#bobby fischer goes to war

[elenichr]

Year of Lists

August Books & Films

(cause it's a short list)

Wicked Little Letters (2023) *5 - I love Olivia Coleman and Jessie Buckley's work dearly. This was just about okay, with a couple of funny moments. The true story on which this is based on is interesting; the movie, unremarkable.

I only read two books in August, but I bundled These Violent Delights with Our Violent Ends so I could rant about them together.

First, Bobby Fischer Goes to War by David Edmonds *3/5 - this was my lengthy non-fiction in print of the year. I usually have the one. Sometimes, it's something life changing, like Fermat's Last Theorem. Other times, it's something quasi fun, well written, but ultimately pretty forgettable, like this one.

And for the main course, These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends by Chloe Gong *3/5 for the both of them combined (*3.7-4/5 for the first one, *2.7/5 for the second)

In bullet points, from my phone notes: *this is a Romeo & Juliet 1920s Shanghai gang reimagining. (the potential!)

The concept is interesting but so ambitious it becomes the duology's undoing. There is so much going on: a monster, political turmoil, family politics, history.

The political threads, despite their potential, are ambitious, often wishy-washy, and don't track, both on character level and overall.

The Shakespearean bits interwoven through the books are delicious, and many of the changes in plot are satisfying. I loved that Roma and Juliette had a past and we're now joining them years later when they must once again encounter each other.

There is a lot of repetition and recycling of plot; would have benefitted from cuts.

Most importantly, both of these books are majorly lacking in romance. There is no pining, no yearning in a cohesive manner. I wanted my heart to break at these characters' plight. Instead, the reader has to imagine the fullness of their connection based on the morsels of their past we're given.

I wish the plot focused more directly, and exclusively, on the feud, building on a couple of events surrounding that, only accented by the political turmoil. With convincing infatuation, the two struggling with family unrest and power that would grant the opportunity to build a better future for Shanghai, their sacrifice could have changed the course of history. I wanted to see two young people struggling with their sense of identity as heirs of power in Shanghai, the futility of this passed-down feud, and their uncontrollable love for one another.

I also wish queerness was better woven through and more prominent.

Shanghai as a main character wins.

THE POTENTIAL!!

[antialiasis]

Chess (the musical)

So Chess is a 1984 concept album and subsequent stage musical with story and lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus from ABBA. On the surface, it is called Chess because it is about some chess grandmasters vying for the chess world championship and the woman who leaves one’s employ and enters a relationship with the other. Under the surface, the real reason it’s called Chess is that the real game of chess is the one played between the US and USSR throughout the Cold War (when it was written and set), in which the characters are all pawns being played against each other to serve the interests of the warring states.

That’s a cool concept! Definitely the sort of concept you’d come up with and think, I have to make something about this, and then you try to come up with the details. Tim Rice, apparently, has tried a whole lot of times to come up with the right details: apparently every other production of this musical tries to rewrite the plot, to the point Wikipedia has a comparison table of plot points between different productions. That’s not as in just changing little details around or cutting or adding a song here and there, like you get with many other musicals; it includes stuff like turning a plot involving two chess tournaments against two different opponents a year apart into one with just a single tournament against one opponent, flipping pivotal character decisions and motivations around completely, making the ending the exact opposite of what it was, etc. etc.

For the purposes of this post, the production we actually watched was Chess in Concert from 2008, with Adam Pascal, Josh Groban and Idina Menzel, which is heavily based on the original West End production from 1986 but with some modifications. I will be doing some character analysis rambling, but be aware that with respect to other productions half of what I have to say may just be blatantly wrong. Man, it must be a trip to be in the Chess fandom. (Hello if you’re here from the tag.)

All in all, I have extremely mixed feelings about Chess. On the one hand, I have two big, major writing problems with it that made me just not enjoy watching the full production very much. On the other hand, it has some genuinely really good interesting bits that I like a whole lot, and also there are some real banger songs. Going to be my work soundtrack for a little while, probably.  Summary and lengthy complaining and rambling below.

In an alternate 1979, the chess world championships are being held in the town of Merano, Italy. American reigning champion Freddie Trumper, loosely inspired by Bobby Fischer, is widely considered the wild boy of chess for his unpredictable behaviour and aggressive personality, which he plays up for the press because there’s no such thing as bad publicity. He has a lucrative deal with a company called Global Television that broadcasts the tournament, and his contact with them, Walter, is secretly some kind of undercover CIA agent. The challenger is Anatoly Sergievsky, a mild-mannered Russian who feels increasingly trapped despite his successes, kept on a tight leash by his handlers from the government, particularly scheming political operative Molokov.

Freddie’s second (sort of a chess personal assistant) is Hungarian-born Florence Vassy, who was sent from Budapest to the UK when the Soviets invaded in 1956, when she was five years old. She has grown weary of his antics over the years and tries to persuade him to please stop making remarks like “All Soviets deserve abuse” and assaulting reporters at press conferences, but to no avail. During the tournament’s first game (the actual chess games are staged as symbolic ballet between dancers dressed in black and white and it’s pretty neat), Freddie flips the board over and walks away. (That’s what appears to be happening in the staging, at any rate, though Global Television goes on to describe it as if who flipped the board was ambiguous; hard to tell if they’re meant to be describing it in a “Who can say!” way because they’re American, or if the situation is actually meant to be more ambiguous than it looked in the staging.)

Florence arranges a meeting between the two players to talk it out, prompting Freddie to lash out about whether she’s even on his side or the side of the Soviets who invaded her country, and how her father would be ashamed of her if he were alive. By the time Florence gets to the proposed meeting, Freddie isn’t there, leaving her awkwardly alone with Anatoly, who briefly wonders if she’s working for them – I mean us (he doesn’t think of the Soviet political machine as his own side). They vent their frustrations, find each other pretty, and start to connect. Freddie finally arrives, revealing he was late because he was working out a new deal with Global Television to get them even more money for participating, and now that they’ve got that he’s perfectly happy to continue the match.

Anatoly plays masterfully and soon leads five games to one. Freddie channels his agitation at being near-beaten and jealousy at the connection he saw between Florence and Anatoly into a paranoid, misogynistic rant at her about how this is what she wanted all along and it’s all because she’s a woman. She’s disgusted and quits; Freddie calls her a parasite. After a moment of angry self-pity, Freddie concedes the match altogether, leaving Anatoly the new world champion. Anatoly immediately sets out with Florence, who he has entered into a romantic relationship with, to defect to the UK to escape Soviet scrutiny.

Act II takes place a year later, at the next world championships in Bangkok, where Anatoly will be defending his title against the next Soviet challenger, a loyal Russian ‘chess-playing machine’ named Viigand. Freddie is there to commentate on the match for Global Television.

Molokov arranges to have Anatoly’s wife Svetlana, whom he left behind with their two children when he defected with Florence, sent to Bangkok to stress him out. He also secretly coordinates with Walter to get Freddie to do a barbed interview with Anatoly where he shows him video of his wife, until Anatoly storms out. Later, Walter and Molokov launch a multi-pronged plan to pressure Anatoly to just plain throw the match and return to the Soviet Union, in exchange for the USSR releasing some political prisoners. Molokov successfully threatens Svetlana into imploring him to come back, while Walter tells Florence that her father is alive in prison in Russia (something Molokov had told him) and they’ll be able to put him at the top of the list for prisoners to be returned if she persuades Anatoly to lose. Florence refuses the deal but is deeply upset, unable to let go of the thought of being able to see her father again. Walter then orders Freddie to approach Anatoly about it with a veiled threat to his employment; he does, acting all friendly, but Anatoly’s not buying it for a second. Freddie then goes to Florence instead, also apparently on their orders but trying to appeal to her based on their previous rapport instead, telling her they can work things out and imploring her to come back to him, but Florence and Anatoly are both as disgusted with him as ever, refusing his pleas.

After a dark moment of reflection about his issues, Freddie approaches Anatoly again — to help him. He’s noticed a flaw in Viigand’s strategy and implores Anatoly to win the match, for the integrity of the game and so that Walter and Molokov won’t get what they want.

Anatoly and Viigand play their final game, and in the end, Anatoly follows Freddie’s advice and wins the match like he was always capable of, in spite of how it alienates both Svetlana and Florence, because it’s the only way he can remain true to himself and retain a shred of symbolic freedom - but he decides to return to the Soviet Union anyway afterwards, to give himself up in exchange for Florence’s father. Anatoly and Florence regretfully reaffirm their love and say goodbye to each other before he leaves. Florence is left alone with Walter, who tells her they’ll get her father, if he’s still alive - oh yeah, they don’t actually know anything about that, who knows, but then again she already never knew if he was actually dead. No change there! Goodbye! (I don’t think we know whether Walter just distrusts Molokov’s information, which would be reasonable, or whether Walter is just telling her they don’t know to cover for not actually planning to bargain for her father at all.) In short, politics screwed everyone over and everything is terrible, but at least Anatoly managed to stay true enough to himself to refuse to let them fix the tournament.

My biggest problem with Chess, at least this production, is that it feels very padded; the pacing is atrocious. Based on my plot summary, do you want to take a guess at how many songs it takes for us to get to the very first chess match, the one I talked about in my second paragraph? Did you guess “Chess Game #1” being song number thirteen?

We have an entire seven-minute song about the town of Merano, Italy where the first act is set (minus a one-and-a-half-minute interlude where Freddie and Florence are introduced), sung by its anonymous inhabitants. Which would be fine, except the town of Merano and its inhabitants have no role whatsoever in the actual narrative, as evidenced by how half of the productions of this thing just casually move it to take place somewhere else entirely. The Arbiter, the tournament’s referee, gets a two-part “I am” song, despite not being a character - he narrates some things and makes a couple of brief inconsequential comments, but at no point is he as a person or his arbiter role actually relevant to anything (he doesn’t even actually arbitrate in the actual dispute that comes up), so why do we need to spend a song on that? We have a full song devoted to all the merchandise for the tournament, which I guess makes a point about the marketing of the whole thing but that point is already made heavily elsewhere and we certainly don’t need an entire song to do it. We have a choir singing a hymn to the game of chess, which is nice and all but please, Tim Rice, just get to the actual story you’re trying to tell, I am begging you. A musical can get away with a song or two that’s not super meaningful but just good fun, but you can’t just write a whole array of inconsequential fluff songs and stuff them all in there before the first significant event of the plot even happens!

(Which is to say, of course nothing will stop you doing this, and this musical is successful despite it, and I feel like the sort of base cultural stereotype of a musical consists of exactly that sort of thing, where sometimes the story stops so we can have a fun musical number. But as that one musical fan whose passion for musicals is driven entirely by appreciation for their potential to tell compelling stories in an especially hard-hitting way and not at all by desire to just see some fun singing and dancing, I hate it, please stop.)

Some of these songs are fun on their own – as I mentioned, I like the soundtrack, though it took me a couple listens; the ABBA guys are good at composing catchy bits and nailing a vibe – but within this narrative, they’re simply filler. All in all I honestly found Chess just tedious to sit through at times, with the general sense that nothing was happening a lot of the time and that the story progression was glacially slow – the show is two and a half hours but could easily have told the same story equally effectively in much less time. It gets better once it gets going, but like, it still finds time to have a substantial choral piece slowly singing the names of all the real-life previous world champions before the final match (“Endgame #1”), which sets a nice mood but goes on way longer than it needs to to do that, only for the song directly following it, “Endgame #2”, to also feature a choir singing the names of all the previous world champions in the background anyway but better. (Did they make two versions of this concept and end up including both of them in full for some reason? Surely they could have started with just a few champions to set the mood and saved the full list of champions for “Endgame #2”? I just do not understand the choices being made here.)

I was earnestly surprised by this because Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita are all good at not doing this. Evita has a song about Buenos Aires, but it’s not just there so we can have a song about Buenos Aires; it’s there to show us Eva’s attitude as she arrives in the city and her determination to rise to the top. I had figured Tim Rice seemed to have pretty good instincts on making sure each song is playing a legitimate part in telling the story. But that’s eminently not the case in Chess - so maybe it’s Andrew Lloyd Webber who brought that sensibility to their partnership (I mean, he did write Cats, but that’s also decidedly not meant to have a central narrative other than, “Here are some cats as described in T.S. Eliot’s poetry,” so that’s probably understandable either way), or maybe the ABBA guys wrote songs he liked that tempted him to include them even when they didn’t really belong, or maybe it’s just that adapting other material gave him lots of ideas for meaningful songs to drive the story forward, while now that he was doing an original story he had a harder time thinking up enough meaningful material, or simply wasn’t sure enough what material was going to be meaningful (I can easily picture the Arbiter having been intended for a more significant role at some stage, for instance – I was kind of surprised when he wound up completely irrelevant), and then never quite managed to decisively distill it down to what mattered.

