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sounmashnews · 2 years ago

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[ad_1] Pope Francis broke his silence on Nicaragua on Sunday as he referred to as for “open and sincere” dialogue amid the Ortega administration’s ongoing persecution of the Catholic Church. In his greetings after the Angelus prayer Sunday, he stated, “I am following with concern and sorrow the situation created in Nicaragua,” whereas holding out hope that dialogue might “find the bases for respectful and peaceful co-existence.”The pope’s intervention adopted the arrest of Bishop Rolando Álvarez of Matagalpa, who was detained throughout a Friday raid on the diocesan curia the place he had been holed up with different clergy and laity. He was positioned underneath home arrest in Managua—the place the Nicaraguan bishops famous in an announcement that Bishop Álvarez was “physically deteriorated but spiritually strong”—whereas the others arrested within the raid had been tossed into El Chipote, a infamous lock-up holding political prisoners.The phrases didn't pacify the pope’s many critics in Nicaragua, nevertheless, who questioned aloud why he waited so lengthy to intervene because the church endured escalating atrocities by the hands of the Sandinista regime—culminating within the arrest of a bishop, who could also be compelled into exile.The phrases didn't pacify the pope’s many critics in Nicaragua who questioned aloud why he waited so lengthy to intervene because the church endured escalating atrocities by the hands of the Sandinista regime.It additionally didn't fulfill many conservatives in Latin America, who expressed exasperation with Pope Francis for not condemning the authoritarian regimes of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba. In these international locations, protests have been repressed, the church has been persecuted and tens of millions have migrated.The pope’s tweets along with his feedback had been met with social media snark. Some referred to as his response too little too late. Others stated it was too weak. A number of even referenced Pontius Pilate and used the phrase ponciopilatismo, which in Latin America has come to imply washing your fingers of a state of affairs and could possibly be interpreted as “both sides-ism.”Álvaro Vargas Llosa, a commentator and son of creator and Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa remarked, “After maintaining a deafening silence in the face of persecution suffered by the representatives of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, the pope, motivated by the complaints of almost everyone, finally decides to comment. And what he broadcasts is indifference and ponciopilatismo.”Andrés Oppenheimer, whose column on Latin America is broadly learn in elite circles, wrote last week, “It’s hard to decide what is more outrageous: Nicaragua’s dictator Daniel Ortega’s decision to shut down seven Roman Catholic Church radio stations and hold a bishop and his aides under house arrest, or Pope Francis’ total silence about these attacks on his own people.”It additionally didn't fulfill many conservatives in Latin America, who expressed exasperation with Pope Francis for not condemning the authoritarian regimes of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.Human rights teams additionally questioned the pope.“Considering Ortega’s record of repression, what else is needed for Pope Francis to pronounce forcefully on the abuses in Nicaragua?” tweeted Tamara Taraciuk, deputy Americas director for Human Rights Watch.“It is time for Pope Francis to stand firmly on the side of the Nicaraguan people.”Pope Francis informed Univision’s ViX streaming service: “I love the Cuban people very much…. I also confess that I maintain a human relationship with Raúl Castro,” stoking additional outrage.The feedback mirror lingering sympathies in Latin America for the Cuban revolution, together with suspicions of the United States, says José María Poirier, editor of the Argentine journal Criterio.“Considering Ortega’s record of repression, what else is needed for Pope Francis to pronounce forcefully on the abuses in Nicaragua?” tweeted Tamara

Taraciuk,“I think he’s always had sympathies with Cuba, not necessarily with [Fidel] Castro, but with the Cuban process,” stated Mr. Poirier, who knew then-Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires.“In his mentality, the problem stopped being communism—the ghost of many years ago—and continues being liberalism, which he identifies with the United States.”The clamor for Pope Francis to talk out comes as Latin America lurches leftward with self-declared leftist leaders profitable elections since 2018 in Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Honduras, Chile and Colombia. Brazil is poised to comply with later this 12 months.Proponents of Pope Francis’ strategy say he's performing little totally different from his predecessors, when coping with international locations managed by authoritarian governments or hostile to the Catholic Church. The pope additionally should play a diplomatic role, they are saying, whereas avoiding bellicose statements.“Not even St. John Paul II chastised the Castros in Cuba,” stated Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez, a Mexican sociologist, who research the Catholic Church in Latin America. Nor did popes publicly criticize army dictatorships in international locations like Chile and Argentina—the place bishops and monks had been murdered—and even condemn the Soviet Union, Mr. Soriano-Núñez says.“I think he’s always had sympathies with Cuba, not necessarily with [Fidel] Castro, but with the Cuban process,” stated Mr. Poirier, who knew then-Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires.“Popes are never going to go against specific governments because it never worked out” up to now, he stated. “I do not see Pope Francis meddling in any specific country’s politics, not even Argentina.”A Jesuit in South America, who didn't want to be named, added, “The pope cannot take confrontational positions without putting Catholics in those countries at risk, particularly when some of them are carrying out educational programs, such as in Nicaragua with universities and Cuba with the little pastoral work that is authorized.”But the pope’s relative silence on Nicaragua has brought on consternation within the Central American nation, the place the church got here into battle with the Ortega regime in 2018 after opening its parishes to the injured throughout protests and later accompanied the households of political prisoners.Mr. Ortega and his spouse, Vice President Rosario Murillo, recurrently model monks “terrorists” and have amped up the repression in 2022. They expelled the apostolic nuncio, kicked the Missionaries of Charity in another country and closed Catholic radio stations and well being and schooling tasks.“In his mentality, the problem stopped being communism—the ghost of many years ago—and continues being liberalism, which he identifies with the United States.”Bishop Álvarez has been probably the most outspoken prelate in Nicaragua after Bishop Silvio José Báez, who left the nation in 2019 for his personal security.A supply in Nicaragua says many count on Bishop Álvarez to expertise the identical destiny as Bishop Báez, except Pope Francis intervenes. “We’ve felt as if we were suffocating and someone let us breathe just a little,” the supply, who wished to stay nameless, stated after the pope’s feedback.Álvaro Leiva, the director of a human rights heart who's now exiled in Costa Rica, despatched a letter to Pope Francis in 2019 informing him of the state of affairs in Nicaragua—and hoping the pope would publicly act.“His raising this issue could have such an impact in the world that it might be decisive for the release of political prisoners,” Mr. Leiva stated. “But he’s been blind, deaf and dumb in the face of the pain suffered by the victims of regime’s human rights violations.”Supporters say Pope Francis is well-briefed on Latin America’s hassle spots. The pope is the first-ever pontiff from the area and beforehand outstanding within the Latin American bishops’ convention. Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin beforehand served as a diplomat in Venezuela, and Jesuit Superior General Arturo Sosa, S.

J., is Venezuelan.President Ortega and his spouse, Vice President Rosario Murillo, recurrently model monks “terrorists” and have amped up the repression in 2022. “[Father Sosa] has a direct line with Francis, [and] I’m certain that they consult with him on the subject,” stated the South American Jesuit.Pope Francis has additionally develop into one of many area’s most outstanding political figures.He turned pope as individuals throughout Latin America had been abandoning the Catholic Church for Protestant congregations and, more and more, no faith in any respect. He additionally was elected shortly after the dying of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and because the area’s resource-fueled prosperity of the 2000s, which lifted many into the center class, petered out.Pope Francis has spoken out on regional ills whereas visiting the Americas: blasting drug cartels as “merchants of death,” providing an apology for the “so-called conquest of the Americas,” championing the reason for migrants, selling ecological preservation of the Amazon and elevating the plight of Indigenous populations.“He continues being a figure of reference in the absence of other leaders,” Mr. Poirier stated.Pope Francis achieved an early diplomatic victory by collaborating within the rapprochement between Cuba and the United States in 2014. The Vatican’s makes an attempt at mediating an settlement between the Venezuelan authorities and opposition in 2016 had been much less profitable, nevertheless.“The problem was that the Maduro side didn’t hold up its side of the bargain,” stated Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela professional on the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights suppose tank.He says the Vatican has been reticent to reengage with the Venezuelan battle, although it maintains important “diplomatic muscle.” But deploying that diplomatic muscle could show not possible.“[The pope] is becoming aware of his own limitations in responding to the many urgent problems across the hemisphere,” Mr. Ramsey stated.“The power of the pope in many of these situations is more of a moral authority and offering diplomatic backchannels more than advancing meaningful political change on the ground.”Correction: An earlier model of this report mistakenly linked to and cited a information report at TeleSUR for a quote from Pope Francis. The appropriate, authentic supply was Univision’s ViX streaming service. [ad_2] Source link

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ifuckinglovestvincent · 7 years ago

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St. Vincent Is Telling You Everything

“I told you more than I would tell my own mother.”

September 10, 2017, 10:34 a.m. By Laura Snapes | BuzzFeed Contributor Reporting From New York, New York Annie Clark was reconfiguring some older material for her upcoming tour when she realized how alien it felt to play it. She could adapt the arrangements to her harsher new sound — the sleazy, acid aesthetic of Masseduction, her upcoming fifth solo record as St. Vincent — but the writing’s proggy complexity was cockblocking the emotion. “In so many ways, I thought I was being completely transparent and brave in every record, only to realize that they are very oblique,” Clark told BuzzFeed News. She cackled and looked delighted. “Who knew! I had no idea.” Clark is much too self-aware for this to be completely true. But the difference between her polite, guarded Texan past and confrontational present is colossal. When I first interviewed Clark in 2009, she nervously pressed her pendant against her lips and face, leaving a red lipstick pox on her insane cheekbones. By 2014’s St. Vincent, Clark’s public persona would be imperious. But these days, she’s a playful freak who revels in showing the tightness of her grip, a disposition aided by long, straight eyebrows that dance like Memphis squiggles. In late July, she appeared in the lobby of New York City’s Marlton Hotel, her temporary home during the making of Masseduction. She had come from pilates — which she likes because it makes her sing better and “come a lot harder” — and disappeared to change out of her leopard-print gym shorts. When I mentioned a recent paparazzi photo of her looking like a sexy detective in another skintight leopard-patterned getup, she asked twice, with predatory delight, whether I’d looked at her camel toe. (No! Okay, maybe!) The only time her control slipped was when the hotel’s stereo started playing “Who,” a knotty song from the album she made with David Byrne, and she shriveled like a salted snail at hearing her own voice. Self-possession like hers is often interpreted as pretentious, or pathological. But over time, the confidence that the younger, anxious Clark had to fake has become bracingly real. You can hear it in Masseduction, a record of pop fluidity and queer possibility. It’s the best thing she’s ever done, and there are no bad St. Vincent records. It’s partly harsh, heady, erotic synth-pop visions steered by her diamond-sharp guitar, and while Clark has written plenty of ballads, there have never been any as brutal and gorgeous as these. Its lurch between apocalypse and ecstasy mirrors how it felt to be kicked in the head by the past couple years. In a way, Clark was right about the obscurity of her past work, filled with archetypes and distanced observations — emotions through a stained-glass window. If not a clear pane, then Masseduction is at least a peep show on heartache, fucking, addiction, destitution, and suicide. And her relatively new life as a very public figure, thanks to relationships with Cara Delevingne and Kristen Stewart, gives it an extra frisson. Tabloids will rush to find the former, the famed British supermodel, on an album littered with wasted bodies, especially on “Young Lover,” where Clark finds someone overdosed in the bathtub. She recounts the night with terror but also arrestingly ugly indignation. “Oh, so what / Your mother did a number / So I get gloves of rubber / To clean up the spill,” she sneers. “Scenario has to rhyme, babe,” is all Clark said about its veracity. She was bemused at being asked to explain the lyrics. To her, this record is butt-naked. “I told you everything,” she stressed. “I told you more than I would tell my own mother. It’s right there.”

