#this doubles with my LEAST favorite version of this phenomenon

[apollos-boyfriend]

late to the oh hellos conversation but how does one listen to soldier post king and NOT hear it’s a Christian song about Jesus as Messiah. “Smeared with oil like David’s boy” did you listen to Hallelujah and think “wow I wonder who this is about ^-^ definitely not the temptation of David and Samson and the complicated ways women are both glorified and vilified in the Bible”

Anyways that is to say I recently started listening to the Oh Hellos and realizing how much of their music is rooted in religious imagery or themes.

no it’s definitely not another case of that. as someone who BARELY paid attention in church. it’s still so easy to pick up on for like 95% of their songs. as i said people can interpret them however they want when it comes down to it. that’s kinda the point. but how do you miss the fact that it’s originally heavily religious.

my favorite version of this phenomena is people adding passerine to their ctommy playlists. because like. as someone who loves the song and has analyzed it heavily in the context of the smp. it could relate to ctommy. but i KNOW that 99% of people aren’t adding it because of that. and i KNOW they’d be shocked to high hell if i told them what the song is actually supposed to be about. and that keeps me going in life tbh

[silverandsoulbonded]

A Life of Stories - Soulbonding and My Story

It’s the late 90’s. A tiny child sits in the grip of wonder on the carpet two feet from the old, analog television screen. The volume is turned way down on a Saturday morning, so as not to wake the parents. And Digimon: Adventure is playing.

That kid was me.

I spent the next several days telling anyone and everyone I knew about the trials and bravery of my favorite new friends on the TV. Taichi and his Digi-pals.

Every Saturday morning I tuned in with wrapped attention to check in on my friends. Because that is what they were. I could not explain it at the time, and looking back I see that I did not understand just how powerful my love for them was, but over the years I began to notice the disparity between my experience and that of others. The glazed looks I received when I tried to communicate just how much the “stories” around me meant to my heart and spirit.

As I grew, so too did my well of worlds. When it was not Digimon, it turned to Batman and the DC Animated Universe. Over the years, as things became harder and harder for me in an unsafe household, I would reach out to those stories for safety and comfort. In the dead of night, listening to shouts, I would silently pray for Batman to come in and save me. I would think about Static, from Static Shock, and his bravery. I would long for the Justice League to show me hope.

I grew up in a conservative Protestant Christian household, and I was quickly taught from the moment I could understand stories that they were not real. It seemed a strange double-standard to me, as we read of Jesus and his amazing feats, recorded centuries ago by the hands of men but somehow “different” than the other stories I consumed, which also taught me and affected me just as emotionally.

It would not be until adulthood that I could finally articulate this incongruity I felt, much less possess the bravery and personal freedom to think about it on my own terms. To set aside the pre-packaged “truth” I had been fed growing up in order to find my own fresh fruits of wisdom and meaning.

Stories. Stories are what sustain humanity. All we have are stories. Even the perceptions we store in our brains are only that. Perceptions. Stories. We can never truly know what an orange is, or who a person is. We only can know our perception of them, and the story of them that lives on within us.

And, sometimes, those stories speak to us in the most fantastic and magical of ways.

Fast forward to 2021.

I am an adult. A practicing witch and pagan. An artist and writer. I am functional and thriving. And I have an unusual family.

Some of the most important people in my life do not exist on the physical plane of this Earth quite the same as other friends of mine. They exist in the subtle realms of Dream and thought and wonder. Over time I have come to find many names for them. Spirits, guides, and “soulbonds”.

I began my foray into the community of “soulbonding” when I began to sense, or rather, acknowledge the living quality of some of the “characters” I was writing about. One character in particular, a being who introduced himself to me in a dream, had me particularly flummoxed. I called him Asura, and from the moment he entered my life through that dream, my entire world changed. It was akin to stepping onto a roller coaster car while it was still moving—except this roller coaster had no track and no limits. His entire presence permeated my life, my thoughts, my daydreams. I wrote about him, and it was my writing about him that led me to thoughts, questions, and explorations I would have never dared otherwise. By finding him, he led me to find myself, and for that I shall be forever grateful.

At some point, I, and even my closest friends, became aware of a “spookiness” about my dogged pursuit of this mysterious character. I started to know things about him and his world, and make connections in his story, that seemed to come out of nowhere but which all cohered together perfectly. Without a fault, I would learn tidbits about him that would suddenly fit with another thing I learned later, though I never had to strain to achieve such things. It was not so much that I was “creating” the story so much as “recording” it. There were elements of his story that overlapped with our world’s history and it was spooky as all get out when I learned about historical facts through his story and later found them to also be reflected in my own world, which has a similar timeline to his. A sort of “sibling world” to his.

We also noticed the tremendous power of my emotional connection to him and his friends. My boyfriend at the time even became jealous of Asura, though I assured him that was absurd. “Asura is just a story,” I would say. And my boyfriend thought the same yet he, and others, seemed unable to ignore the fact that there seemed to be something weird going on.

And, one day, with horror, I realized I was in love with Asura—fortunately, by that time I had since broken up with my boyfriend—but the idea terrified me. Unsurprisingly, this sent a conservative Christian “good kid” such as myself down into a spiral of questions and disbelief.

I felt the imposter syndrome. I thought, “I must be insane.” Yet, no one, myself included, could deny the reality of this connection I felt.

Over time, Asura and his friends began to speak to me. They guided me and provided loving support to me. I, at the time, figured I was either crazy or eccentric.

“Maybe this is a writer thing,” I thought.

And it was that thought that led me to soulbonding. I learned of other writers who also had their “characters” come alive to them. Alice Walker, author of the famed American work, The Color Purple, allegedly purported that she had received her story straight from the characters’ mouths one afternoon, during which she sat down to tea with them and learned their tale. And that is when I found a forum site called “The Living Library” (now defunct), and learned the term “soulbonding”.

In that community I found others who echoed my story in various ways. Deep personal connections to entities from other worlds, many of whom they found depicted in the flourishing ecosystem of thought and imagination, stories, that surrounds the human race. Others, discovered their unconventional friends via dreams, visions, or odd circumstances just like myself. One person I met had actually found one such friend first, in this instance a version of Edward Elric from “Full Metal Alchemist”, before learning years later—with a start I imagine—that Edward actually had an entire manga and anime about him.

I say “version” because another amazing phenomenon I discovered was the occurrence of many instantiations of people, characters, from infinite worlds, all with slight variances from one another. That is when I was introduced to the idea of Multiverse Theory and Many Worlds Theory.

As my personal investigations led me down various spiritual rabbit holes, and eventually led me to spirit-working and witchcraft, I found more and more ideas that seemed to jive with my experience.

I discovered what are colloquially called “pop pantheons” in occult circles. Pantheons of spirits and deities who connect to pop culture figures in human society—and even figures from “fiction”. And there is a whole, thriving community of people who lead successful, fulfilled, and meaningful spiritual lives working with these entities. I learned that reality and “truth” are not objective like I had been taught so long ago. And I finally understood MY truth—all we have are myths and stories. Experience is subjective and the only measure of meaning and truth we have is in the effects we see in our own lives.

With tremendous wonder and happiness, and even love, I have seen the effects my unconventional friends and family have wrought in my life. Asura is my familiar spirit now, and I have a whole host of other beings whom I love. Some come from “personal gnosis”, or unique experience, such as Asura. Others are beings who have come to me from the vast world of collective Dreaming that permeates our world, evident in media sources, in the form of stories.

I still have moments of doubt. I sometimes wonder, “Gee-golly-whiz, am I NUTS?” But then I remember that my truth exists only in my own experience. My ethereal family brings me happiness, growth, and meaning. And there really is no difference between my relationship with them and the relationship I had with Jesus so long ago. Every experience is real to me, and brings with it change and good. And that is what matters.

In this blog I intend to share my experience, in hopes that it can offer a beacon to others in similar situations. Every person’s experience is unique, though I hope mine can at least offer some hope, understanding, and love to another.

Cheers.

And happy story-telling.

- Cosmic

[persephonescat]

Birds and Other Supernatural Phenomenons

Hiiii! This is… long. Probably the longest chapter I’m going to have, but it’s all only one scene and I just couldn’t cut it in half. Thank you for your comments! They make my whole week! Some of you pointed out a few mistakes in the last chapter, I hope it’s all good now! ^^ And please tell me if there are any weird sentences or typos or anything. Multiple people told me that the last chapter’s storm came very suddenly, so I re-read the sixth chapter and as it turns out, the sentence about the weather was lost in the editing. It all looked very dark and moody in my head, so I didn’t notice there was no description of it. Thank you for telling me, I’m definitely going to correct that.

(I think we should call this fic BaOSP in the future when we’re just talking about it in the comments or on Discord or just in general, bc this title is really long… The title and the tags will stay the same of course, it’s just that from now on, BaOSP is the official (???) shortened version of it.)

Damian meets Marinette, I REPEAT, DAMIAN MEETS MARINETTE.

Ch. 1    Previous    Masterpost    AO3 

________________

Ch. 8: Lord Annoyance

It was Monday night and Damian Wayne already hated the week.

Tim finally passed out on Saturday and did nothing but sleep all weekend, so on one hand, now he was capable of speaking in full sentences. On the other hand, all of his sentences were about the process of etching and nobody knew why, so it wasn’t any less problematic.

Dick came home with several holes in his shoe and refused to speak about it.

Jason didn’t eat anything but pork for a week straight and this morning he swore to go vegetarian.

Bruce was in the process of finding new hobbies - Tim said it was midlife crisis, Jason said the old man was finally going crazy and Cass was out of town, so she just yelled at them via video chat. Barbara and Steph laughing their asses off every time the topic came up didn’t help either, but after seeing the anvil in the living room while going to get breakfast, Damian was starting to agree with Jason.

On top of it all, some idiot under the name of Dark Nomad killed a chicken, painted obscene pictures on the walls of one of Bruce’s apartments with its blood, then for some reason, they stole some garden interior and part of the fence. Just fantastic.

And guess who had to track him down and arrest him? Robin. Because his family was a bunch of freaking sadists.

On top of it all, when he finally arrived on the rooftop where the petty villain was spotted two days in a row, the idiot wasn’t alone.

Robin landed quietly, hid behind a metal staircase leading the upper parts of the building and stopped to listen to the conversation going down between the two shadowy forms. He was already planning revenge in the back of his mind - it would’ve been ridiculously easy to poison at least two out of his three brothers. Not too badly but enough for them to have an unpleasant couple of days.

“Did you manage to sleep during the day, or should I be worried about you suddenly falling down from here because of exhaustion?” one of the forms asked flatly, a young girl sitting on the edge of the roof. She looked tiny compared to the Nomad sitting beside her, but she didn’t seem to be afraid at all. Her body language was taunting and open, her dark hair shimmered in the light coming from the streets below as she turned her head towards the boy. She had a slight French accent.

“Nah, I had double English in the afternoon, so I’m good,” the Nomad said, playing with a stray thread on his hoodie. “You?”

“I slept on the bus…” the girl started, trailing off. She tilted her head, concentrating on something. “Could you give me a minute?” she asked, standing up. For a moment, Damian felt relieved. She was already leaving.

Then she turned towards him.

She could’ve just heard something. She could’ve just checked out the area. It could’ve been a coincidence, but she was staring right at him, even though he was sure he wasn’t visible in the dark.

She walked towards his hiding place with no hesitation or fear. He was standing there motionlessly as she got closer. He studied her form, looking for weapons and weak points. She was wearing a warm cardigan with jeans and dark boots. He eyed her scarf and gloves suspiciously. It wasn’t that cold, but he didn’t see anything hidden in them.

Her red lipstick matched her scarf, her hair was tied into a loose braid coming forward at the side of her neck, dancing gracefully when a light breeze caught it. Her body language was still way too open and she foolishly grabbed the railing of the staircase before peeking behind it, leaving her torso even more vulnerable.

If he was ever planning on confronting her, he would’ve changed his mind after that. She was clearly harmless when it came to physical combat.

What the hell was she doing here, then?

“Can I help you?” she asked, looking at where his mask covered his eyes. Her voice was toneless and her accent was gone. Robin wondered if he was just imagining it earlier. Maybe he was too deep in his thoughts to pay attention.

It happened a lot nowadays. Him, getting lost in his thoughts and not paying attention. At first, it annoyed him - and scared the living daylight out of him, not as if he was about to tell that to anyone. Now he knew it was part of being human. It meant he was getting healthier, as Alfred put it. Making mistakes was part of life and he wanted to have a life, right?

Yes, he did.

Sometimes he looked at Bruce and his sorry brothers and realized that he already had a one. It made him feel weird. Happy, probably, but it was a new kind of happy. It made him want to smile at the most random times and help Alfred with chores. It made him have this… desire to go after Bruce when he disappeared to his garden to calm down, to bring home some donuts for Dick every time he passed that shop he liked, to take Jason to Disneyland on his birthday, to make Cass smile more often, to pull up the security footages from the Cave on his computer, so he could check on Tim without him knowing.

It was terrifying and he wouldn’t have changed it for anything in the world.

“Robin?” the girl asked impatiently. Damn, he zoned out. He cleared his throat, trying to find the right thing to say.

“Errm… do you realize you are sitting with a criminal?” Good job, Damian, your brothers would be proud. Why not ask her her favorite color too, maybe that will help. He was prepared to hear Jason’s amused words through the comms, but surprisingly, his brother stayed quiet.

“Are you concerned about my safety?” The girl narrowed her eyes.

He straightened his back and cleared his mind.

“Actually, I’m here to arrest the Dark Nomad,” he told her, trying to sound professional. Not as if it mattered anymore.

“Why?”

“Damaging private property, theft, and vandalism.”

“Could you elaborate? Picking flowers in a park could be considered all three of those.” Her voice was mocking now.

Damian stared at her. She was at least a head shorter than him, with no weapons. He was Robin. She was either incredibly dangerous or very stupid, and he had a hard time believing in the first scenario.

“He killed an animal, draw obscene pictures on the street with its blood, did damage that’s repairing will take hundreds of dollars, stole garden interior… should I continue?”

“When did he do all that?” the girl asked. She didn’t seem surprised at all.

“Why would I tell you?” frowned Robin. “I’m here to arrest him, that’s the only important thing.” Harmless or not, she was getting annoying.

“Well, you can’t legally make arrests given that you’re not a police officer, which means that you have absolutely no reason to be here. You might as well go home,” she explained simply. Her voice was toneless again, she spoke as if she was just stating facts, - which she did, after all.