Aside: I like “The Story of Chess”, the opening song going over the history of chess. But one of the things I liked about it was that it felt like intriguing symbolic foreshadowing for the overall shape of the story, talking about a queen whose sons fought over the throne until one killed the other, leading to the grief-stricken queen telling the remaining son she can’t forgive him for this, while he invents chess to try to demonstrate to her that it was all the dead brother’s fault. I’d heard vaguely that the story was a love triangle, and it seemed to check out that this could symbolize where the story would be going – woman loves both of these chess players, one of them destroys the other in a literal or figurative sense in the course of their competition for the title and perhaps her attentions, she’s devastated and ends up cutting ties with the one who won, who nonetheless can’t accept fault. Only then… that’s not at all what the overall shape of the story is? Sure, Freddie’s aggression about Anatoly drives Florence away from him while he staunchly insists he was in the right. But that’s just some stuff that happens in Act I, and meanwhile Anatoly wins the tournament, and Florence and Anatoly only really start to care about each other after this, and the whole main thrust is entirely unrelated? “The Story of Chess” feels like the ghost of some very early draft of the story, still there despite the plot having evolved into something completely different. It feels really strange to me - this whole narrative about the queen and her sons is kind of odd and pointless if it’s not foreshadowing!

(Another aside: I would kind of object to the notion this musical is ‘about a love triangle’. In this production it’s not explicit exactly what the nature of Freddie and Florence’s relationship was in the first place, but even if it was romantic (which I do think is a sensible reading of how it plays out, don’t get me wrong), Florence leaves him early and there isn’t the slightest hint she has a shred of romantic feelings left for him after that. Freddie may have lingering one-sided feelings for her, but at no point is there tension regarding who Florence loves or whether she might go back to Freddie, and even if you could call it a triangle with the one-sided Freddie-Florence, that side is basically a minor aside and not at alllll the main point of any of this.)

This brings us to my other main problem with Chess, which is that I don’t care about the romance, at all. The musical never properly makes me believe or get invested in Florence and Anatoly’s relationship, and then a whole lot of it is about that, and I just don’t care if they end up together or if Anatoly goes back to Svetlana or whatever. I care about Anatoly feeling suffocated by the endless political games and machinations going on around him, and about Florence’s trauma from the Budapest invasion that gives her trust issues and makes her lash out at Molokov for trying to reach out to her as a “fellow Eastern European”. I even care about her relationship with Freddie – in the sense that he is hair-raisingly toxic and manipulative towards her and I’m glad she gets the hell away when she does, but at least I care. But Florence and Anatoly, half of the musical is devoted to this relationship and I just don’t feel any kind of way about it. Let’s try to dissect how it’s portrayed a bit and muse a bit on romance writing in the process.

Early in the show, we see brief off-hand lines showing Florence and Anatoly are aware of each other and sort of view each other as the “good ones” on the other side - Florence thinks Anatoly seems like a nice guy, objects to Freddie abusing him, and assumes that the fidgeting that apparently annoyed Freddie was something he was ordered to do by his handlers, while Anatoly thinks someone as civilized and nice as Florence has no business running with someone like Freddie.

In “Mountain Duet”, which is the most convincing the romance ever gets to me, Florence and Anatoly are alone together for the meeting Freddie’s late for, and it’s awkward, and they share a bit of a moment of frustration with Freddie and wonderment at each other being basically pleasant company and why they aren’t getting out of their respective cages. There’s a little bit of vague flirting – “So I am not dangerous, then? What a shame” – and then they’re straight to I don’t know why I can’t think of anything I would rather do than be wasting my time on mountains with you, before being interrupted by Freddie’s arrival. Bit quick for the grand declarations that there’s nothing they’d rather do, but okay, that’s a start, I can see how this might develop from here…

…only the next thing that happens with them is simply that we’re told as part of a Global Television news report that she’s helping him defect to the UK. They stand beside each other as he’s questioned at the embassy, including about his wife and kids and how they’re not coming with him. At this point I was squinting a bit like hmm, so are they meant to be in a relationship now? Did that just happen offscreen?

Then Florence sings “Heaven Help My Heart”. It’s… a pretty generic love song about how the feelings she’s feeling have no reasonable explanation and she worries before long he’ll sort of know everything there is to know about her and maybe then he’ll get bored of her. It’s the sort of #relatable love song that you could copy and paste to have any number of different characters sing about each other. Maybe it wouldn’t work for every conceivable couple, sure – but nonetheless, none of this is in any way specific to Florence and Anatoly. So she’s there telling me about how much she loves him, but I can’t tell why she’s feeling all this about this particular guy at all. Even if her worries were just contextualized in a way where something about him makes her think that, that would make it easier to actually connect it to these characters and their relationship. Does Anatoly act like the only reason he likes her is the idea of her having secrets he doesn’t know? I have absolutely no idea, because we’re not shown anything like that.

Anatoly gets hounded by the press about the whole leaving his wife behind thing, and then sings about his lingering love for his home country as something that transcends politics and conflict, but still nothing on his end on why Florence. The first time we see Florence and Anatoly actually interact since getting together, it’s in the very functional “One More Opponent”, where they’re basically just talking about the plot, followed by “You and I”, where they reflect on Svetlana’s upcoming arrival and how This is an all-too-familiar scene / Life imperceptibly coming between / Those whose love is as strong as it could or should be. Okay, your love is very strong, cool, but I still don’t know what the two of you even like about each other! In “The Interview”, as Freddie digs into Anatoly about Florence and her motivations, he defends her with Chess is her passion! – is chess her passion? Does he like that about her? We’ve certainly never seen her play any chess, or him talk to her about chess. No idea.

Florence and Svetlana then get a distant duet, “I Know Him So Well”, where they’re both simultaneously accepting that probably Anatoly belongs with the other one and that on some level they knew this all along, Florence figuring he needs more security, Svetlana that he needs fantasy and freedom. I like that fine in principle, it’s a nice duet with a good melody and pretty harmonies, but once again I just don’t think the setup has made this hit well enough, not when I don’t have any visceral sense of Florence’s feelings for him or why she doesn’t want to lose him, just kind of a series of declarations that she loves him, super loves him, their love is so strong.

During “Endgame #2”, despite Florence’s own refusal of the deal, and as far as we could see not having encouraged Anatoly to accept it at any point, she sings about how everyone will fall to fame and possessions in the end while “1956 - Budapest Is Rising” plays in the background, implying that she wishes Anatoly would deliberately lose to help her reunite with her father, but worries instead he’ll just fall to fame, which I think is a bit of a stretch with regards to his possible motivations for not doing that but okay. “Endgame #3/Chess Game #3” features presumably imaginary versions of Florence and Svetlana berating Anatoly as he contemplates what to do during the final game (at least I assume he didn’t literally stand up from the chessboard in the middle of the game to loudly argue with his wife and lover about whether he should win the game or throw it). He hates the thought that right now everyone sees him as a man who they think has just lost his touch, or who can’t focus because of personal baggage, and he hates the thought of giving in to these demands and having to live with that and being perceived that way. His imaginary Florence is vicious:

Since you seem to have shut out The world at large Then maybe I should cut out Your tiny inessential World-- inconsequential In the kind of game you're playing How do you do it? I tried to be that cynical but blew it I only changed your life You left your home, your wife I'm not surprised I slipped your mind

We don’t know if this is something the real Florence said to him or something his mind is just imagining she might say to him, but either way Anatoly’s agitated conclusion to this mental debate in the moment is that Florence and Svetlana both hated his success, never understood him, just want to steal his work and success and freedom, and his only obligation is to himself. I think this is the most interesting moment of their relationship – supposing imaginary Florence here really is representative of what the real Florence had been saying or thinking, then they’re both having minor breakdowns under the pressure of Walter and Molokov’s manipulation, her feeling as if Anatoly not playing along means she doesn’t really matter to him at all, and Anatoly feeling like she’s just one of everyone around him continually playing politics with him and suffocating his own passions and freedom, when both are really brainworm outbursts in the heat of the moment (in reality, again, Anatoly is about to choose to return to the Soviet Union for the sake of Florence getting her father back anyway, and they sing a concluding reprise of “You and I” where they reassert their love for each other and desire to meet again in spite of everything).

But imagine how much stronger this moment might have been if we’d spent less of our time up to this point just sort of generically asserting how much they love each other and more on building better up to their respective issues as they come out here. Imagine if their songs prior had involved, say, Anatoly’s feelings about Florence being significantly tied to the idea that with her he’s free – after all, she’s the one who helps him defect from the Soviet Union – and then when he feels as if Florence just wants to suffocate and play politics with him too it breaks him. Imagine if Anatoly had repeatedly reassured her specifically that he would always be on her side, and she’d always been wary of believing that thanks to her trust issues but it gave her real hope to try to believe it, and then the feeling that he’s breaking that promise after all cracks her. Or even just some kind of real sense that they actually enjoy each other’s company beyond the tiny taste in “Mountain Duet”! A sense that they trust each other! It would have been cool to have a song where they play chess and just have a good time doing it, or a song where Anatoly confesses to her why he wants to defect. Any of the many other kinds of ways you could play this that’d establish meaningfully what their relationship actually means to these specific characters, in this story, in a way that would get us invested and lend punch to the drama, instead of generic empty declarations of love where we just have to take the lyrics’ word for it.

Character relationships become real and impactful when there’s something unique and specific about them that hits home. Individual moments of them having fun together, of them caring about each other, of them knowing each other and interacting in a way only those two characters would. If you just keep telling me that they love each other, with the exact same words you could apply to a million different couples, and don’t actually show it, I’m not really going to believe it, and ultimately I’m just not going to care one way or another if they have to break up, or feel any feelings at their parting.

In my rambling on Evita, I grumped about how an Icelandic production seemed to think the core of the story was a romance, which it isn’t. But Eva and Juan’s relationship isn’t not a romance, despite starting as a mutually beneficial political arrangement. He genuinely falls for her drive and passion over time (at one point he suggests they just retire from politics and live in comfort together and she adamantly persuades him otherwise) – and in “You Must Love Me”, the late song added in the movie, Eva notices in wonder after collapsing from cancer that Juan is still by her side, worrying about her, even though in her current state she can’t benefit him at all, and feels emotions she never names about that. “You Must Love Me” is simultaneously a realization – he must love her for real after all – and a wish – she needs that to be true right now, in a moment of unusual vulnerability. All of how their relationship plays out is weird and messed-up and kind of fascinating and does not involve a single “I love you”, but because it’s weird and unusual and specific to the odd, complicated relationship that these two people have, I find myself feeling a lot more feelings about this obsessive problematic determinator woman realizing her literal dictator husband genuinely loves her than I ever managed to feel about Florence and Anatoly.

I do like “Endgame #3/Chess Game #3” a lot; it’s legitimately interesting, good character-driven drama and the music is great and intense and makes for a gripping climax. I like the core of Anatoly and Florence’s characters individually, even though they end up spending a whole lot of their time on their romance that I feel absolutely nothing about. But… confession time, my favorite character in Chess is Freddie. Or, at least, my favorite character in Chess in Concert is Freddie.

Freddie is terrible. But I think he’s coherently, interestingly terrible, and winds up having an arc that I actually like a lot. For the whole of Act I, he acts mostly concerned about money and publicity, and is viciously mean-spirited and manipulative with Florence when he feels like she’s taking Anatoly’s side instead of his. In Act II, Walter has a tight grip on him, using him against Anatoly - but we can see he’s not happy about it. He does the whole cruel interview, and makes it personally nasty, but afterwards, as Walter compliments him on it, he just walks away without a word. While subtly threatening him into pushing Anatoly to lose the game and go back to Russia, Walter says, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, huh?”, trying to play on his personal jealousy and spite, but Freddie doesn’t respond to that. He plays his part, says the lines, all while Anatoly insults him and asks who put him up to it; afterward he makes the desperate bid for Florence only to get roundly rejected and treated with disgust again. And then…

The moment of reflection that I mentioned Freddie has here is the song “Pity the Child #2”. It’s relatively straightforward tragic backstory exposition about his childhood: he was neglected by his constantly arguing parents and learned to just shut himself up in his room and to survive by not caring, practicing his chess, and simply not asking if they were arguing because of him, just in case they said yes. When he was twelve his father (who’d called him a fool and probably queer) moved out, and he hoped that’d bring him and his mom closer together, but instead she just kept on neglecting him and having a string of relationships with other equally abusive men. He sank himself deeper into chess to cope. Then:

Pity the child, but not forever Not if he stays that way He can get all he ever wanted If he's prepared to pay Pity instead the careless mother What she missed, what she lost When she let me go I wonder, does she know? I wouldn't call, a crazy thing to do Just in case she said, "Who?"

He’s fine! He’s successful and has lots of money now so he can get whatever he wants. No reason to pity him anymore, he is fine. You should really pity his mother for what she missed, losing out on him! He’s not sure if she even knows her son became world chess champion. But he’s not going to call and tell her, because she might answer the phone and not even know who he is, and he can’t face that possibility any more than he could face the possibility his parents’ fighting was his fault, so he just doesn’t. Ouch.

