told by tumblr that I'd stated this on the app (DID NOT) and could only edit there. Grrr. Not cool, @staff. I've spent another day just tweaking to make it somewhat readable and wondering how these people can be so bad at their jobs. LOL

My crackpot opinions and wobbly writing are my own of course, and I'm aware that they have a larger negative impact on readability than tumblr's incompetence by far. LOL

#aluacrescente #ask #Fleetwood Mac #christine mcvie #women in rock #stevie nicks #Landslide #over my head #john mcvie #dave grohl #sound city #youtube #essay #me #recording studio

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malakia215 · 3 years

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Think fast! What's your favourite mythical figure/ deity / beast and why? (Syu wanna learn more mythology)

Which mythology????

Did I expect this to take me two+ hours to type up? No. But you asked for this.

Egyptian it has to be Ma'at. Ma'at is the goddess that uses her feather to balance an individuals heart on Anubis's scales when they are in the after life. She is a goddess of balance in the universe. Idk I have just always been attracted to her as a goddess that I enjoy. In Greek mythology, there is the tale of Persephone and Hades. An oldie but a classic. Also if you like so good 2D platforming there is this game I LOVE. An indie game called Apotheon. It deals with a lot of Greek mythology in a fun game. But also there is just so many tales that it is hard to choose. In Roman mythology, I really enjoy the Romulus and Remus tale. Again, pretty classic but it is interesting that the founding of Rome was established based on twins that were raised by a shewolf (and also a little sad because one twin killed the other). Also, if you are interested in tales/stories the Metamorphoses and the tales of Julius Caesar are very good. Going further North, we have even more tales: This one isn't mythological or anything but there was historically a Celtic queen that united the Celtic people and revolted against the Roman invasion. Boudica! The Romans HATED her because she was a thorn in their sides and I RESPECT her for it as well as her leadership skills. Celtic also ties very closely with Irish mythology and there is a tale of Cú Chulainn. I learned about him from MiracleofSound video. If you want some good folk metal and to learn his tale I would def check it out! Celtic, Scottish, and Irish mythology deals heavily with Nature so there isn't a specific sort of tale I could give you. (that and I haven't looked much into it as I was more interested in the history and culture of the people). Also, there are many tales of creatures and the like that are region-based so there are just soooo many. I did do a KakaIru fic featuring two of the legends but haven't explored more. Norse mythology is pretty much the same with my knowledge though I do know some stuff thanks to the likes of God of War 4 and (loosely) Marvel movies. You have the Valkeries that ride into battle to carry those humans that gotten a spot in Vahalla (cause who doesn't love that?). But again, this is just one of those pantheons that there are so many good tales it is hard to choose from. If you move further to Asia, there are a lot of tales. Mostly the stuff I have looked up revolves around death, like the pocong- a ghost in a shroud whose origins are from Indonesia. If you would like some spooky tales (both supernatural and otherwise) I would suggest checking out Lazy Masquerade . Also, yokai are very fascinating. Cause Yokai aren't technically monsters in the typical sense of Western Standards. But if you want to learn more about them, I usually go to this nifty website. Moving over to North America there are Aztec legends. I don't know much about them either except for what I know from the MOBA game Smite. Quetzalcoatl is one of my favs that I have learned about but there are many more Aztec gods/goddesses. There is also the tale of the founding of one of their major cities: "The Aztecs claimed that an idol of Huitzilopochtli had led them south during their long migration and told them to build their capital on the site where an eagle was seen eating a snake. The cult of Huitzilopochtli was especially strong in Tenochtitlán, which regarded him as the city's founding god." 1 2

This is also where the Mexico Coat of Arms comes from.

Moving up, there are Native American legends. Once again, the legends I know of are really spooky stuff. For some good tales, you can listen to Mr. Sinister. He does tales about Skin Walkers and Wendigos. But there are also beautiful tales such as Where the Two Came to Their Father. It is a tale of the Navaho People and used during War Ceremonies. I am not well versed on it fully but the story was told to an author to ensure that the legend would live on as (sadly) it wasn't passed down often. This leads into a WHOLE bunch of shit which isn't the focus of your question. That can be a totally different topic of cultural annihilation through the destruction of folklore.

And then moving FURTHER up there are tales from the Inuit people. This isn't something I am well versed in and I won't pretend I am. But it should be mention because it is the focus of some games like Never Alone (which I still need to play). I'm sorry I can't give you more but I am sure there are some wonderful tales for you to explore if you desire. Then there are tales that I have learned off hand. Such the Finnish tale of how the Aurora Borealis came to be. I learned it thanks to this video that was inspired by the tale.

And then if you want to learn about some spooky stuff all over the world you can do a check of this playlist. Has a lot of spooky urban legends for you to explore in a quick top 10 format.

This list doesn't include many different cultures. There aren't any from African countries or Australia or India or Middle Eastern countries or A WHOLE BUNCH OF AREAS. fikfnafjvnjafndvasdnf SO. Did not expect this to be so long but I hope you found some answers and something to explore :D

#mythology #folklore #urban legends #history #I do not claim to be an expert #this is just hobby stuff #and I am rusty on some of the older stuff #sorry #mala rambles

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ampleappleamble · 3 years

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—

Axa could feel them watching her as they settled into their room at the Goose and Fox that night, could feel them wanting to know her. Not only so they could understand why she had done what she had with Purnisc and Kaenra, but also so they could (no doubt) uncover and examine all the painful, humiliating life experiences behind her every decision, all her successes and failures, and then judge her accordingly. Like kith will, she thought, of course. That’s normal and healthy to think.

Genuine concern mingled with morbid curiosity, hung palpably over the group like a scythe posed to reap as everyone sat in awkward silence and waited for Axa to break the silence. So she drained her goblet, got out her pipe and her whiteleaf, and with a grim sense of determination, she told them about it.

About the career she'd built back in Ixamitl, where she had lucked into a scholarship to one of her hometown's more prestigious lore colleges, bestowed on her by a generous politician acquainted with her father. Because she'd always loved to learn and hear stories about kith from around the world, she had chosen to put her good fortune to good use and study to become a naturalist, concerning herself with the cultures and languages and histories that constituted the kith population of Eora.

While most of her colleagues had decided to specialize in Vailian– a popular choice for the political or business-oriented crowd– Axa fancied herself an intellectual, and so she had challenged herself with mastering Ordhjóma: the exotic, mysterious language of the Glamfellen, separated for 10,000 years from their tropical Sceltrfolc cousins in the far-flung, frozen south, in The White that Wends. She had thrown herself into her studies, blowing through massive tomes and ancient scrolls like a hurricane, outperforming her peers with ease. Within four years, Axa had risen like a Dawnstar to the top of her class.

And then the field work had begun.

"It's one thing to read about a people, learn their language from books and study up on their culture," Axa explained, stuffing her pipe slowly, taking her time. "It's quite another to visit their homeland, speak with them, live among them. I was barely seventeen, I'd never even been out of the city..."

Kana winced, painful recognition in his black eyes. "Culture shock can be particularly difficult for younger scholars. We have certain expectations after all our years of academic study, and to find out that the genuine article doesn't quite measure up after all that work can feel disorienting and disappointing. There's not only the shock, there's anger at the natives, and then the guilt over said anger..."

Axa accepted Aloth's proffered light while Kana trailed off– it always delighted her, using arcane flame for something so trivial as a smoke– and sighed. "That's what was really odd about it. I did experience some culture shock, but ultimately the problem wasn't me. It was them. I know it sounds like I'm just being bitter, but... honestly, for whatever reason, the whole village really was actively freezing me out."

"Nice," Edér chuckled, grinning at the unintentional pun until Aloth's glare chastised him back into solemnity.

"No one wanted to talk to me," Axa continued. "Oh, I tried, incessantly, but they just... kept turning away, or answering with nonsense or... or riddles. My colleagues had little difficulty integrating, but I felt like I was just barely tolerated by the villagers. I tried asking the other students about it, but they either feigned ignorance really well or they honestly couldn't tell what these Glamfellen had against me."

"Some sort of... racial prejudice, perhaps?" Aloth looked as uncomfortable as he sounded, but at least the topic was finally broached. Axa shrugged.

"I don't think so, but I honestly have no idea. The other three scholars with me weren't orlans, but they weren't Glamfellen either. And no one ever specifically said anything about my being an orlan."

Sagani nodded. "In my experience, while most Glamfellen tend to be as standoffish as any elf– no offense, Aloth– they don't usually have specific prejudices like that."

"Right? Ordinarily, unity and hospitality are taken very seriously in the frozen south; to support one another is indispensable to survival. Nevertheless, I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong by them, and it was driving me out of my gods damned mind. I was supposed to be studying local accents, dialects, and colloquialisms, but that's somewhat difficult when nobody will actually speak with you. So I ended up spending a lot of time eavesdropping on people, mostly outside, by myself."

Sagani shook her head, drawing her whetstone across her hunting knife. "Bad idea to go it alone out there in the White. All kinds of dangers hiding in the snow."

The orlan barked a sharp, sardonic laugh. "You're telling me. That's how I met Vaargys."

As soon as his name was out of her mouth, Axa could feel her entire demeanor transform, and the atmosphere in the room with her. It was the first time she'd said his name since she'd left home, and even though she knew they'd already been listening, her little audience really seemed to be listening now. She felt her face get warm and her eyes sting from the impending tears, so she turned to the window, trying hard to focus on the streets outside and not at her own reflection in the glass.

Come on, girl. You’ve run far enough. It's time you faced this.

"I spotted him from afar one day at dusk: a dark, distant, shaggy figure out there among the rocks, shambling around just beyond the village's borders. It took me a few minutes to even realize he was kith. My colleagues noticed me watching him eventually, warned me away from him: the 'wild man' the locals called the 'Cursed Vagabond,' the 'Exiled Priest.' And he was out there all alone, struggling to survive because nobody wanted him around, and no one could say why..."

"You had a lot in common," Aloth murmured gravely. It wasn't difficult to see where this story was going. And he couldn't help but think it sounded similar, thematically, to one he knew quite well.

"And kith will paint a face on a rock with their own blood if it means they can have someone to talk to," Sagani sighed sadly, sympathy heavy in her chest. She could see where this was going too, and she dug her fingers into the thick fur on the back of Itumaak's neck for comfort. He grunted in appreciation.

"So I introduced myself, like you do. He was... cautious, but receptive. It helped that I'd brought gifts." Axa exhaled, and blue smoke curled up before her, walling her off. "We got to know one another, and over time we became fond of each other. We started sharing meals and stories about ourselves, our lives. He told me he was a priest of Wael, self-taught, and exiled from his clan for venerating the Eyeless Face instead of the Beast of Winter... He let me get close to him, cut his hair, tend to his wounds..." The tears spilled over at last, and she paused for a moment, hid her face.

"And you fell in love," Sagani finished for her. Classic. Tale as old as time.

Axa smiled again even as she brushed her tears away, dragging her little fist across her golden brown cheeks. "And I fell hard. I was his first real friend, gave him his first kiss. And very soon, I became his first lover." This made the men blush and look away. Axa and Sagani paid them no heed.

"I was fascinated by him, and he adored me. We made our own little world together there in the caves, in the snow. And we lived there, separate from everyone and everything else. Until I had to return to Ixamitl, of course. But I had a plan: Before I could talk myself out of it, I asked him to marry me– the very night before I was to return to the Eastern Reach. ...Gods, I had known him for only five months."

"And... wait, how old were you?" Edér spoke up for the first time since Axa had started her story, confusion clear on his face.

"I– Seventeen, almost eighteen by the time I went back home," she clarified, miffed at the interruption. "I'm twenty-two, now."

The blond man held his hands out in front of him, squinting at his fingers, baffled. "And... and how old were you when you left home? Hey, how old was he?"

Kana sighed and leaned over, patting him on the shoulder with one huge hand and confiscating the man's pipe with the other. "Erh– Never mind that now, my friend. Please, Axa, continue." He smiled that big, toothy smile at the little woman, and she blinked very slowly.

"...I brought him home to meet my family and colleagues, to assist me in my studies since all I'd really brought back from the Land was him, and ultimately, hopefully, to become my husband. In the interest of brevity– albeit somewhat belated– here’s how all that turned out: my family and colleagues hated and distrusted him, and after I had defended him so fiercely I'd alienated myself from most of my peers, I found out that about three-quarters of everything he'd ever told me about his home and his language was complete horseshit and all of our work together was complete bunkum. So! I burned it all in a big bonfire behind our house before telling him to leave and never come back." She ticked her misfortunes off on her fingers as she described them, her hands trembling, and then gesticulated fiercely before letting her fists fall to the small tabletop before her. "And then... I left, too. And now, here I am."

...Gods, that was easy. Much easier than I thought it'd be. Why was it so–

She rambled on before she could lose her nerve. "So. That's why I... wanted to do that for Kaenra. My fiancé lied to me and fucked up my life, too, and I can't just ignore that kind of shit when I see it anymore." She sighed, turning to the window again with her pipe still burning away in her hand. "Vaargys is the reason I had to leave my home and everything I've ever known, because his lies ruined my career and my academic standing and my reputation. How could I just stand by and watch as it happened to someone else?"

"Yet, you advised Kaenra to forgive Purnisc?" Aloth twisted his fingers together in his lap, staring at them rather than looking at Axa as he spoke. "After... all he'd done?"

Sagani glanced at him, narrowing her eyes as he reached up to smooth his hair– and wipe away a stray bead of sweat in the process. Is it my imagination, or is he...?

Axa kept her gaze fixed on the street below. "Yeah, that sort of surprised me too, to be honest." She spotted a stray soul, its violet wisps of essence drifting slowly amongst the city goers, and she squeezed her eyes shut, felt them burn behind her eyelids. "I suppose... I just got the feeling that it wasn't too late for them, that what they had for each other wasn't so broken it couldn't be repaired. Vaargys and me... not so. There was no coming back from what he'd done, and we both knew it."

"Whatever became of him? Of Vaargys?" Kana leaned forward eagerly, his eyes shining with compassion. For once, he actually wasn't taking notes on the conversation, and Sagani noticed that, too.

Axa opened her eyes, and saw the lost soul on the street no more. She shuddered. "After I confronted him, Vaargys simply... left. Vanished into the horizon, just as abruptly as he'd first appeared to me. And then, I got to clean up after him– after us– all alone. I wasn't up to the task; wasn't really up to the task of anything but hiding in bed and regretting my entire life. I could really only scrape together the wherewithal every now and then to go out and sell off or give away all the ridiculous trinkets and baubles we'd accumulated together. A few of the things I tried to get rid of turned out to be stolen, of course– big surprise, Axa, he's a thief and a liar– which did my already brutalized image no favors. Nor my purse, when I was obliged to pay out of my pocket for his chicanery."

"Villain," Kana spat, shaking his head slowly. "Scoundrel! ...Oh, how dastardly, to sow discord between the woman he loves and her neighbors and colleagues, then to abscond, completely free of reproach!" His sorrowful frown was as huge and expressive as his smiles always were, almost theatrically so.

Sagani just barely looked over in time to spot Aloth surreptitiously roll his eyes, and she couldn't suppress her grin. I thought so. Ondra's Lure, they're pretty obvious now that I think of it...

The elf cleared his throat and took the reins. "Shall we assume, then, that your family and friends were unable or unwilling to aid you in your time of need?"

Axa scoffed. "My little brother was sympathetic, but ultimately powerless to help me. He's stuck too far under our mother's thumb. He's a Godlike, and it's made things... difficult, for both of them. He feels obligated to her. As for our mother, she blamed me for my own misfortunes, for 'shacking up' with a man like Vaargys in the first place. So... that sort of says it all about our relationship. My father hasn't been in the picture since I was 13, and any non-academic friends I hadn't already traded for school, I ended up trading for Vaargys. I'd made him my whole world, and he–" She stopped herself, puffed on her pipe. "I don't... really make new friends easily. Never have."

Kana laughed good-naturedly. "With all due respect, present company seems to indicate quite the contrary."

"Ha! Since becoming a Watcher with her own castle who offers to help everyone she meets solve all their problems, I do seem to be quite popular, yes," the orlan agreed with a wry smirk. "...I jest, of course. In any case, the friends I do make, I tend to keep. And cherish." She smiled at Kana earnestly, and now he averted his eyes and went ruddy in the face.

Sagani and Aloth surprised one another, simultaneously faking coughing fits to cover their derisive snorts. Kana went even redder, but still managed a sheepish smile as Axa quickly redirected back to the topic at hand.

"In any case, it was my mother who gave me the idea to relocate to the Dyrwood. She brought back the notice advertising the caravan from the marketplace, threw it at me as I lay in my little nest of quilts and despair, and told me I had better either try and do something to rebuild my life or I may as well just return my soul to the Wheel to start a new one, save it some time and trouble."

"So... in response to your fiancé sabotaging your career and your reputation in your own home community, your own mother told you to... choose between self-exile and suicide?" Aloth spoke very quietly, very carefully. When Axa nodded and shrugged, puffing nonchalantly on her pipe, he couldn't quite come up with anything to say to that.