Damian’s blood was starting to boil. Did the psychopaths roaming this city have a right to murder people? No. Did they have any right to hurt civilians? No. Was any of the things they did legal? No.

Who was this kid to come and tell him about rights, when his family seemed to be the only ones protecting them?

The girl was looking at him as if she was staring into his soul, then suddenly, she smirked.

“Not as if that would stop you,” she said, and Robin looked at her quizzically. “But I have a feeling that you’re after the wrong guy, so if you told me when he did all that, it would clear a few things.”

He was lost. What did this girl want? She was too weird to be stupid. She let the railing go now and was standing with her arms at her sides, her head slightly tilted.

“Today, between two and three AM,” he told her finally, curious about her reaction.

She stared right into his eyes, even though his mask was hiding them and said, “He was with me.”

Robin didn’t see anything about her body language betraying her, but she must’ve noticed he didn’t believe her because she continued.

“We were talking about Tamás Vekerdy and Bruno Bettelheim. They’re psychologists who often write about children. He arrived around midnight, and when he left it was already past five in the morning, so there is no way he could’ve done anything unless he has an evil twin.”

He scoffed angrily. When he spoke again, he was hissing the words from behind his clenched teeth.

“These things don’t take long. He might’ve just slipped away for a few minutes and came back, unless of course if you were in the same position for five hours.” He might’ve also growled a little. He was standing only inches from her now, looming over her.

“That’s not too hard to check, your Highness.” She cocked her head and held his gaze fearlessly. “Where did all this happen?”

He was about to bite back but he stopped abruptly.

Okay, so he might’ve been a little wrong. If the girl was telling the truth, the guy should’ve disappeared for at least one and a half hours to get to the scene from here. Not as if that meant anything, she could’ve easily lied. He just didn’t notice it.

A voice saved him from having to answer.

“Marinette? Is everything okay?” The Dark Nomad was walking towards them. When he noticed Robin, a terrified expression took over his confused one. He was about to go and stand between the girl and the vigilante when she lifted her arm to stop him, not moving her gaze away from Robin. The Nomad looked like a caged animal but didn’t try to fight her.

“Lord Annoyance here states that last night, you cloned yourself between The Book of Diaries and NurtureShock, and went to draw booties and steal a bunch of garden gnomes.”

The Nomad opened his mouth to say something but Robin beat him to it.

“Okay, so first of all, it wasn’t just "booties” and they were drawn with blood, which makes it considerably worse.“ Jason, who was listening to everything he said trough the comms the whole time, chose that moment to burst out laughing. He did his best to ignore him.

"Second of all, a lot of things were stolen, not just…” yep, that sentence was a bad idea, “Garden gnomes.”

“Why do you think he did it in the first place?” the girl, - Marinette cut back.

“It was private property. There was a camera.”

“Whose?”

He took a second to consider the possible fallback of the answer. The existence of Bruce Wayne wasn’t a secret. Neither was the fact that he owned multiple buildings around the city. Maybe it was going to scare the villain enough that he confesses.

“Bruce Wayne’s,” he said finally. The girl’s undisturbed expression made him feel uneasy. “Have you heard of him?”

“Oh, you mean that’s who the big ass tower in the middle of the city is named after? I thought it was the ship name of watery rain or way of pain or something.” Her words were dripping from sarcasm.

‘Who are you talking to? What did they say?’ asked Jason like an excited child but Damian once again ignored him.

“Well, I’m sorry, but his alibi is pretty shaky, you know. Villains can be very convincing here, in case you didn’t notice.” He didn’t think this guy could convince anyone, but it was possible.

“Yeah, his ski mask really makes me shake in fear,” Marinette said flatly.

The villain finally got a chance to say something but his moment didn’t last long.

“It’s not a-”

“Yes, it is. Shut up.” Marinette pinched the bridge of her nose. “He is wearing a hoodie and a mask ever since… birth, probably. How did anyone recognize him?”

“He left his signature,” Robin told her. He wasn’t even angry anymore, he was just very annoyed.

Marinette froze. She almost seemed to forget about Robin as she finally broke eye contact and turned around.

“You… have a signature?” she asked the Dark Nomad, who was still standing behind her, ready to jump at any moment.

He opened and closed his mouth a few times. It reminded Robin of a distressed duck.

“Kinda,” he said quietly.

“Why would you do that?” asked Marinette, gesticulating wildly.

“It’s part of the aesthetic, okay?” he explained with a hurt expression.

“Hey, I’m accusing you of a crime here!” reminded them Robin. This was taking way longer than he wanted it to.

Marinette once again turned to him, let out a deep breath and arranged her face into a more professional expression.

Finally.

“Right,” she started seriously. She gave him a second to compose himself, then continued. “Boobs.”

The Dark Nomad snorted, but Marinette just gave him an unimpressed look and let out an exasperated sigh.

“Okay, so tell Mr. Wayne, that he should be looking for another idiot because I was looking after this one at the time.”

Before he could answer, he heard Jason’s voice in his ear.

'There is a robbery going down at Chucko’s. I’m going in.’

Damian cursed quietly.

“Don’t. Wait for me. I’ll be there in two,” he told him, placing his fingers on the comm so the two people standing in front of him knew he wasn’t speaking to them.

“I have to go,” he told them quickly, then took off before they could do as much as blink.

***

Marinette ran after the vigilante but stopped at the edge of the roof. She saw a dark form jumping over rooftops. After a few seconds, it disappeared and relief rushed over her body.

She was way too tired to think about how she just got into an argument with one of Gotham’s heroes.

She closed her eyes and turned to go back to her room. She needed to sleep. A lot.

“You’re kinda terrifying when you’re sleep-deprived, did you know that?” said Jeremy, coming out from behind the metal staircase.

“I always am,” answered Marinette, still not opening her eyes.

“Do you mean terrifying or sleep-deprived?” asked Jeremy confusedly.

Marinette gave him a small wave, then climbed back to the hotel without a word.

________________

*Quiet chanting* comments, comments, comments

*Chanting intensifies* comMEnts, COMments, coMMENTS

*Thunder*

*The flattering of wings and the sounds of scared birds*

*Chanting* COMMENTS, COMMENTS, COMMENTS, COMMENTS

  Ch. 1    Previous   Masterpost    AO3

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[starringemiliaclarke]

Emilia Clarke on Why Game of Thrones Is the Perfect Form of Escapism + HQ Scans

As Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones, Emilia Clarke created a warrior queen for the ages. Her legend can be told on the walls of caves or on T-shirts at Comic-Con. But behind the Valkyrie wigs and very testy dragons, Clarke has an inspiring origin story of her own.

A valley sprawls before her, rich with every color of green in the kingdom, reaching out to a twinkling city, which borders the infinite sea. Her hair (tinted not with peroxide, but tiny flecks of actual gold) glows with a radiance that makes the setting sun so jealous it hides behind the surrounding mountains, and the evening sky blushes. She is Daenerys Targaryen, Queen of the Andals, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea. Everything in sight belongs to her.

Just kidding! She is Emilia Clarke, sitting high above Beverly Hills in a glass mansion rented for a magazine cover shoot. So high up that passing aircraft rattle the bones of the house and those inside it. So high up that you can see Santa Catalina Island in the distance, peeking out from behind a curtain of fog. She laughs about something the makeup artist says, and the last of the evening light bounces off of her cheekbones and shoots into the camera lens.

We are in the sky to talk about Clarke’s reign as one of the most preeminent television actresses of our time, as Daenerys on Game of Thrones. But first, I have a few questions about her abandoned career as a jazz singer.

Clarke’s default emotion is joy — her resting heart rate seems to be just below that of someone seconds after winning a medium-expensive raffle prize — but it quickly congeals into theatrical horror when I reveal that I know that she is a casual but talented singer of jazz music.

When she was 10, Clarke was an alto in a chorus that she describes as “very churchy.” Then a substitute teacher introduced her class to jazz. “I just innately understood it,” she explains. “I was always sliding up and down the notes. Every time, the [chorus] teacher would be like, ‘Quit sliding, just sing that note and then that one and that’s it. Stop trying to fuck with it.’ Then this [jazz teacher] was like, ‘Fuck with it. That’s the point.’ ” Fast-forward a couple of decades, and Clarke was singing “The Way You Look Tonight” at the American Songbook Gala in New York, honoring Richard Plepler, erstwhile CEO of HBO. Nicole Kidman was there, too, and that is the story of Emilia Clarke, a very famous singer.

Just kidding, again! That is the story of Emilia Clarke, extremely famous actress, and it is not even the beginning. Game of Thrones, the HBO fantasy epic that has captured the global zeitgeist for most of the past decade, has entered its ultimate season. Since the show premiered in 2011, Daenerys’s searing platinum blonde has been branded into the brains of every living person with cable access, so much so that she has become as recognizable an action figure as Princess Leia. Every autumn, legions of Americans don Grecian-style dresses and carry stuffed dragons to Halloween parties in homage. Kristen Wiig even appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in a full Daenerys getup. This phenomenon exists in part because it’s a relatively easy costume to assemble, but more likely because Game of Thrones is the most popular TV show in the history of TV shows.

It’s also just one of three popular entertainment franchises Clarke has participated in. Last year: Solo: A Star Wars Story, as a paramour of Han Solo. Two years before that: the fifth Terminator movie, beside Arnold. She was also Holly Golightly in a short-lived Breakfast at Tiffany’s production on Broadway. None of those projects were particularly successful — but none of that matters, to a remarkable degree, because what matters is: The people love Daenerys.

They love a character whose series arc begins with her indentured servitude as a warlord’s concubine and ends, most recently, with her fighting for sovereignty over a league of nations and for a throne made of swords. They love how fictional languages drift from her mouth like dancing smoke, and how her searing-white mane retains a fearsome curl, even in or near battle. They love the whole dragons thing.

The people would love Emilia Clarke, too, if only they knew who she was. During the first few seasons of Game of Thrones, Clarke was able to fool the general public into believing she was very regular civilian Emilia Clarke, because Daenerys was blonde, and Clarke was not. Now, she says, recognition happens more frequently. Particularly Stateside.

For reasons I cannot fathom, Americans feel more entitled to command the attention of celebrities. “People are like, ‘UH-melia CLORK!’ ” she says, in perfect American. In London, people are prone to whisper about her as she passes by. “ ‘Was that Emilia Clarke?’ ”

“I move like a shark when I’m in public,” she says. “Head down. I think I’ve got quite bad posture because of it, because I’m determined to lead a normal life. So I just move too quickly for anyone to register if it’s me or not. And I don’t walk around with six security men and big sunglasses and a bizarre coat. I really try to meld in.” It gets worse when the show is being promoted, but otherwise, she says, it’s not so bad.

“I move like a shark when I’m in public. Head down…I’m determined to lead a normal life, so I just move too quickly for anyone to register if it’s me or not.”

Her best efforts aside, anonymity may be a pipe dream. The show is as decorated as a Christmas tree in a craft store. Game of Thrones has won a Peabody and 47 Emmys, the most of any television drama in history. The show marries critical praise with popular success, then it mercilessly slaughters those who have come to celebrate this union and receives even more acclaim (“The Rains of Castamere,” season 3, episode 9). The plotlines are famously convoluted. Luckily, we have an entire web’s worth of episode explainers, encyclopedias designed specifically for the Westeros universe, and a self-explanatory Funny or Die segment called Gay of Thrones, starring Jonathan van Ness.

When Mad Men first aired, television bloggers dutifully unpacked its symbolic elements, and millennials celebrated the show’s style with Mad Men–themed parties that were really just ’60s-and-one-red-wig-themed parties. Game of Thrones is basically an economy of its own. Since the show premiered, tourism to Croatia, whose coastal port Dubrovnik stands in for the fictional city of King’s Landing, has nearly doubled. Game of Thrones–themed weddings are so popular that it is almost impossible not to attend them — in 2016, Clarke accidentally walked into one that was occurring at the same hotel where she and the cast were staying during filming. (It was not a canonical wedding, and no guests were harmed.)

Game of Thrones has also earned one of the most important pop culture accolades of the century: The attention of Beyoncé Knowles. I believe it is her favorite TV show, and this is why.

Exhibit A: Jay-Z reportedly gave her a prop dragon’s egg from the set, at great personal expense. Exhibit B: At an Oscars after-party this year, Beyoncé approached Clarke (“voluntarily,” according to the actress) to introduce herself. “I watched her face go, ‘Oh, no, I shouldn’t be talking to this crazy [woman], who is essentially crying in front of me,’ ” remembers Clarke. “I think my inner monologue was, ‘Stop fucking it up,’ and I kept fucking it up.”

“I was like, ‘I just saw you in concert.’ And she was like, ‘I know.’ ” Clarke also mentions that Beyoncé complimented her work but declines to share specifics.

Why are people (more specifically, everybody) and goddesses (more specifically, Beyoncé) all obsessed with a show about some dragons and lots of dungeons?

“The show is sensationalist in a way,” Clarke explains, in an effort to describe a TV series that features twins having sex and a child’s defenestration in the very first episode. It doesn’t matter — Clarke’s conversational style is so intimate and emphatic that basic facts feel like sworn secrets. When she smiles, she does so with every single muscle in her face. “It’s the reason why people pick up gossip magazines. They want to know what happens next…. You’ve got a society that is far removed enough from ours but also circulates around power. How that corrupts people and how we want it, and how we don’t want it.”

In other words, Game of Thrones’ value proposition is creating a rich other world for people to experience a prestige, high-production version of pure, horny, violent, unbridled drama. It is, according to Clarke, pitched perfectly: “I think it caught Western society at exactly the right moment.”

“I don’t know about you,” she says, “but when I watch something, it’s escapism. I’m feeling crappy; I’m just sad, moody, depressed, upset, angry, whatever it is. I know that distraction is what makes me get better. Distraction is what really, really helps me.” She laughs and then quickly pivots to a caveat: “I’m sure that’s not what a therapist would advise.”

It is at this point that Emilia Clarke leans in very close, her breath knocking at my sideburn, and explains to me the bombastic and devastating ending to the most important TV show of the decade.

Wow — just kidding once more. But, uh, while we’re on the topic, how is this whole thing going to end?

