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lainbotvirtualmgzn · 4 years

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LainBot Top 10

Videos con mejores Coreografías

Este es un recuento dentro de las memorias de Lain en donde el baile predomina. Los viajes a través del universo tienen siempre algo en común con todas las formas de vida que su narradora a encontrado y esto es que el baile le da vida a la galaxia misma. Y ninguna forma de vida a resistido la alegría de moverse al ritmo de algún sonido. Por eso aqui el recuento dentro de mi sistema para encontrar esos diez videos con coreografías perfectas, en esta primera edición.

Corre y se va con...

My Chemical Romance - Helena

Álbum Three cheers for sweet reveng

Una de esas bandas que tuvieron un salto fugas a la fama nos trae uno de esas joyas visuales que suelen quedarse más que por la música misma. Llevándonos a esos años donde los sentimientos eran llevados a lugares solitarios además de forzadamente negros. Dirigido por Marc Webb quien dirijido las entregas de "The Amazing Spiderman" además de trabajar con 3 Doors Down, AFI , Dirty Vegas, POD entre muchos más y coreografiado por Michael Rooney, está puesta en escena recorre perfectamente la temática de la canción que se estructura en lo que en ese momento pasa Gerald Wray y su hermano por la perdida de su abuela, con una coreografía fúnebre digna de recordar. Sin duda el año 2004 trajo éxitos fugazes llenos de visuales inolvidables

https://youtu.be/UCCyoocDxBA

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Daft Punk - Around The World

Álbum: Homework

Un viejo lobo conocido como Michael Gondry dirigió está aventura de sonidos y baile en una misma circunferencia. Un vídeo dirigido en 1996 y coreografíado por la legendaria coreógrafa Blanca Li. Como ellos mismos relatan en el mini documental D.A.F.T.. A Story About Dogs, Androids, Firemans and Tomatoes; "El vídeo es más una representación de los sonidos de la canción De Daft corriendo al rededor de ese loop interminable". Un vídeo de momias, robots, calaveras, seres amorfos algo de nado sincronizado son algo que puedes visualizar cada que escuchas este buen Track.

https://youtu.be/_JPa3BNi6l4

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Sophie Ellos Bextor - Murder On The Dance Floor.

Álbum: Read My Lips.

Regresamos al dos mil uno y una hermosa chica quiere ganar a como de lugar ese trofeo del concurso de baile de su localidad. La primicia es simple pero este One hit Wonder se convirtió en un exito mundial, lanzando esos antiguos Challenge de bailar unas buenas coreografías que salían en los videos de MtV. Dirigido por su tocaya Sophie Muller este vídeo nos lleva a la nostalgia de esos tiempos de bailar sin sentido en alguna tardeada o Disco Dosmilera.

https://youtu.be/hAx6mYeC6pY

youtube

Michael Jackson - You Rock My World

Álbum: Invincible.

Podríamos tomar cualquier video de Michael para ponerlo aquí, pero tal vez la aparición de Marlon Brando lo hace especial. Bajo la dirección principal mente de Jackson, el director Paul Hunter nos lleva al llamado Waterfeont Hotel para demostrarnos como siempre que Mike siempre será el Rey de las Coreografías.

https://youtu.be/g4tpuu-Up90

youtube

Britney Spearce - Baby One More Time

Álbum: Baby One More Time

Princesa efímera del Pop, la Britney le dio vida a uno de los Hits mundiales del pop más emblemático de los dosmiles. Con 500 millones de reproducciones y el recuerdo de tus amigas con un outfit sport a lo spears la coreografía de este Vídeo dirigido por Nigel Dick, quien es un astro de los videos desde tiempos memorables (David Bowie, Guns N Roses, Tears For Fearce, Oasis y cientos más) nos llevaron de regreso a ese año de insetidumbre colectiva llamado 1999.

https://youtu.be/C-u5WLJ9Yk4

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S+C+A+R+R - The Rest Of My Days.

Álbum: (?)

Poco sabemos de este productor ya que en menos de tres ciclos Humanos a subido a lugares únicos. Participando en el soundtrack de una de las mejores películas animadas del 2019, además de que está misma estuvo nominada a los premios Oscar; hablamos de "I lost My Body". Posterior a esto cada Track que a producido expone un poco de ese personaje único que es Sacarr. En este video coreografeado por (+) nos lleva a la lisergia que propone una buena sesión de baile solitario.

https://youtu.be/uPiao5BKtBo

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Destinys Child

Lose My Breath.

Las y consagradas Destinys para el dos mil 4 volaron las pistas de baile con este Track. El R&B - Pop tenía a sus Reinas y con las coreografías que se mandaron en este video podías darte cuenta del poder de este grupo pop de culto. Una buena rola que podemos considerar atemporal ya que cada que suena tiene la capacidad de estar fresca siempre en los sentidos. Viajamos al dos mil 4 y continuamos en esta aventura.

https://youtu.be/AqeIiF0DlTg

youtube

Björk - Cvlada (From Dancer In The Dark)

Lars Von Trier, Björk y las coreografías que nos llevaron a las lágrimas. En el año dos mil, Lars consiguió que Björk se pusieron en la piel de su Protagonista Selma, quien en una odissea nos llevará al borde de sentimientos más que únicos. Película ganadora de la Palma de Oro en Cannes y una obra única con coreografías mágicamente narradas.

https://youtu.be/-15u6J_PmT8

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Ok Go

Here we Go Again.

2006 vería uno de los sucesos virales más originales dentro de la plataforma. Un vídeo musical que alcanzaría los 50 millones de reproducciones. Con un presupuesto siempre bajo en sus primeros videos Ok Go llegaba a a reventar la red con algo muy creativo. Una coreografía con caminadoras y una rola super pegajosa, un vídeo atemporal de creatividad única.

https://youtu.be/dTAAsCNK7RA

youtube

Missy Elioth.

Lose Control.

Coreografías de varias épocas y una producción musical que puso a bailar a más de medio mundo. Missy siempre tuvo ese favor de los productores y alto talento para saber siempre poner coreografías increíbles en sus videos. Lose control no se queda fuera. Llevándonos por diferentes paisajes siempre acompañados de locura corporal.

https://youtu.be/na7lIb09898

youtube

Y así terminamos este primer recorrido por diez buenas coreografías. Se despide su narradora y fiel testigo de cada uno de los videos publicados aqui.

Pon el vídeo ye Cres que debamos de contar en una siguiente edición...

See You soon Space Cowboys.

