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technomaestro · 3 years ago

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Top 5 Video Game Soundtracks

Ok. Let's try this *again*. I had a whole thing written up and I accidentally refreshed the page, so tumblr ate the entire thing, and I lost it.

Destiny 2 There's a reason D2 is one of my all time favorite games, and the music for it is one of those reasons. Destiny 2's sweeping orchestral soundtrack is full of songs that encapsulate that grand, epic nature of the world and conflict you find yourself in as the Guardian. From the mission tracks like 1AU/Forge Ahead , Valkyrie, and Guns Blazin which provide this cinematic backdrop as you fight for your victories, to the epic swelling of the raid bosses where the tension in their first phases is replaced with triumphant moments where the tide turns as seen in Riven of a Thousand Voices or Insurrection Prime (even the most hated boss in Destiny has a pretty baller theme with tons of brass in it as you get ready to put him in his grave one last time after fighting him multiple times throughout the raid). Locations such as the Dreaming City have tracks that manage to encapsulate the mystery and history behind each location. No matter my feelings and critiques on the gameplay or the story, the music in Destiny 2 is just an absolute gift of musical genius. Michael Salvatori (yes, that same Michael Salvatori from Halo) is one of my favorite composers for the work he's put into that series. Favorite track: Journey ft. Kronos Quartet. This is the song that plays after the deafening silence that comes from escaping the city during the initial Red War campaign, where you montage your way through an unforgiving wilderness, powerless, as the city fades into the distance behind you. You've been beaten, your home taken from you, but the music swells with hope as you follow a sign from the Traveler - and you know you'll return to reclaim your city. I highly recommend taking a peek at the mission, as you can't play it anymore, to see what I mean as to how the track absolutely enhances the experience.

Hades Supergiant games - the people behind Bastion and Transistor, two other games with amazing soundtracks - really did knock it out of the park with Hades. This game's soundtrack is a wonderful blend of classic acoustic instruments (Check it out - it's called a Bağlama) mixed with metal and electronica to create a theme that evokes not only the aesthetics of the region, but also give it a modern twist that meshes with the dark, haunting vibes of the underworld that you reside in. Each track flows so well from one into the next, mixing perfectly with each area or character you encounter. And the two musical characters you encounter - Orpheus and Eurydice - add in plenty of musical flair to the game themselves. The motifs present in the songs are called back frequently to make it a coherent, consistent soundtrack, and it remixes so incredibly well. Favorite Track: God of the Dead - the theme for the final boss of each run, this track is incredible. Not only does it reflect the theme of Zagreus in a different key, showing the link between Hades and his son, before delving into this heavy, frantic track that perfectly encapsulates having to fight

Payday 2 There are exactly two ways to play Payday 2. The first is stealth - you won't have much in the way of music as you silently slip by cops, cameras, and civilians to reach your score. The other is the way I play, where you suit up in the heaviest body armor you can get, grab two automatic shotguns, and go to town to some of the best soundtracks in the game. Payday 2 has a unique musical cue system with it's audio during loud heists, where it amps up the tracks in time with what the cops are doing. At first, before you've been detected, you have the Stealth track which is always low and very basic to not intrude. In low points, like when you first go loud and the first responders arrive on the scene, you're in a Control track. Then, as the police gear up, it switches to a higher temp Anticipation Track, and then when the police storm your position, the Assault track. So each "song" in Payday 2 is actually 4 songs in one, that the game blends seamlessly together in order to match the audio with the gameplay. It's an incredibly clever system that keeps you immersed in the tension of the heist even as Bain, your mastermind, calls out over comms with instructions. And it helps that almost all of the tracks are exceptional bangers in their own right, with amped up electronica with great percussion and bass lines alongside rebellious hard hitting metal and rock. But during those assault tracks, there's something satisfying about hearing the build, reloading your guns, then timing you leaving cover to unleash fury with the bass drop. There's a great playlist here with links to the different types of tracks if you want to take a peek yourself. Favorite Track: I Will Give You My All - one of the few tracks with built in vocals. This particular track feels like the exact kind of music I'd see in a movie, and with the build I run in game for Loud stuff at the moment which incentivizes me running face first at bulldozers and cloakers, giving it my all is *exactly* what I intend to do in that game.

Horizon Zero Dawn HZD's soundtrack is full of the same sort of sweeping orchestral stuff that made me love Destiny 2, with tracks that serve to accentuate the world around you. The only reason it's down here at 4 and not higher is because there's a somewhat lack of variety; as a singleplayer story game, most of the music you encounter tends to be in cutscenes, rather than during gameplay. That isn't a *bad* thing however, and over the hundreds, if not thousands of games I've played, reaching #4 on the list is no small feat. The actual orchestral bits pair so well with being able to cultivate this theme of a world full of grandeur, the kind of which you'd see in nature documentaries. The various tracks illicit this feeling of a long forgotten hope, which if you know anything about the plot, ties in perfectly. The music that *does* play outside of the incredible cutscenes add to the world's aesthetic so well, pairing the sort of instruments you'd find people playing in the civilizations you encounter with the environments you find them in. Even the battle music, when there is battle music, is a tense affair; the game incentivizes you to stalk your prey, as Aloy is not a frontline fighter: she's a hunter among predators, and the music matches that tone. Favorite Track: A tie between Aloy's Journey, which provides not only natural sounds mixed with the instruments of the Nora and the underpinning of techno that permeates the story (in addition to one of my favorite musical things where you have these grand sweeping vocals that aren't actually lyrics) and Your Hand of Sun And Jewels, which gives off this sort of air of walking through city streets in golden sunlight, where people dance just a block away and you can smell the fragrant spices of the local cuisine. It makes me yearn and if I listen to it on full blast I can forget that I'm stuck at home for a moment.

Pokemon Heart Gold & Soul Silver Pokemon OSTs hold a special place in my heart because as much as I loved games as a kid, getting started on things like Mappy for the NES (which, now that I write that, really shows how fuckin *old* I am), Pokemon was one of the first things that I basically turned into my personality as a child. Silver version especially was one of the ones that *truly* got me going, as in Blue version I always felt one step behind my brother but Silver was *my* game, my generation. I have extremely fond memories of that game, from the Lake of Rage to trying to beat a ghost gym with a Sentret and it taking four hours because normal types and ghost types are just... immune to each other. But when Soul Silver came out and remastered the soundtrack, it brought back this wave of nostalgia. The bit tunes I remember had been brought to life, in a way that was recognizably Pokemon. Hearing it again brought back the waves of wanting to journey and be a hero again that when the game came out, I was sorely missing. The music in the game is upbeat and chipper, befitting a near solarpunk world that I want to live in. Iconic tracks remain iconic but with a bit of cultural flair, showing that the Johto region hasn't lost touch with it's roots. While it isn't the almighty trumpeting of Gen 3, the nostalgic tracks that are already evocative of nostalgia brings a yearning back for a time when things were simpler and I could just play games. Also, the Rival theme is *rocking*. Favorite Track: Route 26 Theme. Route 26 is also known as Tohjo Falls, the place which connects Johto and Kanto together. And for me, this route represents having reached a triumph and the energy to explore what's next. It's a critique directly against the Hero's Journey's unfortunate end, that they can never go home - the hero here *can* go home, but they choose to set out again for new sights. It's full of the fact that when it plays, you're taking your steps into something new, something bold, and full of new challenges that await you. It is, by far, one of my favorite tracks and the orchestral version brings me to tears.

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daggerzine · 3 years ago

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The Simon Provencher interview (by Tom Murphy)

Simon Provencher is perhaps best known for his frenetic and creative guitar work for the post-punk band VICTIME out of Québec. But on March 26, 2021 the musician released his debut EP Mesures via Michel Records. It is six tracks of free jazz collages that bear favorable comparison to the avant-garde compositions of Anthony Braxton as Provencher makes creative and playful use of clarinet, electric guitar, percussion and processing to convey a strong sense of mood and place while making one very aware of aspects of the environment around us we often tune out. In pairing aspects of exploratory jazz and musique concrète, Provencher has given us an album that is both soothing and keeps us grounded in the present. The composer and musician recently answered some questions we presented to him via email about the nature of his music, its inspirations and methods of crafting its elegantly evocative passages.

Dagger Zine (Tom Murphy): Mesures will probably hit some people's ears as akin to a free jazz or spontaneous composition type of record. How did you approach putting together these songs and experimenting with sound compared with maybe how you do with VICTIME?

Simon Provencher: People wouldn’t be wrong in these assumptions at all. Mesures is a record that was written very quickly. I decided to trust my first instincts for much of the record. With VICTIME, our approach has always been more iterative. By that I mean that we’ll loop “embryonic” parts over and over again, slowly changing elements, morphing the composition until we found ourselves happy with how everything sounded together. I’m still very much into this way of writing, but Mesures was a much more immediate affair.

For me, inspiration almost always comes from timbre, usually through loads of guitar pedals. In this case though, I wanted to see what sounds and textures I could get out of the electric guitar without using any external effects or even amplification. Timbre was still my main concern, but in a more subtle way I guess. I slightly detuned the strings and experimented with resonances, chord shapes, finger placement, fingernails, etc. I also “prepared” the guitar: I jammed objects between the strings and tied sewing thread to the strings (if you pinch the thread with slightly wet fingers and slide them around, you get eerie, reverse-like effects).

Enough about me though, another big change was that this record was made remotely with two new collaborators, Elyze Venne-Deshaies (clarinet) and Olivier Fairfield (percussion). Both of them had “carte blanche” (pardon my french) to do whatever they wanted. I can’t speak much to their personal approach to improvisation, but both of them are seasoned veterans and delivered absolutely amazing performances.

D: Some people might think of any kind of music declared experimental is a barrier to its acceptance but your album seems to me very accessible as a form of pure expression. Do you have a sense of why your songs seem so open and, as one reviewer put it, welcoming?

S: I don’t quite know actually. I do agree that the songs have a certain softness to them that was certainly somewhat intentional. When I did the initial guitar parts, I did set out to make something conventionally “beautiful”, or at least “not harsh”. I don’t really have the vocabulary to describe what happened there, but the resonances, repetitions and patterns definitely implied a soft mood from the get go.

I guess this foundation inspired Elyze and Olivier to also play with softer tones, to approach the music with warmth and subtlety in mind. They really “got” the vibe of the music without me ever telling them anything about my intentions. A “shift” of some kind happened when the clarinet parts were added to the drums and guitars. I felt like the mood of the pieces almost completely changed (in a positive way, of course). I think there’s something to the linearity of Elyze and Olivier’s playing, in contrast with the repetitive, hypnotic guitars that gives the music a sense of wandering aimlessness which I really love.

On the audio engineering side, I did intentionally mix the songs with a certain softness in mind. We added some warm tape saturation to some of the sounds and carved out a lot of higher frequencies. On the songs with feedback and noise, Simon Labelle, who mastered the record, made it so that when the clarinets get louder, the high-frequency content ducks out of the way a little bit. This nifty little trick does help out a lot with making the noisy songs more warm and inviting too.

D: Listening through the album I found it resonated with the albums of Anthony Braxton and Ornette Coleman. The former of which never considered his music part of jazz though he is often associated with that form of music and the latter who expanded the range, dynamics and tonal choices of jazz. Were you inspired by in any way by those forms of abstract yet emotionally expressive music? How might you describe its impact on what you've done?

S: I totally was! I discovered Anthony Braxton through Québec jazz guitar great René Lussier. I’ve been a fan of Le Trésor de la Langue for a while and I got into his back catalog last year: his collaborations with Fred Frith, EAI stuff and more, some of which was released on “Les Disques Victo”. “Victo” stands for Victoriaville, a small city between Quebec and Montreal, where there’s a great contemporary music festival named FIMAV. Shamefully, I haven’t actually been to FIMAV yet, but I’ve loved finding recordings of some amazing concerts, a favourite being Anthony Braxton and Derek Bailey’s 1987 Moment Précieux. I was amazed to find out about this rich local history of musical experimentation and improvisation. This record was very much inspired by the whole FIMAV sound.

Coleman is another great point of reference. His records and those of his collaborators, Don Cherry being another big one, all are major inspirations. As a guitar player, I especially got into James “Blood” Ulmer’s career. I really admire his approach to guitar and the immediacy and expressiveness of his music.

I’m probably paraphrasing it all wrong, but Don Cherry said of Ornette Coleman’s “harmolodic” approach that instead of improvising from chords, like in bebop, you’d start with melodies and improvise to create new forms, harmonies, rhythms to try and reach a certain “brilliance” as he calls it. You’d try to make the music transcend. In harmolodic theory, melody, rhythm and harmony are treated as equals, no solos, no lead and accompaniment dichotomy, no strict timing, scale or tonality.

This is both quite simple but also quite hard to actually grasp in a musical setting, and I’m far from mastering any of it, nor is it necessarily something I strive for, but it is an inspiring way to conceive improvised music for sure.

D: The first half of the album you make great use of what sounds like atonal melodies yet they perfectly convey the mood and lend a sense of texture. What informed employing those sounds in the songwriting?

S: I’ve always written music without much regard for tonality, key, etc. My musical background is still very much anchored in No Wave and noise music, where skronky chords and weird, unstable melodies are the norm rather than the exception. When playing, I really don’t think much about it, I follow what sounds good to me in the moment.

Looking back on the recorded music though, I feel like there is a lot of nuance to be found in atonality and imperfection. Detuned chords ringing out have such complex and interesting decaying resonances, you can almost hear the frequencies battling each other. These interactions between notes and lines that fall just short of resolving are part of the magic and intrigue of abstract music. In the case of Mesures, I think there’s something special with how some of the atonal, out of tune textures and weird synths clash beautifully with the in-tune clarinet parts, making either one “pop out” depending on where you focus your attention.

D: The second half or at least the second three songs on the album use processed drones and what some might call noise underneath or in the background, although very much a presence in the mix, of the clarinets? What do you feel this almost contrast in sounds conveyed that say a more conventional arrangement might not?

The second half of the record is basically a rearrangement of the first three songs. There’s four clarinet parts in there! On the first side, they fade in and out of focus, but on side B, everything is there all at once.

This is basically the result of me simply “soloing” the clarinet takes in my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation, the software used to arrange and mix the music). When I heard the four clarinets at once, I really fell in love with the sound.

So I knew I wanted this to be the focal point of the rearrangement, and I knew I wanted to add something. I just happened to be working with feedback that week, so it kind of fell in place. Feedback manipulation was a technical interest first, I had gotten a new guitar pedal called a Feedback Looper, which sends some of your output signal back into the input of a series of pedals. This creates self-oscillating and rich, detailed noises that are somewhat interactive and malleable. By turning some knobs and flicking some switches on ordinary guitar pedals, you end up with an infinite amount of possible glitches and shrieking high frequency tones.

I don’t know if my ears got accustomed to it or what, but I’ve come to really enjoy the sound of this process. I also really love the tactile aspect of it, it feels kind of like an unpredictable modular synthesizer. When I had recorded the feedback improvisation, which I did in one single take, I thought this sparse, harsh rearrangement was a nice contrast with the more warm, conventional first three songs. At that point, the record felt complete.

D: The final three songs also remind me of Philip Glass in his soundtrack work wherein he mixes the playful and flowing with the dissonant. How would you say these sounds complement each other in your own music?

S: Especially on this release, while there are a lot of sounds that are contrasting with each other, I also feel like there is a sense of shared directionality. The song Et quart is a good example of this. The high feedback notes start out in almost complete opposition to the meandering low clarinet lines, but, as the song progresses, the sounds somehow seem to merge with each other and they end up flowing in the same direction for the song’s climax.