It was not hard to root for the Breaker of Chains, until recently. Now we’re seeing the gentle unspooling of her character, and flickers of a dangerous prophecy that she will ascend the throne only to follow in her father’s footsteps and burn it all to the ground. For a while, Daenerys seemed like the Lawful Good ruler, but we have had the great pleasure of watching how power can pervert people. (Nate Jones, at Vulture, leads a thrilling discussion of this very topic.) (Also, if Daenerys were to rule the Seven Kingdoms, only to go nuts, we might at the very least have a spinoff to look forward to.)

Clarke will never say. Throughout 10 or so years in the public eye, her interviews have been peppered with the same handful of charming personal details from her career — the service jobs she worked prior to making it, dancing the funky chicken during her Game of Thrones audition — which feels a lot like walking a vast beach and finding the same series of 10 seashells.

Then, in March, some very different treasure washed ashore when The New Yorker ran the most illuminating profile of Emilia Clarke to date. It was written by Emilia Clarke.

If I am truly being honest every minute of every day I thought I was going to die.

In it, Clarke revealed that she had suffered two near-fatal brain aneurysms during the early seasons of Game of Thrones. The first hit her mid-plank during a training session, and not long after, doctors discovered a second that required them to open her skull for a risky operation. The recovery period was, to her, more painful than the aneurysms. “If I am truly being honest,” she wrote, “every minute of every day I thought I was going to die.” She also announced her charity venture, SameYou, which seeks to provide rehabilitation for young people recovering from brain injuries.

The second time we talk, it is the day before the Game of Thrones New York premiere, and Clarke is at a morning fitting, surrounded by a coronation’s worth of gowns. It’s early, and a passing cold has fried the edges of her voice. But her words still vibrate with so much joy, it’s like she doesn’t even notice. She’s just happy to be here, wherever she is.

Source

Emilia Clarke on Why Game of Thrones Is the Perfect Form of Escapism + HQ Scans was originally published on Enchanting Emilia Clarke | Est 2012

[thelasthalf]

Elephant (2003)

Elephant (2003) 

V2/XL/Third Man

Welcome to Entry 1 of “The Last Half.” Here, we’ll take a closer look at the often underappreciated second half of a great record. 

Starting with 2003’s Elephant, the 4th studio album by American rock duo The White Stripes. 

Accolades (not mine): 

Certifications: Platinum in US, Double Platinum in UK

Reviews/honors: Metacritic rating: 92. 5/5 stars from Rolling Stone. NME Album Of The Year.

Awards: 2 Grammys, “Best Alternative Album” and “Best Rock Song” for “Seven Nation Army”. 

Feel free to shit all over some of the aforementioned publications and institutions (I sure as hell do), but Robert Christgau upgraded his rating of the album in 2012, a testament to the album’s enduring legacy and timeless quality - only getting better with age. So you don’t have to take my word for it :)  

If you know me, you have probably heard me mention The White Stripes and/or Jack White at some point in time. So you may not be entirely surprised at this as my first selection. But, there is a better reason than my mere obsession with the band - although that may have helped fuel my obsession with the concept. This was where the notion of The Last Half struck my brain. Even as a devoted listener, I had always written off the last few songs as filler, in part because the first track is “Seven Nation Army,” the album’s lead single. From there it’s a whirlwind journey through a landscape of distortion laden guitar solos, and a handful of quieter, more introspective tunes sprinkled along the way. “Ball and Biscuit,” a high point, leads into the record’s second biggest single “Hardest Button To Button.” Once you’ve heard everything up to that point, anything else might seem like icing on the cake. 

One night on my way home from work, listening to the album on my headphones, the song I used to skip as a teenager - because I found the voice intro weird - “Little Acorns” kicked in and I stopped dead in my tracks. The guitar and drums were intense and great, but it was Jack’s vocal performance - staccato and mocking - that I took notice of for the first time. Once that grabbed my attention, the rest of the album came into focus for the first time and I realized that even though this was a record by one of my favorite bands, that I had “listened to” in its entirety more than once - I had never really heard it at all. 

“Hypnotize” was a blistering 1:48 reminiscent of the band’s 2001 breakthrough single “Fell In Love With A Girl.” 

“The Air Near My Fingers” had these great minor chord/semitone/atonal guitar and electric piano breaks I had never fully absorbed. 

“Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine” was quintessential Stripes - catchy and cleverly arranged - and it’s a shame there aren’t more live versions available. (I only know of the one…)

And finally, while it’s true that “Well It’s True That We Love One Another” as a standalone is my least favorite on the record, in context it serves as the perfect closer to a great record.

It was then I started wondering, why this phenomenon? I started thinking about other records whose second halves I had never fully digested and how much great music I had missed out on, even from some of my very favorite artists. A couple theories came to mind, first and foremost being listener fatigue. It’s difficult to hold people’s attention for any amount of time - that’s why plays and movies (well, used to) have intermissions. 

Another theory is placement of singles on the record. If the only song most you are interested in hearing is on the first half, the likelihood of you finishing the album, let alone fully appreciating the second half diminishes. Elephant is a great example because literally the first track on the album is “Seven Nation Army”, which turned out to be a hit and gets chanted in soccer stadiums all over the world. However, there are some interesting examples of a hit single being placed later in a record’s track listing we’ll discuss at some point. 

Whatever the reason, we must be steadfast in our pursuit to end the desecondhalfinization of great records! Buy a turntable. Buy your favorite record. Enjoy.

[momentsinsong]

Moments In Song No. 019 - Victor

“Moments In Song” asks people one simple question, “What are you listening to?” We believe that you can learn a lot about an individual and their experiences based off of the music they love. For every installment we ask someone to make a playlist of 10 songs they’re listening to, whether it be something new they stumbled upon, or a song they’ve always loved, and explain the story behind their choices. The person’s playlist is then uploaded, giving them the chance to share it with others. Each post aims to profile someone from a different walk of life, whether they be an artist, a student, the mailman, a school teacher, an athlete, a nurse, your next-door neighbor, anyone with a love for music; showing that no matter where we come from, what we do, or what we look like, music has the ability to bring us together.

With an ethereal set of songs that accompany his pensive thoughts, pharmacy student and rapper Victor gives us a track by track breakdown of his playlist. We talk his musical influences, Clams Casino productions, and what he thinks is the greatest song of all time.

Listen to Victor’s playlist on Apple Music and Spotify.

Words by Julian | Photos by Tayo

What was thought process behind putting your playlist together?

I just made a playlist of almost all the songs I listen to when I’m in pensive thought or songs that have a cool ethereal mood to them. I’ve always been in tune to that kind of music. That’s why I have two songs from Clams Casino on there. For me, Clams Casino is probably one of the best producers of the past decade. Very influential. His influence spans what most people can even fathom. If I look at his work with Lil B in 2009, 2010, and then look at the type of beats all these rappers are rapping on now, or their style, and how they rap, Clams Casino and Lil B were very influential.

Without Lil B and Clams Casino partnering, Clams Casino doesn’t have the platform that he has today. Then someone like A$AP Rocky probably doesn’t hear him, and so his first two projects don’t have that Clams Casino sound. You look at so many artists that started to blow up in 2010, 2011, A$AP Rocky, Mac Miller, Lil B, they were really coming out with that “drop your top, relax and cruise to music,” and I think Clams Casino is a big part of all of that.

Other songs that I put on my playlist from underground artists like Reva Devito, Thatshymn, Abhi//Dijon, these are artist I listen to when I chill, or when I study. That’s what I’m trying to go for with the playlist. Just a type of sound that you don’t have to necessarily have move to it, you can just sit back, relax, and get into your own zone.

I put my song on there at the end because I thought it helped tie everything on the playlist together.

I was listening to your playlist earlier and I noticed there weren’t any real dance or turn up kind of songs on there.  I felt like they all fell into either a boom-bap category, with like eu-IV and Reva Devito, produced by Tek.Lun, the old school Kendrick, and on the other half, that Clams Casino, Abhi//Dijon, Sango, kind of relaxed and melodic category. Did you know from the start that this is the kind of theme you wanted your playlist to encompass?

Yeah absolutely. Even though some of these songs are kind of old, like “Ignorance Is Bliss,” “Realest Alive,” and “Moments In Love,” which is from the 80’s, I listen to them either every day or at least once a week. Especially times when I’m in school, studying, or in the mood to delve into my thoughts.

“Ignorance Is Bliss” is one of Kendrick’s best songs to me. Overly Dedicated does not get the recognition it deserves as a cumulative work. I personally do believe that Overly Dedicated is on the same tier as Section.80 in terms of Kendrick’s bravado and lyricism, because he’s really rapping something serious on that song. I still go back to those to projects a lot. I feel like a lot of the themes on there are universal. There’s no filler on them. You know exactly what you’re getting.

“Moments In Love” is a long song, it’s like 10 minutes long, and that version has always been my favorite. People don’t know how influential The Art Of Noise are, just to music in general. When people listen to Yeezus or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, or some of the stuff from Michael Jackson’s HIStory album, The Art Of Noise did that stuff back in the 80’s.

I’m not super familiar with them, are they a pop group? Electronic?

They were an experimental band in the 80’s from the U.K. So many things that people are doing today, they did 30 years ago, which is mind blowing. The way “Moments In Love” is structured, you have a lot of different part, a lot of ups and downs, a lot of different breaks. And all of these breaks evoke a different emotion, and plays into the emotions that someone might feel in a relationship. When I was making this playlist, I knew it had to be number one. In my opinion it’s the best song of all time.

Wow, that’s quite the claim.

Honestly. Out of everything that I’ve ever listened to I can’t find anything, at least in my personal opinion, that really…

Evokes that same kind of emotion,

Yeah emotion, the techniques they use for the time era they were in. If you listen to other stuff from the 80’s compared to this, this is just crazy.  It’s still even really different compared to music out today. Along with that, its influence that people may or may not know about is amazing.

And then after that I went to “Realest Alive.” Lil B’s version isn’t on any streaming sites, but it’s a great song.

What era of Lil B is that?

That’s 2010 Lil B. So that’s when Lil B was just really starting to get out there. This was back when Lil B would release 5 songs a day. Literally he would release 5 different songs a day, and he would have 4 troll songs, and one song that was great. And he would do that on purpose because when he tries he’s an extremely good rapper. The thing is that he’s a deconstructionist. If you listen to Lil B from 2008/2009 he’s rapping on perfectly on the beat, but towards the end of 2009 he released “Like a Martian” and started doing all his based freestyle, stream of consciousness stuff. So during that time, this would be the 1 out of the 5 songs he’d be serious on. By 2011 he was legitimately a well known phenomenon.

Yeah I feel like around that time he was doing a lot of work with Soulja Boy, and influenced that way he made music after that. And even guys now like Lil Yachty and Lil Uzi, there’s definitely some Lil B DNA in them.

For sure. So from “Realest Alive” it goes to “Ignorance is Bliss,” which has Kendrick rapping about a whole range of different topics.  I feel like that streamlines very well into “Numb” by Clams Casino. Now from “Numb” I wanted to lighten up the mood a little bit so I went into songs that are love related. Once you get to “IVyou Pt. 2,” “Rose Gold,” “Therapy” those songs show more of a positive side of what one can feel in a relationship.

You go to “How Do You Love Me” by Xavier Omar and Sango. That song is actually about Xavier Omar asking God, “How could you even love me, even though I am the way I am, even though I am this imperfect being?” I think it segways nicely from “Therapy” because Thatshymn talks about how weed, drinking, and sex can be a form of therapy, but for Xavier Omar he’s talking about how God can be a therapy. For me. I feel like that’s a great contrast, and shows two different forms of love.

And I just finished things with “Stu Pickles.” It’s a good mellow track, talking about relaxing with friends and everyone working together to achieve their goals. For the lyrics I say, “I’m way to blessed to not stress right now,” it’s just me talking about God blessing me to be in the situation I’m in.

I think in our society we take a lot of things for granted. I saw a crazy statistic one time when I was younger. It said if you have a house with electricity, a roof over your head, a bed, and all these other commodities, you’re already richer than 75% of the people in the world.  If you think about that it’s crazy. Everyday really is a blessing, and you try your best to fill it out, and find your way to where you need to go.

What songs and artists made you want to start rapping and making your own music?

If I’m thinking about my favorite rappers growing up, Tupac is number one by a mile. Tupac was extremely influential to me. All Eyez On Me, I know that entire double album back and forth because my dad had the OG double CD that was released in 1996. So after Tupac, it’s Nas, all of his stuff. The first album I ever bought with my own money was his Untitled album. That and the Wu-Tang Clan’s 8 Diagrams. Wu-Tang Clan was also very influential to me. Enter the 36 Chambers  I know that album so well. ODB was so ahead of his time. You listen to “Brooklyn Zoo” and the way he’s rapping is so crazy, but somehow he’s perfectly in pocket, he’s perfectly on the beat. In order to rap like that is extremely hard. ODB to me is just an extraordinary rapper.

Any final thoughts on your playlist?

It’s a microcosm of me throughout the years. It represents the type of music I listen to when I’m in a pensive mood. It’s “sit down and think” music.

Connect with Victor:

https://twitter.com/viceroy_o

https://www.instagram.com/victorolalekan_/

https://soundcloud.com/victorolalekan

Connect with Moments In Song:

https://www.instagram.com/momentsinsong/

https://twitter.com/moments_in_song

https://tinyurl.com/MISAppleMusic

https://tinyurl.com/MISSpotify

[cureforbedbugs]

A Stream within a Stream

Here's a piece I wrote on spec that was never published back in 2018. Much of it remains true -- update for Lil Nas X -- though some of it is a bit dated now. Had I been asked to move forward I would have done more actual research into a few of the wannabes and done a copyedit and factcheck -- inaccuracy/undeveloped ideas warning!