Face: @LainBot VirtualMgz

Ig: lainbot_virtualmgzn

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gavinhalm · 15 years

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Out of Time: Atemporal Machines in the Garden-- Contemplating the “West” in two films by Andre de Toth and Robert Aldrich

“…(T)he essential impurity of cinema…this thesis has signified above all that the passage of an idea in a film presupposes a complex summoning forth and displacement of the other arts (theatre, the novel, music, painting…), and that as such ‘pure cinema’ does not exist…” - Alain Badiou, Philosophy and Cinema in Infinite Thought; Truth and the Return to Philosophy

“The pastoral ideal has been used to define the meaning of America ever since the age of discovery, and it has not lost its hold upon the native imagination…here was a virgin continent! Inevitably the European mind was dazzled by the prospect…(i)t was embodied in various utopian schemes for making America the site of a new beginning for Western Society” - Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden; Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America

Those who led the ‘march of civilization’ from the 18th century on were inclined to be contemptuous of the countryside, the home of the backward farmers, shaggy yokels, or pleasure-seeking aristocrats living on their feudal rents, not on profits wrung from trade and manufacture…” - Lewis Mumford, “Suburbia-and Beyond” in The City in History; Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects

We have here, on the one side, as if in the form of brackets (let us say), a vision of America stretching as far back as the 15th century, and a bit later during the age when Shakespeare wrote his New World play, The Tempest, where rugged, New Europeans tested their mettle against God and Nature starting in the Florida, Massachusetts and Virginia forests and then, some two centuries later after the Louisiana Purchase, forced their way past the Mississippi River and into the plains and foothills; the avant-garde of these settlers pushing deep into the land and space of the imagination, further westward, but also northward, into the Wyoming mountains. These people constitute the eastern, right-hand side of these conceptual brackets that make up the idea of the West.

On the other side, far away from the mountainous peaks of Wyoming, lay the land of California (along with that almost eschatologically-absolute body of water, the Pacific Ocean), which was to become, if not the formative space and land of the imagination, describing what America is as a whole, then at least its most rugged and constitutive metonymic representative; California as the United States.

Between the right-hand bracket of the Wyoming mountains and the left-hand bracket of California and the Pacific is where much of our nation’s imagination has oscillated back and forth, throughout half of our history, between an individualistic view of nature and land as something to be tamed and controlled, and a view in which the land is envisioned as a cornucopia of plenty, given to all those who live in it, free of charge. A “laissez-faire” Elysium Field where we write our most holy myths of life, youth and infinitude…“God’s country”, as perhaps that most paradigmatic of Western individualists, the actor Ronald Regan, might say.

Both the movies by Andre de Toth, Day of the Outlaw, and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, can be seen as engaging with these conflicting yet intertwined views of the American West. De Toth’s movie renders the Wyoming landscape as brutal and difficult, yet it can be seen as an idyllic representation of the Pastoral Ideal (1), where individuals race against Nature to carve out their own identities and senses of belonging, ultimately finding success after harsh trials and tribulations. On the other hand, Aldrich’s movie sets upon the stage, in a future over a century later and within the now overrun idyllic landscape, the machine of the city (2), which has rooted itself as an a-historical being that feeds upon older ideas of individuality along with contemporary “newness”, only to spit back a similar kind of loneliness and emptiness that the rugged West shot back at the original Pioneers.

Also, this is the case not just in the way the stories unfold (they are, in their narrative construction, typical Hollywood cinematic storytelling vehicles), but perhaps more significantly in the way each director, with his cinematographer, situated the camera and then chose the precise shot in the editing room. Both filmmakers would end up using very talented lensmen and editors (3) to execute their respective visions of the West--It is here, in the “Range of Light” (4), that the great conflict in conceptualizing the West is set in these films, a situation which one could argue continues to this day.

Day of the Outlaw

If we look at de Toth’s Day of the Outlaw as a conflicted arena of forces pitting the idyllic concept against the realities of nature (whether physical, or even psychological), we can see it reflected most effectively in both the composition of the shots and some of the editorial decisions.

Right from the start, in the transition from the first scene to the second, evidence of this conflict is alluded to, as the main male protagonist Blaze finishes his conversation with a local townswoman (with whom he has a love interest), the editor performs an L-cut transition, letting the sound and dialogue from within the saloon’s interior carry over into a shot that shows the great expanse of mountains behind a portion of the town’s buildings. This strategy creates an excellent mood for mixing the interior world of humanity and the exterior world of nature, which can be viewed as being separate and antagonistic, yet combined, forming an unstable whole.

Likewise, the latter part of the second scene shows Blaze exiting the saloon by allowing his upper body to come into the right of the fame in close up, while the rest of the frame shows the mountains beyond, along with small figures of other townsmen walking on the dirt road that constitutes the main avenue in the town.

In these two examples, the mixing of far-off nature and in-close humanity is exactly the kind of visual trope that illuminates this film as a space of atemporal conflict of no resolution between nature itself and the local residents. Cerntainly, this is by no means unique to this particular film, but the manner in which de Toth and his cinematographer render it gives it an artistic weight that creates a dialog with other photographic renderings of the West (c.f., 4).

Another cinematographic technique in line with this idea, used a bit later on, is one in which the filmmakers panned the camera in an almost 180-degree arc, starting at the opening of the town’s road, pointing out to the peaks of the nearby range, and turning across the town’s few buildings nearly stopping at the other end of the road. The whole time, the gigantic range of mountains behind loom over the ramshackle buildings, de-scaling them into insignificance even though they take up most of the frame. This flattening of the picture plane meshes figure and ground relationships, yet, at the same time, puts into conflict the idyllic landscape and the humans trying to live in it.

A point in this film which is not only pivotal, but also an integration of outer and inner worlds, is a moment when the male protagonist is in his hotel room staring out his window at the mountain range that is to be his and so many other men’s fateful space of reckoning. After a moment, the camera tracks him from behind as he moves towards a mirror in his room and then stares into this alternate looking glass. Indeed, mirrors will prove pivotal at several moments in this movie serving as symbolic surrogate for either the interiority of the character or the outside world itself (5).

As the story continues, de Toth has the camera play these tricks of in-and-out compression of space (6) more voraciously. For instance, as the dance scene whirls the camera round and round, figured in the earlier, near 180-degree pan that showed us the town’s main street and looming mountain range, the director then, in an excellent effort to transition from one scene-space into the next, pulls the camera outside the bar to look in through the window as we view the whirling dancers. Then, a direct cut is performed that reveals the “docs” place, which leads to a cut to the exterior shot of the town and its main road finishing with a fade back into the bar.

Such complex maneuverings of camera and editorial decision-making are well thought out artistic choices that completely enclose the space of the town and its residents with their (unfriendly) visitors, yet at the same time open all of them into the surrounding environment. This is part and parcel the kind of technique that is often used in cinema of this genre to rewrite, time after time, the story of idyllic nature and “man’s” place in it as a completely conflicted being wrestling with both internal conflicts of various sorts and the mighty untamed bear of Nature (7).