D: What are some other artists operating now that you find interesting and/or inspirational and resonant with what you're doing?

There’s way too many to name them all, but I’ll try! I think there’s a very interesting local-ish scene around me. I admire the work of N NAO, either her solo releases or her collaborations with Joni Void. Sarah Pagé does mind-bending music with harp and effects; I’ve had the pleasure of catching her live in Ottawa just before the pandemic started last year. Kara-Lys Coverdale is also a major inspiration, so is Kee Avil, whose live show and guitar playing blew me away.

I also need to shout out my friend (and bandmate) Mathieu A. Seulement, whose end-year list allowed me to catch up on a lot of fantastic new music, including, but not limited to Ana Roxane’s Because of a Flower, Jasmine Guffond’s Microphone Permission, Caterina Barbieri’s Ecstatic Computation and, last but not least, Holly Herndon’s magnificent Proto.

**the three Simon photos were taken by Charlotte Savoie

www.simonprovencher.bandcamp.com

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lingthusiasm · 5 years ago

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Transcript Episode 45: Tracing languages back before recorded history

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 45: Tracing languages back before recorded history. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 45 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about language families and reconstructing proto-languages. First, we’re excited to announce that the LingComm grants have been granted. We have amazing winners that are listed in the show notes page or on the website lingcomm.org.

Gretchen: You can stay tuned for further news from our four grantees. As their projects start coming out, we’ll be telling you about them as well.

Lauren: Speaking of things that are out and in the world, I’m very excited that P. M. Freestone’s Crown of Smoke, which is the conclusion to the Shadowscent duology, is now available. The UK edition is available worldwide. I created the Aramteskan language for those books. We talked about that for Book 1 in our Episode 37 about language and smell because it’s set in a world where scent is really evocative and powerful. If you want to know how that book series ends, you can get Book 2 now.

Gretchen: This month’s Patreon bonus episode is about linguistics with kids – books and activities and observations that you can do with kids to learn more about how they’re learning language or to incite a joy of language with kids.

Lauren: You can get this as one of 40 bonus episodes that we have available at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: We have over 40 bonus episodes. If you’ve listened to all of the main Lingthusiasm episodes and you’re like, “Oh no! I wish there were more Lingthusiasm,” good news – you can support the show and listen to so many bonus episodes that are right there waiting for you.

[Music]

Gretchen: While we’re talking about history and getting kids excited about linguistics, can we go back into really ancient history and talk about how I got into linguistics?

Lauren: Oh my gosh, yes.

Gretchen: I’ve told part of this story before. I first encountered linguistics when I was around 12 or 13, and I happened across a pop linguistics book on a bookshelf –

Lauren: Ah, so this was started by a specific book! How interesting.

Gretchen: This was started by a specific book that I still have. I came across this bookshelf, and I just sort of picked it up because it looked like pop science and I knew I liked pop science. Then, I got about halfway through it, and I was reading it and I was like, “This is so cool! This is the coolest thing! This book is never leaving my possession again!” Fortunately, it belonged to my grandparents and they were willing to let me steal it.

Lauren: Nice of them.

Gretchen: One of the things that really sparked my imagination when I was reading this pop linguistics book was that it had this chapter about proto-world.

Lauren: Proto-world?

Gretchen: I feel like you have to say it like that – PROTO-WOOOORLD.

Lauren: Ok, let me try. I was about PROTO-WOOOORLD!

Gretchen: Exactly. This is this tremendously exciting idea that maybe we could figure out what the oldest language in the world sounds like. To me, at the time, this seemed incredibly exciting. What an ambitious task. All of the 7,000 languages in the world, you could figure out what they might have in common. Unfortunately, as I discovered –

Lauren: I don’t want to disappoint 13-year-old Gretchen, but that’s a bit of a tall order.

Gretchen: Unfortunately, as I learned more about linguistics, I also learned that proto-world is not a thing.

Lauren: But, having said that, the ability to take what we know about languages now and work backwards is definitely a thing. That’s the field of historical linguistics.

Gretchen: Right! What we can do is we can go back at this time depth of a few thousand years – 2,000 years to maybe 5,000 years – and figure out what languages had in common there and figure out some larger language families. Fortunately, very interestingly, language is probably some hundreds of thousands of years old. There’s just no way of going back to that extreme time depth. But, for this couple thousand years that we can do, it’s super interesting.

Lauren: I think it’s worth explaining why things get too squishy to go back to PROTO-WOOOORLD by looking at how we start doing historical linguistics and why you can only go back so far.

Gretchen: Exactly. I think the language that a lot of people think of when we think about reconstructing historical languages is this language called Proto-Indo-European. You don’t have say to PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN because this one’s pretty solid.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: This is the reconstructed ancestor language of many of the languages that are spoken in Europe and the Indian subcontinent. Not all of them. There are some that aren’t related to this, like Basque and Hungarian. But most of the languages spoken in Europe, and a large number of languages spoken in India, all have this relationship.

Lauren: I think it’s not super surprising to people that languages are related. As an English speaker, if you hear German or Dutch, you’re like, “I can recognize some of those words. They’re easy.”

Gretchen: I don’t think it really takes a whole reconstructing proto-language to hear the English word “apple” and the German word “Apfel” and be like, “Hm, I wonder if there’s a connection there.”

Lauren: “Woah! They’re related?!”

Gretchen: Or even better, the Dutch word which is literally also “appel” but spelled differently. I don’t think that’s rocket science.

Lauren: What I think is impressive though, and where historical linguistics really came into its own, is looking at similarities but also differences and figuring out how those differences were systematic, so you can work back in time. If you think about as languages go on the sounds change so, if you put that in reverse, you can reverse those sound changes to figure out what an earlier version of the language might’ve sounded like.

Gretchen: You can make fun of this apple/Apfel example, but there are connections that are a little bit less intuitive. One of my favourite connections is you get these very large and elaborate tables, which we cannot convey tables in an audio podcast form –

Lauren: Not pleasantly, anyway.

Gretchen: – that go through and look at particular words. You have a word like “pater” in Latin and “father” in English and “pitar” in Sanskrit and “Vater” in German. You can look at then and be like, “Huh, all of those languages except for English have that T in the middle.” English has a /θ/ sound, which isn’t that different from a T. You have “padre” in Spanish. You’re like, “Uh, D, that’s not that different from a T.” Maybe there was an ancestor language that had a word like this for “father” that also had a T in the middle. Or if you have “pater” from Latin with a P, and Sanskrit both have a P, and German has a V, and English has an F, you can be like, okay, well, we have two Ps – well, several Ps – and a couple Fs and Vs. Maybe there was one of these, especially the P because Latin and Sanskrit are spoken pretty far apart – German and English are spoken pretty close together, just geographically – so maybe the ancestor language had a P there as well. You can do that comparison at this very, very nitty gritty level for a whole bunch of individual words and figure out which sounds change. Again, if you see P changing to F from Latin to English in “father,” you should also see P changing to F in other words. The Latin word “pes, pedes,” meaning “foot,” it’s cognate with foot because, again, there’s that P to F change. Well, German is “Fuß,” which isn’t a V, so, again, you have to account for this. You can go through and make these very elaborate tables with cross comparisons.

Lauren: My favourite historical sound change comparison, because I think it’s always good to have a favourite, is the – if you look across a lot of languages that are related to Latin, they have a /k/ sound where the German languages, which branched off at a slightly different time and in a slightly different way, have a /h/ sound, which means that the word “canine,” which is the Latin for “dog,” and the word “hound” are actually historically related. That /k/h/ is one example of the change.

Gretchen: Because they both have this N afterwards.

Lauren: Yeah. There’re other changes that happen as well. “Heart” and “cordial,” or “cordis,” which is where a lot of our medical words around “heart/coronary,” come from, that’s that Latin /k/ again.

Gretchen: My favourite example with English “heart” – which is, again, there’s your H – my favourite example of the specific /k/ to /h/ change is in “cornucopia” versus “horn of plenty.”

Lauren: It’s right there.

Gretchen: That “cornu-” at the beginning of ��cornucopia,” that’s a horn! And the “-orn” part, “corn” and “horn,” you really see a lot of similarities because the rest of the sounds in those words haven’t changed as much.

Lauren: The nice thing about “cornucopia” is that we borrowed “copious” from Latin to mean “a lot.” Because it wasn’t just a word that stayed in English and had the systematic sound change, we didn’t borrow it as “hopious.” We just borrowed it with the Latin sound. That’s the difference between words that are borrowed and words that are related.

Gretchen: The neat thing about doing this comparative reconstruction is that you need to figure out, okay, first of all, what do we know about the history of this word? Because the word “copious” in English isn’t gonna give us evidence for what was going on in the ancestor language of the Germanic languages because we know that it was borrowed from Latin much more recently. First of all, figuring out where all these words came from and then doing the comparison only with that bit of core vocabulary that did have all of the sound changes happen to it. The fun thing is that, as an English speaker, because we’ve borrowed so many words from other European languages at various times, is that we can often see these sound changes happen even within English. Even if you don’t speak Latin, you can be like, “Oh, I know the word ‘cornucopia.’” You can see this happen within English as well because we’ve borrowed words at different time depths.

Lauren: One thing I’m always blown away with, with historical linguistics doing this comparison and then working backwards to reconstruct an older language, is just how many words it requires, how much knowledge of which words are a borrowing and which words are original to the language. For every sound rule there’s always these sub-rule exceptions because in front of some verb something doesn’t happen. It’s this meticulous work. As computers have become more advanced, the scale of the work has expanded so much because you can crunch more data. There’s very large spreadsheets and tables that happen to build these reconstructions. But even before that, people could go so far back to reconstruct what they think words were like before written records because writing is actually a relatively new invention, especially writing of sounds and not just images for words.

Gretchen: Writing is so new. It’s so interesting to look back at this part before written records exist. This is why people call them proto-languages. Any language that’s preceded by a “proto” is something that’s been reconstructed. Sometimes, you get Old English. We have records of that. We have books about it. But if it’s a proto-language, it’s specifically called that because we don’t have any sort of written records and it’s been figured out in that sort of way. I think what I really love about historical linguistics is the way that it pays attention – the people who do it – pay such close attention to what’s attested and what’s reconstructed and the sources of information. There’s this convention in historical linguistics to write an asterisk before proto-words. This confused me coming from the rest of linguistics because in the rest of linguistics, you put an asterisk before a word or sentence that’s not grammatical.

Lauren: Or like in my instant message chat where I frequently have to use an asterisk because I misspelt a word and need to correct it.

Gretchen: Well, okay, there’s that too. I think that is a bit later of a usage than the linguistic sense. Normally, in most of linguistics, an asterisk is used for “This is ungrammatical.” This is like “horn plenty of” or something like that, which you wouldn’t say those words in that order. Historical linguists use that asterisk as a reminder to themselves to be humble about it. It’s not that it’s ungrammatical; it’s that it’s unattested. “This one isn’t real” in the same sort of way as like, “This is ungrammatical. It’s negative evidence. This one isn’t real.” Except, for the historical linguists, it’s “We’ve put in a whole bunch of effort and we’ve had all these theoretical debates and we’ve come up with our best effort possible with a lot of sweat and tears to figure out this thing that we still want to acknowledge as not real.” The asterisk there is really a sort of intellectual humility.

Lauren: You begin to see why proto-world would be such a challenge because, by the time you get to Proto-Indo-European, which was probably spoken 4,000 years B.C.E. – so you’re looking at 5,000 to 6,000 years ago for Proto-Indo-European – you are making a lot of guesses to get to that point. Then, if you try and compare it to any other proto-language that’s been reconstructed, you’re now making guesses out of two guesses which becomes very slippery.

Gretchen: It’s like if you have one number that’s fairly uncertain that’s got a margin of error – you know, plus or minus 5% – and you have another number that also has a margin of error of plus or minus 5%, and then you multiply together, you suddenly have a number that has an error of, I think it’s plus or minus 25% because I think you also multiply the margins of errors. Don’t quote me on the statistics, but the point is you get a worse number – a less precise number that has a greater margin of error. The same thing happens when you try to do that. There are some attempts to say, “Okay, well, even if we can’t do PROTO-WOOOORLD, maybe we can find an ancestor language of Proto-Indo-European that is spoken in a slightly larger area,” but even that is still very speculative because of the time depth involved.

Lauren: Unless we discover some way that spoken and signed languages left fossils or we invent time travel, neither of which feel particularly plausible, we’re stuck with the –

Gretchen: I always say this is the first thing that I’m gonna do whenever I get my hands on a time machine is I’m gonna go back and retrace some language families. People just don’t seem to understand why this is such an important idea.

Lauren: So compelling. I would fund the heck out of that time travel research.

Gretchen: Thank you! I appreciate it. We need to write a grant. It’s still really neat. If you know a couple of Indo-European languages, you can use it to make nifty connections. I definitely managed to figure out some various Dutch vocabulary from my knowledge of English and German. I was able to be like, oh, I can probably triangulate on what this word means because I know what the sound changes have been. That’s really satisfying. I also think that when we talk about historical linguistics and comparative reconstruction, it’s easy to get down the Indo-European rabbit hole because it’s so satisfying to do this with languages where you already know potentially more than one of them or at least you have a bunch of borrowed cognate vocabulary to work with and to see these connections between languages that you’re maybe more familiar with. There’s a whole bunch of comparative reconstruction that’s also happened in language families in the rest of the world as well.

Lauren: Yes. I’d hate for people to think that this is the only language that this has happened for. It is an area where there has been a lot of written records, and I think that has helped drive a lot of that work and a lot of local interest from Europeans who are interested in tracing their own languages back.

Gretchen: I mean, the Indo-European languages have been written down longer than some languages, not as long as others. You could go pretty far back with Semitic languages too, I expect, because they’ve been written down for a long time. One thing that I find really interesting is – so Proto-Algonquian, which is the ancestor language of the Algonquian languages which are spoken in a large portion of Canada, especially – not in the north – but a large portion from British Columbia all the way to Nova Scotia and the Maritimes on the east and into the north-eastern United States in New England. There’s about 30 Algonquian languages. Proto-Algonquian is a really well attested, well reconstructed language family that is the ancestor language from which these languages are descended. The estimate’s that it was probably spoken around 2,000 to 3,000 years ago and, like with the apple/Apfel example, it’s very clear at a certain level to speakers that these languages are similar and that these languages feel like cousins. If you get some speakers of different Algonquian languages in a room together – and I’ve been to the Algonquian conference when I was in grad school and you had different speakers and different linguists who had researched these languages – sometimes they just sit around being like, “What’s your word for this? Oh, yeah, we have that.” It can be really fun.

Lauren: Okay. So, no one is like, surprised by Proto-Algonquian as a concept?

Gretchen: No one is surprised by Proto-Algonquian as a concept. I noticed when researching for this episode that there had actually been a linguist who had noticed this connection 10 years before one of the early famous speeches about Indo-European. Even if you want European intellectual tradition bragging rights, which are their own thing – it is definitely not where all knowledge comes from – but even if you want to participate in that tradition, this language family has been talked about for a long time.

Lauren: Cool!

Gretchen: I should probably mention a few of the names of the languages in Algonquian because many of them are languages that people have probably heard of – Ojibwe, Cree, Massachusett, Menominee, Wampanoag, Blackfoot, Mi’kmaq, Innu. There’re a whole bunch of languages that are in this family. A lot of words from them have been borrowed into English at this point. A lot of words for concepts that English speakers encountered in North America, things like “moose,” “chipmunk,” “moccasin,” “hickory,” “caribou,” “racoon,” “skunk,” “succotash,” “toboggin,” “woodchuck.” Some of these were reshaped on the model of more English-looking words. “Woodchuck” was reshaped. But a lot of words for animals and concepts in North America were ultimately borrowed from an Algonquian language.

