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2023 Person Of The Year: Taylor Swift

— By Sam Lansky | Photographs By Inez And Vinoodh For TIME | Published: December 6, 2023

Taylor Swift is telling me a story, and when Taylor Swift tells you a story, you listen, because you know it’s going to be good—not only because she’s had an extraordinary life, but because she’s an extraordinary storyteller. This one is about a time she got her heart broken, although not in the way you might expect.

She was 17, she says, and she had booked the biggest opportunity of her life so far—a highly coveted slot opening for country superstar Kenny Chesney on tour. “This was going to change my career,” she remembers. “I was so excited.” But a couple weeks later, Swift arrived home to find her mother Andrea sitting on the front steps of their house. “She was weeping,” Swift says. “Her head was in her hands as if there had been a family emergency.” Through sobs, Andrea told her daughter that Chesney’s tour had been sponsored by a beer company. Taylor was too young to join. “I was devastated,” Swift says.

But some months later, at Swift’s 18th birthday party, she saw Chesney’s promoter. He handed her a card from Chesney that read, as Swift recalls, “I’m sorry that you couldn’t come on the tour, so I wanted to make it up to you.” With the note was a check. “It was for more money than I’d ever seen in my life,” Swift says. “I was able to pay my band bonuses. I was able to pay for my tour buses. I was able to fuel my dreams.”

Swift’s accomplishments as an artist—culturally, critically, and commercially—are so legion that to recount them seems almost beside the point. As a pop star, she sits in rarefied company, alongside Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna; as a songwriter, she has been compared to Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Joni Mitchell. As a businesswoman, she has built an empire worth, by some estimates, over $1 billion. And as a celebrity—who by dint of being a woman is scrutinized for everything from whom she dates to what she wears—she has long commanded constant attention and knows how to use it. (“I don’t give Taylor advice about being famous,” Stevie Nicks tells me. “She doesn’t need it.”) But this year, something shifted. To discuss her movements felt like discussing politics or the weather—a language spoken so widely it needed no context. She became the main character of the world.

If you’re skeptical, consider it: How many conversations did you have about Taylor Swift this year? How many times did you see a photo of her while scrolling on your phone? Were you one of the people who made a pilgrimage to a city where she played? Did you buy a ticket to her concert film? Did you double-tap an Instagram post, or laugh at a tweet, or click on a headline about her? Did you find yourself humming “Cruel Summer” while waiting in line at the grocery store? Did a friend confess that they watched clips of the Eras Tour night after night on TikTok? Or did you?

Her epic career-retrospective tour recounting her artistic “eras,” which played 66 dates across the Americas this year, is projected to become the biggest of all time and the first to gross over a billion dollars; analysts talked about the “Taylor effect,” as politicians from Thailand, Hungary, and Chile implored her to play their countries. Cities, stadiums, and streets were renamed for her. Every time she came to a new place, a mini economic boom took place as hotels and restaurants saw a surge of visitors. In releasing her concert movie, Swift bypassed studios and streamers, instead forging an unusual pact with AMC, giving the theater chain its highest single-day ticket sales in history. There are at least 10 college classes devoted to her, including one at Harvard; the professor, Stephanie Burt, tells TIME she plans to compare Swift’s work to that of the poet William Wordsworth. Friendship bracelets traded by her fans at concerts became a hot accessory, with one line in a song causing as much as a 500% increase in sales at craft stores. When Swift started dating Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chief and two-time Super Bowl champion, his games saw a massive increase in viewership. (Yes, she somehow made one of America’s most popular things—football—even more popular.) And then there’s her critically hailed songbook—a catalog so beloved that as she rereleases it, she’s often breaking chart records she herself set. She’s the last monoculture left in our stratified world.

It’s hard to see history when you’re in the middle of it, harder still to distinguish Swift’s impact on the culture from her celebrity, which emits so much light it can be blinding. But something unusual is happening with Swift, without a contemporary precedent. She deploys the most efficient medium of the day—the pop song—to tell her story. Yet over time, she has harnessed the power of the media, both traditional and new, to create something wholly unique—a narrative world, in which her music is just one piece in an interactive, shape-shifting story. Swift is that story’s architect and hero, protagonist and narrator.

This was the year she perfected her craft—not just with her music, but in her position as the master storyteller of the modern era. The world, in turn, watched, clicked, cried, danced, sang along, swooned, caravanned to stadiums and movie theaters, let her work soundtrack their lives. For Swift, it’s a peak. “This is the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I’ve ever been,” Swift tells me. “Ultimately, we can convolute it all we want, or try to overcomplicate it, but there’s only one question.” Here, she adopts a booming voice. “Are you not entertained?”

A few months before I sit with Swift in New York, on a summer night in Santa Clara, Calif., which has been temporarily renamed Swiftie Clara in her honor, I am in a stadium with nearly 70,000 other people having a religious experience. The crowd is rapturous and Swift beatific as she gazes out at us, all high on the same drug. Her fans are singularly passionate, not just in the venue but also online, as they analyze clues, hints, and secret messages in everything from her choreography to her costumes—some deliberately planted, others not. (“Taylor Swift fans are the modern-day equivalent of those cults who would consistently have inaccurate rapture predictions like once a month,” as one viral tweet noted.)

Standing in the arena, it’s not hard to understand why this is the biggest thing in the world. “Beatlemania and Thriller have nothing on these shows,” says Swift’s friend and collaborator Phoebe Bridgers. Fans in Argentina pitched tents outside the venue for months to get prime spots, with some quitting their jobs to commit to fandom full time. Across the U.S., others lined up for days, while those who didn’t get in “Taylor-gated” in nearby parking lots so they could pick up the sound. When tickets went on sale last year, Ticketmaster crashed. Although 4.1 million tickets were sold for the 2023 shows—including over 2 million on the first day, a new record—scalpers jacked up prices on the secondary market to more than $22,000. Multiple fans filed lawsuits. The Justice Department moved forward with an investigation. The Senate held a hearing. Given these stakes, Swift had to deliver.

Ticketmaster and Live Nation executives testified at a Senate hearing after demand for tickets overwhelmed the siteAl Drago—Bloomberg/Getty Images

“I knew this tour was harder than anything I’d ever done before by a long shot,” Swift says. Each show spans over 180 minutes, including 40-plus songs from at least nine albums; there are 16 costume changes, pyrotechnics, an optical illusion in which she appears to dive into the stage and swim, and not one but two cottagecore worlds, which feature an abundance of moss.

In the past, Swift jokes, she toured “like a frat guy.” This time, she began training six months ahead of the first show. “Every day I would run on the treadmill, singing the entire set list out loud,” she said. “Fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs.” Her gym, Dogpound, created a program for her, incorporating strength, conditioning, and weights. “Then I had three months of dance training, because I wanted to get it in my bones,” she says. “I wanted to be so over-rehearsed that I could be silly with the fans, and not lose my train of thought.” She worked with choreographer Mandy Moore—recommended by her friend Emma Stone, who worked with Moore on La La Land—since, as Swift says, “Learning choreography is not my strong suit.” With the exception of Grammy night—which was “hilarious,” she says—she also stopped drinking. “Doing that show with a hangover,” she says ominously. “I don’t want to know that world.”

Swift’s arrival in a city energized the local economy. When Eras kicked off in Glendale, Ariz., she generated more revenue for its businesses than the 2023 Super Bowl, which was held in the same stadium. Fans flew across the country, stayed in hotels, ate meals out, and splurged on everything from sweatshirts to limited-edition vinyl, with the average Eras attendee reportedly spending nearly $1,300. Swift sees the expense and effort incurred by fans as something she needs to repay: “They had to work really hard to get the tickets,” she says. “I wanted to play a show that was longer than they ever thought it would be, because that makes me feel good leaving the stadium.” The “Taylor effect” was noticed at the highest levels of government. “When the Federal Reserve mentions you as the reason economic growth is up, that’s a big deal,” says Ed Tiryakian, a finance professor at Duke University.

Carrying an economy on your back is a lot for one person. After she plays a run of shows, Swift takes a day to rest and recover. “I do not leave my bed except to get food and take it back to my bed and eat it there,” she says. “It’s a dream scenario. I can barely speak because I’ve been singing for three shows straight. Every time I take a step my feet go crunch, crunch, crunch from dancing in heels.” Maintaining her strength through workouts between shows is key. “I know I’m going on that stage whether I’m sick, injured, heartbroken, uncomfortable, or stressed,” she says. “That’s part of my identity as a human being now. If someone buys a ticket to my show, I’m going to play it unless we have some sort of force majeure.” (A heat wave in Rio de Janeiro caused chaos during Swift’s November run as one fan, Ana Clara Benevides Machado, reportedly collapsed during the show and later died; Swift wrote on Instagram that she had a “shattered heart.” She rescheduled the next show because of unsafe conditions, and spent time with Benevides Machado’s family at her final tour date in Brazil.)