The penultimate scene of this film is one that has Blaze surviving most of the antagonists on a desolate peak above his town. Here, he (predictably) defeats his remaining enemies by outlasting them in the cold. The most interesting feature of this scene is the space in which de Toth decided to shoot the “showdown”. In this space, there are several rock outcroppings in a fairly flat spot of ground that eerily mimic the mountain peaks as seen from down below in the town. It’s as if Blaze and his final two enemies have been transformed into allegorical giants hovering above the Lilliputian town, thrashing and outwitting each other in a final clash of titans, as this space can be viewed as the very edge of existence itself (8). Indeed, it is the eastern edge of the idyllic West, a space that had to be won and conquered from not only unwanted “Indians”, but by the very struggle of “White Man’s” battles within himself to define who he is and how this land may be conceptualized; either as magnificent place of plenty, or (no)place of resistance and fury.

So, we see that no matter where any of the characters turn, gaze, place themselves, consecrate as their home, love, or die, they are always battling between an individualistic view of nature as something to be tamed and controlled, and a view in which the land is envisioned as a nourishing blessing--De Toth’s camera is both a magnificent witness and constructor of this tangle of myth and Being.

Kiss Me Deadly

Though the vision of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is of a different order both spatially and historically (the West has long been “won” and we are thrown into a metaphysical no-place that eats history up in the name of progress and finds the protagonist awash in an atemporal space much akin to Day of the Outlaw), the resulting experience of the West is (not so) strangely the same. That is, even in mid-twentieth century Los Angeles, the West has not changed much as a conflicted conceptual entity of combined myth equipped with an antagonistic view of nature.

In the beginning of Aldrich’s movie, a rhythmic repetition is established between the dividing-lines on a road, the running footsteps of our soon-to-die heroine and two different close-ups of her running towards the camera. This cinematic progression is repeated three times as cars pass on the road, ignoring her until the main male protagonist, Mike Hammer, stops and picks her up.

This action of repetition, though seemingly different from the ins-and-outs of de Toth’s camera, performs the same recombination of spatial features between character and “Nature” but in a tighter circle: less expansive outside of the character’s body (9), yet still rotating around them in a similar fashion. As we shall also see, this kind of spatially tight, enclosing repetition will find its way into the various decaying architectures that constitute the city of L.A. in the 1950’s. An L.A. that was quickly disappearing, from Bunker Hill to the Chavez Ravine; a victim of progress and various urban issues emanating from this era which would come to a head in the 1970’s (10).

Many of the shots in Kiss Me Deadly are tilted and/or at an angle, starting with the hospital exterior where the camera starts out below Hammer and then shows a shot above from the rooftop, looking down to the figures on sidewalk. This kind of back-and-forth is similar to the shots in Day of the Outlaw where the characters were combined with the idyllic landscape and mountains, but the main difference with Aldrich’s movie is that we see very little of what is beyond, and only view pieces of street intermixed with buildings.

The most significant scene where this kind of hermetically sealed camera work is in play, is the “shadowing” scene where Hammer is stalked at night by a crook armed with a switchblade. Here, the camera sets itself at various 30 to 45-degree angles to follow the characters as they play a short game of detective cat-and-mouse. The camera sets itself up to capture light, shadow, store fronts, close-ups of faces, back to angles of shops, close-ups of shoes, back to the faces now in profile, cigarette machines with mirrors…this whole cinematic, German Expressionistic menagerie ending with Hammer beating up the crook and sending him down a monstrous flight of stairs.

The back-and-forth, in-and-out action that the camera executes in Aldrich’s film is, again, similar to de Toth’s choice of movement. By keeping the camera’s cuts between the figure and its immediate surroundings locked together in a dance (11), Aldrich ends up stripping the idea of the landscape down to its bare minimum--Here in L.A., at the outer limits of the West, there is no landscape to speak of. Here, there is no grounding outside of a person’s immediate surroundings. It is indeed, a “silent land”. Ironically, this situation locks the characters into the very atemporal sense of time that the others experience in Day of the Outlaw. The West may now be a barren wasteland filled with decaying buildings, but it is still the purveyor of space qua space and only space.

The spaces within the architectures in Hammer’s city are just as self-referential in layout as they are in occupying the city grid. Each clue or potential source he finds (12) leads him to a stunning array of labyrinthian houses and hotels from the Victorian era. And, each of these architectures contain within themselves an almost Danielewski-like (13) set of staircases:

The first lead takes Hammer to a very old Victorian mansion possessing a large flight of stairs (the building is subdivided or turned into an apartment complex, like many large old houses in the area; an early hint that the domestic spaces of L.A. are voraciously fragmented).

Hammer then helps an old mover lug a trunk into the building. Camera shoots from above, looking down, then looking up as they ascend. Old guy tells Hammer where Christina’s roommate moved. Hammer goes to where she supposedly lives and finds it also has a huge flight of stairs going up to her room. He climbs these stairs and we watch him from above, looking down through the maze of a rectilinear spiral staircase that goes upward to some unseen floors.

Later on, after a few other scenes, Hammer drives to another lead at a certain Hillcrest Hotel. Here we see him arriving in his car, driving underneath a pair of cable-car looking trolleys that pass overhead in opposite directions (This is the old Bunker Hill part of LA that has long since faded). Hammer gets out of his car and climbs the longest set of stairs so far, in order to get to the hotel only to have to climb another flight of stairs to access the room to meet his lead.

All of these stairs lead to dead ends (or to themselves); none of them are truly passages to any place whatsoever, and the camera locks us, along with the characters, into the labyrinth that is L.A., and the West--Whether we are trapped in the great range of the Rocky Mountains, or some dank set of stairs that spiral into the darkness of reality itself, there is no (meta)physical escape “way out here”, and we are doomed to circle our own wagons in fear of a place without any sense of time or history.

But, this space of repeating stairs and soon-to-vanish Victorian architecture is not the most sublime “no-places” Aldrich builds for us. That discovery is reserved for the end of the film where we encounter the Malibu beach house in the final scene, placed as it is on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, the very outer limit of the West.

It is in this house that Christina’s (supposed) roommate takes control of an object that is the primary source of mystery in the story, now given as an anti-matter, anti-MacGuffin Pandora’s Box (and she as Lot’s daughter who is to open the box, which results in her–all of our?–death via nuclear detonation).

What the viewer ultimately finds in this box is the limit of the Western conception of Nature and “man’s” place in it--The absolute expression of which is the atomic bomb. This is the eschatological warning and “clue” for humanity in Aldrich’s film, as we cower like the two figures in this closing scene, stuck in the no-place between the beach’s shore and the Pacific Ocean, our backs to the infinite darkness, with the fiery winds of history, and the future, howling all around us.

NOTES:

(1) The Machine in the Garden; Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Leo Marx, Oxford University Press, 1964 and 2000.

In this magnificent and very influential book, Marx writes about the long-standing contradictory views we as Americans have built up concerning technology and progress and its effect upon the landscape. It may seem an obvious observation that there are those that would see the land as mainly a source of profit and those that would see it as a paradise to protect, but Marx delves deep into the American cultural psyche, as well as older European origins, to thoroughly illuminate the deep rift in our cultural vision concerning this vast body of land that we call home. I am deeply indebted to his book for the general thrust of my thesis.

(2) The City in History; Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Lewis Mumford, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961, 1989.