Annie Clark Nedda Afsari Masseduction started out with three tenets: It would feature programmed beats and pedal steel guitar, and examine power and seduction. “What does power look like, who wields it, how do they wield it — emotionally, sexually, financially?” Clark ticked off her fingers. The album was properly born over a creative first-date dinner with Jack Antonoff, the Bleachers frontman who also recently produced and wrote with Lorde and Taylor Swift. Clark was looking for a teammate; they told each other everything that was going wrong in their lives and decided that total oblivion was the only way out of their heads. “It wasn’t, ‘Hey, let’s make a record together, that’ll be fun,’” Antonoff told me. “It was, ‘Let’s absolutely go all the way and find the absolute best thing that exists here,’ which is really the only way to work on things.” That grit is Clark’s MO. Until recently, she claimed to have taken approximately 36 hours off in between returning from touring 2011’s Strange Mercy and starting work on 2014’s St. Vincent. The concerts for the latter were bonkers, starting the run as avant-garde, meticulously choreographed deconstructions of a traditional rock show, and ending it with exorcisms that entailed Clark crumpling down a 10-foot pink plywood pyramid like a drunken horse. She often stole objects from the crowd: a pair of crutches, someone’s dinner. The spectacle of her murdering the thing she’d trained for was addictive.

St. Vincent during the 2015 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. Frazer Harrison / Getty Images “Touring became a blood sport for me. I mean, I was born with a whip anyway, and touring became this self-flagellating exercise,” she said, clenching her jaw and lashing each shoulder with an imaginary strap. “And I was seeking that kind of physical exhaustion; I was seeking the pain.” She doesn’t know why, and she’s okay not knowing why, though eventually she did accept that her relationship to touring was a form of delirium. On the new album’s “Sugarboy,” a dystopian, post-Moroder disco banger, she describes herself as a “casualty hanging on from the balcony.” (She literally climbed rafters in some theaters, kicking away security guards.) This hysteria is one of the reasons she considers Masseduction her saddest record. “I lost my mind, I lost people, I gained people, I stopped touring,” Clark said of that period between 2014 and 2017. “It was just a lot of a lot, you know.” After the St. Vincent tour dates ended, Clark had to learn to construct and value life away from the road — she had been on tour since age 16, when she worked as an assistant for her aunt and uncle’s jazz group. “And I still love that,” she said of touring, “but it’s more like a component of my life now rather than…my life.” Back home she indulged in a “period of bacchanalia,” and briefly got into self-medicating, an experience she turned into the lunatic track “Pills”: Imagine the Stepford Wives lost in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory (Kamasi Washington guests on saxophone; Delevingne sings on the chorus). She’s transfixed by the forces that can swallow us — “You know, drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll,” she winked. “So corny. Kill me! Kill me dead!” Though sometimes she uses those themes to dress up more mundane relationship dynamics. “Savior” explores the unhealthiness of mutual projection through a funny S&M parable involving nurses and nuns and our tediously prosaic concepts of kink: “You put me in a teacher’s little denim skirt,” Clark moans on the song. “Ruler and desk so I can make it hurt / But I keep you on your best behavior / Honey, I can’t be your savior.” The album’s self-destructive dynamic comes out on the title track — “I can’t turn off what turns me on,” she wails over twisted guitar — and her protagonists never stop annihilating each other for their own benefit, whether for carnal kicks, or for the mothers who “milk their young” in the song “Los Ageless.”

The album cover for Masseduction. Loma Vista Recordings And then there’s the heartbreaking “Happy Birthday Johnny,” which sounds like a snowflake but crushes like an anvil. It calls back to the title track of her 2007 debut Marry Me, about “John” who’s “a rock with a heart like a socket I can plug into at will”; and to “Prince Johnny,” the decadent downtown royal from St. Vincent. She said she feels compassion and hopelessness for his self-destruction, but can’t judge because she’s just like him. Maybe he’s also a cipher for the way humans use each other — Clark flatly refused to talk about him. “One thing I have learned in six records and 10 years is that I’m not obliged to answer any questions — a lesson I more or less only recently learned.” She stared into the bar, fixing a grim expression through her orange aviators. “Next question.” At any rate, the song is a whole story. Once conspirators, her and Johnny’s literal fire-starting days are behind them, and now he lives on the street, calling up Clark at New Year’s for “dough to get something to eat.” She demurs, and he calls her a queenly miser who’s sold out for fame. “But if they only knew the real version of me / Only you know the secrets, the swamp, and the fear,” she pleads. It is deeply tragic, being shamed — perhaps rightly — by the person who once understood your shame. Antonoff theorized that she’s mourning a past on the record. On the forthcoming Fear the Future Tour (named after a new song, and to resemble a Jenny Holzer maxim), Clark said she probably won’t be flinging herself around stages as much because “I think I’m emotionally throwing myself around a lot more.”

A still from St. Vincent’s “New York” music video. Alex Da Carte In late July, Tiffany & Co. announced Clark as one of the faces of its fall advertising campaign. Diamonds and waspy Americana are a weirdly prim contrast to the freaky propaganda aesthetic that Clark is calling “manic panic” — the Masseduction album cover is a photo of a nice ass in a leopard-print thong bodysuit. But like any savvy propagandist, Clark’s image will be everywhere this year. Having directed a short film, The Birthday Party, as part of the horror anthology XX, she’s now due to direct a feature-length, female-led adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. (“The most rich text I have ever read: transgression, modernity, society, repressed queerness.”) There’s also a multimedia performance as part of October’s Red Bull Music Academy in Los Angeles, and an upcoming art exhibition in New York. A coffee table book. Essays. (She calls art “a fountain of youth” that’s given her everything and everyone in her life, hence her urge to make everything.) And that’s just the exposure she has control over. Celebrities like to pretend that their success is the result of some cosmic fluke, but Clark has said quite openly that the best part of becoming more famous thanks to her love life is “just getting the opportunity to do more work in different fields,” which nobody ever admits! (Though her 2015 Grammy for Best Alternative Album and overwhelming critical acclaim probably helped, too.)

St. Vincent, Zoe Kravitz, and Zosia Mamet at the Tiffany & Co.-presented Whitney Biennial VIP Opening in March 2017 in New York. Mike Coppola / Getty Images One of Clark’s best-known songs, 2014’s “Digital Witness,” is about social media voyeurism. “I wonder if, in the future, privacy will be something that only the 1 percent can afford,” she told Rolling Stone that year, which now seems beautifully naive. From the second she and Delevingne were spotted together at the 2015 BRIT Awards, the UK’s pervy yet ever-scandalized tabloid media went nuts that their hottest young model was dating a woman, and pursued them so staunchly that the couple once took revenge by firing water pistols at the paparazzi. “She really is so famous!” Clark said of Delevingne, feigning hammy disbelief at the attention they received. “That shouldn’t have been shocking to me, but it was shocking to me in the sense that she’s such a sweet, really, deeply kind, unspoiled person. She has more compassion in her little finger than—” She waved her hand around her torso with a grim laugh. (The pair reportedly split last fall, but Clark would only say they were “never not close.”) Clark’s self-assurance helped her to perceive the tabloid aggression and celebrity weirdness as baffling rather than distorting. She was too classy to run with my suggestion that attending that Taylor Swift 4th of July party must’ve been an interesting anthropological study. “That was, I think, in the midst of a game of Celebrity,” she said of a photo of her wearing the same stars ’n’ stripes onesie as Gigi Hadid, Karlie Kloss, and Ruby Rose. She took a long pause. “I was very bad at it!”

From left: Cara Delevingne and Annie Clark Schiller Graphics But she was disturbed by dangerous high-speed car chases from paparazzi in pursuit of photos of the couple; she thinks the gossip industrial complex relates to a wider societal disparity. “The biggest problem was that the value system of it is all based on aspiration,” she said with genuine concern. “It’s wealth aspiration, fame aspiration. But if the government, if the world was just generally a more compassionate, empathetic place, people wouldn’t be aspiring to…that. They would be more fulfilled with their own lives if the wealth gap in general wasn’t so insane.” Admittedly, it was hard not to want to look at them, in matching sharp suits and laser-cut Burberry, queering the archetype of the male rock star dating the young supermodel, watching the context around an established artist mutate in front of you. There is the kind of halfway-benign personal invasion where paparazzi follow you and your girlfriend around an airport. But then there is the kind where the never-not-creepy Daily Mail doorsteps your older sister at home in Texas and calls up your well-meaning uncle to sandbag him into revealing that your father went to prison in 2010 for participating in multimillion-dollar stock fraud. Although it is grotesque to treat the paper’s muckraking as a puzzle piece, it did illuminate part of the story behind Strange Mercy, which Clark had — understandably — only ever vaguely attributed to an overwhelming period of loss. “Suitcase of cash in the back of my stick shift,” she sang on “Year of the Tiger.” “I had to be the best of the bourgeoisie / Now my kingdom for a cup of coffee.” (She cowrote the song with her mother, Sharon, who split from Clark’s father when she was three.) “Everybody has their personal tragedies and their crosses to bear,” Clark said in a clipped tone. She calls her father’s 12-year prison sentence “a horrible tragedy. On so many different levels. So absolutely heartbreaking.” She — an adult — could handle it. But her younger half- and stepsiblings on her father’s side are still teenagers. “And I specifically would never talk about that or have ever mentioned that in a myriad of questions about Strange Mercy because it seems like an incredible betrayal of my family. But most specifically, my youngest siblings who are innocent children. They were kiddos.” She described the Daily Mail story as “faux concern,” and reiterated that the paper couldn’t find any dirt on her, no matter how outrageously they tried. “I’m not ashamed of my family,” she said. Then I asked her whether her father going to prison had spun her own moral compass, or made her reconsider any values of right and wrong that he may have instilled in her. She was momentarily confused, and then let rip a massive, absurd, demonstrative laugh. She kept going. “I love my father,” she said eventually, still tickled. “I love my father very much, as any child loves their parent. He’s very intelligent and erudite and a good writer and incredibly well read, and those are all things that I value and I’m glad that he instilled in me.” She paused, and kept on laughing. In the run-up to announcing Masseduction, Clark was Instagramming absurdist junket-styled videos, in which she wears a hot pink skirt and a transparent rubber top the color of ash, and takes questions from an off-screen interviewer. Her answers were scripted by the musician and comedian Carrie Brownstein, who is also her ex-girlfriend. One video poses the question of whether Annie Clark and St. Vincent are the same person. She pauses to consider. “Honestly, you’d have to ask her.” What’s it like being a woman in music? “Good question,” she muses, as the camera zooms to her black and yellow fingernails, which spell out “FUCK OFFF.” These films might factor into her upcoming tour, but the answers were also written for journalists. Earlier in July, in London, Clark found alternative ways to conduct interviews for hours at a time. She invited some female journalists to get massages with her (too weird with men, even though she was face-down on the table the whole time, avoiding eye contact). Other writers were invited into a 10-by-10-foot pink wooden box that was constructed in a North London studio especially for the occasion. Her interrogators had to duck through a low door to enter the blacklit space. “Not full-on crawl, because that’s a little heavy-handed,” she clarified. Inside, she looped a pedal steel recording and lit a Diptyque candle that struggled to mask the paint fumes.

St. Vincent / Via Instagram If anyone asked her an obvious question — like where the name St. Vincent came from — she planned to play prerecorded answers and “check my email, or stretch, or zone out for a second,” she said, sounding almost disappointed that she didn’t get a chance to enact her schemes. She insisted she wasn’t being antagonistic. But sitting opposite Annie Clark for two hours is often intimidating enough without the added fear that she’s about to make fun of you to your face: It is a gigantic power play! “Oh, deeply so,” she said, affecting a wryly elegant tone. “But then also not at all because I was the insane person stuck in a box for eight hours!” If critics and fans are bored of this sort of thing — see Arcade Fire’s recent album campaign — they are clearly not as tired as the artists who have to smile politely at writers who don’t know how to use Google. Plus, Arcade Fire’s hijinks felt cynical; Clark’s feels like a rejection of the idea that women artists are meant to be relatable, having endured a career’s worth of inane juxtapositions between her pretty face and gnarly shredding like it means anything. The point, she said, was that putting ourselves in a totally different, slightly strange context can produce interesting results. (She and I were meant to do Pilates together — before an oversold class spared me the indignity.) Why not make everything thoughtful and curated? If the stakes are already high, why not aim even higher and put yourself in extreme circumstances to see what happens? If Clark has done two things for the cerebral indie-rock world that she’s long outstripped, it’s teach about sex (thank god), and expose its low-risk complacency for a con.