Top: Swift told TIME she started training six months in advance of the Eras Tour, which kicked off in March. Courtesy TAS Rights Management Bottom: Austin, Andrea, and Scott Swift with Taylor at NYU graduation in 2022 where she received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts. Courtesy TAS Rights Management

Swift is many things onstage—vulnerable and triumphant, playful and sad—but the intimacy of her songcraft is front and center. “Her work as a songwriter is what speaks most clearly to me,” says filmmaker Greta Gerwig, whose feminist Barbie was its own testament to the idea that women can be anything. “To write music that is from the deepest part of herself and have it directly speak into the souls of other people.” As Swift whips through the eras, she’s not trying to update her old songs, whether the earnest romance of “You Belong With Me” or the millennial ennui of “22,” so much as she is embracing them anew. She’s modeling radical self-acceptance on the world’s largest stage, giving the audience a space to revisit their own joy or pain, once dismissed or forgotten. I tell Swift that the show made me think of a meme that says, “Do not kill the part of you that is cringe—kill the part of you that cringes.” “Yes!” she exclaims. “Every part of you that you’ve ever been, every phase you’ve ever gone through, was you working it out in that moment with the information you had available to you at the time. There’s a lot that I look back at like, ‘Wow, a couple years ago I might have cringed at this.’ You should celebrate who you are now, where you’re going, and where you’ve been.”

Getting to this place of harmony with her past took work; there’s a dramatic irony, she explains, to the success of the tour. “It’s not lost on me that the two great catalysts for this happening were two horrendous things that happened to me,” Swift says, and this is where the story takes a turn. “The first was getting canceled within an inch of my life and sanity,” she says plainly. “The second was having my life’s work taken away from me by someone who hates me.”

Swift shows me some things she loves in her apartment: a Stevie Nicks Barbie that sits still boxed in her kitchen, sent to her by the artist; the framed note from Paul McCartney that hangs in her bathroom; tiles around the fireplace that Swift found shopping in Paris with her mother. Connections to her family are everywhere, including a striking photo of her grandmother Marjorie, an opera singer and the inspiration for a track on her album evermore. Swift grew up on a Christmas-tree farm in Pennsylvania, with her younger brother Austin; her father Scott was a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch, and Andrea worked in marketing. Her family still works closely with her today. “My dad, my mom, and my brother come up with some of the best ideas in my career,” Swift says. “I always joke that we’re a small family business.”

After moving to Nashville as a teen, she signed with Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Records. Swift’s songwriting ability was evident from the first lyrics of “Tim McGraw,” her debut single: “He said the way my blue eyes shined put those Georgia stars to shame that night—I said, ‘That’s a lie.’” Even for country music these lyrics are literary—conjuring a romantic fantasy, then deflating it a line later. The fairy-tale promise of love and intimacy became a runner in Swift’s work as a songwriter, something she’d repeatedly espouse, then skewer; she was self-aware about the role narrative played in her expectations. She was seen as a gifted pop-country ingenue when, in a now infamous moment, Kanye West interrupted Swift onstage at the 2009 VMAs while she was accepting an award. The incident set in motion a chain of events that would shape the next decade of both artists’ lives.

It was around that time, Swift remembers now, that she began trying to shape-shift. “I realized every record label was actively working to try to replace me,” she says. “I thought instead, I’d replace myself first with a new me. It’s harder to hit a moving target.” Swift wrote songs solo, incorporated diverse sonic influences, and placed more clues about personal relationships in her lyrics and album materials for fans to decode. Her epic ballad “All Too Well,” from 2012’s Red, epitomizes Swift’s superpower as a songwriter, deploying tossed-off details like a forgotten scarf that comes back at the song’s end to stab you in the heart—but it also had a secret message hidden in the liner notes. When an extended version of the song hit No. 1 last year upon its rerelease, it wasn’t only because the song is extraordinary, but because it has its own lore, like Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” if it came with an experiential puzzle for fans to solve. “She’s like a whole room of writers as one person, with that voice and charisma,” Bridgers says. “She’s everything at once.”

Swift knew she had to keep innovating. “By the time an artist is mature enough to psychologically deal with the job, they throw you out at 29, typically,” she says. “In the ’90s and ’00s, it seems like the music industry just said: ‘OK, let’s take a bunch of teenagers, throw them into a fire, and watch what happens. By the time they’ve accumulated enough wisdom to do their job effectively, we’ll find new teenagers.’” She went full-throttle pop for 2014’s 1989, putting her on top of the world—“an imperial phase,” she calls it. She didn’t realize it would also give her much farther to fall. Public sentiment turned—sniping about everything from her perceived overexposure to conspiracy theories about her politics. “I had all the hyenas climb on and take their shots,” she says. West wrote a song with vulgar lyrics about her, and claimed that Swift had consented to it, which Swift denied; West’s then wife, Kim Kardashian, released a video of a conversation between West and Swift that seemed to indicate that Swift had been on board with the song. The scandal was tabloid catnip; it made Swift look like a snake, which is what people called her. She felt it was “a career death,” she says. “Make no mistake—my career was taken away from me.”

It was a bleak moment. “You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she says. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.” (Kardashian wrote, in a 2020 social media post, that the situation “forced me to defend him.”) Swift’s next album, 2017’s Reputation, featured snake imagery; the video for “Look What You Made Me Do” saw her killing off younger versions of herself. She remembers Reputation being met with uproar and skepticism. “I thought that moment of backlash was going to define me negatively for the rest of my life,” she says. She had also satisfied her record deal with Borchetta, and knew she wanted out. “The molecular chemistry of that old label was that every creative choice I wanted to make was second-guessed,” she says. “I was really overthinking these albums.”

She met with Lucian Grainge, the CEO of Universal Music Group, and Monte Lipman, who runs Universal’s top label Republic Records, to talk about signing a deal that would give her more agency. Today, Grainge is perhaps the most powerful executive in the music industry, but, as I sit with him in his office in Los Angeles, he describes himself as an “old punk” who operates on instinct more than metrics. He told Swift, he says, “We will utilize everything that we’ve got as a company for you.” Swift felt like she’d been given carte blanche: “Lucian and Monte basically said to me, ‘Whatever you turn in, we will be proud to put out. We give you 100% creative freedom and trust.’” It was exactly what she needed to hear most when the chips were down.

Yet the release of Swift’s first album with Republic, 2019’s Lover, coincided with the second big upheaval in her professional life: Borchetta had sold Big Machine—and with it, Swift’s catalog, valued then at a reported $140 million—to Ithaca Holdings, which is owned by music manager Scooter Braun, a former ally of West’s. “With the Scooter thing, my masters were being sold to someone who actively wanted them for nefarious reasons, in my opinion,” Swift says. (“It makes me sad that Taylor had that reaction to the deal,” Braun told Variety in 2021.) The sale meant that the rights to Swift’s first six albums moved to Braun, so whenever someone wanted to license one of those songs, he would be the one to profit. Swift rallied her fans against the deal, but still felt powerless. “I was so knocked on my ass by the sale of my music, and to whom it was sold,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, they got me beat now. This is it. I don’t know what to do.’” She went back to work, using the pandemic lockdown to pare back her sound on critically acclaimed albums folklore and evermore.

Around the same time, she started thinking about rerecording her old albums in an effort to wrest back control. “I’d run into Kelly Clarkson and she would go, ‘Just redo it,’” Swift says. “My dad kept saying it to me too. I’d look at them and go, ‘How can I possibly do that?’ Nobody wants to redo their homework if on the way to school, the wind blows your book report away.” Since Swift wrote her own songs, she retained the musical composition copyright and could rerecord them. She also negotiated to own the master rights for her material when she moved over to Republic in 2018, so she now owns her new material and the rerecorded songs. (Major labels have since made it more difficult for artists to rerecord their music.) She began rerecording subtly different versions of her old albums, tagging them “(Taylor’s Version)” and adding unreleased tracks to redirect listenership to them. She frames the strategy as a coping mechanism. “It’s all in how you deal with loss,” she says. “I respond to extreme pain with defiance.”

Top: Swift performs at Foro Sol in Mexico City on Aug. 24. Hector Vivas—TAS23/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management Bottom: After playing Kansas City in July, Swift returned in October to support her boyfriend, Chiefs star Travis Kelce. David Eulitt—Getty Images

Grainge calls the rerecording project “bizarrely brilliant and unique”—something that only an artist at her level could pull off. “It’s got such a narrative—there’s a reason for it.” He shakes his head. “Imagine Picasso painting something that he painted a few years ago, then re-creating it with the colors of today.” Part of the success story, Swift says, is the freedom she received from the label to follow her instincts. “If you look at what I’ve put out since then, it’s more albums in the last few years than I did in the first 15 years of my career,” she says. That prolific output has fueled her ascension. “She could serve two terms as President of the United States and then go to Las Vegas,” Grainge says. “Who else can do that?”