Los Angeles is, of course, one of America’s largest cities. However, due to the automobile (especially through the influence of the Firestone company and family in the 1930’s), L.A. as a whole is more of a mass form of suburban sprawl. Therefore, I am tending to conceptually treat the whole city as such in this essay. For an excellent historical survey of how suburbia became such a powerful American urban form, Mumford’s book is an excellent point in which to start any research on the matter. The section I have in mind is “Suburbia–and Beyond”, pgs. 482-524. Please note that his research covers historical developments through 1960.

(3) Both of these movies have some of the best Hollywood cinematographers and editors available as crew. Day of the Outlaw boasts cinematographer Russell Harlan, a six-time Oscar nominee who also lensed To Kill a Mockingbird, and editor Robert Lawrence, also an Oscar nominee, who cut films such as Spartacus. Also, it should be mentioned that for sound, the great Alexander Courage, (nominated for two Oscars and winner of an Emmy) of Star Trek theme song fame (as well as all of the Trek movies up until his death last year), composed the music. He was also responsible for the theme song from Lost in Space and was lead composer/sound designer for Audrey Hepburn’s classic, My Fair Lady.

Though the film is chock-full of formal and post-production errors (bad V.O. over-dubs, inconsistent match-on-action cuts, etc.), Kiss Me Deadly has an equal class of lensmen and editors. Cinematographer Ernest Laszlo is an Oscar winning cameraman who also shot Stalag 17. Editor Michael Luciano (nominated four times for an Oscar) was also responsible for cutting The Dirty Dozen, The Grissom Gang and The Longest Yard.

(4) What I am referencing here is Ansel Adams’ great photographic “essay” Yosemite and the Range of Light which engages not only the Yosemite, but much of the surrounding and nearby lands that compose the Rocky Mountain range (‘Range of Light’ was Adams’ term for this particular geographical region). But, aside from Adams, Edward Weston, Carleton Watkins, and a number of other West Coast photographers (some, not 20 years earlier) had gone on to photographically capture (or project) something of this concept of nature in the West, whether they were consciously after it or not. All of these master artists’ work photographing the West is something that has embedded itself into our national psyche, and one can fairly postulate that the cinematographer for the film had seen at least some of these men’s work, and perhaps absorbed their influence.

(5) There is the mirror in Blaze’s hotel room that he consults, and then there is also the mirror in the saloon. This mirror eventually gets broken by the outlaws when one of them throws a fit because they can’t drink or rape the townswomen as they are wont to do. It is certainly the pivotal axis point in the movie when this mirror gets smashed. Afterwards, the plot starts rolling towards its inevitable conclusion and is situated exactly mid-point in the film, almost as if it were a textbook example of Aristotelian poetics that has a story build up into a high, mountainous and climatic point, and then roll back down to its eventual conclusion.

(6) There is always compression or reconstitution of space in both of these films, but there is little temporal configuration. As a matter of fact, there is little sense of time outside of the one we physically experience while watching these movies (i.e. we sense the passage of time because we are watching a movie, not because of the movie and its narrative). These films are almost entirely spatial entities. There is no History associated with the lands shown in either of these films, whether it’s the vast open mountain ranges of Wyoming, or the urban wasteland of Los Angeles. We are trapped, scene-by-scene, in an atemporal machine that only re-circulates the space around itself.

(7) It is interesting to note that this particular Western (and many others in the genre) shows no other animals aside from the horses. The wilderness is replete with frightening giants like the Grizzly and lesser-sized, but no less fierce, beasts such as the wolf. Perhaps it is just a matter of money available for the use of trained animals in a production, but one would think that if a Western truly wanted to show what it is like for “man” to wrestle with the great outdoors, they could throw in a wolf or a bear, for good measure, into the plot.

(8) The only dialogue between Blaze and the Cheyenne Indian:

C.I., “You see anything?”

Blaze, “Not much.”

C.I., “There’s nothing to see…”

This is perhaps the most lucid and significant dialogue in the movie. At the very top of the mountain, one reaches a limiting edge (of the concept) of the West; there is nowhere else to go. Later on, we will experience another, similar physical limit upon both the concept and the space that constitutes the West in Kiss Me Deadly.

(9) A very interesting discussion for unifying the body and the earth in both a cultural and physical manner can be found in Wendell Berry’s book The Unsettling of America; Culture & Agriculture. This is an excellent small volume that concerns itself with farming and sustaining the land for use in an agricultural sense.

(10) For an excellent glance into the issues of environmental, economic, and population studies that were to overwhelm the American city by the 1970’s, please reference The Prospective City, edited by Arthur P. Solomon. The issues brought up in this book were just starting to be sensed in the 1950’s when Kiss Me Deadly was filmed: intra-metro population distribution of African-Americans (not to mention Hispanics); the changing roles of city centers; industrial locations in relation to populated urban areas; transportation issues. All of these matters are an integral part of the perception we now have of our cities, but we can sense their presence within the fragmented urban space of the Los Angeles as portrayed in this movie.

(11) An interesting parallel between cinematic movement and urban planning can be found in Wayne Attoe and Donn Logan’s book, American Urban Architecture; Catalysts in the Design of Cities. In their book, Attoe and Logan propose the concept of “catalysts” to both describe what goes on in downtown redevelopments, as well as use it to help model potential sites of change that could be targeted for efficient redevelopment.

The tie with cinematography is in the way singular urban spaces (such as a particular business, or park, etc.) link to others by becoming economic/social moving agent/forces (catalysts) which direct their own growth, as well as the (now) connected spaces. It’s almost like looking at a combined map and shot list for moving though a scene/city during a film.

(12) Hammer’s “need to know” takes on epic and mythical proportions well beyond a typical detective’s drive to find clues in a story. For instance, there is a scene when he is in his girlfriend/secretary’s apartment and she whispers in his ear, “Va Va Voom says your Greek name would be “Mikela Sulfuris’…” What is so interesting about this is that in the Christian Bible, burning sulfur is referred to as “brimstone”, or, more to the point, fire and brimstone (this word will appear in the dialogue, again, at the apocalyptic end of the movie). Subjects for such sermons were “eternal damnation”, and the like. Hammer must find out all there is to know, even at the risk of experiencing eternal damnation himself…

Taking the director’s cue in attaching mythical significance to a character, one could conceivably view Va Va Voom as a figuration of tekne; the Greek word for artisanship, craftsmanship, or even (like the philosopher Martin Heidegger interprets it) technology itself. He is, after all, a mechanic with craftsman-like skills.

(13) The House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski, Pantheon, 2000.

This book has perhaps one of the most frightening staircases ever conceived in the history of literature. It resides behind some walls in a sweet, 1930’s Palmer-like suburban house on some street in Anytown, U.S.A. (thoughmuch of the novel is focused within Los Angeles). This staircase not only lives, breathes and growls, it grows and shrinks to epic proportions, all underground... Growing from being only a couple stories deep, it becomes several thousands of miles deep (at one point I believe it is theorized that it goes further in depth than the circumference of the earth). Basically, it is a spatial demon one can walk through, and, some of the staircases in Kiss Me Deadly must be the early relatives of this later monster.