(I enjoy the inconsistent use of third person in this song, adding distance to some of it. I had my game to play, but pity the child with no such weapons, no defense, no escape from the ties that bind. You should pity this other hypothetical child with no coping strategies who’d have no escape from it, definitely not him, because he had chess to play so he was FINE.)

And sure, tragic childhood neglect backstory™, but this really does pretty specifically explain everything about why Freddie is Like That. He’s obsessed with money and infamy because as an adult he convinced himself that having money means he can get whatever he wants now so none of it matters anymore, and his mom’s the one who’s missing out on him, and he wants her to know how successful he is but can’t bring himself to actually contact her so all he can do is be prominently featured in the media and hope somewhere she’s watching. His burst of vicious misogyny triggered by the feeling Florence was betraying him in favor of some other man whose company she prefers is presumably rooted in his mom constantly neglecting him in favor of seeking out ill-fated relationships with random abusive men. And he would respond to his feelings of rejection and neglect by turning inward, to his coping mechanism and singular passion: chess.

Which is what he does now. He hated doing whatever Walter told him to sabotage a chess tournament. He hated being used like a puppet, and the sting of rejection and humiliation, but also, Viigand is just a mediocre chess player. And hence, in his own little final act of rebellion, he defies Walter and approaches Anatoly to tell him that you see, Viigand’s King’s Indian Defense – and when Anatoly says I don’t understand why you’re helping me, Freddie responds:

Because I love chess! Does nobody else? Jesus, sometimes I think I’m the only one! How can you let mediocrity win?

These lines right here, and the song “Talking Chess” in general, were one way or another my favorite bit in this whole musical. After the whole thing has been a tangle of political drama behind the chess tournaments controlled by the bigger players where Freddie and Anatoly were constantly at odds, Freddie wriggles out from under Walter’s thumb and manages to get over himself enough to just come to Anatoly and tell him no, actually, fuck it, win this thing, you can win, because you’re a better player than Viigand and you shouldn’t give any of these manipulative chucklefucks what they want. This competition is supposed to be about chess.

This is Freddie’s final scene here. The progression from “The Deal (No Deal)”, where Freddie is repeatedly scorned and rejected in the process of going along with Walter and Molokov’s schemes, to the raw lowest point of “Pity the Child #2” that makes his character make sense, to this little act of blazing defiance in reaching across the aisle (which also implicitly means he’s finally willing to swallow his pride about Anatoly and admit that he fully deserved to be world champion and Freddie always knew that) for the sake of the integrity of the game that he grew up with as his only passion and companion, is just really good and cathartic to me. I feel like it makes Anatoly’s decision to go for the win feel more satisfying, too – makes it implicitly represent more, a rebellious act of both players against the political operatives playing them. I just enjoy it a lot.

And… this song/scene apparently only exists in specifically the 1986 London West End production and its particular derivatives. All other versions, Freddie doesn’t do this and “Pity the Child #2” is just a bit of expository self-pity that doesn’t lead to anything and also may be placed way earlier in the show. The liner notes on the original concept album apparently explained that by the end Freddie has completely stopped caring about chess and only cares about politics and Florence rejecting him. I am appalled! This is the best bit and it’s what makes Freddie’s whole character worth it! Freddie caring about chess most important part of Chess the musical 2k23.

(At least presumably in every version Freddie still spends “One Night in Bangkok” explaining to a bunch of sex workers that he’s just here for the chess, thank you very much. You’re talking to a tourist / Whose every move’s among the purest / I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine […] I don’t see you guys rating / the kind of mate I’m contemplating / I’d let you watch, I would invite you / but the queens we use would not excite you. In the Chess in Concert choreography he definitely seems to be enjoying the physical attention during the instrumental break, and you can definitely validly interpret these lines with a certain sense of irony, but honestly is it just me or do the lyrics as written make him sound super ace. I am very here for Freddie just legitimately thinking chess is better than sex. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had issues with sex regardless based on his whole being neglected while his mother brought random guys into bed thing.)

So, I think this is a distinctly flawed show, I have some notes, but one way or another the bits I do like have stuck pretty firmly in my head, and somehow I have now spent a couple of days banging out 6000 words about it. All in all Tim Rice appears to be quite up and down for me but when he hits he really hits, bless him. Interesting characters and character dynamics really are my one true weakness.

Also the ABBA guys are good at this. I’m trying to convince myself not to make a musical motif chart for this too.

[sergiosantos]

Books read in 2022

All the books I read in 2022, with a ⭐️ next to my favourites. You can also check my lists for 2020 and 2021.

Fiction

We - Yevgeny Zamyatin ⭐ The Last of the Masters - Philip K. Dick The Carpet Makers - Andreas Eschbach ⭐ Death's End - Liu Cixin The Ark Sakura - Kobo Abe His Master's Voice - Stanislaw Lem The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis - José Saramago Seeing - José Saramago La Diagonale Alekhine - Arthur Larrue The Man Who Planted Trees - Jean Giono The Castle - Franz Kafka The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin ⭐️ The Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem

Non-fiction

Blockchain Chicken Farm - Xiaowei Wang ⭐ On Anarchism - Noam Chomsky A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide - Cyd Harrell The Anarchist Handbook - Michael Malice Nea Kavala, Nea Kavala - Frederico Martinho The DisCO Elements Selected Writings - Mikhail Bakunin Bobby Fischer goes to War - David Edmonds & John Eidinow Play Winning Chess - Yasser Seirawan Kraftwerk - Uwe Schütte On Tennis - David Foster Wallace Capitalist Realism - Mark Fisher Judgment of Paris - George M. Taber Voices from the Valley - Moira Weigel & Ben Tarnoff Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? - Linda Nochlin Soft City - David Sim The Motorcycle Diaries - Ernesto Che Guevara Rebel Ideas - Matthew Syed Wine and War - Don Kladstrup Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman ⭐ The One-Straw Revolution - Masanobu Fukuoka Movement - Thalia Verkade ⭐ The Permaculture City - Toby Hemenway The Race Against the Stasi - Herbie Sykes The 99% Invisible City - Kurt Kohlstedt & Roman Mars The Captive Mind - Czesław Miłosz Consider the Oyster - M. F. K. Fisher The Kronstadt Uprising - Ida Mett Post-scarcity Anarchism - Murray Bookchin

[theatticoneighth]

Watching The Queen’s Gambit; on the Remarkable Unexceptionality of Beth Harmon

‘With some people, chess is a pastime. With others, it is a compulsion, even an addiction. And every now and then, a person comes along for whom it is a birthright. Now and then, a small boy appears and dazzles us with his precocity, at what may be the world’s most difficult game. But what if that boy were a girl? A young, unsmiling girl, with brown eyes, red hair, and a dark blue dress? Into the male-dominated world of the nation’s top chess tournaments, strolls a teenage girl with bright, intense eyes, from Fairfield High School in Lexington, Kentucky. She is quiet, well-mannered, and out for blood.’

The preceding epigraph opens a fictional profile of Beth Harmon featured in the third episode of The Queen’s Gambit (2020), and is written and published after the protagonist — a teenage, rookie chess player, no less — beats a series of ranked pros to win her first of many tournaments. In the same deft manner as it depicts the character’s ascent to her global chess stardom, the piece also sets up the series’s narrative: this is evidence of a great talent, it tells us, a grandmaster in the making. As with most other stories about prodigies, this new entry into a timeworn genre is framed unexceptionally by its subject’s exceptionality.

Yet as far as tales regaled about young chess wunderkinds go, Beth Harmon’s stands out in more ways than one. That she is a girl in a male-dominated world has clearly not gone unremarked by both her diegetic and nondiegetic audiences. That her life has thus far — and despite her circumstances — been relatively uneventful, however, is what makes this show so remarkable. After all, much of our culture has undeniably primed us to expect the consequential from those whom we raise upon the pedestal of genius. As Harmon’s interviewer suggests in her conversation with Harmon for the latter’s profile, “Creativity and psychosis often go hand in hand. Or, for that matter, genius and madness.” So quickly do we attribute extraordinary accomplishments to similarly irregular origins that we presume an inexplicability of our geniuses: their idiosyncrasies are warranted, their bad behaviours are excused, and deep into their biographies we dig to excavate the enigmatic anomalies behind their gifts. Through our myths of exceptionality, we make the slightest aberrations into metonyms for brilliance.

Nonetheless, for all her sullenness, non-conformity, and her plethora of addictions, Beth Harmon seems an uncommonly normal girl. No doubt this may be a contentious view, as evinced perhaps by the chorus of viewers and reviewers alike who have already begun to brand the character a Mary Sue. Writing on the series for the LA Review of Books, for instance, Aaron Bady construes The Queen’s Gambit as “the tragedy of Bobby Fischer [made] into a feminist fantasy, a superhero story.” In the same vein, Jane Hu also laments in her astute critique of the Cold War-era drama its flagrant and saccharine wish-fulfillment tendencies. “The show gets to have it both ways,” she observes, “a beautiful heroine who leans into the edge of near self-destruction, but never entirely, because of all the male friends she makes along the way.” Sexual difference is here reconstituted as the unbridgeable chasm that divides the US from the Soviet Union, whereas the mutual friendliness shared between Harmon and her male chess opponents becomes a utopic revision of history. Should one follow Hu’s evaluation of the series as a period drama, then the retroactive ascription of a recognisably socialist collaborative ethos to Harmon and her compatriots is a contrived one indeed. 

Accordingly, both Hu and Bady conclude that the series grants us depthless emotional satisfaction at the costly expense of realism: its all-too-easy resolutions swiftly sidestep any nascent hint of overwhelming tension; its resulting calm betrays our desire for reprieve. Underlying these arguments is the fundamental assumption that the unembellished truth should also be an inconvenient one, but why must we always demand difficulty from those we deem noteworthy? Summing up the show’s conspicuous penchant for conflict-avoidance, Bady writes that: 

over and over again, the show strongly suggests — through a variety of genre and narrative cues — that something bad is about to happen. And then … it just doesn’t. An orphan is sent to a gothic orphanage and the staff … are benign. She meets a creepy, taciturn old man in the basement … and he teaches her chess and loans her money. She is adopted by a dysfunctional family and the mother … takes care of her. She goes to a chess tournament and midway through a crucial game she gets her first period and … another girl helps her, who she rebuffs, and she is fine anyway. She wins games, defeating older male players, and … they respect and welcome her, selflessly helping her. The foster father comes back and …she has the money to buy him off. She gets entangled in cold war politics and … decides not to be.

In short, everything that could go wrong … simply does not go wrong.

Time and again predicaments arise in Harmon’s narrative, but at each point, she is helped fortuitously by the people around her. In turn, the character is allowed to move through the series with the restrained unflappability of a sleepwalker, as if unaffected by the drama of her life.  Of course, this is not to say that she fails to encounter any obstacle on her way to celebrity and success — for neither her childhood trauma nor her substance-laden adolescence are exactly rosy portraits of idyll — but only that such challenges seem so easily ironed out by that they hardly register as true adversity. In other words, the show takes us repeatedly to the brink of what could become a life-altering crisis but refuses to indulge our taste for the spectacle that follows. Skipping over the Aristotelian climax, it shields us from the height of suspense, and without much struggle or effort on the viewers’ part, hands us our payoff. Consequently lacking the epochal weight of plot, little feels deserved in Harmon’s story.

In his study of eschatological fictions, The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode would associate such a predilection for catastrophes with our abiding fear of disorder. Seeing as time, as he argues, is “purely successive [and] disorganised,” we can only reach to the fictive concords of plot to make sense of our experiences. Endings in particular serve as the teleological objective towards which humanity projects our existence, so we hold paradigms of apocalypse closely to ourselves to restore significance to our lives. It probably comes as no surprise then that in a year of chaos and relentless disaster — not to mention the present era of extreme precariousness, doomscrolling, and the 24/7 news cycle, all of which have irrevocably attuned us to the dreadful expectation of “the worst thing to come” — we find ourselves eyeing Harmon’s good fortune with such scepticism. Surely, we imagine, something has to have happened to the character for her in order to justify her immense consequence. But just as children are adopted each day into loving families and chess tournaments play out regularly without much strife, so too can Harmon maintain low-grade dysfunctional relationships with her typically flawed family and friends. 

In any case, although “it seems to be a condition attaching to the exercise of thinking about the future that one should assume one's own time to stand in extraordinary relation to it,” not all orphans have to face Dickensian fates and not all geniuses have to be so tortured (Kermode). The fact remains that the vagaries of our existence are beyond perfect reason, and any attempt at thinking otherwise, while vital, may be naive. Contrary to most critics’ contentions, it is hence not The Queen’s Gambit’s subversions of form but its continued reach towards the same that holds up for viewers such a comforting promise of coherence. The show comes closest to disappointing us as a result when it eschews melodrama for the straightforward. Surprised by the ease and randomness of Harmon’s life, it is not difficult for one to wonder, four or five episodes into the show, what it is all for; one could even begin to empathise with Hu’s description of the series as mere “fodder for beauty.” 