"As harsh as it sounds," she pressed on as she rose and crossed the room to stand before the hearth, "I agreed with her. I still do. Mama grew up a slave and only finally earned her freedom by running away, so maybe she's biased, but... I was never going to be able to move on like that, lying around like I was dead already, surrounded by bad memories. I had to do something, get up and get out. And wouldn’t it be my luck, she dropped a nice, pre-packaged escape plan in my lap, just like that. Nicest thing she'd done for me in a good long while. ...So. That's what lead me to the Dyrwood."

"And then it lead you to the bîaŵac, the Engwithan ruins, the machine," Kana murmured, rubbing his chin and studying the little woman. "Perchance, did you ever pray to Wael that you might live an interesting life? Because if so, you've had your wish granted many times over!"

"It's funny," Axa sighed as she bent and tapped her pipe against the bricks of the fireplace, "you'd think I'd hold a grudge against Wael, allowing Their priest to make a fool of me like that. But in the end, I had to admit that although he betrayed my trust and wrecked my life, Vaargys hadn't actually ever violated any of Wael's tenets. ...Made me rethink the gods, a bit. Maybe he was a true servant of Wael after all, sent to guide me here for some reason. And I do still pray to Wael for guidance, on occasion."

The aumaua sat up in his chair, beaming. "Ah! Shall we go to the Hall of Revealed Mysteries tomorrow after all, then? We can ask the scriveners' opinion!"

"Gods! I spill my guts to you, and you're still thinking about going to the library?" Axa shook her head and chuckled. "You're a mystery, Kana."

"Wait, so... you were gonna marry a pale elf?" Edér mumbled into his pillow, half asleep and trying to kick his boots off. "But you're an orlan. Would that... how would that work?"

The little woman threw the sheets back on her bed, using a little more force than she'd meant to. "Another mystery, Edér," she snapped, rolling her eyes. "Mysteries abound."

The other two men winced as Sagani laid a gentle, steady hand on the orlan's shoulder. "Hey. ...Hel of a day for all of us. Let's call it a night, yeah?"

So they did.

—

#poe anthem infinitum #watcher axa #well! didn't think i'd be including that backstory in this chapter!#but that's how it shook out #next portion should be the last in ch. 9 i hope i hope i hope #story why are you so long but also somehow not descriptive enough #pillars of eternity

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land-of-classpects-and-analysis · 4 years

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Mage of Life

There is a beginning to everything, as well as an end. The classic tale of how Life creates these wonderful gifts and then sends them away to eventually reach their beloved: Death. Much like how Seer September had its own mysterious beginning before ending within the vastness of Space, why not begin Oculus October with an Aspect almost as important as Space? While Space may represent new beginnings, Life is an Aspect that represents positivity, good health, and survival. Of course, there are other things it also represents, but it truly depends on the Class it is connected to. With it being a new month and therefore a new beginning, it would only be fitting for the first analysis regarding Mages to be that of the Mage of Life.

At first, the Mage of Life may seem to be quite the puzzle to wrap one’s head around. Life is a warm and positive Aspect, is it not? How then, pray tell, does one somehow manage to suffer in their pursuit of knowledge about this Aspect? If Mages are meant to begin their journey with a horrific introduction to their Aspect, what does a horrific version of Life look like? To put it simply, and to lay out the groundwork for the rest of this; the Mage of Life would most likely be someone who could be deemed as the “Therapy Friend”. As noble of a title this may seem to those who have never been in such a predicament, it is oftentimes far from it. To be the “Therapy Friend” is, more often than not, being the friend who everyone goes to about their problems. The Mage of Life would listen - truly listen - and they may try to give their best advice that they can muster. However, when it comes to their own problems, they are often met with disinterest, apathy, or rudeness and belittlement.

Due to this, the Mage of Life would most likely be one to bottle up their emotions rather than seek out anyone who may actually want to listen. This can cause quite a bit of tension and stress not only in the Mage of Life’s, well, life, but also within their social circle. As more problems and emotions the Mage bottles up, the closer they get to having a complete and utterly destructive meltdown. It is a horrible habit of the Mage of Life, but it’s one that they unfortunately have deeply ingrained into their way of life. However, this volatile and unhealthy practice will not always leave an aftermath of a simple and easy pick-up. There will be at least one moment where, in the midst of one of their breakdowns, the Mage of Life will commit an act of such a horrible nature that they cannot undo it. No apologies can make it better, and chances are they have no clue how to even go about healing the wounds that they wrought. The Mage of Life has never actually had to do much healing in their life, instead only having to listen and provide words of comfort, encouragement, and reassurance. After the final straw has broken their own back will the journey for the Mage truly begin.

The Mage of Life would be one who has to actively seek out the knowledge of their Aspect and its properties, but they could also actively seek out knowledge through their Aspect. No matter which path calls for the Mage of Life, though, it is most certain that they will face many struggles and hardships throughout their journey. Do not be fooled by the unassuming nature the Life Aspect presents itself to be - it is an Aspect just as capable of bringing about suffering as any of the others. After all, haven’t we all experienced the pricking of a rose thorn, the itchiness of poison ivy, a tree falling atop a house or car, and, for a select few, aren’t seasonal allergies simply the worst? While those bound to Life are known for being on a constant march towards positivity and progress, the Mage of Life is one of the best examples of this. After witnessing the true harm and damage their role as a Therapy Friend has not only brought onto others, but also themself, it will be what truly pushes the Mage towards the true nature of their Aspect and what it means to be bound to Life.

For the Mages of Life who seek out the knowledge of their Aspect, they will soon find that the answer isn’t all that simple. To some it may seem obvious and quite simple; go to therapy, get rid of bad friends, make more positive and healthier choices in their life, and more. However, that isn’t exactly the case, if only because the Mage of Life’s journey can be rather slow. They don’t immediately learn everything about their Aspect by capturing once and taking the knowledge from that. It’s far more like following a trail of breadcrumbs until they finally discover a proper piece of bread from a much larger loaf. These pieces of bread, though, aren’t often found by simply walking down a pleasant forest path or city sidewalk. Heavens, no. Rather, it would be far more like having to crawl under, or perhaps even through, barbed wire at one point, running from a pack of ravenous wolves at another, and so much more torment and turmoil. If anything, the Mage of Life may have one of the hardest journeys out of all the Mages. Their journey is not only meant to teach them how to become a proper healer so that they may make amends with the harm they have caused, but it is also meant to teach them how to be humble and kind to themself.

One thing that may pose itself to be the biggest issue for the Mage of Life is having to learn that their needs sometimes are required to come first. They have only known self sacrifice for most, if not their entire life. In fact, it may be difficult for the Mage of Life to even perceive their way of life as harmful to themself, and may be overwhelmed at the thought of having to put their needs before others. This is not to say the Mage of Life is a pure, sweet, innocent soul - not at all. However, they are most definitely a victim of people taking advantage of their ability to listen and the patience that comes with it, all while allowing their supposed friends to walk all over them. The Mage would have to face these facts head-on if they ever wanted a fighting chance against their Aspect and the journey ahead of them. For some, or perhaps even most, of the Mages of Life would be terrified to admit that they allowed this to happen to them. Mages can be quite stubborn at times, after all, and having to face the fact they aren’t as strong as they present themself to be can possibly shatter their entire world. Over the course of their journey, though, would they come to learn and realize what true care, towards them specifically, looks like, and by design they will also see the harm that they have allowed to come to them for so long.

The journey of the Mage is meant to bring them to many places, as well as meet twice as many, if not more, people to help them learn and make their discoveries. Mages often prefer working alone, as one of the last things they’d hate to admit to is that they need someone, but they are also sometimes quick to give up in trying to push someone away if said person is especially stubborn. In the beginning, the Mage of Life wouldn’t know anything about proper self-care or how to go about truly fixing things. During their journey, though, they may slowly learn what it means to heal, forgive, and take care of themself by the places they go and the people they meet. Mages have a knack of being at the right place at the right time - even if such a place results in them becoming harmed. The Mage of Life may gain this knowledge by becoming hurt and having to tend to their own flesh wounds, learning from the mistakes they make along the way. They’d most likely be drawn towards places and people involved with healing, or at least things that promise knowledge on the topic. These things could range from various hospitals, libraries with books, various religious groups and buildings, people who may be official doctors, spiritualists, or as simple as an elderly person who has seen the harshness of the world while also seeing the good, or they may seek out fellow Life-bound in general.

As for the Mages of Life who wish to achieve knowledge through Life itself, this can become a far more abstract process of gaining knowledge and, as is often the case, a far tougher challenge to take on. While it may sound like the easier option - acquiring knowledge through the process of healing - it is most definitely anything but. The Mage of Life would have to allow themself to become hurt, sometimes in more ways than one, so that they may find ways to heal from it and gain such knowledge. However, even if they don’t actively seek out these opportunities of pain, the world around them will still see to it that the Mage of Life experiences enough hurt that they will have no choice but to heal. Through each scar they acquire, though, they gain more knowledge of what it means to live, heal, and move on. If they can survive all of these moments of pain and suffering, then they can survive anything. Not only that, but they can use the knowledge they have acquired to come back as a better person and an even better healer. One might even argue that Mages of Life who pick the latter option are the better healers of the two paths, though that is not always the case.

Some Mages of Life who pick this path may come back having more knowledge on healing and how to remain positive in the face of suffering, ready to give more aid and care to those they care about. Then there are those who may try to use the knowledge they received as a means to silence others - play the card of “well, I suffered a lot more than you have, and I turned out just fine. You have nothing to complain about.” Indeed, being a Life-bound does not guarantee that person to be one of kindness and positivity, especially if they begin to believe the world around them is doomed to be void of such things. On their journey, some Mages of Life may fall for this trap and as such believe that the world is beyond fixing, much like themself and everyone else around them. Some of these Mages of Life could be those who failed their journey; finding what was expected of them and their recovery too extreme and terrifying, and so they hid away and eventually came to resent their Aspect and what it stands for. As such, they could become a rather bitter and venomous person to be around - perhaps even becoming like that of the people who hurt and mistreated them in the past. It is hard to tell if those who failed journey have a higher chance of acting hostile due to lack of knowledge or from the fragments they were only ever able to collect before giving up. Either way, though, a Mage of Life at their worst is someone willing to play the long game, so long as they finally get to dig their claws into someone by the end of it.

While the journey for any Mage is daunting, dangerous, and sometimes downright terrifying, the Mage of Life is one who has to live a life of self-sacrifice before they can finally stand up, pack their things, and start their journey. Healing is not always a pretty process, but it is especially not pretty when you are a Mage of Life. As tempting as it may be to give up at times and allow this pain and injustice to continue, if the Mage of Life were to keep going, if only for a little while longer, they could become a valuable ally to have on someone’s team. By the time they have fully realized and captured the true knowledge of their Aspect, they will finally be able to realize their worth as a person and what it means to be a healer to not only those around them, but also to themself. A well-adjusted Mage of Life is one who is most often at the top of their game - full of energy, love, and happiness for everything and everyone around them. While they can’t heal via magical powers, they can most definitely heal their friends and allies through the special means they learned during their journey.

In a way, the Mage of Life committed the ultimate self-sacrifice by putting themself through a horrible process of trial and errors, bruises and cuts, and so much more, if only so that no one else would have to go through what they did. To those who stayed true to themselves, though, were able to come out of it a better and stronger individual. They may not truly understand their self-worth just yet, but they still would be far quicker to realize when someone is not a good fit for them and as such would be as quick to slice them out of their life. They’ve had their battles, and they’ve gained their scars because of it, but the Mage of Life does not look upon them with shame or anger. Instead, they look at them as marks of progress in their journey. After all, to the Mage of Life, there is no such thing as failure, but rather a chance to learn and grow into something better. That is what the Mage of Life strives towards.

#Mage #Mage of Life #Homestuck #Hiveswap #Mage of Life Analysis #Life Aspect #Oculus October #Life

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heavymetal-and-reflective · 3 years

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She’s So Unusual by Cyndi Lauper

Album review by MacArthur Radio

I’d recommend this album to fans of Robyn, Lorde, Kesha, Katy Perry, early ‘80s Madonna, and ‘80s music in general.

The sound of this album is just so essentially 80s with all the synths, from the technicolor bells and arpeggios to the arcade video game reminiscent sounds, it's just so wacky and COLORFUL, especially combined with Cyndi's boisterous, rude, passionate vocals.

Also this may be one of my fav album covers of all time, like top 3. It's a special type of art to match visuals to a sound, but this does it perfectly with the colors, aesthetic, her pose, and I just love. She chewed.

The songs are classic pop songs about love and heartbreak for the most part. But she also made "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", an absolute classic that we've all heard, but we're not gonna talk about her because we ALL know her and how fierce she is, but let's talk about all the other underrated tracks.

"She Bop" is a very unique song that took me a second to realize is about masturbation, specifically female masturbation and let me just say I am always HERE FOR IT when a female artist pushes the boundaries with their art by making cultural resetting songs that discuss or express sexuality in a new way, in a new light, whether it's "WAP", "Love To Love You Baby" by Donna Summer, or other songs. To make a song about masturbation in the 80s AND make it a single as she was at the height of her career is fierce as hell to me.

The lyrics are somewhat subtle enough that the song can't be called vulgar or obvious, "Yeah, I wanna go south and get me some more/Hey, they say that a stitch in time saves nine/They say I better stop or I'll go blind." (Adressing the age old tale that masturbating makes you go blind). Then the chorus "She bop, he bop, a we bop/ I bop, you bop, a they bop" is basically equating "bopping" with masturbating, and saying basically, everyone fucking masturbates! Sexuality is normal for men AND women to have!

Her vocals are so unique and specific to her as well in this album, with her huge, dramatic, almost childish sounding, belting that’s so full of raw passion and emotion. On the amazing opening track "Money Changes Everything" she's singing about a lover leaving her for someone with more money, and how money runs everyone's lives and it actually is more powerful than love in this world. The song doesn't feel sad however, it has this magical triumphant energy that makes you wanna sing along at the top of your lungs, and this is the energy of most of the non ballad songs on the album.

"When You Were Mine" is another breakup anthem, that is actually a cover of a song written by Prince. I love him, but I do think she ATE with her version of the song. They're sonically very different of course, it's just my taste. This song is somewhat reminiscent of the album, Melodrama by Lorde, in the sense that it’s colorful and is very sad as it recounts the relationship between two people, but is also a dance track similar to “Green Light” or “Supercut” by Lorde. In my head cannon this song went number one internationally for 3 weeks and was a major hit, but it wasn't. I also love how when Cyndi covers a song, she doesn't change the pronouns to be about a man, just a small detail I love and was apparently controversial.

The synth pop power ballads on this album are also otherworldly and ethereal. "Time After Time' is a classic most of us know and "All Through The Night" is a song with similar feelings, textures, and colors, but just even more magical and delicate than Time After Time.

"Yeah Yeah" was a song that definitley caught me off guard when I listened to it on headphones. Cyndi was talking in her childish, New York Italian accent and laughing in one ear and in the other a satisfying synth arppegio would play, and in other parts of the song, it felt like I was on a New York City street as cars honked in the background.

The album is undeniably synth pop, but it also has a very punk attitude and vibe at times, mostly because of Cyndi's powerful, raw vocals.

Overall this album is an 80's the house down, purely joyful, childish, synth pop, colorful, LOUD, quirky, and at times, soft and ethereal piece of work that may be my favourite 80's album ever.

Fav tracks: Money Changes Everything, When You Were Mine, Time After Time, I'll Kiss You, Yeah Yeah

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bestsongby · 3 years

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New Thoughts on Old Classics:

Hotel California, by the Eagles. 1976

Is it Essential?

The Eagles (or, more specifically, Henley and Frey) were often viewed as cocaine-fueled El Lay misogynists. I think the cocaine-fueled and El Lay are indisputable, but is the misogynist tag a little unfair? Could be.

I’ve always been fascinated by Hotel California, the Eagles’ bazillion selling magnum opus, and how it plays with that perception in mind.

Hotel California is the Eagles stretching their powers as far as the rubber band will allow before it snaps or loses its shape forever, which probably explains why their only subsequent release as an active band was the lackluster The Long Run, a collection of half-assed disco shuffles and by-the-numbers rockers. (aside from barely an Eagle Timothy B. Schmidt’s heartfelt soft rock gem “I Can’t Tell You Why,” and barely upright Eagle Joe Walsh’s catchy as fuck guitar rocker “In the City.”)

For what it’s worth, the stretched rubber band theory is one I apply to most great rock acts who spend any time working under the Album as Art theory of record making. (acknowledging that there have been many, many Not Great bands operating under this theory) The Beatles wisely realized they’d reached that point with Abbey Road, and packed it in before the slope slipped. The Stones began that climb with Beggar’s Banquet, and went from strength to strength until they reached their apex by plunging back down through the depths with Exile on Main St. The Kinks bucked the trend to some degree by releasing one pretty brilliant and one almost pretty brilliant album after their ultimate statement of intent, The Village Green Preservation Society. The Who…well, the Who never really got there. They fooled the world into believing Tommy was their Everest flag-planting, but the truth is Quadrophenia was a better album. All of which obscures the fact that the Who’s greatest album is Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy, a perfect collection of classic singles, few of which managed to tickle the U.S. charts.