#west #westerns #westernfilm

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aaroncutler · 6 years

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August 24: The Portuguese-language link above leads to the list of award-winners from the 20th edition of the Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival, more commonly and colloquially known as FestCurtasBH. I was pleased to attend this year’s edition of the festival, which featured small retrospectives devoted to filmmakers Safi Faye and Akosua Adoma Owusu; a series of works by Black Brazilian filmmakers that ranged from Zózimo Bulbul’s wonderful pioneering films Spirit in the Eye and Aniceto do Império on a Day of Emancipation to notable recent films such as André Novaes Oliveira’s Backyard; and a fine array of new international highlights including Barbs, Wastelands, Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor, Fantasy Sentences, Onward Lossless Follows, Optimism, Los perros de Amundsen, Screen, Solar Walk, and the International Competition’s prize-winning Palenque.

I participated on the jury for the festival’s Brazilian Competition, together with Owusu and Junia Torres (founding director of the festival forumdoc.bh). From among a group of worthy candidates, we chose to give an Honorable Mention to Chico Santos and Rafael Mellim’s We Are All Here. The determination of the competition’s prize-winner required less nuance. Our discussion of Ana Pi’s NOIRBLUE – Displacements of a Dance essentially focused on our varied reasons for liking it. The non-strenuous nature of our work was emphasized the following day when we learned that the film had additionally won the Public’s Choice award, suggesting that any trio of casual audience members would have reached the same verdict in our place.

Yet, although the perceptibly crackling energy in the room during NOIRBLUE’s screening made this second award’s result unsurprising, I see two amazing dimensions about it in hindsight. The first is that the audience voted for what could possibly and legitimately have been the best film in the festival – Brazilian or foreign, new or old. The second is that the audience awarded a frankly and openly experimental film, one that seems to organically find new techniques on a shot-to-shot, cut-to-cut basis as a way of beautifully opening into a warm and direct dialogue with the world. It is a film worth seeking out.

Ana Pi is a dancer and choreographer, born in Belo Horizonte and currently living in Paris, who made her first film in tandem with the choreographic piece NOIRBLUE. I am posting below our jury statement about the film, both in English and in Portuguese.

EN: We, the three jury members of the Brazilian Competition of the 20th edition of the Belo Horizonte International Short Film Festival, bestow an Honorable Mention upon a film whose overtly hybrid construction joins documentary registers of interviews with squatters and context for their occupation with staged encounters and scripted scenes involving nonprofessional actors and fictional characters. The result is a work that fascinates from a formal perspective. However, the film goes far beyond its style, in compelling and moving ways, to explore important contemporary themes involving gender and sexual identity (with special focus on a trans protagonist); territoriality and housing rights; and the urgent, ever-present need to confront racial and class-based inequalities that profoundly mark Brazilian society. The Honorable Mention therefore goes to an important protest film that gives voice to oppressed minorities of our time: We Are All Here, co-directed by Chico Santos and Rafael Mellim.

Now, for the main prize: We highlight an essayistic and profoundly image-based work that liberates the self through dance, as well as through an empowering blend of movement and color that connects the past to the present. We highlight the wondrous ways in which a film told in first person and from a deeply personal perspective strikes collective chords. The film actively seeks out ancestry through marvelously rendered journeys to Africa and through dreamlike, simultaneously timeless and timely moments of performance of Black ontology and identity in which the filmmaker herself appears swathed in items of clothing that resonate throughout the work.

We further highlight her formal inventiveness in organizing the film’s aesthetic elements, with special attention given to the articulation of a poetic and potent voiceover narration and to the variety of usages of the human body in scene. The film recalls and abandons the confines of diverse moving image genres and forms – among them traditional documentary, travelogue, personal essay, diary film, video art, and music video – as it embraces viewers inside a particular and special sensibility without allowing them to forget themselves.

We therefore highlight a film more than capable of connecting forcefully with different audience members, and a work that simply ignites the screen with electric shocks of hope, strength, and positive energy. So we here celebrate, in a loud unanimous voice, the winner of the prize for Best Short Film in the Brazilian Competition: NOIRBLUE – Displacements of a Dance, directed by Ana Pi.

PT: Nós, os três membros do júri da Competitiva Brasileira da 20a edição do Festival Internacional de Curtas de Belo Horizonte, conferimos uma Menção Honrosa para um filme cuja construção híbrida, explicitada em cena, alia registros documentais do contexto e entrevistas (com moradores de uma ocupação) à encenação de não atores e personagens ficcionais, roteirizados, compondo uma obra interessante do ponto de vista de sua construção formal. O filme também, de maneira comovente a partir de seu estilo, aborda temáticas relevantes para o tempo presente, como questões de gênero e sexualidade (destacando o protagonismo de uma mulher trans), a territorialidade e o direito à moradia, o contexto das ocupações e do enfrentamento da questão das desigualdades de classes e raciais que marcam profundamente a sociedade brasileira. A Menção Honrosa então vai para um importante filme-manifesto que dá voz às identidades oprimidas em nossos tempos: Estamos todos aqui, co-dirigido por Chico Santos e Rafael Mellim.

Agora, para o prêmio principal: Destacamos um filme que libera o ser através de dança, e também, através de uma mistura generosa de cores e movimentos que conectam o passado com o presente. Destacamos o gesto de como um filme de auto-representação, ensaístico, elaborado de uma perspectiva inteiramente subjetiva, em primeira pessoa, se articula à dimensão coletiva de uma maneira absolutamente inventiva, relacionando passado – ancestralidade buscada de forma ativa, presente no próprio deslocamento ao continente africano e, sobretudo, na presença de uma ontologia negra que situa a realizadora, presente no texto, em movimentos oníricos da dança (simultaneamente temporal e atemporal), em elementos da indumentária que ressoa de forma marcante ao longo da obra.

Destacamos, também, a inventividade formal na organização dos elementos estéticos que compõem o filme, marcadamente a articulação entre um texto potente e poético, o uso do corpo humano em cena, das cores, compondo um estilo que rompe com as possibilidades de classificação de gêneros cinematográficos, escapando sem escapar, ao vídeo-dança, ao videoclipe, ao documentário, ao filme diário, ao filme de viagem, ao ensaio pessoal. Um filme que coloca e envolve o espectador em uma sensibilidade especial, sem deixar de exigir dele um engajamento de pensamento.

Destacamos um filme capaz de conectar com diversos públicos, e uma obra que brilha na tela com relâmpagos de força, esperança e energia positiva. E celebramos, em voz unânime, o vencedor do prêmio de Melhor Curta-Metragem na Competitiva Brasileira: NOIRBLUE – Deslocamentos de uma dança, dirigido e estrelado por Ana Pi.