Nedda Afsari Of course, in some people’s eyes, this makes her a phony, a manipulator. Earlier this year, legendary cultural critic Greil Marcus wrote an admirably dim-witted column for Pitchfork where he compared Clark to the slippery Father John Misty, aka Josh Tillman, claiming that they “perform as artists of such pretentiousness you couldn’t possibly figure out how to talk to them. … There’s no way to address a saint: To be a saint you have to be dead … Such characters allow themselves to appear as if touched by God, which is what they’re selling, and laugh at you if you’re so square not to know who they really are: to join their club.” If Marcus had read any of the million interviews that Clark is parodying in her high-concept clips, he would know the name is rooted in humiliation and squalor — the hospital where Dylan Thomas died — rather than divine aspiration. “And I have never, nor would I ever, put the kind of trapdoors and booby traps in my music to make the listener feel dumb,” Clark told me in response to Marcus’s theories. “I have enough hubris not to kill myself, but I actually have such a deep respect for the listener that I have never tried to pander. Songs and arrangements were complex and convoluted at times, but they were sincere attempts at connecting.” She hoped there will be no mistaking her intent with her new record, which “is so first-person and sad.” But if anyone does, she knows it’s not her job to correct them.

A still from the “New York” music video. Alex Da Carte A still from the “New York” music video. If you want to use Masseduction as a treasure map, then this is what it tells us about Annie Clark’s personal life. She experienced a complicated kind of heartbreak. Sometimes that makes her crazy and neurotic: “I won’t cry wolf in the kitchen,” she swears on woozy opener “Hang on Me,” but threatens to jump off her roof “just to punish you” on the vengeful, cracked opera of “Smoking Section,” the last song. Sometimes a mental safety net stretches out when she might otherwise get hurt. “Slip my hand from your hand / Leave you dancing with a ghost,” she sings on “Slow Disco,” the most tender song she’s ever written. “Don’t it beat a slow dance to death?” a forlorn and disembodied voice repeats as it fades out. Her world is changing, and that’s unsettling. “Too few of our old crew left on Astor,” she sings on “New York,” a song about lost heroes. On “Fear the Future,” she belts the title as the song reaches a pyrotechnic cataclysm that sounds like a truckload of fireworks being dumped inside a volcano. But if you respond in kind to Clark’s vulnerability, then these are the more meaningful revelations that we can take from Masseduction into our lives: Relatability is a crock, and sincerity doesn’t take a single form. “I refuse to seem less threatening, if that’s how I’m perceived,” said Clark. “Ultimate freedom is not caring whether you are liked, because you are making something you really love and believe in.” On Masseduction Clark tells us that all the good forms of desire — love, sex, art — are self-destructive. But at their best, they create just that little bit more than they consume, and can eventually alchemize anxiety into total power.

#I’ve gotta try that Pilates #st vincent #annie clark #Laura snapes #interviews

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yoursongpodcast · 7 years ago

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For 'Tell Me About Your Song' #81, Lucas Kwong of The Brother K Melee talks about his song 'Stranger from the Country'. Sorry for the delay in getting this up -- it's been quite a year!

Stranger From The Country by THE BROTHER K MELEE

In the course of our discussion, we touched on the following topics:

Romanticism Pilate's wife The Stations of the Cross The Great Chain of Being Rashomon Happiness is a Warm Gun A Day in the Life WFMU The Seven Second Delay Almost Amateur Hour: set list / audio

This episode contains a brief excerpt from a live performance of the Brother K Melee's song 'Margery', which you can also find on Bandcamp.

For more information about Lucas's music, as well as his upcoming shows and videos, check out his website at brotherkmusic.com. You can listen to and buy his music on Bandcamp, and he is also on facebook and twitter.

The 'Tell Me About Your Song' icon was designed by Shaenon K. Garrity.

If you want more information about your host, Jacob Haller, then check out my web page, my facebook page, or my twitter account.

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Episode Transcript:

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

What do you have to say?

JACOB: Hello, and welcome to Tell Me About Your Song, the podcast where I talk to musicians and songwriters about a song they've written. Today's guest is Lucas Kwong of The Brother K Melee, and the song he'll be talking about is named "Stranger from the Country." So where would you like to start, Lucas?

LUCAS: There's this, like, capital R Romantic idea of the artist as someone who just kind of flows freely through life, and lets ideas come to them, and what I've realized is, if I let myself do that, then I will just postpone doing things. Like a lot of creative people, I can be kind of lazy. My church had an exhibit inspired by the Stations of the Cross. A lot of artists in this community, Ytu know, each artist was assigned to a different station. So, I signed up to do one about the sentencing of Christ, and so it was, kind of, one of those things where there's a deadline, I have to turn in, you know, produce something by this time, and also there's a limitation of subject. Now, of course, you know, within those broad parameters, I had, kind of, creative liberty to put my own spin on the song, but, you know, it's not going to be about that one time I had a road trip in New Orleans, or something like that, right? I mean, there's a definite set of limitations from the beginning, and it just came in pieces. I remember, in the third section of the song, the part:

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

First he was silent as a stone cold killer, Or a killjoy filler for the main man.

LUCAS: That whole part came to me all at once. I was in the shower, and I was kind of scared of writing more, because it just felt so perfect, that one part -- I didn't want to ruin it by adding other parts that either made that part sound bad, or weren't as good themselves. The thing about, you know -- I wanted to avoid writing a song, is, the kind of song that is very didactic. You know, when you're dealing with religion, when you're dealing with a song that touches on religion, or sacred texts, you always run the risk of making it, like, you know, an object lesson, and -- I guess the secular equivalent would be, like, a protest song, where it's very blunt and clear: This is what the message is, right? And I don't want to do that. I didn't want it to be that kind of monotonous. So I realized that a way around that could be to make it in multiple sections. And I've always loved the Beatles song "Happiness Is a Warm Gun."

[EXCERPT FROM 'HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN' PLAYS:]

She's not a girl who misses much.

LUCAS: So I thought maybe I can do something like that.

[EXCERPT FROM 'HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN' CONTINUES:]

Do do do do do do, oh yeah.

LUCAS: And then, after that, it was pretty quick. Then I had the second part, which is from Pilate's perspective, and then I realized the third part could be, you know, the part that I originally came up with.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

And then our mouths filled with laughter when he said we'd see him after On high at the Almighty's right hand.

LUCAS: There's four sections of the song, and I had the third section, but I didn't know it was the third section, and then maybe, you know, two months later, I was walking around outside, and -- you know, when you're walking -- I live in Brooklyn now, and I live pretty close to the Brooklyn museum, so I was just going for a walk, and I was just kind of mumbling to myself, which I sometimes do, without a time signature, and I just had different words coming to me:

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

Last night my lady had the strangest dream, She was under a white moon. Nothing was as it seemed, Everything was too soon.

LUCAS: And that's how the first section started, because, you know, the first section of the song has no time signature. And I just had words at that point -- and I briefly considered, like, forcing them into a meter, and I was like, "Maybe just leave it, and that can be the introduction."

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' CONTINUES:]

... "Man do I know you?" You said "Better than you might think, If you allow me to show you, Cause this is the hour and the power"

LUCAS: And because of those words, you know ... Those words are from the perspective of Pilate's wife -- you know, there's a single verse that talks about a dream that Pilate's wife had -- and, once I had those those lyrics, it kind of -- I kind of realized the song was about different perspectives, you know, on this one event.

JACOB: I had forgotten that Pilate's wife was part of that whole story.

LUCAS: Yeah, it's like a "blink and you --" It's like a cameo.

JACOB: Mm-hmm.

LUCAS: Because it's one verse, and it's so -- It's so mysterious. It's like, what was that dream? And what kind of relation does Pilate have with his wife, anyway? Does she always tell him her dreams? You know, there are all kinds of questions, but it, you know, I only had six minutes.

JACOB: [laughs] Yeah.

LUCAS: And there was a physical restraint, too, because I had ordered a 12" record [probably 10". -editor], so I was trying to write a song I could fit on, because otherwise I'd have had to order a 12", and that would have been way too big, so... And then, actually, the day before recording was when I came up with the fourth section, because I still wasn't totally happy with it, and it was -- I was straddling -- You know, should the third section be super aggressive and heavier, or should it be more meditative and dreamlike? And then I realized, "Well, I can just add another section, and stitch together two of the previous sections." That became the fourth section, and that's how the song came together. It was very haphazard.

JACOB: So, kind of the inspiration for the song was from this, kind of, assignment to write about the Stations of the Cross --

LUCAS: Yeah, one particular station: the sentencing, but it was part of this larger exhibit.

JACOB: Like, the Stations of the Cross, it's like -- It's kind of these discrete parts that fit together to form this, you know, the overall story --

LUCAS: Yeah, yeah.

JACOB: -- and then the song also has kind of multiple parts. Do you think there's a relationship there, or am I just --

LUCAS: Probably yes. It's a -- What is it called? The medieval -- They used to call it the Great Chain of Being, the microcosm, macrocosm, so, you know, that's probably part of it. You know, this is -- This is interesting -- this is the first time I've been asked to interpret my own music. I feel so -- I don't know. I don't feel like I should have the authority to interpret my own music. But I think that's a totally right on way of looking at it, because the Stations of the Cross is already about multiplicity of perspective. It's already about, I don't know how to say it, I think of it a bit like Rashomon. I mean, it's unfolding in time, it's not like it's always looping back to the same moment, but, yeah, you are dealing with an overarching narrative, and yet are these discrete moments, and maybe that was just in the back of my mind as I was writing the song. And I just have always, as much as possible, tried to get around the verse/chorus/verse/chorus option. Sometimes that is what the song wants to be.

JACOB: Yeah. Have you written other songs that have kind of been in parts like this?

LUCAS: A few times, and, in fact, as I was writing the song, I realized there's a specific subgenre in my music that builds. You know, it'll start with like one or two instruments, and I'll build to, like, a crescendo. And so, I think this song has something of that. You know, I tend to gravitate toward that. But I think that's why I was glad I came up with the fourth section, because that kind of took it somewhere new. You'll find a lot of my references are Beatles songs. So, like, "A Day in the Life" is the archetype of this kid of song, right, where it starts off just with John on the piano and guitar, and then it sounds like the end of the world by the end, with the whole orchestra, and that's it, right?

[FINAL CHORD OF 'A DAY IN THE LIFE' BY THE BEATLES PLAYS]

LUCAS: And that's part of my DNA, and in a lot of my songs will just -- If I'm not careful to craft it a little bit, and disguise the origin, I'll want to do that. So, you know, i -- Little things, like the fourth section of the song, help me to make sure that each song has its own character, while, I guess, also having, like, a family resemblance to the other songs. I was playing it for my wife, and she was digging all of it, and I could tell she just thought that that part of [sings] "What do you have to say?" in the third section wasn't quite working, so that was what pushed me to come up with, instead of [sings] "What do you have to say?", like, [sings a different melody] "What do you have to say?" -- shorter and hostile, and from there, the third section became more of the heavier, because once I had that hostility, I felt like the third section wanted to be all about distortion and snare , and ... I don't know. I don't often write songs that are that are inspired by 90s rock, but I grew up in that era, you know? And the third section is definitely inspired by the music I actually grew up with, because I also had Dylan, and the Beatles, and Frank Sinatra in my house, you know, but Soundgarden and Nirvana -- like, that was the stuff, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Oasis -- all that stuff was what my peers were actually listening to, so I guess the third section is kind of my salute to that era.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

What do you have to say?

LUCAS: That's another challenge, because when we do it live, it's going to sound different than it does on the record.

JACOB: Yeah, have you played it out?