Lauren: That’s really cool. I assume that place names are probably also somewhere this pops up a lot as well.

Gretchen: Tons of place names – “Ottawa,” “Massachusetts,” “Connecticut.” I mean, and there are other indigenous languages spoken in this area. Iroquoian languages are also spoken in this area and they’re not related, but they were some of the first languages that European settlers had contact with. A lot of their words for things in the North American continent became the English words for the items as well.

Lauren: Once you have a word for “raccoon,” you can take that word with you across the country.

Gretchen: What’s also really interesting is that these languages had structural and grammatical similarities as well.

Lauren: That’s cool because so far, we’ve only talked about doing historical work by comparing words and sounds and working backwards from them. Of course, we also have grammar, and grammar between closely related languages can be very similar and tends to be more similar. If you’ve learnt a language close to English or you’ve learnt English from the basis of speaking another Germanic language and then learnt a grammar of a very different language family, I think that’s probably something you’ve encountered before.

Gretchen: Indo-European languages, for example, often have a grammatical gender distinction between masculine, feminine, and neuter. Some of them have collapsed some of those genders into just masculine and feminine, or neuter and common, with common as the collapsed masculine-plus-feminine gender. Or in some cases, like English, they only retained relics of that on the pronoun system. Algonquian languages have an animate/inanimate contrast, which is also a way of splitting things up. They also do particular things with the verb depending on whether they’re dealing with animate nouns or inanimate nouns. There’s a lot of ways that that animate/inanimate contrast shows up and goes all the way through the grammar.

Lauren: A bit like with sounds we look for that systematic change with the grammar. We can look at systematic ways that it pops up across each individual language and then compare them to see if we can find commonalities.

Gretchen: Sometimes, reconstructing sounds can help us find bits of grammar. One of the ways where animate versus inanimate shows up in Algonquian languages is that the way of making the plural is different. If we can reconstruct a plural suffix for the animate nouns and we can reconstruct a plural suffix for the inanimate ones, then that must mean that they had this distinction between the two suffixes because otherwise they wouldn’t both exist and they wouldn’t exist in all the daughter languages.

Lauren: This is one of the fun things about historical linguistics is that it lets you dabble in all the different parts. You have to know a little bit about how sounds might work and change and how grammatical structures work and how they might change across languages as well. You get to look at all the different parts of how language works.

Gretchen: Indo-European languages in general don’t distinguish between inclusive and exclusive “we.” You know, “You and me, we’re going to go to the movies” versus “Me and this other person, we’re gonna go to the movies, and we’re leaving you behind.”

Lauren: Oh, okay. But at least I know. At least I’m not waiting for my invitation over here.

Gretchen: At least you know. You’re not waiting. The Algonquian languages all do make this distinction. That’s something you can reconstruct because all these related languages make it. Whereas, Indo-European languages, none of them make this distinction. This is the kinds of fine-grained grammatical stuff that can last for thousands of years that this distinction sticks around, or it doesn’t.

Lauren: So great.

Gretchen: There’s this really great website the Algonquian Linguistics Atlas that has audio files of speakers saying various words and phrases in different Algonquian languages. They’re kind of mapped around. You can click on sound files and hear what they sound like and how they’re written in various different areas. We’ll link to that.

Lauren: In Australia, you also have this one language family reconstructed that has a really large geographic spread. That’s known as the Pama-Nyungan language family, which is made up of the Pama languages, which is a subgroup, and the Nyungan ones. They’re just talked about together as a single group. In fact, it’s such a large group – it’s around 300 languages, we think – that the dozen or so other language families that sit across the top of Australia are all just known together as the Non-Pama-Nyungan languages. Even though they’re not related to each other, they’re just lumped into being not this major language family.

Gretchen: I feel like maybe I should clarify that the Algonquian language family is definitely not the only language family in North America. It’s a very big one, but there are a lot of languages, especially on the west coast, that are in smaller groups. In towards the south into the US, there are various other groups as well. It’s not quite as cohesive as the Australian picture.

Lauren: Yeah. It’s very diverse at the top of Australia. There’s a lot of diversity within this Pama-Nyungan language family, but it definitely dominates in terms of the number of languages in Australia. One thing that I obviously don’t just find upsetting because of its relevance to historical linguistics, but you’re really working with fragmented records in Australia in a way that is obviously because of a direct and traumatic experience of colonization where you had an incredibly rich oral tradition, and you still have an incredibly rich oral tradition across millennia. Oral traditions have incredible ways of conveying rich time depth of information. It’s just a very different experience to the written traditions we’re used to with things like Latin and Old English. It means that, when those channels of passing on knowledge and passing on language were lost, we really lost this ability to tell the full story of Australia. A lot of the work that’s done is done with very fragmentary records of word lists or, sometimes, just a couple of words we know – maybe a few key words in a particular language. When I read about historical linguistics in Australia, I’m always just left with this really heavy-hearted feeling about the stories that we’ve lost in being able to tell this big time-depth story.

Gretchen: That’s huge.

Lauren: Because we have these really fragmentary lists of data, a lot of what we can say for certain about similarities and the things that make up the Proto-Pama-Nyungan language is around the sounds that are in the language. Like many of the Pama-Nyungan languages spoken today, it was a language without fricatives, so it doesn’t have sounds like /s/ or /z/ that we take for granted in a lot of the other language families in the world and can make it very striking as a language family.

Gretchen: Interesting.

Lauren: It had three vowels which, again, is definitely on the smaller side for human languages.

Gretchen: Which three vowels – or is that not agreed on?

Lauren: An /i/, /a/, and /u/. The cool thing is, when you have fewer vowels, you do more interesting things with the vowel space.

Gretchen: When I was learning Arabic, which also only has three vowels, a lot of things that you might think of as different vowels in English are considered just like versions of the same vowel in Arabic.

Lauren: Yeah. It’s really neat.

Gretchen: I think I noticed when I was visiting Australia that a lot of the place names that were based on local languages had /ŋ/ sounds in them. Is that something that’s true of Pama-Nyungan?

Lauren: Yes. The velar nasal gets a lot of use. It’s in Proto-Pama-Nyungan as well. Although, when it occurs at the start of a word, we often have changed that so it’s easier for English speakers to pronounce.

Gretchen: Ah, yes. That old story. I mean, there are some languages in North America that were wiped out very early. We don’t have a lot of records. One of them is Beothuk, which was spoken in Newfoundland. We know that, but we don’t know very much about the language or the speakers in general. It’s not even clear whether it was Proto-Algonquian or not – whether it was its own language family. Another one, Wampanoag, has relatively recently been part of a pretty successful language revitalisation movement because they did leave written records – quite a lot of them – so speakers were able to bring the language of their ancestors back. Overall, a lot of the Algonquian languages still have at least some speakers around and many of them have revitalisation movements and these kinds of things because there is still sufficient language transmission happening or being very actively worked on to continue happening in a lot of these areas. It takes effort but it’s not down to the situation where you only have a couple word lists.

Lauren: Sometimes, when you see these very neat historical trees – much like animal evolution trees, people will draw these tress of the evolution of languages like Proto-Indo-European as they split off into all the language families and then the languages we know today – sometimes I feel like you can get so into paying attention to words in tables and sound comparisons you can kind of a forget that there’s a big story of human history that happens across thousands and thousands of years when you’re doing historical linguistics.

Gretchen: Yeah, and that languages have this history but a lot of this history, I think, to get back to this question what can we even know, is related to other types of activities that happen in the world, whether that’s conquest or war or people moving from one area to another. Those histories also show up in what we can know about language.

Lauren: So far, we’ve talked about sounds. We’ve talked about grammar. But we can also look at which words you end up being able to reconstruct all the way through to the proto-language. The word for “mobile phone” we’re not going to be able to reconstruct back to Old English even if we have records or not.

Gretchen: Oh, no! Really?

Lauren: The words that we can reconstruct can tell us potentially something about what people were talking about back in a language before we have written records of it.

Gretchen: Right. The idea being that if these languages all had a common ancestor word for “fish” or something, we know that people must have had fish because otherwise they wouldn’t have had a word for it.

Lauren: Yes. There’s been a lot of work on Proto-Indo-European for this just because there’s been a lot of work on Proto-Indo-European and there’s a lot of data for it. We know, for example, that words that we can reconstruct all the way back include domestic animals like “cow,” “sheep,” “goats,” and “pigs,” and words for dairy foods like “milk” and words for “wool.” That gives you an idea of the kind of agriculture they were performing.

Gretchen: The level of technology.

Lauren: Well, yeah, we can reconstruct a word “wagon,” and there’s an indication that they had access to the technology of the wheel.

Gretchen: That’s some technology right there.

Lauren: It’s an exciting technology back then.

Gretchen: They’re a couple hypotheses about where this means that Proto-Indo-European was spoken. I think a lot of people these days think that it was spoken in the steppe – the Pontic-Caspian steppes – zone in Eastern Europe. That’s around present-day Ukraine and southern Russian. There’s also a hypothesis that it was spoken in Anatolia, which is pretty much modern-day Turkey, somewhere in that general direction, but there’s still people doing archaeological research and various kinds of research to try to figure out exactly where. One thing you can do is say we’re quite sure that it wasn’t spoken on an ocean because there isn’t a Proto-Indo-European word for “ocean,” but there was for other smaller bodies of water. They had access to some water but not the big one. You can figure out things like that. For Proto-Algonquian, people think that it was spoken somewhere – I think the recent research suggests that it’s spoken immediately west of Lake Superior, based on looking at the names of plants and animals that are across the different Algonquian languages. Those are found in that particular area.

Lauren: Once again, you have to add some knowledge of semantics and then some botany and agriculture to your list of things you need to know about when figuring out proto-languages.

Gretchen: My favourite recent example of this is that a lot of people have been very excited these days about the fact that many European languages use a verb that’s like “to hamster” to mean “hoard.” German has “hamstern.” Dutch has something very similar. There’s a bunch of different languages – I think some Slavic languages have it. People were like, why doesn’t English have this great word “to hamster”? I was asking this on Twitter the other day and somebody pointed out to me that the range of the European wild hamster doesn’t extend into Britain. It’s only on the European continent.

Lauren: That is excellent. Maybe we have a hypothesis there about the extent of linguistic and hamster spreads.

Gretchen: Well, English does have the word “to squirrel,” which means something quite similar because we do have squirrels in English-speaking areas more than we used to have hamsters. No claims about Proto-Indo-European there, but it’s an interesting example of how geography and climate and animals and plants and botany and so on, the flora and fauna, can influence what we know about languages as well.

Lauren: We’ve talked about three different proto-groups. We haven’t even talked about isolate languages for which you can’t find any related languages to do any comparison. There are a whole bunch of other language families that have been constructed and reconstructed back to proto-forms. I work on Tibetan languages which are, depending on how far back you’re willing to make educated conjectures, are either part of the Tibeto-Burman family, which includes the languages of Tibet and the languages of Burma and that whole region, that some people claim we can reconstruct even further back to include the Sinosphere, so the languages of China, which would be a much larger and older group. That’s a part of the world that I work in directly in terms of proto-language reconstruction.

Gretchen: Another proto-language that I’m just a huge fan of is Proto-Bantu.

Lauren: Yeah, that’s a good one.

Gretchen: I studied a very, very small amount of Kinyarwanda when I was in undergrad. Ever since then I’ve been like, Bantu languages are great! Proto-Bantu is really neat because one of the things that a lot of people know about the Bantu languages is that they have all of these noun classes. It turns out like, yeah, you can reconstruct all of these noun classes. Of course, there’s controversy about exactly how many can be reconstructed to Proto-Bantu. A lot of the – there are a certain set that are very well-established, and then there’s another area where there’s more controversy. We can also reconstruct where people lived and what technology they had. Agriculture, fishing, and the use of boats based on the vocabulary were already known to the Bantu people before they started expanding into different areas and the languages started diverging, but iron working was something that showed up later once they’re already expanded. You can place the date of expansion between 3,000 and 800 B.C.E. These things you can know about these people so long ago is really neat.

Lauren: Gretchen, if we wanted to get to proto-world, we would have to take all of these proto-families that people have spent centuries now meticulously working back to these incredibly tentative hypotheses about how these languages work and you would have to go back even further to get to proto-world. How does grown-up Gretchen feel about 13-year-old Gretchen’s aspirations?

Gretchen: Well, I went back – and I still have this book – I went back, and I looked at it again for the first time in many, many years.

Lauren: Oh, my gosh, amazing! What was it like to revisit?

Gretchen: I mean, fortunately, the chapter was only nine pages long, so there was only so much damage they could do in nine pages. I’m not naming the book. It was a great book for getting a 12-year-old interested in linguistics.

Lauren: It served its purpose.

Gretchen: I haven’t read anything else of it in many years, but I was very willing to be very credulous about a lot of these statements. One of the things that I noticed is that, so we’re able to go back a couple thousand years by comparing what we have of existent languages or sometimes records of languages from a few hundred years ago or about 1,000/2,000 years ago you can go back an additional hop step of many 2,000 to 3,000 years. That’s where we can go. The problem is time depth-wise. It’s not just like, okay, well, what if we take each of these languages and compare them. Even if we could do all of this methodology, which we can’t always, that only takes us back another potential hop step of another couple thousand years. We need to go back, like, 100,000 years. We need to do this step, like, 50 times.

Lauren: We’re already in incredibly tenuous ground.

Gretchen: We just don’t have data at that point. Maybe 50 times, maybe 70 or 80 times, because we also don’t know how far we have to go back because speech and sign doesn’t leave fossils. Not only do we not know how far we have to go back, we start multiplying very approximate numbers by each other and then we just keep doing so and the inaccuracies just keep compounding. I’m glad that this book got me into linguistics, but I’m also glad to leave it safely on the shelf as a memento.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Have you listened to all of the Lingthusiasm episodes and wish there were more? You can get access to 40 bonus episodes right now to listen to at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards like helping to keep the show ad-free for everyone. Recent bonus topics include synaesthesia, numbers, and linguistics with kids. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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anotherkindofmindpod · 5 years ago

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I just read both interviews, Part 1 and 2 of Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone Interview of 1971. It sounds as though John and the other Beatles DID have a realistic gripe about Paul taking over, directly projects, handing out musical assignments, etc., etc. and I'm sure he had the ego by this point to match! I would probably have become irritated by Paul as well. And no hints or even reading between the lines of John being emotionally hurt by Paul with regard to loss of intimate relationship.

Hello and thanks for writing in, Listener!First, I’d like to point out that we haven’t reached the Lennon Remembers portion of our Break-up Series, and will dig into it much more thoroughly in a future episode (stay tuned!).

Presumably this ask isn’t in response to anything we’ve actually discussed on the podcast, in which case I feel that I should explain that what we do on our show is reevaluate conventional wisdom and contextualize public statements within the realities of actual behaviors. In other words, not taking things like Lennon Remembers at face value is AKOM 101.

If what we were doing on this podcast was as easy as simply reading the most infamous interview John Lennon ever gave (the one upon which the conventional story of the Beatles break-up is founded), it wouldn’t be much of a podcast or a very groundbreaking analysis, would it?

Second, I’d like to mention that listeners/readers can hear the entire (3.5 hours!) interview on You Tube. Very evocative with audio! Wenner’s editing in the print versions often make John sound more coherent and less vitriolic towards everyone but Paul than the audio reveals (i.e. the shitty comments about Paul are always printed but the ones about George, Brian, etc often aren’t).