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spclmxrbsprgrm · 5 years

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AWARENESS

“Music is permanent; only listening is intermittent”.13

John Cage

*13

Christoph Cox cites in his book Sonic Flux, Sound, Art, and Metaphysics Deleuze’s suggestion that we think of sound as,

“[a] continuous, anonymous flux to which human beings contribute but which precedes and exceeds them—an ever-changing and variegated sonic domain of incalculable size and infinite temporal dimension to which new material is added every moment.”14

Cox also calls on John Cage’s 4’33’’ to reveal this vast stream that surrounds us. As I previously mentioned, with this piece, our perception starts from the expectation that sound will reach us in a certain way. This expectation is a construction, and is one that makes us deaf.

By spending time in aural contemplation of the unintentional sounds made during the performance of 4’ 33’’, our thresholds undergo an adjustment or tuning to what Cox calls background noise, or:

“...the intensive murmur that fills every silence or, rather, that of which so-called ‘silence’ is made. Indeed he (Cage) takes ‘silence’ to be something inaudible – namely, the transcendental dimension of sound: the perpetual sonic flux of the world that is the condition of possibility for the audibility of any sound” .(2018,23).

Here, background noise is presented as the elemental basis and the starting point from which to experience further spectra of sonic flux.

Based on this, I think that the idea of silence is something that has been created in response to a dualistic way of conceiving reality, something based in a visual sense, created to structure the feeling of the sonic stimulus we receive. This construction decides what sound is, or is not, in the range of our attention or curiosity, and this is conformed by very diverse aspects; cultural, political, social, situational, attitudinal, and even biological. This builds a barrier to a full awareness of the diverse process and stimulus present in our surrounding reality. If this sonic flux is what is discerned and “sampled”15in a sonic experience of here and now, it can be said that the premise of sound as one of the multitud of different fluxes that make up our world is an important part of contemporary thought. It is present in the pathway from Cage to Club.

When Cox writes about this infinite and atemporal flux, he is opening a window to the understanding of how the sound that passes through us is built and reinterpreted.

To understand how sound is used in the club, we have to center our attention to how DJs works. They usually work on two levels. One is the sample or production level, where sound modules, or samples, are treated as ‘blocks’ being arranged and mixed in some way between other decisions and processes to finally conceive a ‘track’. They press those tracks, originally in vinyl records. Most of the time these are records made in collaboration with independent labels and other DJs, or self-managed pressings for promotions or testing.

They use these records as ‘modules’ to compose a DJ mix. Here they are working on the set level, a level over the production level. The DJ mix is seen as a stream of affective sonic impulses flowing and influencing a culture narrowly linked to the listening of recorded music.

Cox argues that “mix is to reinscribe, to place the floating sample into a new chain of signification”(2017, 480) and this can “make possible profoundly egalitarian music”(Ibid). Christian Marclay, one of the first artists to experiment with turntables and manipulation of records to create new sounds conceived that “recorded sound is dead sound, in the sense that it’s not ‘live’ anymore. Old records have this quality of time past, this sense of loss. The music is embalmed. I’m trying to bring it back to life through my art”16

DJ’s splice part of a recorded reality, scatter and re-loop the samples to contribute to the creation of a new one. A new reconstructed sonic reality. That for the DJ’s and dancers, could stream forever like an eternal Jazz jam, but under the influence of an overwhelming sound and media machinery.

The interpretation the DJ creates from his sampling of the sonic flux is presented on the dancefloor of a club as a DJ ‘set’, and as a sonic opportunity for the co-performers to interact with it over an extended amount of time, opening wide the flux experience. Each set influences a youth that will sample it, and bring it back as anew artistic creation, contributing to the culture and to the atemporal sonic flux.

The Club, in contrast to other art manifestations, recquires a different temporality to enter and transit the stream proposed by a more ‘traditional’ work of art. And not only because the ‘opening time’ of the place where this happens, like museums or music venues. Also the time the artwork need to be perceived.

The proposed reality of Club experience needs a ‘warming up’ time to get in and also a ‘coming down’. It does not start and finish in exact moments, and the diverse phases are not clearly divided. A Club experience can start in the cue of the Club (or at home), and can finish in the afterhours (or in the middle of the night), this remains to the raver open experience.

The whole temporality maintains the potential for 48/72 hours in a row at times. One can go in or out the times one can manage. DJ sets could stream for long hours changing the ‘vibe’ and the sonic reality of the arena.

Here I want to separate the dynamic of a band concert or live set to the dynamics of a DJ set. DJ sets are preferred usually to maintain the ongoing flow of the music, and the decks allow different DJs to keep playing for a long time, play other DJs tunes, test pressed records and white label unreleased pieces or some ‘gem’ vinyl records as well.

Returning to the idea of sonic flux drawn before, I believe that the interaction with them, conscious or not, both in club settings and in experimental music, can be a way of collective learning and self-awareness.

Cox’s work is centered on a flux made of sound, but it joins the conception of great flows cataloged by Manuel DeLanda in the book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. For example, the flow of history includes lava, minerals, biomass, genes, bodies, food, language, money, and information. With this way of thought, many new ones are revealed. Now I am thinking of pandemics, catastrophes, weather, pollution, spirituality, consciousness. The streams that constitute culture and nature, “are congealed and dissolved, captured and released through immanent historical processes that are isomorphic across these various domains”.17

By experimenting with them, we experiment with ourselves, and in Club context, in a chaotic co-created embodied technological reality.

Experiencing the act of rave can “subsum the human within the general field of fluxes that constitute the natural world”.(Cox, 2018, 263) I conceive these experiences to be a key factor for social and human evolution. I believe this really influences Club cluture, and can be a fundamental factor for this to be conceived as a ”‘revolutionary’ culture holding the potential ‘to ultimately change the course of human consciousness “.18

13 Cage, John. Introduction: Themes & Variations. Station Hill, 1982.

14 Deleuze cited in (Cox, 2018,63)

15 See (Cox, 2018, 23)

16 Christian Marclay in (Cox, 2017, 327)

17 Manuel deLanda in (Cox, 2018, 2)

18 Fritz in (St. John 2009, 5)

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dianaspa · 5 years

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El color rojo es tendencia, pero es que además en los labios siempre ha sido un clásico. Si este año te atreves con el color más sexy, descubre sus distintos tonos y cómo llevarlos: seleccionamos once labiales súper elegantes y con diferentes acabados para llevar a todas horas.

Super Stay Matte Ink City Edition en el tono Dancer, es un labial líquido con acabado mate en un color rojo vivo. Su textura no reseca y se fija durante horas en los labios gracias a la tinta líquida de larga duración. De Maybelline New York en Amazon, por 7,95 euros.

Everlasting Liquid Lipstick de Kat Von D es una barra de labios con una alta pigmentación y duración. Tiene una fórmula cremosa y viene en formato gloss. El acabado es mate y hemos elegido el tono Santa Sangre, un rojizo anaranjado muy favorecedor. Tiene propiedades hidratante gracias a la vitamina E y a la cera de las semillas de girasol. Además, es vegano. En El Corte Inglés, por 20 euros.