Watching over the series now with Bady’s recap of it in mind, however, I am reminded oddly not of the prestige and historical dramas to which the series is frequently compared, but the low-stakes, slice-of-life cartoons that had peppered my childhood. Defined by the prosaicness of its settings, the genre punctuates the life’s mundanity with brief moments of marvel to accentuate the curious in the ordinary. In these shows, kindergarteners fix the troubles of adults with their hilarious playground antics, while time-traveling robot cats and toddler scientists alike are confronted with the woes of chores. Likewise, we find in The Queen’s Gambit a comparable glimpse of the quotidian framed by its protagonist’s quirks. Certainly, little about the Netflix series’ visual and narrative features would identify it as a slice-of-life serial, but there remains some merit, I believe, in watching it as such. For, if there is anything to be gained from plots wherein nothing is introduced that cannot be resolved in an episode or ten, it is not just what Bady calls the “drowsy comfort” of satisfaction — of knowing that things will be alright, or at the very least, that they will not be terrible. Rather, it is the sense that we are not yet so estranged from ourselves, and that both life and familiarity persists even in the most extraordinary of circumstances.

Perhaps some might find such a tendency towards the normal questionable, yet when all the world is on fire and everyone clambers for acclaim, it is ultimately the ongoingness of everyday life for which one yearns. As Harmon’s childhood friend, Jolene, tells her when she is once again about to fall off the wagon, “You’ve been the best at what you do for so long, you don’t even know what it’s like for the rest of us.” For so long, and especially over the past year, we have catastrophized the myriad crises in which we’re living that we often overlook the minor details and habits that nonetheless sustain us. To inhabit the congruence of both the remarkable and its opposite in the singular figure of Beth Harmon is therefore to be reminded of the possibility of being outstanding without being exceptional — that is, to not make an exception of oneself despite one’s situation — and to let oneself be drawn back, however placid or insignificant it may be, into the unassuming hum of dailiness. It is in this way of living that one lives on, minute by minute, day by day, against the looming fear and anxiety that seek to suspend our plodding regular existence. It is also in this way that I will soon be turning the page on the last few months in anticipation of what is to come. 

Born and raised in the perpetually summery tropics — that is, Singapore — Rachel Tay wishes she could say her life was just like a still from Call Me By Your Name: tanned boys, peaches, and all. Unfortunately, the only resemblance that her life bears to the film comes in the form of books, albeit ones read in the comfort of air-conditioned cafés, and not the pool, for the heat is sweltering and the humidity unbearable. A fervent turtleneck-wearer and an unrepentant hot coffee-addict, she is thus the ideal self-parodying Literature student, and the complete anti-thesis to tropical life.

[loudlydangerouscrusade]

The Talk about Books

© Noteworthy – The Journal Blog

SPEAKER: Dr. Joselito delos Reyes

TOPIC: Paano Isasalibro ang Ideya Mo at Iba Pang Kuwentuhang Libro

 (Part I: Kuwentuhang Libro)

            “Ang buhay kong ito ay hinubog ng maraming, maraming libro. Walang iisang libro na pwede kong sabihin na life-changing, pwede kong sabihin na nagpabago sa buhay ko. Hindi ‘no, marami, collective effort nila para baguhin ako.” (My life was molded by many, many books. There is no single book that I can say life-changing. It is not, there are many, it was their collective efforts to change me.) Thus, Mr. delos Reyes is justifying that a person changes whenever he reads books. That these books shape him to what he is.

           He mentioned of the two books by Augustine Mandino II, better known as OG Mandino, which made him change – “The Greatest Salesman in the World” and “The Greatest Miracle in the World”. Aside from those, he also gave the names of those he have already read. They were “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” by Mitch Albom, “Without Seeing the Dawn” by Steven Javellana, and “Mass” from “The Rosales Saga” by F. Sionil Jose.

           Also, he encouraged everyone to reread the two novels of Dr. Jose Rizal – no other than “Noli Me Tangere” and “El Filibusterismo”. These two are both semi-life changing for him. He read it again, this time as leisure reading, not a force one like what he had during high school. “Panibagong basa, panibagong sipat,” he explained. This is when he realized Rizal’s superb skill. “Napakagaling ni Rizal,” he said. With this, like what others would say, our own perspective changes as we grow older – how we see something now is different than we did before.

          He also added, “Walang masama o mabuting libro basta pagnilayan mo ang kanyang nilalaman. Walang panget o walang magandang libro na tatalakayin basta sinuri mo kung paano ito umiiral.” (There is no bad or a good book if you will just ponder on its content. There is no bad book to be discussed if you analyze/examine on why it exists.) Moreover, one’s interest in books, (say the genre that a person loves to read), is subjective. “Hindi ko alam kung ang nakakaapekto sa akin ay nakakapekto sa inyo. Iba’t iba tayo ng hilig.”  (I do not know if what affects me, affects you. We have different interests.)

           Moreover, one must not tell, “Hindi mo pa nababasa ‘to? Dapat nabasa mo na ‘to.” (You have not read this? You should have already.) Instead, say “I suggest…” to avoid smart shaming or intellectual bullying which Sir Joey hates. He further explained this by referring to Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences. That everyone has his or her kind of intelligence. He added, “Hindi ito mass reading.” (This is not mass reading.)

           Aside from the books given, other compositions that he had finished are the following: The Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton; The Prayer of the Frog, Anthony de Mello; Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa; Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry, Neil deGrasse Tyson; and Hollywood Cartoons, Michael Barrier.  

           “Masaya ako na *nagugulpi ang libro.” (I am happy a book is being read a lot of times.) Sir Joey expressed that he is happy when a book was being read multiple times by different people.

           “Wala akong partikular na paksa na nagugustuhan. Lahat ng paksa ay maaari kong magustuhan. Kaya’t iba’t ibang paksa ng libro ang nasa bahay ko.” (There is no particular topic that I like. I can possibly like all topics. That is why there are books with various topics in my house.) When reading, a reader must not limit himself only to one but should also try exploring other subjects.  

            In here, the author showed books he has at home, each one having a varied theme. Among them was “A Movable Feast (Life Changing Food Adventures around the World) by Anthony Bourdain, et. al. “Hindi man ako makapunta sa iba’t ibang panig ng daigdig, at least para ko na ring natikman ang mga pagkain sa iba’t ibang panig ng daigdig.” (I may not be able to travel; at least, it would seem that I had tasted foods from the different parts of the world.) Fast Food Nation (Eric Schlosser), Bobby Fischer Goes to War (David Edmonds and John Eidinow), Sports Illustrated: 50 Years of Great Writing (various writers), Making Saints (Kenneth Woodward), and some from the Sweet Valley High and Valentine’s Romance series were also exhibited.

          “Pag-aralan natin‘yung mga possibility ng mga libro.” (Let us learn the different possibilities of books.) This means there is more for a book, not just for reading. (Similar with the paragraph above, reading books lets us explore and experience things.)

            Further, Sir Joey classified the two kinds of reading: (a) force reading and (b) luxury reading.

            “Mahalin natin ang isang puwersang ipinapababasa sa atin dahil makakatulong din sa ating well-being.” (We should love reading in which we are forced for it helps in our well-being.) Though we are not into those readings that our teachers had given us, in the end, it would benefit and would do well on us. One of the gains is that we can reflect them with our lives. Many times that what are transcribed in the texts are really happening.

           “Reading is culture. Matutunan ng bata kapag nakikita niyang ginagawa ng magulang ito.” (A child learns when he sees his parents are doing it.) Instead of making someone read, why don’t we let them do it? The idea suggested is parents may put books on places where they can be easily seen.  

           “Para mag-iwan ka ng marka sa mundong ito, tatlong bagay: (1) magka-anak, (b) magtanim ng puno at (3) magkaroon ng libro.” (To leave a mark in this world, three things: (1) to have an offspring, (2) to plant a tree, and (3) to publish your own book.  Someone who reads a lot, eventually, may think of having his own book/s.  

 (Part II: Paano Isasalibro ang Ideya Mo)

           Those who have already started on with the dream of publishing could have a folder named: Book Project, Special Book Project, or Enhanced Special Book Project. To have his book published is automatically the dream for those who love to read or those who are called as bibliophiles.  

           At first, Mr. delos Reyes talked about book length. A book could have 30 or 40 thousand words. “It depends,” he said. As an example, “Troya” (one of his books) with 200 pages has 70,000 words. Aside from the said count, the thickness of a book is also determined by the size of the letters which can be microscopic or not.

           “Hindi necessarily na ang librong iniisip mo ay libro mo na sa simula.” (It does not necessarily mean that the book you were thinking of in the first place is a book already.) He explained that the idea of having a book can come from anywhere. It can start as a collection of your Facebook status (like his book ‘Istatus Nation’ that won “Best Book of Filipino Essays” in the 34th National Book Awards by National Book Development Board (NBDB) and MCC or Manila Critics Circle) or tweets about love.

           There are two ways of publishing book – by self-publish or by bringing it to a publishing house. If self-publish, the author is the one who is in control of everything – starting from the marketing, printing, and the sales. But there is a catch into it, “Ikaw din ang malulugi kung sakali.” (You are the one to suffer (a great) financial loss if ever.)

           On the other hand, Mr. Joey said, “May pulitika sa publishing company.” (There is politics in publishing company.) We cannot deny that publishing houses are still into business after all. But, if you have a publisher, the people working in it will really help you in publishing your own book – from marathon editing to the very detailed proofreading including the language, syntax, and such.

           Moreover, the cost of the proofreading and the layouting depend on the number of pages. The payment for both is not as a whole but PER PAGE. With that, it may cost someone roughly P15, 000.00 alone for the editing. Yes, the cost for the layout is not included, it is separated. Lastly, “pwera pa ‘yung imprenta.” (The printing of the book is still EXCLUDED.) Additionally, the book can be printed either by paperback or by hardbound. The more number of copies printed, the cheaper the price of books will be.

            Plus, when you published your book, you need to get it ISBN or International Standard Book Number (It is a ten-digit number assigned to every book before publishing, recording such details as language, provenance and publisher. – Oxford Dictionary). “Kailangang magbayad para magkaroon ng unique numbers.” (Someone has to pay to get those unique numbers.) The publisher can get it for you unlike for those who choose to self-publish their books.  

             Also, Sir Joey said that an author should have someone – an evil friend and/or editor. That someone, “mang-ookray”, will deride the author’s masterpiece. This person is important so that your book will be criticize – justifying the positive and negative points of your work before it undergoes publishing. Another reason why a “mang-ookray” is vital, as explained by Sir Joey, “Hindi sa lahat ng panahon pupwede mong ipagtanggol ang nilalaman ng iyong libro. Iisipin nila na matalino ka na kaya aasahan na nila na maayos ito.” (You cannot protect the content of your book at all times. They would be thinking that you are intelligent already that they expect your book to be neat and proper.) You should also have a few who will tell you if your book has the capacity of being seen in the bookstores or not.

           Lastly, each book has its own purpose and audience. Example, a textbook is intended for students and is use for learning concepts depending on the subject area. While on the other hand, a cookbook is for chefs or cooks and use for learning how to make a dish.  

             A little reminder, “You need also to respect somebody’s craft.” Publishing a book is not easy. Aside from money, it requires time, effort, knowledge, enthusiasm and courage. It is not something that is done overnight. Many authors had shed blood before turning them into ink.  

(*nagugulpi – is a Filipino word, its root word is “gulpi” that means hit or strike. From the given sentence, which was said by the speaker, we do not take the meaning literally. It is because if we do, the idea of the statement: Masaya ako na nagugulpi ang libro, will be “I am happy that books are being hit or strike.” which does not really explains the point.)

Writer’s Note

This write-up is about the webinar by Mr. delos Reyes for the different sessions prepared by Vibal Publishing House for the celebration of World Book Day. 

Mr. delos Reyes, called as Sir Joey, is the Program Coordinator of University of Santo Tomas (UST) BA Creative Writing Program, 2015 and 2016 National Book Awardee for Essay, and 2018 National Book Awardee for Nonfiction.

 (May 02, 2020, 5:53 PM)

[rhondanicole]

Color U Peach & Black: Prince’s ‘Sign O’ the Times’ Turns 30 (Part 1, Disc 1)

March 31, 1987: Prince released his ninth studio album, Sign O’ the Times. A double-album/two-disc Paisley Park Records collection that arrived on the heels of 1986′s Parade (which was also a March 31st release) and in between that year’s two Madhouse joints--8 (January) and 16 (November), SOTT shuttered the dramatic whimsy of its predecessor in favor of solid, rock steady funk, soul, and social commentary. The album was met with immediate critical acclaim, delivered four chart-topping singles (the title track, “U Got the Look” featuring Scottish pop star Sheena Easton, “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” and “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man”), enjoyed an impressive run on the Billboard 200 chart, and was certified platinum by the RIAA. SOTT received multiple Grammy nominations in 1988, including Album of the Year and Best R&B Song and Best R&B Performance by a Group or Duo for “U Got the Look.” An accompanying full-length concert film hit theaters in November, giving stateside fans an opportunity to experience the album live since the Sign O’ the Times tour was a strictly European affair.