In the grand narrative of Swift’s life, as she rose this year, her foes’ fortunes also seemed to turn. Over the summer, it was reported that several of Braun’s key clients—chief among them Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande—were no longer being managed by his company, while West’s antisemitic and other offensive remarks led to his losing key endorsement deals. Swift knows firsthand that fame is a seesaw. “Nothing is permanent,” she says. “So I’m very careful to be grateful every second that I get to be doing this at this level, because I’ve had it taken away from me before. There is one thing I’ve learned: My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making things. Keep making art.” She considers. “But I’ve also learned there’s no point in actively trying to quote unquote defeat your enemies,” she says. “Trash takes itself out every single time.”

The premiere for Swift’s concert film takes place at the Grove, an outdoor mall in Los Angeles, which has been shut down for the event; Swift has packed 13 screens with thousands of fans. She goes, one by one, to each theater thanking sobbing audience members for being there. Like the tour, the film, which was released directly to theaters without a traditional partner, is an event. “We met with all the studios,” she tells me, “and we met with all the streamers, and we sized up how it was perceived and valued, and if they had high hopes and dreams for it. Ultimately I did what I tend to do more and more often these days, which is to bet on myself.” She credits her father with the idea. “He just said, why does there have to be a—for lack of a better word—middleman?”

In the theater excitement ripples through the crowd, a mix of fans and Swift’s friends, as we wait for her. To my left are two dedicated Swifties, sisters who introduce themselves as Madison, 23, and McCall, 20, and who are still reeling from taking a selfie with Swift on the red carpet. Their wrists are covered in friendship bracelets, some of which are deep cuts—such as no it’s BECKY, a reference to a beloved Tumblr meme, and BLEACHELLA STAN, for Swift’s 2016 platinum blond bob—and Madison reveals a tattoo on her forearm that says “Taylor’s Version.” Both tell me their favorite album is Reputation. They are my favorite people I have ever met, and I want to talk to only them for the rest of my life. Madison admires Swift for her vulnerability—“which is insane, when she’s under endless scrutiny”—while McCall cites her consistency, which she calls “a lost art form.” When I ask how McCall feels about Swift’s romantic life, she fields the question elegantly. “It’s a disservice to her to focus on that stuff,” she says. “She’s so good at making her personal experience relate to millions of people. When I listen to her songs, I think about what I’ve been through—not what she’s been through.”

Swift’s private life has long served as both grist for the tabloid mill and inspiration for her own work; she split from her longtime boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, earlier this year. Most recently, she’s been dating the NFL star Travis Kelce, as has been well documented when she attends his games. “I don’t know how they know what suite I’m in,” she says. “There’s a camera, like, a half-mile away, and you don’t know where it is, and you have no idea when the camera is putting you in the broadcast, so I don’t know if I’m being shown 17 times or once.” She is sensitive to the attention that’s put on her when she shows up. “I’m just there to support Travis,” she says. “I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads.”

I point out that it’s a net positive for the NFL to have a few Swifties watching. “Football is awesome, it turns out,” Swift says playfully. “I’ve been missing out my whole life.” (A game she attended in October was the most-watched Sunday show since the Super Bowl.)

Given her complex history with public interest in her dating life, I say, it seems noteworthy that her relationship with Kelce has played out so publicly. Swift gently pushes back: “This all started when Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell,” she says. “We started hanging out right after that. So we actually had a significant amount of time that no one knew, which I’m grateful for, because we got to get to know each other. By the time I went to that first game, we were a couple. I think some people think that they saw our first date at that game? We would never be psychotic enough to hard launch a first date.” The larger point, for her, is that there’s nothing to hide. “When you say a relationship is public, that means I’m going to see him do what he loves, we’re showing up for each other, other people are there and we don’t care,” she says. “The opposite of that is you have to go to an extreme amount of effort to make sure no one knows that you’re seeing someone. And we’re just proud of each other.”

Swift’s openness is one part of why her fan base leans heavily, though not exclusively, female. The Eras Tour was one critical piece of what Swift calls “a three-part summer of feminine extravaganza”—the other two parts being Gerwig’s box-office bonanza Barbie and Beyoncé’s blockbuster, culture-shifting Renaissance Tour. “To make a fun, entertaining blast of a movie, with that commentary,” she says of Barbie, “I cannot imagine how hard that was, and Greta made it look so easy.” (“I’m just a sucker for a gal who is good with words, and she is the best with them,” Gerwig says about Swift, whom she calls “Bruce Springsteen meets Loretta Lynn meets Bob Dylan.”)

Swift is no less effusive in talking about Beyoncé, who brokered a similar deal with AMC and shows up to Swift’s Los Angeles premiere; the next month, Swift returns the favor by attending Beyoncé’s in London. “She’s the most precious gem of a person—warm and open and funny,” Swift says. “And she’s such a great disrupter of music-industry norms. She taught every artist how to flip the table and challenge archaic business practices.” That her tour and Beyoncé’s were frequently juxtaposed is vexing. “There were so many stadium tours this summer, but the only ones that were compared were me and Beyoncé,” she says. “Clearly it’s very lucrative for the media and stan culture to pit two women against each other, even when those two artists in question refuse to participate in that discussion.”

To Swift, the success of all three feels like an inflection point. “If we have to speak stereotypically about the feminine and the masculine,” she says, “women have been fed the message that what we naturally gravitate toward—” She has a few examples: “Girlhood, feelings, love, breakups, analyzing those feelings, talking about them nonstop, glitter, sequins! We’ve been taught that those things are more frivolous than the things that stereotypically gendered men gravitate toward, right?” Right, I say. “And what has existed since the dawn of time? A patriarchal society. What fuels a patriarchal society? Money, flow of revenue, the economy. So actually, if we’re going to look at this in the most cynical way possible, feminine ideas becoming lucrative means that more female art will get made. It’s extremely heartening.”

Beyoncé joined Swift in Los Angeles on Oct. 11 for the first screening of her Eras Tour filmJohn Shearer—Getty Images for TAS

Amid so much attention, it seems noteworthy that Swift appears more relaxed in the public eye, not less—although I wonder out loud whether it just appears that way. She nods. “Over the years, I’ve learned I don’t have the time or bandwidth to get pressed about things that don’t matter. Yes, if I go out to dinner, there’s going to be a whole chaotic situation outside the restaurant. But I still want to go to dinner with my friends.” She sounds thoughtful. “Life is short. Have adventures. Me locking myself away in my house for a lot of years—I’ll never get that time back. I’m more trusting now than I was six years ago.”

She’s also having more fun. At her premiere, Swift sits in the same row as me, Madison, and McCall, singing along and dancing in her seat; we keep craning our necks to look at her, sharing thunderstruck looks: Isn’t this surreal? There are moments in the film when the cameras capture the enormous screens behind Swift onstage, and it feels like a house of mirrors, these myriad reflections of Taylor Swift—us watching her watch herself on a screen, which is itself showing Swift’s image on so many screens, the thousands of fans onscreen in the stadium and us in this theater, with Swift in the middle of it—all of us rapt, unable to look away.

Swift and I have been talking for a while now at her apartment, long enough that our coffees have gone cold and her cat Benjamin Button has trundled into the room, then gotten bored and left. She tells me about revisiting Reputation, which is perhaps the most charged era in the tour. “It’s a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure,” she says, laughing. “I think a lot of people see it and they’re just like, Sick snakes and strobe lights.” The upcoming vault tracks for Reputation will be “fire,” she promises. The rerecordings project feels like a mythical quest to her. “I’m collecting horcruxes,” she says. “I’m collecting infinity stones. Gandalf’s voice is in my head every time I put out a new one. For me, it is a movie now.”

It strikes me then that for all the talk about eras, it’s also worth thinking about genres—how Swift has moved between them in the stories she’s told. At first, it was a coming-of-age story, one about a young woman finding her way in the world and honing her voice before a fickle public. Then there were romances, great ones—tales of enchantment and desire, heartbreak and disillusionment, relationships that she both excavated for her songs and that the media documented for her with either joy or schadenfreude, depending on the day. There have been dramas with stakes so high and turns so twisty they feel Shakespearean in their scope, betrayals both personal and professional that have shaped her life. Occasionally, these stories have tipped into screwball comedy—like when a crowd in Seattle cheered so loudly it registered as an earthquake, or when, on a tour stop in Brazil, the local archdiocese allowed messages celebrating her to be projected onto the 124-ft. Christ the Redeemer statue. But they have one thing in common: Swift.

She is a maestro of self-determination, of writing her own story. The multihyphenate television creator Shonda Rhimes—no stranger to a plot twist—who has known Swift since she was a teenager, puts it simply: “She controls narrative not only in her work, but in her life,” she says. “It used to feel like people were taking shots at her. Now it feels like she’s providing the narrative—so there aren’t any shots to be taken.”