LUCAS: We did once. We did it once, about a month ago, and that was literally a week after we recorded it in the studio. And it was good! It just feels different. It's difficult, first, because there's so many different sections with their own moods, and I think, when you're in the studio, you can layer those moods, and then when you're performing it live, you have to be a little bit schizophrenic. [laughs] Maybe you have to be a bit schizophrenic in general, as a musician, if you want to express a lot of different things, but especially with a song that's going from, you know, this dreamy state, to this interrogation, to this much more kind of alarming, heavier, third section. I think that's one of my goals, is to nail that in the performance.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS]

LUCAS: David really is a great drummer, and I kind of put a lot on his plate, because he had to learn this song in 24 hours, complete with different twists, and we did it in -- we did his whole part in -- well, it was in two chunks, but it was one take for each chunk. Sections 2 and 3 were one take, and section 4 was another take. But, yeah, he nailed it! [laughs]

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

... a king don't need to pray, A king don't need to pray.

LUCAS: The second section of this song is Pilate speaking, and he's kind of -- I wanted it to be more of rapid fire interrogation, so that's why, you know, there's fewer spaces in between the phrases, and the notes are shorter.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

Better find the right words to say,

LUCAS: You know, I had this idea -- very martial, you know, almost taking it into an image of, like, a Roman military, you know, with those -- beating the drums of war.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS]

LUCAS: What I like about his drumming in the second section, is that he has the menace, but it's not over the top, yet. And then the third section -- Yeah. I mean, he's just banging the shit out of those drums.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

First he was silent as a stone cold killer, Or a killjoy filler for the main man. And then our ...

LUCAS: It started with playing with syllables. Like, I was just watching my niece, this video of my niece, and she's trying to sing along to "The Wheels of the Bus", and it's just, and she's not even two years old, and it really struck me -- You know, before we learned to speak as a way of communicating with each other, we're just copying adults' syllables, you know? And we're just playing with sound. That's how language starts for each person, and a lot of time that's how, I guess that's how my songs start. So I was playing with "killjoy" -- "kill", "fill" ... you know, that kind of thing. It's a funny line, when I look back at it, because the word "kill", right, that's, like, a badass word. You know, it connotes badass-ness. But then when you link it to joy -- "killjoy" -- it's almost like, if you really break it down, the first part sounds like it's badass and then it ends up like a wet noodle, you know what I mean?

JACOB: Right.

LUCAS: There's a disillusionment inside -- that's how it seems to me, anyway. I don't know why parsing of "killjoy" is accurate or not, but that's how it feels to me.

JACOB: Sort of the thing that I like about it is, like: Right. But those images are kind of opposed, you know. Like, "the stone-cold killer" and "the killjoy filler" -- Like, "the killjoy filler for the main man" -- I'm just kind of picturing, like, you know, an opening act for the guy that everyone is there to really see.

LUCAS: Exactly. Exactly. No, that's exactly it, you know? And that's the part of the story -- you know, the story that has been told over, and over, and over, and sometimes terribly, you know -- this story of the Passion of Christ, that I think is so interesting, is that, like, the characters in the story have these two simultaneous views of this person: That, on one hand, he's a criminal, and he's a threat, and, you know, might even be a terrorist. You know, because the church tradition now is that he was crucified with two thieves, but the original word is a little closer to revolutionary, right? So, on one hand, they see him as a threat. On the other hand, you know, he's a joke. He's seen as a buffoon. You know, that's why the Roman soldiers, they say, "OK, hail, king of the Jews. Whatever." And they whip him. And it's both at the same time, and that was just always so interesting to me, that the climax of this story in the Gospels is this problem of perception. You know, that this person at the center of it is simultaneously seen as such a huge threat, and also a massive joke. And, not only that, but that's the center of this sacred story. You know, I've always thought it was so strange that, effectively, what this Holy Week story is about, is commemorating, and even treating as sacred, blasphemy: Celebrating the fact that God is being treated both as a criminal and as a joke. You know, both as a killer and a killjoy. And, honestly, you know, in my own spiritual practice, sometimes God looks like both at the same time, too, whenever you see something -- a natural disaster -- or when I do, you know, the killer part, and then other times the killjoy part, and then other times it's, like, something else entirely. That's my experience of it. The last couple of lines.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

She didn't have the right time, Cause the time you were serving was the right kind.

LUCAS: "She didn't have the right time, because the time you were serving was the right kind." Because I remember, I actually worked a long time to figure out how to close that, because I think -- I was playing with time, and, at first, it was, like, "She didn't have the right time, but you said, you know, but you had the right time," and, you know, dumb things like that, and then I realized, you know, in the context of the song, "she didn't have the right time" means that she thinks that it's the middle of the night, but it seems like, in the dream, she's meeting Christ, and Christ has been waiting there for a long time. So that's what she means by "she didn't have the right time." But then "serving time" is different, right? Serving time is prison, and serving time is the law. That's what is really interesting, and will, in some way, always be interesting to me about this story, which is that it's about serving time.

[EXCERPT FROM 'STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' PLAYS:]

... silent as a stone cold killer ...

JACOB: So, if people would like to hear more of your music, what should they do?

LUCAS: People can go to www.brotherkmusic.com, and that's kind of a one stop for videos, concert announcements, you know, new releases. They also go to my Bandcamp: brotherk.bandcamp.com, and help me stave off penury by purchasing my product.

JACOB: I recommend it.

LUCAS: [laughs] Thank you. Oh, right -- and of course, you know, the usual: Facebook, Twitter. They're both facebook.com/brotherkmusic, twitter.com/brotherkmusic.

JACOB: OK. Well, cool. Well, my name's Jacob Haller, and I have music, and other podcasts, and things. You can find out about all that stuff at jacobhaller.com, and I have a website devoted to this podcast, tellmeaboutyoursong.com, and I also have a blog where I post link -- you know, I'll post links to all of Lucas's websites and whatnot at yoursongpodcast.tumblr.com. And, with all that said, we're going to go out and listen to the entire song we've been talking about: "Stranger from the Country", from the Brother K. Melee. Thanks for listening.

['STRANGER IN THE COUNTRY' BY THE BROTHER K MELEE PLAYS IN FULL -- LYRICS ARE ON BANDCAMP]

JACOB: Do you remember how we met, by the way?

LUCAS: Yes I do.

JACOB: Yeah.

LUCAS: We were at -- man, what -- okay what's the radio station?

JACOB: WFMU.

LUCAS: WFMU! Right. Their talent show. Yeah, that was fun. That was my first time doing anything like that, and, you know, that was my only time I've ever done one of those variety show kind of situations. I just remember being very frantic ...

JACOB: Yeah.

LUCAS: ... for the whole evening, because, you know, they thrust you on stage, and give like three minutes to set up, and they didn't have the hook, but I kept imagining someone backstage with, like, a hook, you know, ready to --

JACOB: Right, and someone was going to play the trombone if we went on too long ...

LUCAS: Yeah. That was a useful exercise, actually. I feel like, if I did that every three months, it would keep me on my toes as a performer.

[EXCERPT FROM 'THE SEVEN SECOND DELAY ALMOST AMATEUR HOUR' FROM WFMU PLAYS:]

KEN: Rita did great. Our next guest, Andy -- our first electric act of the evening -- He brings Rock & Roll with a literacy problem -- Please welcome Brother K!

[APPLAUSE. AN ORGANIST PLAYS AS THE BAND GETS ON STAGE. THE BROTHER K MELEE LAUNCHES INTO THEIR SONG 'MARGERY'.]

#Lucas Kwong #Brother K #The Brother K Melee #jwgh #Tell Me About Your Song #TMAYS #songwriting #interview #podcast #music

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christsbride · 7 years ago

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Evidence for the Crusifixtion of Jesus

How do we know Jesus died on the cross? We must look at the historical evidences recorded for us in ancient history. What evidences is there? Outside of the Biblical witnesses (the synoptic gospels) we first look to the closest culture associated with Jesus and his death; Judaism. JEWISH HISTORY Two researchers, Edwin Yamauchi and John P. Meier, have constructed a copy of the "Testimonium" of Flavius Josephus (37-101AD; wrote ~45 years after Jesus) with the probable later Christian insertions removed. In parentheses are what is found in the Arabic manuscript. The following paragraph is Yamauchi's:

“About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man (And his conduct was good and he was known to be virtiucous) For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. (They reported that he had appeared to them after his crucifixion and that he was alive). And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.”

Here Josephus the Jewish historian records that Jesus was condemned by crucifixion. Josephus does not have to be believe in Jesus in a religious sense to admit and record a historical event regarding what happened to Jesus. Being a anti-christian source, he records this event as an actual historic occurrence. Given his time of writing and area of association, he would have known witnesses of this event. Later in Jewish records we see in The Babylonian Talmud, a commentary on Jewish laws composed between A.D. 500-600 (Neusner/Green, 69), contains a text about Jesus’ death. The Tractate Sanhedrin (43a) states:

Jesus was hanged on Passover Eve. Forty days previously the herald had cried, “He is being led out for stoning, because he has practiced sorcery and led Israel astray and enticed them into apostasy. Whosoever has anything to say in his defense, let him come and declare it.” As nothing was brought forward in his defense, he was hanged on Passover Eve.

SYRIAN HISTORY Secondly we can look at Mara Bar-Serapion who wrote around 70AD (~35 years after Jesus); He was a Syrian philosopher and a non-christian. When giving historical examples of innocent people being killed, he gives this example:

"...Or the Jews by murdering their wise king?…After that their kingdom was abolished. God rightly avenged these men…The wise king…Lived on in the teachings he enacted.”

The Jews never murdered their kings of the past. Jesus however was mockingly called "king of the Jews" on the cross. It was an argument that even Jewish leadership used to get Rome to approve his crucifixion. 35 years after Jesus was murdered, Rome destroyed Jerusalem. But "the wise King lived on in the teachings he enacted". Thus Serapion was indirectly stating that Jesus was a real person of history that was killed. ROMAN HISTORY Third, we see as recorded by Cornelius Tacitus (56-120AD); a very trusted Roman historian, senator, proconsul of Asia, and defiantly a non-christian who wrote around 116AD (~80 years after Jesus) an interesting statement:

“Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.”

Tacitus records that Jesus "suffered THE extreme penalty" by Rome, which was crucifixion. Then Lucian of Samosata (120-180AD; ~115 years after Jesus) was a satirist and Roman comedian who very negative and sarcastically critical of Christians. He wrote several books and in a negative since, unintentionally affirms Jesus' death:

"The Christians. . . worship a man to this day - the distinguished personage who introduced this new cult, and was crucified on that account. . . . You see, these misguided creatures start with the general conviction that they are immortal for all time, which explains their contempt for death and self devotion . . . their lawgiver [taught] they are all brothers, from the moment that they are converted, and deny the gods of Greece, and worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws. All this they take on faith"

Lucian also affirms the historic event of Jesus' crucifixion. The image above is roughly 1st to the late 3rd century dating which depicts a person crucified with a donkey head being worshiped by a person to the left. The words engraved at the bottom translate "Alexamenos worships [his] God," This was mocking a person named "Alexamenos" for worshiping "[his] God" who was on the cross. Origen reports in his treatise Contra Celsum that the pagan philosopher Celsus made the same claim against Christians and Jews:

“For the sake of such a monstrous delusion, and in support of those wonderful advisers, and those wonderful words which you address to the lion, to the amphibious creature, to the creature in the form of an ass, and to others, for the sake of those divine doorkeepers.."