Lipstick Aida Domenech x MAC es una barra de labios inspirada en las rosas rojas con acabado mate y edición limitada. Un rojo con mucha personalidad e ideal para cualquier ocasión. De MAC en El Corte Inglés, por 19,50 euros.

Full Vinyl Lip Lacquer de Nars es una barra de labios en formato gloss que proporciona un brillo reflectante y con acabado vinilo. Tiene una fórmula cremosa, muy pigmentada y con cobertura total. También contiene vitamina E para hidratar los labios. El tono Mississippi es un tono cereza profundo ideal para las amantes de los tonos rojizos oscuros y el brillo. En El Corte Inglés, por 27 euros.

Audacious Lipstick de Nars es una barra de labios con un diseño inspirado en los años setenta. Tiene una cobertura total y proporciona cierto dramatismo a los labios. El tono Cherry Red es un rojo cereza súper favorecedor y con un color muy saturado. En El Corte Inglés, por 31 euros.

KissKiss Matte de Guerlain es una barra de labios en color rojo mate e hidratante. Su formulación lleva extracto de guindilla para unos labios con más volumen, aceites y ácido hialurónico para hidratar y dar suavidad. El tono Spicy Burgundy es un rojo con toques burdeos perfecto para la época invernal. En Douglas, por 29,95 euros.

Barra de labios mate de L’Oréal Paris x Isabel Marant en el tono La Butte Marshal, un rojizo burdeos totalmente atemporal. Tiene un acabado mate y una textura cremosa muy confortable. En El Corte Inglés, por 13,56 euros.

En Trendencias Belleza

Hay vida más allá de rojo: 9 labiales que darán intensidad a tu look de fiesta

The Chubby Lipstick de 3ina es una barra de labios en formato stick con textura de cera. El tono 100 es un rojo súper vivo para las fans de los rojizos potentes. El color es súper intenso y con acabado mate aterciopelado. La fórmula contiene cera de abejas que es antioxidante y aporta un toque cremoso e hidratante a los labios. En Asos, por 9,95 euros.

Glitter Switch x Thuy Le’s de Lottie London es una barra de labios en formato líquido mate, pero al presionar el brillo aparece por arte de magia. Es de edición limitada, no produce transferencias y se seca como un gloss normal. El tono Extra Af es un rojo rosado para un toque lleno de brilli-brilli. En Asos, por 9,99 euros.

LO-Fi Lip Mousse de Urban Decay en el tono rojo vino Amplify es un labial en textura mousse. Su fórmula es muy ligera, cremosa y resistente al agua. Tiene un acabado aterciopelado y se puede aplicar con los dedos para un toque más natural y con el aplicador que incluye para unos labios más definidos. La cobertura es totalmente modulable. En Urban Decay, por 19,90 euros.

Water Lip Stain de Clarins tiene una textura líquida (“al agua”), ligera y fresca. Se funde con los labios al momento y tiene un acabado mate. Es totalmente modulable, ya que puedes conseguir un acabado más ligero y natural o más intenso. Está disponible en varios tonos, pero el 03 Red Water es el protagonista de la colección. La fórmula contiene extractos de plantas para aportar confort y flexibilidad a los labios. En Clarins, por 22,50 euros.

Fotos | Amazon Belleza, Maybelline, El Corte Inglés, Kat Von D, Guerlain, 3ina, Lottie London, Urban Decay, Clarins

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– La noticia

Viva el rojo: once productos para lucir labios de escándalo

fue publicada originalmente en

Trendencias Belleza

por SueMissIndie

#Diana Spa

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casualfoxphantom-blog · 6 years

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Meu olhar entrega todas as vezes quando se depara com o seu, mesmo quando não é pra entregar... Meu sangue esquenta entregando com minha face ruborizada ao lhe encarar... Seu cheiro inebriante surta meu faro viciando-o a ponto de querer cada vez mais... Querer seu abraço apertado, seu ombro pra confortar minha cabeça turbulhenta, que lateja pulsando e pulsando ansiosa e medrosa de não conseguir te ver amanhã... Ou depois... Naquele momento peço baixinho para que o tempo pare, estacione por alguns instantes para poder apreciar seus olhos brilhantes, hipnotizantes, que não consigo parar de olhar... Vc eh como aquela canção gostosa que no auge queremos ouvir à tda hora, e... Quando deixa de ouvir a melodia às vezes paira nos pensamentos deixando saudade... É Especial, atemporal, algo que não se esquece por completo... Porque já se fundiu no meu ser. #por #by #michellepalma #poetisa #poetess #atriz #actress #dançarina #dancer #pravc #amoreterno #amorincondicional #foreverlove

#atriz #poetisa #dancer #michellepalma #dançarina #pravc #amoreterno #foreverlove #actress #por #poetess #amorincondicional #by

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rocktails · 7 years

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La importancia de Marc Bolan

1984, en Buenos Aires, es año de MTV: Música Total Videos. Duran Duran copa las revistas. Algunas hasta se animan a preguntarse si son “los nuevos Beatles?”. The Reflex invade la tele y los 80s quedan definidos y anclados para siempre con esas hombreras, esos peinados y ESA cascada que en su momento parecía fascinantemente realista. Después de tres discos y el obligado en vivo, Duran Duran se separa por “diferencias creativas”. Lo que sea que eso quiera decir. Y forman dos nuevas bandas, que duran un disco cada una.

Andy Taylor y John Taylor (guitarra / bajo de Duran2) se juntan con Tony Thompson (ex baterista de Chic) y Robert Palmer y, bajo la atenta mirada de Bernard Edwards (bajista de Chic, socio eterno de Nile Rodgers), forman The Power Station.

Tras un gran primer single (Some Like It Hot, acompañado de un video que conjugaba una modelo trans con un Robert Palmer vestido de cura… si, en serio), sale Get It On (Bang a Gong), con un riff de guitarra que está ahí, a un par de notas de la gloria de Hungry Like the Wolf. Y naturalmente fue un delirio para quienes amábamos Duran Duran. Y fue nuestra puerta de entrada para luego adorar a Robert Palmer con su Riptide (Addicted to love) y su Heavy Nova (Simply irresistible).

En 1984, mis ochos años ni siquiera habían escuchado insinuar el nombre Marc Bolan.

En 1991, el más grande de Minneapolis toma prestadas cadencias y partes del riff de “Get it on (Bang a gong)”, le agrega su negritud y sensualidad y lo transforma en Cream, el single más exitoso de aquel Diamonds and Pearls que tenía un holograma por tapa. El delirio sigue. Y todavía no se por qué…

¿Marc quién?

En aquella época rechazaba los 70s y todo lo que de allí hubiera surgido (salvo soul o funk). Ya ver el nombre T Rex me hacía imaginar dragones, conjuros, psicodelia, canciones de 25 minutos, tecladistas con capa, sahumerios… ¿Escucharlo? Nah, con los prejuicios alcanza.