STREAM WITHIN A STREAM Spotify’s Quiet Pop Laboratory Right now the song I’ve listened to the most frequently on Spotify in 2018 is, appropriately enough, “Obsessed,” by Maggie Lindemann. It seems to adhere faithfully to what I’ve come to think of as the Spotify house sound -- vaguely Scandinavian, with tropical house flourishes (if you’re hearing someone’s pitch-shifted voice spouting gibberish where the chorus would normally go, you might be listening to trop-house). I still chuckle at the cheesy one-liners directed to a self-obsessed hunk: “I feel your chest but I can’t find your heart!” For the most part, I’ve stopped asking where the hell these things come from. In this case, I was listening to my previous Spotify favorite, Neiked and Dyo’s “Sexual,” when Lindemann started autoplaying from the Recommended Songs at the bottom of my self-curated playlist. I clicked through to discover that, amazingly, Lindemann’s biggest song on Spotify -- a trop-house remix of one of her more confessional-leaning songs -- has 350 million streams, about double the number of “Swish Swish,” the latest single by Katy Perry. “Obsessed,” the ostensible follow-up, only had a little over 10 million at the time. Why the disparity? And where did Maggie Lindemann even come from? Why is it that once I started letting Spotify dictate the shape of my pop playlists, I seemed to be listening to so much music in some alternate universe that was uncannily close to pop radio, but never quite connecting with it? I started compiling a new playlist, my Stream within a Stream, for those acts that just kept popping up, at first serendipitously but then predictively based on my listening habits, whom I’d never heard and had never even heard of before Spotify surfing: LEON, Sigrid, Glades, Lauv, Nina Nesbitt, Julie Bergan, Maty Noyes. They sure seem famous -- many of their hit songs have a hundred million or more streams. And yet, there’s a sense that they’re eternally outside of the zeitgeist, hovering near a broader breakthrough. In the 2013 Coen Brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis, Oscar Isaac, playing a schlubby would-be Bob Dylan, seems practically destined to fail. A glimpse of the frizzy-haired silhouette of Robert Zimmerman in the closing moments all but confirms it -- Davis, Isaac’s character, was no Dylan. But Dylan’s ensuing shadow of stardom may be the very thing that leads us to discount the idea that, but for the grace of God, or the whims of an audience, there could have gone Davis instead. That idea, that the right audience, the right whim, can make or break a song, was the gist of Duncan Watts’s mid-00’s experiments in cumulative advantage, a phenomenon in which something’s existing popularity helps it to garner more popularity. The fact that the thing -- a song, a restaurant, a baby name -- was already popular gives it an added advantage to some other thing that wasn’t popular yet. The rich get richer -- cumulative advantage is an inequality framework for an attention economy. This finding of Watts’s study, that the popular stuff tends to get more popular, was reported as confirming a commonsense understanding: we listen to what people in our social networks listen to, and the things that are already popular in those networks will then, through seemingly incontrovertible social dynamics, get even more popular, sometimes forming what’s called a “cascade” of popularity, where the popularity increases exponentially as it breaks through to more and more people. “Viral” is just a catchy word for a popularity cascade. Cascades help to explain why new hit artists can seem to come out of nowhere. The mechanisms through which they cascade -- those early sharing networks -- sometimes remain elusive to newcomers. I could have predicted from my vantage as a high school teacher in North Philadelphia that Cardi B was creating a stir and might very well be a big deal, given the right support and right opportunities. But until “Bodak Yellow” dethroned Taylor Swift to make Cardi B the first #1 female rapper to top the charts solo since Lauryn Hill, she probably wasn’t on the radar of many of the kinds of people who, for instance, would help “Bodak Yellow” eventually win the Pazz and Jop critics poll. The song cascaded, stormed the charts, and the rest is pop history. The only problem with this story so far is that it isn’t the whole story; and what’s more, it’s not even really the most interesting part of the story. One of Watts’s key insights was that, far from being explanatory (per the formulation “this is only popular because a bunch of other people were listening to it,” say), cumulative advantage is a fundamentally unpredictable phenomenon. What makes one thing cascade or go viral and another thing languish cannot be attributed to any one factor in advance; every story is different, and in some other counter-factual universe, things may not have happened the same way. To prove this, Watts and his colleagues set up an experimental music laboratory online, where thousands of participants used a music website called Music Lab to download new music from a batch of songs selected by the researchers. Behind the scenes, there were actually several separate and distinct versions of the website in which the same songs were offered to different experimental groups. In some groups, you just downloaded, listened, and moved on. But in other groups, you could see which songs other people had already downloaded. In the groups where downloads were visible, one particular song always managed to rise to the top -- and not always just by a little, sometimes by a huge margin. That is, one song benefited from cumulative advantage and then cascaded, towering over the others. By contrast, the groups in which you could not view other people’s downloads had no clear winners. Nothing cascaded. But here’s the counter-intuitive part: not every universe crowned the same songs as #1. In different experimental universes, different songs hit #1, and the variability between where those #1’s fell in other universes was stark. If we imagined lots of parallel versions of our own pop charts, we might think about Cardi B reaching #1 in our universe, but in another one maybe she’d hit #6, or #19. It’s likely she would have landed somewhere on the charts, because she had a network of support to begin with -- even if I’d never heard another song playing in my classroom past her 2016 single “Foreva.” And there’s probably a story that explains “Foreva,” too -- but only retroactively. In Watts’s experiment, although well-produced songs did well across the board, and poorly-produced songs (ones chosen specifically to be unlistenable) did poorly, nothing consistently explained why in one universe Song X was far and away #1 while in the universe next door, consisting of people from the same general pool of subjects, Song Y was far and away #1, and next door to that it was Song Z, and so on. Every story was different. Now, about a decade later, Spotify hasn’t gone so far as to replicate the Music Lab, at least not to my knowledge -- that would require creating literal parallel streams, where everyone’s platform looked a little different based on an experimental design. But Spotify is at the very least quietly running their own A&R experiment that gives us a glimpse of cumulative advantage in action with a bit more clarity than, say, the machinations of the pop charts dictated by radio play. Spotify’s savvy algorithms, opaque major label connections, and newfound kingmaker role in the pop charts have all been well documented. There are handshake deals; in some cases (Spotify’s “sponsored tracks”), there is de facto payola. But even with its obvious and not-so-obvious machinations, Spotify has still set up a fascinating illustration of cumulative advantage within its playlists. To speak to the “I like what my friends like” aspect of cumulative advantage, Spotify uses various forms of text, audio, and social tracking to suggest new favorites to you in playlists like an individual user’s Daily Mix. Anyone with a toddler can feel the whiplash of purely algorithmic playlist creation whenever Thomas the Tank Engine crashes into Waxahatchee. As far as the human-curated playlists go, Liz Pelly has documented the ways in which major-label-owned playlist curation has mixed with Spotify’s own editor-curated playlists, chosen by a cabal of human recommenders. Some songs that get big on Spotify can start to make waves outside of the streaming service’s ecosystem, as the successes of artists like Neiked, the Norwegian producer whose “Sexual,” with singer Dyo, has been shared by Taylor Swift and repurposed by Maroon 5. But what about that other finding, that there is an essentially unpredictable element to what determines a song’s popularity? Does it still hold when there is seemingly a whole musical ecosystem that those editors and algorithms control? Looking more closely at some of those human-curated and algorithmically-enhanced playlists provides a clue. Spotify is a complex environment where primed pumps don’t always strike oil. Though Spotify is, in all likelihood, driven by the same seedy motivations that also drive payola (of which Spotify has its own explicit form, in its “sponsored tracks” for non-subscriber listeners), cartel-like behavior from major labels, and the general status quo of incumbent advantage, it’s still a place where new artists search for that spark that might transform their popularity from trickle to cascade. If you browse many Spotify-curated playlists -- the ones with the Spotify logo in the corner, and the ones that are suggested automatically when you use Spotify’s Browse feature -- you’ll see an expected roster of genre-appropriate selections. Sometimes these will veer into the territory of B-level celebrities, ones whose popularity may have transferred over from an underground base of Soundcloud followers (in the case of many of the selections in Rap Caviar) or from viral YouTube success with cover versions, or any number of avenues from just outside the mainstream periphery -- reality television, television and film soundtracks, artists benefiting from traditional channels of music industry hype. Maggie Lindemann, my “serendipitous” discovery, is signed to the same Warner subsidiary as Cheat Codes (the source of her Spotify virality), Young Thug, and Migos, after all. But scroll down a bit, or randomize the playlist, and you might start to discover something else. Here, sandwiched between proven pop incumbents and pop-adjacent up-and-comers, are genuinely unknown artists who are subjects in a grand experiment in audience development. In some sense, this is no different from older forms of trial and error -- a new single played once on the radio only to find its audience or flop, say. But there is something new about the sheer number of trials, all operating simultaneously across hundreds of playlists and millions of listeners, all at once. To illustrate, take a look at the Women of Pop playlist, with about 488,000 followers. Women of Pop is Spotify-branded, not curated by a random user, and it features a desaturated photo of Ariana Grande on the cover. Its first fifty tracks or so will give you what you came for: rising pop stars (it opens with Camila Cabello) and long-established acts (keep listening for P!nk, Lady Gaga, and Rihanna). Likewise, toward the end of the list we slowly travel back through time, to Ashlee Simpson’s “Pieces of Me” and, finally, Macy Gray’s “I Try.” But if you pause in the middle, you’ll start to notice artists who are undoubtedly women in pop, but don’t exactly scan as the women of pop. Further down are artists who are missing even this nominal claim to fame. Mags Duval is a Nashville singer-songwriter who seems to be in the orbit of music industry bizzers but hasn’t broken through yet even by Spotify’s own play count standards: just north of a million streams on her featured track here, “Stay Lonely,” which was previously selected for a New Music Friday playlist. By contrast, Duval’s surrounding artists on the playlist, Tove Lo and Carly Rae Jepsen, have over 250 million and 80 million streams for their tracks, respectively. You see similar numbers for Brynn Elliott and Phebe Starr -- all three are artists who have so far stalled far south of ten million streams. There seems to be a lot of acts like this, tucked into playlists with some modest support from Spotify in their initial selection process -- selection for a New Music Friday, say, or the quirk of a human curator for benign or shady reasons (I’ll leave it to others to expose the handshake deals). From the Pop IRL playlist there are several acts with only one minor song to their name on Spotify. There’s Malia Civetz’s “Champagne Clouds,” a modest success so far at 3 million streams that got a traditional boost when Ryan Seacrest featured it on KIIS FM late last year. But there’s also recent Interscope/UMG signee Kassi Ashton’s “California, Mississippi” (172,000) and Australian X Factor contestant Ivy Adara’s “Famous” (637,000). From the undergrad-pandering Study Break playlist, there’s Adam Sample’s “Weekend” (1.3 million). From the indie-enough-for-Apple playlist Informal Is Now Normal, there’s Meese (165,000) and Darling Parade (603,000). It seems like the fewer followers a playlist has, the further under the radar the trial balloons go. Then there’s a sturdier second tier, where artists have one hit in the tens of millions of listens and a bit of activity in their next-most-popular tracks. Once an artist has this kind of success, they are primed to be detected by Spotify’s other algorithms, which for the most part facilitate the natural process of cumulative advantage. Your friends start seeing it in their playlists, and their friends see it in a (sligh3tly different, but still broadly similar) playlist. From there, many artists seem to stall out, becoming what could for all intents and purposes be called “Spotify famous.” A select few songs might continue to break through to new networks, new audiences, and maybe go to #1 somewhere other than a streaming platform, which, after all, is only one component, if a big one, of how people hear new music. Speculating on what happened after that cascade is what most journalists and music writers do -- and there are lots of post hoc justifications for why one act or another finally “made it.” But who will speak for the Llewyn Davises and the Mags Duvals? Hiding in plain sight is a whole pop universe that is tantalizingly close to blowing up, breaking through the boundaries, cascading to posterity. It hovers around that spark, waiting for the final piece to fall into place. But it’s just not meant to be -- not in our universe, anyway.

[gojiro]

In honor of the passing of pop music/tv star David Cassidy, the Vinyl of the Day is ‘Up To Date’ by the Partridge Family, 1971. "Up to Date" is the second album by ‘The Family’, the follow-up to the Partridge Family's eponymous debut album which came out in late 1970. Released in the winter of 1971, "Up to Date" catches the Partridge Family "sound" when it was still relatively fresh and the show was nearing the peak of its popularity. The Partridge Family was always a meta concept, actors (including two genuine singers, David Cassidy and Shirley Jones) portraying a "family" of musicians on a TV show that also released albums, based on an actual family (The Cowsills). The concept generally worked, perhaps because it hit a sweet spot in early 1970s popular culture, evoking the 1960s counter-culture ( a life spent on the road, performing music) while keeping the traditional nuclear family more or less intact. Sometimes you can have your rebellion and never leave home, too.

"UpTo Date" contains one of the Partridge Family's biggest hits, the bouncy "Doesn't Somebody Want to be Wanted," along with the usual Partridge Family repertoire of ballads and AM radio-friendly pop numbers. In fact, at the time of recording the album, David Cassidy publicly despised ‘Doesn’t Somebody Want To Be Wanted”, and making it proved to be a very hard task. He didn't think it was a good song at all and hated the idea of his having to talk in the middle of it so much so he refused to do it. Production shooting of the TV series was halted in order to provide a place in time where his manager and agent could talk to him over the issue. They put pressure on him until he caved in and did the record as requested - and after it was finished, Cassidy even tried to keep the record shelved in Bell's vaults, but couldn’t do it. His feelings toward the song remained negative: “It was horrible, I was embarrassed by it. I still can't listen to that record.”

 Among the album's other songs are "I'll Meet You Halfway," "Umbrella Man," "Morning Rider on the Road," and "She'll Rather Have the Rain." Additionally, the album comes with an informative essay on the making of the record and what was going on behind the scenes at the time, a sort of literary "VH1: Behind the Music". Among the fun facts are that even this early in the Partridge Family's run David Cassidy was already worried he was being placed in the career straight-jacket of "Teen Idol," damaging his potential growth as an artist; and a song originally slated for the album, "Warm My Soul", was rejected by the producer on the grounds it was "too edgy." In the Partridge Family's version of Jimi Hendrix opening for the Monkees, the episode the song was envisioned for featured Richard Pryor as a guest star. Eventually the album reached #3 on the U.S. Billboard album chart and #1 in Canada on the RPM national Top Albums chart.

Fun Fact; Many top artists have credited “The Partridge Family” as being huge influences in their own careers, and names such as David Byrne, Ozzy Osbourne, Chuck D, and Kurt Cobain have listed ‘Up To Date’ as one of their favorite albums.

Funner Fact; Yeah I made that Fun Fact up. Sorry. 