Tertullian, writing in the late 2nd or early 3rd century, reports that Christians, along with Jews, were accused of worshiping such a deity. He also mentions an apostate Jew who carried around Carthage a caricature of a Christian with ass's ears and hooves, labeled Deus Christianorum Onocoetes ("the God of the Christians begotten of an ass"). Thus, through this insulting graffiti in ancient Roman culture, we see that Christians were worshiping someone who was crucified. The donkey head is the derogatory depiction of Jesus, as it was taught that Jesus, the king, entered Jerusalem on a donkey also the donkey itself depicted how Roman society felt about Jesus himself. None the less showed the culture making fun of someone who was crucified. What we know about Roman crucifixion is that it was extremely successful. Even if Jesus was to had survived after being brought down from the cross, just unconscious, the burial ritual of the Jewish culture would have suffocated him regardless. Given what we know now medically, the wounds he would have suffered, the lack of nutrition, dehydration, wound infection, and burial suffocation; he could still not have survived. ISLAMIC RECORD About 630 years after Jesus, Ibn Ishaq (d. 761 CE/130 AH) reports of a brief accounting of events leading up to the crucifixion. But about 200 years after Ibn Ishaq, the idea of Jesus' crucifixion changed to the idea that he only appeared to be crucified or that he did die for only a few hours before being raised to heaven. Al-Tabari (d. 923 CE/310 AH) records an interpretation attributed to Ibn 'Abbas, who used the literal "I will cause you to die" (mumayyitu-ka) in place of the metaphorical mutawaffi-ka "Jesus died", while Wahb ibn Munabbih, an early Jewish convert, is reported to have said "God caused Jesus, son of Mary, to die for three hours during the day, then took him up to himself." Tabari further transmits from Ibn Ishaq: "God caused Jesus to die for seven hours", while at another place reported that a person called Sergius was crucified in place of Jesus. Ibn-al-Athir forwarded the report that it was Judas, the betrayer, while also mentioning the possibility it was a man named Natlianus. Al-Masudi (d. 956 CE/343 AH) reported the death of Christ under Tiberius. But then, Ibn Kathir (d. 1373 CE/760 AH) suggested that a crucifixion did occur, but not with Jesus and that ‘The servant and messenger of God, Jesus, remained with us as long as God willed until God raised him to Himself.’ It seems that the Islamic idea of Jesus' pseudo-death follows the early traditions of Gnostic teachings in that Jesus himself did not die but was replaced at the cross by someone one else who appeared to look like Jesus on the cross. Yet other Islamic teachers such as Ja’far ibn Mansur al-Yaman (d. 347 AH/958 CE), Abu Hatim Ahmad ibn Hamdan al-Razi (d. 322 AH/935 CE), Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani (d. 358 AH/971 CE), Mu'ayyad fi'l-Din al-Shirazi (d. 470 AH/1078 CE ) and the group Ikhwan al-Safa affirm that Jesus did die by Crucifixion, and not substituted by another man. It is important to note two things: (1) The Islamic reports of Jesus not dying by crucifixion are at least 900 years after Jesus! (2) They affirm Gnostic teachings which have been proven to be unreliable historically and philosophically. The inconsistent accounts within Islam make it impossible to validate Islamic sources as historically reliable. CHRISTIAN RECORD It is easy to write off The Bible as a bias source of the historical event of Jesus' crucifixion but the same can be said for all the non-christian sources that deny it. The fact that there exists non-christian sources that affirm Jesus' crucifixion is compelling in and of itself. But is the biblical record of Jesus' death unreliable? According to non-christian secular scholars and historians such as E. P. Sanders and Maurice Casey, who are bold enough to admit, that, The Bible is reliable enough to know that he did in fact die. The Rylands Library Papyrus P52 is a biblical manuscript dated 90AD to 150 AD records a small portion of the story of Jesus' crucifixion. Which the fragment can be possibly dated to only 60 or so years after Jesus. Clement of Rome who wrote around 90AD and affirms the death of Jesus in Chapter 16 of 1 Clement. Ignatius (born around 35 AD and died around 108AD) affirms Jesus' crucifixion in his letter to the Smyrnaeans. Polycarp of Smyrna (born around 69AD and died around 155AD) affirms Jesus' crucifixion in his letter to the church in Phillipi. THE PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE Ancient Jewish history records Jesus' death on the cross. Syrian philosopher affirms his death as an historic event. Ancient Roman historians and writers affirm Jesus' death as an historic event. Early church teachers affirm Jesus' death. Later some Islamic writers even affirm Jesus' death. Currently, well respected secular scholars affirm that the Bible's record of Jesus' death is reliable. We can in fact conclude given the preponderance of evidence that Jesus did in fact die by crucifixion. If you have any questions or comments about this article please contact us or join our discussion forms

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kostikivanov · 7 years ago

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St. Vincent’s Cheeky, Sexy Rock

Annie Clark, the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known as St. Vincent, has an apartment in the East Village. She’s rented it since 2009. But last winter and spring, while she was in town recording a new album, she didn’t stay there. If she wanted something, she sent someone to get it. “I need to not have to worry about the plumbing and the vermin,” she said. “Also, the trinkets and indicators of my actual life.” She was immersed instead in the filtration of that actual life into song. She was in a hermetic phase: celibate, solitary, sober. “My monastic fantastic,” she called it. A stomach bug in March left her unable to stand even the smell of alcohol, and, anyway, there were so many things she wanted to get done that she didn’t have the time to be hungover. She abstained from listening to music, except her own, in order to keep her ears clear.

She was staying at the Marlton Hotel, in Greenwich Village, a block away from Electric Lady Studios, one of the places where she was making the record. Most days, she got up at sunrise, took a Pilates class, and then headed to Electric Lady, to work past sundown. She had dinner in the studio, or else alone at a nearby restaurant, or in her room. A book or an episode of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and then early to bed. Not exactly “Hammer of the Gods.”

It had been more than three years since the release of her last album, which she’d named “St. Vincent,” as though it were her first under that name, rather than her fourth—or fifth, if you include one she made with David Byrne, in 2012. All these were well regarded, and with each her reputation and following grew. The music was singular, dense, modern, yet catchy and at times soulful, in an odd kind of way.

Still, the self-titled album was widely considered to be a breakthrough, a consummation of sensibility and talent, a fulfillment of the St. Vincent conceit—this somewhat severe performer who was both her and not her. The act was a blend of rock-goddess bloodletting and arch performance art, self-expression and concealment. (She says that she got the name from a reference, in a Nick Cave song, to the Greenwich Village hospital where Dylan Thomas died.) The ensuing tour was called “Digital Witness,” named for a creepy/peppy song on the album about our culture of surveillance and oversharing. Her life was a whirlwind. There was a Grammy, some best-album acclaim and time on the charts, and a binge of attention from the music and fashion press, and, eventually, from the gossip industrial complex, too, when she began a relationship with the British actress and supermodel Cara Delevingne. The Daily Mail, struggling to take the measure of this American shape-shifting indie rocker, called Clark “the female Bowie.” (The paper’s stringers doorstepped Clark’s family.) When that romance came to an end, after more than a year, she began to be photographed with Kristen Stewart, another object of fan and media obsession, and so the St. Vincent project took on a new dimension: clickbait, gossip fodder. This bifurcation, as Clark called the split between her public life as an artist and the new one as a tabloid cartoon, was disorienting to her, and even sad. But there was a way to put it all to work: write more songs. Clark, quoting her friend and collaborator Annie-B Parson, the choreographer, told me one day, “The best performers are those who have a secret.”

For the new album—it comes out this fall, although Clark has not yet publicly revealed its name—she hooked up with the producer Jack Antonoff, who, in addition to performing his own music, under the name Bleachers, has co-written and produced records for Taylor Swift and Lorde. This has led people to suppose that Clark is plotting a grab for pop success. In June, she released a single called “New York,” and on the evidence the supposition seems fair. It is—by her standards, anyway—a fairly straight-ahead piano ballad, lamenting lost love, or absence of a kind. “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can handle me,” she sings. Fans immediately began speculating that it was about Delevingne, or, if you thought about it differently, David Bowie, who died last year. “It’s a composite,” Clark told me, though of whom she wouldn’t say. She objects to the idea that songs should automatically be interpreted as diaristic, especially when the songwriter is a woman. “That’s just a sexist thing,” she said. “ ‘Women do emotions but are incapable of rational thought.’ ”

A few weeks before the release she told me, “It’s rare that you get to say ‘This song could be someone’s favorite.’ But this might be the one. Twenty years of writing songs, and I’ve never had that feeling.” It was May, at Electric Lady. She was in the studio with Antonoff. “We’re doing the flavor-crystally bits,” Clark said. This essentially meant adding or removing pieces of sound to or from the sonic stew they’d spent months concocting. “There’s a lot of information on this album,” she said.

Clark, who is thirty-four, was sitting cross-legged on a couch. She had on studded leather loafers, a suit jacket, and black leggings with bones printed on them, in the manner of a Halloween skeleton costume. Her hair was black and cut in a bob. (In the past, she has dyed it blond, lavender, or gray, and has been in and out of curls, its natural state.) She wasn’t wearing much makeup. When she performs, she puts on the war paint, and usually goes in for fanciful costumes and serious heels. For the “Digital Witness” tour, she wore a tight, perforated fake-leather jumpsuit with a plunging neckline, and smeared lipstick. Last year, she did a show while attired in a purple foam toilet. Parson, who is responsible for the rigid postmodern dance moves that Clark has embraced in recent years, referred to her aspect as “wintry,” which doesn’t quite encompass her tendency to throw herself around the stage or dive off it to surf the crowd.

Now she seemed slight, fine-boned, almost translucent��it was hard to imagine her surviving a sea of forearms, iPhones, and gropey hands. She has a sharp jawline, a few freckles, and great big green eyes, which can project a range of seasons. She thinks before she speaks, asks a lot of questions, and has a burly laugh.

On a coffee table in front of her were a Chanel purse and containers of goji berries, trail mix, and raw-almond macaroons. She stood occasionally, to play slashing, tinny lines on an unamplified electric guitar of her own design—a red Ernie Ball Music Man, from her signature line, that retails for upward of fifteen hundred dollars—which, on playback, sounded thick and throbby.

She shreds on electric guitar, but not in a wanky way. It often doesn’t sound like a guitar at all. Her widely cited forebears are Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew, of King Crimson. “I don’t love it when the guitar sounds like a guitar,” she said. “The problem is, people want to recognize that it’s a guitar. I have facility, and so I feel like I should use it more. I don’t have any other ‘should’ in my music.” (It can be funny, if dispiriting, to read, in the comments sections of her performances on YouTube, the arguments that guitar nerds get into about her chops.)

When she listens to a playback, she often buries her head in her arms, as though she can hardly bear to hear herself, but, really, it’s just her way of listening hard. Once, during a mixing session, while she was at the board and I was behind her on a couch, surreptitiously reading a text message, she picked up her head, turned around, and said, “Did I lose you there, Nick? I can feel when attention is wandering.” Her cheery use of the name of the person she is addressing can seem to contain a faint note of mockery. There’d be times, in the following months, when I’d walk away from a conversation with Clark feeling like a character in a kung-fu movie who emerges from a sword skirmish apparently unscathed yet a moment later starts gushing blood or dropping limbs.

Part of this is a function of Clark’s solicitousness, her courteous manner. “She’s created a vernacular of kindness in her public life,” her close friend the writer and indie musician Carrie Brownstein told me. “But the niceness comes through a glass case.” Clark has observed, of the music industry in this era, that good manners are good business.

Clark and Antonoff had met casually around New York but hardly knew each other until they somehow wound up having what he described as an emotionally intense dinner together at the Sunset Tower in Los Angeles. “She was very open about the things in her life,” Antonoff said. “That’s what I was interested in. Continuing to reveal more and more. I said, ‘Let’s go for the lyrics that people will tattoo on their arms.’ ”

Clark has eight siblings, some half, some step. She’s the youngest of her mother’s three girls. Clark’s parents divorced when she was three. This was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father, from a Catholic family with eleven kids, was a stockbroker and a prodigious reader who could recite passages from “Ulysses”; for a while, he had the girls convinced that he was a Joycean scholar. When Clark was ten, he gave her “Lucky Jim” for Christmas. At thirteen, she got “Vile Bodies.” She acquired a knack for punching up: in junior high, she toted around the Bertrand Russell pamphlet “Why I Am Not a Christian.”

By then, Clark’s mother, a social worker, had remarried and moved to the suburbs of Dallas. Clark was reared mostly by her mother and stepfather, and considers herself a Texan. Her father remarried and had four kids, with whom Clark is close. In 2010, he was convicted of defrauding investors in a penny-stock scheme, and was sentenced to twelve years in prison. She has never publicly talked about this, although she told me, “I wrote a whole album about it,” by which she meant “Strange Mercy” (2011), her third. When I asked her if she felt any shame about his crimes, she said, “Shame? Not at all. I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not my shame.”