Frequently cited as the last official Revolution album and a stark transition between the outgoing and incoming musical personnel (Wendy, Lisa, and Bobby Z. were on their way out [Dr. Fink and Brown Mark remained], while Miko Weaver, Sheila E., Levy Seacer, Jr., Eric Leeds, Atlanta Bliss, dancer Cat Glover, vocalist/keyboard player Boni Boyer, and Wally Safford and Greg Brooks would make up the band featured in the movie; longtime collaborators Susannah Melvoin and Jill Jones were also featured on the album but not in the film), SOTT marks both the end of an era and the inaugural outing of the new sounds and visuals Prince would cultivate throughout the latter part of the 1980s. Having dominated the first part of the decade and, depending on whom you ask, peaked with 1984′s Purple Rain, SOTT moved in an unapologetically different direction than even his immediate post-Purple Rain album, Around the World in a Day. Conceptually, thematically, aesthetically, SOTT was a swift departure from much of what even diehard fans had come to know of Prince’s music of the time, beginning with the album’s first single and album opener, the title track.

Disc One

Consider for a moment the times during which SOTT was released: still in the midst of the Reagan era, the AIDS crisis, inner-city (and, as more than one cultural historian has suggested, government-sanctioned) crack cocaine epidemic, the song “Sign O’ the Times” paints a grim picture of the present moment, referencing hardcore drug addiction, space shuttle disasters, the ongoing threat of nuclear war, and the pitfalls of the “me” decade. Carried by one of Prince’s slickest bass lines to date and his signature guitar riffs, the song’s narrative does more to serve as a cautionary tale than to offer even the smallest glimmer of hope. Even the seemingly nonsensical closing lyric, “Let’s fall in love, get married, have a baby/we’ll call him Nate if it’s a boy,” feels like surrender. And yet, within just a few measures, Prince encourages us to “Play in the Sunshine.”

With its obvious nod to high-energy gospel (in a similar vein as “Let’s Go Crazy” and “Delirious”), “Play in the Sunshine” is trippy, happy, joyous. Inviting us into a world where we “love all our enemies til the gorilla falls off the wall” and where “we’re not afraid to make love in the sunshine,” the album’s second track, which Prince and crew performed live on the 1987 MTV VMAs, is the perfect segue into the super-funky dance floor favorite, “Housequake.” Featuring Prince’s alter-ego, Camille, on lead vocals, “Housequake” is James Brown funk at its finest. It’s a party banger that still gets in one’s ass good and plenty, all these years later. 

The poetic stream of consciousness that is “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” follows, weaving a tale of a bewildered lover who, after “talkin’ stuff in a violent room/fighting with lovers past,” seeks the wisdom and comfort of “someone with a quicker wit.” He stumbles upon a waitress, Dorothy, who invites him to take a bubble bath while they listen to Joni Mitchell after serving him fruit cocktail. He obliges, but refuses to remove his trousers because, well, he’s “kinda goin’ with someone.” Dorothy is unfazed, and the song is a brilliant mix of melancholy and muted keys, intricate drum loops, and slippery-sounding bass.

Because no Prince album is an official Prince album without sex--and lots of it, “It” storms in to shake us from our relatively subdued vibe. Damn near screeching in a most plaintive way, Prince unabashedly lays out his love for “doin’ it,” “in the bed, on the stairs, anywhere.” Alright.

Possibly one his sweetest songs ever, “Starfish and Coffee” is the true story of a real little girl, Cynthia Rose, as told to Prince by the song’s co-writer, Susannah Melvoin. A simple ode to childhood innocence, wonder, and imagination, the song is an instant mood lifter sure to bring a smile to your face. 

The horn-heavy, sexy “Slow Love” is a smoldering slow jam espousing the virtues of slipping gently into a romantic movement. With strings arranged by the great Claire Fischer, this tune evokes the seductive build-up of dancing close, temperatures rising, and sweet, sweaty release.

“Hot Thing” brings back the drums, the horns, the funk, and the sweat as the second to last track on SOTT’s first disc. As the B-side for the “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man” single, “Hot Thing” got an especially hot work out in the concert film, with Prince and Cat entangled in a particularly erotic dance sequence. The song also received a couple remixes by producer Shepp Pettibone, and was one of the songs featured on the soundtrack for Spike Lee’s film, Girl 6, a decade later. 

Closing out the first disc is the divine “Forever in My Life.” One of many tunes from that era said to have been inspired by his one-time fiancée, Susannah Melvoin, “Forever in My Life” opens with an insanely catchy hook before launching full-on into one of Prince’s most heartfelt declarations of love. Pouring his heart out of a driving drum beat and pulsating bass line, Prince makes it known that “there comes a time in everyone’s life when he gets tired of fooling around.” Whether a sincere marriage proposal or a unique way to say “I’m ready to get serious,” the song absolutely goes down as one of his dopest. Don’t believe me? Peep the video below. Them harmonies, chile!

(Meet me back here tomorrow for part 2!)

--Rhonda Nicole

[spotlightsaga]

Kevin Cage of Spotlight Saga presents... A Rewind Review of the final episode of Quarry on Cinemax whose cancellation was just announced yesterday. As you'll see in the language of this article, I personally hold the show in high regard, even including it the Top 5 #BestOf2016 series we ran. Cinemax, who is owned by HBO claims they are revamping the network that is just now gaining a good wave of steam and building a respectable library. The Knick was also a groundbreaking series that recently received the axe from the same network, yet Strike Back that last ran in 2015 is already getting a reboot. What say you, Cinemax? We are incredibly disappointed by your decision to cancel this incredibly thought provoking Crime Drama set in a very real to life 1972 Memphis. Michael D Fuller, executive producer and co-creator of the show (along with (Graham Gordy) is a huge inspiration for me and for 'Spotlight Saga', inspiring me to include a more honest approach to political standpoints, something at the time I was very afraid to use in my writing. The following article was written shorty after the end of Quarry's Legendary 8-Episode run. Going forward, as much as I am frustrated with Cinemax, I think it's important to focus on the positives here and follow & support both Fuller & Gordy in any future projects or endeavors they may have. Thank you, Fuller. Thank you, Gordy. You have earned more than a few lifetime fans. Kevin Cage of Spotlight Saga reviews... Quarry (S01E08) Nuoc Cha Da Mon Airdate: October 28, 2016 (Cinemax) Ratings: Premium Cable/Streaming - Nielsen is Guessing! Score: 10/10 (An Extremely Rare Perfect Score) **************SPOILERS BELOW*************** *Poltical Views do NOT represent Spotlight Saga* Well, I asked for it... Basically begged for it, I even considered taking a day off work to just sit at home and watch it. Now, I've finally watched it, and I feel...changed. 'The Vietnam Scene' let's us peak into the PTSD origins and Mac's time at war, as well as providing a provocative theory on just what we might have been doing over there in the first place... Losing lives on both sides, our veterans returning home to a chorus of boos, met with thick walls of human disdain, and stop signs in every direction they turned. Single Camera, long take shots can be risky. Just look at Daredevil, a show that successfully used them in S1, then overused the same hallmark shots in S2. They simply cannot be your whole show, because one continuous 'sequence shot', particularly those that surround an upsetting action or disturbing sequence linger with the viewer, like the shots themselves linger on the situation at hand. In this case, a raid in Vietnam 🇻🇳 on a village with mainly fisherman, women, and children... Innocent lives lost in a war that in the end meant nothing but death, heartache, and terror. Of course that asshole of a captain commended Mac (Logan Marshall Green) and praised him to The Broker (Peter Mullan) at the end, 'He's a good soldier.' Yup, cuz he does what he's told without hesitation... Like firing the first shot without thinking, snowballing a cascade of death and chaos, topping off the whole experience by throwing a grenade into a covered pit that contained a toddler... A toddler who we are shown blown right out of the pit into fucking pieces. That's one thing that Quarry never does, shies away from violence, from the money shot... And it never feels exploitative, it just feels like that's the reality, a reality that the viewers should not be protected from. And so it goes... The Broker is no vigilante, tho he does give the people that he employs the benefit of small 'in-between' jobs that make them feel like they are doing good in the world. It's a game of chess, and he is Bobby Fischer in his prime, and a patriarch of the 70's... A king of a dirty unferbelly ruled by the almighty dollar and poppy fields as far as the eye can see. The day I wanted to take off work, just so happened to have three or four people at the bar discussing Vietnam. Of course, right? I immediately throw Quarry in the mix and of course, none of them had heard of it... Unsurprising, considering how hard it is just to obtain Cinemax, thank god for Amazon Video now! We discussed the length at which protesters treated the returning war veterans; Picketing, spitting, throwing objects, screaming and shoving homemade signs in their face... As if the soldiers ever had a choice in the matter. You enlist, You're drafted, you're trapped, you're owned, and just like Mac... If you are a good soldier you do what you're told like a goddamn robot, a machine without empathy, and then when you return home you have nothing. PTSD? In '72? Here's a pamphlet. 'Be glad the man has his legs and his arms,' the man at the VA tells Joni (#JodiBalfour) when she desperately seeks help for a man she cannot save herself. So there you have the people in control of our government, sending our brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers over to fight a pointless war. Then you have the rich men, the patriarchs, who are able to come through and buy a slice of the action... A poppy field... A goldmine just waiting to make the rich man richer. And then you have protesters, mainly uninformed Regular Joes who only see the picture that's painted before them, like the SJW's today that picket and march through our major cities furthering the divide they claim they are trying to stop. Oh yes, that's the truth of the matter, a truth that blind rage and ignorance stop people from seeing. There is something inherently terrifying about the parallels of Vietnam 🇻🇳 to the wars and thousands deployed in countries like Iraq 🇮🇶 Iran 🇮🇷 Afghanistan 🇦🇫 Pakistan 🇵🇰 Kuwait 🇰🇼 Bahrain 🇧🇭 Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦 Syria 🇸🇾 Yemen 🇾🇪 And I could go on and on and on, places we have no business being, places that our country backwardly depends on for oil, or countries that have militias and terrorist organizations just sitting on oil fields holding them captive to prevent the chaos countries like ours and others have caused attempting to police the world and secure access to natural resources, while they themselves use the guns we have directly armed them with to oppress their people and then line the pockets of people like Hillary Clinton's with hundreds of thousands of dollars. No, I am no sympathizer, both sides make me sick. The whole thing makes me sick. Mostly, the human race makes me sick. A long time ago while living in San Francisco, I realized that the most beautiful and pure people are mostly at the bottom sleeping in the street or struggling at a minimum wage job, while the ugliest and ruthless people are at the top inviting a lucky few up to share in a night of debauchery, caressing their insecurities with thoughts of becoming their protégés or possible arm candy while their young and their beauty is still intact. Just last week, less than a month to go in his final term, Obama abolished the 'Wet Foot, Dry Foot' policy, a policy that helped save thousands of Cuban 🇨🇺 lives and helped build the great city of Miami that I call home... This done in the spirit to 'normalize relations with our one-time foe.' While abolishing this policy *COULD* indeed do just that, hidden behind that very controversial and well known policy; Another policy, The Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, was also nixed. That lesser known policy allowed the opportunity for Cuban Medical Professionals to come to the US through other countries to earn residency, citizenship, and jobs. A sneaky move, one disguised as a way to strengthen the relations between The USA 🇺🇸 & Cuba 🇨🇺. Just one of many examples that not everything in the painting is portrayed as it should be or relaid to the public highlighting the big picture as a whole. This is a man who promised us CHANGE, but the majority of these promises of change were broken. Under the Obama Administration more Whistleblowers were jailed under the Espionage Act of 1917, imprisoned, or forced to seek asylum, like Snowden in Russia 🇷🇺 and of course famous Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, who is literally living in an Ecuadorian 🇪🇨 Embassy in London 🇬🇧. Then today Obama grants clemency to Transgender Whistleblower Chelsea Manning, shortening her 35 year sentence to end 3 decades early in May of this year, 2017. Why, Obama? A PR move to distract from other last minute changes and to surge an approval rating on the way out? Something to think about, especially when he was so adamant about putting those that expose our government's truths, lies, and nasty cover-ups behind bars or strand them in foreign countries that don't exactly provide the same freedoms. Meanwhile last year was the first year that I was forced to pay taxes, and not just because I'm penalized for seeking affordable medical treatment for cash, and not pumping money into the Insurance Industry, the failure of Obamacare. All of this happening, and a rich white New York female actress named Lena Dunham tells the world that she's never had an abortion, but she wishes she had. WHY?! Meryl Streep uses an acceptance speech to rile up SJW's. And to add insult to injury, she says an art form and sport older than her 50x over, MMA and Combat Arts are not really arts. WHY?! God bless some of Meryl Streep's performances, they are truly cinematic gold, but that doesn't automatically make her the High Queen of all Art, deciding what earns that prestigious label and what does not. I try and promise myself that I will not get political in my reviews, but honestly when I write emotional parallels I seem to get the most responses. And because of great television series like 'Quarry' that most definitely gets my stamp for my list of #BestOf2016 TV Series), they inspire me to put my ideas out there, my life stories, my origins, my secrets, my heartaches, my tales of happiness and tragedy... Because of series like 'Quarry' I am more honest with you than I am with anyone else in my life. It's scary to put these very personal, private, and passionate views and experiences out there. Like I said, the one rule I try to set for myself is try to keep politics (or at least pick and choose my crusades and battles) out of it, and to treat those with opposing opinions with respect and class... But here we have a moving, haunting portrait of political injustice, and it's inspiring. It's hard to stay quiet when there is so much injustice surrounding us, so much ignorance. I have literally seen people I love with all my heart throw away meaningful, lifelong friendships over this sham of an election on both sides. I am not a conservative. I am not a liberal. I am a man who is happy with very little... I have a slice of paradise in a city where I am very much the minority. I'm happy living life one day at a time, living a quiet life and practicing different forms of artistic expression, over the years learning that my gift is worth a bit of money, but still getting the hang of making it the center of my universe. I'm no hired hitman, but I've abused this body with serving, bartending, and even go-go dancing... At one point I was literally working day shifts serving tables in Miami, getting off at 4 or 5pm, then driving to Ft Lauderdale, dancing without my clothes at night until the early morning, trying to catch a few low-paying DJ gigs in between. Like Mac, we all have our demons, demons that many of us will never quite shake. We can defeat them, learn to live as harmoniously as possible with them, or let them destroy us slowly. Quarry is a vivid and honest tale of political injustice, racial divides, struggling human beings just trying to survive in a world where the odds are stacked up against them, a tale of broken men and women, the moments that make us feel alive, the moments that haunt us, a tale of a human being struggling with their sexual identity in a brutally violent and unaccepting world, one that is engraved and hardwired into them, broken egos, and a tale of how people can easily be turned into puppets with the almighty dollar and a simple plant growing from God's green earth. I found it very fitting that before the last sequence of scenes Mac goes to cast his presidential vote. Unfortunately it always comes down to the lesser of two evils... Republicans or Democrats, but both are evil and wicked in their own individual ways. To #VoteLibertarian or Green is unheard of (though this idea is changing and becoming more of a reality now, thank god) and for many years I considered the act 'throwing away' my vote, but with the candidates becoming increasingly hard to differentiate the pros and cons... Maybe it's time that everyone starts voting Libertarian, Green, some sort of other growing Independent Party... Or like Mac, just write in the late, great Otis Redding. My Step-Father has taken to the practice, and he's right... If you can't beat em', don't join 'em, vote for somebody else, ANYONE. Ive been told this is a problem in all countries, so on a worldwide scale I'm not sure if even Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump was even the hardest decision a voter has had to face... We had it easy, The Philippines 🇵🇭 had to settle for Rodrigo Duterte, a MADMAN who encouraged the people of his country to hunt down and murder people suffering from the disease of addiction. Somethings gotta give, the division I see in our world today frightens me, but most of all it saddens me. For now, here in the US, what's done is done. We must allow things to play out as if the world 🌎 was our television series. Stop the division. Stop the hate, on BOTH sides... And let's take things as I have learned to live, one day at a time. Being unified if things go wrong will be a lot better than being a nation torn apart. Maybe the future will surprise you, maybe it won't... Just hold on to your empathy and everything will be alright. It's the only thing we have left. We have to do better.

