#anima in absentia | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

stanakatic-spain · 6 years

Text

Canada South: 7 razones de porqué amamos a Stana Katic (2017)

Canada South explica 7 razones de porqué amamos a Stana Katic

Canada South: Los canadienses aman a Stana Katic. La actriz nominada al Emmy que es conocida por su papel interpretando a la Detective Kate Beckett en la exitosa serie, Castle, estuvo durante 8 temporadas en ABC, nació en Hamilton, Ontario, Canadá y creció en el corazón de Illinois. Pero ella ha mantenido ambas nacionalidades y da crédito a su parte canadiense y sus lazos familiares yugoslavos que da forma a sus valores.

La historia tras graduarse en West Aurora High School en Illinois en 1996, Katic volvió a Canadá. estudió en la Universidad de Toronto y luego actuación en DePaul University Goodman School a principio del 2000. “Tuve a muchísimas influencias en mi crecimiento”, me cuenta felizmente en una entrevista hace unos años. “Leí muchísimo, leí sobre Juana de arco, leí sobre Pippi Calzaslargas y todas esas fantásticas aventuras. Y luego… Zorba. Realmente creo en ese estilo de vida. Vivir la vida al máximo.”

Y ella lo hace.

Además de Castle, que trajo más de 10 millones de personas que veían semanalmente la serie cuando se emitía y está en el top 5 en España, Francia, Reino Unido, Italia y Alemania, Katic encarna el espíritu de la mayoría de los canadienses, flexible y amable. Además de la TV y su papel en películas como CBGB, Big sur, Feast of Love, For Lovers Only, Quantum of Solace… El trabajo de Katic también ha sido un amplio alcance filantrópico, el cual la hace como una notable canadiense, especialmente este año. Aquí hay 7 cosas que amamos de la enigmática y poderosa canadiense:

7. PRESENCIA: 8 temporadas en la televisión no es por accidente y, al lado de su compañero canadiense Nathan Fillion. Pero puedes ver a Stana en la película indie por los hermanos Polish (Mark y Michael), For Lovers Only o incluso en Sister Cities, y puedes ver como su rango de notabilidad como actriz. Ella trae algo raro a la pantalla.

6. PERSPICACIA: Ella piensa más allá y no salta en papeles. En 2017, Katic comenzó la producción en un papel protagonistas para Absentia, un thriller dramático de Sony Pictures Television de 10 episodios.

5. INSTAGRAM: Mira lo ecléctico que ofrece Stana desde humanidad a comida en la popular red social. Ella se acerca a los 400.000 seguidores. La puedes encontrar en @drstanakatic.

4. ARDIENTE Y SIN MIEDO: La compañía de producción que Stana lanzó, Sine Timore Productions, tiene un profundo significado. “Significa sin miedo, sin temor” me contó. “Me gusta la idea de construir una compañía con la intención de no tener límites”.

3. FEROZ DEFENSORA DE NIÑOS: El bienestar de los niños es algo grande para Stana. Ella regularmente visita hospitales y coordina donaciones a un orfanato en India. Y su participación en panel para un festival de niños de República Checa es impresionante. ¿Alfabetismo de los niños? Si. Stana cree que invertir en la educación y cuidado de los niños es una inversión en humanidad. Sigue adelante…

2. CHICA VERDE: Lanzó un programa medioambiental con su compañero de Castle, Seamus Dever, llamado The Alternative Travel Project (ATP). Anima a las personas de Los Ángeles a no usar su coche por un día o más. Fue global y creó un efecto poderoso.

1. PROFUNDIDAD: Durante un viaje a Perú, hace varios años, Stana encontró un chamán. “El me estuvo diciendo que su sistema de creencia es como un rio, cuando el camino se abre, hay un camino para seguir, que debería de ser fácil para ir en una dirección”, me recalcó. “Y si hay problemas en el camino, entonces ese no es el camino para ti. Te tienes que mover en otra dirección.”