As a child, Clark was shy, quiet, studious. She played soccer. (There’s a charming video from a few years ago of her demonstrating the mechanics of the rainbow kick, while keeping her hands in the pockets of her overcoat.) Her nickname was M.I.A., because she was so often holed up in her bedroom, listening to music. She was a classic-rock kid—Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull—but the real gateway was Nirvana. “Nevermind” hit when she was nine, and she was precocious enough to notice. Like a lot of kids, she found a mentor behind the counter of the local record store, who turned her on to stuff like Stereolab, PJ Harvey, and Nick Cave. Also like a lot of kids, she started playing guitar when she was twelve. Her first live performance was at age fifteen, at a club in Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood—she sat in with her guitar teacher on “The Wind Cries Mary.” She played bass in a heavy-metal band and guitar in a hardcore outfit called the Skull Fuckers: riot grrrl, queercore, Big Black.

Clark’s uncle—her mother’s brother—is Tuck Andress, a jazz-guitar virtuoso who, since 1978, has performed with his wife, the singer Patti Cathcart, as the duo Tuck & Patti. When Clark was a teen-ager, she spent summers as their roadie on tours of Asia and the United States. After graduating from high school, she worked as their tour manager in Europe. It was a lean outfit, so she handled pretty much everything, from settling with the clubs to fetching towels and water—an aspiring rock star’s mail room. The greatest lesson, though, may have been witnessing the power that music could have over strangers. “I’d watch Tuck & Patti bring people to tears,” she said.

“We knew she was serious about this music thing,” Cathcart told me.

“You couldn’t keep her from it,” Andress said. “But, until you hit the road, you have no idea. Of course, now she travels in a dramatically more luxurious way than we do.”

Clark went to Berklee College of Music, in Boston, but dropped out after two and a half years, itchy to write and record her own music rather than train to be a crack session hire, which is how she saw the program there. The best thing she got from it, she says, is a love of Stravinsky. She still can’t read music. She moved to New York, but after three months ran out of money and retreated to Texas, where a friend who played theremin with the Polyphonic Spree, a big choral-rock band out of Dallas, encouraged her to audition. She toured with them as a singer and a guitar player for a while.

Later, she hired on with Sufjan Stevens, the orchestral-folk artist. He first saw her at the Bowery Ballroom, where she was performing solo as the warmup act for a band she also played in, the Castanets. “She was up there with a guitar, standing on a piece of plywood for a kick drum, two microphones, one of them distorted, and two amps,” Stevens told me. “Obviously, she had talent.” Off she went with another giant band. “At that time, there were a dozen musicians touring in my band, and there was always a moment in the set where people could ‘take a solo,’ ” Stevens went on. “All the men usually just played a lot of notes really fast. But, when Annie’s turn came, she refused to do the obvious white-male masturbatory thing on the guitar. Instead, she played her effects pedals. She made such weird sounds. It was like the Loch Ness monster giving birth inside a silo.”

At the time, Clark had her first album, “Marry Me,” in the can, and sometimes she performed solo before her sets with Stevens. “I didn’t have that performance character she has,” he said. “I kind of wish I had. It’s both personal and protective. To get attention as a woman, in a heteronormative context where sex appeal sells, and to sell yourself instead by emphasizing your skill, ingenuity, and work ethic is an incredible feat.”

The first song on “Marry Me,” “Now, Now,” had her singing, “I’m not any, any, any, any, any, any, any, anything,” which, intentionally or not, sounds like “I’m not Annie, Annie. . . .” You might say that it was the opening salvo in St. Vincent’s still unfolding act of concealment and disclosure.

“This scaffolding that she has been so deliberate in constructing has allowed her to take more risks,” Brownstein said. “She presents this narrow strand of visibility. She can mess around with the whole thing of her being called doe-eyed or a gamine. There’s a classic kind of professionalism in the act, sort of like the old country stars—Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash. They let you know when you have access to their world. It’s a contrivance.”

The new album, by Clark’s own reckoning, is the gloomiest one she’s made: “It’s all about sex and drugs and sadness.” It ends with a song about suicide, which she sings in a husky voice that is downright frightening. (“Like any red-blooded American, I’ve considered suicide,” she told Marc Maron, on his “WTF” podcast.) She says that she wrote it on a tour bus en route from Lithuania to Latvia. Sure, sometimes the Baltics can bring you down, but, beyond that, there’s clearly some serious heartbreak and darkness underlying this new project.

Around the release of the “St. Vincent” album, Clark had been on tour more or less perpetually for ten years. “I was running hard. There were family things, illness,” she said. “I’m a little like a greyhound. Get me running in a direction, and I’ll run myself into the ground.” Among other things, her mother had a health crisis, which Clark doesn’t like to talk about.

“I was hurling myself into crowds, climbing the rafters,” she said. “I felt like, if I’m not bruised and bloody when I come offstage, I haven’t done it right.”

There’s a song on the new album called “Pills.” “Pills to grow, pills to shrink, pills, pills, pills and a good stiff drink / pills to fuck, pills to eat, pills, pills, pills down the kitchen sink.” (As it happens, those lines are sung by Delevingne, who will be credited, for the benefit of the British gossip press, as an underground sensation named Kid Monkey.) “I was trying to hold on,” Clark recalled. “I didn’t have coping mechanisms for tremendous anxiety and depression. I was trying to get through pharmaceutically.”

Clark may resent the assumption that everything she writes about is personal, that the protagonist is always her. “You couldn’t fact-check it,” she said. To questions about sexuality, she insists on fluidity. “I’m queer,” she said. But “the goal is to be free of heteronormativity. I’m queer, but queer more as an outlook.”

Yet there is just one narrator on this album. “The emotional tones are all true,” she said. “The songs are the most coherent expression of them. Songs are like prophecies. They can be stronger than you are.”

One day, during a mixing session at Electric Lady, Clark told me that her favorite lyric on the album was “Teen-age Christian virgins holding out their tongues / Paranoid secretions falling on basement rugs.” Later, she texted me to say that her favorite was actually “ ‘Remember one Christmas I gave you Jim Carroll / intended it as a cautionary tale / you said you saw yourself inside there / dog-eared it like a how-to manual.’ Cause Christmas—carol—Emanuel.” That’s from a song about a hard-luck old friend or lover named Johnny, who hits the singer up for money or support. “You saw me on movies and TV,” she sings. “Annie, how could you do this to me?” I asked her one day who Johnny was.

“Johnny’s just Johnny,” she said. “Doesn’t everyone know a Johnny?”

As Clark neared the end of recording, she turned some attention to the next phases—packaging, publicity, performance. She has observed that, when she makes the rounds to local media outlets or on cattle-call press junkets, she is repeatedly asked the same questions, many of them dumb ones. “You become a factory worker,” she said. “When you have to say something over and over, there’s a festering self-loathing. No better way to feel like a fraud.”

She’d made what she was calling an interview kit, a highly stylized short film, which consists of her answering typical questions. She sits in a chair with her legs crossed, in a short pink skirt and a semitransparent latex top before a Day-Glo green backdrop, with a camera and a sound crew of three female models in heels, dog collars, dominatrix hoods, and assless/chestless minidresses. A screen reads, “Insert light banter,” and then Clark reappears, saying, with a strained smile, “It’s good to see you again. Of course I remember you. Yah, good to see you. How’s—how’s your kid?”

There follows a series of questions and answers, with the former presented as text onscreen—generic placeholders:

Q. Insert question about the inspiration for this record.

A. I saw a woman alone in her car singing along to “Great Balls of Fire,” and I wanted to make a record that would prevent that from ever happening again.

Q. Insert question about how much of her work is autobiographical.

A. All of my work is autobiographical, both the factual elements of my life and the fictional ones.

Q. Insert question about being a woman in music.

A. What’s it like being a woman in music? . . . Very good question.

The camera cuts to her interlaced fingers. She wears paste-on fingernails, each with a letter. They spell out “F-U-C-K-O-F-F.”

There are more—What’s it like to play a show in heels? What are you reading? What album would you want on a desert island?—and her answers are mostly but not always sardonic. They were written by Brownstein. Clark shot another film, a kind of surreal press conference, with a similar deadpan gestalt and Day-Glo color scheme and trio of kinky models. In this version, in reply to the woman-in-music question, she performs a “Basic Instinct” uncrossing of her legs, as the camera zooms in on her crotch, accompanied by the echo of a drop of water in a cave.

These videos don’t quite serve the utilitarian function that Clark had put forth—that of saving her time and energy by furnishing her interrogators with workable answers—but they do convey a sensibility that suits the brand: cheeky, sexy, a little Dada. (They’re more on message, perhaps, than her recently announced role as a star of the new ad campaign for Tiffany.) She’d prefer to embody certain ideas than to have to verbalize them, when the context comprises dubious, inherited, unexamined assumptions about gender, sexuality, songwriting, and celebrity. She prefers gestures to words. She sent me a photo of herself from a video shoot and wrote, “Me performing gender.”

Meanwhile, she was having a costume made for her solo performance: a “skin suit” that would give her the appearance of being naked onstage. One morning, I met her in downtown Los Angeles, at the L.A. Theatre, an old movie palace. She arrived alone in a black BMW M-series coupe. The costume’s designer, Desmond Evan Smith, met her outside, to take advantage of the sun. He had swatches of latex, to compare with her skin. One was too pink, another too yellow.

“This is me with a slight tan,” Clark said. “I’m pretty pale.” She had on cutoff jean shorts, a Western-style shirt knotted above her navel, and the studded loafers. Smith led her to a gilded hallway on the second floor to size her up with a tape measure.

“What do you need me to do?” Clark asked.

“I just need you to stand there and look pretty,” Smith said.

“Done and done.”

He read out her neck, waist, and bust numbers.

“Hear that?” Clark said. “Perfect babe measurements.”

He peeled down her shorts to measure her hips. “Cheetahkini,” she said. “Is that a portmanteau?”

“Spread for me,” Smith said. “Your legs.”

“Comedy gold, Nick,” she said.

Later, when she’d started calling me Uncle Nick or Nicky boy, I’d find myself wondering if this skin-suit episode hadn’t been an elaborate setup, a provocation or even a trap laid by someone known to be in command of her presentation in the world. Or maybe it was just show biz, the same old meat market now refracted through self-aware layers of intention and irony.

“Should we get someone to volunteer to be my body?” Clark asked. “To add a little pizzazz? I could choose my own adventure here. I could get a custom crotch.” She began referring to this as her “perfect pussy.” “I’ll scroll through Pornhub and find one.”

After the skin-suit sizing, Clark drove across town, to a coffee shop off Melrose called Croft Alley, to have lunch with her creative director, Willo Perron. Perron, who is from Montreal, does visual and brand work for a variety of pop stars—Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna. He helps them conceptualize music videos, album covers, and stage shows.

Perron, who is forty-three, wore white jeans and a light-gray T-shirt and black-and-white leopard-print skater shoes from Yves Saint Laurent. (“They may be a bit too rad dad,” he said.) He had a droll, weary air; his expertise was assured but lightly worn. He drives a Tesla. His girlfriend was the waitress at Croft Alley.

He wanted to discuss the album cover. There’d been a shoot in Los Angeles, on the same set they used to film the satirical interview kit. “Did you look at the photos?” he asked Clark. “Can we just do it? It’s good. It’s bold, too. It’s the one that stood out.” He was talking about a photograph I’d first seen on the home screen of Clark’s cell phone: an image of her research assistant, a photographer and model named Carlotta Kohl, with her head stuck through a pinkish-red scrim. Really, it was a picture of Kohl’s legs and rear end, in hot-pink tights and a leopard thong bodysuit. “This is not my ass,” Clark had said. “This is my friend Carlotta’s ass. Isn’t it a nice ass?”