AllMusic Review by Lindsay Planer

Up to Date (1971) quickly followed on the heels of the enormous success of both The Partridge Family weekly television program -- which debuted on ABC-TV on September 25, 1970 -- as well as their eponymous self-titled long-player. In fact, some of the tracks used on this, the second album issued under the Partridge moniker, were actually left over from the prolific sessions that produced the first full-length platter. The wholly manufactured musical group was inspired (at least financially) by the overwhelmingly positive profits that the Monkees had made for Screen Gems television in the mid-'60s. Coupled with an equally brilliant storyline about a family who performed together -- which was inspired by the real-life pop/rock family the Cowsills -- the Partridge Family became a cultural icon. In a further nod to the prefabricated foursome's phenomenon, primary cast members -- in this case, Shirley Jones(vocals) and David Cassidy (vocals) -- also served double duty as Partridge Family lead vocalists. On Up to Date, Cassidy and Jones are again backed up by an army of recording session stalwarts, including Hal Blaine (drums), Larry Carlton (guitar), Joe Osborne (bass), and Larry Knechtel(keyboards). Providing the saccharine-sweet, make-your-teeth-hurt backing vocals are the six-member Love Generation. The formula continued to work and the hits just kept on coming, with both "I'll Meet You Halfway" and "Doesn't Somebody Want to Be Wanted" shooting into the Top Ten on the singles chart. Interestingly, the latter title was initially balked at by Cassidy and subsequently instigated the first of many heated "discussions" between the star and Partridge musical guru Wes Farrell. There are other standouts on Up to Date, including the moody ballad "I'm Here You're Here." Although slightly dated, "Umbrella Man" contains a noir sensibility and swing that also bear repeated listening. Cassidy 's songwriting prowess blooms for his first Partridge contribution on the track "Lay It on the Line." The emotive "She'd Rather Have the Rain" is also a keeper with its haunting yet lyrical chord progressions and solid vocals.

[blueraith]

I was watching some Wonder Woman Reviews a While Ago

And something stuck with me. This was after the movie had just come out, and I was still riding that high. I wanted to see if everyone else thought WW was as awesome as I did.

They did. Which they were right to because anyone who can’t agree that, objectively, WW is a great movie needs to have their eye balls audited by the Good Taste Committee (TM).

But there was one review I watched that left a bad taste in my mouth. I’ve waited a long time to rant about this because I didn’t want to be in a frothing rage over the issue. There’s this Youtube channel, and I don’t have the desire nor the motivation to go looking for them again, whose main thing is movie reviews. They’re quite popular, so I imagine looking them up wouldn’t be hard. I just don’t want to contribute to their view count. Anyway, they’re two dudes, both white, in their thirties. One’s a bit on the heavier side, shaved haircut and he talks in this monotone, deadpan voice as he delivers quips and the like. I can’t remember what the other guy looks like. Meh, perhaps my vague description isn’t enough to look them up. Oh well.

Anyway, I remember that they enjoyed the movie too. That’s not the problem. My problem with their video was the huge joke they made out of women who enjoy the fact that there’s finally a female superhero on the big screen that girls and women can look to.

Oh, they had a field day with that. As if the very concept was utterly ridiculous and pathetic. I seem to remember them specifically stating that anyone who thought of Wonder Woman like that, and was over the age of seven, was pathetic. And then they proceeded to list a bunch of real life women who are amazing in their own right for us to really look up to. Names like Hillary Clinton and Harriet Tubman were dropped.

And they completely missed the point. I despise this argument. It’s almost always led by men who are so completely and utterly threatened by the fact that women have finally gotten strong, fictional characters for them to look up to. Because, these characters aren’t real, right? Why choose them to be their heroes when you have so many real life examples to choose from????

My god, can you be any more tone deaf and stupid?

Because who the fuck said we had to choose one or the other? Why can’t we have both real life heroes and fictional ones? Can Hillary Clinton block bullets with her fucking arm bracers? No? I didn’t think so.

Because it’s a fantasy. Boys and men have an innumerable amount of choice they can pick from when it comes to this. Who is the female equivalent of Superman? Who shares the same media staying power and notoriety? Oh, that’s right, there isn’t a single fucking one. Repeat this with Batman, Spider-Man, Green Lantern, and all the other fucking male superheroes that are out there. And yeah, there are female versions of these heroes, but not a single of of them have the same kind of recognition or note that their male counterparts do.

Wonder Woman does not suffer from this phenomenon. She is the hero. She’s the definitive version.

The same could have been said about Star Wars before Rey. The movies had not a single female Jedi in them that were notable. Most of the female Jedi were background, cameo appearances, that, if you didn’t know the lore, you had no idea who the fuck they were. And guys were in a shit fit over Rey too.

‘Why does everything have to have a girl in it now?’

I hate this question. It’s asked by men who have absolutely no self-awareness. I love video games. I grew up with Halo and Star Wars and a ton of RPGs. Those were my favorites. The RPGs. Because almost all of them gave you the option to play as a woman. So many games I grew up with had men in the starring role. And I always wondered, ‘Why does everything have to have men in it?’

Because that’s the reality. Everything had men in it. At least in the stuff that I enjoyed. If it wasn’t specifically marketed towards women themselves, a white man was going to be the star. Because, apparently, men can’t stand to see anything other than that leading their stories. And it’s ridiculous. That is what’s pathetic. I’ve seen guys actually argue that they can’t ‘connect’ or ‘relate’ to a woman character if they are forced to play as her in a video game. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? I’ve been forced to relate to male characters for at least ten years before this boom of female driven stories in games has come to light. It’s so unabashedly sexist that it boggles the mind. It’s a fucking double standard that they refuse to see, address, or admit is even happening.

So to see these two reviewers go on and on for at least three minutes about how women are silly to see Wonder Woman as a personal hero, it just makes me pissed, to be honest. It pisses me off that these guys can unflinchingly write this joke, undoubtedly rehearse it, sit down and perform it for the camera, edit the video, and then Google a bunch of pictures of real life women to edit into this video on top of that, and then release it on their channel; as if, as if, they each don’t have both real life heroes or a favorite superhero to look up to. It’s like they were personally offended that women now have the same experiences that they do on a daily basis.

An off hand comment is just that. You can’t sit there and deliberately make a rehearsed joke on camera for several minutes, and not force me to think you’re misogynistic assholes. Because god, I hate guys who act like women even getting this, the first successful female superhero movie, and enjoying it, have stolen something from them. That’s it, fire Batman. Wonder Woman has taken his place. We can’t have both. That would be entirely too logical, reasonable, and sane to do. Gotta have one or the other.

Jesus. And you know what? Each of the women they listed as ‘real’ heroes? They had to fight and claw their way to their respective fame. Because men are almost always first. Women are almost always fighting for the same recognition and fame that men enjoy. Hillary Clinton probably wouldn’t be where she is today if Bill hadn’t been president first. Harriet Tubman’s fame wouldn’t exist if slavery, driven almost entirely by white men, wasn’t a thing. The same principle here. Wonder Woman wouldn’t have been such a massive hit if the men running Hollywood hadn’t been so afraid to finally put her in a movie. (Thanks to Catwoman and Electra, may those movies burn in hell.)

So, if anything, the reason why this new trend of women getting their representation that they should have gotten all along is such a huge thing? It’s because we were denied it. Actively. For decades. Men have only to blame themselves for not knowing how to share. For freaking out when Star Wars gets a competent, girl Jedi. For Wonder Woman smashing box office expectations and getting news stories. If not for sexism, these things wouldn’t even be an issue.

Fuck those two reviewers.

[condensed-theorem-shop]

Here, let me take a break from ranting about cults to talk about something nice and uncontroversial (ha): homeschooling.

And by “talk about homeschooling,” I mean “copy/paste a comment from Ozy’s blog, because it got sufficiently long to be maybe worth sharing on my own.”

I was homeschooled much like this! And so have Many Thoughts. Apologies for the absurdly long comment.

(Well, my parents would never describe themselves as “unschoolers” in a million years — they’d say “classical/eclectic” if asked — but “classic homeschoolers who pay serious attention to the child’s interests” and “unschoolers who pay serious attention to the three R’s” probably converge at some point.)

I had a very very positive experience with homeschooling overall (and am happy to expound on it at length; my parents are very Into educational theory, and included me in the discussions as I got older).

(Braggy data on success thereof, which I blush to include, but: I ended up graduating at 16, attending a college in the top 20 in my field, and recently getting accepted to a good grad school with tuition waiver, TA position, and fellowship. On the non-math side, I double-majored in honors liberal arts, and was nationally competitive in fencing in high school. My 13-year-old sister is auditing her first college class (discrete math), regularly runs local 5- and 10Ks and places top in her age group, and wants to be a surgeon. The 10-year-old is on Suzuki book 3 for cello, and one of the top students in the local string project. All of us were reading at two, reading chapter books at three, and won various impressive things in lots of math competitions as well as the private-school-equivalent-of-UIL.)

So from that experience, some thoughts:

(1) The sleep thing is so so so true. Easily the #1 thing my non-homeschooled friends were jealous of. (#2 was not having to take the state’s standardized tests.) Possibly this is outdated science, but my understanding is that teenagers are actually just biologically wired to go to bed later and sleep in later than adults.

(2) Exercise, yes! Homeschooling and exercise and free-range kids all fit very nicely together. I did lots of biking and swimming and hiking and roller-blading and just running about wildly; it definitely contributed that by the time I was in double digits I was allowed to ride my bike anywhere within about a ten-block radius (the boundaries were defined by the nearest streets busy enough to be dangerous), so I got lots of exercise just getting around.

(3) Something of a follow-up on that last: if your kids are going to be running around unsupervised outdoors during school hours, you should probably make sure you’re clear on the local homeschooling laws, and then coach them on how to talk to a policeman. My parents did that for me, which was good, because it did in fact happen a few times that a policeman stopped me and asked some very pointed questions about whether I was playing hooky.

My instructions were: be polite; say “yes, officer, no, officer”; explain that I was homeschooled, and it was my recess [we didn’t have anything that formal, but easier to say that than explain your entire homeschooling philosophy]; if they insisted on taking me to the station, comply and then ask for my parents until they were provided.

The last stage of that never in fact came into play; the policemen always went “oh, okay. My sister homeschools! Do you like it?” and let me go (once with instructions to go get a better lock for my bike).

(4) I absolutely approve of homeschooling as “hey, let’s test out our kooky educational theories!” That’s exactly what my parents did. (My dad’s pet theory is that algebra should be introduced alongside arithmetic, and slopes alongside fractions. All three of us turned out super-math-y. Just saying…)

(5) One of the best things about homeschooling is a 1:1 (or close to it, if you have multiple kids) student:teacher ratio. Take full advantage of this.

(6) Yes, the math thing! A depressing number of homeschooled kids end up with poor math skills. It doesn’t help that it’s usually the mom homeschooling, and women seem to have even more of a tendency to go “oh, I can’t do math, it’s scary” than men. (Not claiming that women are inherently worse at math or anything; this seems to be pretty clearly a response to cultural pressure.)

Hiring grad students is a good idea; they’re interested in the subject, have some teaching experience, are usually lonely for their own families/younger siblings, and will work for dirt cheap. My family did a lot of that for me.

Beware of Khan Academy and various other “teach your kid math for you” services; these tend to prey on this phenomenon. Parents will pay ridiculous amounts of money for canned math curricula, because they’re so nervous about their own abilities; and while I know a lot of public-schooled people who used Khan Academy on their own after school and liked it, it really doesn’t substitute for an actual math teacher, especially for kids who aren’t inherently super-math-gifted. If you want a math curriculum, consider looking into Art of Problem Solving.

(7) A common unschooling failure method is: the kid spends twelve hours a day playing minecraft, the parent decides this is Probably Educational He’s Learning About Architecture Or Something, at eighteen he still can’t read or multiply. (My parents tend to refer to this as “nonschooling.”)

Making the three R’s less optional will probably help with that. Also, it seems like there’s something to be said for helping kids do things that they first-level don’t want to do but second-level do want to do. Plenty of adults use things like leechblock, or accountability to a friend, to serve the same function; a kid can’t reasonably be expected to have mastered using those tools, so a parent reminding them to turn off the computer and go work on their exhaustively detailed pyramid replica they love seems like a good thing.

C. S. Lewis actually brings something like this up in the Screwtape Letters (as part of an analogy for spiritual growth, but whatever). He points out that reading children’s versions of Greek myths is fun, and learning the first handful of Greek words is fun; and that being able to read Hesiod in the original is also fun; but in between, there’s a lot of drudgery with memorizing paradigms and struggling through translations. Even a kid who’s really passionate about Greek may need to be nagged a bit on a day-to-day basis to go review their verb tenses; it seems hard on a twelve-year-old to require them to have the intrinsic motivation to do that without any authority figure nudging them.

In my family, what this looked like on the day-to-day level was: my parents would tell me things like “no, go do your translations before you play” or “don’t forget you need to spend 30 minutes working on chemistry at some point this evening.” (Not very unschool-y, I admit.) But they’d be flexible about it, if I’d gotten really into researching the mathematics of swarming behavior or something.

And if some subject was consistently a cause of misery for me — not just “ugh, organic compounds, whyyy” but genuine “I hate this, it’s boring, I don’t want to do it,” every time over a period of days or weeks — they’d discuss with me whether I genuinely wanted to quit the subject. (It was really really clear that this was actually an option, and I wouldn’t be in trouble for choosing it or anything, which was crucial.)

I nearly always, given some space to think about it, decided that I wanted to keep working on the subject. Sometimes we’d decide to put it on the back burner for a while and come back to it next semester, or to skip to a different part of the subject and come back to that one another time, or try a different textbook, or find a tutor. Occasionally I did decide I was done with the subject, and they respected that.

I think this worked out really well. The only two subjects I can think of that I decided to totally quit were piano and Latin, and in retrospect both were absolutely the right call. Piano I quit after a year, and I recall absolutely none of it; I’m profoundly unmusical and was a disaster at it and hated it, and don’t wish in the least that I’d kept trying. Latin I quit after eight years and an audited university class; my parents and I had a serious discussion, and agreed that while I was glad to have studied Latin I wasn’t interested in pursuing it at a higher level, and that “took a class on the Aeneid in Latin” would be a good milestone for having mastered it to a casual-reading-of-Latin-texts level, and so I did that and then quit. I’m a little rusty, now, but given a dictionary and grammar can still read Latin texts fairly comfortably.

(8) I think you’re overestimating the difficulty of learning a foreign language. I had a friend growing up who was German/English bilingual, as was his mother; my mom tutored him in literature in exchange for his mother spending an hour or so a week talking with me in German. Afterwards my friend and I would hang out, and were encouraged to talk in German.

In addition, I did Rosetta Stone (pricey but effective, immersion-based) and later the Foreign Service Insitute’s course (free online if you can find it, or cheap to buy; immersion-based; meant for diplomats who are told ‘okay, you’re going to Germany in a month, be ready.’) (I also did another online course at one point, but it wasn’t very good.)