“Cuando le escuché decir eso, pensó, Dios, hay muchísimas cosas con las que lidiamos en una base diaria. Y quizás no son cosas con las que tengamos que lidiar, quizás es todo mucho más simple, ¿sabes?, esa es mi manera de tomar decisiones. Cuando estoy explorando mi intuición es como un río. Si se siente bien, me muevo fácil en esa dirección. No hay un debería o no debería. O una lista de pros y contras. Y esa es la manera en la que lidero mi vida.”

Inicio » REVISTAS | MAGAZINES » 2017 » Canada South | Febrero 2017

The post Canada South: 7 razones de porqué amamos a Stana Katic (2017) appeared first on Stana Katic Spain: Tu fuente de información sobre Stana Katic en España.

from WordPress http://stanakatices.com/canada-south-7-razones-amamos-stana-katic/ via IFTTT

#Stana Katic

3 notes · View notes

chevd-blog · 6 years

Text

My Top 100 Favorite Albums of All Time (Part 6: 10 - 6)

10. Anno Domini High Definition – Riverside (2009)

In 2010, as I was preparing to leave Emily Carr University with a degree in fine art, I was faced with questions about the direction I wanted my painting practice to take. What did I want my artwork to say? I began by reevaluating my niche as an artist, trying to take stock of whatever attributes I had which set me apart from my peers. The largest, as far as I was concerned, was my training in computer animation. All of my colleagues were traditional painters, and that was a skillset which I could see that I possessed and others didn't. With that in mind, I decided to focus my work thematically on technology; I wanted to be able to incorporate my training with 3D computer modeling software and Photoshop into my painting, and I also felt very strongly that technology would be one of the most vital themes that could be explored by a 21st Century artist.

Around the same time, I discovered Lunatic Soul and Riverside. At first, I was just happy to have something new to listen to in the studio while I painted. But when I obtained their most recent album at the time, Anno Domini High Definition… it truly spoke to me. It was perfectly in line with the theme of my own artwork— an album which explores the effects our advancing tech is having on us. Is it really connecting us, or is it driving us apart? Is it really enlightening us, or is it turning us all into zombies with goldfish attention spans? It's all there in the title of the album, a phrase which alludes to the fact that we live in the age of wi-fi and high resolution, but also serves as a clever backronym for ADHD. This was the thesis statement for my artistic practice, in musical form.

The album begins with "Hyperactive", which emerges from a simple piano melody, and picks up steam until transitioning into a heavy metal day-in-the-life chronicle of a person whose entire perception of reality has been altered by his electronic existence. It is also the shortest song on the album, with each of the four subsequent songs being progressively longer. Clocking in at nearly 9 minutes, third track "Egoist Hedonist" meanders through three movements, including a jazzy brass section interlude, while dealing topically with the crushing pressure of conformity to society's expectations. The beautiful slower-paced "Left Out" picks up where the preceding song leaves off, detailing the emotional consequences of being overlooked in such an oppressively homogenous society. But the album's full power is conserved until the final track, "Hybrid Times", an almost 12-minute epic that embodies the perils of 21st Century life in its most virulent form: technology addiction. It starts with a frantic piano, and gives rise to squealing organs and guitars and Mariusz Duda's screams about obsession, before sinking into a seductive sea of digital ambience. In summary, from an aesthetic perspective, this is one of the albums which I feel best encapsulates my relationship with the ever-advancing world around me.

Prime cuts: "Hybrid Times", "Egoist Hedonist", "Hyperactive"

9. In Absentia – Porcupine Tree (2002)

With as much of Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson's solo work as ended up on my list, I'm sure it's not going to come as a colossal surprise to anyone that In Absentia ranks this high. This is, after all, the most critically and commercially successful album in the band's two-decade discography, and the one that many fans will point to as their best. When you mention Porcupine Tree to someone, chances are, this is the album they're going to think about first. It's a fantastic album for initiating someone who hasn't heard of them. I should know. It was the first one I heard, too.