[kraaks-avant-guardian]

Manuel Göttsching

An essay on E2-E4, an opening move in chess or a highly influencial record in contemporary music.

Manuel Göttsching is pretty much a living legend. The man behind krautrock pioneers Ashra Temple (with Klaus Schulze) and Ashra, is basically one of the founders of Kosmische Musik, post-Eno ambient and electronic music. With his 1984 solo masterpiece ‘E2 - E4’ he created a 58 minute trip through icy synths, metallic percussion en spacey guitar solo’s. Göttsching geniusly combined the minimalism of composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich with an irresistible groove. Thus the German musician - along with colleagues Kraftwerk - unknowingly inspired an avalanche of imitators on the other side of the Atlantic who would pioneer genres like house and techno.

— Niels Latomme

Let me tell you something about the millennium old game of chess. Some people find chess incredibly dull, others are addicted to it. The game fights a war between two minds, equipped with the same weapons, and the same limited amount of moves. It’s a war ruled by restrictions, and it is incredible poetic; or, depending on which side you’re on, it’s a game for nerds, boring, slow and abstract. No matter which angle you look into it, although it’s an extremely dry game, it earned its place in the history of mankind. It even provoked a complete mythology, as it was a huge shock for mankind when a chess champion got beaten a computer. Not to speak about books like The Chess Novel, by Stephan Zweig, or the records by Wu-Tang Clan.

Some people feel the same about the record E2-E4 by Manuel Göttsching, recorded in 1981, but released in 1984 — in some ways a pivotal year. I was talking to Spencer Clark and he finds the record incredibly dull, and values Ashra’s output way more than this piece. But other people think it’s one of the best records ever made. This record, not unlike the game of chess, earned its place in musical history, being considered as the first house or techno record. (A side remark: Göttsching admitted that he not really likes dance music.)

The record is loosely inspired by chess. But, it has more resemblances to chess than the cover and the title. Let’s start with the title: “E2-E4” is an opening move in chess, it’s called the King’s Pawn Game. Wikipedia says:

White opens with the most popular of the twenty possible opening moves. Although effective in winning for White (54.25%), it is not quite as successful as the four next most common openings for White: 1.d4 (55.95%), 1.Nf3 (55.8%), 1.c4 (56.3%), and 1.g3 (55.8%).[2]

Since nearly all openings beginning 1.e4 have names of their own, the term “King’s Pawn Game”, unlike Queen’s Pawn Game, is rarely used to describe the opening of the game. Advancing the king’s pawn two squares is highly useful because it occupies a center square, attacks the center square d5, and allows the development of White’s king’s bishop and queen. 

Chess legend Bobby Fischer said that the King’s Pawn Game is “Best by test”, and proclaimed that “With 1.e4! I win”.[3] King’s Pawn Games are further classified by whether Black responds with 1…e5 or not. Openings beginning with 1.e4 e5 are called Double King’s Pawn Games (or Openings), Symmetrical King’s Pawn Games (or Openings), or Open Games – these terms are equivalent. Openings where Black responds to 1.e4 with a move other than 1…e5 are called Asymmetrical King’s Pawn Games or Semi-Open Games.

The title of the record might be misleading. The code is just one of the 18 possible opening moves, and is not as defining as such. Depending on the players, each game goes its own path. If you think deeper about cause-consequences, each opening has its consequences for the rest of the game, and I think you can apply this to the E2-E4 piece too.

Chess is a rigid game, a closed circuit with very defined rules. Each piece has its own movement, weaknesses and strengths. The board has only 64 places and the goal is very simple: you have to conquer the other party’s king. Paradoxally, its very rigid set of rules and limitation creates a field in which endless possibilities appear. It’s a field in that enhances imagination, psychology and poetry. You start a game, and by intuition you move pieces. You can learn about the best opening moves, and how to respond to the other’s moves, and eventually threats and attacks, but you can never rationalize the game completely. A game develops by having unconscious preference for certain pieces and their moves. Some people even claim that you can be read through the moves you make on the board.

E2-E4 is like the game of chess, meticulously composed. It’s a truly teutonic musical composition, more dehumanized than kraftwerk ever will be. If you listen closely, the piece is made out of 8 layered sources. The sources — synths, delay’s, drumcomputers — are synced together, by a very influential invention called MIDI. It allowed the composer to prepare a set of limitations and defined rules, and let every source slowly fade in and out. During each part Göttsching tweaks and triggers the sounds, so that a slowly shifting structure appears. It’s not unlike minimalist avant-garde music, in which the base structure is founded on a few basic notes or structures that are repeated with a very limited amount of variations. The context creates this extraordinary effect in which the slightest change of the parameters —could be the note, the cadense, the rhythm, or the filter and the frequencies — has a maximum of consequences in the sound; the minimum of changes even defines the nature of the piece per se. The revolutionary aspect is that he applied minimalist idea’s to new technology, and showed the way for Derrick May, Juan Atkins, Jeff Mills and likes how to let people dance themselves towards transcendental salvation.

Although the record suggests a defined start and end, and even though it has 8 defined parts (again 8; 8 x 8 = 64, the same amount of squares on the board of chess) with names that suggest a specific mood, there is more to it. On a deeper level, you can consider E2-E4 as just one possible output. Göttsching could have started with other filters or other tunings and drumrhythms. As if every game of chess is one possible outcome of the very rigid system beyond it.

The emotional and the psychological plays a very big role in equally chess and E2-E4. As I pointed about above: the game of chess thrives upon rationalized rules and limitations. The concrete output is influenced by the players consciousness and even more, as we are not the rational creatures we want to be, but driven by forces that are the result of thousands of years evolution, by our subconsciousness. Every minor change creates a maximum of consequences. This defines the way we perceive the composition. He himself meant it as a abstract, minimalist piece. But history taught us that the record influenced a stream of dancers and techno musicians. You can either listen to it, or dance to it. But the complexity of sounds, created by a minimum of sources, let’s you drift away in it’s sheer beauty and emotional warmth. The record does not contain emotions, but I’m sure it conveys a lot of emotion.

One last thing I’d like to point out as a striking parallel in between the game of chess and the record. On minute 32.00, or just 2 minutes far in the part that is called Promise, somewhere in the beginning of the B-side if you’re used to listen it on vinyl, suddenly a guitar kicks in. Göttsching is a master guitarplayer. His work with Ashra Temple, and even more the album Inventions for electric guitar exemplify this. Moment 32.00 is a flipping point in the record. It suddenly changes the complete mood of the album. Depending on your mood, it could make the timeless sounding synthesizer structures sound like a cheesy, kitch, outdated lounge track. Is it the guitar shredder Göttsching coming in, as a persona, pointing out that electronic music is minor to real instruments? Or couldn’t he just resist to show off his guitar skills?

It could be also another equivalent to a game of chess. Every game of chess has a flipping point. The point of no return to which everything before was building upto. The point that makes clear who is losing and who is winning. Mostly the gameevolves pretty quickly after that point, one of the parties will lose his or her important pieces and the game falls apart till it reaches the hunting phase. Even then the game can be equally dull or exciting, depending on how you look to it, or on your personal subconsciousness. If the Guitar Part is consciously conceived as the point of no return in the Göttsching record, I think he truly understands the game of chess, and its merits. He could have kept on building up towards the so-called ‘drop’, the point in which the beats falls away on clubfloors, to pimp up the dancers. But he didn’t…he choose to use his master guitar skills to change to mood, as one of the possible outcomes of the rigid game. To point out the endless possibilities and to prove that a rigid structure can be the portal to deepened aesthetic beauty.

[tozoa]

ヾ(⌐■_■)ノ♪: what are your favorite band(s)/artist(s)?

Hoooooboy this’ll take a minute:

ABBA 

AC/DC

Access

The Ad Libs

Afterburn

Agiman

Agnelli & Nelson

Ahmet Ertenu

Ai Otsuka

AiK

Airbase feat. Floria Ambra

Airwave

AKB48

Akeboshi

Aki Kudou

Akioka Ou

Akitaka Tohyama

Akon, Stat Quo & Bobby Creekwater

Alberto Ginastera

Alchemist

Alessia Cara

Alex Aero

Alex Clare

alex gopher

Alex Stealthy

Alex Whitcombe & Big C

Alexander Von Pitanic: Salzburg Camerata Academica

Alfred Hitchcock

Alice D In Wonderland

Alice in Chains

Alien Ant Farm

All American Rejects

Allegri

Allie Moss

Allister Brimble

The Allman Brothers Band

The Allman Joys

Allure

Aluto

Alvin Risk

AM

The Ambush

Amiina

Amilcare Ponchielli

Amy Lee

An Horse

Andain

André Visior & Kay Stone

Andrew Bayer

AndrewShumMusic

Andy Duguid 

angela

The Angels

Animotion

ann lee

Anna Calvi

ANNA TSUCHIYA inspi'NANA (BLACK STONES)

Annabel

Anointed

Antonín Dvořák

Antonio Montana

Antonio Vivaldi

Aoi Тeshima

Apocalyptica

Aquaplex

Arai Akino

The Archies

Archigram

Argonaut

Aria

Armin

Armor For Sleep

Arrakis

Art of Dying

Art Of Trance

Ashtar Command

Asou Kaori

Asuka Sakai / Yu Miyake

atfc

Atlantis

The Auranaut

autokratz

The Avalons

Avenged Sevenfold

AWOLNATION

Ayana

Ayla

Ayumi Hamasaki

Backstreet Boys

Balearic Bill

Ballroom

Bamboo Lounge

Banyan Tree

Baracoa

The Bar-Kays

Basic Perspective

Bastille

Danny Elfman

The Beach Boys

Beach House

Beachwood Sparks

Beady Eye

Bear McCreary

Beastie Boys                

The Beatles

Beck

Bee Gees

bellone

The Belmonts

Beltek

Ben Shaw

benassi bros

Benzino

Berlin Symphony Orchestra

Bernhard Güller: Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra

Bert Weedon

Best Coast

Bibio

Biffy Clyro

Bill Elm and Woody Jackson

Bill Haley & The Comets

Billie Ray Martin

Billy Idol

Binary Finary

Bing Crosby

the biz

Bizarre

Black Lips

The Black Ryder

Frank Black

Blank & Jones 

Bless The Fallen

Blink-182

Blood For Blood

Blood Red Shoes

Blue Gender

Blue Rock

The Bluetones

Bo Burnham

BOA

Bob & Gene

Bobby “Boris” Pickett & The Crypt-Kickers

Bobby Creekwater

Bobby Tank

Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan

Bon Jovi

Bone Chrusher & Three Days Gra

Bonnie Tyler

Booty Bronx

Botany

Boy & Bear

A Boy Called Joni

boys noize

Brad Knauber

the bravery

Breaking Benjamin

BREAKWATER

Breeder

Brendon Maclean

Brian Eno

Brian Lebarton

Bride of Frankenstein

Bright Eyes

Britney Spears

Broken Social Scene

Brooks and Dunn

Brother

Bruce Faulconer

BT

Buckner & Garcia

The Budos Band

The Buggles

Bulgarian Womens Choir

Bullitt

The Buoys

Steve Burns

BYPASS

Bystrik Režucha: Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra

Cabala

cajuan

Camerata Academica Salzburg

Camerata Romana

Camille Saint-Saëns

Canibus

Canvas2 

Canyon

Cappizzi Pickett

Carl B.