Perron explained to me, “It all started, well— There hasn’t been a female lead who’s been able to be both absurdist and sexual. Sultriness but in a New Wave character. The energy of ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse,’ ‘Beetlejuice,’ the Cramps, the B-52s, with some chips of Blondie. Think of Poison Ivy, from the Cramps: absurd but hot.”

“Manically happy to the point of being scary,” Clark said.

“We built these Day-Glo canvases and had people sticking limbs and heads through the canvases. Then we found that the most entertaining thing was the back of the canvas: Carlotta ostriched into the wall, just her ass.”

“Can we do it?” Clark said.

“It says everything that we want to say,” Perron said.

“But will people assume that it’s my ass? I’m doing all these body-double things.” She went on, “I was thinking a photo of my face that encapsulates the entire record—but maybe that’s a bit of a fool’s errand.” She mentioned an image from the shoot of herself with some stylists around her.

“It’s too ‘1989,’ ” Perron said.

“Too on the nose?” Clark said.

“It’s a single cover, not an album cover.”

Clark and Perron hooked up four years ago, when she was working on the “St. Vincent” album. “That thing was near-future cult leader,” he said. “We were talking about media and paranoia and blah, blah. Annie referenced ‘Black Mirror.’ It had only been on the BBC. And the films of Jodorowsky. We were working with a 1970 psychedelic aesthetic, plus postmodernist Italian, but in Memphis style.” The cover showed Clark sitting on a pink throne, with her gray hair in a kind of modified Bride of Frankenstein.

“One of the early conversations we had was about how indie rock always does the unintentional thing, so that it doesn’t have an opportunity to fail,” Perron said. By this, he meant, say, a band in T-shirts, looking tough, standing in the back of a warehouse—authenticity as a euphemism for the absence of an idea. “But we wanted pop-level intention.”

“The best ideas are the ones that might turn out to be terrible ideas,” Clark said.

They got into Perron’s Tesla and headed to his office, on the second floor of a house on a residential street nearby. A few assistants worked quietly at laptops. There was a rack of file boxes, with the names of clients: Drake, the xx, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga.

They watched a rough cut of the interview-kit press conference. “There are moments where you seem really pretentious,” Perron said. “But then, the brand should be ‘absurdist.’ ”

Clark said, “Yes, there are moments where people will be, like, ‘Is she just a pretentious dickhead?’ ”

They discussed possible music-video directors and brought examples of their work up onscreen. (One was a duo called We Are from L.A., who are from France.) Then they talked about the solo show, with the skin suit.

“Remember when I said the only ideas worth doing might be terrible ideas?” Clark said. “This might be one. Me solo with the guitar, and other characters who are shambolically me. It’s high-tech Tracy & the Plastics. I want Carrie to write the dialogue.”

“There’s dialogue?” Perron said, wearily.

“Yes, I’m putting aside postmodern choreography for this round. But I like for there to be some physical obstacle to overcome, to help me focus. It’s about manufacturing your strength. You’re wondering why I came to you. It’s because you worked with David Blaine.” Perron said nothing. “It should feel bananas, not pretentious,” Clark went on.

Then Perron said, “Do we want to make a decision on this cover art?”

“Let me look again,” Clark said. “Option one: Carlotta’s ass. Two, one of my selects. A head shot.”

“That gives me the last two or three records,” Perron said. “I want this one to be more aggressive. Let’s move away from that thing.”

“You mean that kooky thing?”

“That sedated thing.”

Clark said, “Let’s do Carlotta’s ass.”

“The label will give us some pushback,” Perron said. “But, honestly, I think it’s great.”

After a few moments, Clark said cheerily, “Fun fact: Carlotta has scoliosis.”

“It’s been a generative time, creatively, and I would like for it to set the stage for a broader vision,” Clark told me one day, with uncharacteristic career-oriented self-seriousness. Talk like this, out of rock-and-roll people, usually means projects, sidelines, interdisciplinary schemes. For example, Clark had an idea to take old Mussolini speeches and make Mad Libs out of them. She’d have her nieces and nephews fill in the missing words and phrases; then, in an art gallery in Italy, Isabella Rossellini would sit and recite the Mad Libs (the script delivered to her by Clark via an earpiece, to add a layer of awkwardness) to a soundtrack of chopped-up, sort-of-recognizable Verdi and a monitor playing clips of Mussolini himself.

Or motion pictures. Last year, Clark co-wrote and directed a short film called “The Birthday Party,” for “XX,” an anthology of horror films directed by women. In it, a suburban mother hides her dead husband’s body inside a large panda suit at her young daughter’s birthday, and it keels over into the cake, providing the film’s subtitle: “The Memory Lucy Suppressed from Her Seventh Birthday That Wasn’t Really Her Mom’s Fault (Even Though Her Therapist Says It’s Probably Why She Fears Intimacy).” At one point, Clark had a development deal to write and direct another film, called “Young Lover,” which is also the name of a song on the new album. A writer in her twenties has a sadomasochistic affair with an older married woman—“ ‘Swimming Pool’ meets ‘Bitter Moon’ meets ‘Blue Velvet’ ” is how Clark pitched it. Recently, Lionsgate, mining properties out of copyright, approached Clark with the idea of directing a film based on “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” with a female protagonist. The writer is David Birke, who wrote the screenplay for “Elle,” with Isabelle Huppert, which had become an obsession of Clark’s. (In the film, Huppert’s character’s father is in prison.) Birke, it turned out, had taken his daughter to see a show during the “Marry Me” tour, ten years ago. So, here was mutual admiration, a chance to play together in the sandbox of success.

The “Dorian Gray” treatment called for six historical settings. “It would be an expensive film to make,” Clark said. She reckoned twenty-five million dollars. “The likelihood of making this film is, like, two per cent. But I don’t care, because it’s fun. Worst-case scenario is I get seen as a hardworking person with ideas in a medium I’m interested in. I sort of subscribe to the idea of the busier you are, the busier you are.”

The day after her session with Perron, we drove up to Laurel Canyon, to Compound Fracture, which is what she calls the house that serves as her studio and working space. Technically, it is not a residence. There is a live room in the den (good for recording drums), a studio in the garage, and, just inside the front door, a white grand piano, with a book on the music rack of the complete Led Zeppelin (tablature for intermediate guitar), and, next to it, some lyrics scribbled on stationery from the Freehand hotel in Chicago: “Doing battle in the shadows / Baby you ain’t rambo (rimbaud).” She keeps a neat, sparse house. She’s a born de-clutterer. The art work is eclectic: a Russ Meyer nude, paintings made by people in extreme mental distress, and a photo mural of the high sage desert of West Texas. There’s a downstairs sitting room—“If musicians want to take a break,” Clark emphasized—with a stocked bar, William Scott busts of Janet Jackson and CeCe Winans, and some show-and-tellable mementos. She took one down: “I was on an ill-fated surfing trip to Barbados, in my 90 S.P.F., and I looked down and there was this cock and balls made of coral.” This had survived the purges. So had a brass heart sent by the surviving members of Nirvana. In 2014, when the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Clark played Kurt Cobain’s part in a live performance of “Lithium.” There was a plaque in recognition of her inclusion, in 2014, on Vanity Fair’s international best-dressed list. “I’ve been wearing athleisure ever since,” she said.

For a while, her friend Jenny Lewis, the singer-songwriter, had slept on the couch down here. “She’s like a tree,” Clark said. “I would take shade in her. She made me eat food, because I forgot.”

Lewis told me, “I would go upstairs, make a quesadilla, cut it in half, and leave a half there. Maybe the little mouse would come. I’d come up later, see the half gone, and think, My work is done here.”

“As an adult, I haven’t cohabitated with another human,” Clark said. “Jenny and I have been on tour so long, we know the ways to not annoy people.”

When they first got to be friends, years ago, “we Freaky Fridayed,” Lewis said. Clark, eager to get away from New York, moved to Los Angeles, and Lewis, escaping some personal rubble in California, moved into Clark’s East Village apartment.

“We shared so much,” Lewis said. “The sacrifices you make for your music, not having a family. Some things unique to being a woman on the road, silly stuff like removing your makeup in filthy sinks around the world. Just being a woman out there trying to keep it together. Also, being a woman in charge, and the nuances of that.”

They also both had fathers who had been incarcerated. Lewis’s had been in prison for two years—“Everyone in my family goes to jail or prison,” she said—and then was diagnosed with colon cancer and died soon after.

Clark wanted to go for a hike in the midday heat. Every day, she tries to put herself in what she calls a stress position—some kind of physical difficulty, to force herself to persevere. We made the short drive from her house to a ridgeline with a view in the direction of Burbank, and began descending a trail through scrub and poison oak. She had on some flats that she called tennis shoes. The dryness made the steeper pitches slick, and she approached them with great care. At one point, a hum of bees caused her to shriek and run. I was reminded of her song “Rattlesnake,” which is about an encounter with a rattler while she was hiking naked in the Texas desert. “I’m afraid of everything,” she said. “I’m almost inured to it. Same with shame. I figured out years ago that, if everything is absurd, then there is nothing to be afraid or ashamed of.”

Despite her stress-position talk, Clark is a creature of habit, a curator of routine. Brownstein recalled insisting that they go on a different hike from this one, a couple of miles away. “She asked that I never drag her anywhere unfamiliar again,” Brownstein told me.

An hour later, we were back at the house. A mixing engineer named Catherine Marks arrived, to listen to some of the mixes on the new album. Clark wanted a fresh set of ears. (The principal mixer, back at Electric Lady, was Tom Elmhirst, an eminence who has worked with Adele, Lorde, Bowie, and Beck.) Marks, a tall Australian, was wearing a tank top that read “La La La.” Clark had showered and changed into a Pink Floyd “The Wall” T-shirt.

They talked about the low end on one of the songs. “I want to give it more balls,” Marks said, which had a good ring to it, in the Aussie accent. “Tom is a genius, obviously.”

“Best idea wins,” Clark said. They talked for a bit about how unprepared each of them had been for how hot Elmhirst is. They went out to the garage studio, which was full of wonderful toys—racks of guitars, various mikes, and an array of vintage synthesizers. Check it out, an E-mu Emulator II.

Marks sat down at the console. “Smells nice in here. It doesn’t smell like dudes.”

“It’s this Japanese incense.”

A Pro Tools session in the dying light of a Laurel Canyon afternoon. Marks got to work checking out the mixes. It was easy to imagine Clark in here alone for hours, days, weeks, thickening and pruning the sound as it scrolled by onscreen. Outside, you could hear a neighbor playing drums and the occasional honk of a lost Uber. Inside, Marks was listening to a track that Clark wanted to reimagine. “The vocoder’s not working for me,” Clark said. “I like the guitar better. If you need to sleaze it up, add Gary Glitter tuning. Just add glam guitar.”

“I can’t turn off what turns me on,” Clark’s voice was singing, while Clark herself stood behind Marks, checking her phone.

“Oh, my God,” she said, eyes suddenly wide. “This is so stupid. Oh, my God.” She typed a response, put her phone down on a preamp, and began pacing in anticipation of a reply. “It’s so convoluted.” She scooped up the phone and read a new text. Typing a reply, she was shaking her head. “What?” Marks asked.

“It’s a cuckold situation,” Clark said. “I can’t talk about it.” This was more than just hot goss. It was the most excited I’d ever seen her. Another exchange of texts, more pacing, head-shaking, the burly laugh. “It’s the first time I’ve felt glee all day.”

Last month, Clark went into a studio, in midtown Manhattan, with her friend the producer, composer, and pianist Thomas Bartlett, to record an alternative version of the new album: just her voice and his piano, a chance to hear, and to preserve, the songs stripped down to their bones. She had signed off on the final masters of the record the day before they started. “I took a whole night off,” she said. She was wearing a leopard-print bodysuit. “Now I’m done with my emotional anorexia, my monastic fantastic. It’s so good to just play music.”

It went like this: An engineer, Patrick Dillett, played a track from the record, then Bartlett spent a few minutes learning it and vamping on an electric piano, and then they went into the recording studio and laid down a few takes, him on a grand piano and her cross-legged on a couch, singing into a mike. After the first take, Dillett said, “It sounds pretty. Is it supposed to?”