I came across Porcupine Tree around 2006, while I was still at Ringling College in Florida. I had recently heard of this cool new website called Pandora Radio, which could recommend music based on a listener's selections. I decided to test it out by asking it to find me music in the same modern progressive rock vein as the Mars Volta. One of the songs that popped up was "Radioactive Toy", an early Porcupine Tree song that was featured on their 1992 debut album On the Sunday of Life. It wasn't as similar to the Mars Volta as I had expected, but it was interesting enough to me that I remembered it and moved on. Later, when I got around to doing more research into Porcupine Tree, and which album was best to properly introduce me to their sound, In Absentia was the one upon which everyone seemed to agree. So I tracked down "Blackest Eyes" and "Trains" on YouTube, and gave them a listen. Just from listening to those two songs, I was an instant convert. And it was a rather momentous timing as well, as I was reaching the end of my time in Florida, and preparing to start a new chapter of my life in Canada. Looking back on it, I now realize I've unconsciously drawn a pretty big line in my head: my last two years in Florida were my Mars Volta years, and my six in B.C. were my Porcupine Tree years. It's a funny thing, how the mind works sometimes.

Musically, In Absentia is an infectious blend of the band's progressive roots with a distinctly post-90s alternative rock influence, as well as some heavy metal edge and a little extra ambience tossed in for good measure. Though not a concept album in the purest sense, many of the album's tracks, including "Blackest Eyes" and "Strip the Soul", are thematically linked to serial killers, and an exploration of the impetuses behind their twisted mental states. Like the other two albums directly before it, In Absentia also has one of Steven Wilson's trademark critiques of the music industry, this time in the form of "The Sound of Muzak", which laments the apathy with which the degradation of popular music is regarded. Wilson's vocals may perhaps not be the flashiest, but there's something in the conservative, simplistic nature of his singing that has always struck me as charming— particularly in songs like "Trains", where he layers the vocals to produce a wholesome choral effect. And while we're on the subject of "Trains"… yes, I know it's so cliché of me to say, given how it's the single most popular song in the band's repertoire, but it's damn near flawless. Listen to "Trains" and tell me you don't feel something special, I dare you. And the same challenge can also be extended to the devastating "Heart Attack in a Layby", or the melancholic "Prodigal", or the album's beautifully graceful piano finale, "Collapse the Light into Earth". There's just so much stellar musicianship here, that I have a difficult time fitting it all into a terse few paragraphs.

Prime cuts: "Trains", "The Sound of Muzak", "Strip the Soul"

8. Ænima – Tool (1996)

One of the most indispensable albums of my high school years, I received my copy of Ænima sometime around 2001 or 2002. Upon my first listen, it became an instant favorite, and cemented Tool as one of the most profoundly important bands I had ever heard. I can't overstate this. When I was 17, Tool was the axis around which all my other musical tastes rotated. They were the foundation of my love of progressive rock and metal. In an era when boy bands were only just beginning to peter out, Tool— and Ænima specifically— helped me keep my sanity, and showed me that musical appeal and intelligence were not mutually exclusive. That was incredibly important to me at that age, because I sure didn't see many other signs around me that my intellect was something of which I could be proud.

Ænima is, in many ways, a transitional album— after the band's first full-length release, Undertow, they parted ways with their original bassist Paul D'Amour and replaced him with Justin Chancellor, which shifted their sound away from the blunt, primal heaviness of their early work, toward something much more nuanced and thought-provoking. Ænima was the sound of Tool evolving. The name itself is meant to be symbolic of change— a mixture of "anima" and "enema", representing the purging of the psyche. And of course, I would be remiss if I failed to mention one of the other major catalysts for this metamorphosis: the band's experiences with the now-legendary comedian Bill Hicks, who passed away in 1994 from pancreatic cancer, and to whom Ænima was meant as something of a posthumous tribute. Hicks was first and foremost an evangelist for free and critical thought, and while opening shows for Tool, his influence rubbed off on the band. It was Hicks' routine entitled 'Goodbye You Lizard Scum', a tongue-in-cheek rant about the destruction of Los Angeles as retribution for its vapid banality, that inspired the album's apocalyptic title track (albeit, spelled "Ænema" instead).