Carl Doy

Carl Michalski: Vienna Opera Orchestra

Carl Perkins

Carly Rae Jepsen

Cary Brothers

Casa Royale

Cascada

Cashis

Cass

The Phantom of the Opera

Catcher

Cave Man

Cavo

CeCe Winans

CERRONE

Chad & Jeremy

CHAKA KHAN

Channel Tribe

Chant

The Chantays

Charles Gounod

Charlotte Martin

Charm City Devils

Chata

Cheap Trick

The Chemical Brothers

Chicane

Chieko Kawabe

Chiho

Chikita Violenta

Chiller Twist

The Chimes

Choopie & Shmuel

Chopin

Choro Club

Chouken Denkanyuu

Christina Aguilera

Christy Nockels

Chronamut

Chrono Crusade

Chuck Berry

Cignus X

Cindy Morgan

The Civil Wars

CJ Bolland

Clannad

Clarence “Frogman” Henry

The Classics

Classified Project

Claude Debussy

Clear View

Clive Tanaka Y Su Orquesta

Cloud 69

Clouded Leopard

Club Quake

Matrix soundtrack

C-Murder

Coast 2 Coast

Coca & Villa

Cold

Cold Cave

Coldplay

Commission

Conjure One

Connie Francis

Continuous Cool

The Contours

Control Freaks

The Cowsills

Crash and the Boys

Cressida

The Crests

Crispin Glover

Crydajam

Cryoshell

Culture Club

Curtis Mayfield

Cut Copy

D

D’ Alt Vila

D.R.U.G.S.

D12

Daft Punk

dahlback & cost

The Daktaris

Dale Hawkins

The Danleers

Danny & The Juniors

Danny Elfman

DarkMateria

Darkstar

DARLIN’

Datarock

dataworx

Dave Angel

dave spoon

david guetta

David Hasselhoff

David Hodges

David MeShow

Dawes

Dawnseekers

De Hideki

De Trainer Derek

Deadlock

Deadmau5

Dean Martin

DearS

Death Cab For A Cutie

Del Shannon

Delerium

Denchuu Shinkyuu

Deniro

Depeche Mode

Der Dritte Raum

DeVotchKa

Dexys Midnight Runners

The Diamonds

Die Firma

digitalism

Dimrain47

Dion & The Belmonts

Dionne Warwick

Disparition

Disturbed

DJ Cor Fijneman

DJ Crazy Chris

DJ Dazzle

DJ Eremit

DJ Hooligan

DJ Jan

Dj Kitkiller

DJ Marco Bailey

DJ Merlyn

DJ Morgoth

DJ Philip

DJ Skee & THX

DJ Slug

DJ Tiësto

DJ Ton T.B.

DJ TripleStar

Dj-janer

djt93901

Dmitri Kabalevsky

DNAngel

Do As Infinity

Dobre & DJ Theor

DOKAKA

Dokmai

Dom

Dom Kennedy

Dominic Plaza

Dominion

Don & Juan

Don Burnham, Patty Kistner

Donna Burke

Dos Deviants

Douster, Savage Skulls & Robyn

Dove Beat

Dr. Dre

The Dreamlovers

The Drifters

Drumfire

Duane Allman

Dubravka Tomšič

The Duprees

Duran Duran

Dylaln Lloyd

E Nomine

Earl Lewis & The Channels

EDDIE JOHNS

Eddy Arnold

Edvard Grieg

Edward MacDowell

EDWIN BIRDSONG

Ef 

Effective Force

Eiko Shimamiya

El Trono de Mexico

Electric Pulse

electric six

Electro-Prompt

Elie

ELISA

Ellie Goulding

Elvis Presley

The Embers

Emigrate

Emika

Eminem

Emmanuel Top

equaleyes

Es Vedra

Escaflowne

Essit Muzique

Estuera

The Eternals

Eufonius

Eurythmics

Evanescence

Eve

Everlast

The Everly Brothers

Evolver

Existone

Exit

Fabiana

faithless

Fall Out Boy

Falling in Reverse

Fanfarlo

Fantasia

FAT JoE

Fats Domino

Faylan

Feeling B

Felix Da Housecat

Felix Mendelssohn

Fictivsion

Field Music

Friend

Filterheadz

Finger Eleven

Fire & Ice

First Aid Kit

First Arsch

First Class

First State

fischerspooner

The Five Americans

Five Finger Death Punch

Fix To Fax

The Fixx

The Flamingos

Flipsyde

FLOW

Fluid Inc.

Fluid Ounces

Flyleaf

Fontella Bass

Fonzerelli

Fool’s Gold

Format #1

Fortress

Foster

Foster the People

The Four Lads

Four Seasons

Four Tet

The Four Tops

Fox

francesco farfa

Francis Poulenc

Frank Black

Frank Shipway: Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

Frank Sinatra

Frankie Goes To Hollywood

Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers

Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons

František Drdla

Franz Ferdinand

Franz Liszt

Franz Schubert

Franz Von Suppé

The Fray

Fred Baker

Freddy Cannon

Frédéric Chopin

Free Radical

Fridge

fripSide

G. Love

Gabriel & Dresden

Gabriel Pares

Gabrielle

Gackt

Gaetano Donizetti

Gakupo

The Game

Games

Garrett Davis and Kirsten Lepore

Gary Chapman

Gela Zilkha

GEORGE DUKE

George Frideric Handel

George Thorogood & The Destroyers

Georges Bizet

The Gift

Gilbert O'Sullivan

Gioachino Rossini

Girls Bravo

Giuseppe Verdi

Glasser

Glenn Morisson

Global Experience

Gôji Tsuno

golden bug

Goldenscan

goldfrapp

Goo Goo Dolls

Good Charlotte

Gorillaz

Gotou Mai

Gouryella

gracia

Graeme Norgate, Grant Kirkhope

Grayarea feat. Erik Shepard

Grease

Green Day

The Green Martian

Green Martian

Greg Vail

Groove Park

Groovezone

Groundswell

GTR

Gucci Mane

Gui Boratto

Guy Mitchell

Gwen Stefani

H.I.M

Hadouken!

Haga Keita

Hal David, John Cacavas

Hamaguchi Shirou

Hammock Brothers

Hans Zimmer

Harada Hitomi

Hardy Heller and Ray Boye

Harry Bluestone

Harry Lubin

Harry101UK

Hashimoto Miyuki

Hatsune Miku

Hayes Carll

Hazuki Erino

heartless1298

Helen Forrest

Hélène Gal

Hello Seahorse!

Henry Adolph: Philharmonia Slavonica

Henry Jackman

Henry Mancini

Hensha

Herb Alpert

Hermann Abel: Camerata Academica Salzburg

HH

Hideki Tobeta

HIR

Hirasawa Susumu

Hirohashi Ryou

Hiroko Taguchi

Hironobu Kageyama

Hiroshi Okubo

hitomi

Holden & Thompson

Hole In One

Holly Miranda

Holy Ghost!

Hoobastank

Horie Yui

Hotel Lights

The Hour Glass

The Hues Corporation

Hundred Waters

Hybrid

Hyperdrive Inc

I:Cube

Ian Pooley

Ice Cube

Ichigo 100%

Ichiko

Idiot Pilot

Ikimonogakari

Ikkitousen

Ilaria Graziano

The Imaginations

Imagine Dragons

Imogen Heap

The Inchtabokatables

Indigoflare

Infected Mushroom

in-grid

The Ink Spots

Inoi team

Insigma

Interflow

The Interludes

Iommi

Ishida Yoko

The Isley Brothers

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

Itou Shizuka

Iyukai

J Daniel

J. Geils Band

J.E. Sawyer

J.E. Sawyer, James Melilli

J.S. Bach

Ja Rule

Jack Wall and Sam Hulick

Jackie & The Starlights

Jackson C. Frank

Jacques Offenbach

Jadakiss

Jaimy & Kenny D

Jakatta feat. Seal

Jake & Jesse

James Iha

Jamie Grace

Jamie Lidell

Jan Driver

Jan Johnston

Jars Of Clay

JASEfos feat. Claire van der Boom

Jason Graves

Jason Michael Carroll

Jason Steele

Jay & The Americans

Jaytech

Jay-Z

Jean Sudbury

Jedidja

Jeff Williams

Jeremy Fisher

Jericho

Jermaine Dupri

Jerome ‘Pacman’ Elia

JERRY GOLDSMITH

Jerry Lee Lewis

Jerry Ropero

JES

Jesper Kyd

Jetta

Jimang

Jimmy Charles

The Jive Five

joachim garraud

Johan Gielen pres. Abena

Johann Pachelbel

Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Strauss

Johann Strauss Jr.

Johannes Brahms

John Dahlback

John Farnham

Johnny Bond

Johnny Cash

Johnny Preston

Johnny Thunder

Joker Jam

Joman

Jon Lajoie

Jonas Steur

The Jones Sisters

Jose Gonzalez

Joseph Haydn - Kodaly Quartet

Journey

JPL

JT Functions

Judas Priest

Jukai

Julia Fischer & Academy of St. Martin In the Fields

Julien-K

Julius Drake & Ian Bostridge

Jun Sasaki

Junkie Xl

Junko Nishi

Jyukai

Kagami Seira

Kagamine Len

Kagamine Rin

Kageyama Hironobu

Kai Tracid

Kaito

Kakazu Yumi, Asakawa Yuu, Orikasa Fumiko & Toyoguchi Megumi

Kalafina

Kalafut & Fygle

Kaleido Star

Kamaya Painters

Kamui

Kamui Gakupo

Kane & Abel 

Kanno Youko

Kanye West

KAORI

Kaori Utatsuki

Karen Overton

KAREN YOUNG

Karin

Katamari Soul Trains

Katie Thompson

Katou Idzumi

Katsuro Tajima

Katy Perry

Kawada Mami

Kawai Eri

Kawai Kenji

Kawasumi Ayako

Kay Kyser

Kazuki Yanagawa

Kazuma Jinnouchi

Kei Shindou

Kekou Souchi

Ken Nakagawa

Kenji Ohtsuki & Fumihiko Kitsutaka

KID

Kidz In the Hall

Kikuko Inoue

The Killers

Kim Ann Foxman & Andy Butler

kim fai

Kimito Lopez

King Unique

KINYA

kirina

Kirk Franklin & The Family

Kitagawa Katsutoshi

Kitagawa Shouri

Kitamura Eri

KIYO

Kiyoura Natsumi

kmc feat. sandy

KOAN Sound

Kobayashi

Koda kumi

Kôji Kaya

KOKIA

Konami Kukeiha Club

Konishi Kayo & Kondoo Yukio

Kool & the Gang

Korn

kos

KOTOKO

Kourin

K-taro Takanami

Kubota Mina

Kugimiya Rie

Kuko

Kuko & Torikki SHirai

Kuko & Yasumi

Brett Kull

Kumi Koda

Kuniva (D12)

Kusakanmuri

Kuwashima Houko

Kyary Pamyu Pamyu

L.S.G.