Here, Swift has told me a story about redemption, about rising and falling only to rise again—a hero’s journey. I do not say to her, in our conversation, that it did not always look that way from the outside—that, for example, when Reputation’s lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” reached No. 1 on the charts, or when the album sold 1.3 million albums in the first week, second only to 1989, she did not look like someone whose career had died. She looked like a superstar who was mining her personal experience as successfully as ever. I am tempted to say this.

But then I think, Who am I to challenge it, if that’s how she felt? The point is: she felt canceled. She felt as if her career had been taken from her. Something in her had been lost, and she was grieving it. Maybe this is the real Taylor Swift effect: That she gives people, many of them women, particularly girls, who have been conditioned to accept dismissal, gaslighting, and mistreatment from a society that treats their emotions as inconsequential, permission to believe that their interior lives matter. That for your heart to break, whether it’s from being kicked off a tour or by the memory of a scarf still sitting in a drawer somewhere or because somebody else controls your life’s work, is a valid wound, and no, you’re not crazy for being upset about it, or for wanting your story to be told.

After all, not to be corny, haven’t we all become selective autobiographers in the digital age as we curate our lives for our own audiences of any size—cutting away from the raw fabric of our lived experience to reveal the shape of the story we most want to tell, whether it’s on our own feeds or the world’s stage? I can’t blame her for being better at it than everyone else. It’s also not like she hasn’t admitted it. She sang it herself, in her song “Mastermind,” off last year’s Midnights, in a bridge so feathery you could almost miss that it marks some of the rawest, most naked songwriting of her career: “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid/ So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since/ To make them love me and make it seem effortless/ This is the first time I’ve felt the need to confess/ And I swear I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian because I care.”

She tells me she wrote that song after watching the Paul Thomas Anderson film Phantom Thread, which—spoiler—culminates in the reveal of a vast, layered manipulation. “Remember that last scene?” she says. “I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to have a lyric about being calculated?” She pauses. “It’s something that’s been thrown at me like a dagger, but now I take it as a compliment.”

It is a compliment. After I leave Swift’s house, I can’t stop thinking about how perfectly she crafted this story for me—the one about redemption, how she lost it all and got it back. Storytelling is what she’s always done; that’s why, Chesney tells me, he gave her that gift all those years ago. “She was a writer who had something to say,” he says. “That isn’t something you can fake by writing clichés. You can only live it, then write it as real as possible.”

She must have known that all the references she made had hidden meanings, that I’d see all the tossed-off details for the Easter eggs they were. The way she told me that story about Chesney, she knew there was a lesson, about the power of generosity, and how a crushing defeat can give way to a great and surprising gift. The way she said, “Are you not entertained?”—surely we both knew it was a quote from Gladiator, a movie in which a hero falls from grace, is forced to perform blood sport for the pleasure of spectators, and emerges victorious, having survived humiliation and debasement to soar higher than ever. And the way before I left, she showed me the note from Paul McCartney hanging in her bathroom, which has a Beatles lyric written on it—and not just any Beatles lyric, but this one: “Take these broken wings and learn to fly.” —With reporting by Leslie Dickstein and Megan McCluskey •

Styled by Heidi Bivens at Honey Artists; hair by Holli Smith; make-up by Diane Kendal; nails by Maki Sakamoto; production by VLM Productions

On the covers: Jacket, denim shirt and turtleneck by Polo Ralph Lauren; dress by Area; bodysuit by Bardot, tights by Wolford; earrings are artist’s own

On the inside: Jacket, denim shirt and turtleneck by Polo Ralph Lauren; tuxedo jacket, tuxedo shirt, vest and pocket square by Ralph Lauren Collection, jeans by Polo Ralph Lauren; dress by Alaia; rings by Anna Sheffield and Cartier; earrings are artist’s own

#Taylor Swift #Article #2023 Person Of The Year #Sam Lansky #TIME

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brookstonalmanac · 11 months

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Events 10.17 (before 1950)

690 – Empress Wu Zetian establishes the Zhou Dynasty of China. 1091 – London tornado of 1091: A tornado thought to be of strength T8/F4 strikes the heart of London. 1346 – The English capture King David II of Scotland at Neville's Cross and imprison him for eleven years. 1448 – An Ottoman army defeats a Hungarian army at the Second Battle of Kosovo. 1456 – The University of Greifswald is established as the second oldest university in northern Europe. 1534 – Anti-Catholic posters appear in Paris and other cities supporting Huldrych Zwingli's position on the Mass. 1558 – Poczta Polska, the Polish postal service, is founded. 1604 – Kepler's Supernova is observed in the constellation of Ophiuchus. 1610 – French king Louis XIII is crowned in Reims Cathedral. 1660 – The nine regicides who signed the death warrant of Charles I of England are hanged, drawn and quartered. 1662 – Charles II of England sells Dunkirk to Louis XIV of France for 40,000 pounds. 1713 – Great Northern War: Russia defeats Sweden in the Battle of Kostianvirta in Pälkäne. 1771 – Premiere in Milan of the opera Ascanio in Alba, composed by Mozart at age 15. 1777 – American Revolutionary War: British General John Burgoyne surrenders his army at Saratoga, New York. 1781 – American Revolutionary War: British General Charles, Earl Cornwallis surrenders at the Siege of Yorktown. 1800 – War of the Second Coalition: Britain takes control of the Dutch colony of Curaçao. 1806 – Former leader of the Haitian Revolution, Emperor Jacques I, is assassinated after an oppressive rule. 1811 – The silver deposits of Agua Amarga are discovered in Chile becoming in the following years instrumental for the Patriots to finance the Chilean War of Independence. 1814 – Eight people die in the London Beer Flood. 1850 – Riots start, which lead to a massacre in Aleppo. 1860 – First The Open Championship (referred to in North America as the British Open). 1861 – Aboriginal Australians kill nineteen Europeans in the Cullin-la-ringo massacre. 1907 – Marconi begins the first commercial transatlantic wireless service. 1912 – Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia declare war on the Ottoman Empire, joining Montenegro in the First Balkan War. 1919 – Leeds United F.C. founded at Salem Chapel, Holbeck after the winding up of Leeds City F.C. for making illegal payments to players during World War I. 1931 – Al Capone is convicted of income tax evasion. 1933 – Albert Einstein flees Nazi Germany and moves to the United States. 1940 – The body of Communist propagandist Willi Münzenberg is found in South France, starting a never-resolved mystery. 1941 – World War II: The USS Kearny becomes the first U.S. Navy vessel to be torpedoed by a U-boat. 1943 – The Burma Railway (Burma–Thailand Railway) is completed. 1943 – Nazi Holocaust in Poland: Sobibór extermination camp is closed. 1945 – A large demonstration in Buenos Aires, Argentina, demands Juan Perón's release.

#Events

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hakesbros · 2 years

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Albuquerque, Nm News, Weather And Sports Koat Channel 7

In and across the metropolis there are trails, bike routes, and paths that present the residents and visitors with options to motorized travel. In 2009, the city was reviewed as having a serious up and coming bike scene in North America. The similar 12 months, the City of Albuquerque opened its first Bicycle Boulevard on Silver Avenue. There are plans for extra funding in bikes and bike transit by the town, including bicycle lending packages, within the coming years.

In Albuquerque, the mayor's workplace has struggled to address the complaints of residents about homeless encampments taking on public parks and about aggressive panhandling. The metropolis plans to develop a multimillion-dollar heart on Albuquerque's south aspect where the homeless can search services but the number of beds will meet only a fraction of the necessity. Features and functionality that streamline the development process, provide digital design experiences and provide real-time access to order and supply information. As the focus homes for sale in albuquerque nm of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, the city is punctuated by agricultural acequias that distinction with the in any other case closely urban settings. Crops such as New Mexico chile are grown along the entire Rio Grande; the pink or green chile pepper is a staple of New Mexican cuisine and widely obtainable in restaurants, together with national fast-food chains. Albuquerque can be home to quite a few radio and tv stations that serve the metropolitan and outlying rural areas.

With over 1 million home professionals on Houzz, you’ll simply find the trusted Design-Build Contractor on your next project in Albuquerque, NM. The home was constructed around the architect and sandal designer, Bernard Rudofsky’s ideas and mixed a number of components. The home has onerous and gentle textures and old and new items that convey the Comeau couple’s eclectic taste new homes albuquerque. The firm’s founder, Kevin Evans, grew up within the development business, the place his father worked as a tile and drywall contractor in Farmington. Evans began his research in architectural drafting and design at the Phoenix Institute of Technology while working for a commercial drywall contractor.

Albuquerque climate is characterized by 310 days of sunshine, as properly as infinite blue skies you could enjoy every time you enterprise out of your personal home. With our over fifty five communities, you presumably can simply take pleasure in all of the thrilling activities Albuquerque has to offer and have something homes for sale albuquerque fun to do each single day. This area is comprised primarily of older properties in a rural setting, permitting for a change from the standard city flavor of most communities. Many homes are customized and the area showcases a lot of Albuquerque’s true estate sort properties. You could count on to pay between $300,000 to over $2,000,000 for homes within the North Valley.