And then there are the Loves (Forever Changes) and Zombies (Odessey & Oracle), who strayed outside their comfort zones long enough to produce single discs that stand up to the greatest of the Greatest, despite neither band ever really being truly among the Greatest. (and, yes, both bands were otherwise very, very good at times)

Whew. I digress.

Let’s start with this: Is Hotel California a great album?

I’d like to say it is, but it might not even be the Eagles’ best album. I think, assuming assessing a “best” of anything Eagles-related doesn’t make your stomach clench, an argument could be made for One of These Nights (the album that immediately preceded this one – which easily wins the battle of cover art, anyway). But Hotel California is the most Eagles of Eagles albums, and stands as the best summation of their moment in the sun. And, it marks that moment when tuneful music produced by strong personalities could dominate the American pop culture landscape like no other medium.

In hindsight, Hotel California, riding shotgun with Fleetwood Mac’s equally mammoth Rumours, stands as a signpost in a pivotal moment in pop culture’s de-evolution from artist-controlled playground to complete corporate takeover. The suits always knew there was money in the music, but, holy shit, this much money?

Hotel California is an arrogant, confident, pretentious, calculated work of fiction, and you can hum along to it. It’s dominated by Don Henley, but it’s the input of the other band members that prevents it from completely collapsing under its own weight.

So, in review, let’s start with the title track, which can almost definitely be tuned in somewhere on your terrestrial radio dial at this very moment.

“Hotel California” started as a killer guitar riff by lead guitarist Don Felder. (Fittingly, Felder, who primarily kept his head down and played the shit out of his guitar throughout the Eagles’ history, eventually became estranged from the band) Once Don Henley grafted his lyrics to the music, the song became the ultimate distillation of the Eagles’ Desert Cocaine Tableau. Most of the group’s biggest hits were pretty direct, lyrically. A woman either pissed them off, or a woman was invited to lay down in the desert with them. Or sometimes the women were left behind while the band wrote their own desperado inspired mythology. But the fragmented imagery in “Hotel California” could only really make sense if the listener has a straw permanently lodged up his nose. The Witchy Woman of the past becomes the hostess of a demonic hostel where pink champagne replaces wine and pretty boys dance endlessly in sweat drenched courtyards. It seems as if the Hotel California is a place to run to and to run from, and we’re pretty sure Henley is only lamenting the “mirrors on ceiling” because all of his coke is now going to wind up on the floor.

With all of that said, the interplay between the guitars is deathless, and even vague descriptions of driving through the desert at night are enough to conjure up personal imagery for anyone confused as to what “colitas” is (are?). (The fact that the Eagles played an acoustic version of this live is either proof that they’re assholes, or that, like Eric Clapton’s tedious acoustic return to “Layla,” they just don’t quite understand the reasons for their own success – Felder trumps Henley here, and that’s that)

With that out of the way, we catch our breath and listen to the gang take it down a notch (with the help of JD Souther – the Eagles were never lacking for talented SoCal co-conspirators, starting at the beginning with Jackson Browne) with “New Kid in Town,” which, damn it, is pretty unassailable, musically. It’s got hooks for days, lush production that never swamps the tune, and a sincere, understated vocal performance from Glenn Frey, backed by great group harmonies. What? The lyrics? Well, okay. The woman is doing him wrong (in the third person, for some reason – maybe it’s not manly to admit you’re the one being cuckolded?), and she’s not living up to her end of the bargain, and…

Okay, you get the point. It’s a Henley/Frey lyric.

“Life in the Fast Lane” (It’s interesting to note the band led the album off with Hotel California’s only three single releases – all smash hits, of course) kicks in next, and we’re reminded overtly of the cocaine. It’s a great radio rocker – guitar licks weaving in and out, featuring maybe the slickest production on the album, and Henley doesn’t spare the dude in the equation this time, letting us know that both parties are feeding each other’s sinful excesses (sex and drugs). It’s a tale as old as Los Angeles, and the spoken “are you with me so far” dropped in by Henley manages to insult the listener almost by accident. (yeah, we’re with you, Don! Sex and drugs go hand-in-hand with rock and roll, brother! Revelation!)

And then we roll into “Wasted Time.” In which Henley (boy, so far, this is really a Don disc more than a Glenn disc) strains to let the poor dumb broad who left him know that she’s done nothing but fuck up her love life by fucking the wrong dudes, and, most importantly, by leaving Henley. It’s definitely this type of sentiment that allows critics to glue the MYSOGYNY label on our heroes. It never occurs to Don that this girl might have made the right choice in leaving a dude who not only plods through an orchestrated piano ballad about the terrible decisions she’s made, but backs it up with an orchestral reprise to hammer the point home. (the reprise actually originally opened side two, just to make sure you couldn’t escape the sentiment by flipping over the album – the fucking Eagles led off side two of their biggest album with an orchestral reprise. Admire their balls)

The sequencing of Hotel California comes across as pretty messy in the era of the compact disc/digital album, with the “Wasted Time(s)” dropped right smack into the middle of things, and “Life in the Fast Lane” book-ending the song(s) with the next track up…

And it’s another Henley rocker (what demons was Frey battling in 1976 that allowed him to take such a backseat to his his white ‘fro-sporting partner?), “Victim of Love.” It’s a catchy rocker about…some poor dumb broad. I hate to harp on the cocaine, but how much of it was Stevie Nicks doing to think Henley was a fun dude to party with? Anyway, this one is another radio staple, despite never being released as a single. Truthfully, all the album really needed was “Life in the Fast Lane” to remind us the boys could rock a little. But here they slowed it down a notch in case you had trouble keeping up with them the first time.

And then, out of nowhere, we’re dropped into Joe Walsh’s melancholy reflection on life, “Pretty Maids All in a Row.” I can’t say exactly what the Eagles were thinking when they pulled Walsh into the band (”Hey – this dude makes us look sober!”), but I’d be hard-pressed to believe they anticipated his first recorded contribution would be such a beautiful, naked sentiment, punctuated not with his trademark guitar rips, but by piano and synthesizer. It’s a jarring shift in tone, helping the album achieve an eclectic vibe it was struggling to achieve with Henley dominating the proceedings, and all the more powerful for it.

Anyway, great track. And it’s followed by another great track.

Backing up “Pretty Maids” is, for my money, the best track on the album, and one of the most overlooked songs in the band’s catalog. No coincidence it’s a Randy Meisner song. “Try and Love Again” is a soaring, hopeful rocker, punctuated by Meisner’s upper register, and some truly uplifting guitar soloing. It’s a mystery why this track wasn’t released as a single, unless Henley and Frey were still annoyed that Meisner’s “Take It to the Limit” was the band’s first number one single. But it’s the one track from the album I find myself revisiting most often, without apology. It’s also worth noting that while Meisner’s lyric is treading on self-pity, he’s not blaming a chick for his problems.

At this point we’ve wound our way through a collection of hit singles, timeless riffs, and a couple of contributions from lesser used band members that stand up to the hits. It’s hard to say there’s a definite theme at play here, although California and Los Angeles are definite players on the scene. So it’s up to Henley, again, to hammer things home with the most pretentious track in the Eagles’ entire catalog.

“The Last Resort” answers the question, “What if Randy Newman didn’t have a sense of humor?” A confused history of California (and over seven minutes long, to punctuate its importance as a statement), complete with references to the “Red Man” and Malibu and all of those bright lights that sullied the landscape, presented by a group that pretty actively moved closer and closer to the neon the further their hitmaking prowess ascended. The song starts as a literal travelogue about a girl from Providence (”The one in Rhode Island”), and then slips into a reminder that California has really succeeded at excess, which is evidently a bad thing.

In the end, it’s all the preacher’s fault, anyway. One suspects that Henley (and Frey?) realized he wasn’t really headed toward any logical conclusions with this one, and the lesson we’re left with is that the missionaries traded the Red Man’s peace of mind and started us on the path toward…well…all of that cocaine and colitas, I guess. (it is a pretty tune, though)

And that’s it. Nine songs (split into ten tracks), three hit singles, and 38 million copies sold.

Is Hotel California essential? In terms of understanding the “evolution” of pop culture, it’s an essential landing point for those curious how Los Angeles went from acoustic canyon-dwelling hippie haven to the paranoid personal driveway for limos filled with coke-addled celebrities wearing sunglasses at midnight because the lights fuck with what’s left of their peripheral vision.

But in the battle of juggernaut Los Angeles pop albums, Rumours creams Hotel California because Fleetwood Mac can be heard shutting out the world and wrestling with their relationships while coincidentally at the peak of their songwriting and performing abilities, whereas the Eagles were trying to make statements without much to state. Rumours is essential. Hotel California sounds good when you’re not paying attention too closely.

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#Hotel California #Eagles #Don Henley #Glenn Frey #Joe Walsh #Randy Meisner #1976 #Rock Music #cocaine #Rumours

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cartoonfangirl1218 · 4 years

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Tales from Shadowhunter Academy thought-rant

Maybe it's because I read the series out of order that I have this opinion. But I wish Tales from Shadowhunter Academy had more stories following Simon and George and the like around their training and their missions for the school. Admittedly the first time I read it, I had only read the City of series, and I was eager for more Simon and Izzy so TfSA seemed perfect and I got attached to the character since I skipped to all the Simon scenes. Upon second reading, I had finished the Infernal Devices trilogy which soon became my favorite. I loved the Victorian fantasy aesthetic and all the literary quotes between Tessa and Will, and just ahh a lot of it. Anyway, so some of the stories made more sense now I knew who all these characters were.

However, I still stand by how I wish more of it was focused on Simon at the Academy. In the 10 stories, 4 are stories within a story (The Whitechapel Fiend, Nothing but shadows, The evil we love, Pale Kings and Princes) and 2 have a major focus on side characters to set up future stories (Born to an endless night, Bitter Tongue).

Now don't get me wrong I enjoyed Born to an endless night and The Evil we love. It's always great to see the growing Lightwood-Bane family and compare their acceptance of Magnus to The Evil we love about Robert's time in The Circle. I was so disappointed to find out The Circle graphic novel was canned. I wanted to know more about them. At least The Evil we Love gave a taste, and later Celine’s story. I especially liked Pale Kings and Princes because of how it combines the past with the downworlder prejudice that Simon is trying to combat after the events of the Fae-Sabastian alliance and New Accords. But ones like The Whitechapel Fiend and Nothing but Shadows felt like it was using the Academy as frame stories so people can see the Infernal Devices gang again and learn about the Chain of Gold generation.

Which is nice but.... we have so much content coming from Ghosts of the ShadowMarket, the Chain of Gold trilogy, even in the Magnus Bane. Chronicles which I'd argue is a better use of it since Magnus is part of the story, trying to help James in The Midnight Heir compared to Simon who just listens and learns relevant lessons. I guess the big reason why I want more about Simon's time at the Academy is that I actually wanted to know more about his fellow students.

George, ah, I ADORE George Lovelace. I'd give to see two whole novellas about him, he is so charming. I agree with Simon, he is a wonderful guy and could give Jace a run for his money.

But there's also Marisol Garza Solcedo. It's implied she's had a hard life, dead parents, and that she specifically came to the Academy to learn to fight. I want to know more! What is it like for mundanes like Marisol who don't have any special connections to prominent families (like Kit), just bad lives and iron wills. Like Simon wondered, what drove a 13 year old to join the Academy to potentially die by fighting demons or by ascending. And what about Beatriz Velez Mendoza whose father, grandfather, and brother died during the Dark War? Were they the heads of the family? What was it like when it was only women? She grew up away from Idris, what was it like? How did that inform her nicer perception of Downworlders/does she ever feel pressured to live up to the family members who died? Beatriz who is distantly related to Cristina Rosales-Mendoza, do they know each other at all?

And Jon Cartwright? Is there something he should be ashamed about his family as Scarsbury implied? What was it for him to become close to the dregs that he scorned so much? To fall in love with Marisol? Did he fear his family might disapprove? Is that why he dated Julie briefly before falling hard and committedly to Marisol?

And there's Julie Beauvale. We only had one scene of sympathy to know her mother and sister died, but what about her dad? She says he's useless now, what is it like to live with a dad who may be permanently traumatized or changed? How hard is it to reconcile what you thought you knew about your whole life and culture to realize The Law may be wrong? How did she finally succumb to the charm of George Lovelace (I mean, it's not hard to imagine, George is a gem after all. But I want more flirty George and even sexy George). And what about Vivian Penhollow having to make the Academy work after being retired for the last 50 or so years. Vivian trying not to let her cousin-in-law and Consul Jia down. And someone really trying to reconcile Downworlders and Shadowhunters. Sunil and Boris and the like. I wanted to see their missions, the different styles of leadership between them.

I want to see more of their personality flaws, how they handle possibly failing in archery or something, maybe some heart to hearts and those classic back to back fight poses. If we didn't have that Nothing but Shadows story we could have seen shadowhunter vs mundane baseball! Maybe have them track or fight or something with downworlders we haven’t seen. I always wanted to see more of how mermaids are in this world. Maybe even kelpies. Something besides the big three of vamps, werewolves and fae.

I just feel that these characters had so much more depth potential to be mined but they were sidelined in favor of stories with characters that will have whole novels/POVs in future books. I know Simon can't be observant of everyone since he has his own problems and was trying to get a date with Izzy, I understand that but maybe we could have gotten more explicit hints.

He was surprised that Beatriz and Julie became parabatai, I was too. Cassandra wrote on her tumblr it was because "Aw, you’re so sweet! I’m so glad you like Julie and Beatriz. It was fun to write them, in that they were having a whole sromance (like a bromance but with girls!) which Simon wasn’t entirely aware of. I actually think that Julie and Beatriz weren’t that close before they went to the Academy, but that through knowing Simon, George and Beatriz, Julie’s mind and the way she wanted to live was changed forever, and she wanted (and asked) Beatriz to be parabatai with her for the same reason I think a lot of people want a parabatai… to have someone who keeps them right, to have someone who makes them a better Shadowhunter, not just practically but morally." Well, how do they do that? What does Beatriz get from Julie's harshness? How does Julie become more compassionate? We wouldn't know because as she said Simon doesn't notice, which is a slight shame because until Chain of Gold, we didn't have a female-female parabatai duo.

Jon apparently comes to care so much for George that he cries at his funeral. How would we get that? They hardly hung out until the last story. Simon only starts noticing Marisol and Jon's relationship as something romantic in Angels Twice Descending. Well, I wanted to know more about them too. Because it was clear that something was developing beyond Marisol wanting to scare and humble Jon. When did they first click as something more?

I knew they wouldn't be main characters, they wouldn't be saviors of the big battles and I certainly didn't expect them to be anything more than cameos. But if they'd gotten explored a little more, just for these novellas to focus on them, their deaths in Lord Midnight and Queen of Air and Darkness would become even more poignant because we care about them as characters,not just as Simon's friends. Basically I wish there was some more love for them and maybe more headcanons besides the ones swirling in my head about these unanswered questions. So if you have hcs or ideas or want to add to the rant. Reblog and add on.

#random musings #unpopular opinion #maybe #tales from shadowhunter academy #the shadowhunter chronicles #simon lewis #george lovelace #marisol garza #beatriz mendoza #jon cartwright #julie beauvale

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hollenius · 4 years

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Sorry, I just really love interviews where Peter Buck talks about books. And also about crying at a Pepsi commercial.

https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-2001-10-14-0110140554-story.html

Edit: apparently this is not accessible in all countries, so I am copying and pasting the text under the cut. Contains some discussion of Michael Stipe’s lyric-writing strategies as well as tales R.E.M. reading all of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories while in the van in 1982, whether Faulkner or Hemingway or Fitzgerald liked music, intuition vs. hard work in the act of creation (and how writing a song isn’t like writing a novel), the relative effectiveness of specificity vs. generality in bringing about an emotional response in the audience (and, again, how songs aren’t like novels) etc.

RECONSTRUCTION OF THE FABLES: MARK LINDQUIST and PETER BUCK

THE HARTFORD COURANT October 14, 2001

Mark Lindquist: The only thing I did to prepare for this was to go through my CD collection, and the three bands that dominate my collection are the Beatles, R.E.M. and the Replacements. I listened to albums by each in progression, and one of the things I noticed -- maybe because I was looking for it -- is that each of these bands became increasingly interested in narrative, in story, as their career progressed. Do you think that happened with R.E.M.