While it may not quite be their most advanced work, Ænima is sonically one of their most interesting albums, and was the one that was responsible for laying much of the groundwork and setting many of the precedents for the path the band was to follow in their post-Undertow years. It is the album that introduced the band's use of experimental segue tracks to pad between the actual music and showcase their quirky sense of humor—here, there are several, including "Message to Harry Manback", a violent answering machine message from an irate Italian which the band reframed as a love poem; "Useful Idiot", which is comprised of the sound of a record skipping, and which was included in order to mess with listeners of the vinyl edition; "Intermission", which is a Monty Python-esque organ intro for the song "jimmy"; and "Die Eier Von Satan", an industrial-sounding German screed intended to fool the unsavvy listener into mistaking a cookie recipe for a Nazi rally. Thematically, the songs themselves are largely tied to the subject of personal evolution: "Stinkfist" vocalizes a disenchantment with desensitization, "Forty-Six & 2" explores the idea of growth through terms of Jungian psychology, and the album's 13-minute finale "Third Eye" begins with samples of Hicks's stand-up act and takes the listener on a journey of deep, psychedelic-fueled introspection. From start to finish, Ænima is about shedding one's old skin and attaining a new consciousness— it's what the band themselves did in the course of making the album, and musically, it's what I did in discovering it.

Prime cuts: "Pushit", "Stinkfist", "Third Eye"

7. Kid A – Radiohead (2000)

Let me set the scene for you: It's Spring Break 2007. The beginning of April in Florida, and I'm 21 years old. I'm staying in a hotel room in Orlando over the weekend, after driving up from my parents' house in Bradenton. My mission is to gain entrance to the Canada Pavilion at EPCOT, so I can do some artistic research on totem poles for my senior thesis presentation at Ringling. It's been a few months since my first trip to actually visit Vancouver, when things didn't go as well as I had hoped. On Saturday night, I am heartbroken, despondent, and completely at a loss for what to do next in my life. Sitting alone in the dark of my hotel room, I listen to "How to Disappear Completely", and totally collapse into despair. Kid A was an album that I discovered from my time spent in Canada, from friends who were fans of Radiohead. In that moment, though, the music perfectly mirrored my isolation and melancholia—I actually felt like disappearing completely.

I know it's a strange incident to cite as a reason for liking this album, but it isn't just this one incident that has indelibly stamped Kid A into my consciousness. I have so many memories tied to that album: camping near Harrison Hot Springs, in the forests of British Columbia; late-night singalongs in the car with friends while driving somewhere; the ending of my time in Florida. Despite the fact that Kid A alienated a lot of Radiohead fans who were expecting something more along the lines of OK Computer, Part 2, it's actually my favorite Radiohead album specifically because it's such a hard-left turn away from everything the band had ever done up to that point (well, that, and the memories). There's an eerie feeling permeating the entire recording— steeped in paradox, simultaneously calm and frenetic. I once told my friend Laurie about the Orlando incident, and that I interpreted "How to Disappear Completely" as six minutes of sheer melancholy. She replied that the impression the song gave her was much more positive and uplifting. And here's the thing: after that conversation, both of us could understand the reasoning behind the other's perspective. The song is both of those things at the same time.

The biggest change, of course, was Radiohead's risky decision to ditch their trademark 90's alt-rock sound for an avant-garde art rock blend with a sound palette of strange digital textures and electronic drum beats— "Everything in Its Right Place" and "Idioteque" being textbook cases. In other instances, like "The National Anthem", the band experiments with jazz instrumentation that, only three years earlier, would have been unthinkable on a Radiohead album. The only song on the album that even remotely resembles the old Radiohead's rock roots is "Optimistic", although even that song is much more ambient than their usual early fare. And through it all, Thom Yorke's distinct voice, despite being frequently unintelligible, lends the music another dimension of emotion with a collage of strangely oblique lyrics. It's an album that has served very well as an expression of my own adventures into the unknown.