Ted puts the costs of each a part of the project on a spreadsheet that enables one to see where cash goes. The buyer is given a finances for home windows new home builders in albuquerque, doors, flooring, etc. The dealers, chosen by Ted, that the shoppers work with, are the best at what they do.

Buy the proper home on the proper price near Albuquerque with an area Redfin actual property agent. In 1842, the world was introduced to the first-ever pale lager, and beer was eternally changed. This gentle straw to golden-colored earthy sensation quickly became the most popular type of beer on the planet. Just as this iconic beer makes nice use of flavors, our Pilsner floor plan makes great use of space on this open single-story home.

Albuquerque is positioned on the crossroads of a number of ecoregions, depending on the system applied. Camino Retirement Apartments provides unbiased and assisted residing on a month-to-month foundation. Camino is Albuquerque’s first retirement community, which opened its doorways in 1972, and it’s positioned east of Juan Tabo with views of the East Mountains.

Located NW of Albuquerque, Rio Rancho is Albuquerque’s largest neighbor. With a rising inhabitants of roughly fifty five,000—60,000, this city is having fun with fast progress and powerful homes for sale in albuquerque new mexico financial improvement. Intel is the city’s largest employer, and has been largely responsible for the economic prosperity loved by the neighborhood.

#real estate

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lastfrontierh · 2 years

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Heli-ski U S Association Protecting The Method Forward For Helicopter Skiing

While $3,200 looks as if a lot for three days, with a minimal of 21 runs per day, the bang in your buck is large. Northern Escape’s luxurious primary lodge is uniquely accessible, sitting on the banks of the Skeena River just twenty minutes from the town of Terrace. Northern Escape’s terrain lies in the Skeena Mountains of the Coast Range, a dramatic, lovely spine of glaciated peaks shot via with sea-level river drainages. Both lodges already sourced local components where possible for his or her five-star meals, and supplied B.C.-based beer and wine choices. It’s raining down on the lodge at Northern Escape Heliskiing in northern British Columbia.

Our three Run and5 Run packages are constructed for day heli skiers in search of a single or multiday adventure. Perfect for experts in addition to first timers who seek to take their powder addiction to the following level. As a professional freeskier, I really have been fortunate sufficient to heli-ski across Heliski the globe. From the Alps to the Andes and Canada to Alaska and I can say that arms down the most wonderful heli-ski expertise of my career has been with Arctic Heli Skiing in Iceland. The terrain is countless, the scenery like nothing else on the planet and the guiding is solely the best.

The Valle Nevado Heli-Ski program is organized through the ANH (National Heli-Ski Association of Chile). All of our pilots have in depth hours of flying in local circumstances and are extremely expert and experienced in winter mountain operations. They maintain a New Zealand Commercial Helicopter Pilot Licence and are often subjected to stringent performance checks to satisfy New Zealand CAA Part one hundred thirty five necessities. These are particular to specialised techniques required for alpine flying.

See what it’s wish to carve your means down pristine runs within the Alaska backcountry. Years of driven and meticulous terrain exploration by our guiding staff allows our guests to search out themselves within Heliski the terrain of their goals. At the tip of the day, it’s a fast journey again to civilisation however it’ll take you a while to come back down to earth.

Cervinia is an superior resort and has a few of the highest altitude skiing in Europe, with its skiable summit reaching 3480m. It shares the epic Matterhorn with its sister resort Zermatt over the border in Switzerland, making it a world-class snowboarding vacation spot. Beyond the extensive pistes, there's much Heliski more intensive backcountry, which is graced with common dumps of fresh fluffy powder. The heli skiing can either be a single day drop to a 6 day excessive expertise, however no matter what you'll get your worth for cash on epic vertical descents.

Get up within the snow once more or cross off a non-snow activity out of your bucket listing. There could additionally be limited places to heli ski in Argentina, but once you head to the Uco Valley, you will expertise some of the greatest terrain on the planet. The heli ski operator has established an abundance of peaks and drops that can blow your mind, with assured untouched traces for you to select. They usually offer 3 to 7-day journeys with a lot of flying time for you are taking in the views, while their expert guides take you to the most effective, distant spots. Although the bundle is fairly costly, you do get the chance to remain in some of the luxurious mountain lodges.

Imagine endless terrain, inspiring steeps, and colossal vertical toes. Take to the skies by helicopter to access virgin slopes deep in the Andes for a few of the most exhilarating mountain descents you will ever make. The expert native guides will take you out for some action-packed days in untracked powder, throughout glaciers and down backcountry bowls. The day begins with a weather check, then transport to the staging space. Safety briefings on avalanche transceivers and helicopters are followed by an easy scenic ride to the ridge of your goals.

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debutart · 4 years

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Welcome to the creative world of Alan Berry Rhys, a talented graphic artist, illustrator and fine artist based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Vintage graphic advertising inspires his work. Alan’s big, bold shapes, retro notes, strong colours, unique texture, and lettering with hints of fun elements, give his work a distinctive characteristic. In search of inspiration from the simpler life he often explores craftsmanship lifestyles, such as those of fishermen, axemen, butchers and carpenters. He also enjoys exploring popular street graphics.

Using screen-printing, risograph and painting, he has developed a unique style based on low quality printing methods of early graphic advertising, while often incorporating unique lettering and typography.

Alan has worked on many high profile advertising campaigns, including a wide range of commercial and commissioned works for well known brands, including Jack Daniel's, Absolut Vodka, Nike, Puma, Sol Beer, Cinzano, Vans, Oreo, Good Year, Penguin, California Customs, Pilgrim London, BlackFin, Gravedad Zero.

Many of Alan’s pieces have an appealing vintage-made-modern look often rendered in vivid colours, and sometimes rendered with a sophisticated limited pallet. Alan is talented at understanding briefs in depth and he takes pride in providing appropriate visual solutions, whether they be for a campaign, a book cover, or an editorial project.

Alan has been a graphic design professor at Buenos Aires University for 8 years. As an artist, he has mounted several solo shows in London, Buenos Aires, Rosario (Argentina), San Francisco and Santiago de Chile. He has also participated in several combined shows in Portland, Buenos Aires, Tandil (Argentina) and Asunción (Paraguay). He has been invited to the last 3 editions of Puma Urban Art in Buenos Aires.

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red-wines-recipes · 4 years

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Cheers - Its Wine

Wine is one of the most fascinating drinks among the European citizens. It is an alcoholic beverage prepared from the fermented grape juice. Grapes have the chemical property of carrying out fermentation without the utilization of sugars, enzymes or other nutrients. It is prepared fermenting the crushed grapes with the different types of yeast strains. Yeast consumes all the sugars present in grapes and converts them into alcohol. Different types of grapes and different strains of grapes are responsible for the production of different types of wines. Apples and berries are also utilized for the preparation of wines and the wines obtained are named after the name of the fruit like apple wine or elderberry wine or are popularly name as fruit wine or country wine. Barley and rice wine are prepared from the starch based materials and resemble beer and spirit more than wine and ginger wine is fortified with brandy. The term wine is used for these beverages because of their high alcoholic content. The commercial use of the term English wine is under the government control.

Wine has a very rich history which is 6000 BC old and is thought to have originated in the borders of Georgia and Iran. The wine was prepared in Europe for the first time about 4500 BC ago in the Balkans and was very common in Rome, Thrace and ancient Greece. Wine also deserves an important role in religion throughout the history. The Greek god Dionysus and the Roman god Bacchus symbolize wine and the wine is used in the catholic and Jewish ceremonies. The word wine has originated from a Proto-Germanic word winam which means grape. The earliest cultivation of grapevine Vitis vinifera first started in Georgia. Wine has been prepared in India from the Vedic times. Viticulture started in India first in the Indus valley where grapevines were introduced for the first time from Persia about 5000 BC ago. Chanakya, the chief minister of the Emperor Chandragupta Maurya has discussed about wine in his writings about 4th century BC ago and has designated wine by the term Madhu. He has focused on the side effects of wine and has strongly condemned the use of wine.

Wine is prepared from more than one varieties of Vitis vinifera like Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Gamay and Merlot. When one of these varieties is used the resultant is termed as varietal. The world's most expensive wines come from the regions like Bordeaux and Rhone Valley are blended from different varieties of the same vintage. Wine can also be prepared from the hybrid varieties of grapes obtained by genetic cross breeding. Vitis labrusca, Vitis aestivalis, Vitis rupestris, Vitis rotundifolia and Vitis riparia are native North American varieties of grapes grown for the production of jams, jellies or sometimes wine.