Peter Buck: Absolutely. When we started out, Michael was trying to find a way of communicating that wasn't a literal language. He didn't want to string together sentences that told a story that everyone could agree on. I really respected that, the feeling that the narrative stuff has been done, love songs have been done, and this sort of Rorschach blot of words and emotions are a different way to approach telling a story.It also opens it up a lot, in that people can listen to these songs and, without knowing exactly what they're about, put themselves in the song. Michael told me recently: His theory is, name your 10 favorite rock songs of all time. Write them down. Then write next to them what they're about. Guarantee that you'll only be able to do that for two of them.

ML: Let's try that. Name your five favorite rock songs.

PB: "Like a Rolling Stone," "Fight the Power," "We Can Work It Out," "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" and "Gloria" by Patti Smith.

ML: OK, "Like a Rolling Stone." What's that about?

PB: Obviously it's an aggressive song putting someone down, but I don't know who that person is. Assuming that I know a little about Dylan's life, it could be about the people who followed him around. It seems to be a portrait of someone who thinks they're a winner, who's high in society. Who that is, I don't know. I could be completely wrong. I don't know what Napoleon "who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat" means.

ML: But you remember the line about those Siamese cats.

PB: With Dylan, you always get that. "The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face." That's from "Visions of Johanna," which is one of my favorite songs, but I have no idea what that means.

ML: How about "Fight the Power"?

PB: I would assume, being a white guy from the suburbs, that it's about being black, but I don't know. If the Beastie Boys had written it with the same lyrics, I'd have no idea.

ML: "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times" is from "Pet Sounds," which is chock-full of stories, at least in my mind. I may be imposing a narrative, because I listened to this CD when I left for college, and to me that album was about leaving home, going on a new adventure: "I once had a dream, so I packed up and left for the city." But that may have nothing to do with what Brian Wilson intended. Still, let's talk about R.E.M.'s progression toward stories.

PB: When we first started out, I know that Michael felt everything in rock and roll had been done. We didn't want to write a love song, or anything that could be construed as a love song, for 10 years.

ML: What would you say your first love song was?

PB: Well, it wasn't a love song. "The One I Love" is an anti-love song, but since "the one I love" is in the title ... we used to play it, and I'd look into the audience, and there would be couples kissing. Yet the verse is, "This one goes out to the one I love/A simple prop to occupy my time." That's savagely anti-love. But that's OK. People perceive songs as they are. People told me that was "their song." That was your song? Why not "Paint it Black" or "Stupid Girl" or "Under My Thumb"?

ML: But that's pop music -- Noel Coward's line about the amazing "potency of cheap music."

PB: It doesn't even matter, the value of the music. I've teared up at commercials.

ML: What commercial made you tear up, for God sake?

PB: The Pepsi commercial where the woman is depressed and the monkeys bring her a Pepsi. It was because of my life at the time, and not the commercial, but that's what pop music is, too. It's not necessarily what's written or even implied. It's what you as the listener take out of it. Which is why I tend to think songs that are less specific are more powerful.I've never cried at, say, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" by Bob Dylan, which is a very specific song. I know that there's a woman named Hattie Carroll, and she was killed. But it was reportage. It never made me tear up, but other songs have. It's all about what you bring in at that moment, so narrative is not necessarily the most important thing.

ML: Do you think that works in literature? One of the things they tell you in Writing 101 is to make things more specific rather than more general. Is literature more powerful if it's less specific?

PB: Absolutely not. I think literature is a chance for someone like me, who's led a more or less middle-class life, to look into someone else's heart and mind and be shown a world that I don't know. When I was a teenager, I read a lot of African American literature -- "Soledad Brother" or "Invisible Man" or Richard Wright, and there were things that completely changed my life. The strength of literature is its specificity.

ML: Why do you think R.E.M.'s music has become more specific, more story-driven?

PB: I think Michael was trying to find a way on the early records to tell a story without telling a story. As he got a little older and became more comfortable doing the singing and being a public figure, the idea was still, "I'm not going to tell a story where someone says this is a song about ... " Now as a writer Michael likes to take a character he imagines and write from that perspective, tell a story in the first person. But it's not necessarily his perspective.

ML: When I saw R.E.M. in Seattle in 1999, I think Stipe introduced "The Apologist" by saying, "This is a story about ... " And "All the Way to Reno" is a pretty classic narrative. It reminds me of "That's Not Me" from "Pet Sounds," not musically or lyrically, but conceptually.

PB: "Reno," I'm sure that is sung from the perspective of a 17-or 18-year old girl. It has to be. I've never asked him.

ML: And "That's Not Me" is sung from the perspective of a like-minded 17- or 18-year-old boy. Bret Easton Ellis has said as you get older, you become more interested in narrative, in stories with a beginning, middle and an end.

PB: Part of it is definitely an age thing. When I was in my 20s, and my band was in its early years, we were capturing an experience, not necessarily thinking about the chain between the past and the future, which is what a novel is. As you get older, your life is less about capturing the moment and more about understanding what you're doing.

ML: Has Michael's progression or change as a lyricist been influenced by literature?

PB: I don't know. The only way I can say our band was directly influenced by literature was when we did our first big American tour in 1982, before our first EP came out. We were in a van, touring to nobody, playing songs no one has ever heard. I managed to find all three of the Flannery O'Connor short-story collections, and every member of the band read every one of the words in those three collections on that tour. We passed them around, pages falling out, putting pages back in, reading them with a light on at 2 a.m., going from San Antonio to L.A. I felt really strongly that it changed the way we thought about writing. I don't know why, because she writes about faith and the problems of faith in a world where there is no faith, and Michael wasn't writing linear dialogues, but when we made our first record, I think we all thought Flannery O'Connor was something we would emulate in some way.

ML: I can be listening to a particular CD or song that evokes a mood or a moment in a way I admire, and I will try to get the same effect into what I'm writing. Has the reverse ever happened to you? You're reading a novel or short story, and it works for you so well, you think you want to get whatever it is that works for you into your music? Do you take what you read the night before into what you write?

PB: All I can say is I certainly hope so, which is why I try to read good stuff.

ML: OK, other books that have affected you as a songwriter?

PB: Denis Johnson.

ML: Why?

PB: I don't know why. "Already Dead" changed me when I read it. I can't say why or how, but I felt like a different person at the end, in the same way that when I was a teenager, Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" completely moved me.

ML: One of the things music can do for writers is that we can take a song, an idea in a song, or even a character in a song, and expand it into a story, or a screenplay, or a novel. Another thing music can do for writers is set a tone for whatever we're working on that day. Most writers I know listen to rock, but Kerouac talked about how he would do that with jazz.

PB: What do you think Faulkner did?

ML: I think he just drank.

PB: But do you think he put the 78s on? He probably wasn't a Glenn Miller guy. Was he a Duke Ellington guy? I bet Faulkner played records at his house. I'd be really shocked if he didn't play gospel stuff from the '30s and '40s, if he didn't listen to blues music.

ML: What about Hemingway?

PB: My feeling is he didn't get much pleasure in life. Having read his books, I doubt very much that he had an ear for music. I bet he loved music in the hills of Spain, dancing to it, no matter how good or bad it was. But did he go home and put on records? I doubt that very much. Now Fitzgerald, he found joy in life.

ML: And in drinking. It kept him from writing.

PB: He's another of those people who never really found what he needed to do in his life. I re-read "The Crackup" about a year ago, and there's a great quote, and I paraphrase, about how when I was young I wanted to be Byron, Don Juan, J.P. Morgan. All that is burned away. I'm a writer now, nothing else. Literature is something written out of deep understanding. Music is written more out of the intuitive. When I read great books, I refuse to think they just made it up as they went along. That's what happens in rock and roll.

ML: There are passages that come to you as a writer that feel like they wrote themselves. However, you unfortunately have to write the other 500 pages or so yourself.

PB: The good stuff occurs because you work really, really hard, spend your entire life immersed in one thing, and if you're able to let yourself go completely for that time it takes to do anything great. My superstition, though, is songs that are there that aren't written. I think every songwriter feels, "I'm really good at my craft," but the good songs pop up, and you always like to feel they come from somewhere other than inside of you.The night I wrote "Losing My Religion," I was drinking wine and watching the Nature Channel with the sound off and learning how to play the mandolin. I had only had it for a couple nights. I had a tape player going, and the tape has me playing some really bad scales, then a little riff, then the riff again, and you can hear my voice say "Stop." Then I played "Losing My Religion" all the way through, and then played really bad stuff for a while. I woke up in the morning not knowing what I'd written. I had to relearn it by playing the tape. That's where songs come from for me, someplace where you're not really thinking about it.That's what's different from literature. You can't sit down and let "The Great Gatsby" happen. The songs I write are four minutes long. You can disconnect from wherever you are for four minutes and find it. I really doubt you can do that for months with a novel.

ML: There's something that's always struck me as a little off about Peter Buck and Michael Stipe. Traditionally, the songwriter is thought of as the more intuitive, and the lyricist as the more lettered. The reality is you're the more lettered, and Stipe is the more intuitive.

PB: Michael has this amazing ability to absorb things. He doesn't sit around and read tons of books, but he does read. He probably reads more political literature than I ever have.

ML: It's funny, I know lots of novelists who wish they were rock stars, but I don't know any musicians who wish they were novelists.

PB: Hey, I'm raising my hand right here!

The poster has moved with me now for 15 years. It's part of a series for America's public libraries, featuring a very young-looking R.E.M., with Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe and Bill Berry each holding their favorite books. I'd love to know what Stipe is holding, but, like his early lyrics, the title is obscured. Peter Buck holds an Oscar Wilde collection, and that, along with a mention of Wilde in a Smiths song from the same era, "Cemetry Gates," conspired to send me to the library. Peter Buck's a tremendous reader. His Seattle home is filled with almost as many books as records. So we asked Buck to dine last week with his friend Mark Lindquist, whose music-infused novel "Never Mind Nirvana" gets like few others the profound way music can be not only a soundtrack to life but also a road map. We asked them to talk about how artists and musicians are influenced by each other. -- David Daley, Books Editor

#interviews #peter buck #michael stipe #r.e.m.#writing #music #mark lindquist

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deadly-cipher · 4 years

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Dear Alternative Community Gatekeepers, Stop

Alternative is not a label which you can give to one 'group' of people. alternatives are non conformists who have no social group. you cant recognise an alternative person by what they wear or look like, so dont try to. they dont all wear the same clothes (like moshers, chavs, goths, indies or any other group of people who try to be individual but all seem to like the same stuff, wear the same clothes and only listen to music which their friends like). alternative people enjoy listening to whatever the hell they like, because they dont just like one type of music, they may just enjoy music on a whole, or it may just depend what kind of a mood they are in to what kind of music they listen too at that time. although this term is based around mysic it also applys to clothes as i said above many groups try to all wear the same stuff in order to fit in, alternatives wear whatever they like, if its designer, and they like it, they will wear it. if its got the name of a band on, and they like it, they will wear it. if there is a song which is by slipnot, and they like it, they will listen to it. if there is a song, which is by eminem, they will listen too it. Punk is not about a certain hair colour, style, or music, although music does take a large part in most punks lives. Punk is about liking what you like, being yourself, saying what you think and FUCK ALL THE REST. You don't need a two foot high red mohawk to be a punk, although that is wicked cool. You don't need sleeves, a backpiece, or any tattoos at all to be punk. You don't need a Misfits, Casualties, Sex Pistols or any band like that jacket to be punk. You don't need anything to be punk except for awareness, self respect, respect for others and an open mind. A Goth is someone who sees beauty in the dark side of life. Today's society is focused on negating darkness because it is associated with evil. Think about it - in almost every fairy tale, who is the antagonist? The brunette. Who is the protagonist? The blonde. Dark is evil, evil is bad, and therefore we should wipe all trace of it from our lives. Unfortunately, that's simply not possible. No matter how hard society tries, people still die. Day turns into night. Love becomes loss. It's a fact of life. So while everyone else is denying an entire half of life, the Goths embrace ALL of life, good and bad. Goths understand that the best and most lasting joy is tinged with a little sadness, and that all love is bittersweet. Goths understand that not everybody has to be happy 24/7, and that the way to succeed is not by pretending you are. Sunlit skies are beautiful, yes, but so are dark cloudy ones. What is white without black? What is a rose without thorns? Thus, by embracing the shadows as well as the sun, Goths are, in many cases, actually more emotionally healthy than those in mainstream society. Emo is an emotional person. They are not depressed all the time and some are acually very happy at times. They do smile, they don't sit in a corner crying all day. Some are actually quite popular and laugh and joke around lots. NB: Emo does not mean the person cuts themselves, they might but that is not why they're emo. The word "scene" coves a large spectrum throughout recent history, but its most modern definition is used to describe certian subcultures and movements. The most notoriously famous and targeted is the alternative music scene, or more specifically, branches of the alternative music scene such as hardcore, indie, fashoionxcore, etc. A breed of scenesters (people on the scene) has begun to come to the forefront. These scenesters are usually very music-savvy and loyal to a few specific genres (typically hardcore, metal, indie, retro, 80's new wave, classic rock, etc. to name a few), of which they dress to exemplify. It is hard to pin down a style for a scene male or female, considering the trends amongst them vary from coast to coast, and certian fads come in and out within their ranks. Typically, though, many scene kids will have facial piercings, tattoos, and longer hair. It is not unusual to see teased hair with long bangs on males, or short fauxhawks (a mohawk without the sides shaved, a fashion-friendly version) on females. It is almost a throwback to the revolution of Britian's glam era, very androgynous and fresh. Scenesters take a lot of pride in their overall image, and often they appreciate shock value. Oftentimes they are thrifty, employing their abilities as bargian-hunters and do-it-yourself gurus to do something unique with their style. Large vintage sunglasses, retro patterns, tight jeans, classic metal/band tees, plastic jewelry, and heavy eye makeup are just some of the incorperations into scene style for either sex. This style and showmanship is at its height during shows (concerts), where often scene kids will meet their friends and size up strangers who visit their turf. There indeed is competition among scenesters...sometimes friendly, sometimes not. Shows are in fact not just concerts, but often a means of socialization for those on the scene. Those people who partake in scene lifestyle often choose to date/socialize only with those like them, which can cause bitterness or rejection to outsiders. The music scene is often associated with other areas that scenesters are interested in, which is liekely, art, photography, creative writing, poetry, tattoos & piercings, civil rights, animal rights, etc. Many scene kids have strong beliefs about these things and consider those who do not to be "posers." They feel that their scene style is not only a fashion statement, but an all-encompassing lifestyle. Many scene kids incorperate their future plans into their lifestyle, going into careers such as journalism, photography, artistry, piercing, tattooing, working for magazines, being musicians, hairstylists, running venues and/or coffee shops, etc. This tends to cause scene kids to congregate, visit, or even move to big cities to find opportunities to meet other scenesters, find jobs that suit them, or to live where they have a plethora of activities that they enjoy readily at their disposal. Recently internet revolutions like myspace.com have provided a new means for the ideas of scene culture to be spead, for scenesters to find new friends, bands, and activities. Scensters design stylish and graphic profile pages to both draw attention to themselves and to find others like them, and many people have joined up with the scene fad due to internet advertising. The downside of many scene atmospheres is that some scene kids tend to develop a superior mentality. Some who are especially popular and affluent can make it harder for the younger, yet-aspiring scenesters to join in with the subculture. This is not always the case, however. Different areas breed different demographics of scene kids. Perhaps part of their attitude comes from the problem that scenesters have begun to feel threatened about their culture being jeopardized because of a sort of trickle down effect. The internet is permitting easy access for anyone who would want to don scene-esque style and jump right in to a culture that scenesters feel they have built from the ground up and developed into a complex lifestyle. However, this lends many to get caught up in popularity contests in local areas as well as on the world wide web. Unfortunately, this can also lead to rifts in scenes. Groups of hardcore scenesters start "crews," often characterized by fierce brotherhood to the point of violence against others who are unlike them or who are in other crews. The scene is dividing amongst itself, due to purists who feel the scene is about music only, and those who have taken the scene fashion to be almost, if not equally, as important as the music itself. Some of the fashionable scenesters stick to their musical roots, but often due to the aforementioned trickle-down effect, there are people joining the scene who are not interested in the music, but are only in it for the attention. Thus, the scene will continue to divide. Whether they will admit it or not, kids interested in this lifestyle of excitement, concerts, body modification, fashion, and overall alluringly unusual aesthetics will continually be labeled as "scene." They chose an alternative path because they wanted to find acceptance elsewhere. Now, they face a community just like any other: one of all different types of people, who have different opinions and standards. It has its pros and cons, ups and downs, just like any lifestyle does. A metalhead is somebody who loves heavy metal. Don't always have the "look". And it's not even necessary to listen to just the classic metal bands, you can listen to the subgenres. You just have to appreciate the genre as a whole. The term: Short for independent rock. In terms of music it would be independent of major labels/mainstream stuff. History: grew out from 60s garage, 70s punk, and 80s post punk it started in the mid 80s as alternative/college radio music. Once nirvana hit big the alternative genre split: the popular side was just alternative(Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, No Doubt, etc.) and the other half that wasn't mainstream(by choice or not) became indie rock(Pavement, Sebadoh, Built To Spill, etc). Some bands have signed to major labels but are still considered indie(Modest Mouse, etc.). Go figure. Sound: In the begining indie sounded like alternative(because it was) but it grew more experimental and weird. In Britain indie has more of a typical sound like Radiohead, Muse, etc. rather than a definition based on 'the scene.' The scene: if you really think all indie kids do is try to be cooler than other people then... well.. you're mostly right.