Prime cuts: "Idioteque", "Everything in Its Right Place", "How to Disappear Completely"

6. The Fragile – Nine Inch Nails (1999)

As a teenager, I was slow to develop an affinity for Nine Inch Nails (as well as associated act Marilyn Manson). It wasn't for lack of interest; I'd seen NIN and Marilyn Manson music videos, and I knew for sure that I was interested. It was mostly because I lived in the Bible Belt, and because I was also wary of what my parents' reaction might be if they knew I owned anything by them. Don't get me wrong—they weren't really religious themselves, and they were usually pretty laissez-faire about my musical tastes… but I can recall an occasion where my father once told me in no uncertain terms that he saw no artistic merit whatsoever in Marilyn Manson; it was one of the very few times growing up when I really felt like my parents and I clashed on the sort of music to which I could listen. But The Fragile changed that. In 2003, in the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, I spent a month at a pre-college program at Ringling, which was intended to give prospective students an idea what on-campus life would be like. During one of my periods of free time, I was browsing a nearby store which sold used vinyl records and CDs, and came across a copy of The Fragile. It was my chance! No parents to worry about for weeks, no conservative Georgia atmosphere to tell me no— I was totally in the clear to buy it and add it to my collection, and no one could do a goddamn thing about it. Over the next few weeks of the program, as I became familiar with the album, I finally had a chance to properly fall in love with NIN.

So what do you do after you create a groundbreaking album like The Downward Spiral? How the fuck do you top it? That question has already been partially answered by my review of Kid A (another album that was created under similar circumstances). But in Trent Reznor's case, I suppose another part of the answer was quantity, because The Fragile is a double album, separated into a "Left" disc and a "Right" disc. That doesn't necessarily mean he sacrificed quality, though. I sort of feel conflicted saying this, because I know that Reznor was personally going through a particularly difficult and painful time in his life during the recording of this album… but it's my favorite NIN recording, specifically because it's so much more nuanced than anything else he'd done up to that point. I can't say it's heavier, because Broken takes that distinction; I can't say it's truly darker, because of The Downward Spiral. But The Fragile is very hard and very dark, in a less readily apparent way. It doesn't bludgeon you like its predecessor does. There are still furious outliers like "Somewhat Damaged" and "No, You Don't", but the rage of The Downward Spiral has been transmuted into resignation, self-loathing, and even some quieter moments of introspection here.

One of the biggest differences between The Fragile and its forerunners is the increased presence of piano—not a synth, not a keyboard, not digital textures, but a real, honest-to-goodness traditional piano. It was something that really hadn't been seen very much from Reznor at the time. Aside from the raging intro (the aforementioned "Somewhat Damaged"), the Left disc is full of songs where the piano has a conspicuous presence: "The Frail", "The Wretched", "We're in This Together", "Just Like You Imagined" (also known as the instrumental from the trailers for 300), and the oddly gentle "La Mer". The end of the Left disc is capped by the eerily beautiful "The Great Below", which has, over the years, earned the dubious distinction of being one of my top picks for listening during my depressive bouts; it is about as close as I've ever truly been to staring into the abyss. On any other recording, I would consider it the climax of the whole work, but in this case, considering its subject matter, I wonder if it's not more fitting for me to call it the nadir instead. The Right disc, on the other hand, sees Reznor more in his usual element, with the hard-edged guitars, precision drums, and rasping, glitching electronics of songs like "Where Is Everybody?" and "Please". When it comes down to it, The Fragile's real strength lies in being the best demonstration of NIN's full musical range— and through it all, Reznor's mix of self-deprecation, cynicism and flirtations with nihilism hold the diverse assemblage of songs together as a binding element.

Prime cuts: "We're in This Together", "The Great Below", "Into the Void"

And at last, all that is left is the top 5! Check back here tomorrow for the final part of the list!

#top 100 #top 100 list #music #list #albums #favorite

0 notes