La Gusana Ciega

La Roux

La Sera

Lain

Larry Hall

Late Night Alumni

Laura Veirs

Laurence Siegel: London Festival Orchestra

LCD Soundsystem

Le Butcherettes

Le Knight Club

Leama

Ledisi

Lee Andrews & The Hearts

Lee Fields

Lemon 8

Léo Delibes

Leon Bolier pres. Inner Stories

Leonid Rudenko

Les Charts

les visiteurs feat. tommie sunshine

Leslie Gore

The Letter Y

Level 42

Lex

Lia

Liam Finn

Libor Pešek: Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra

Life According To Bozo

Lily

Linda Perhacs

Linkin Park

John Linnell

Lionel Richie

Lisa Coleman & Wendy Melvoin

lisa miskovsky

LITTLE ANTHONY & THE IMPERIALS

Little Big Man

Little Tin Frog

Lloyd Banks feat. Akon

LMFAO

LN Movement

LNQ

Local Natives

Lock

Logan Whitehurst

Loic Bertrand: Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra

The London Symphony Orchestra

The Lonely Island

LONG SHOT PARTY

The Long Winters

Loop Control

looseheadz

Lord Of Trance

Lost Weekend Western Swing Band

Lou Christie

Lou Reed & Metallica

LOVERIN TAMBURIN

Lucinda Williams

Ludwig Van Beethoven

Luminary

Lyle Workman

M.I.K.E.

Mac Miller

Mac Zimms

Mack 10

MadamEdea

Madness

Mads Arp

Magdalene Keibel Combo

Mai Kadowaki

Mai Yamane

Major League

Makino Yui

Malcolm McLaren

Malibu Beach

The Mamas & The Papas

Mami Kawada

Man On Earth

Manna

Mannheim Steamroller

Mantovani

Maor Levi

MAORICA

Maracca

Marathons

Marc Marzenit

Marco Bailey

Marcus Schossow

Mariàn Pivka

Marica

Mariko Takase

Marilyn Manson

mario piu’

Mark Mancina

Mark Norman

Marmalade Boy

Maroon 5

Martian Successor Nadesico

Martin ODonnell

Martin Rex

Marty Robbins

Masako Iwanaga

Masako Nozawa & Mayumi Sho

Masami Nakatsukasa

Masami Okui

Mason

Mass Missile

Master P Feat. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony & Silkk The Shocker

Mastodon

The Mat 1 EP

Matchbox Twenty

mathias schaffhauser

Matt Lange

Matt Nathanson

matt samuels

Maurice F. Henschel: Pretoria Philharmonic Orchestra

Maurice Ravel

Mauro Picotto

Max Graham

Max Raabe & Palast Orchester

Maximum The Hormone

Maxwell

maya

May'n & Nakajima Megumi

Mayumi Fujita

The McCoys

Mechalie Jamison

meg rock

Megumi Hayashibara

Megumi Nakajima

Megurine Luka

Mejale Pirates

Mekka

MELL

Memory Tapes

Menahan Street Band

Mermaid Melody

Metallica

Metric

Mi

Mia X Feat. Mystikal

Michael Armstrong

Michael Giacchino

Michael Jackson

Michael McCann

Michael W. Smith

Michoacan

Mick Boogie

The Micronauts

Middle Class Rut

Midori no Hibi

Midway

The Mighty Imperials

Miguel

Mike Morasky

Mikerobenics

Mikuni Shimokawa

David Miller

Milos Karadaglic

The Mindbenders

Minnie Riperton

Mishka

Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels

Mitsunori Ikeda 

Miyuki Hashimoto

Miyuki Kanbe

Mizuki Nana

Mizuki, Nittoku Inoue

Mockba

Modest Mouse

Mono Puff

Monolith

MONORAL

The Monotones

Montell Jordan

Moogwai

Moonbeam

moonbootica

Motocraft

Motorcitysoul

Motorcycle

Movado

Movie Screen Orchestra

Mozzart

Murray Gold & BBC National Orchestra of Wales

Mutemath

My Chemical Romance

My Darkest Days

Mylene Farmer et Seal

Mystery Skulls

Mystical

myuu

Nakajima Ai

Nalin & Kane

Nana

Nana Kitade

Naomi Davis & Sugarman Three

Naomi Shelton & The Gospel Queens

Nat King Cole

Natural High

Naughty Boy

NCB

Neil Davidge

New Vaudeville Band

Newsboys

Nic Chagall

Nice Peter

Nickelson

The Nightcaps

Nihils

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Nino Nardini

Nino/Round Table

Nirvana

Noa Assembly

Nobuo Uematsu, Nittoku Inoue

Norato

Norin & Rad

Notorious B.I.G

NY Alliance

Obie Trice

Obie, Kuniva, Stat Quo, Bobby Creekwater, Cashis

Odyssee

Ohara Sayaka

Ohmi Tomoe

Ohmna

OK Go

Okui Aki

OLIVER CHEATHAM

Oliver Lieb

Oliver Von Dohnányi: Slovak National Phiharmonic Orchestra

Olivia Lufkin

The Olympics

Omori Toshiyuki

One Republic

Oomori Toshiyuki

oOoOO

ORANGE RANGE

Orbital Velocity

Orgasm Death Gimmick

The Oriëntalist

Orita Donichi

Oscar Araujo

Ｏｔｏｍａｎｉａ

The Outlaws

Owl City

Ozgur Can

P.O.S.

Pablo Gargano

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart

Palast Orchester mit Max Raabe

Panic! At The Disco

Papa Roach

Paradise Kiss

Paradise Road

Paramore

Parker & Hanson

Patrick Stump

Patty & the Emblems

Paul Johnson

Paul Oakenfold

Pearl Kyoudai

Peggy Lee

Pendulum

The Penguins

Percy Faith

Pete Thomas, Ashley Slater, Laurie Stras

Peter Falk: Vienna Volksoper Orchestra

Peter Schmalfuss

Petter

Petula Clark

N'Sync

phil collins

Phuture

Pink Elephant

Plain White T’s

planet funk

Planisphere

Plastic Boy

The Platters

Plumtree

Pob feat. X-Avia

The Poets of Rhythm

Point Of Grace

Kanto Symphony

The Polyphonic Spree

PoppinS

Porno Graffitti

Port O'Brien

Powerman 5000

PrEmoEffect

Eliza Rickman

Prince

The Prodigy

Project Monolith

Proof

PSY

Puddle of Mudd

Puhdys

PULLTOP

Pulser

Push

PWB

Qattara

QMAVALLOW

Quadran

Queen

R Kelly

R.O.N

Rachael Starr

Rammstein

Rank 1

rava

Rawrthaas

Ray Conniff

Read or Die

Reba McEntire

Rebecca St. James

Rec

Recepter

Rei

Reinhard Voigt

Renato Girolami, Nicolaus Esterhazy Sinfonia, Hungarian Radio Chorus, Janusz Monarcha, Regina Schorg & Bo Skovhus

Reprise

The Republic Tigers

Reynada Hill

rhu

Richard Gibbs

Richard Marx

Richard Strauss

Richie Valens

Rick James

Rick Springfield

Ricky Martin

Rie Tanaka

Rihanna

Rin Kagimine

Rise Against

Riva

Rival Sons

The Rivieras

RJD2

Roach Motel

Rob Searle

robbie rivera

Robert Babicz

Robert Benfer

Robert Francis

Robert Palmer

Robert Schumann

Robin Beanland

The Roc Project

Rocky Chack

Rodrigo y Gabriela

the rogue element

The Rolling Stones

Ronnie And The Schoolmates

Ronnie Dove

The Roots

The Roues Brothers

Roy Orbison

Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

The Royal Teens

Roze

Rui Da Silva

Rui Nagai

rune rk

Russ Gabriel’s Audio Spectrum

S.B. McCafferty

Saint Seiya

Saitou Chiwa

Sakamoto Maaya

Sakin

Salia

Salt Tank

Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs

Sambuca

San

Sander Van Doorn & Julian Jordan

Sandor Czech Ensemble

Sandy Fox

Saori Nishihata

Sasaki Nozomi

Sasako Shigeharu

Satoko Yamano & Kageyama…

scanty 88

Schiller

School Of Rock

Scoop

score

Scott Grooves

Seabear

Seal

Sean Dexter

Seatbelts

Sebastian Tellier

The Second Coming

Seether

Self

Senoo Takeshi

Serial Experiments Lain

Serj Tankian

Sex Bomb-Omb

Shah & Laruso pres. Global Experience

The Shangri-Las

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings

SHARP 2

Sharp Tools

She Keeps Bees

The Shells

Sheryl Nome starring May'n

The Shields

Shigeru Matsuzaki

Shikata Akiko

Shimamiya Eiko

Shinedown

Shinichi Ishihara

Shinji Orito/Magome Togoshi

Shiny Toy Guns

Shoji Sugiyama, Yu Miyake

Show Luo Feat. Koda Kumi

SID

Sierra Swan

sikk

Silent Breed

SiLK

silvercity

Simon

Simple Minds

Sinichi Ishihara

Sisko

Sister Princess

SISTER SLEDGE

Skillet

Skrillex

Skull Drugrey

The Skyliners

Slipknot

Small Black

Smart System

The Smashing Pumpkins

Smith & Pledger pres. Aspekt

SMS no Minasan

The Sneaker

Snoop Dogg

Snow Patrol

Soft Cell

The Soft Pack

Solar Factor

Solar Stone

Solar Stone and JES

Solaris Heights

Solid Globe

Solkrieg

sonique

SONOROUS

Soulja Slim

South London Voodoo

Space Shuffle

The Spainiels

Sparklehorse

Spiral

Split Second

Squeeze

Staind

Stardust

Stat Quo

A Static Lullaby

Steady Mobbin

Steam

Stephen Rippy

Steve Conte

Steve Forte Rio

Steve Jablonsky

Steve May

Steve Winwood

Steven Curtis Chapman

Stone Factory

Stone Sour

Strauss

Stray Cats

Stray Dog

streetlife dj’s

Strong Arm Steady

Stuck in the Sound

The Students

Styles Of Beyond

Styxx

Suara

Sugarman Three

Sum 41

SUN

Sunburst

Sunday Club

Superspy

The Supremes

Surfer Blood

Susan Ashton

Susumu Hirasawa

Suzuki Konomi

Svetlana Stanceva; Alberto Lizzio: Mozart Festival Orchestra

Swifty McVay & Mr. Porter

The Swimmer

Sylvia Cápová

Symphony Of Love II

System of a Down

Systematic Parts

T. Rex

T.L.T.

Tainaka Sachi

Takahashi Youko

Takeshi Senoo

Taking Back Sunday

Talib Kweli

Taneri

Tastexperience

TATA VEGA

Taucher

Taxigirl

TCY Force

Tears For Fears

Teddyloid

Teebs

Teikoku Yousei

The Temper Trap

The Temptations

TENMON & Eiichiro Yanagi / minori

Tex Beneke and Margaret Whiting

Theory Of A Dead Man

They Might Be Giants

Third Man

This Radiant Boy

Thomas Bangalter

Thomas Schumacher

The Thompson Twins

Three Days Grace

Three Drives

Tiger Army

Till Lindemann & Richard Kruspe

Tilt

Timothy Bloom

Tina Turner

TLC

Todd Rundgren

Together

Tokyo Mew Mew

TOM

Tom Cloud

Tom Mangan

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

tomas andersson

Tommy James & The Shondells

Tomoe Ohmi

Tomoki Hasegawa

Tomomitsu Kaneko

Tony Yayo

Toro y Moi

Melanie Martinez

Jason Trachtenburg

Tranquilizer

Transa

Tremor

Trigun

The Troggs

Tupac

Turboweekend

Twila Paris

Twilight

Twilight-Perception

Two Steps from Hell

U2

UGK Feat. N.O. Joe

UNDER17

The Used

Ushio Hashimoto

Utada Hikaru

Utah Saints

UVERworld

V6

The Vaccines

Vanessa Mae

VDM

Vegas Soul

The Veil Kings

Vengaboys

The Videos

Vimana

Vince Guaraldi Trio

Vincent de Moor

Viper 2

Vitamin String Quartet

Vitaminless

Vladimir Petroschoff: Berliner Festival Orchestra

The Vogues

Voltaire

Vondelpark

The Voyager

V-Three

W.A. Mozart

Wada Kaoru

Waffle

Wang Chung

the wanted

Way Out West

Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders

Weird Al Yankovic

West & Storm

Wheed Baskin

The Whigs

White Lies

White Rabbits

Wighnomy Bros.

Wild Bunch

Will.I.Am

William Elliot Whitmore

William Fitzsimmons

William Hartnell

The Willows

Wiz Khalifa

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Woods

World Clique

The Wrens

Xero

Xzibit

Yahel

Yanase Natsumi

Yanni

Yasunori Iwasaki

Yeasayer

Ylvis

Yo Hitoto

Yoko

Yoko Kanno

Yoshino Yuuji

Youko Ishida

Young Parisians

Yousei Teikoku

Yu Miyake

Yui Horie

Yuka

Yuka

Yuri Misawa

Yves DeRyter

Zack Knight

zdar

Zedd

Zoo Brazil