#alt #alternative #alternative community #gatekeeping #gatekeeper #alternative community gatekeepers #alt gatekeeping #alt gatekeeper #punk #goth #emo #scene #indie #metalhead #stop gatekeeping

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2tall4this55 · 4 years

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So since my last post i have listened to a few new books and re-listened to one of my favorite series. The series is Kings Dark Tidings by Kel Kade. Their are currently 4 books in the series. The author has recently released book 1 of a new series this past November. That will actually be the next book on my list to listen to. Based on his website he is halfway done with the second book in his new series and the next installment for the Kings Dark Tidings series is called A Mage of No Renown, a kings dark tidings tale. I believe this book is a back story to a character introduced in book 2. For know I will stick to my idea of reviewing the entire series and then each book individually.

FYI, while i don’t go into detail i do discuss plot lines in the series. So while i don’t consider them spoilers i feel a heads up is warranted. I will be going into specifics on the indavidual book reviews.

The series as a whole fits with the classic fantasy genre. It is a sword and sorcery world with some unique world building that makes it stand apart from other series’s. The first unique aspect is the main character Rezkin. Most main characters either start off as complete amateurs when it come majic or weapons or are some how already strong with no real explanation as to why. Kel Kade starts off with Rezkins training. While not everything is explained as a reader you quickly piece together he is being trained by his Kingdom. His training is extreme and by the end you understand why he is a powerhouse. Throughout the story you see him using tactics or skills that are amazing to imagine. While you might think this type of character would make the story boring because you know he is the best, you would be wrong. Kel Kade make every situation realistic. Meaning given the rules of the world and his training every situation still puts you on the edge of your seat. He takes on entire thief’s guilds, assins, and bandits where one wrong move would mean his death. The story progresses from hunting one man based on his last orders, to protecting and honoring his friends, to dealing with a kingdom conspiracy. All leading him to his goal of dethrone a mad king and stoping demons from destroying the world. Each step of the way new characters are introduced each seeing different sides of the main character. One side is the honorable friend that is knowledgeable and follows a knightly code. One side is the natorious Raven who is taking over the underworld. Yet another is the man given the highest honor in the kingdom in secret as a Sowrd Bearer with two priceless shalyn blades. In short this story has a bit of everything. The story will have you laughing at the miss understandings caused by Rezkins lack of knowledge of out-worlder ways and in the next you will be sitting there thinking dam did he just take over an entire city of theifs guilds in 24 hrs just to correct some kids poor training? I highly recommend this series and i can not wait for book 5. My next post will summarize book one.

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furederiko · 4 years

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"Shin Sakura Taisen Rekidai Kayoushuu" Review (Part 2)

SEGA boldly (or is it a risky move?) introduces new Kagekidans that represent new cities with this game. Not one or two, but just THREE for now, with a fourth one debuting later in the Spring TV series. Track 4 to 6 of the album are specifically slotted for these new heroines...

Contrary to reports in various sites that had reported them as such, in my opinion, these are definitely NOT character image songs. Kouhei Tanaka-sensei has openly referenced them as "[City Name] GEKITEI". So these sit in line with Paris Kagekidan's "Mihata no Moto ni" and New York Kagekidan's "Chijou no Senshi". Whatever happens to those teams, by the way? Hmmm...

One might argue that unlike "Shin GEKITEI", only one member sings these songs. But they seem to forget one thing: Sakura Shinguuji sang solo on the first vanilla version of that song. I don't know what the future holds, but there's a possibility that in the sequel(s), we might get another take of these songs that incorporate other members of their teams. For two of them, at least. We'll just have to wait and see. For now, let's embark on a globetrotting journey!

Niji no Kanata (Other Side of the Rainbow) by. Huang Yui (Sumire Uesaka)

As soon as I heard the full version, I wasn't completely sure how I felt about it. Surprisingly, I think I enjoyed the short MV version better. When SEGA started releasing one MV after another, starting from Berlin to this one, "Shanghai GEKITEI" totally stole my attention. I proudly declared it as my favorite of the three. Perhaps because the verses felt more concise (with less instrumental parts) that made it sound more... kickass? Even though it had a somewhat odd lyric, which you will understand why. This full-length version somehow exuded a different vibe. The verses were longer, which was the bit that I'm not too fond of. On the other hand, the lyrics flowed better and made more sense. And then there's an issue with Yui's voice. She had a playful and childlike tone in "Aratanaru". Assuming that's her who got the shortest line in the interlude, of course. I prefer the more gallant take that she used here, but the inconsistency threw me off. Suffice to say, I had to hear it a few times to finally get the hang of it. But goodness gracious, the Chinese vibe, which was even stronger (that should be obvious, I know! Ahaha), never failed to win me over. Just like the verses, the instrumental portions were also longer, thus giving it a slower and elegant pace. That serenading sound of Erhu just hit my soft spot every single time, likely resonating with some part of my genes. Combined that with a blast of modern instruments, and it blew me away. I sure want to see a live orchestra perform this with a Chinese theatre dance to accompany it! Its lyrics, courtesy of Ouji Hiroi, carried a similar message of Teito, Paris, and New York themes. Protect the city, its people, and seize the dream. Why does the title use 'Rainbow', though? Especially considering 7, while being a good number for a relationship, is considered as unlucky in Mandarin (ghost month). The key is in the kanji for 'Rainbow', because it is also known as 'Hong' or 'Jiang', the name of a two-headed dragon in Chinese mythology. And what does the symbol of Shanghai Kagekidan look like? Yep, a DRAGON! So while in Japanese it literally translates as "Other Side of the Rainbow", the context also points to it being "Other Side of the Dragon". Even though it might take me a while to get used to this, and it's no longer my number one, it's an amazing piece nonetheless. I'm old, so I'm not familiar with Sumire Uesaka's pop songs. But so far, I haven't heard her sang a song like this. As Kouhei-sensei had stated, these new "GEKITEI" were composed to challenge the VAs vocal prowess. That seems to be the case here, to which Uesaka did a great job! PS: Wikipedia told me that Uesaka is a fan of Russia. I wonder how she would feel if she was cast as a leader of the Moscow Kagekidan instead?

Entaku no Kishi (Knights of the Round Table) by. Lancelot (Manami Numakura)

Just like the previous song, I had a completely opposite reaction to this as well. It honestly took a while for me to like or even understand the London Kagekidan theme when its official MV first came out. This full anthem also sounds different but in a far more positive light! How so? The second Westminster Bells kicked off, my mouth grinned so wide. Then the music slowly developed into that familiar tone, but continued to build up even more with meticulous touches and flares of fanfare, horns, trumpets, and an electrifying mix of the electric guitar. And suddenly I was transported into the medieval era, with images of brave knights flashing on my mind, en route for a battle to protect the land. Daaaang... Kouhei-sensei totally knows how to make something sound so graceful, yet gallant and rich, huh?! A sensation that young'uns nowadays would easily call 'EPIC'. My lingering issue with this song remains as-is: Manami Numakura's voice. Don't get me wrong, she is a wonderful VA with a unique vocal tone (Kohaku in "Dr. STONE", right?). I'm just not a fan of her singing voice, never was since her Idolmaster days. Even when it's my least favorite part of the song, that tomboy-ish charm blends perfectly with the song and gives it a distinct sound. The end result is something that continues to delight me and puts a smile on my face. Oh, what about the title, you ask? I think it's obvious enough. London Kagekidan is clearly based on the tales of King Arthur. Arthur is (likely, the code-name of) its blond-haired, high priest-dressed Captain, while our female lead here is the loyal Lancelot. It intrigued me when the lyrics, by Shouko Fujibayashi, mentioned 12 knights just like its lore. Does the team really have that many members? Assuming it will feature in the sequel, that would be fun to see. Then again, Idolmaster started out with 10(+1) idols, so I'm sure Lancelot would fit along just fine! Hahahaha... PS: Do you think that echoing bell at the intro and interlude sound convincing? Well, Kouhei-sensei said they actually recorded it at the actual location! Another good reason to appreciate this song.

Kurogane no Hoshi (Iron Star) by. Elise (Nana Mizuki)

*standing ovation* This. This IS a SCARY song! And by scary, I mean what a challenge it IS to pull off. Imagine trying to do at least an okay job at this in a karaoke booth? Godspeed. Nuh-uh, I don't think this song will work without Nana Mizuki's powerful vocals. Not just because I'm a fan of her, or have always wanted her to be part of this franchise. But I love Elise because she adds that much-needed heavier tone to the cast. Her brief but scene-stealing lines in "Aratanaru" proved that notion. You could easily recognize her voice amidst the chorus. If you think the short MV version (the actual first 1:20 minutes) that you see above already sounds amazing, just wait till you hear the middle part of this song. It slowed down, with various strings gently swayed you to enter another realm. Then it went FULL OPERA, with a piercing vocal work that would send nothing but genuine shivers to your soul! Goosebumps. All the time. The music had clear influences of Wagner's compositions, and those who are at least aware of classical music (or have seen "ClassicaLoid Season 2" Hahaha) would probably notice that almost immediately. Song of Valkyrie, anyone? Because of that, Kouhei-sensei personally did the arrangement for this number, seeing that it required a full-blown orchestra ensemble. Sensei showed the first part of the music sheets during one of the Teigeki Report, and I had a feeling it must've blown away everyone who saw it. I mean, Seijuurou Kamiyama's VA Youhei Azakami was literally jaw-dropped. He also revealed that Nana went above and beyond on that last high note, hitting it longer than she was supposed to, in time for the grand orchestra finish. Seriously, goosebumps. It is certainly one of the highlights of the album, and you DEFINITELY need to listen to this. Also, this is the only Kagekidan theme that I'm not sure can work as a group song. It IS still a Berlin Kagekidan song, proclaiming the might and power of the team that started it all. But can it be performed by a team of Hoshigumi? Dealing with that complicated lyrics by Shouko Fujibayashi ("...Schwarzer Stern, kurogane no hoshi..."), and fast-paced tempo will undoubtedly leave them breathless. Now I'm patiently counting the days to see Nana perform this in a live concert! Mindblown... PS: By the way, original Hanagumi's "Dream/Yume no 1 Pound" and Kanadegumi's "Enbukyoku, Kimi ni" came to mind when I tried to analyze this song. Presumably due to that middle part, which is true to Kouhei-sensei's style. You'll be hearing that magic touch of him again in some of the next tracks.

Next: the curtain rises for the Shin Hanagumi ladies!

Video is available on SEGA Official Youtube Channel. "Shin Sakura Taisen" is produced by SEGA, and RED Entertainment. Credits and copyrights belong to their respective owners.

#music #review #sakura wars #Sakura Taisen #Shin Sakura Wars #shin sakura taisen #project sakura wars #awesome #mind blown

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bbclesmis · 5 years

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Andrew Davies Preps For The End Of One Series And The Beginning Of Another

Screenwriter Andrew Davies has been a true master of modern television adaptations, brining such iconic works as Middlemarch and Little Dorit to the MASTERPIECE screen for decades. Now, as he looks ahead to the end of his critically-acclaimed recent adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Davies also previews his charming new adaptation of Jane Austen’s unfinished final novel, Sanditon, set to appear on MASTERPIECE in 2020.

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Transcript:

Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob, and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.

This week on Les Misérables, ten more years have passed, and Valjean and a now-teenaged Cosette are living in a Parisian convent while Javert, now in charge of the capital city’s police force, continues to hunt his ever-elusive quarry.

CLIP

Cosette: What was my mother like?

Jean Valjean: Don’t make me speak of it. She was one of my workers and I dismissed her.

Cosette: What for?

Jean Valjean: For nothing, for concealing the truth.

Jace: Here to discuss the narrative time-jump and simmering political and personal tensions in Les Misérables is writer Andrew Davies. Davies has been one of the United Kingdom’s most prolific screenwriters, bringing his sumptuous adaptations of titles as varied as Middlemarch and Little Dorrit to MASTERPIECE for decades. Davies is already on the job for his next big MASTERPIECE series: a bold new adaptation and completion of Jane Austen’s tragically unfinished final novel, Sanditon. But with a few more episodes of Les Misérables to go, he offers a preview of the upcoming conclusion of his French revolutionary drama series.

Andrew Davies: Sometimes it’s the best not to kind of explain it to the audience just to say, you know, ‘Here it is. This moved and also baffled me. You know, let’s see what you make of it.’

Jace: Davies joins MASTERPIECE to talk Sanditon, the morals of Les Misérables, and his remarkable legacy as a true master of screenwriting.

And this week we are joined by Les Misérables writer Andrew Davies, welcome.

Andrew: Thank you.

Jace: What drew you to adapting Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables? And why is now the perfect time for such an adaptation of that specific book?

Andrew: It’s a big daunting kind of thing. And it probably wouldn’t be something that I’d have voluntarily just suggested to anybody. It’s not really my kind of book, in the sense that Jane Austen is my kind of author, because I’m reading it in translation. It’s great virtues are not to do with subtleties and wit. And, you know, the little varieties of human behavior. It’s a big kind of book. It reminds me of the Bible. You know, it’s so strong, it’s so iconic. It was suggested to me, and I read it, and I was kind of bowled over by it, by the strength of it and also by the sonorities and the echoes of like the world we live in today. A divided society, certainly, as far as UK and France are concerned but you know, maybe America as well, in which there are there are the haves and the have-nots and this is a book predominantly about the have-nots. It seemed very apposite and contemporary to do this book now.

Jace: True or false: your tagline for the project was, ‘Nobody sings’?

Andrew: That’s true, yes. Yes, that’s right. We came across that quite early on.

Jace: You were quoted in The Telegraph as saying that this adaptation quote, ‘Will rescue Victor Hugo’s novel from the clutches of that awful music with its doggerel lyrics.’ Fans of the musical and some of its cast members were not pleased with your words. How do you react to their retorts?

Andrew: Well I mean, of course they were! I was very rude about the musical, but you know, you have to say what you think, don’t you? You have to be honest. I know a lot of people love the musical, but I thought it was a very feeble attempt to represent the novel. I completely accept that other people disagree with me. That’s the way it is it, isn’t it?

Jace: This version of Les Misérables sans singing gives us instead backstories of Fantine and Jean Valjean. We’re privy to very different aspects of these characters. A lighthearted romantic Fantine, a raging, almost feral Valjean.

CLIP

Jean Valjean: How could I not have a heart full of bitterness and hatred? I’d like to see you after nineteen years in the hulks! So don’t preach to me about God and love.

Bishop: I beg your pardon, forgive me, I should have considered your feelings.

Jace: Was it important to you to focus the first episode on these untold stories?

Andrew: Oh yes and I like the way you characterize Jean Valjean raging, almost feral. Yes, sure. I think that’s that’s kind of where it comes from my first encounter with Les Misérables was when I was a little boy, I had a book called, Great Stories From the Classics, and it was little little petite extracts and it was a story of the Bishop’s candlesticks, and I saw, you know this poor Bishop, here comes this this terrifying figure who’s, you know, hardly human. He is so rough and so rude. And I found it quite hard to understand the behavior of the Bishop and also the behavior of Jean Valjean after the Bishop been so kind. You know, I thought surely he should be terribly grateful. Instead he robs the Bishop and then the Bishop not only forgives him, but gives him more things. And that that that kind of puzzled me. But that I wanted to, I don’t know, preserve that sense of and it comes across in the book I think of how frightened people are of Valjean because he’s a man of extraordinary power and strength and he’s so resentful against society, because of society, what society has done to him that I wanted to keep that frightening aspect of him. And that gets echoed later on in the story, when he takes Cosette out to see the dawn rising over the gates of Paris. It turns out that really he wants to see the convicts.

CLIP

Cosette: Can they really be men?

Valjean: Yes, they are men. They are men like me. Cosette?

Cosette: I think if I crossed paths with one of those men, I think I would die. Just from looking him in the face.

Andrew: It’s so strange it’s not like it’s like kind of novels you normally read, is it? It’s like something it’s like a kind of solemn mystical religious tale, you know, more than a book. You know, you could live your life by this book, somehow.

Jace: You could. I mean, it’s about a monster who becomes a man, and a man who becomes a monster and sort of the inherent complexities of humanity. It’s interesting to me because we we get a glimpse of Fantine. Traditionally we sort of picture her sort of a tragic sex worker. We get to see her entire backstory here. She’s given entirely new dimensions. Javert, however still remains a bit of a mystery. Did you consider filling in his backstory at all? I mean we get the fact that he was raised in a prison. But to see that additional dimension.