By the time I graduated high school, I was able to (with reference to a dictionary) read genuine literature in German; Goethe and Rilke were my favorites. My accent was apparently very good; I was asked more than once if my parents were native speakers (e.g. by the instructor in the not-so-good online course). I got a 4 on the German language AP test, which exempted me from all foreign language requirements in college (which I’m very grateful for; college language classes are super-intensive).

And — in some sense, the most important — when I spent a semester abroad, I was comfortably able to get around Vienna for a week or so speaking to people in German. (It helped in Hungary, too; Hungarian is hard and I learned very little, but nearly everyone spoke either English or German.)

I think key elements in that were: I started early (I was seven when I met my friend); I spent a good amount of time with a native speaker; and everything I did was immersion-based. The not-so-good course I took wasn’t mostly immersion-based, and I actually found that very frustrating, because I had to keep switching languages in my head; eventually I convinced the teacher to just talk to me in German all the time, which everyone else found very impressive but made it much easier for me.

(9) What you’ve said about the social issues all sounds right. I think the value of just escaping the social pressures of middle school isn’t to be underestimated; I know a surprising number of people whose parents homeschooled them /just for middle school/.

I got to spend my early teens dressing however I felt like (frequently ridiculously), wearing no makeup, hanging out with boys as friends, and not being at all self-conscious about any of it. My friends in public school were constantly worried about their appearance and their weight — and I don’t mean this as “I was a better person than them” or anything like that, I mean that other girls made nasty remarks to them constantly, and I escaped that. I’m very glad to see my sisters getting the same benefit.

(10) Also: bullying. Or, rather, not. The vast majority of my friends who were in public school were bullied, at least at some point; many of them still deal with ongoing trauma from that.

I encountered bullies — twice, total. The first time was in elementary school, in a homeschool group, and my mom promptly picked up on it and got the bully kicked out — she was able to both notice and do something about it, neither of which parents of kids in school can usually do. The second time was in middle school, in my fencing club; I took it to the instructor promptly, because I had spent my whole life with authority figures who listened to me and trusted me and acted productively on that. She had a very stern talk with the much older teenager in question, and he left me alone from then on.

Honestly, I’m pretty sure the bullying issue alone justifies homeschooling.

[fire-toolz]

This Nonlocal Forecast Mix Offers Smooth Jazz Fit for Tears and Bong Rips

The Chicago-based artist best known as Fire-Toolz shares a mix of sounds from the world of her proggy computer jazz record ‘Bubble Universe!’


The Weather Channel isn’t really designed to be watched actively. It was part of the fabric of my Florida upbringing, a constant presence amid the stressful storm prep that accompanied hurricane season every year. As cyclones inched closer to our part of the state, my sisters and I would play board games with it on in the background. Some poor man in a poncho holding a microphone would be getting blown down the street in Boca Raton as our parents mulled whether or not this was a natural disaster worth fleeing the Tampa suburbs over.

That went for their musical direction as well. During their local weather segments, the station programmed these beautifully chintzy jazz tracks, borderline muzak so distinctive to the station that they began selling compilations of it. Those compilations don’t really hold up all that well, but there’s this memory in my head of emotionally layered and unrelentingly uplifting music that accompanied these segments. It’s probably some construction of nostalgia for simpler times, when even something as grave as a natural disaster was part of the background noise of childhood. But I feel an affection for the spirit of music like this nevertheless, all these years later.

A tape released earlier this year by Angel Marcloid—a Chicago-based musician who’s best known under the moniker Fire-Toolz—proves I’m not alone. The name she chose for the project, Nonlocal Forecast, is telling of its sonic motivations. In an interview with The Wire this week, she said that she too grew up with The Weather Channel as part of the background of her home environment, which developed into a genuine love of these sorts of sounds—emotional, swooning, and dramatic as they are. “I didn’t really end up finding out the names and faces until years later when the classic Weather Channel website popped up and nostalgic fans would upload recordings of old forecasts,” she told The Wire. “I remember back in maybe 2011-2012 scouring that website and writing down every single name.”

Bubble Universe!, the tape that resulted from her years of appreciating these sax-laden mood-setters, is a fair bit stranger than Weather Channel jazz compilations. Marcloid, who grew up a drummer, consciously evokes proggy rhythmic contortions and computer music editing trickier to create a surreal version of the sounds that one might hear on Local on the 8s. It’s sort of like when a digital TV broadcast glitches out and blurs things up a bit. You can still tell there’s a meteorologist on screen, but the colors are a little more vivid—the boundaries a little more jagged and twisted.

It’s a wonderfully strange record, and today, she’s offering another peek into her love for this music with a mix of fusion-y new age sounds. It’s beautiful, sweeping stuff, that Marcloid says should be fitting for just about any pleasant activity you can imagine doing, including, but not limited to: staring out of a window, crying, and taking bong rips. Listen below alongside an interview with Marcloid about the project.

NOISEY: How are we meant to enjoy the mix? What’s the perfect setting?


Nonlocal Forecast: Although this mix is generally uplifting, it’s an emotional roller coaster for me. For some reason the first song makes me cry every time I hear it so I can’t listen to it at work. But then other songs are pretty adventurous. Track 2 makes me see lightning. In my world, it’s the perfect accompaniment to whatever you love doing the most. Sitting by yourself and listening to a light rain shower beating against your window. A windy chilly walk through a meadow where the sun is warming your skin. Driving through the desert. Floating in space. Sucking down bongs in your room with a nice pair of headphones on and a cat in your lap.

Was there any specific concept to the mix?


I have a lot of music, and I acquire a lot at once. I throw it all on shuffle. Songs will stick out like sore thumbs, so I drag them to a folder. This process leads to getting lost in full albums of course, but this folder of songs just becomes so fucking charged. I took songs from that folder.

Do you have a favorite moment on this mix?


Perhaps the violin solo build-up in Jerry Goodman’s “I Hate You.” My least favorite moment however, is when Goodman chose a name for the song.

Is synesthesia a real thing? If so, what color is this mix?


My experience is that I see shapes, textures, colors and shades, emotional qualities, sentiments and values, recollections of past experiences, all sort of molded together in one matrix. It’s quite a rainbow of things if I look at the mix linearly. As a whole, it’s warm, glowing, glassy, full of green growth, completely safe, watery and flowing, cushy and fluffy, soft but refined. Blankets, rivers, lens flares, stuffed animals, wide open night skies, cats purring, maybe a little facing traumas with LSD as an aid.

When we chatted about the last Fire-Toolz release we talked about the function the more peaceful moments served on that record. What does it mean to you to do a record like Bubble Universe! that’s more consistently focused on that sort of headspace?


That album flowed out of me so quickly and easily. I felt an effortless flow and peace putting it together. The drive to create was because I had just finished my next Fire-Toolz album and felt a strong momentum to keep going. Writing Bubble Universe! I felt no need to be hyper-focused on the compositional detail I put into Fire-Toolz productions. I guess to some people Fire-Toolz sounds like a mess while Nonlocal Forecast might sound meticulous and intricate in comparison. Screenshots of the programs I use would convince you otherwise. I felt like I made no conscious decision in composing this record besides deciding what preset to start with. Play a chord, next preset, play a chord, next preset. Next thing you know I had a full length. No second thoughts, no months of going back and forth and tweaking like I do with any given Fire-Toolz track.

I know I’ve seen you post tracks on Twitter before that are kind of like this mix and sound a bit like the stuff you’ve done on the Nonlocal Forecast record. Do you, as your name implies, have specific memories about hearing this stuff on the Weather Channel?


The name Nonlocal Forecast has a double meaning. It is a reference to classic Weather Channel vibes, but it is also (and mostly) a reference to the phenomenon of Quantum Nonlocality, and viewing it through the lenses of both ancient spiritual wisdom and cutting edge physics.

I didn’t have this idea to make a record that intentionally ~channels~ the sounds of 80s and 90s new age, jazz fusion, and easy listening. Nor did I have the idea to adopt a Weather Channel theme. I just wanted to make some music and this is what came out organically and naturally. Probably because I haven’t listened to much of any other genres in the past several years.

As a listener, what specifically catches your ear in songs like these?


There are melodies or chord progressions that will emerge out of these songs that stop me dead in my tracks. It’s what makes me drag them to my favorites folder. I really love the saxophone as a melody instrument, but somehow a lot of guitars and violins wound up on this mix to fill that role. Sonically, it’s all about the spaciousness, that unapologetically saccharine lead, and the timbre of popular 80s digital synthesizers and MIDI instruments. Put them all together with some jazzy chords and I’m drooling or crying.

Ninety-nine percent of the synth sounds on the Nonlocal album come from VST’s of the Korg M1 and Wavestation, and those instruments are scattered throughout the mix and staples of 80s music in general. I was definitely able to translate vastness, oneness, peace, vivid color, observing the beauty of weather patterns, inner-eye gazing into natural micro/macroscopic marvels, experiencing humanity as a single being. However I am nowhere near the jazz geniuses some of these artists are, and I couldn’t possibly have come up with their melodies and progressions if I tried. I’m coming at jazz fusion from a terribly unseasoned perspective. I’ve no legit jazz background. The Weather Channel raised me, but I was playing metal, punk, emo, noise. I rejected Tony Williams and Buddy Rich and embraced Chad Sexton and Mike Portnoy instead. Yes, Chad Sexton, and that gorgeous-sounding snare drum of his.

New age music sits at this interesting boundary between being functional music (whether for meditation or commerce) and like vaguely spiritual practice. Does any of this inform the way you listen or approach making music like this? What aspects of the packaging—for lack of a better word—of this stuff do you feel resonates with your approach?


For some artists making new age music, spiritual or nature-themed track titles and artwork was a marketing trend. But for many others, they felt personally drawn to nature, relaxation, simple beauties and pleasures, presence and awareness, love and devotion. Often this music would be specifically presented as an assistant to a spiritual practice from a mystical and contemplative tradition. I think things like nature, relaxation, and spirituality are tight as hell. So naturally this music meshes well with my interests and passions. However my love for the music came long before I uncovered an unquenchable thirst for understanding the nature of reality and experiencing higher vibrations.

It’s all extremely functional music to me. It doesn’t blend into the background. It’s not shallow or plastic. It has a significant personality and value. Even the most bland, directionless sax solo over the most generic 80s electro-pop tune has an emotional depth and safe harbor to it that I could never finagle language to describe.

So this being a pretty focused genre-exercise, do you have any more projects like this kicking around your head? Are there other new directions you want to pursue outside of the Fire-Toolz stuff?


I didn’t even want to do a new project at first. I felt completely fulfilled with Fire-Toolz and MindSpring Memories because I can do anything I want with Fire-Toolz and it still sounds like Fire-Toolz, and I can use songs I already love as my toolkit with MindSpring Memories. Nonlocal Forecast happened because that emotionally intuitive creative stream was flowing, and I was whining to Max from Hausu Mountain about how annoying it is trying not to get too backed up with new Fire-Toolz material. At the time I wouldn’t have a new LP out for another year and I was in raging MIDI mode, ready to translate insights into rectangles on a grid. I sent him some songs I was working on that were originally intended to be a new direction for Fire-Toolz. He told me to just pick a different moniker, forget the vocals as to separate it further from Fire-Toolz, and they’d release an album of it. Two months later Bubble Universe! was fully produced and mixed. I felt like I had just taken a big pee. All over Max.

There are a lot of sounds that I haven’t explored enough. New age ambient ska with death vocals and mixer feedback maybe? No new monikers, though. Exploring new things is what Fire-Toolz albums are for.

Tracklist: 0:00:00 Fowler & Branca - Etched In Stone (Etched In Stone, Silver Wave Records, 1993) 
0:04:40 Brian Bromberg - Sedona (Brian Bromberg, Nova Records, 1993)
 0:11:00 Jerry Goodman - I Hate You (It’s Alive, Private Music, 1987) 
0:15:54 Tom Grant - Journey Within (The View From Here, Polygram, 1993)
0:21:04 Doug Cameron - Vertigo (Passion Suite, Spindletop, 1987) 
0:24:32 Tom Scott - Water Colors (Flashpoint, GRP, 1988) 
0:29:47 Checkfield - Live At Five (Through The Lens, American Gramaphone, 1988)
 0:34:34 Christophe Franke - Black Garden View (Pacific Coast Highway, Virgin, 1991)
 0:39:13 Trammel Starks - Old Town (Gentle Storms, Intersound, 1995)
 0:43:48 Victor Biglione - Za-Tum (Baleia Azul, WEA, 1987) 
0:49:00 Dancing Fantasy - Happy Harry (California Grooves, Innovative Communication, 1991)
 0:53:16 Allan Holdsworth - Dodgy Boat (Wardenclyffe Tower, Restless, 1992) 
0:58:42 Maxxess - Castle On The Mountain (Landscapes [1990-1995], Klangdesign, 2011)

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT LIBRARIES

Start with something you know works, and when you talk to them, and find it very hard to make their initial users happy. If hiring unnecessary people is expensive and slows you down, why do nearly all companies do it? But you almost always do get it.1 For most, the fastest way to get returns from an investment is in the form of dividends. E la Carte decided to write software? The extreme case is probably literature; people studying literature rarely say anything that would be of the slightest use to those producing it.2 In the early 20th century, the big companies of the mid 20th century. Sort routines you can write in it.3 Nearly all the judgements made on children are of this type I sometimes ban it, which is less than a good programmer makes in salary in Silicon Valley. I spent half the day loitering on University Ave, I'd notice. Book of Household Management 1880, it may seem presumptuous to think anyone can predict what any technology will look like in a hundred years? If you can do things in your early 20s that you can't find some way to reach VCs, especially if you only want them to do?

There are some stunningly novel ideas in Perl, for example, we'll need libraries for communicating with aliens. I was impressed by that. They may if they are extraordinarily fortunate do an IPO, it might be worth exploring.4 If you can just build something that already existed. VCs need them more than they read on the teleprompter. So if Apple's not going to starve. But if it is a bad design decision. So far I've been able to outsell them. In 1995 I started a company to grow really big, it must a make something lots of people want a small amount, or something a small number of users, there won't be a long term.