Hybridization is a different process so cannot be confused with grafting. Most of the world's grape vineyards are planted with the European variety of grapevine Vitis vinifera grafted with the North American species rootstock. This is basically done because the North American species are resistant to Phyllosera a root louse that damages the roots of grapevines resulting in death. In the late 19th century most of the vineyards of Europe were destroyed by a bug leading to deaths of grapevines and heavy economic loss. Grafting is a common practice in all wine producing nations except Argentina, Chile and Canary Islands and only these areas include vineyards free from any devastating pests. Associated with wine production terroir is an important concept that includes variety of grapevine to be used, elevation and shape of vineyard, type and chemistry of soil, climate and seasonal conditions and the local yeast cultures to be used. The fermentation, ageing and processing of wine in terroir may result in good wine production.

The classification, production and sale of wine are under the control of government in many parts of the world. European wines are classified on the basis of the regions where they are produced while non-European ones are classified on the variety of grape used. Common examples of locally recognized non-Europeans regions for wine production include Napa Valley in California, Columbia Valley in Washington, Barossa and Hunter Valley in Australia, Central Valley in Chile, Hawke's Bay and Marlborough in New Zealand and Niagara Peninsula in Canada. Some blended wines are sold by a particular trademark and are under strict rules and regulations of the government for example, Meritage is a generally a Bordeaux-style blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot and may also include Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, and Malbec. The commercial use of the term Meritage is possible only after getting license from the Meritage Association. France uses different systems based on the concept terroir for classification. Greece and Italy classify on the basis of the regions where they are prepared. New World ones are classified on the variety of grapes used for preparation.

A vintage wine is one that is prepared from the grapes grown in a particular season of the year are labeled as vintage. Variations in the character of wine may vary due to palate, colour, nose and development. High quality wines taste better if are stored properly for a long time. Habitual wine drinkers generally stored the bottles of vintage wine for future consumption. For a wine to be called as vintage wine in United States the American Viticultural Area has passed certain rules like the vintage wine must contain 95% of the its volume of the grapes harvested in that year. All the vintage wines are bottles in a single batch so that all may have the similar taste. Climate plays an important role in character of wine as it affects its flavour and quality strongly. So we can say that vintage wines are characteristic of a particular vintage. Superior vintages from a reputed producer and region fetch higher prices of wine than average vintages. Non-vintage wines can also be blended from more than one vintage for consistency a process which allows wine makers to keep a reliable market image and maintain sales even in bad years.

Wine tasting is sensory examination and evaluation of wine. Wines are made from the chemical compounds that found in fruits, vegetables and spices. The sweetness of measured by the amount of sugar left in wine after fermentation, relative to the acidity present in wine. Dry wine has a very small percentage of residual sugar. Individual flavours in the wine can be easily detected as the grape juice and wine contain terpenes and esters as chief components. Experienced tasters can easily identify the type and flavour of wine. Chocolate, vanilla and coffee also act as flavouring agents for wine. Wine aroma comes from the compounds present in wine which are released on being exposed to air. Red wines are highly aromatic. Outstanding vintages from best vineyards fetch good prices in the market around $US 30-50 dollars per bottle. The most commonly purchase wines in Europe include Bordeaux, Burgundy and cult wines. The wine grapes grow almost between thirty to fifty degrees north or south of the equator. The world's southernmost vineyards are present in the Central Otago of New Zealand's South Islands near the 45th parallel south and the north most are in Flen, Sweden just north of 59th parallel north. UK was the largest producer of wine in the year 2007.

Wine is the most important and popular beverage of European and Mediterranean cuisines participating in the simple as well as complex traditions. Apart from its popularity as a beverage wine is also a good flavouring agent particularly used stocks and braising as its acidity imparts a different taste to the sweet dishes. Red, white and sparkling wines are very popular and are known as light wines as they conatin only 10-14% alcohol content by volume. Desert wines contain 14-20% alcohol and are sometimes fortified to make more sweet and tasty. Some wine labels suggest that after opening the wine bottle they must be allowed to breathe for few minutes before consuming while others recommend drinking the wine immediately after opening. Decanting is the process of pouring the wine in a special container for the purpose of breathing only. Decanting the wine with the help of filter removes the bitter sediments that may have been formed in the wine. Sediments are more easily formed in the older wines.

During aeration the exposure of younger wines to air adds flavour as well as aroma to them and also makes them smoother. Older wines lose their flavour as well as aroma if exposed to air for a long time. Exposure of wines to air does not benefit all types of wines. Use of wines in religion and ceremonies has been known since ancient times. Wine is an integral part of Jewish laws and traditions. Kiddush is a blessing recited over grape juice to sanctify the Jewish holiday. In Christianity wine is used in a sacred rite called Eucharist which originates in the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper in which Jesus shared bread and wine with his disciples and commanded them to do the same in remembrance to me. Beliefs about the nature of Eucharist have been disputed among different Christian denominations. The use of alcohol has been strictly prohibited in the Islamic law. Iran and Afghanistan had a wine industry that vanished after the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Excessive consumption of wine affects the human body. Every 100 gram of red wine provides about 85 Kcal energy, 2.6 g carbohydrates, 0.6 g sugars, 0.0 g fat, 0.1 g proteins and 10.6 g alcohol. Epidemiological studies have shown that moderate consumption of wine reduced death rate by preventing heart attack. Population studies have observed a J curve association between wine consumption and risk of cardiac failure. This suggests that heavy drinkers are at higher risk of getting heart attack than moderate drinkers and non-drinkers. Studies have shown that moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages reduces the risk of cardiac arrest but this association is very much strong with the wines. Some studies have proved red wines to be best over white wines. Red wine contains more polyphenols than white wine so is much more protective against cardiovascular disease.

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unscharf-an-den-raendern · 4 years

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Interview with Ralf from 2005 (translated from German)

Read the original German version here: http://www.electroempire.com/index.php?thread/1755-ralf-h%C3%BCtter-kraftwerk-interview-2005/

They’re the most influential German band of all time, for a third of a century they advanced and shaped electronic music like no one else. During that time, they only gave about one hundred interviews worldwide, the living legends are considered to be media-shy. Now Arschmaden-rave-magazin managed to be the first German magazine since 2001 to get an exclusive interview with the Düsseldorf sound pioneers Kraftwerk. Hauke Schlichting was allowed to spend almost an hour on the phone with Ralf Hütter and found out that music gods are also completely normal people sometimes.

Hauke Schlichting: Are there many pre-order of the notebook edition of “Minimum Maximum” already?

Ralf Hütter: I think so. Kraftwerk is not just music, we also create the lyrics, the pictures and the entire visual concept. I’ve been doing that with my partner Florian Schneider since 1970. This notebook edition enables us to put a lot of ideas into effect that we had for a long time. And now that it's finished, it's a liberating moment.

Hauke Schlichting: I once saw you in the audience of a talk by Oskar Sala. I suppose that pioneers like Sala, John Cage and certainly Karlheinz Stockhausen were a source of inspiration for Kraftwerk...

Ralf Hütter: Especially in our living environment in the second half of the sixties. Our friends and we were involved in the art scene. Electronic music was not foreign to us.

Hauke Schlichting: In an old interview from 1976 you said: "The world of sounds is music.” The first thing that came to my mind was whether the members of Kraftwerk listened to and liked music by noise musicians or even industrial music? Is that a similar approach?

Ralf Hütter: I can only speak for myself now, but I definitely see a spiritual kinship there. Definitely.

Hauke Schlichting: You called your music "Industrial Folk Music" once...

Ralf Hütter: Yes, but not with an F. It was about "Industrielle Volksmusik", the English translated it. It was an idea of the electronic Volkswagen. That's a concept. We have always reported on everyday things. "Autobahn", for example, was an attempt to make everyday music.

Hauke Schlichting: Is there any electronic music from - let's say the last 20 years - that inspired you?

Ralf Hütter: Yes, especially this spiritual kinship between the two cities starting with a D.

Hauke Schlichting: Düsseldorf and Detroit!

Ralf Hütter: Right. We know the creative heads of Detroit like Derrick May, Mike Banks and Kevin Saunderson. And that's what we consider to be a real inspiration, alternating, which finds its sound in this language. The dynamic that's in there, like in here. This electric funk or whatever you want to call it, that's a spiritual kinship.

Hauke Schlichting: Were the first Cybotron records of Juan Atkins things that you already noticed back in 1981?

Ralf Hütter: We were also in New York earlier, where the record company took us to some afterhours in non-authorized clubs.

Hauke Schlichting: They already existed back then!?

Ralf Hütter: Yeah, sure, at the end of the seventies. Then we had the experience that Afrika Bambaataa played our song “Metall auf Metall”. I thought, oh, fine, and then more than a quarter of an hour went by and I started wondering, because the song is not that long. Until I realized that he combined it with several record players.

Hauke Schlichting: A live remix with turntables, so to speak...

Ralf Hütter: That must have been in '77.