Andrew: Yeah. It would mean going too far back, too far back in flashback or whatever. Yeah, I could have done it. And one of those strange things that struck as somebody reminded me when we’d been developing the story for sometime, somebody said, ‘Valjean and Javert both seemed to be virgins,’ which is so extraordinary. You know, two mature men, and we don’t have any account of either of them having a loving relationship or a sexual relationship. Maybe sex is unimportant to Javert. And then having met Jean Valjean, he gets so annoyed with him that this develops into a kind of obsession, which is like a twisted love affair. And it’s like, Jean Valjean doesn’t seem interested in Javert at all, except as part of the forces that he’s fighting against. Once he gets out of prison, he never gives Javert another thought until he comes into his world and starts tormenting him.

CLIP

Rivette: That’s one man out of hundreds — and that was a decade ago. He may have been dead for years.

Javert: No, no, I am convinced that he is still alive and here in Paris, laughing at us. I shall never be at peace until he is back in chains.

Andrew: And one of the things I did in the adaptation I think was because I just couldn’t believe that coincidence that I would turn up and then having turned up that neither of them would recognise each other. I mean that’s way Hugo has it in the story. I think well, actually it makes it much richer. If you think there has I heard about this guy and he thinks I’m beat it’s that guy I had in jail and I bet he’s been committing crimes all the time and I just want to see him again. And I want to trap him. I want to nail him. I want to get him in my power. And so then it becomes a situation where they both know, but neither of them is letting on. Yeah, Javert is just waiting for Jean Valjean to reveal himself.

Jace: You’ve become known as a master of adaptations. You once said it gave you ‘A wicked thrill’ to cut down War and Peace. Are there any sacred cows when it comes to adapting fiction?

Andrew: No, I don’t think so. But I’m aware that these great books are not called Great Books for nothing. I mean these guys knew what they were doing. So I do respect the excellence of the original. But having said that, an adaptation is my take on them. It’s not the definitive one, necessarily, but I think it’s my job and my duty to get my reading of a book, not just try to humbly prostrate myself before the Great Author.

Jace: Given that you’re adapting rather colossal tomes for the screen, how do you prioritize or decide what makes it in and what doesn’t?

Andrew: I do a thing at the beginning, after a first reading, or my most recent rereading if I’ve read it long ago in the past, ask myself, ‘What really is the story here? Whose story is it? Who do we love? Who do we need to keep at the forefront of our minds?’ And base the whole adaptation around those two questions.

Jace: And how much of that decision making is personal versus thinking about what the audience might want or need?

Andrew: Um, entirely personal. I obviously I’m concerned about the audience but the audience is something very amorphous. I think the first audience as being me. I want to write something that I would like to see and that I would enjoy seeing, and there is something that I think most people wouldn’t realize which is that the first people that see it the people the time working closely with and they’re three or four very clever, very sympathetic, very clued up young people who are decades and decades younger than me, and close behind pleasing myself, I want to please them. And I don’t think of the audience in general. I think when I’m writing it, ‘Have I got it right for myself?’ and then I think, ‘Oh Laura’s going to laugh at this, Will is going to be moved by that.’ So those thoughts are quite uppermost in my mind.

Jace: Before this next question, a quick word from our sponsors…

Jace: Now this week’s episode moves the action forward to 1832. We find a teenaged Cosette and Jean Valjean are still living at the convent. How did you decide where to place the time jump in the series? Was there always a notion that it would be at sort of a natural halfway point?

Andrew: I think Hugo himself helps us here, I mean he did this, we don’t get a lot of detail about how Cosette goes from age 6 or 7 to 16 or 17. We find her again a fully changed character, from being this abused little girl who’s clearly a survivor. And little Cosette is somebody who, when she’s shown love, reciprocates and she hasn’t been too damaged by all the abuse she’s suffered. And they have one of those almost idealized, perfect father daughter relationships. I invested a lot of emotion myself, I’m the father of a daughter. And there’s just a brief period in the girl’s life when her father is just everything, and she falls in love with you. And and then she’s going to gradually, yeah change, and of course Jean Valjean who’s known no love in his life before, can’t bear it that this is going to change.

Jace: You mentioned briefly earlier about Javert happening onto Montreuil where Jean Valjean just happens to have set himself up. Les Misérables relies rather heavily on coincidence — Marius ends up in Valjean and Cosette’s old flat next to the Thenardiers, whom his father told him saved him during the war. Cosette that ends up with the doll made of her dead mother’s hair. Should these occurrences be read as coincidence or as providence?

Andrew: Well I think again, as I said before this is one of those books, it’s not like an ordinary book. I’ve tried to sort out or explain or get away from some of the coincidences, but I guess some of the things in the book you’ve just got to understand. We don’t know for definite that the doll is made out of her mother’s hair, but it might be, because it could be the same guy. I mean he goes around the country, ‘I’m buying and selling I’m selling and I’m buying.’ And the teeth and the hair the get redistributed again and again.

Jace: Marius meets Eponine, and she tries to tempt him through a peephole in the wall. His romantic attraction to Cosette is complicated by sexual desire for Eponine which culminates in a we’ll say vivid dream he has. What were your intentions with this scene and with Marius’s sense of guilt?

Andrew: Well I was just fascinated by by Eponine and her character and just her juxtaposition with Marius at this stage. In the book, Marius is just such a po faced puppet, really. And I wanted, you know, to make him more like you know a real young man who’s been, I mean. In a way, like like most of the kids in this book, he’s been abused. I mean his upbringing was ridiculously privileged but he’s been brought up as a kind of little fascist, really. And he’s worked out for himself that with some prompting that some in his grandfather’s view is biased and crazy. And that he’s got to work out his own and things and of course here’s this here’s this girl who’s possibly a teenage prostitute. It’s never absolutely clear what she does, and she’s living next door and she likes him. And I just think it’s I always like if I can find any sources for humor in these these these sort of grand, iconic books and the situation where he has this pure romantic love for Cosette, but there’s this girl next door who’s sort of tempting him physically, and so I couldn’t resist giving him an erotic dream about the wrong girl. He wants to have a dream about Cosette, which is all kind of pure and kissy-kissy. Instead he finds she’s she’s changed into Eponine, who has a more kind of direct and visceral appeal. I suppose for him though from Eponine’s point of view, Eponine has a kind of pure attraction for. She just thinks he’s lovely and she’d do anything for him. I mean he’s he’s a you know a different kind of boy from the kind of boys she’s known.

Jace: There’s a massive fight sequence between Valjean and the Thenardiers and their criminal associates who ambush him, and ultimately Javert shows up as well.

CLIP

Valjean: You dare to threaten my Cosette? You think you can do anything to impress me? Look! Now do your worst!

Jace: How difficult was it to write this pivotal action sequence?

Andrew: I thought it was difficult because it’s so strange in the book. The most vivid thing in all this encounter, is that he allows himself to be overpowered and bound and then his superhuman strength is a given in the story. So he throws them all off, and proceeds to take this iron out of the fire and wound himself with it in order to demonstrate how puny any effort to frighten him about that kind of thing would be. So it’s again, it’s, you keep getting these things that are, you know, not rational and not logical and something like a kind of mystical text.

Jace: I mean it is craziest thing.

Andrew: That we need to reflect on and say, ‘Well what is that? What could that mean?’

Jace: That moment is the craziest of all craziness. Because he does burn himself. It is a demonstration of sort of his strength and his fearsomeness and it sort of is that moment where he allows the monster to come out that he’s been containing, it is sort of his true self. I mean, what were you trying to convey with that precise action?

Andrew: I was just trying to I don’t know, represent that episode in the book, I think. And it was something that I found you know very powerful and moving, but hard to understand. And sometimes, you know, it’s the best not to kind of explain it to the audience, just to say, ‘Yeah here it is. This moved and also baffled me. You know, let’s see what you make of it.’

Jace: We have an Andrew Davies adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sanditon on the horizon. Austen only wrote about 100 pages of that fragment. Was it challenging or liberating getting to finish an unfinished work of Jane Austen?

Andrew: Well it was, but it was both both challenging and liberating. It’s odd, it’s just a fragment, it’s quite a long fragment, I would imagine she would have ruthlessly edited the hundred or so pages that she wrote, because I find that there was enough for half the first episode, but that was all in her hundred pages. But she did get to introduce the characters and set out the situation and that was a really bold departure for Jane Austen, because the situation is the transformation of a little seaside village into a fashionable seaside resort like Brighton or somewhere like that. And the characters are again a departure. Of course, we’ve got our young heroine, who is a fairly typical Jane Austen heroine. She’s a bit like a rather more clued up version of Catherine Morland out of Northanger Abbey, she’s come from a large family of which she’s the oldest girl. So she’s quite sussed out about farm life and looking after her younger sisters. But she gets pushed into a new world with a lot of different people who are different from all the sorts of people that she’s known before. And crucially these main people, they’re not kind of aristocrats or gentleman farmers, they are business people, they’re entrepreneurs. They want to make a new world and make themselves some money. And you know, that’s different from all Jane Austen’s characters before and and so a lot of the novel is about things like raising money, attracting celebrities, trying to build momentum. How modern! And also it’s got Jane Austen’s first black character, who’s an heiress from the West Indies with a fortune. I’ve said it was a hundred thousand pounds, which is huge for those days but it makes it so, on the one hand, she will encounter of course a lot of prejudice because this an England seaside village, no one will ever seen a black person before. But on the other hand, whoever marries her is going to be set up for life. So that’s an interesting situation. And then you’ve got the local rich lady, who’s got lots of money that she might leave to this person or this person or this person. And so we’ve got several people who are after her money. And of course, an entrepreneurial family of brothers all need her money as an investment. And so we’ve got a wonderful situation I think to start a story, and it was very liberating to write it. And also I was very, very much in mind that this Regency period where it’s set. She set it, I think well, she was writing it in 1820, so I thought, let’s let’s go for 1820, which was late Regency period. A period of extreme kind of looseness in society, really, which was much more dissolute, and actually than we��ve got today. Jane Austen knew all about that stuff, but she always kept it below the surface with discrete references. We’re not going to be so discreet.

Jace: I’d expect nothing less. Andrew Davies, thank you so very much.

Andrew: Thank you.

Jace: MASTERPIECE viewers already on the edge of their seats thanks to Season 3 of Unforgotten won’t want to miss next week’s podcast, where we go behind the scenes with this season’s horrific killer as DCI Cassie Stuart and DI Sunny Khan catch their prey.

CLIP

Sunny: The ticket was issued at 6:20 a.m, on the A-405.

Cassie: Which is where?

Sunny: About six miles outside Middenham.

Cassie: And was he heading to, or from?

Sunny: From.

Jace: That’s next Sunday, May 12, following the explosive third season finale of Unforgotten.

MASTERPIECE Studio is hosted by me, Jace Lacob and produced by Nick Andersen. Elisheba Ittoop is our editor. Susanne Simpson is our executive producer. The executive producer of MASTERPIECE is Rebecca Eaton.

#les mis bbc #bbc les mis #Andrew Davies #podcast #Interviews #pbs

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dustedmagazine · 5 years

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Dust, Volume 5, Number 7

Cy Dune’s Seth Olinsky

It’s summer time finally, and who wants to be bothered with 3000-word essays on the obscure but worthy? Not us, we want shorter reviews for longer days. We’ve got cannonballs to do off lake piers, carbonized meat to ingest, cold brews to drink. So that we can get back to all that, we deliver a robust Dust with the usual mix of garage rockers, Chicago improv’ers, acoustic finger-pickers, up and comers and lately revived-ers. We hope you enjoy it, sitting out there on your deck or fire escape or stoop...and don’t forget the sun screen. Contributors this time include Andrew Forell, Ben Remsen, Justin Cober-Lake, Jennifer Kelly, Isaac Olson, Bill Meyer and Jonathan Shaw.

Martin Brandlmayr — Vive Les Fantômes (Thrill Jockey)

Austrian drummer/composer Martin Brandlmayr’s award winning radio opera Vive Les Fantômes (Long live the Ghosts) combines spoken word and jazz samples with experimental electronics and percussion to create a dialogue across time and genres between Brandlmayr and some of his influences including Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Jacques Derrida and Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Snatches of live music - a trumpet tuning up, a piano run – emerge between Brandlmayr’s understated free drumming, subtle electronics and the occasional bracing burst of noise. Monk talks sound, Miles issues instructions, and Derrida answers the telephone to speak with an unheard interlocutor. Over an engaging 53 minutes samples repeat in various juxtapositions to create relationships and emphasize their mutability. The spectral voices of long gone cultural giants speak of human frailty and the strength of the creative act. Vive Les Fantômes poignantly addresses memory and mortality. The piece closes on Derrida speaking for the first time in English “OK, I’ll be very glad to meet you. Goodbye.” Et Fin.

Andrew Forell

Burial — Claustro/State Forest (Hyperdub)

Claustro / State Forest by Burial

William Bevan AKA Burial changed the face of electronica with the release of his eponymous debut album in 2006. His take on dubstep, jungle and ambient continues to influence producers, and his releases are highly anticipated. This first release since 2017 distills the elements that have enthralled and intrigued since the debut. A-side “Claustro” returns to Burial’s roots in jungle and rave. Vinyl crackle coats a four-to-the-floor shuffle and a vocal sample repeats in glorious swells of billowing, cloud-like sounds. It’s exhilarating albeit tinged with Burial’s signature yearning melancholy before it drops, dissolves into twinkling stars “Are you ready?” repeats and then “This song goes out to that boy.” before it kicks back in with an almost cheesy refrain “I got my eye on you, tonight.” which in turn fades back to crackle. “State Forest” is a completely different beast. A rich ambient narrative rich in atmospherics, found sounds and keening waves of synths creeping through a desolate landscape of shadow and dread. The funereal pace unfolds with miniscule details — broken twigs underfoot, drips of rain, quiet exhalations — then sudden silence. Burial places the listener in this environment, observant if not omnipotent or omnipresent, like the narrator of a classic Antinovel. Yet “State Forest” is not alienating or discursive. It shows rather than explains — a direct experience like a Beckett tale. It is his most effective piece of music since “Come Down to Us” and its obliqueness is the key to its power.

Andrew Forell

Cy Dune — Desert (Lightning)

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Akron/Family blended so many influences during their ten-year run that they avoided easy classification. With the collaborative nature of the group and its members switching instruments, it was hard to know what came from who, or whether the whole thing was just a bit of folky synergy. Then the band split up, and the years passed. Dana Janssen created Dana Buoy, an unexpected electropop duo more suited for clubs than for Akron/Family's wildernesses. Seth Olinsky, after a couple quick release years ago, emerges now as Cy Dune, with a sound much more in line with the Akron/Family aesthetic.

On Desert, Olinksy's songwriting and guitar playing provide the center of the album, but only to set up the weirdness that surrounds them. The bluesy stomp of “When You Pass Me” puts Cy Dune in the roots tradition, but the jazz influences remain strong enough that it's no surprise that bassist William Parker shows up. “Desert 2” offers chamber oddity, more a sketch than a song, but then “Desert 3” steps into the garage for some rock. Across this short album, Olinsky crams in a five-year hiatus's worth of ideas. The freak-folk of “It Is the Is” closes with some dissonance, a hint of a jazz, and a happy reminder that Cy Dune's desert archives are only beginning to open up.

Justin Cober-Lake

Angharad Davies / Rie Nakajima / Alice Purton — Dethick (Another Timbre)

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What is a score? Sometimes it is a series of staffs marked on lined paper. Sometimes it is a set of images, which may be followed according to varying degrees of specificity. Sometimes it mandates a piece of music down to the smallest detail, sometimes it offers suggestions, and sometimes it gets ignored. It’s common enough for improvisers to select partners based on their musical personalities rather than the instruments they play, so one might say that the selection is a compositional act. In this situation violinist Angharad Davies, cellist Alice Purton and sound artist Rie Nakajima (she plays kinetic devices and found objects) chose to play together for a couple days in a small church in Dethick, England. The choice to play together, the instruments they brought, the chapel’s accouterments and acoustics — that’s the score. The CD’s ten pieces sound like artifacts of a search for possibilities. How close to the language of chamber music, the shared vernacular of the two string players should they hew? How do things sound when you shake them? What does this organ sound like? What will these stone walls and stained glass windows do to the sounds? And what will one player do in the face of each other’s actions? Decisions in the face of puzzlement; that’s how these three women played this score.

Bill Meyer

Dehd — Water

Water by DEHD

Dehd’s Water is spare and sharp, with ambling jangles of prickly guitar, a thud of bass, a shattering clank of snare on the upbeats. The Chicagoan trio — that’s Jason Balla (of Ne-Hi and Earring), Emily Kempf (of Vail and ex- of Lala Lala) and Eric McGrady — situate their songs within the tradition of scrubbed bare garage clangor, albeit with a rockabilly-ish twang sometimes flaring in the guitar lines. The one lavish, elaborate element is vocals, which twine and descant and swirl around each other, though never with undue precision. “Wild,” which leads off the disc, conjoins their various cracked and yearning voices in complicated points and counterparts, sometimes in lush, romantic sustained notes, others in percussive, time-keeping chants. “Lucky” starts in single-voiced sincerity and erupts into massive, girl-group sha-la-la-las (though some of them sung by men). Balla and Kempf recorded these songs while breaking up as a couple; they currently tour them as exes, which must lend the tunes a bit of extra ragged edge. Perhaps that’s why songs like “On My Side” are so fetching, sung with shredded hurt and blistered melody, but reaching for sweetness and finding it.