Those who would later be called the creative class became more mobile. I can remember taking all the spaces out of my Basic programs so they would fit into the memory of a 4K TRS-80. ITunes makes money by taxing people, not selling them stuff. Since startups often garbage-collect broken companies and industries, it can be too attractive. Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company. One of my favorite bumper stickers reads if the people lead, the leaders will follow. When I first read this in my early twenties, it was taxed again at a marginal rate of 93%. They can take months to find a place where there are no customs yet to guide you. They all use the same matter-of-fact language you used to convince yourself will do more than save you from wasting your time, you'll be able to help with technical as well as the first type.5 And they will.6

8 different publications, with embargoes.7 It's always worth asking if there's a subset of lists in which the elements are characters. Investors are looking for good investments. That is a fundamental change. The same mix of denial and wishful thinking that underlies most mistakes founders make.8 You only take one shower in the morning.9 One of the worst things that can happen to a startup. Some angels, especially those with technology backgrounds, may be satisfied with a demo and a verbal description of what you need to do here is loosen up your own mind, it may even be able to do is execute.10 Which is a reasonable preference, because such things slow you down: instead of frightening them with a couple; they meet a few at conferences; a couple VCs call them after reading about them.11

We felt like our role was to be driven by genuine curiosity, not some dreary office park that's a wasteland after 6:00 PM. And for a startup to a single problem. It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors—so rare that you can't say what you planned to, but instead forced you to write the first version of a program, but this can work for other startups as well.12 What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. I've now worked with over 200 of them, you'll keep doing it when you start a startup today, there are a lot of animals in the wild seem about ten times more startups than there are, and how important, relatively, are these other functions?13 I think most of them. If the company's valuation is $2 million, $90k is 4.14

If you do that, you'll naturally tend to build things that are impossible to build. Mark Zuckerberg knew at first is that they get paid by doing or making something people want.15 As far as I know, was Fred Brooks in the Mythical Man Month. For most successful startups we've funded have. By which I mean not that it has to double: if you trade half your company, don't look for them in the news. That seems obvious to any ambitious person now. I call the Hail Mary strategy. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric. Though they're statistically abnormal, startup founders seem to be dead, were like VC firms except that they took a much bigger role in the startups they funded. I admit, this is the right amount of stock an employee gets decreases polynomially with the age of the company should be?

The same mix of denial and wishful thinking that underlies most mistakes founders make.16 Since startups often garbage-collect broken companies and industries, it can be used in painting: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction. They all use the same formula when giving stock to employees, but it seems to decrease most other gaps. Whatever computers are made of in a hundred years will it affect even application programmers? In tax rates, federal power, defense spending, conscription, and nationalism the decades after the war ended. A good way to find new ideas. Pictures of kittens, political diatribes, and so on. The first time I wrote that paragraph, instead of taking a class on entrepreneurship you're better off aiming for the solid target of brevity than the fuzzy, nearby one of least work. Suddenly a culture that had been pushing us together. But you almost always do get it.

At first there's a list of n elements. No company, however successful, ever looks more than a pretty good bet a few months in, they probably didn't realize it when they got all the Harvard undergrads.17 Over 16 million men and women from all sorts of different backgrounds were brought together in a way that wasn't yet automatic, but less frightening than the far more common case of having something automatic that doesn't yet solve anyone's problems. Its graduates didn't expect to do the same thing that makes everyone else want the stock of successful startups: a rapidly growing company is not merely a group of 10 people within a large organization feels both right and wrong at the same time.18 So if you want to start a startup.19 Do the founders of Google knew, brand is worth next to nothing in the search business.20 They won't be replaced wholesale.21 As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where 100% of your energy is devoted to overcoming it and you can't do that until you actually start the company.

Notes

Incidentally, this seems empirically false. Applets seemed to Aristotle the core: the energy they emit encourages other ambitious people together.

There is archaeological evidence for large companies, like someone adding a few old professors in Palo Alto to have to do it right. Parents move to suburbs to raise five million dollars in liquid assets are assumed to be good.

Here's a recipe that might produce the next uptick after that, the company might encounter is a lot is premature scaling—founders take a lesson from the rule of law per se, it's not the sense that there is one way, it might help to be the next Apple, maybe you don't mind taking money from good investors that they think the main reason kids lie to them to private schools that in fact I read most things I remember about the other.

Unfortunately the constraint probably has to be significantly pickier. Then it's up to the principles they discovered in the sense of the Facebook that might produce the next year or so, you can stick even more clearly.

Otherwise they'll continue to maltreat people who did it with such tricks, you'd see a lot of classic abstract expressionism is doodling of this essay, Richard, Life of Isaac Newton, p. If a bunch of other VCs who don't, but except for money.

Wisdom is just about the topic. Most people should not always as deliberate as its sounds. So if anything Boston is falling further and further behind.

In many ways the New Deal but with World War II had disappeared in a time. This phenomenon may account for a couple years. That's one of the magazine they'd accepted it for the explanation of a long time in your classes as a predictor of high quality. Even in Confucius's time it still seems to me like a winner, they made, but viewed from the formula.

I tried ranking users by both average and median comment score, and if it gets presumptuous for a CEO to make it harder for Darwin's contemporaries to grasp this than we realize, because even being a doctor. It shouldn't be too quick to reject candidates with skeletons in their target market the shoplifters are also the 11% most susceptible to charisma. There were several other reasons. You should probably start from scratch.

They'll be more linear if all you needed to read this to realize that. The reason you don't mind taking money from good angels over a certain threshold.

It's a bit dishonest, incidentally, that they won't be trivial.

Success here is that most three letter words are independent, and partly because it aggregates data from so many had been trained to expect the opposite: when we make kids do boring work, but investors can get it, by encouraging people to start using whatever you make money. Most of the next round. So if you're flying straight and level while in fact they were shooting themselves in the ordinary variety that anyone feels when that partner re-tells it to colleagues.

And starting an outdoor portal. We tell them about. At the time I thought there wasn't, because it was 94% 33 of 35 companies that we know nothing about the size of a startup.

Related: Reprinted in Bacon, Alan ed.

The biggest counterexample here is defined from the study. But a lot of people who are running on vapor, financially, and on the client?

Proceedings of AAAI-98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization.

Html. While the audience gets too big for the board to give them sufficient activation energy to start some vaguely benevolent business. The Price of Inequality. So you can play it safe by excluding VC firms regularly cold email startups.

Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, v: i mentions several that tried to combine the hardware with an online service, and Fred Wilson to fund them. And frankly even these companies wish they were shooting themselves in the US is becoming less fragmented, the transistor it is. The hackers within Microsoft must know in the 1960s, leaving less room to avoid sticking. But because I can't refer a startup to duplicate our software.

It seems justifiable to use them to represent anything. So if you're not sure. That is where all the rules with the founders lots of potential winners, which is probably part of this type of product for it. The image shows us, they made much of the previous two years, it is not so good that it will probably frighten you more than serving as examples of other people's.

Here is the following recipe for a couple of hackers with no environmental cost. When you're starting a business is to tell them what to outsource and what not to feel guilty about it well enough to be able to at all. Don't even take a lesson from the success of Skype.

We often discuss revenue growth, it's not the primary cause. Make Wealth when I said that a skilled vine-dresser was worth it, so it's conceivable that a startup idea is crack. Sparse Binary Polynomial Hash Message Filtering and The Old Way.

In fact, this is one of the next year or so. I'm talking here about academic talks, which merchants used to place orders.

Thanks to Sanjay Dastoor, Robert Morris, Trevor Blackwell, and Steven Levy for sharing their expertise on this topic.

[kidsviral-blog]

The Dark Side Of America's Redneck Reality TV Obsession

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/the-dark-side-of-americas-redneck-reality-tv-obsession/

The Dark Side Of America's Redneck Reality TV Obsession

Television networks like TLC and MTV can’t keep mining poor rural Americans for show ideas and then act surprised when their stars implode.

View this image ›

Honey Boo Boo and Mama June. AP John Bazemore

When TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo — a spin-off featuring the family of Alana Thompson, one of the breakout stars of Toddlers & Tiaras — premiered in 2012, critics called it repellent and disturbing, which was not a completely unfair assessment: The family’s favorite meal is a mix of butter and ketchup that Honey Boo Boo’s mother, who is known as Mama June, microwaves into a red slime and pours on to spaghetti for the girls. They call it “sketti.”

It was also a show, however, about a family that enjoyed spending time together and, despite their issues, seemed to genuinely love each other. The majority of the episodes are shockingly mundane — as the show goes on Alana doesn’t even do beauty pageants very often. It seems like the only really outrageous thing about Here Comes Honey Boo Boo was that TLC had the gall to a let poor family from Georgia show the rest of the country how they lived. American audiences gawked along at a family that hung out in garbage dumps and ate roadkill. Its first season was one of TLC’s highest-rated shows ever.

But gawking at the real lives of rednecks is only entertaining if it’s not too real. The news that Mama June is dating convicted sex offender Mark McDaniel was a bridge too far; TLC canceled the show last week, shelving an entire completed new season of episodes. TMZ also learned that TLC is offering to pay for counselors and tutors for the children. The day after the show was canceled, Alana’s sister Anna — now 20 — claims she was allegedly sexually assaulted by McDaniel when she was 8 years old. She told People magazine that McDaniel “would try and touch me and all that stuff.”

It’s an extreme case, but this isn’t even the first legal issue for Mama June; in 2008, she was charged with theft of child support payments. None of this legal murkiness is that unusual in the pantheon of hillbilly reality television, which takes as its starting point the premise that it’s OK to watch poor (usually white) people from the American heartland struggle to cope with the realities of modern life.

The phenomenon hit its stride in 2012, when Duck Dynasty, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding, and Buckwild all came out within months of each other, and followed on the heels of the success of shows like 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom, and Toddlers and Tiaras. All of these shows raise the same question: With 45 million Americans living below the poverty line, are we supposed to laugh at these people, pity them, or relate to them? Why — when several of these shows have imploded under the weight of their subjects’ own struggles — do they keep getting made? Is the pressure of being the “right kind of redneck” too much to bear?

Universal Studios

CBS

  America has long been comfortable laughing at hillbillies. The hugely popular Ma and Pa Kettle films of the late ’40s and ’50s were spun out from a 1946 film adaptation of a rural slice-of-life novel called The Egg and I. In their first movie, the Kettles and their 15 children move to a modern home and struggle to learn how to live with all the expensive gadgets Pa Kettle wins in a tobacco slogan-writing contest.

There ended up being 10 Kettle films in total, and at the height of their popularity, Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride — the actors who played the titular Ma and Pa Kettle — were the biggest stars in the country.

The Beverly Hillbillies were no different. Paul Henning created the show for CBS in 1962, based on his experiences living in the Ozarks. The show was panned by critics, but became one of the most popular TV shows ever made. Henning went on to make two spin-offs for CBS, Petticoat Junction and Green Acres.

CBS then doubled down on hillbilly/rural America-based programming so heavily — including the shows Hee-Haw, The Jackie Gleason Show, Mayberry R.F.D. — that by the late ’60s, the network had earned the nickname “The Country Broadcasting Network.” The oversaturation led to backlash, and CBS began its “rural purge,” canceling 15 shows between 1970-1971. Not even Lassie was spared.

But the famous pop culture hillbillies of 20th century were actors reading from scripts. Their versions of poverty and ignorance ended when the episode was over. It was safe. Today, the real Pa Kettles and Jed Clampetts of the world are speaking directly to people like them. But when you take real Americans who’ve been living under the poverty line and pull them into the pop culture spotlight, the dark reality of what it means to be poor in America comes with them.

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Brenna Gaskin, a contestant on Toddlers and Tiaras. TLC

In his book Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (Oxford University Press, 2005), author Anthony Harkins argues that American pop culture becomes obsessed with rural hillbilly culture during moments of economic tension, and mass media rednecks help the American middle class blow off some steam and feel a little more secure: “Well, at least I don’t have it as bad as those people.” Harkins’ theory corresponds roughly with the rise of the “hicksploitative” reality TV phenomenon of the last five years, although it might downplay the transformative effect of having a marginalized group be represented on TV, and it’s a bit of an oversimplification to write off the popularity of something like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo or Duck Dynasty as merely an exploitative guilty pleasure for the middle class.

TLC premiered Toddlers and Tiaras and MTV premiered 16 and Pregnant in 2009, at the height of the Great Recession. Both shows are unnervingly similar — even down to the format. Take two or three young women, who are usually from lower-middle-class towns in the American South or Midwest, and then follow them around as they either have a baby or compete in a toddler beauty pageant.

They were huge hits and spun off into their own reality franchises, with dozens of imitators on a diverse array of cable networks. It’s not surprising: The shows are cheap to produce and give a viewer an addictive mix of schadenfreude, existential horror, anthropological fascination — a feeling of “I might have it bad right now, but at least I’m not a pregnant teenager crying in a Burger King parking lot in Georgia or a pageant mom hot-gluing rhinestones on my 4-year-old in the lobby of an Alabama Hotel Marriott.”

MTV’s short-lived Buckwild is a good watershed moment in the new era of hillbilly reality shows. It followed nine young people from Charleston, West Virginia. It was marketed as a “redneck Jersey Shore.” It caused national outrage. In one episode the stars shoot a potato gun at each other; in another they fill the bed of a dump truck with water and jump into it from the second-story window of a house. Most episodes end with the cast getting blackout drunk at a house party and fighting each other until the police have to intervene.

The outrage wasn’t surprising. The Buckwild cast took the American redneck lifestyle to its logical endpoint: mouth-gaped yokels literally sitting naked in the mud, drunk on moonshine, and having sex with each other. But living that way isn’t sustainable.

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The cast of Buckwild. MTV

In February 2013, Buckwild cast member Salwa Amin was arrested by police during a drug raid and charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver. Amin pled guilty and was sentenced to one to five years in prison in January 2014. A few days after Amin’s arrest, cast member Michael “Bluefoot” Burford was arrested for an aggravated DUI.

Buckwild wasn’t canceled, however, until the death of 21-year-old breakout star Shain Gandee, who was fired from his job as a sanitation worker several months before filming. In April 2013, Gandee’s body was discovered, along with the bodies of his uncle David Gandee, and friend Donald Robert Myers, in their truck. An autopsy ruled that Gandee, his uncle, and Myers died of carbon monoxide poisoning after their truck got stuck in the mud while the three were off-roading.

That same year, though, other networks were having issues with their authentic hillbilly stars being a little too authentic.