Hauke Schlichting: Mr Bambaataa is definitely a pioneer as well.

Ralf Hütter: Definitely.

Hauke Schlichting: There are an infinite number of songs nowadays which obviously sampled Kraftwerk. You were once described as "the most sampled artists besides James Brown". Are you annoyed when this happens without being asked?

Ralf Hütter: In the right music it is mental communication. Creative feedback. But if they appear on any “cucumbers” (Translator’s note: Ralf means bad musicians) or purely commercial products, then our publishing house will take action.

Hauke Schlichting: Do you collect your own records? If you want to own all the Kraftwerk records, including all the different pressings, you’d have to collect several thousand.

Ralf Hütter: I think that's materialistic nonsense. It's like collecting beer coastes. That’s totally uninteresting. It's about music, not about some pieces of plastic.

Hauke Schlichting: But they say that you collect old synthesizers.

Ralf Hütter: Our studio has been changing constantly since 1970, there are always new things being wired, installed or programmed. Improved. So often some equipment is put away, first in the warehouse, because you might need them again. At some point they were standing there, nobody wanted them, then they got dusty, then reactivated in the Kling Klang Museum. Ten years later we restored and repaired them all to the latest state of the art. Now we have been asked if we could make them available for an exhibition, but at the moment we can't give them away because they are actually in use. Over the last twenty years, we have transferred all the original Kraftwerk sounds to the digital level. Together with our electrical engineers Fritz Hilpert and Henning Schmitz.

Hauke Schlichting: You used to take a lot of equipment weighing tons with you on tour.

Ralf Hütter: Yes, the Kling Klang Studio is our instrumentarium. It has been like that ever since the first concerts. At that time they were still single instruments or single racks with many cables. Then at some point we assembled them in multi-racks.

Hauke Schlichting: The live equipment was always identical to the studio equipment. Is that still the case now? The things you carry around with you now are much more compact.

Ralf Hütter: Now we play with the virtual Kling Klang Studio with laptops at concerts in real time and mobile. That's why we have been able to travel all over the world since 2002. Today we have complete access to the entire audio-visual show, which also changes a bit from concert to concert. That's what makes it interesting. We no longer have to build it up every day to reach a fixed status, we can work with it live. In the past we were on tour rather reproductively, a lot of things didn't work, that was actually a torture, these concerts back then. That's why we only did one tour, in 1975 ("Autobahn"), then for years almost nothing and in 1981 ("Computerwelt"), when we did another tour, we also used many tapes in addition to my analog sequencer, because our music was actually not playable live at that time.

Hauke Schlichting: The live DVD you’re releasing now gives the illusion that it is the complete recording of one concert. If you take a closer look, you will see that it has been put together from many concerts. Was there no concert that was great from front to back?

Ralf Hütter: We recorded and documented everything. We then selected the recordings based on quality and intensity. That was then put together. That is also our concept of electronic mobility. "Tour de France" should definitely be from Paris, "Autobahn" from Berlin, "Dentaku/calculator" from Tokyo. We had a lot more material available later, but we couldn't put that in. In Santiago de Chile, for example, the audience has the best timing in the world when clapping along. I've never experienced anything that synchronous before.

Hauke Schlichting: When Kraftwerk is in the studio, do you sometimes make music just for fun, just playing around a bit?

Ralf Hütter: We once said that the music composes itself.

Hauke Schlichting: That means constant trying out and jamming around?

Ralf Hütter: That's where we actually come from, we've been doing that since the late sixties. For more than a third of a century we've been walking on the same electronic path. We just try to be open for ideas. They come when you cycle, like “Tour de France”, they come when you drive, like “Autobahn”. Some things also arise from texts, from books, from all kinds of things. We use all mental ideas, we do not work according to one principle. The freedom lies precisely in the fact that all art forms are open to you today. It is a gift that we live in a time where you don't need a large orchestra and where you don't need a nobleman who puts gold ducats at your disposal. Now there is an autonomy that can be realized through the man-machine Kraftwerk.

Hauke Schlichting: Your studio seems a bit like a fortress against the outside world. But you have emphasized several times that you are not isolated at all, that you meet a lot of friends and actually lead a very normal life. But we know relatively little about that. Does that mean that private life is the super important compensation for an artist's life?

Ralf Hütter: No, we see ourselves as scientists, as music workers. We do our work, we drink a cup of coffee in the morning, on weekends we ride our bikes. We go to clubs because the lively scene of electronic music is important to us. And that's where it takes place. We have been connected to club culture since the sixties.

Hauke Schlichting: Does that mean that you now travel more often or specifically to performances by live artists or DJs?

Ralf Hütter: Mostly that happens when we are on the road. If the travel plan allows it, because otherwise it can happen that you can't concentrate at concerts in the evening due to lack of sleep. Working at the screen, with the mouse, they’re very fine movements. Minimal movements with maximum effect on sound and images. Again a mental reference to this work "minimum-maximum".

Hauke Schlichting: Can you imagine working with other musicians?

Ralf Hütter: We already worked together with different musicians, especially with music engineers. For example with François K, with William Orbit, with Etienne de Crécy, with Orbital, with Underground Resistance.

Hauke Schlichting: The revision of your back catalogue is now finished...

Ralf Hütter: Yes, finally. It is also about clarity and now for the first time everything is as it was intended.

Hauke Schlichting: Can you release more albums in the future that way?

Ralf Hütter: Yes, also because the technical development has changed in our favour. We now have the right tools at our disposal, so we don't have to spend so much time on wiring and installation.

Hauke Schlichting: The teen newspaper Bravo quoted you in 1975 with the sentence: "One day they will imitate our music. Could you have imagined back then that this would really happen?

Ralf Hütter: Yes, we thought so at that time. We played the album to them in my old Volkswagen. We had a big loudspeaker in the back, we didn't have the kind of equipment we have today. And then my friend Florian and I drove on the motorway with our poet and painter friend Emil and Bravo. At the beginning of the seventies our music was mostly only played in special radio programmes, e.g. by Winfried Trenkler. Before "Autobahn", Kraftwerk only existed in this art and student scene. And then live, we come from this live music scene. That we now play electronic music all over the world again is something where the circle closes. Now it takes on the shape we imagined in our imagination at the time.

Hauke Schlichting: Thirty years ago you also said: "In twenty years, in our opinion, there will hardly be any groups with guitars and drums any more. For us these instruments belong to the past already today."

Ralf Hütter: Right.

Hauke Schlichting: But that didn't quite come true.

Ralf Hütter: There are many antiques. But that is still true. There are also still symphony orchestras. In our opinion, the thoughts or essence of the present can only be realized with adequate means.

Hauke Schlichting: You have very few concrete political statements in your music...

Ralf Hütter: Rather socio-political, from our everyday life.

Hauke Schlichting: You only find a concrete one in the new version of "Radioactivity".

Ralf Hütter: Yes, we inserted that because there were endless misunderstandings. We simply wanted to clarify these misunderstandings with one word ("Stop").

Hauke Schlichting: Because of the last album the topic of cycling was once again massively brought into the picture...

Ralf Hütter: I had written this lyrics in 1983 with my French friend Maxime Schmidt. Florian was experimenting with sounds at the same time with his first sampler. This resulted in the album concept "Tour de France". At that time we released only that one single under time pressure and then the ideas fell a bit into oblivion. However, this practically slumbered as a film script in a long version in the studio under the heading unfinished projects. And we just finished that now.

Hauke Schlichting: You have been active as cyclists for a very long time...

Ralf Hütter: Yes, since "Mensch-Maschine". The concept of "man-machine" has brought an awareness, from the pure sound field of music a dynamic physicality man-machine has conclusively emerged. We tried that out and the fascination has remained.

Hauke Schlichting: The unity of man and bicycle is still the man-machine.

Ralf Hütter: That's how it is.

Hauke Schlichting: The man-machine motif has always been a dream of mankind. It already existed with the Greeks, it played a major role with the alchemists, in E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Sandman", in the film "Metropolis" - there are countless examples.

Ralf Hütter: That had become reality for us. There was often the misunderstanding of the machine-man, but we were always concerned with man-machines. We are interactively connected with the machines, that has remained so until today, that is actually a synonym for Kraftwerk.

Hauke Schlichting: Was Kurt Schwitters' "Schmidt-Lied" from 1927 the model for the album "Radioaktivität"?

Ralf Hütter: I've never heard it.

Hauke Schlichting: May I quote from it?

Ralf Hütter: Yes, of course!

Hauke Schlichting: "Und wenn die Welten untergehn, / so bleibt die Welle doch bestehn. / Das Radio erzählt euch allen, / was immer neues vorgefallen. / Und funk ich hier ins Mikrofon, / hört man im Weltall jeden Ton. / Und bis in die Unendlichkeit, / erfährt man jede Neuigkeit. / Wir funken bis zum Untergang / ins Weltall kilometerlang." ("And if the worlds go under, / the wave will still exist. / The radio tells you all, / whatever new happened. / And if I radio here into the microphone, / you can hear every sound in space. / And to infinity, / you'll hear every news. / We'll radio until the end / to space for miles and miles."