Año dos mil y monedas. Cuidando la casa de un amigo, encuentro el compilado de b-sides y non-album tracks de Morrissey My Early Burglary Years. Que tiene la hermosa Sunny. Que tiene la hermosa Boxers. Y que tiene una versión en vivo (no muy pulida) de una canción llamada Cosmic Dancer. Me pega de lleno en el plexo solar. No puedo parar de escucharla. La aprendo al piano. La aprendo en guitarra. Y el “I was dancing when I was twelve…” se hace carne. E himno.

Casi simultáneamente, aquella joya del cine llamada Billy Elliot se estrena en Argentina y su escena inicial involucra un vinilo y unas manos que ponen… Cosmic Dancer. Sincronía pura.

De Marc Bolan… solo el nombre. Mi mente ubica al omnipresente David Bowie narrando su primer encuentro, a sus 17/18 años, pintando la pared de la oficina del manager que compartían (“tus zapatos son un horror”).

Claro, hasta que años después finalmente escuché el disco Electric Warrior, la obra maestra de Marc Bolan en su encarnación como T Rex.

Electric Warrior es una singularidad. Un hecho irrepetible en la discografía de Bolan (The Slider es muy bueno, pero todo lo demás… intenté tantas veces… nada se acerca siquiera a la magia de Electric Warrior).

Un disco atemporal, que se identifica con el nacimiento del Glam rock, la plantilla sobre la cual un año más tarde David Bowie pintaría su Ziggy Stardust. Géneros al margen, cada segundo de Electric Warrior dignifica y glorifica la música como experiencia, como exorcismo emocionante y festivo a la vez. Sus cadencias, su groove blanco y británico (por más oxímoron que parezca), su fraseo, las letras que por momentos no tienen sentido en la superficie pero al cabo que ni importa… Los arreglos de cuerdas que dan forma y sustancia a buena parte del disco, con el obvio highlight en la imposiblemente bella Cosmic Dancer (que se lucen más en esta versión instrumental)… Y la producción del favorito de Bowie: Don Tony Visconti.

Electric Warrior tiene tantos highlights como canciones y es un disco pensado para el vinilo, en donde Lean Woman Blues es un adecuado cierre (del Lado A) y no una mera transición entre la balada Monolith y el monolito rocker indeleble de Get It On. Si, aquel Get It On imbatible con el que The Power Station sorprendió a mi yo de ocho años.

Además, el vinilo favorece escuchar todo el disco. Si no, el riesgo del repeat eterno en Jeepster sería demasiado alto… En rigor, el repeat sería del atómico 1-2-3 que te ataca a puro groove con Mambo Sun, a pura belleza con Cosmic Dancer y a puro rock&pop con Jeepster, y volvemos a empezar.

Y después de escuchar por primera vez Planet Queen, uno no puede sino acordarse de Gustavo Cerati y cómo “ella” usó su cabeza como un revolver, y está bien. El Sr. Cerati siempre abrevó en fuentes sabrosas y esta no es excepción. Ni mucho menos.

Dato de color: Electric Warrior salió en 1971, año en que también se editaron, por ejemplo: There’s A Riot Goin’ On (EL disco de Sly & the Family Stone), What’s Going On (EL disco de Marvin Gaye), Imagine (John Lennon, ¿hacía falta aclarar?), Sticky Fingers (Rolling Sto… bueh), Led Zeppelin IV (….eh….), Blue (Joni Mitchell), Hunky Dory (Bowie)… Discos trascendentales, majestuosos… Tanto, que la canción del año para los Grammy fue… Bridge Over Troubled Water de Simon & Garfunkel. En fin.

2012. Después de una pausa de 7 años, Saint Etienne edita nuevo disco. Esta vez, el tópico del álbum es la música desde la perspectiva del oyente: cómo nos afecta, cómo una canción o un disco puede mutar de significado a partir de las cosas que nos van ocurriendo, cómo nuestra música se entrelaza indefectiblemente con nuestras vidas.

Me lleva a pensar en cómo la mano invisible de Marc Bolan fue guiándome, llevándome de paseo por la música a través de muchos años, a través de diferentes artistas, canciones y discos, preparándome hasta poder estar en condiciones de empezar por el principio: escuchar y disfrutar de Electric Warrior.

En Over The Border, Sarah Cracknell se pregunta, casi en susurros: “and when I was married, and when I had kids, would Marc Bolan still be so important?” (“y cuando me case, y cuando tenga hijos, va a seguir siendo tan importante Marc Bolan?”).

Y como no podía ser de otra manera, esa canción que abre el disco tuvo su cuota de re-significación cuando, años más tarde, nacieron mis hijos.

Aún hoy la pregunta me eriza la piel y me llena de emoción cada vez que la escucho. Tal vez más que antes.

Porque parece inofensiva. Parece hecha casi al pasar. Poniendo en el mismo plano a la música con tal vez una de las cosas más trascendentales y rupturistas: tener hijos. Pero la pregunta es más. Es un conflicto y un temor sincero: ¿Qué rol ocupará la música cuando crezca/envejezca? Cuando tenga responsabilidades, cuando me case, cuando tenga hijos. ¿Ocupará el mismo espacio que antes? ¿Tendrá el mismo efecto?

La respuesta llega inmediatamente, con un gran twist compositivo, desde los coros de Over The Border, apenas 4 minutos de empezado el hermoso disco Words and Music by Saint Etienne.

La respuesta que le da todo el sentido a la canción, al disco y a todas aquellas preguntas y temores que subyacen en la pregunta original: “Every single day” (“Cada día”).

¿Va a seguir siendo tan importante Marc Bolan? Sí, cada día.

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rocktails · 7 years

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La importancia de Marc Bolan

En 1984, mis ochos años ni siquiera habían escuchado insinuar el nombre Marc Bolan.

¿Marc quién?

Casi simultáneamente, aquella joya del cine llamada Billy Elliot se estrena en Argentina y su escena inicial involucra un vinilo y unas manos que ponen… Cosmic Dancer. Sincronía pura.

Claro, hasta que años después finalmente escuché el disco Electric Warrior, la obra maestra de Marc Bolan en su encarnación como T Rex.

Y como no podía ser de otra manera, esa canción que abre el disco tuvo su cuota de re-significación cuando, años más tarde, nacieron mis hijos.

Aún hoy la pregunta me eriza la piel y me llena de emoción cada vez que la escucho. Tal vez más que antes.

La respuesta llega inmediatamente, con un gran twist compositivo, desde los coros de Over The Border, apenas 4 minutos de empezado el hermoso disco Words and Music by Saint Etienne.

La respuesta que le da todo el sentido a la canción, al disco y a todas aquellas preguntas y temores que subyacen en la pregunta original: “Every single day” (“Cada día”).

¿Va a seguir siendo tan importante Marc Bolan? Sí, cada día.

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#La importancia de Marc Bolan

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