Next, we’d like to state the usual disclaimer (which everyone is probably already aware of but is a good reminder anyway!): John later disavowed this interview. In fact, he was so angry at Jann Wenner for publishing it as a book, it apparently created a permanent rift between the two. You may choose to view/value this interview as John being super honest, but please consider that in this allegedly “truthful” book/interview, John:

claims George is musically/creatively inferior to John

declares the McCartney album ��rubbish”

reveals his belief that he and Paul’s confidence levels are intrinsically, inversely related to one another

says George was so aggressively rude to Yoko that John wished he would’ve punched him over it

proudly admits that he “maneuvered” the other Beatles to get Klein in as manager

bemoans the fact that everyone says Brian Epstein was so great “just because he’s dead” and that Brian cheated and robbed the Beatles

makes derisive comments about “fags” at least five times in the printed version alone and calls Lee Eastman “a wasp Jew, man, that’s the worst kind of person on earth.”

admits to lying in interviews and deflects accountability on the basis of being “just a guy” who mouths off about stuff

As for Paul, John is admittedly all over the place, swinging fairly wildly from nostalgic (reminiscing about having “a good mind like Paul’s” on his side and co-writing with their “fingers in each others’ pies”) to bitter (”Paul thought he was the Beatles,” etc).

As for the accusations that Paul was tyrannical, we’ve addressed these before (particularly in Break-Up Episode 2). Just as Geoff Emerick, Michael Lindsay Hogg and Doug Sulpy (and even John, when he was feeling more generous) have articulated, we too feel that Paul stepped up and led the band in a time of need and deserves unequivocal credit for that. We believe much of the subsequent complaining from the other Beatles is akin to the kind of griping one directs at a colleague who gets promoted (“who died and made you king!?”) and while some of it was likely based in genuine irritation at Paul’s communication style, much of it was probably petty. This is why we are looking at the situation from all angles, to get a better sense of what is reality v. spin. In any case, we don’t dispute that there were power struggles within the band.Any reader is free to choose John’s side in any/all of these battles. But our overall takeaway from this particular interview is that John was unloading a lot of pent-up rage; against teachers, fans, Aunt Mimi, his mum, critics, Paul and anyone else who didn’t properly recognize his genius and praise him for it.

“That’s what makes me what I am. It comes out, the people I meet have to say it themselves, because we get fuckin’ kicked. Nobody says it, so you scream it: look at me, a genius, for fuck’s sake! What do I have to do to prove to you son-of-a-bitches what I can do, and who I am? Don’t dare, don’t you dare fuckin’ dare criticize my work like that. You, who don’t know anything about it.”

Based solely on Lennon Remembers, one could reasonably believe John didn’t like anyone but Yoko and Allen Klein (of whom he also speaks with reverence). Fortunately, John gave a million other interviews in his lifetime, so even though this one is given a disproportionate amount of weight (probably b/c it is the most inflammatory and “raw”) we can compare John’s comments, behavior and art over a broad spectrum of time. We feel this gives us a better, more thorough and more authentic portrait of John’s POV. This is a good idea with ANY public figure, but especially important in John’s case, since, by his own admission he has a tendency to say what he feels in the moment and doesn’t necessarily stand by his own statements afterwards.

John in 1976: “I get a bit absolute in my statements. [laughs] Which sometimes get me into deep water, and sometimes into the shallow.”

To your other point, our overall impressions about John’s feelings regarding “loss of an intimate relationship” with Paul certainly do not hinge on Lennon Remembers, nor have we ever suggested they do. In fact, LR is commonly used as the primary proof-point by McCartney detractors and Lennon/McCartney deniers (those who willfully and sometimes passionately ignore and/or deny the deep love between John and Paul, as described by John and Paul themselves and everyone in their lives) that Paul was a tyrant who destroyed the Beatles with his massive ego.

We have never disputed the existence of Paul’s ego. But consider this: John refers to himself as an egomaniac REPEATEDLY throughout this interview. Why is there a loud faction of people who consider John being an avowed egomaniac perfectly reasonable (sexy even!), but find it unforgivable that Paul is the same way? Consider these excerpts from Lennon Remembers:

Do you think you will record together again?

I record with Yoko, but I’m not going to record with another egomaniac. There is only room for one on an album nowadays.

How would you assess George’s talents?

[…] Maybe it was hard for him sometimes, because Paul and I are such egomaniacs, but that’s the game.

Who do you think is good today? In any arts…

The unfortunate thing about egomaniacs is that they don’t take much attention of other people’s work. I only assess people on whether they are a danger to me or my work or not.

[Tangential]

But the Beatles were artists, and all artists have fucking’ big egos, whether they like to admit it or not […]

Yes, John rants repeatedly about Paul’s ego during this interview- while he simultaneously declares his own genius and artistic superiority over others. We find it mind-boggling how this irony continues to evade some people, but there it is.

George Harrison has repeatedly complained about BOTH John & Paul’s egos (and their shared ego IRT “Lennon/McCartney”), but again, this is often ignored in favor of singling out Paul as the villain.

Furthermore, it’s helpful to bear in mind when consuming Lennon Remembers that John and Yoko had received training in media-messaging by this point and were very savvy at Public Relations. We know from people close to them that they drafted their stories in advance before offering them to the public. This fact, combined with Lennon’s tendency to “mouth off” means we have the right and responsibility to question and examine John’s claims rather than simply parrot them mindlessly.

If you are genuinely interested in our take, we recommend our Break-Up Series. We think you will find it well-researched and thoughtful, even if you disagree with some of our conclusions.

Or if you simply dislike McCartney and find him “irritating,” that’s fine too. Not everyone has to like everyone!

For additional discussion/analysis of Lennon Remembers, I recommend any of several threads on Erin Torkelson Weber’s site, the Historian and the Beatles.

the flawed lens of Lennon v. McCartney

Jann Wenner’s bio

how Rolling Stone shaped the breakup

discussing a podcast appearance

Thank you so much for this ask! It is always a pleasure to share information. Have a wonderful day.-The AKOM crew

#Lennon Remembers #John and Paul #jann wenner #anotherkindofmind podcast #Beatles #HAPPY VALENTINES DAY

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alexsfictionaddiction · 4 years ago

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Review: Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

I was thrilled to learn that I’d been accepted for this stunning collection of spooky folktale retellings. During the autumn, I love nothing more than cosying up with some darkly wonderful tales, so I couldn’t wait to dive in.

Commissioned as an audio project in order to hark back to the original delivery format of these stories, the wonderful team at Virago Press decided to put these strange, unsettling retellings against some truly beautiful illustrations and release them in this gorgeous volume of whimsical horror.

Each of the stories take inspiration from a hidden or lost British folk story and each of the authors who have contributed knows the area from which their folktale hails from. All of the authors are women of a wide age range and from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds, which are often reflected in their work.

The original folktales in this collection (which you can read at the end of the book) were sourced by Professor Carolyne Larrington of St John’s College, Oxford and she treats us to an enlightening introduction, talking about the significance of absorbing local culture and nature. She talks about how the events of this year has perhaps encouraged us to indulge in that, as we’ve been confined to our home towns more. She also talks about the history of the word ‘hag’ and why the collection uses it as its name. She refers to a medieval story, where a cursed princess gives her prince the ultimatum to love her as either the hag that she has been transformed into or allow her true beauty to return. He says that he loves her all the time and gives her the choice to live as she chooses. This is what these stories are all really about -the things that women want and the freedom to make their own choices.

We begin with the immersive fusion between reality and the supernatural in the ghost story, simply titled A Retelling by Daisy Johnson. It explores how a writer can become literally consumed by their work and ends on a horrifying, grisly note.

Naomi Booth then takes us on a suspenseful tragic ride to Sour Hall, a cold, isolated, boggart-filled setting with an immovable Tell-Tale Heart air.

‘She wondered about the tales of people who looked like her. Why were their stories not considered of value too?’

Irenosen Okojie’s Rosheen tells the macabre story of a young Irish girl, making her way to an English farm in search of her father’s story and the Caribbean culture that she never knew. The desire to tell the world about those who have been marginalised is obviously highly central to the book’s focus and this is something that many of the stories have in common.

We see it again in Kirsty Logan’s Between Sea and Sky, where a single mother faces distrust and suspicion in her small community. This strange, beautiful tale is a poetic celebration of the mother and child bond as well as a commentary on the mistreatment of women who choose to live outside of conventional boundaries.

Merging Indian mythology with a little-known folktale from the Midlands, Mahsuda Snaith treats us to a glistening, ethereal story in The Panther’s Tale. It’s a parable about women helping each other and a stark warning not to underestimate a woman’s power, when she reaches her full potential.

Eimear McBride’s amusing narration comes to us in the form of a sad, whimsical love story called The Tale of Kathleen. Featuring fae encounters, a strong religious streak and assumptions of madness, it makes for an absorbing, gripping read.

We meet queer twin sisters in Liv Little’s The Sisters, who seem to be two parts of a love triangle. They come together over their mother’s illness but their rivalry has all the components to prevail after the very abrupt ending. There is an entire novel’s worth of material in this story, so a part of me is hoping it may be developed one day.

Perhaps one of the most unsettling tales in the book is Emma Glass’ The Dampness Is Spreading, featuring a midwife who delivers the babies of addicted mothers. It is incredibly bloody and leans towards the grotesque of Grimm in some respects but off-set against a modern background.

Natasha Carthew takes us on a very evocative trip to Cornwall in The Droll of the Mermaid, where a family curse story bleeds inevitability. There is also celebration of kindness to all living things and the importance of living a good life before death takes you, which although seeping with tragedy, causes it to glow with hope.

The collection ends on Imogen Hermes Gowar’s The Holloway and I think this may be my favourite. Exploring the horrors of domestic violence within a small family, this compelling story has a very satisfying ending. Although it’s laced with tragedy, hope and courage are both there and this expert storytelling sent me back into the real world with a sense of faith that justice will always be served.

Hag is an anthology that disturbs, informs and thoroughly entertains but above all, celebrates women and minorities. We’re prompted to think about race, sexuality, gender, religion and trauma, as well as inherently female issues such as motherhood and desire repression. These stories depict women going after their dreams and getting them, while inflicting fair punishment where it’s needed. Of course, the feminist slant put Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber collection in mind but Hag brings a different, revitalised energy to these stories that I think we all need this October.

#hag: forgotten folktales retold #fairytales #folktales #folklore #retellings #book review #anthology #review #books #bookworm

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bestwirelessheadsets-blog1 · 4 years ago

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Riotoro Aviator Classic Gaming Headset Review: Tried as well as True Design

OUR VERDICT

The Riotoro Aviator Classic is most definitely comfy, and when it involves video gaming, the audio supplies a punch. We have worries regarding the best wireless headsets construct of high quality and long life.

FOR

Well-cushioned

Excellent audio isolation

Powerful bass

Does not compromise mid clearness

AGAINST

Loosened mic connection

Underwhelming finish

Audio does not have a richness

Can't shut off the digital border

A flash of bright red accent coloring. A vague throwback tribal design logo design. A COMPUTER outer birthing a remarkable similarity to one more item on the market. I predict a Riotoro.

The U.S.-based novice to COMPUTER gaming kit is making a huge press to broaden its variety lately, going deeper right into the COMPUTER situations and power supplies it went into the marketplace with yet additionally breaking out into pc gaming key-boards and video gaming mice, like the Riotoro Nadex. Yet can the firm make one of the best pc gaming headsets?

Stepping once again into the great unknown is the Riotoro Aviator Classic the company's very first COMPUTER pc gaming headset (also deals with PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch as well as mobile). Looks a little bit familiar though, does not it? There's more than a whiff of the very popular HyperX Cloud collection to it, which includes the popular HyperX Cloud Alpha.

Can we really anticipate similar levels of comfort as well as efficiency from the Aviator Classic? At $80 since writing, it's somewhat cheaper than the HyperX Cloud Alpha, which is usually concerning $100, yet significantly more than Corsair's excellent spending plan array HS50 and HS35 stereo cans. What do you obtain for the investment? Virtual 7.1 surround, a detachable mic, and the choice of USB or 3.5 mm input. While the headset nails the convenience classification, it has space to grow in others.

Riotoro Aviator Classic Specifications

Motorist Type50mm

ImpedanceNot divulged

Regularity Response20 - 20,000 Hz

Microphone TypeDetachable, noise-canceling

Connectivity3.5 mm or USB Type-A

Cable7.2 foot/ 2.2 m braided wire as well as a USB adapter

Weight12.8 ounces/ 40g

LightingNone

Software program?

Style as well as Comfort

Allow's begin with comfort. Equally, as they show up, these are extremely well-padded and comfy canisters. The Aviator Classic's earcups use as thick a layer of memory foam extra padding as we've ever before seen on a headset as well as are ended up in leatherette. The contact pad product has a significant effect on the total noise of a headset, and I prefer leatherette for its great noise seclusion. Certain, textile cloth pads would supply greater breathability, but I'll take that compromise in favor of a secured limited chamber around my ears that allow those regularities to bounce around magnificently.

The Aviator Classic felt slightly larger on my head than the 11.9-ounce Cloud Alpha, which isn't especially light-weight itself. Fortunately, the quantity of support on the Aviator Classic's headband kept the pain at bay. It additionally helped that the headband is wide and also good, dispersing the weight over a bigger location, while the horizontal clamping force of the aluminum band attached the ear cups to my head firmly, yet happily. The elongated cups verified outstanding at audio isolation as well as exterior noise termination too.

The develop top quality and finish is where the Aviator Classic appears. The headband is adaptable and also worryingly lightweight; it definitely would not survive being mistakenly rested on. The steel joints, on the other hand, are a bit noisier than is the standard, and also the black surface looks rather fundamental, doing not have any of the cleanings you would certainly commonly see on in a similar way valued-- as well as even more affordable-- headsets. The earcups' matte finish likewise looks a little low-cost. Basically, after rolling these around in your hands for some time, you would certainly feel like these are spending plan containers.

A gold-banded 3.5 mm port connects to a red, knotted wire. I actually like the cord, regardless of my normal aversion to intense colors in gaming peripherals. That red cable then connects to either a longer USB cable with an inline control or a black splitter cord with 3.5 mm sound as well as a mic in links. Both mics, as well as quantity mute switches, get on the USB inline, yet they don't brighten when toggled, so it can sometimes be tricky to find out whether your mic's really broadcasting or otherwise. A little light right here would certainly have been handy to fix this.

Furthermore, the volume up and down switches only reduce or enhance volume by increments of two in Windows. The function's supposed to make it so it doesn't call for a lot of presses to make substantial quantity adjustments, but I found it to a tiny nuisance.

In enhancement, the digital 7.1 surround if you opt for a 3.5 mm link to your PC you shed out on the inline controls.

All in all, despite a few strange kinks, we're actually impressed by the comfort of this layout. As well as most importantly, it tees the Aviator Classic up for some great noise.

Audio Performance

Noise as well as comfort don't exist in separate vacuum cleaners. Perfectly the vehicle driver's tuned, nonetheless expertly the EQ formed, the factor of call around the ears often verifies the determining aspect in headphones. You'll lose the tightness and also strike of your bass and finish up with a murky noise if sound leakages out around the rim of the earcup. And that's the advantage of a design like the Aviator Classic. The foam pillows sit tight and also unbelievably snug without being awkward around the ears, developing a sealed chamber. Aviation-style earphone designs like that of Riotoro's cans are exceptional at this precise accomplishment, and if you map the line of inspiration back much sufficient, you end up back at the original QPad QH90s, which HyperX acquired the layout license to and ultimately constructed its Cloudline. As a matter of fact, the QPad looked at flight headsets, which pilots use in loud cockpits to communicate important information with ATC as well as the trip team, for its initial style.