Ralf Hütter: A spiritual bond!

Hauke Schlichting: It only remains for me to say that we all hope not to have to wait that long and we are looking forward to new material. You will be turning sixty next year, I hope that Kraftwerk will continue to produce music for a very long time and present it live. But if you've been cycling for 25 or 30 years, like you do, then you should probably be fit.

Ralf Hütter: Yes, we are.

Hauke Schlichting: Wonderful, good luck for the future and thank you very much.

#kraftwerk

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tallat-of-thralls · 5 years

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Mesquite: The Tree of Life of the South West

"I could ask for no better monument over my grave than a good mesquite tree, its roots down deep like those of peace who belong to the soil, its hardy branches, leaves, and fruit holding memories of the soil..." J. Frank Dobie, Texas Writer

Overview

The name mesquite derives from the Hispansized word 'mizquitl'.

There are more than 40 species of mesquite trees found worldwide, at least 90 percent of which grow in Latin America, principally Argentina and Chile. Although mesquite also thrives in other arid regions such as those in Southwest North America, Africa, the Middle East, Tunisia, Algeria, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Burma, Hawaii, West Indies, Russia, Puerto Rico, and Australia.

The tree itself comes in a variety of sizes depending on rain fall. Locations with higher rain fall note mesquite trees ranging from 40-50ft in height with a spread of nearly 40 feet or more. The branches are sparsely covered in thin feathery leaves with 2inch thorns growing at the base of the leaf joints.

This blog will mostly focus on Latin America; specifically in the Southwest Us and Texas.

There are seven varieties that cover one-third of the state of Texas or 56 million of the 167.5 million acres of land from the Rio Grande to the Panhandle, across central and north Texas and into much of west texas. Of all the US states 76 percent of mesquite wood grows in Texas. Mesquite grows in all regions of the state except the deep East Piney Woods.

Out of the seven varieties, the post will mostly reference Prosopis glandulosa var. glandulosa a.k.a "Honey Mesquite".

Map of the American South West and Latin america showing the range of Mesquite tree growth.

Native Tribes: Resource and Myth

Description reads: Salt River Reservation, Pima Agency Arizona, two Maricopa men(sitting) and Mojave Man in full aboriginal dress. 1880

Mesquite was such an omnipresent and nutritious resource and a central part of life itself that many tribes such as the Walapai, Apache, Papago, and Maricopa honored mesquite within their language and mythology.

Mesquite beans were the food staples for many of the South West Native American tribes. Through out the United states they gathered millions of pounds annually. In cases of food shortages, mesquite beans were often the only food source.

Much of the plant material such as fiber, thorns, sap, and roots were used in the making of many goods. The fibers were used for making of textiles and baskets. The

The creation myth of the Maricopa states that the Maricopa, Pima, and Yavapai -after death of their maker- scattered over the land and gathered mesquite beans. An Apache myth recounts how the sun and moon consulted with one another and formed the mesquite tree then hung beans upon its branches. The death of the Coyote myth of the Pima tells of Mesquite surviving the Great Flood and of how the coyote ate so many beans that they swelled in his stomach.

The Mesquite was an extremely important resource and was used frequently as an amenity of trade between the Apache tribe and the Pima tribe. When food plants failed during time of drought the Pima would travel long expeditions to trade goods with the Apache for beans and bean flour. With it, the Pima made dough and cooked it as round cakes. Certain tribes such as Pima and Opata also fermented bean flour water creating a bean beer called Atole and has a mildly intoxicating quality.

The gum, or sap, of the tree was used as adhesive to mend broken pottery as well as dye clay before the heating process. The gum when mixed with mud was used in several tribes spiritual and courtship rituals.

Both leaves and gum of the Mesquite is known by the tribes to carry healing powers and medicinal properties.

The Yaqui community in particular honor mesquite as one of two plants to have supernatural powers beyond most other plants. However of the two, only Mesquite grows in the sacred territory of the Yaqui and is said to have powers to detect and vanquish witchcraft especially if the wood is cut into a shape of a cross. One Yaqui myth tells of a "talking stick" made from mesquite wood which foretold death to all people baptized as christian.

Anglo-Texan History

Image of Mesquite Texas, 1890 showing piles of mesquite branches and horse drawn wagons containing grain or beans.

Historians believed that the mesquite was orginally limited to extreme South Texas and spread north only after the Civil War when cattle drives became frequent. Cattle would eat mesquite beans when grass was not plentiful.

Early Texas settlers facored the mesquite wood because not only was it plentiful but it also resisted rotting. Before commercial barbed wire came to texas in the 1870s, ranchers built sturdy corrals from mesquite-log picket fences. Travelers also fashioned hubs for wagons, wagon spokes, and small boat ribs from mesquite.

During the civil war, when coffee was scarce, Texans made ersatz coffee from roasted and ground mesquite beans. Honey made from mesquite flowers was especially prized. In the absence of pins, settlers substituted mesquite thorns.

In the 1869 Dr. John E. Park of Sequin patented under the no. 51,407 on December 5 for the use of mesquite bark in tanning leather. In the article from 1870 Texas Almanac, he included information on the superiority of the use of Mesquite in tanning leather. For, mesquite was found to be richest in Tannic Acid (a substance used for tanning) and worked exceptionally faster than previous methods because the acid penetrated the hide faster. Fast enough to seldom lose hide to decomposition. This allowed for tanning to be done in summer months, a process usually done in winter.

Medicinal Uses

*Note: not a replacement for modern day regulated medications and treatments.*

Aztecs made a lotion from ground mesquite leaves to treat sore eyes.

The Yuma tribe treated venereal diseases with an infusion of leaves and sap.

Comanches chewed on leaves to relieve toothaches.

The Yaqui Tribe treated headaches with a poultice made from mashing leaves to a pulp, mixing with water, and binding the mixture to the forehead.

The light-amber gum or sap that oozed from mesauite bark was mixed with water and gargled to treat sore throats, or swallowed to treat diarrhea, aid in digestion, and help wounds heal.

The Yavapai rubbed a mixture of mud and mesquite gum into their hair to simultaneously dye it and treat lice.

Modern Uses

Although ranchers still try to annihilate mesquite due to injury of livestock and cowhands, a dedicated group of texans cant get enough of it. They are mostly artisans who value mesquite for its beauty, the ease with which it can be worked, and the high sheen of finished pieces. Some even prize its irregularities.

Mesquite has a swirling grain, radial cracks, mineral deposits in the bark, and often many insect holes. Mesquite is dimensionally stable: as most hardwoods dry they shrink more in one direction than they do the other while mesquite shrinks the same percentage in both directions. It has a surface hardness of 2,336 pounds per squared inch, equal to that of hickory and almost twice that of oak and maple; and a density of 45 pounds per foot greater than oak, maple, pecan, and hickory.

Modern Spiritual interpertations:

Harmonizing qualities

Accessing the willingness to cross the wasteland of "dark night of the soul" to find deep spiritual richness within yourself and others

Comfortably connecting with others from a place of compassion and warmth

Standing inside a circle of love

Self blessing

Forgiveness

Possible use for Mesquite in imbalances

Emotional remoteness

Aloofness

Allowing others to see a coolness that actually covers an inner warmth

Feeling as is there is a barren wasteland or spiritual desolation within self.

Feeling separated and remote from others or self.

Personal Suggestion on craft Use*

*Disclaimer: subject to error and not a replacement for actual medications; allergy notice: mesquite is part of the legume family. Research trees and plants in area before ingesting random plants. Watch out for use of pesticides in public places. I do Not recommend diy fermentation. I do not support appropriating native tribes' traditions and rites unless explicitly permitted to by said tribe, do NOT trespass on Sacred Lands for resources it may be possible to purchase sacred mesquite from the tribes. Do Not vandalize sacred grounds or public trees. BE RESPECTFUL.*

Mesquite is tasty. Use wood for rich Smokey flavor on barbequed meats and vegtables.

Make tea from leaves

The beans are said to taste sweet and contain 30 percent sugar trace. Eat beans raw, roasted, dried, or ground into a flour.

Use water diluted sap to treat rashes. (Unless allergic.)

Use diluted sap in hair as you would oils.

Burn leaves and wood to smoke cleanse.

Hang mesquite cross to avert hexes or harmful craft.

I recommend buying from South Western Tribes and other mesquite artisans for bobbles and other wooden figures. Otherwise, source your mesquite in an earth friendly manner by sustainable means and only take what you need.

Information Sources:

"The Magnificent Mesquite" book by Ken E. Rogers

Texasalmanac.com

Desert-alchemy.com

Local Texans

Picture Sources: Google and pinterest

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