Jennifer Kelly

DJ Lag and Okzharp — Steamrooms EP (Hyperdub)

Steam Rooms EP by DJ Lag and OKZharp

Durban-based South African Gqom producer DJ Lag teams with London’s Okzharp on the raw, percussion-heavy EP Steamrooms, their first collaboration for Hyperdub. The word Gqom, an onomatopoeia based on the Zulu word for ricochet, is said to mimic the sound of hitting a drum. Steamrooms contains none of the joyful lightness one expects from South African house. This is strictly a woozy, dangerous, disorientating amalgamation of heavy militaristic drums, Zulu chants and stabbing synths tempered somewhat by Okzharp’s grimy London influence. The effect is late-night sweaty club as the drugs are wearing off ad euphoria slips into something sinister and unhinged, but it’s undeniably exciting. I can’t go on; I must go on. Steamrooms’ four tracks exhort you to move till you drop. “Nyusa” encapsulates the atmosphere, shrouded in hiss, a funky unadorned synth riff clangs over an exhausted chant from a breathless dancer and drums thud beneath. The end of the night if not the world.

Andrew Forell

Fetid — Steeping Corporeal Mess (20 Buck Spin)

Steeping Corporeal Mess by Fetid

This new record from Seattle death metal band Fetid may be the essential corrective to our national imaginary’s notion of that city as a monolithic site of liberal social policy, coffee “drinks” with lots of soy and greenwashed, vaguely cosmopolitan modes of cultural production. How many of us remember that Sir Mix-a-Lot, he of boundless enthusiasm for humanity’s anterior, is a Seattle native? Fetid share his interest in the undersides of bodies, and of things. There’s a decidedly intestinal — if not rectal — vibe to the unpleasant cover art for Steeping Corporeal Mess, and songs like “Dripping Subtepidity” and “Reeking Within” indicate a willingness to palpate beneath the Pacific Northwest’s famously moist terrain, to squish and squelch away in its rot and lukewarm organic goo. For a certain kind of listener, this may be the most fun you’ll have with a record this spring. For sure it’ll make you remember why David Lynch chose Washington state for Twin Peaks: who can forget the scene when Agent Cooper slides his long tweezers under Laura Palmer’s fingernail, to pull out a letter “R”? Or how long he has to dig around under there for it?

Jonathan Shaw

The French Tips — It's the Tips (Self Released)

It's the Tips by The French Tips

First: if The French Tips come to town, go. They recently toured with fellow Boiseans Built to Spill and blew them off the stage. As for the self-titled, self-released souvenir I took home: it’s got three great songs, (the first three, conveniently) five that are never worse than good, no duds and a lot of potential. It’s an excellent EP padded into honorable debut. The French Tips’ sound is indebted to, among others, Sleater-Kinney and Savages, but their guileless commitment to community, manifested in onstage instrument switches, shared vocal duties, their embrace of disco beats and a fat, confident, bottom end warms up their post-punk sonics considerably. The disco influence is as much spiritual as it is rhythmic: despite their righteous skronk und drang, despite oceanic guitar and bass which rage and release, surge and ebb, flash and hide, this is dance music, music to help you exorcise the bullshit. The French Tips is a bit green, but should they wish to pursue it, this is a band that deserves a record deal. Thesis statement: “Me and my witches about to burn it down”. I hope they do.

Isaac Olson

Friendship — Undercurrent (Southern Lord)

Undercurrent by Friendship

In this period of endless sub-sub-genres and hybrid forms in heavy music, it’s refreshing to hear a band with a sound that’s so straightforward. Friendship play hardcore: fast, vicious, intense songs that establish a riff and stick with it. Song titles say a lot: “Punishment,” “Lack,” “Garbage,” “Wrecker.” And so on. They’re succinct. There’s usually a breakdown section. There’s a bunch of d-beat songs. If you average the track lengths, you get almost exactly two minutes. It’s all really loud. They probably play really loud when you see them live. They can probably clear the room pretty quickly. It’s sort of fun that these guys call their band “Friendship.” It’s a good record to play when the neighbors put on Fox News. It’s a good way to say, “I don’t want to be your friend.”

Jonathan Shaw

Froth — Duress (Wichita)

Duress by Froth

It’s been a million years, it seems, since we were captivated by the “Yanni/Laurel” debate, a single murmured phrase that sounded like different things to different people. It was like that baked late-night meandering discussion about whether what I see as red is the same as yours come to life, and it vanished into the ravenous maw of internet culture. Except that Froth, an L.A. band currently on its fourth album, made a song about it, “Laurel,” full of clashing guitars and slow unspooling anarchy and whispery narratives. It could be the softest heavy rocker ever or the loudest twee fuzzed bedroom pop, depending on how you hear it. There’s a constant buzz at the bottom of all Froth’s songs, broken more often than not, by a reach for radiant melody. Froth makes an altogether engaging racket that borrows sleepily from Teenaged Fanclubs, in a fuzz-needled daze from MBV. “77,” the second single throws off the anorak for a denatured krautish groove, while “John Peel Slowly,” an instrumental, sketches a dream-landscape with loose-stringed bass, piano and space noises. Make your own sense of it, though. What you hear is largely up to you.

Jennifer Kelly

Burton Greene / Damon Smith / Ra Kalam Bob Moses — Life’s Intense Mystery CD (Astral Spirits)

Life's Intense Mystery by Greene / Smith / Moses

If you can translate words into vectors, the name of this album tells you a lot about the forces at work. While pianist Burton Greene and drummer Ra Kalam Bob Moses were born over a decade apart, both were touched by the 1960s’ cosmic spirit. And when you put Patty Waters’ preferred pianist on the same stage with Weasel Walter’s most enduring bassist, intensity is on the agenda. But if you had to boil this music down to one image, it would be the symbol for yin and yang. Opposing forces often complement each other. When the pianist mugs a bit on “Kid Play,” the bass goes with the ferocity of a bull that just figured out that the fight is rigged; and when Moses and Smith dance light and lithe on “Perc-Waves,” Greene deploys some more percussion that asserts an unbudging center of gravity. And if you want to ignore all the metaphors, you can just let yourself fall into the force of this music’s mercurial flow.

Bill Meyer

Invasive Species — Adapter (Baggage Claim)

Adapter by Invasive Species

You know the story; the drummer takes his solo, and the audience heads out for a beer or a piss. Invasive Species’ LP suggests that the problem isn’t drum music, it’s just that you’ve been listening to the wrong drummers and maybe there aren’t enough of them. Kevin Corcoran and Jon Bafus have been playing together for nine years, performing mostly within the city limits of Sacramento, California. Separately, their affiliations range encompass prog bands, Asian fusion ambient music and improvised exchanges with members of the ROVA Saxophone Quartet. Together, they play music that is concerned less with genre than with the possibilities of two augmented drum kits. Grooves collide and mesh, textures interweave and pull tight, meters multiply and never do these combinations seem designed to show off either musician’s prodigious chops. Rather, they show what a marvelous brain massage intuitively organized beats can provide.

Bill Meyer

Tyler Keen / Jacob Wick — S-T (Silt Editions)

Tyler Keen and Jacob Wick may employ different means, but their sounds make sense embedded on either side of a short strip of tape. Both men make noise that gets more complicated the closer you listen to it, and neither particularly needs volume to get noisy. Keen starts out with a blast, but once that subsides unintelligible walkie-talkie chatter, sputtering static, and the sounds of a cassette being snapped into a player pass before your ears. This is restless stuff, paced for the days when you haven’t been able to refill your Adderall RX and can’t be bothered to wait. Wick plays trumpet, probably muted by things they don’t tell you about in jazz school and definitely filtered through the sounds of room and non-invisible recording gear. Fueled by circular breathing that sustains a rarely broken stream of air, Wick’s horn rasps and hisses. Imagine that the sounds of a moth made of steel wool masticating its way through a warehouse full of old army blankets have been transmitted down a gutter and thence onto tape, and you just might imagine the sounds of Wick’s side of this cassette.

This is the second release by Silt Editions, a label with no web footprint aside from an email address ([email protected]). At press time, there were still a few copies in various distributors’ stocks. Happy hunting.

Bill Meyer

Rob Noyes — “You Are Tired” / “Nightmare Study” (Market Square Records)

You Are Tired b/w Nightmare Study by Rob Noyes

There’s no one way to do things, but the 45 rpm single seems tailor-made for playing late at night. “Just one more,” you tell yourself, fishing old records from the shelf and sitting companionably alongside the memories they conjure out of the commingling of sound, mind and the sensate experience of dust transferring from the sleeve to your fingers. “Well, maybe another one.” Rob Noyes is on to your game, and the tune on A-side of the Massachusetts-based 12-string guitar player’s latest record sees through your self-delusion and tells you like it really is. The chiming melody is as ingratiating as a late-night tug on the arm from a loved one. “Aren’t you going to come to bed?” But you’re on a roll, so you flip the record, expecting to hear another cantering tune. That’s when Noyes pulls you down the rabbit hole and into a state of consciousness that the sleep-deprived know only too well. Noyes has mastered a technique that makes him sound like a tape playing backwards even though he’s actually strumming in real time. It’s a neat trick, but it serves a function beyond showing Noyes’ imagination and technical acumen. By plunging the listener into a state of blurry disorientation, it confronts them with the next-day consequences of playing records late into the night.

Bill Meyer

Pelican — Nighttime Stories (Southern Lord)

Nighttime Stories by Pelican

Pelican’s sixth full-length starts in a pensive mode, an acoustic guitar ushering in “WST.” The guitar belonged to guitarist Dallas Thomas’ lately deceased father, and it sets a somber tone. Death haunts these bludgeoning, moody grooves, giving Nighttime Stories a heaviness that can’t be ascribed purely to guitar tone. Later, in the crushing stomp of “Cold Hope,” Pelican grinds relentlessly, the drums scattershot volleys of explosive angst. “Arteries of Blacktop” is likewise weighted and slow, a massive bass churn slugging it out with viscous sheets of amplified guitar sheen. Yet there’s a great deal of epic, serene gorgeousness, too — in the minor key strumming of “Full Moon, Black Water,” the mathy, knotty acrobatic riffs of “Abyssal Plain,” the slow building drone of “It Stared at Me.” The album title commemorates a friend of the band, Jody Minnoch, who died unexpectedly of heart problems in 2014; he’d meant to use the phrase for a Tusk album, but passed before he could do so. The title track glowers with volcanic life force. Hip deep in mourning and existential query, it celebrates a muscular, triumphant still-here-ness.

Jennifer Kelly

Spiral Wave Nomads — Spiral Wave Nomads (Feeding Tube / Twin Lakes)

Spiral Wave Nomads by Spiral Wave Nomads

Spiral Wave Nomads is a two man, two state band. Eric Hardiman (guitars, bass, sitar) lives in upstate New York, and drummer Michael Kiefer lives in Connecticut. This means that distances must be traveled if the two of them are to meet face to face, which is how substantial parts of this LP of cosmic instrumentals was made. And what better thing to do as you cross the verdant hills of the Northeastern USA than jam some tunes? Drifting alone to these ascending guitar lines and undulating percussive surges, it’s easy to imagine one or the other Nomad rounding some valley road and flashing on Popol Vuh’s Aguirre. “Was that a fly fisherman standing in the river, or did I see some conquistador on a raft, hollering at the monkeys?” Drift and drive a little longer and they might marvel at the play of striating light across the clouds and associating to some past pleasantly dreamy experiences involving a CD player loaded with Neu and Jimi Hendrix. All of which is a fanciful way to say that these guys sound like they have done their space rock homework, and they put their knowledge to good use on this LP. So don’t throw away the download code; you might want to program your own rural adventure with these tones.

Bill Meyer

Chad Taylor — Myths and Morals (Eyes & Ears)

Myths and Morals by Chad Taylor

One day at the end of last summer, Chad Taylor showed what it takes to be an MVP. Over the course of one long, humid Sunday afternoon on a semi-shaded stage at the Chicago Jazz Festival, he played three consecutive sets with three different bands. He sustained the set-length dynamics of Jaime Branch’s Fly or Die, swung muscularly with the Jason Stein Quartet, and managed the mercurial flow of the Eric Revis Quartet. He might have soaked through a shirt, but he never dropped a beat, nor did he ever seem less than tuned in to the particular requirements of those three quite different ensembles.

Myths and Morals most closely corresponds to another of Taylor’s projects, the Chicago Underground Duo. While his equipment is restricted to drum kit and mbira (thumb piano), his compositional imagination is wide open. These pieces may tarry for a moment on some texture or pattern, but for the most part they are studies in constant development. Precision and restraint yield surprise and mystery; the music is so involving and complete that it’s easy to forget that you’re listening to solo percussion.

Bill Meyer

Chris Welcome and His Orchestra — Beyond All Things (Gauci Music)

Beyond All Things by Chris Welcome & His Orchestra

A free jazz octet might sound like caviar soup: too much of an indulgent thing. Chris Welcome makes it work here, harnessing the noisy tendencies of this roomful of younger New York players with some light-touch compositional structure and a willingness to swing. In under half an hour, we go from a free-time fanfare highlighting the gestural playing of trumpeter Jaimie Branch and tenorist Sam Weinberg through to a medium-firm groove laid down by bassist Shayna Dulberger and drummer Mike Pride, over which cornetist Kirk Knuffke blows with a coolness so confident that it sounds like the swing feel of the composition was summoned by his playing, not the other way around. Minutes later, that groove gets harder and altoist Anthony Ware delivers a fiery solo while the rest of the horns chatter in the background like they’re doing avant-garde Dixieland (an approach perhaps being alluded to by the appellation “and His Orchestra”). Welcome himself mostly hides behind the sonic bushes, his heavily effected guitar and synthesizer offering eerie interjections and a short woozy solo halfway through the piece. He’s a virtuoso guitarist, but here he gets to be a virtuoso organizer, savvy enough to know the amount of organization called for.

Ben Remsen

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beesloosewithcanon · 5 years

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11 Questions Meme

Rules: answer the questions of the person who tagged you, come up with 11 new ones, and tag 11 new people.

I was tagged by @natsora! Thanks, lovely! this was fun!

1. What’s your favourite food?

It’s a dead tie between maki rolls and mushroom risotto. Both have rice… so should I just say rice?

2. What’s the most dangerous thing you’ve done?

Heh. Story time.

I was in technical theatre all through high school (building sets, managing sound levels, creating props, and, my specialty, lighting). My high school had a massive auditorium that sat a over a thousand people. Not only was it used for our school productions and events, but it was also consistently used by the city for things like the Symphony and traveling professional ballet performances. Anyway – so this massive theatre had catwalks about three stories up where we hung 80% of our lighting instruments. Normally when you have a theatre with a lighting rig like that, you wear a safety harness while you’re working. Not me (or the other technical theatre students). We used the buddy system: one of us would lie on the catwalk floor and pretty much dangle over the edge while we worked to adjust lights or change out colors while our buddy would hold ankles and sit on our feet. And I did this all the time. While I was doing it, it never seemed dangerous. But looking back on it, if the buddy wasn’t strong enough, I would have definitely fallen to my demise on more than a dozen occasions, like two phones of mine had.

I also grew up in Alaska and came face to face with a least half a dozen bears when wondering around the mountainside alone as a kid. So... my definition of what is or isn’t dangerous is a bit skewed I suppose.

3. What’s your guilty pleasure?

I haven’t watched it in ages but I’d have to say the TV show Lost Girl. It’s awful, like – all around awful (acting, premise, story, directing, etc.) but I enjoy it.

4. What’s your dream job?

Character/dialogue writing for a triple-A game franchise or simply being a writer in the gaming industry.

5. What’s your favourite song or music?

My music tasks are super eclectic (like I’ll go from listening to EDM to top 40 to classical symphonies to rock, and then dubstep in the same car ride. It’s wild), but the one song that always makes me stop and listen is a piano piece called The Heart Asks Pleasure First.

6. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would that be?

A cabin in the woods a few miles outside of a small town. It’s not that I dislike people (I’m an extrovert who really enjoys people and enjoys hosting people at my house), but my mental health is better when I’m surrounded by nature instead of concrete. A specific place that fits the bill is a tiny fishing town in Alaska, called Gustavus.

Or I’d love to live in Northern Japan, in the Hokkaido region of Japan.

7. How many pets do you have?

I have two! An eleven-year-old corgi named Piper and an almost one-year-old border collie lab mix rescue named Twig.