You can see the connection. By shutting out exterior sound, aviation-style headphones submerse you in the sound you want to listen to, and what's more, they afford the regularities that construct those seems the space to resonate without running away. These Riotoro cans are as efficient this as any headset we've evaluated.

The headset is billed as offering virtual 7.1 surround noise. There's no toggle for the attribute, neither in software nor on the headset itself. Therefore, we can only reason that virtual border sound is constantly on when you're making use of the Aviator Classic.

During the screening, the low-end was available in strongly as well as specified, offering area for the mids to voice unimpeded. The highs come through fairly clearly too, as well as although the emphasis in the EQ curve is most definitely on producing that magnificent bass feedback, it's a clear adequate soundscape that you can play CS: GO, Apex Legends, or PUBG without the requirement to boost the audio of steps via software.

Compared to the slightly more expensive HyperX Cloud Alpha and also the HyperX Cloud II, the Aviator's audit result does not appear as abundant. It's refined, however there's a minor con to the whole sound that's specifically recognizable when paying attention to the music you're familiar with. It's similar audio to applying a software application EQ account-- outstanding in the beginning, however a touch excitable once your ears bed in as well as get utilized to it.

The accompanying software is very restricted and does not appear to offer any type of means of toggling the virtual 7.1 surrounds on or off, which's likely the culprit of that man-made ring to the noise. It would have been excellent to consist of an alternative to turn this off in order to tighten up the noise as well as eliminate that reverberant quality you usually get with digital surround formulas.

Inevitably, we're entrusted to a headset that sounds actually punchy in games however lacks just a little refinement to be taken into consideration for every little thing else.

The Aviator Classic's microphone sounded functional enough, however, it never appeared securely fastened when I attached it. There was worryingly little resistance when detaching it too, which opens the door to the possibility of knocking it loosened mid-game as well as going radio-quiet.

Software application

Riotoro gives its very own application for managing the Aviator Classic's settings, and also it's no looker. An extremely basic UI evocative the Windows XP glory days provides manual volume adjustment, private quantity adjustment on both right as well as left sides, a mic mute button, and gain a degree.

You additionally obtain a handful of presets, particularly Hi-fi, Movie, Music, and also Manual. These seem to change the EQ profile, however they're quite refined in their variant from each other.

Profits

We're not sure just how much rough and tumble it can take, however Riotoro's launching best wireless headsets likewise gets the feeling and also seem ideal out of the package.

Taking its hints from aviation-style headsets developed to block out external sound, the Aviator Classic uses generous padding to secure your ears in tight and after that pump some powerful, bass-heavy audio into them. We have worries regarding the loose mic link in our review example and worry that it'll endure some wear and tear after months of daily usage. As well as we likewise wish there was an option to turn off digital surround sound.

For alternatives, the HyperX Cloud Alpha isn't much more and is our most advised headset. as well as the Corsair HS60 Pro Surround shows solid develop top quality.

#wireless headsets #wireless headphones #best wireless headsets #best wireless headphones #headphone #headset #music #audio #entertainment

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ourdallasvideofestthings · 4 years ago

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Greetings all,

Today I want to talk about political advertisements. We have, from time to time in election season, had the great Ed Bark do a program about TV ads, but this time you just get me. In the early days of TV advertising, the ads were not very sophisticated and there were not as many attack ads. Here is the I Like IKE ad from the year before I was born. Later JFK had an animated spot that, like Ike’s, seems to just see how many times they could say the candidate’s name in the spot. Eventually, there was a negative ad where JFK used the words of IKE against Nixon, but the ad that really changed everything was the famous ad for LBJ, which is in the Library of Congress. It uses the power of montage in the same way the Russians did, however in this case; it’s not to make an intellectual point, but an emotional one. It tapped into people’s fears, perhaps in a way they could not articulate, that Goldwater was should not be trusted with the nuclear codes. The ad was made by Tony Schwartz who was really an audio guy. He wrote a book called the responsive chord that I recommend reading. In The Responsive Chord, he puts forth the resonance principle--that the meaning of an ad (or any other piece of communication) is not present in the ad itself but rather in how the ad relates to the vast array of knowledge and associations already held in the mind of the viewer―both factual and emotional. Thus, audience members do not merely digest a message; they are an essential force in creating it. Schwartz guides us through the many fascinating consequences. The implications for anyone looking to impart a message or influence decisions are enormous. There is Humphrey’s minimalist ad, just laughing at the idea of Spiro Agnew, the famous Morning in America, which we will get back to in a minute. Of course, we have the Willie Horton Ad and The Swift Boat Ad. All of these were TV ads, which is where people spent much of their leisure time. Now there are more than just TV ads. (I just saw a NY Times piece that Trump's TV ads are mostly false, just like the swift boat ads.) However, ads are not just on TV these days. They are on-line on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and many other social media platforms and they can have a major impact without having to pay anything to get seen. In this year’s election cycles there are two very different versions of anti-Trump ads. There are the Lincoln project ads and the Republican Voters against Trump. Since both of these have nothing to do with the Biden Campaign, they are not on TV, and they don’t have to be vetted for approval, they just get to run with it. Both groups are pushing ads at a very fast clip. The Lincoln project ads are very slick and pull no punches. Perhaps one of the best is the Mourning in America ad that riffs on Reagan’s Morning in America spot or their ad Truth. Their ads get to the point and are evocative, but in some ways, the Republican Voters Against Trump might be more effective. These ads are not at all slick. They are mostly a person talking to their phone. No music or sophisticated editing. Each of these stories and there are many, many, many of them, are of a long time Republican talking about why they cannot vote for Trump or Republicans. Sometimes, it is not the filming, editing, or music that evokes a response; it is the real, honest, unmediated image/message that speaks to a deeper truth. What these ads do is give permission to those who are thinking about not voting for Trump the notion that they are not alone. So, what is going on? Before I get to everything else at this moment, in this week’s Cinematic Conversation, we will be discussing the classic The Night of the Living Dead (1968) by George Romero. The word zombie was first seen in 1819, but it was this film that brought us the idea of flesh-eating dead/undead into pop culture. For those who have been in my film classes, you will know there are three genres I strongly discourage: mockumentary, hitman, and zombie films. This film is an exception and you can see it for free. Our guest host for the week is Professor Rick Worland who teaches film studies at SMU. His first book, The Horror Film: An Introduction appeared in 2007 from Blackwell Publishing. His recent book, Searching for New Frontiers: Hollywood Films in the 1960s, was published by Wiley Blackwell in 2018. He was the 1997-98 Algur H. Meadows Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Meadow’s School of the Arts. Hope to see you Thursday night at 7:30. Last week, I mentioned the Angelika Theater was available to rent. Well, you can get a similar deal at the Studio Movie Grills, and here is a list of films you can see. Speaking of SMG, they are opening up at Plano and Lincoln Square in Arlington. The CarBaret at Brizo Bar will be showing Saturday Night Fever, and there will be dancing. On Netflix, I would recommend the documentary series Immigration Nation. This is not one of those series where they don’t have enough visuals to tell the story, so they reenact scenes. Here, the crew had great access to really see what is going on with ICE and it is disturbing, to say the least. On Amazon Prime, you should check out Midsommar, before the summer is over. There is no movie like this. The Women’s Texas Film Festival (on-line version) has wrapped by the time you read this. Congrats to them for a great fest! Have a great week,

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essenceoffilm · 7 years ago

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Truffaut Salutes to Books and What They Represent in Peculiar Sci-Fi

Produced in between of Le peau douce (1964) and La mariée était en noir (1967), Fahrenheit 451 (1966) marked French director François Truffaut’s brief departure into the international territory of non-French cinema. Not only was the film Truffaut’s first film in English but also his first in color. Running the risk further, the film meant a new opening for the production company of Universal, too, since it was their first European production. Given these risky factors at play, it might not be surprising that Fahrenheit 451 was not a success. It did not do particularly well in box office and it was a critical flop. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote a hostile review, concluding that Fahrenheit 451 “is a dull picture -- dully fashioned and dully played -- which is rendered all the more sullen by the dazzling color in which it is photographed.” According to Crowther, Truffaut would be successful only if his intention was “to make literature seem dull and the whole hideous practice of book-burning seem no more shocking than putting a blow-torch to a pile of leaves.” [1] Whether one agrees with Crowther’s critique, emphasizing the failures in acting and the execution of the material, or not is besides the point, because the film could also be criticized for marking Truffaut’s artistic regression in terms of more formal aspects. Although Fahrenheit 451 might in this sense represent the wrong path of traditional film which Truffaut took and which Godard, for one, abandoned, and as such might justifiably be left in peace by some aficionados, it has garnered critical appreciation in later rediscovery. James Monaco has commended its visual style, though he has also felt that the film is unnecessarily dull [2]. Despite being Truffaut’s weakest film of the 60′s, it seems to me that Fahrenheit 451 is at the very least worthy of discussion and has many good elements to its merit which should not be overlooked.

Based on the 1953 novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 takes place in the not-so-distant future where firemen do not set out fires but burn books in order to prevent critical thinking. Oskar Werner plays the obedient fireman Montag who never reads the books he burns because they do not interest him in the slightest. As a result of his intellectual indifference, things seem to be going quite well for Montag. A promotion is coming his way and he has a beautiful wife, played by Julie Christie, who is fully content with her life which consists of watching semi-interactive plays on her futuristic flat TV screen. One day, however, an elementary school teacher, Clarisse, also played by Christie in a double role, enters Montag’s life, and she is able to spark a budding interest in Montag for the books he burns. After discovering Dickens, Montag turns into a reclusive bookworm who raises suspicion in his wife who eventually informs Montag to the officials. Becoming an enemy of the state, Montag leaves society with Clarisse as they join a remote tribe of “the book people”, an eccentric group each of whose members have memorized a book and thus have become that book. Their escape is a success, and a living library wanders in sad snowfall in the iconic ending of Truffaut’s film.

Not your typical science fiction film, Fahrenheit 451 does not unfold in action-packed sequences and it does not have a lot of things going on for its nearly two hours of projection time. Telling of the film’s peculiarity even in the context of Truffaut’s oeuvre is that Truffaut kept a diary of the film’s production (something he did not do for his other films) which was later published by Cahiers du Cinéma. In the diary, Truffaut expresses both his likes and dislikes for the film in question, admitting that “I like the film quite well when I see it in pieces or three reels at a time, but it seems boring to me when I see it end to end.” [3] Prominent New Wave scholar James Monaco agrees, arguing that where Truffaut succeeds in creating a powerful visual aesthetics, he fails in captivating the audience with a dramatic narrative:

Clear, fresh, and evocative, these images and sounds create a strong mood for the film, as does Herrmann’s music; but the mood can’t carry the full weight of the de-dramatized and de-politicized science fiction. [4]

Monaco’s complaint regarding the “de-politicized” nature of Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 refers to the popular sentiment that science fiction ought to be political. Whether this is the case or not is open for debate, but it seems nonetheless appropriate to take a look at the dystopian society Truffaut portrays in his film. After all, this is why so many people are drawn to science fiction, I believe, since it offers a narrative form to operate utopian contemplation through negation (that is, by portraying dystopian societies) -- from Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Gilliam’s Brazil (1985).

If Godard paid little attention to such aspects of the genre in Alphaville (1965) due to his ubiquitous fascination for the formal and meta-narrative elements of cinematic representation, Truffaut would pay even less attention due to his enduring emphasis on the people. Both Godard and Truffaut create their dystopian settings with few cinematic strokes, but Godard’s remains more abstract, whereas Truffaut’s feels (perhaps surprisingly) more real and concrete, even if parodist to an extent. Most diegetic information regarding the dystopian society in Fahrenheit 451 is provided in the background events and details in dialogue -- which, frankly, quite well fits with Truffaut’s overall emphasis. Based on the information, the spectator can deduce that the state of this dystopian world tries to alter history, to eradicate the citizens’ memory, and to manipulate them to believe what it wants them to believe. It is suggested that the state is covering up a war, and in the end we see the state’s successful manipulation of Montag’s TV death for the audience in front of their screens. The characters lack not only a collective memory for their shared history but also their private memories. Montag’s wife, for instance, does not remember when she and Montag first met. Given Truffaut’s intentions, his portrayal of the society is appropriately most interesting in its depiction of humanity. The people lack a connection. They don’t look at each other. They sit in train carts and wait for nothing. They sit in front of their televisions and are captivated by seemingly non-empty images. They are imprisoned by the images which have taken over the life they no longer remember. They live in the society of the spectacle.

The way I see it, here lies the most intriguing aspect of Truffaut’s portrayal of the dystopian society; that is, the increasing power of the image. At first, it might seem odd to critique the power of the image and praise the power of the word by cinematic means, but it works because the spectator is frightened and caught by the very power of the image. This takes its point of departure from the very beginning since the opening credits of Fahrenheit 451 which are not shown in text but recited out loud (like the closing credits of Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, 1942). Despite the striking filters of bright color and the quick zoom-ins characterizing the opening credits sequence, the lack of written text is not a mere exercise in 60′s cinematic coolness; rather the opening establishes the Leitmotif of the film, the absence of written text. No where in the film do we see written text (with the obvious exception of the banned books -- and the first time we do as Montag discovers literature is unforgettable). The state only uses numbers and images. Not only has speech overthrown writing but image has overthrown langue, the linguistic system at large.

Depicting a society where images dominate our lives more than words, Truffaut (and undoubtedly Bradbury as well, though I have not read the novel) was definitely ahead of his time. Truffaut must have experienced the fact that more books were printed in his time than ever before, but perhaps he felt that those books weren’t really cared for, loved, and embraced. Nowadays, in the second decade of the 21st century, the theme feels even more urgent. Books are printed less and less, while old books are being thrown into dumpsters. People read less, and many of those who do seem to prefer listening to online audio books. Thus Truffaut’s attempt to give books their magic back, to make them resemble valuable living things, might even be appreciated more fully today in 2017 than in 1966. There lies deep melancholy in the powerful images where the wind turns the pages of the books before flames coerce the thin pages to curl up in agony. In the 60′s, Truffaut might have meant to salute to literature, but from today’s perspective, he is also saluting to the art of the printed word, to the physical texture of books.

The reason behind Truffaut’s ode to books is the idea that books represent something, and that something is what Truffaut is saluting to. It is what is sometimes called inner life; yet this requires a specification because the books in Fahrenheit 451 certainly do not denote individual mental life but rather the collective inner life of mankind. Thus it might be better called Geist or the dimension of Lebenswelt which contains the impractical and disinterested (in the sense 18th century aestheticians used the term, the purity of aesthetic desire) aspects of consciousness: emotions, values, beauty, love, theoretical reason. It is important to emphasize the fact that theoretical reason belongs to this dimension as well because Truffaut is not elaborating a conventional emotion versus reason scenario -- unlike one might expect in a story like this -- but rather a narrative reflecting the eternal struggle between the practical and the impractical (the theoretical, the self-deliberate) the latter of which includes emotion and art as well as sciences and philosophy. It is this dimension, which might be better left unnamed, which Truffaut salutes to in his cinematic ode to books.