“Will I be ashamed of myself?” she asked him.

“I hope so. Isn’t that the point?”

They recorded in sequence and got through several songs a day.

Later that week, she and Bartlett invited a dozen or so friends to hear her perform the album. Among them were David Byrne, Sufjan Stevens, and the singer Joan As Police Woman, who was celebrating her birthday at the studio afterward. They sat in folding chairs. Clark was on the couch, made up and dressed fashionably in a long jacket and pants.

“Now I can feel the feelings,” she said. She made a show of unbuttoning her pants in order to sing.

“The acceptance of beautiful melody is sometimes difficult for a downtown New York musician,” Byrne had told me earlier in the day. But here was Clark, without all the sonic tricks—the jagged guitar and the scavenged beats—accepting her melodies, feeling the feelings. She told me later, “I didn’t realize the depth of the sorrow on the album until I performed it that night.” The next day, she was shelled and had to cancel appointments. “It turns out that that was crucial to my being done with the experience of making it. Now I need to do what I need to do as a performer: I need to be able to disassociate.”

The final song on the album, the one about suicide, concludes with her repeating “It’s not the end,” in a voice that makes you want to bring her hot soup. On the night of the studio performance, she finished singing and sheepishly accepted the applause of her friends. Then she buttoned up her pants and said, “Party time, everyone.” ♦ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/st-vincents-cheeky-sexy-rock

#Annie Clark #st vincent

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talhaghafoor2019-blog · 6 years ago

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Joan Baez: ‘Music can move people to do things’ | Music | The Guardian

Joan Baez has been singing her songs of protest for 60 years, her matchless soprano voice rising above trouble. She can look back on an extraordinary career that included a new interpretation of Bob Dylan songs in the 60s, and singing for Martin Luther King (with whom she became friends). The daughter of a Mexican-born physicist and a strong-minded Scottish mother, she has announced, at 78, that she is now on her last tour, performing her swansong album Whistle Down the Wind.

What moved you to record the album Whistle Down the Wind after a 10-year gap? I felt it was time. I’m phasing out and wanted to choose something to bookend my first album. My original album has a song about a silver dagger; my last a song about a silver blade. The first was a traditional folk song – the girl lost out. In the last, which was written for me, she turns round and kills the guy – she could be part of the #MeToo movement.

You are 78 and on your last tour – where do you get your incredible stamina? What is the secret to taking such good care of yourself? My mum lived to 100 and never had any serious diseases. My father died at 94 with all his hair and teeth. I’ve a lot to live up to… caring for myself? The most important element is the Gokhale Method, which is all about posture and based on native women who stand straight even after picking rice all day and don’t have any back problems. And meditation, even though it has always slightly bored me, is important. Plus pilates and yoga stretches. And at my age, walking is the best exercise. I have a lovely field I walk across every day for about 40 minutes.

And your voice? What does it need – rest or exercise? Both. But what has been exhausting is reconstructing every song I ever wanted to do in a low, limited range. I love how Whistle Down the Wind came out, but my voice will continue to deteriorate no matter how hard I try.

So you don’t plan to arrive at the Leonard Cohen growling stage? Well, they’re guys and somehow get away with it better...

I loved your anti-Trump song Nasty Man on YouTube, a viral hit, in which your sympathetic performance is in delicious contrast to your subject... Have you read Trump on the Couch? It’s a wonderful book, but its main message is that Trump is incapable of change – no compromises, no backing off, my button is bigger than your button.

So depressing… are you an optimist or pessimist? When I was 15, I thought of myself as a realist. But now I have to remain in denial for a good portion of the time because otherwise I’d go crazy. You have to measure what you do in little victories that reintroduce compassion and empathy. We won’t have social change until people are capable of taking risks again.

You’ve been an activist all your life. But can a song change anything? Songs change a lot. Music lifts the spirits, crosses boundaries and can move people to do things they would not otherwise have done.

Do you still define memory as you did in your song about your affair with Bob Dylan as “diamonds and rust”? That song went down to the bottom of my soul… I don’t know where its words came from.

We have to depend on the young – they unite about climate change. We adults don’t know how to deal with it

Is it inevitable your name will always be remembered alongside Dylan’s? Well, what happened recently was that I painted some pictures of him, and I put his music on, and any stuff that was getting in the way, any jealousies, any resentments, completely vanished. And maybe it was to do with this time in my life, and maybe it was to do with realising that you can hold grudges for only so long. And that it is stupid to hold grudges. The Buddhist training is that you forgive.

And on top of that I felt: oh my God, your name is going to be attached to somebody for the rest of your life… and this is an honour because of what that guy created. And you know, he’s not socially gifted, but that doesn’t matter. He can take an artist’s liberties as far as I am concerned.

In every interview, you are defined through famous men: Dylan, Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King. Which woman has most influenced you? Emma González, representative of the youth movement. We have to depend on the young – they unite about climate change. We adults don’t know how to deal with it. That little movement has the most potential of anything we’ve seen in the US in the past 40 years. The other woman who influenced me was my mother. She was so funny. When I asked what she wanted for her 100th birthday, she said: “To drop dead!” A week after, she did. I was influenced by her connection with nature, living in the woods. My home is in a very civilised wood in California.

Do you mind getting older? About two years ago I thought, oh my God, I’m going to be 80, and so I went about the house saying: “I’m going to be 80” for about a month. It doesn’t bother me now. My other female heroes include Meryl Streep, who campaigns to stop women rearranging their faces through surgery. My goal is to embrace the wrinkles.

Speaking of homes, I’ve heard you’re a disciple of Japanese decluttering queen Marie Kondo? I was messy when I was little, but later realised you need to keep things orderly because your house is your brain: everything in it is a reflection of what is going on inside of you.

Your son Gabriel has been with you on tour as percussionist. Do you feel this makes up for the time you missed with him when he was little? He will finish the tour with me. It has been more than any mother could have dreamed, because most mums don’t get to hang out with their sons once their sons marry.

How do you plan to spend your time when no longer performing? I will paint. And I love to dance – maybe I’ll take classes in Latin dance.

You won’t stop singing? The more my voice deteriorates, the less happy I am with it. Humming around the house it’s all flat and cockeyed and I think [laughs] maybe I’ll just talk to myself instead.

• Joan Baez’s Fare Thee Well tour is at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, 25 Feb; Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow 26 Feb; and London Palladium 28 Feb, 1 March

This content was originally published here.

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ahopkins1965 · 4 years ago

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Intersection of Life and Faith

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10 Things You Need to Know about the Number 666

Dr. Roger Barrier

Preach It, Teach It

2020

2 Aug

Editor's Note: Pastor Roger Barrier's "Ask Roger" column regularly appears at Preach It, Teach It. Every week at Crosswalk, Dr. Barrier puts nearly 40 years of experience in the pastorate to work answering questions of doctrine or practice for laypeople, or giving advice on church leadership issues. Email him your questions at [email protected].

Dear Roger,

You said in today's post that you will post your answer to "what does 666 mean" when somebody asks you. May I please be considered a "somebody" so that you will do so?

I, too, believe in "types and shadows" and do believe that the Bible is to be read both historically and predictively. We are certainly living in some very frightening, scary times, aren't we? The antichrist knows his days are numbered . . . and so do we. So, what is the real meaning of 666? May you be greatly blessed. Mary Kay

Dear Mary Kay,

Here is your answer to what 666 means according to the book of Revelation:

1. 666 literally means a name.

The number "666" is the number of the name of the coming Antichrist. Giving a number to a name is called "gematria," which is the Greek practice of adding up the letters in someone's name. In Latin this practice is called "isopsephism." Each letter in the Greek language has a numeral equivalent. Add up the letters and you get the number of the name.

2. Greeks used this number-name practice in their daily lives.

When Julie and I were dating I often wrote the initials, "RB + JT" in my notebook or in the wet cement of a newly poured sidewalk. Of course, the Initials stand for, "Roger Barrier plus Julie Tacker." Young lovers in Greece and Rome used gematria to express their relationships. For example, one inscription on a wall in Pompei reads, "I love the girl whose number is 545."

Of course, it is quite easy to take a name and turn it into a number. It is much harder to take a number and turn it back into a name.

Turning the number into a name is the key to unlocking the name of the Antichrist.

3. Revelation 13:8 is the verse that mentions 666.

"This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666." (Revelation 13:8)

According to John, those who are wise can get an insight into the Antichrist's identity by knowing the number of his name.

4. In ancient Greek, Hebrew and Latin letters represented numerals according to their order in the alphabet.

For example, in Greek, Alpha is one, Bata is two and so on.

The letters in Greek for “Nero” (Neron) add up to 1005. However, if the Greek letters for Nero Caesar (Neron Kaisar) are transliterated into Hebrew (nrwn qsr), the letter numbers add up to 666 (50 + 200 + 6 + 50 + 100 + 60 + 200 =666).

5. The original 666 wasn’t written the way we write it.

The number of the beast" was not written as a figure like “666.” Rather, the letters of the alphabet were written out in full.

6. Many interpreters consider the Roman Emperor Nero to be the “antichrist” of Revelation 13.

...because the number of his name is 666 and because he inflicted “Antichrist-like” horror upon the first century Christians. Some consider Nero to be a historical Antichrist and we that we are not to expect a future Antichrist. Yet, for the number to have any significance for a first century AD reader, it would have to refer to a contemporary historical figure.

7. Other interpreters consider the number to be applicable to both past and future.

Other interpreters, myself included, view the Book of Revelation as being both historical and predictive of coming future events (This is the double fulfillment principle of prophecy.) According to this view, Nero was indeed an “antichrist” as well as a type or picture of the coming future Antichrist—whose number-name will also add up to 666.

8. History shows us why Nero would perfectly reflect the character of a 666 "antichrist".

Nero was a despicable man who murdered his own mother. Nero fiddled the night Rome burned. By blaming Christians for the fire, he justified his tortuous murdering of uncounted hundreds of those who proclaimed Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. He proclaimed his supposed divinity on coins, identifying him as the "Savior of the World.”

Since Christians have only one Lord, refusing to burn incense and declare Caesar Nero as Lord was like signing your own death warrant. As an aside, since Nero ruled from A.D. 54-68 he would have been the emperor to whom Paul appealed his case as recorded in Acts 25:10-12.

Nero's evil acts don't stop there...

For those who may be interested, I quote below a passage from Tacitus, the Greek historian (c. A.D. 60-120), who preserved in his Annals (XV.44) the viciousness of the Neronian persecutions which give us some idea of the horror the coming Antichrist will inflict on both Jews and Christians.

Nero falsely accused as the culprits [who started the fire] and punished with the utmost refinement of cruelty a class … who are commonly called Christians. “Christus,” from whom their name is derived, was executed at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius.… Accordingly, arrest was first made of those who confessed [to being Christians]; then, on their evidence [refusing to worship Nero as Lord], an immense multitude was convicted ... Besides being put to death they were made to serve as objects of amusement; they were clothed in the hides of beasts and torn to death by dogs; others were crucified, others set on fire to serve to illuminate the night when daylight failed…. All this gave rise to a feeling of pity, even towards men whose guilt merited the most exemplary punishment; for it was felt that they were being destroyed not for the public good but to gratify the cruelty of an individual.

9. The number ‘6’ is the number of man.

The number “6” in the Bible is often associated with man; just as the number “7” is the perfect number and “3” often correlates to the Trinity. 666 is thus a number that consistently falls short of triple perfection: 777. The number also refers to the “unholy trinity,” Satan, the Beast and the False Prophet.

10. 616 also has significance.

Some early manuscripts identify the number-name of the Antichrist as 616 (instead of 666). By omitting the final “n” in Nero’s name in Greek, transliterating that name into Hebrew, and then adding up the letters, the number of Nero and of the coming Antichrist both add up to 616. Regardless of the number, Nero is the only name that can account for both 666 and 616. But, 616 is a story for another time.

I hope my answer to what 666 means is both interesting and informative. Thanks for the question.

Love Roger