8. Do you have other creative outlets beyond the one you are engaging in most often?

Yes! On Tumblr it’s all fanfiction, but I also run a review site for queer media called thequeerblr.com (which I haven’t posted to in two months because I’ve been busy with other things); I write original queer fiction but haven’t finished anything yet or have tried to have it published; I am the Game Master (GM or DM depending on your tabletop RPG experience) for my D&D group that plays every weekend and have created a completely original world setting and story for my players; I slowly crochet blankets for friends (but mostly for my dogs); I draw and paint on occasion; and on even rarer occasions, I play guitar and piano if I have them available to me.

9. Recommend me a book or a fanfic

Oh, do I have a book recommendation for you! I love the Princess Series by Jim C. Hines (The Stepsister Scheme, The Mermaid’s Madness, Red Hood's Revenge, and The Snow Queen’s Shadow). The first book is a little slow on the uptake, but it’s a four-part book series that is a vague retelling of several popular fairy tale stories with like a… Charlie’s Angles twist? Basically, there are three princesses who work as the Queen’s special task unit and I know that sounds cheeky as hell, but the characters are amazing. Each princess has her own unique character arc and character development. And there is a lesbian main character in it who I love to pieces.

10. Can you go one week without your mobile phone and internet?

Absolutely. Just put me in nature with a journal and a tent.

11. How many WIPs do you have at the moment?

Hahahahaha …. Ha… haaaa. Fuck. Um… fanfiction alone I have 7 (only three of which are currently posted), and for my original fiction, I have… 10? 12 if you include a game concept and a podcast concept? So almost 20 altogether.

Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

Alright, tagging: @natsora @sredmund @ieatlazers @renwritesstuff @caniusproductions @adventurewithtea @korra-of-the-south @wolf-heart1197 @rpgwarrior4824 @theoreticallye @raedmagdon

Obviously no obligations. <3

Your questions:

1. If you could rewrite one game, which one and why? 2. What is one thing you like about reading fanfiction over published fiction? 3. What is one thing you like about reading published fiction over fanfiction? 4. What is one piece of media that you love but have yet to dive into its online fandom? 5. What fandom consumes most of your Tumblr feed? 6. Given the opportunity to live in another country, would you? Or would you stay in your current country? Why? 7. If you were given the opportunity, by like a wizard or something, to suddenly be a master at your preferred craft (writing, drawing, painting, sewing, etc.), would you take that offer? Or would you continue to learn the skill and grow on your own? 8. What period setting do you enjoy the most for the media you consume (historical, modern, futuristic, etc.)? 9. What type of artwork (if any) do you have hung in your living space? 10. What is your favorite genre to write? (If you’re not a writer, what is your favorite genre to read?) 11. What is your favorite type of nature (forest, beach, plains, etc.)?

#11 questions meme #holy shit coming up with questions was way harder than answering them #ask me stuff #ask me things #this was fun

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aurora-daily · 6 years

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Mother Earth’s Warrior

Interview: Aurora for The Line of Best Fit by Cheri Amour (September 28th, 2018)

Norway’s greatest pop export, AURORA speaks to Cheri Amour about her not-so-difficult second album and why it opens up a forest of thought for our future preservation.

There have long been popular culture characters in our midst hell-bent on saving the planet. Healing the world and making it a better place, for you and me and the entire human race. But there’s something different about AURORA Aksnes, better known as million-streamed Norwegian singer/songwriter, AURORA. Her latest release, Infections of A Different Kind, puts Mother Earth at its heart.

It feels fitting then to be sat in one of London’s luscious parks together, AURORA decked out in green amongst the evergreen sipping on her coconut water. She is slight but by no means shy and constantly alert, throwing out relatable anecdotes that seem to be skipping through her mind as she scans her surroundings. Her eyes are shining bright, often looking outwards rather than directly at me. Instead, she is constantly seeking out the sky, the clouds, darting at the path of a pigeon, beaming at a small child opposite us on another table. At one point, she becomes distracted by my stationary choices (“I have the same pen but in green”) and is immediately back in the bustling streets of gay Paris where she made the purchase, with her underlying care and compassion for all things, living or otherwise. “I should’ve brought mine and they’ve could’ve spoken”.

It’s been over two years since the singer sprang onto our stereos like a forest-spirit from the Bergen mountains with her debut EP, Running With Wolves. But whilst her musical mission might be led by a bold vision for a brighter future, her present still looks pretty rosy with debut full-length, All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend racking up a massive 200 million streams globally. It’s an almost magical might for an artist who only celebrated her 22nd birthday this year. But on speaking with AURORA, her emotional intelligence is undeniable. “I know the world is not a fairy tale and we’re just doing our best…” she happily admits, an astute admission for someone so renowned for her enchanting pop gems.

For the Bergen-based artist though, her strength clearly comes from the collective power of change rather than the sole-creator. She often refers more holistically to an issue than nitpicking specifics. Indeed, it’s this rallying sense of collective change that has gifted AURORA such a solid fan base of “warriors and weirdos” from the depths of South America to the smaller towns and cities of Australia. “It’s so important to fight for the things you care about”, she continues. “They have proven they can do that. They share my message. They stand up for me. If one person disagrees with what I do, they go to war”.

It reminds me of another story of a similarly impassioned figure wanting to make collective change in their world. Often admired as the crowning work of Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli, Princess Mononoke powerfully paints the struggle between the gods of a forest and the humans who consume its resources. And, it seems unbeknownst to Ghibli at the time, over 20 years on from its original release, that same spirit hasn’t been lost in Infections of A Different Kind.

Her relationship with nature is woven throughout, a sort of Hansel and Gretel style breadcrumb trail through her mind’s eye of the world around us. Much like Ghibli’s tale which finds the main protagonist locked in a struggle for the future of the unspoiled forest and an elaborate moral universe, the sophomore record is rooted in Mother Earth. “We are killing incredible beauty without even knowing that we’ve already killed so much”, she reflects, her fingers playing with a small burgundy, woven scarf. It looks homemade, thin and narrow, entwined around her small hands. “We’ve killed entire species of animals. We’ve killed possibilities of making medicine. We’ve killed people”, she pauses, clearly upset by the thoughts. “It makes me sad because I know the planet will live. She will outlive us all and we will die because we’re just tiny ants on her big skin”.

But despite her worry, life and death feel like a natural cycle for AURORA, as you might expect from someone so clued up on the climate. She speaks confidently about nature’s balance, preferring the pragmatic output of an organism rather than anything overly fussy which could also be true of the sounds she makes. “I don’t really like flowers that much. They’re too pretty for their own good. People pick them and they get to die inside a vase”. If she were a flower, AURORA would be a dried white rose, perfectly encapsulated within a moment of time; pure, classic and radiating humility. Meanwhile, lavender for its medicinal properties and affection to bees gets a glowing write up. “That’s my favourite thing about Mother Earth actually”, she explains. “All the knowledge and all that she provides us; the fruit, the medicine. That’s why we need the rainforest but we tear it down”.

Only recently have we seen the devastating effects of illegal logging in the Papua New Guinea forests which provide a home for many of its unique species. Most timbers from New Guinea and its offshore islands are processed in China before being sold around the world, largely for use in furniture and flooring. Likewise, in the Amazon around 17% of the forest has been lost in the last 50 years, mostly due to forest conversion for cattle ranching. Sadly it’s the global brand giants causing most of the destruction with Greenpeace releasing a recent report that identified major palm olive producers such as Unilever, Nestlé, Colgate-Palmolive, and Mondelez, have destroyed an area of rainforest almost twice the size of Singapore in less than three years. The problem is, much like the Native American saying, what will happen after the last tree has fallen and the rivers have been poisoned?

Live favourite, "The Seed" encapsulates this idea. Her vocal is moving, selflessly offering herself up to restore what humanity has destroyed: “Suffocate me / So my tears can be rain / I will water the ground where I stand / So the flowers can grow back again”. "The Seed" acts like the nucleus of change for AURORA. It’s the birth of something. It’s thought or an act or a movement. “It’s the beginning of everything”, she explains, enthused. “The way the seed lies underground with no sun, nothing, darkness but it knows where to go and then it breaks through the stone, the mountain, asphalt, and earth. All these things they came from down there”, she insists, pointing at a nearby flower bed at which point her gaze is caught by a fluttering pigeon on the roof. After a few seconds, she apologises: “The pigeons are so distracting”.

Conversation turns to her own beginnings, painting a picture of her home back in Norway which sounds like something straight out of a Lord of The Rings novel. A fjord carved out by glaciers in the ice ages with a little island in the middle of it that she would often take a small kayak out to and sleep overnight on in the summer when the sun rarely sets. “On one of them lives quite an angry goat so don’t go there. He’s like a proper…”, she gesticulates the animal’s horns with her hands by her ears. “He’s intense. All the other ones are fine”, she laughs. The open water feels like it is a bit of a theme to her early years, spending much of her childhood on sailboats of some varieties, not surprising for a country that has the kind of tight relationship with water that Brits have with tea. Whether it's coastline, fjord, lake or river, water is everywhere in Norway and Norwegians make the most of it. Her father sailed the seas for four years in a row before she was born, she tells me proudly.

The other towering backdrop to her youth were those sturdy mountains and an ambitious walking regime. The latter almost certainly a contributing factor to her ingenuity and appreciation of the rambling flora and fauna so prevalent in her songwriting today. “We’d go for mountain hikes at least four times a week”, she states, matter of factly. “You bring some chocolate with bread and cheese to eat at the top. It’s kind of what you do together with your Mum’s friend and her kid, you know?” Perhaps not the same as growing up in the flatlands of Norfolk, I admit. “Well, it’s very normal in Norway, especially Bergen because you have the mountains everywhere”, she continues. There’s a mountain in every city at least. In every village. And in my village, we only have eight neighbours, there’s only us living there. And I look at the water and I have the forest behind me. She openly sighs and takes a moment, transporting herself back to the shimmering open waters, stood with lungs full of the fresh mountain air.

Surrounded by such a magical setting, it’s not surprising that AURORA tries to create a kingdom of her own for listeners. The first hint at the new record, former single “Queendom” is dedicated to “everything that’s alive”. Insistent that “Queendom” should be a place “with only love”, the song is also a celebration of our differences with an open innocence that tries to find the best in all of us. Again, Ghibli’s own ethical ethos rings true here, with Princess Mononoke heralded as for its ability to make heroes of outsiders and blurring the stereotypes that usually define such characters. It’s the same for AURORA. She is an artist breaking down huge barriers around inclusivity which shine through “Queendom”’s electro-pulse and call-to-arms. “It’s very much about giving hope, like being given the tools to become a warrior, a fighter to deal with the now. Not an escape but a way to really stay in the present, and make a change”.

Directed by Paris-based, Polish-Australian Director King Burza, the single’s video finds Aurora bathed in natural light exploring the cavernous surrounds of an old country home, the dappled light falling on her through the beaten window frames. She leaps through the high-ceiling hallways in flowing white cotton, much like the lyrics suggest, as our lamb. The pulsing chorus beat kicks in with a procession of women dancers weaving behind her arms like the Shiva herself, the fierce warrior Goddess. With Scandinavia often heralded for its gender parity, it’s not surprising that a huge part of “Queendom”’s rallying cry is being channeled into some sort of feminist anthem but as AURORA herself says: “it’s much more than that. I want it to be a song for people in need”.

“I began writing for Infections of A Different Kind the day after my first album was released...it’s good when it’s fresh when you’re still like a predator. You can still smell the blood from the prey."

With its timely post-#metoo-era release, it’s not surprising that there’s a strong focus on the strength of women in here though as well as flipping assumed gender norms and empowering an army, as she sings: “The women will be my soldiers / With the weight of life on their shoulders”. It’s an element of Nordic folklore that really spoke to her warrior instincts. “I like that it was often the women that hunted. When the men went out on a journey to kill and steal, the women stayed and were the boss which is kind of cool”. Similarly, she sees herself played back to her in scrappy forest-dwelling nymphs, the Huldra. “They had messy hair like I had when I was a child”, she jokes.

Propelled by our comparisons, talk turns into a bit of an education in Norwegian children’s tales as she boasts that many of them centre around a troll. Whether that’s a troll turning to stone in the sun before it eats the children or the story of a young boy from the village who challenges the troll to a porridge-eating contest. Tactfully tying his knapsack to his belly, the boy scoops more porridge into the bag than he eats himself and then, once full, slashes it open encouraging the troll to do the same so they can power through the porridge. Fooled by the boy, the troll cuts his stomach and dies leaving all of the gold and silver in the cave for the boy to take home to pay off his family debts. “Then you have the troll mother who has put her eleven troll children to bed. That’s the first song I sang when I was two years old in my Mum’s blue kitchen”, she recalls. A newborn with pink cheeks begins to whimper to its Mum on the table next to us now which lures the singer’s attention away for a fleeting moment, her mouth fixed in a wide-open smile. “Sorry, babies and pigeons. Very distracting”, she reasons.

After the brief introduction to Norwegian folklore, it feels apt to ask around the production of the new record which took place in a fairytale studio-cum-chateau somewhere in the South of France. Positioned in a vineyard surrounded by animals and a pond, the castle sounds like the right kind of pastoral setting for such a life-affirming record. AURORA details an almost Beauty And The Beast-like existence there, holed up in the huge house’s halls and libraries for just over a month. Chef Marie cooked a three-course meal, three times a day whilst the dog Paula and cat, Ginger amble through the corridors.

It becomes clear quite quickly that AURORA hasn’t faced the difficult second album syndrome. “I began writing for it the day after my first album was released because then the first album had been done already for four months”, she beams. “That’s why I always begin right after I release right after my previous thing. I begin on the next”. A natural hunter, she adds: “It’s good when it’s fresh when you’re still like a predator. You can still smell the blood from the prey. And you’re kind of just running after it and you know where to go, that’s how I felt”.

It was a fairly natural process then? “I found it way easier than the first because I really knew what I wanted. I’ve always known since I was an embryo what I want and now I have the tools to make it happen. I know how to produce, and how to play more instruments. I played the drums and the rhythms. The multi-instrumentalist played drums on all of the songs on Infections of A Different Kind, actually, it’s kind of a new passion for her. “I love it. It’s very energetic and you get quite tired afterward which I love. I love the feeling of exhausting myself”, she grins.

"I have my own dream language which half of the population understands...a fourth...an eleventh so I also had to learn things myself because I am the only one who can know."

Adding to her workload, AURORA took up a lot of the production duties on the record too which makes a powerful statement in a world for far too many women artists are corralled into working with male producers. She’s not afraid to tackle this in her own terms, often struggling to articulate what she wanted using the technical language, the singer offers up her own alternative parallels: “Make it sound like water or bellyache”. “I realised I don’t have the technical language. I have my own dream language which half of the population understands...a fourth...an eleventh so I also had to learn things myself because I am the only one who can know”. She’s adamant that crafting her music, much like her new love of drums, is one of her biggest pleasures. The ability to realise her imagined worlds into reality gives her a certain sense of belonging which, in the future, might remain a constant more so than the live show. “If there’s one thing I’ll do less of, you know in forty years, it’s touring. But not studio, I’ll always be there”, she adds resolutely.

But despite her preference, she knows the power of sharing her songs with her legion of fans and she confesses many of the new numbers have already made it into the live set. “I think at one point it was maybe a bit too many. I like all my songs better live just because of the energy so it’s always nice to know that the fans will get to experience that first”. And that’s exactly what AURORA has tried to do with the release schedule of the record, teasing one more single out last week ahead of today’s full-length. The stark opener of “Churchyard” finds AURORA’s sincere vocal layered over one another and doused in reverb as a solemn strings section soothes in with a morbid twang as she questions the fine balance between life and love. You can almost see the arms flailing theatrics of similarly environmental leaning, Kate Bush against the beat.

Indeed, AURORA isn’t the first artist looking to heal the world with their humanitarian ideals. Pop’s biggest ally, Cher donated more than 180,000 bottles of water to Flint, Michigan, in the middle of the city's clean-water crisis. Grammy Award-winning, Rihanna was named Harvard Humanitarian of the Year back in 2017 for her philanthropic efforts after funding the build of a state-of-the-art centre for oncology and nuclear medicine to diagnose and treat breast cancer in her home nation of Barbados. Infections of A Different Kind stands united with Mother Earth almost as a vocal shining a floodlight on the dire situation we’ve left her in.

At this point, playing with the tousled strands of her hair, AURORA is whisked off for another meeting and disappears into the trees of Holland Park, much like the Huldra into the Norwegian forest. Just from spending an hour with her, it’s clear how much the Norwegian songwriter cherishes real connections with the people she meets and is keen to create a shared space where we can all co-exist together; new technologies alongside sustainable ecosystems. Without national treasure, David Attenborough preaching about the plastics in our oceans, it’s sometimes easy for us to cut out the stark realities of climate change. But high up in those Norwegian mountains, with her ear to the wind, AURORA hears it all and is ready to lead.

Forget Princess Mononoke, AURORA is our modern day pop royalty.

Infections of A Different Kind is out now on Decca Records.

#aurora #aurora aksnes #interviews #ioadk

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