Yet Truffaut’s call for the love of books went on deaf ears. Rather than romantic and passionate, Fahrenheit 451 was received as dull and desolate. Crowther writes that

[N]othing could be more depressing than seeing people ambling through the woods of what looks to be a sort of adult literary camp, mechanically reciting ‘The Pickwick Papers’ and Plato’s ‘Dialogues,’ or seeing a dying man compelling his grandson to recite after him and commit to memory Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished ‘Weir of Herminston.’ What a dismal image we have here of the deathless eloquence of literature! [1]

While the ending might be depressing in the sense that it shows the desolate state which humanity is in, I think Crowther fails to appreciate the wider picture. The final images where the characters pass the camera in serene snowfall while reciting the books they have become is supposed to be melancholic. But its melancholy is romantic by nature. It further emphasizes the leading theme of books as organic and living; since the state tries to destroy them, the people try to save them by embodying them. After seeing books burn in agony, we see them live in another form. Truffaut was already establishing this theme in the scene, which ends with one of the highlights of the film, that is, the montage of the burning books at the secret library, where the old lady wants to die with the books. Yet she had not yet “become a book” which is why her death feels less tragic, but she wanted to die “like she lived,” meaning a life with books, the impractical dimension of emotion, art, and theoretical reason. The way I see it, the living books wandering in snowfall is not a depressing sight of idiotic learning by heart but rather a melancholic view of people trying to maintain that dimension in a world which does not see value in it and therefore tries to demolish it.

The reasons behind the critics’ dismay probably concern the overall execution of the film, however. First of all, since the film was Truffaut’s first in English and he was anything but fluent in the language, the spoken dialogue in the film can have an unnatural stiffness to it. Second, Truffaut did not get along with Werner, and Christie seems to have been a last minute choice to play both the role of the wife and the schoolteacher -- roles which were not supposed to be played by one actor. Third, the film was Truffaut’s first and only science fiction film with whose stylistic and narrative execution he may not have been that familiar.

Although the first point of criticism seems valid enough, I think the unwieldy delivery of the lines as well as the overall stiffness in the actors’ performances fits with the rest of the picture. If Fahrenheit 451 is really a film which tries to depict a dull-minded society whose inhabitants have lost touch with the Geist, the impractical dimension of Lebenswelt, it seems appropriate to emphasize their absent being. Even if this was not intentional but merely due to Truffaut’s inability to work properly in English, it works in the context of the film.

Agreement on the second point of criticism seems almost unanimous; in other words, most people agree that Werner and Christie were bad choices for the roles. I will sustain from making argument for either position, but I think the fact that Christie plays a double role is worth discussing briefly. It seems to have been a last minute choice and as such it did not influence the original script. This, however, makes the choice to use the same actress for both roles seem irrational and unfounded only if one agrees with the idea that films can be reduced to the screenplay. If one holds a different position, it seems entirely plausible to argue that Truffaut’s film developed while filming and the use of Christie in a double role influenced it.

It seems worth noting that I, as a spectator of the film, tend to forget this double role before I sit down to watch it (perhaps writing this down puts an end to that cycle). The same thing has happened with me in watching Luis Buñuel’s Cet obscur objet du désir (1977, That Obscure Object of Desire) where two actors play the same part. Regardless of whether one shares this experience or not, the use of the same performer for two roles seems thus to immediately emphasize and enhance their dualistic fellowship. The wife and the teacher, the obedient believer of the state and the passionate lover of books, are two sides of a coin. In the spirit of Cartesian dualism, one could go as far as claiming that the teacher represents the detached soul of the empty wife whose consciousness has been extracted due to the absence of books and the impractical. On the other hand, the dual presence of the same actress emphasizes the blurriness of individual boundaries in the dystopian society of the spectacle Truffaut portrays; it highlights the impression that the zombie-like people merge into an unidentifiable visual mass under the same, all-mighty image.

To my mind, the third point of criticism is most interesting. It concerns the genre of science fiction and assumptions about what it should be like. Truffaut’s departure from the genre is evident to some by the lack of technological gadgets and supernatural elements both of which are apparently included in the Bradbury novel. Truffaut’s film is also more de-dramatized than most science fiction in the sense that it moves rather slowly and there is little tension between the ice cold characters. Moreover, it does not come across as political, unlike many of Bradbury’s novels as well as other dystopian narratives. Monaco seems to rely on basically these genre assumptions in his critique of the film:

[T]he very nature of science fiction as a genre, as opposed to the drama of adultery or the revenge play, is just that it provides the novelist or filmmaker with a structure akin to parable and fable so that he can speak of grand themes convincingly. By muting that aspect of Fahrenheit 451 Truffaut made it almost impossible for the film to succeed with audiences. (...) When Fahrenheit 451 is compared with Jean-Luc Godard’s venture into science fiction, Alphaville, made a year previously, it becomes even more apparent that what is missing in Truffaut’s try at the genre is some sense of active resistance to the dismal, suffocating existence it postulates. Bradbury’s original novel, like Godard’s Alphaville, is deeply rooted in politics; Truffaut’s film ignores them. [5]

Monaco rests on the same argument when he agrees with Crowther that Truffaut fails to induce passion for books in the brief and weak ending where Clarisse and Montag “are still spaced-out, passive children of the TV-stoned generation they think they have escaped. They have advanced from narcissism to idolatry, no further” [6].

I think Monaco’s criticism relies a little too heavily on the presupposition that science fiction should be dramatic and political. Since Fahrenheit 451 is science fiction, but it is not dramatic and political, it fails this normative command and, according to Monaco, is therefore a bad film. Although this is a formally valid argument, I don’t think the normative premise is necessarily true. It would be the same thing to argue that war films should have dramatic war sequences, and because Jean Renoir’s La grande illusion (1937), which is a war film, does not, it is a bad film. For another example, I don’t think another French New Wave film, which also represents science fiction, is that dramatic or political either, which is Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968). Its power stems from somewhere else. I think Monaco is essentially guilty of the same naivety as Crowther both of whom try to explain their disapproval of Fahrenheit 451 by referring to conventional notions of what narrative film should be. After all, Truffaut’s genre films of the 60′s from Tirez sur le pianiste (1960, Shoot the Pianist) onward were not about trying to make classic genre films but precisely about “exploding the genres,” as Monaco himself puts it in one of his apt chapter titles. In this sense, it seems a little silly to evaluate the film by comparing it to the traditional formulas of the genres.

The way I see it, a much better strategy in arguing against Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 would be to say that it does not go far enough into the direction of “exploding the genres,” stylizing its aesthetics, and utilizing de-dramatization in spite of trying to do that by challenging classical conventions of the genre. Although I tend to lean toward such an evaluation, as I feel that Fahrenheit 451 is among Truffaut’s lesser works of the 60′s, the development of the argument goes beyond the scope of this post. In order to suggest such an evaluation properly, however, it might be beneficial to take a brief look at Truffaut’s modern style in the film before concluding because that is, I believe, where the biggest merits of Fahrenheit 451 lie.

Even if Fahrenheit 451 had a fairly classical structure in terms of narrative, Truffaut gives the film a taste that is totally unique and Truffautesque. The stark and dismal mise-en-scène, in perfect harmony with the intellectual state of the society, leaves a lasting impression with the bright, red firetrucks against the gray autumn environment, the black fascist uniforms of the firemen, the shocking 60′s decor, and, of course, the aforementioned stiff acting which emphasizes the characters’ absent presence in the sullen space. In the ascetic sound world, Bernard Herrmann’s classical and minimal score breathes an air of strangeness into a world it never seems to have known.

In the spirit of 60′s nouvelle vague, Truffaut uses a lot of jump cuts to distort temporal organization but also more classical dissolves which are, however, modernized by occasional fade-outs laden with bright colors. One example of the peculiarity -- and the difficulty in grasping the film as a consistent whole -- of Truffaut’s style is the surprising change in the film’s aspect ratio when the image of 1.66:1 is briefly cut in half as the firemen investigate a playground. The purpose seems obvious: it guides the spectator’s gaze in a quasi-Hitchcockian fashion, taking away the freedom whose importance Bazin always emphasized with regards to observing the space. A more common way of doing this is the iris device which has echoes to the silent era, and Truffaut also uses the iris once in the film. Although these cinematic means are used ever so sparingly in Fahrenheit 451, they do suggest how Truffaut is constantly controlling our gaze just as the state is the illiterate minds of its people -- another great example without any particular device besides extreme close-ups is the scene where Montag discovers literature for the first time with Dickens as his guide.

Like the juxtaposition of jump cuts with dissolves, Truffaut also uses both long and short takes. There is the single shot which covers the scene of Montag and Clarisse walking from the train to their homes next to each other, but some scenes are, conversely, executed as intense montages of close-ups when, for example, the fire station has an alert before the destruction of the secret library. The movement of the camera in both examples is slow and calm, but Truffaut’s camera is also wild and playful in zooming and panning rapidly.

As these means are combined with not only a classical structure but also more classical means (such as establishing shots and shot-reverse shot sequences), Truffaut’s contradictory style gives Fahrenheit 451 a peculiar, disorienting tone. This tone might explain why some dislike the film so heavily, but also why we keep coming back to it. I would call the tone naivistic because it feels playful and simple. The juxtapositions are done for the sake of beauty -- for the impractical dimension. The naivistic tone also fits well with the childlike characters of the film from the obedient and illiterate citizens to the overly idealistic book people. This is, of course, not to look down at the film but to appreciate its fable-like quality. There is something wonderfully naive about the film’s aesthetics. The playful surprise of the cinematic means used thus articulates the integral theme of creativity which reaches from art and love to science and philosophy.

Despite a tragic topic of intellectual apocalypse, this tone gives Fahrenheit 451 not only an optimistic but also a strangely lightweight mood. The original material would no doubt provide a framework for a big and melodramatic spectacle, but Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 feels as intimate as Truffaut’s closed chamber dramas of few characters and milieus. Truffaut is asking great questions, but those questions are presented in a circle formed by a handful of people. The sad snowfall of the end culminates this simplicity and further romanticizes Truffaut’s wonderfully naive universe which praises man’s will to preserve that which has no apparent usage.

Notes:

[1] Crowther 1966.

[2] Monaco 1974/2004, p. 71.

[3] Quoted in Monaco 1974/2004, p. 69.

[4] Monaco 1974/2004, p. 71.

[5] Ibid. p. 70.

[6] Ibid. p. 71.

References:

Crowther, Bosley. 1966. “'Fahrenheit 451' Makes Burning Issue Dull:Truffaut's First Film in English Opens Plaza Picture Presents Dual Julie Christie”. In New York Times, November 16th, 1966.

Monaco, James. 1974/2004. The New Wave. 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Harbor.

#François Truffaut #Fahrenheit 451 #British #1960's #French New Wave #Nouvelle Vague

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theteenagetrickster · 5 years ago

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The twenty Absolute Best Dubstep Songs of the EDM Years

The EDM.com team put our heads together and organized a listing of the 20 absolute best dubstep tracks released coming from 2010-2019.

UPDATE (12/23/2019): Respectable states were actually included and also "Bangarang" through Skrillex was cleared away and substituted as it was actually erroneously noted as dubstep.It's secure to

mention that this many years has actually been actually the greatest in the past history of dubstep. While thrusting to the best of the digital globe early in the decade and coming to be one of one of the most well-known EDM subgenres for years later on, dubstep surpassed the initial hype as well as came to be a steering interject the electronic popular music arena.

In honor of the fantastic years of dubstep our team've obtained to appreciate, here are the style's 20 finest paths of the years.20.

" Rail Buster" - Trouble 10 ft. Rico Act

An anthem devoted to those who like to make place surveillance fear, "Rail Buster" embodies the sense of the headbangers in the frontal row. Along with a minimalistic overview putting total importance on Rico Action's now-iconic vocals, hardcore supporters of dubstep have discovered on their own embracing the tip of headbanging therefore hard their backs ache.

19. "Experts" - SKisM

In 2012, the Never Claim Perish manager SKisM discharged "Pros," his phone call to upper arms for his fellow dubstep super star allies. His skillful manufacturing skill-sets are actually on total screen as he rips via the monitor offering listeners little bit of opportunity to breathe. Illustrating Zomboy, Skrillex, Excisionas well as himself combating an enabled internet giant, the video following the tune remains one of the finest in the past of the category.18.

" Gold (Foolish Love)" - Excision and Illenium ft. Lagoon

Some of the more unexpected partnerships in bass music, Excision sponsored the help of the superstar future bass manufacturer Illenium for their emotional monitor "Gold (Stupid Passion)" including Lagoon. While the first portion of the tune is much more evocative Illenium's trademark sound, midway with it loses as well as threatening grumbling begins as raw electrical power similar to Excision's precursors erupts. The outcome is actually a smooth blend of the duo's talents, making it look like they have actually been teaming up for decades.

17. "Dead Presidents" - Zomboy and also 12th Planet ft. Jay Fresh

A massive cooperation that found Zomboy join pressures with among the absolute most essential personalities behind the United States dubstep action,, "Dead Presidents" observes the two bass heavyweights at their outright best. With Jay Fresh's vocals as well as a smart take on Zomboy's trademark catch phrase throughout, the duo produced a striking dubstep tune dripping along with style like couple of others.16.

" Behemoth" - SVDDEN DEATH

Launched in 2018 as a portion of the very first access in his atmospherical VOYD-branded EPs, "Behemoth" through SVDDEN FATALITY ended up being an on-the-spot staple in virtually every bass musician's set. Unquestionably heavy in every feeling of the definition, the grinding, pummeling bass coming from the escapement bass manufacturer aided "Mammoth" reside up to its own title.

15. "Like a Bitch" - Zomboy

Zomboy delivered shockwaves via the event circuit with the release of his eruptive tune "Like a Bitch." With one of the best momentous break downs in dubstep history, from the extremely second this path hit the airwaves, enthusiasts and DJs identical recognized it will be a major bargain. Inciting uproars almost each time it is actually in the mix, "Like a Bitch" helped move the already gigantic Zomboy to brand new heights.14.

" Haven Festival" - Enormous Attack (Zeds Dead Remix)

Through 2010, it was actually obvious Zeds Dead will turn into one of bass songs's most appreciated actions. On the heels of their big remix of "Eyes aflame" by Blue Structure, the Toronto duo would certainly release an amazing rework of Gigantic Strike's "Haven Circus." It interests look back at the growling bass and sawing synths to view how the duo had the capacity to develop such appealing sounds with modern technology effectively behind what our team possess today.

Thirteen. "I Needed to have Air" - Magnetic Male ft. Angela Hunte

When legends Skream, Benga, and Artwork unveiled their supergroup, Magnetic Male, the dubstep community understood one thing enormous was actually coming. Helping movie critics definitely discover the mainstream allure dubstep has, "I Needed to have Air" incorporated stand out vocals along with the audios of the underground in a means that had not very been actually done a lot back then. It laid the foundation for artists for the rest of the years and beyond.12.

" Gold Dirt" - DJ Fresh (Change Structure Remix)

Launched in the Spring season of 2010, Motion Structure's flip of "Gold Dust" by DJ Fresh came to be one of the most prominent monitors online in the times where our experts discovered our favorite tracks via YouTube. Featuring his hallmark shrill bass, the way he winds the vocals along with his empowering sound created the tune one that instantly transforms the crowd right into a jumping, disorderly singalong.

11. "Bass Head" - Bassnectar

Launched at the start of the many years, "Bass Head" neighbors and also dear in the hearts of Bassnectar enthusiasts worldwide. Along with being just one of best in the super star bass performer's arsenal, the tune will motivate the title that supporters used when describing on their own. Throughout this monitor and also many more, Bassnectar will take place to amass among the biggest followings in every of digital songs and offer out series nearly everywhere.10.