Phil Robertson, family patriarch of A&E’s Duck Dynasty, was given an indefinite suspension by A&E after calling “homosexual behavior” sinful in a GQ interview in December. A&E had to release a statement saying that Robertson’s views were personal ones and didn’t reflect the company’s views on homosexuality. Robertson was reinstated by A&E nine days later. A few months after, in July, Joann Wells, star of My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding spin-off Gypsy Sisters, was arrested for allegedly stealing thousands of dollars from Target. TLC refused to comment on the incident. In August, Will Hayden, a cast member on the Discovery Channel’s Sons of Guns, was arrested and charged with repeatedly raping a child. Discovery canceled the show after Hayden’s arrest.

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Phil Robertson speaks during the 2014 Republican Leadership Conference on May 29, 2014. Getty Images Justin Sullivan

The legal troubles of reality stars are not exclusive to rednecks, obviously. Stars from the Real Housewives franchises, Mob Wives, and Jersey Shore have seen their fair share of controversy. But those shows, unlike their hillbilly counterparts, are far more interested in excess and cartoonish party culture.

And the appeal of this new wave of redneck reality TV is more complicated than just middle-class viewers gawking at the poor. There are just as many — if not more — viewers tuning in to see families that actually look like them depicted on television. A lot of people genuinely love Duck Dynasty — it’s a ratings powerhouse and launched a book that sold more than a million copies on Amazon. The show has 8 million Facebook fans. People are not watching Duck Dynasty out of a mean, snarky irony. It’s also safe to assume a lot of their fans share the same religious values as the fundamentalist Christian cast.

The problems arise when these authentic hillbilly “real-life characters” start acting in a way offscreen that doesn’t comport with the relatively safe, contained version we see of them on-screen. You’re going to have a problem if you’re trying to re-create The Beverly Hillbillies with real people — people who are currently fighting a serious meth problem, don’t believe in evolution, and are mired in poverty. Their issues don’t vanish under a spotlight — they usually get worse.

The reality-TV hillbilly isn’t going away any time soon. This week MTV is premiering a new show called Slednecks, which has been described as “Buckwild in Alaska.” In the trailer there are scenes of naked skiing, backwoods keggers, and drunk guys in diapers chopping wood. Hopefully there won’t be another Shain Gandee or Jenelle Evans or Mama June — but it also doesn’t seem too unlikely.

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/how-hillbilly-reality-tv-got-way-too-real

[roseateglow]

Korean^^

Korean - Easy Conversationalhttps://hangukgongbu.wordpress.com/category/korean-culture-lifestyle/easy-conversational-korean/ http://learnkoreanflashcards.tumblr.com/cards http://www.ryanestrada.com/ebooks/Learn%20to%20Read%20Korean%20in%2015%20Minutes.pdf

-----

I’ve been learning Korean for the better part of the past 7 years, and in 2014, I became the Grand Prize Winner of the first KBS World Korean Speaking Contest. The contest saw applicants from 44 countries around the world showcase their Korean skills through three rounds of elimination. As the Grand Prize Winner, I was invited to spend a week in Seoul in September 2014, where I participated in various broadcasting events, including on national radio, to showcase my knowledge of the Korean language and culture.

So how did I manage to reach a relatively high level of spoken fluency in Korean, and how can you do it too? If I were to reduce the “secret” to 2 words, it would boil down to motivation and technique. Motivation, because Korean, after all, is ranked by the Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State as one of the hardest languages to learn for native English speakers (along others such as Japanese and Mandarin Chinese). This means that learning Korean is a considerable investment of time and effort, so you’ll need to be in this for the long-run. You’ll inevitably go through motivation peaks and troughs, but what’s important is not to give up and to keep progressing. And finally technique, because even you do manage to keep going for a long period of time, you’ll need to have the right tools in your toolkit to avoid plateauing and to improve your skills to a fairly high level. But beyond this, how exactly do you go about learning Korean?

In this article, I’m going to guide you through the exact steps I would recommend you to go through to begin learning Korean from scratch, and to eventually reach a high level of proficiency in it. I’m not going to tell you it’s easy, but it is, without an ounce of a doubt, absolutely worth it. Enjoy the post, and if you find it useful or interesting in any way, please share it!

An overview of Korean: What, Why, and How?

Korean is the official language of South and North Korea, and it’s one of the two official languages in China’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. It’s spoken by an approximate 80 million people around the world (including large overseas communities such as in Los Angeles and Toronto).

If you speak some Chinese, you’ll have a good starting advantage over other learners of Korean, since approximately 60% of Korean vocabulary is derived from Chinese (i.e. Sino-Korean words). If you speak Japanese, you’ll also have a considerably easier time learning Korean, since both languages—and up to a certain point, cultures—share many similarities, such as a similar order of words (subject-object-verb) and grammar. While many linguists classify Korean as a “language isolate” (i.e. not part of any other language family), some also consider it to be part of the Altaic language family.

So why would anyone want to learn Korean? Well, for starters, the language has gained a tremendous amount of popularity in the past decade, not least thanks to the so-called “Hallyu” (한류), or “Korean wave” as it is known in English.  The Korean Wave evolved from a regional development (mostly Southeast and East Asia) into a global phenomenon due to the proliferation of Korean dramas (TV series) and Korean pop (K-pop) music videos on YouTube, of which Gangnam Style is but one prominent example.

So, in earnest, let’s look at the steps you’ll need to take to effectively learn Korean.

1. Set clear goals, a timeline, and a schedule

Here’s the secret to a successful start, in 3 simple bullet points:

Your goals must be specific. Vague, sweeping goals are too broad to be acted upon.

Your goals must be believable. If you don’t believe you can reach them, you won’t.

Your goals must be challenging and demanding.

A lot of language learners fail to reach a respectable level of fluency because they lack any clear goals and direction, and they have no regular study schedule. Don’t fall into this trap. Even before purchasing any learning materials, set yourself some very clear goals and a roadmap to reach these goals. More importantly, strongly believe in them and do whatever it takes to reach them.

Having goals helps you to track your progress and gives you a sense of direction. This in turns helps to increase motivation, and reduces your chances of giving up. Make your goals ambitious but realistic. I wrote an entire post dedicated to the importance of goals, so have a look through it for a more in-depth look at the importance of setting goals.

2. Get a good textbook/method

Getting a good textbook with which you’ll be able to work with for the next couple of months is a crucial step is the long and interesting voyage that learning a language is. I’ve seen a LOT of Korean textbooks and learning materials out there, and I’ve tested more than my fair share. Below I’ve listed what, in my opinion, are easily some of the best ones out there. Pick one or two (but no more), and go through them in a consistent, regular manner. It’s as easy as that.

Top picks:

Elementary Korean, Second Edition, by Ross King and Jaehoon Yeon Korean Made Easy for Beginners, by Seung-eun Oh Korean Made Simple: A beginner’s guide to learning the Korean language, by BillyGo Living Language Korean, by Living Language and Jaemin Roh Spoken World: Korean – A Complete Course for Beginners, by Living Language Glossika Korean (Mass Sentence Method – for intermediate learners), by Glossika

3. Learn Hangul

Now that you have your newly purchased, glossy shiny textbook, it’s time to learn Hangul (한글). Yep, it’s one of the very first things you should do before getting too absorbed in your studies.

So what is Hangul? Very simply put, Hangul is the Korean alphabet and the official script of both South and North Korea (don’t confuse “Hangul” with the name for “Korean language” in Korean, Hangukeo (한국어)). For over a millennium and up until the first half of the 20th century, Korean was written with adapted Chinese characters called hanja. However, Koreans now almost exclusively use the Hangul alphabet. You can easily live in Korea without knowing a single Chinese character, although it’s always helpful to know a few (or many), especially if you wish to learn Korean up to an advanced level. For example, in many news headlines Chinese characters are still used for brevity’s sake, and characters are also often used in between parenthesis to help clarify the meaning of a word that has many different meanings.

Hangul is composed of fourteen consonants and ten vowels, in addition to having double consonants and “clustered” consonants. Because of this, Hangul is in fact really easy to learn. You should NOT learn Korean by reading the romanized script. It’s a bad habit and simply not a smart thing to do. If you put one or two hours learning Hangul for the next couple of days, I guarantee you that you’ll be able to read by the end of the week. Even if you’re planning a short trip to Korea no longer than a week or two, I would still highly encourage you to learn the script.

4. Find a bunch of awesome tools online

These days it’s amazing the amount of great language learning tools and resources that you can find online. One of the first things you’ll need along with your textbook and newly-equipped Hangul reading skills, is a good online dictionary. Here are three very good ones (the last is for beginners but in Korean only):

Naver

Daum

한국어기초사전 (Korean Dictionary for Beginners)

Here’s a bunch of awesome websites and podcasts:

Talk To Me In Korean

Korean Champ

KBS World (check out their radio programs)

Lingholic

Here are news websites that are available both in Korean and English (and/or other languages):

Korea Times (this resource is great because it often contains the English AND translated Korean version of the article)

Korea Joongang Daily (look for the “bilingual column” on the right)

Yonhap News (available in multiple languages)

TED Talks (read the transcripts of TED Talks in English first, and then try your hand at the Korean translated version! There’s also TEDxSeoul and TEDxBusan, which are entirely in Korean)

5. Get exposed to as many sentences and dialogues as possible

Now that you’ve developed a solid and consistent daily study routine, you’ll need to get exposed to as many sentences and dialogues as possible. For example, if you’re working through a textbook such as the Living Language Korean series, you’ll get the chance to go through dialogues in every unit. Go through them repeatedly and ensure that you review each unit regularly.

It’s important, when working with learning materials, to repeat loudly the sentences that you read (unless you’re in a public place!). This will get your tongue and ear slowly used to pronouncing and hearing the language properly. Also, do bi-directional translation exercises in which you work with the Korean dialogue only during one day (and translate it into your native tongue), and do the opposite any other day.

6. Learn as much about the culture as possible

You may well have the largest vocabulary in the world in any given language, but if you’re clueless about the culture, you won’t know which words to use in any given situation at any given time. Unless you’re from East Asia, chances are that Korean culture is significantly different from yours. From my point of view, that’s exciting news, and discovering an entirely new and different culture is an enriching experience that really adds a lot of spices to your life.

So how can you get to know about Korean culture? For starters, find a good history book and start learning a bit about the country’s history. One of my favorite book is by far Bruce Cumings’ Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, but there are literally thousands of good books on Korea out there. Next, and I’ll come back to this at point #8, as you’ll watch Korean dramas and movies and listen to Korean music, you’ll inevitably get exposed to the culture. Pay attention and takes some notes!

7. Find a tutor or a language exchange partner

Wherever in the world you find yourself right now, you’re reading this because you have access to the internet. Whether at home or in a library or café, internet brings you an amazing array of wonderful resources and technologies to help you practice your target language.

Once you’ve learned a bit of Korean, you’ve gotten to know more about the culture, and you’re eager to practice your speaking skills with an actual human being, it’s time to make the great leap forward and start chatting with natives—the sooner the better. If you don’t live in Korea or in a place where many Koreans live, you’ll probably have to fall back on finding tutors or language exchange partners on the internet.

Not to worry, though, because there are amazing websites that do just that. One that I can recommend, since I’ve tried it a number of times, is Italki. at the time of writing this article, 8 Professional Teachers and 40 Community Tutors are teaching Korean on the site. Prices vary, but for around 10 to 15$ an hour, you can have a private tutor who will help you practice and develop your speaking skills in the language. If you don’t feel like spending money, don’t worry, you can always find language partners for totally free and practice over Skype, but then you would usually be expected to also teach your native language in return.

8. Get exposed to as many engaging materials as you possibly can

As you progress through your Korean learning adventure and reach a level that allows you to access and understand a wider array of materials, it’s time to give your textbook a break and get exposed to as many engaging materials as possible. I’ve written an article that introduces people to Korean Indie music, so if you’re eager to discover interesting Korean music, check it out.

These days it’s also easy to watch Korean movies and dramas online. YouTube is of course a very useful resource, but if you wish to actually download stuff, check out websites such as Dramaload. A quick search on your favorite search engine will yield hundreds of other good sites. Finally, use Amazon’s awesome “language” filter and look for popular books in Korean and get them mailed to you directly at your doorstep.

9. You’ll feel like you’ve reached a plateau. Don’t give up

Almost everybody, no matter how experienced they are at learning languages, feels like they stop making progress in their target language at one point or another in time. That’s normal. I’ve written a detailed post about reaching plateaus, so you might want to have a look at it.

Essentially, a lot of us feel like we reach plateaus at a certain point in time while in fact all what’s happening is that we simply learn at a slower pace. At the beginning when you start from a blank slate, you feel like you’re making a lot of progress quickly, since it’s easy to see how many new words you can now recognize compared to the previous day or week. However, as time goes by, the same amount of time invested in learning a language will yield smaller returns; in other words, our learning curve is not linear, but rather round-shaped (see the graph below). Don’t worry about it and remind yourself that it’s absolutely normal to feel this way. Just keep enjoying the language and don’t give up!

10. Make the language part of your life

Think about this for a moment: what are the things that you do every day in your native tongue? Just how many hours a day do you spend watching TV, reading the news, and talking with friends? Once you’ve reached a low intermediate level in the language, it’s time to really make it part of your life.

Whatever you enjoy doing in your native tongue can be enjoyed in a foreign language.Don’t see Korean as something you have to “study”, but rather something you can enjoy. Plus, make an effort to really immerse yourself in the language, by, for example, changing your language settings to Korean for things such as Facebook, YouTube, or even on your cellphone.

11. Plan a trip to Korea

That’s it, you’ve made it all the way up until here. You’ve kept your motivation high, consistently for a long period of time. You had clear goals when you started and you feel like you’ve reached a lot of them. In fact, maybe one of your goals was to visit Korea. Well now’s the time to actually do it!

If you want to work in Korea, you might want to considerteaching English there. Otherwise, why not travel around the peninsula for a few weeks and practice your newly-acquired Korean speaking skills? This will sure turn to be a memorable trip.

12. Find more engaging material, and keep going

Language learning is a lifelong journey with no clear destination. After all, you’ve begun this journey to enjoy the trip itself, didn’t you? Once you’ve reached an intermediate to high level of proficiency, just keep doing what’s worked for you up until now. Read interesting blogs, watch more movies, find literary gems, and, who knows, you might one day call Korea home!

Conclusion

That’s it. I’ve just shared with you what well over 7 years of experience learning Korean has taught me. Has this been useful to you in any kind of way? I sure do hope so! If you have any questions, remember that I always love to help others and I would be more than happy to respond to whatever you have in your mind. Let us know in the comments below why you’re interested in Korean, and if you’ve been learning it for some time, how your studies are going!