" Go Yourself In The Shoe Again" - Skream & & Example It is actually secure to claim that without Skream's additions to the style this checklist would certainly not be actually possible. While he released countless dubstep classics in the mid to late '00s, he didn't decrease down in the abiding by many years, launching some of his all-time greats. An ideal illustration of the is his collaboration with vocalist Instance on their keep track of "Try Yourself In The Foot Again." Listening to it years later on works as a history session on the roots of the category we understand and love.

9. "Vermin" - Blade Event

While Timepiece's Rob Swire and Gareth McGrillen were no strangers to electronic music, their jump to dubstep became heads. Equal components attribute docudrama as well as dancing floor igniter, "Vermin" off Knife Person's 2nd EP showcased the duo's development chops. It included a number of the best fascinating sound layout as well as gloss around as they headlined celebrations all over the world.

8. "Bass Cannon" - Change Canopy

Coming from the moment the seemingly innocent alarms from "Bass Cannon" are heard, something clicks in listeners' scalps and also they get ready for madness. Flux Canopy carried out not conduct back as he let loose the carte blanche of his toolbox with audio that experiences like it's actually shot coming from a cannon. Even as the track approaches its own tenth special day, it still carries on to electrify dance floorings as if it were a brand new release.7.

" Crave You" - Tour Facilities (Experience Club Remix)

Before melodic dubstep took control of primary stages at primary festivals around the globe, Adventure Nightclub discharged their remix of Air travel Facilities' "Crave You" years in advance of the curve. Completely catching the essence of the authentic, the Montreal duo produced a moody soundscape of impressive, ariose dubstep highlighting the most ideal of Air travel Facilities' emphatic vocals for some of the very best remixes in the past history of bass popular music.

6. "Assures" - NERO

The 4th single off their awesome debut album Invite Reality, "Promises," has a few of the very most popular vocals the style has ever viewed. Also the absolute most informal of EDM fans can easily recite to you the verses coming from the U.K. chart-topping keep track of. In addition to NERO's outstanding authentic mix, the track would certainly later on be actually remixed by Calvin Harris. Afterwards, in collaboration along with Skrillex, the triad will develop a remix that would certainly happen to win a Grammy in 2013 for Ideal Remixed Recording, Non-Classical.

5. "Throwin' Elbows" - Excision and Space Shoelaces

Perhaps the absolute most crucial have a place in modern bass music, Excision would certainly happen to turn into one of the absolute most massive actions in dubstep and also develop Lost Lands, the world's largest celebration of bass songs. Heretofore accomplishment, he participated in manufacturing star Space Entwinesfor "Throwin' Elbows" off of his 3rd studio cd Infection. Recognized to trigger mosh pits to unplanned erupt, the duo's bone-breaking tune is still a staple in dubstep artists' ready to this time.4.

" Terrifying Beasts and also Pleasant Sprites" - Skrillex

At the beginning of the many years, Skrillex released some of the files that transformed digital music as we understand it, "Frightening Monsters and Great Sprites." As the headline path off his sophomore EP, it will win the Grammy for Finest Dance Recording, while the EP will succeed the award for Greatest Dance/Electronica Cd in 2012. Its viral video recording example would happen to end up being engrained in the minds of the entire electronic globe and past, as it was the preface to a lot of audiences' introduction of Skrillex's famous growling basslines.3.

" Woo Improve" - Rusko

A pioneering act that supported dramatically to dubstep's evolution, Rusko genuinely lives up to his nickname, "The Don." While "Woo Improvement" was actually certainly not his 1st attacked whatsoever, it was among his first in the present many years and also still to present an outright supporter fave. Wavy like handful of others, "Woo Improvement" showcases a contemporary take on the audio that pushed artists like himself and also Caspa to the limelight while likewise preparing the bar for the developers of tomorrow.

2. "I Can't Quit" - Motion Pavilion

For his 3rd introduction on this list, Flux Structure's very most widely known song is actually showcased. "I Can't Quit" would almost quickly turn into one of the best recognizable tracks in electronic music past history. Played at primary sporting events worldwide, stated the trendiest history on the planet by Zane Lowe, as well as sampled by Kanye West and also Jay-Z, "I Can not Cease" came to be a lot more than simply a terrific dubstep tune, yet a social phenomenon.1.

" Movie theater" - Benny Benassi ft. Gary Go (Skrillex Remix)

Although the world identified the past emo frontman Skrillex's great skill on 2009's Frightening Monsters and Wonderful Sprites, numerous consider his remix of Benny Benassi's "Cinema" to become the vital Skrillex monitor as well as one deserving of the best respects of the years. Played in spots that bass songs didn't also exist in, for lots of, "Movie theater" was their 1st taste of dubstep. Promptly turning the EDM globe on its head, Skrillex escalated to the top of both the dubstep and also digital globe and is often credited as being one of the best necessary bodies in the American EDM boom of the 2010s. Along with business excellence, the keep track of would win him the Grammy for Greatest Remixed Recording, Non-Classical and also assist further cement his heritage being one of dubstep's ultimate acts.

Honorable Acknowledgments

"Sugary food Store" - Medical Professional P

At the starting point of the many years, Medical professional P discharged one of his most well-known tracks to time, "Sweet Outlet." Beginning off along with uplifting piano to accustom attenders to the track, Doctor P sends out some screeching bass with rich growls throughout generating a melody that right away creates emotions of nostalgia with experienced dubstep followers.

"Yasuo" - Bommer & & Crowell

Seen as a cornerstone for a climbing activity in the bass world, Bommer and Crowell's Organization of Legends-motivated "Yasuo" came to be nothing less than an anthem. Named after a status coming from the enormously preferred video clip game, vocal lines from the assassin are linked with the cutting bass declines as well as haunting tricks throughout. Discharged in 2014, the monitor is going to try to proceed its reign of horror on the bass circuit long right into the next many years.

This content was originally published here.

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caveartfair · 6 years ago

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This Open Source Software Could Make Museum Websites More Accessible

Earlier this year, dozens of New York City art galleries were hit with lawsuits filed separately by two legally blind plaintiffs. Their common charge: The websites of galleries including Sperone Westwater, Gagosian, and David Zwirner were not readable by people with vision loss, an alleged violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Many of these cases are pending, and the law on ADA website compliance is murky. But defendants and other cultural players who do want to break down digital barriers face the question of how they can redesign their websites to be accessible to all. One particular issue: how to provide clear information about images of artwork. For this, galleries and museums can look to the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, which has created a tool that seamlessly integrates image descriptions into its online platform.

Called Coyote, this program provides a system for creating, reviewing, and managing the language used to describe art—a thorny process that involves acknowledging and navigating personal prejudices. Its name refers to a Hopi legend about a coyote that wanted to see further than its own eyes would allow.

Visit the MCA’s website, toggle on the descriptions by clicking “image description” in the menu on the left, and small white boxes with blue text appear atop images. The caption for Laurie Simmons’s Walking House (1989), used to promote the MCA’s ongoing survey of her work, reads: “A black-and-white photograph depicts a model house sitting atop naked, feminine legs wearing nude heels.” A work by Doris Salcedo is described as: “Four murky sepia-toned images of shoes embedded on a white wall by what appears to be surgical stitching.” These descriptions can automatically be transcribed aloud by screen readers, allowing visually impaired or blind users to imagine the artwork.

Many museums ensure that individuals with disabilities can experience art in person by providing special resources, from in-gallery audio descriptions to tactile tours. But most can benefit from improving accessibility for their virtual visitors. The MCA Chicago’s website is the first by a museum that has “intentionally created visual descriptions as a primary feature,” according to Sina Bahram, founder of Prime Access Consulting, a company that helps organizations make their digital spaces more accessible. “There are museum websites that put alt text on images”—HTML code descriptions that screen readers can detect—“but to our knowledge, this is the first to take image descriptions so seriously and surface them for all users.”

The result is a laudable example of inclusive design—a design approach that ensures products have equitable use for people with diverse abilities. In other words, the same information is conveyed to everyone, no matter their visual acuity.

Long and short description of Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Painter), 2009 in the MCA’s image description software, Coyote. © MCA Chicago.

Bahram was hired by the museum in 2015, when it was redesigning its website, and he spearheaded the project alongside former MCA employees Susan Chun and Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli. That year also marked the 25th anniversary of the passage of the ADA, and the MCA had been in conversations with other museums across the country about how to better serve visitors with disabilities. “We wanted to build a platform to solve a need for institutions to enhance access for visitors who are blind and visually impaired,” said Lisa Keys, MCA Chicago’s deputy director. “It was clear that we needed better tools.”

Coyote is a free, open-source software that lives in the cloud, so anyone can adopt it. Editors log in and write descriptions for images assigned to them, which get reviewed before web developers present them to the public. “Think of it like a Google Doc for image descriptions,” Bahram said. “There’s an editing and approval flow that is really critical.”

Currently, just about 10 percent of the MCA’s 20,000 or so images have descriptions, but the museum’s editorial team has devoted a lot of energy to coming up with guidelines for writing about artworks in the most effective and intelligible way. The quandaries are complicated: What kind of visual information do you include in a few succinct lines? How does diction help shape the experience of learning about an artwork? How do you clearly describe abstract art?

“Our primary goals are to be accurate, informative, and to stay within [30 words],” said Sheila Majumdar, the museum’s senior editor. “The biggest challenge lies in guarding against internal biases and mistaking opinion or assumption for fact. This is why every description is reviewed by an editor, and no editors approve their own descriptions.”

The Coyote team developed a style guide (also freely accessible online) to help them decide what to include or exclude in descriptions. There are tips related to focus (“describe the objects/information most important to understanding the image”), demographic information (“default to ‘light-skinned’ and ‘dark-skinned,’ when clearly visible”); and precision (“avoid excessive specificity and jargon”). “The first question I recommend asking is, ‘What is relevant?’” said Majumdar. “There is a lot of room for interpretation. In some instances, colors, shapes, or textures might take precedence over narrative content.”

The MCA’s team is also aiming to write two descriptions for every image—a short one and a long one. Screen readers automatically read the former; the latter, which requires users to opt in, gives a more detailed and evocative understanding of an image. The aforementioned Simmons photograph, for instance, has a longer description that reads: “The humanoid house is dramatically lit against a black background, as if posing for a portrait or performing in a play. The house is angled downward toward the floor, giving an impression of sheepishness or a bowing movement.” And the MCA doesn’t only describe images of artworks; it also provides captions for promotional photography and performance documentation. Faced with a massive and growing image repository, editors are now prioritizing images related to current exhibitions and programs, while working backward to fill in text for images of artworks in its permanent collection.

A web designer might shudder at the thought of all this additional text. But the notion that it is difficult to produce a website that is both accessible and elegant is “a false narrative that we fight against,” Bahram said. “That these two things are antithetical is simply not true. It’s not only the right thing to do, but it is easy to achieve those things.”

Of course, revamping your website to meet accessibility standards requires resources, and image descriptions are a very small part of this process, which involves considering details like color contrast and the number of flashing objects on a page. Museums and other cultural spaces interested in using Coyote have to consider the labor required of their web and content developers. But the software can be customized, even for small businesses. “We want to work with people to encourage them to make their websites more inclusive, as far as image descriptions,” Bahram said. “We want to make sure we have the right solution for them. We’re solving a need, not a want.”

Coyote is just one program the MCA has implemented to enhance the museum experience for its visitors with disabilities, in addition to its American Sign Language and touch tours. Last month, it started offering free admission to members of this community and their caretakers. “By removing any financial barrier, we really want to encourage them to visit,” said Keys. The museum’s commitment to Coyote extends that sentiment to its digital gateway—often the first impression visitors have of an institution they plan to visit.

Chicagoan Patti Gregory-Chang, treasurer for the National Federation of the Blind of Illinois, was excited when she found out about the museum’s website and in-gallery programs earlier this week. “This might make me go back to museums,” she said. “Too often our experience is finding glass with nothing we can touch and no audio we can hear. Museums should be for everyone.”

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

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perfectzablog · 6 years ago

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Is Your Child An Orchid Or A Dandelion? Unlocking The Science Of Sensitive Kids

Dr. Thomas Boyce, an emeritus professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, has treated children who seem to be completely unflappable and unfazed by their surroundings — as well as those who are extremely sensitive to their environments. Over the years, he began to liken these two types of children to two very different flowers: dandelions and orchids.

Broadly speaking, says Boyce — who also has spent nearly 40 years studying the human stress response, especially in children — most kids tend to be like dandelions, fairly resilient and able to cope with stress and adversity in their lives. But a minority of kids, those he calls “orchid children,” are more sensitive and biologically reactive to their circumstances, which makes it harder for them to deal with stressful situations.

Like the flower, Boyce says, “the orchid child is the child who shows great sensitivity and susceptibility to both bad and good environments in which he or she finds herself or himself.”

Given supportive, nurturing conditions, orchid children can thrive — especially, Boyce says, if they have the comfort of a regular routine.

“Orchid children seem to thrive on having things like dinner every night in the same place at the same time with the same people, having certain kinds of rituals that the family goes through week to week, month to month,” he says. “This kind of routine and sameness of life from day to day, week to week, seems to be something that is helpful to kids with these great susceptibilities.”

Boyce’s new book is The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Some Children Struggle and How All Can Thrive.

Interview highlights:

On the lab test he did to determine if a child is an orchid or a dandelion

We made an effort to try to understand these individual differences between children in how they respond biologically to mild, common kinds of challenges and stressors, and the way we did that was we brought them into a laboratory setting. We sat them down in front of an examiner — a research assistant that they had not previously met — and we asked them to go through a series of mildly challenging tasks. These were things like recounting a series of digits that the examiner asked them to say and increasing that from first three to four to five digits; having them just engage in a conversation with this examiner, who might ask them about their birthday or presents or something about their family. That, in itself, is a challenge for a young child. Putting a drop of lemon juice on the tongue was another kind of challenge that was evocative of these changes in biological response. …

We measured their stress response using the two primary stress response systems in the human brain. [One was] the cortisol system, which is centered in the hypothalamus of the brain. This is the system that releases the stress hormone cortisol, which has profound effects on both immune function and cardiovascular functioning.

And then the second stress response system is the autonomic nervous system, or the “fight-or-flight” system. This is the one that is responsible for the sweaty palms and a little bit of tremulousness, the dilation of the pupils, all of these things that we associate with the fight-or-flight response. So we were monitoring responsivity and both of those systems as the children went through these mildly challenging tasks. …

We found that there were huge differences [among] children. There were some children at the high end of the spectrum, who had dramatic reactivity in both the cortisol system and the fight-or-flight system, and there were other children who had almost no biological response to the challenges that we presented to them.

On how a child’s responsivity to stressors can be connected to physical and emotional behavioral outcomes

We find in our research that the same kinds of patterns of response are found for both physical illnesses, like severe respiratory disease, pneumonia, asthma and so on, as well as or more [in] emotional behavioral outcomes, like anxiety and depression and externalizing kinds of symptoms. So we believe that the same patterns of susceptibility that we find in the orchid child versus the dandelion child work themselves out not only for physical ailments but also for psychosocial and emotional problems. And we believe that the same kinds of underlying biological processes work for both. …

We do know, for example, that these two stress response systems … the cortisol system and the fight-or-flight system, the autonomic nervous system, both of those have powerful effects on the immune system, so they can alter the child’s ability to build an immune defense against viruses and bacteria that he or she may be exposed to. And they have also powerful effects on the cardiovascular system, so [they] could eventually, in adult life, predispose to developing hypertension, high blood pressure or other kinds of cardiovascular risk.

On how children’s experiences can vary, even within the same family

The experience of children within a given family, the siblings within a family — although they are being reared with the same parents in the same house in the same neighborhood — they actually have quite different kinds of experiences that depend upon the birth order of the child, the gender of the child, to some extent differences in genetic sequence. It is a way of talking about these dramatic differences that kids from different birth orders and different genders have within a given family.

On pushing orchid kids to stretch to do new or difficult things

I think that this is probably the most difficult parenting task in raising an orchid child. The parent of an orchid child needs to walk this very fine line between, on the one hand, not pushing them into circumstances that are really going to overwhelm them and make them greatly fearful, but, on the other hand, not protecting them so much that they don’t have experiences of mastery of these kinds of fearful situations.

Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper adapted it for the Web.

Is Your Child An Orchid Or A Dandelion? Unlocking The Science Of Sensitive Kids published first on https://greatpricecourse.tumblr.com/

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bisoroblog · 6 years ago

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Is Your Child An Orchid Or A Dandelion? Unlocking The Science Of Sensitive Kids

Like the flower, Boyce says, “the orchid child is the child who shows great sensitivity and susceptibility to both bad and good environments in which he or she finds herself or himself.”

Given supportive, nurturing conditions, orchid children can thrive — especially, Boyce says, if they have the comfort of a regular routine.

Boyce’s new book is The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Some Children Struggle and How All Can Thrive.

Interview highlights:

On the lab test he did to determine if a child is an orchid or a dandelion

On how a child’s responsivity to stressors can be connected to physical and emotional behavioral outcomes

On how children’s experiences can vary, even within the same family

On pushing orchid kids to stretch to do new or difficult things

Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper adapted it for the Web.

Is Your Child An Orchid Or A Dandelion? Unlocking The Science Of Sensitive Kids published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

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juangallojongaro · 6 years ago

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Best of 2018

Anna Birch – “Belle Isle” What starts as a slide-guitar-country-crooner transitions into a rockabilly bridge before settling back into sentiment. A heartbreakingly earnest and beautiful love song about moving to a new place and meeting a new person. I saw Birch open for Speedy Ortiz last summer, watched a young couple slow dance to the song, and started crying a little bit. After Birch sang the closing lyric, beginning with “we danced to that song/twice in a row,” she was exhorted by Speedy Ortiz lead singer Sadie Dupuis to play the song again. She didn’t; I wish she had.

Big Red Machine – “Melt” I was introduced to this song because it was the theme song to a podcast about the disastrous 1996 U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team (find that excellent pod here), and found the chanting rising “when you are who you are” sort of mesmerizing. The lyrics are obtuse (much like the entire project, a collab between Justin Vernon and one of the Dressners from the National where they dress like Mad Max Kanye [which, what the fuck]). It is a good time to hear Vernon scream “YOU KNOW IT’S A STRUGGLE, IT’S A KIND OF DEBACLE” like he’s Jim Ross calling a particularly exciting Attitude Era WWE match. A slobberknocker!

boygenius – “Me & My Dog” Politically, 2018 will go down as the Year of Woman as female candidates ran and won in historic numbers in the midterms. In a less historic achievement, it was the Year of the Woman in my best of list, where female fronted or involved projects carried 12 of 18 spots. 2018 was the year when the majority of the best rock records were made by women, and few put out better albums that the three headed monster supergroup, boygenius. “Me & My Dog” is the best track on their superlative self-titled LP. The first third starts with simple orchestration and Phoebe Bridgers’ voice followed by Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker swooning swelling harmonies until the song kicks into another gear in the middle before crescendoing higher and higher until the punchline and plaintive lyric “I wanna be emaciated.” The album version is great, but the live versions best capture the catharsis. boygenius is my favorite new band of the year.

Damien Jurado – “Percy Faith” Shouts to my dude Kit who made sure that I checked out this album, the first I’ve listened to from Mr. Jurado’s enormous discography. While I find the sheer size of that discography pretty intimidating, this song is approachable—a time traveling track about big band leaders, hostage situations, and being on your phone too much. Wry lyrics delivered with a straight face (see, “I am writing from Seattle/Where they now have put a trademark on the rain”) are the star of the show, but the soaring strings and noodling organ sustain multiple listens.

Father John Misty – “Date Night” It shambles, it Jaggers, it oozes confidence in both senses of the word. Ooze is correct, and I wouldn’t be shocked if FJM revealed the swirling synths were covered with cheap, greasy pomade. It’s the best song on great record that’s funny (“I’ll get you ice cream if you give me a card”) and propulsive enough to close a set. God’s Favorite Customer was a return to form after the solipsistic bloat of the second half of Pure Comedy. Here’s hoping he remains in poem zone going forward.

illuminati hotties – “(You’re Better) Than Ever” Too precious by half but catchy as hell, “(You’re Better) Than Ever” was the song that I listened to the most despite of my better judgment. It’s a straight forward rocker about an ex that’s doing better than you are. Problem is the song is delivered with a smile instead of a sneer, and the mean lyrics don’t match the sweet delivery. Still, the surf rock drums and harmonies are great. More importantly: illuminati hotties is the best new band name of the year.

Jeff Rosenstock – “Yr Throat” SEE BELOW

Lucy Dacus – “Night Shift” Without question, the SONG OF THE YEAR. One third of the boygenius titanic triumvirate, Dacus’s anthem starts in a diner with a two-timing ex and ends with a division of the city by time of day. Dacus knows that she isn’t necessarily being practical, but she’s emotionally unreasonable and raw. Quiet/loud that would leave Black Francis and Kim Deal taking notes, the last two minutes are sad and soaring, roaring and resigned.

Mitski – “Nobody” Mitski made the leap this year, basically the music business version of 2018 Brewers slugger Christian Yelich. Like Yelich, Mitski had flashed elite tools in prior years but never quite put it all together (somehow this is Mitski’s first official appearance on my list; honorable mention only in 2015). In 2018, things changed with the New York City songstress dropping Be the Cowboy, the audio equivalent of Yelich’s monstrous .326/.402/.598 (w/ 36 dingers and 22 bags!) 2018 line. Mitski took home album the year from a number of publications and Yelich was the National League MVP. “Nobody” is the basically Yelich’s mega-game from August 29 where he went 6 for 6 and hit for the cycle, helping the Brewers pull out a one run win over the Reds. A slinking disco home run, the song showed Mitski feels both seamless and like five different songs at once. Excellent delivery, danceable and delectable. I’m seeing her in April, right around Opening Day. If you’re looking for me, I’ll be the one leading the MVP chants.

Pusha T – “If You Know You Know” The best of Kanye’s bizarre 2018 productions (the less said about Mr. West at this point, the better), Push’s irresistible ode to (what else, literally what else?) having once dealt cocaine was so good it convinced me for about three weeks that Kanye was back. Also, apparently Pusha T beefed with Drake this year; I’m okay with that.

Robyn – “Ever Again” SEE BELOW

Shannon Shaw – “Freddies ‘n’ Teddies” A brassy wall of sound missive from Shaw, a big voiced Californian who, I just discovered, fronts an outfit called “Shannon and the Clams,” who also released an album in 2018. I’m concerned I should have picked a song by “Shannon and the Clams.” Alas, we’re not starting the new year with regret. “Freddies ‘n’ Teddies” is an excellent throwback jam. It’s a pearl.

Speedy Ortiz – “Lucky 88” Had a weird experience at the Speedy Ortiz show last summer—they went on at like 10:30 PM and played, like, my six favorite Speedy Ortiz songs in a row. At that point, I’d rode my bike to the show and realized a couple things: 1) it was a work night, and 2) I really didn’t want to hear any more of the songs. So, I left! Never done that before. Anyway, goes without saying that “Lucky 88” was one those songs. It’s very good of Speedy Ortiz to keep making Rilo Kiley records because I like Rilo Kiley! Tackling subject of gross dudes with interesting percussion and evocative and tongue-twisty lyrics lyrics (See, “Try and work in this town/without a silver spoon and foot in your mouth” and “One more time with reeling” and “I was born in the cold-clotted heart of the storm”) it’s a stand out track on a good record.

St. Vincent – “Fast Slow Disco” Technically a remix of the “Slow Disco” off of 2017 Album of the Year, MASSEDUCTION, the new version improves on the original in every way. On Twitter, Annie Clark wrote that she “always felt this song could wear many different outfits and live many different lives. here she is in disco pants, sweating on a new york dance floor.” Sweat and live it does, transformed from the original prayer to a fucking Pet Shop Boys song. It’s a banger, and continued proof that Clark is one of the best pop artists working.

Swearin’ – “Grow into a Ghost” There’s some Fleetwood Mac-y shenanigans going on with this band—basically, the two lead singers were dating and then broke up but then made this record. I don’t know; it’s not my business. This song is my business. With Allison Crutchfield leading the way with an excellent read on the lyrics, this pop punk potato chip isn’t particularly substance, but it is really good, crunchy, and with the right amount of salt.

Tranyanne and Danny – “O’Keeffe” There’s a swaying simplicity, putting you in mind of the Ben Folds Five at their most daydreamy with a dash of Broadway panache. Ostensibly about titular painter, it’s a duet that’s good for a slow dance with a dip or two.

U.S. Girls – “Incidental Boogie” You like art rock? U.S. Girls love art rock! It’s a feminist statement piece about (I think, I’m ready to be really wrong here) about domestic violence, BDSM, and empowerment that puts you in mind of The Knife’s masterpiece Silent Shout and maybe The Phantom Thread. It’s all over the place and I’m too thick to figure it out.

Young Gun Silver Fox – “Lenny” This 70’s cheese rock throwback is delicious trash. Essentially, it’s “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)” if, 1981, someone commissioned Daryl Hall and Michael McDonald to write a yacht rock musical based on Frank Sinatra songs. I’m not saying this song is frozen pizza rolls—I’m saying it’s gourmet frozen pizza rolls that are filled with the finest heirloom tomato sauce, cured salumis, and aged cheeses. It’s stupid and it’s bad for you and I will eat a million of them.

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR: Honey by Robyn and POST- by Jeff Rosenstock.

These are two very different albums. The lyrics are in English and no one, like, throat sings, but Rosenstock’s raw, claustrophobic punk and Robyn’s luscious electropop seem antithetical. Taken together, the two help me best explain what was like for me to be alive in 2018.

Dropped on New Year’s Day, POST- begins screaming, “Dumbfounded, downtrodden and dejected/Crestfallen, grief-stricken and exhausted/Trapped in my room while the house was burnin'/To the motherfuckin' ground.” Rosenstock captures just how fucking stressful it is to be living through the Trump Administration. The grift, the humanitarian horror, the callous and smirking racism, the grinding and clobbering indecency. He captures the paralysis and that feeling that it won’t get better, he won’t go way; “it’s not like any other job I know/If you’re a piece of shit they don’t let you go.”

There were so many times this year when I was struggling with something personal—anxiety, the stresses of my job, feeling mean or irritable and it would feel worse because President Diaper-Butt said something repugnant. The political stress and the personal stress fed each other.

On “Powerlessness”, Rosenstock sings “[s]o where can you go when the troubles inside you/Make your limbs feel like they're covered in lead?/How can you solve all the problems around you/When you can't even solve the ones in your head?” I struggled with this all year and basically defaulted to paralysis. Rostenstock put words to that ennui.

Rosenstock sang about feeling bad—Robyn sang about getting better. Her record starts in a similar place of psychic pain. It’s more mundane, a break up, but Robyn blows the heartbreak out into pop hits. On “Missing U,” she’s just as vulnerable and paralyzed as Rosenstock, “[c]an't make sense of all of the pieces/Of my own delusions/Can't take all these memories/Don't know how to use them.”

Over the course of the record, Robyn gets better. In interviews, she explained that she took the time to go through a couple years of psychotherapy (this is privilege; we all can’t take years off from work to sort out our shit—I can’t, Rosenstock certainly can’t) and emerges better—fully realized and in charge of herself. The two centerpieces of the second half of the album, the titular “Honey” and the finale, “Ever Again” are physical and optimistic. She put the work in and got better.

I tried to get better in 2019, as well. It was a mixed bag—lost a bunch of weight, gained it back. Bought a house and was driven half-crazy by the process. Got a promotion, lost some hard cases. But I really improved my mental health. I worked hard on being mindful and trying to feel better. I didn’t get all the way (unlike Roybn, I don’t feel like “I’m never gonna be brokenhearted ever again”), but I feel better than I did a year ago.

There’s going to be at least more years of the political degradation. I can’t control that. But both albums end on hopeful notes, expecting that things will get better. I don’t know if they will. But the emotion and message of these albums, make them the best of 2018.

#bestof2018

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templified · 5 years ago

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Best Modern WordPress Themes | Templified

New Post has been published on https://templified.com/best-modern-wordpress-themes/

Best Modern WordPress Themes

In this collection, we’re highlighting the very best modern WordPress themes. These themes are all simple, cutting edge and packed with features, just like any modern WordPress theme should be.

Amio

Amio is a clean and simple, multi-purpose WordPress theme that works for all kinds of online organizations. Developed with a gorgeous minimalist style, this precise and meet theme is so versatile, there’s nothing you can’t do with it. For artists and creative groups or individuals, agencies and portfolios, for personal or professional blogs, this minimal theme has a simple design that is practically eye candy. Your readers will be able to focus on what is most important on your website, your content. This theme provides a premium experience and it’s very user-friendly as well. Built on the Redux framework, and Amio is fast loading and efficient in terms of its code, that’s going to allow you to rank better in the search engines and provide a user experience that is Second To None of for all of your visitors.

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Revoke2

The Revoke2 WordPress theme is specifically designed for businesses of all types. Its clean coding allows it to be easily customized for your specific business purposes so that you will quickly have your site up and running. It comes with demo data, which lets you easily insert content onto the site by simply replacing the sample with your real content. It features a full-width grid layout that has been extended to 1170 px to increase your layout options. The “Tesla Framework” that comes with this theme easily allows you to customize layouts so you can easily display items such as services provided, portfolios of projects and so on as well as customizing other details such as colors, headers and other sections of the site. Since the theme is designed to be fully responsive, the site will display on tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices.

Revoke2 comes with six custom post types, including portfolio, services, features, team & partners and testimonials, thus, you can easily add these sections to your site as you need them, and quickly insert new content such as team member profiles, client details with no hard work. The Portfolio page comes with options that allow you to display different types of content including videos. You are also provided with various short codes so you can easily add items to your home page such as sliders, recent blog posts and portfolio images. It is WooCommerce ready, so you can add an online store using this plugin, allowing you to sell anything on your site. It also comes with a free Slider Revolution plugin, which provides a host of slider management options and styling to help improve your content presentation. Other notable features include header widgets that let you display contact information on the header and support for a blog with a featured display page so you can easily add new posts.

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Awesome

Awesome is the name of this symbol portfolio theme and I think it could be a good choice for some of you who want one of the simplest, most mobile friendly and responsive photo portfolio themes available. That’s not to say that this template doesn’t offer plenty of features and customization options, you can easily change background images, upload your logo, add a Favicon, swap around text blocks and widgets to create a unique design. There are slideshows with drag and drop image ordering and you can add just as many images as you want. Designed for multiple post formats, quotes and links along with all of The Usual Suspects like audio, image galleries, single images and videos, awesome is a WordPress theme that delivers big results with a relatively simple and lightweight package.

The main goal of Graph Paper Press’ Awesome Theme is to create a minimalist website while still preserving the essential features needed to best showcase an artist’s portfolio. The Awesome Theme may suit photographers, videographers, illustrators, painters, graphic artists, and designers.

With the Awesome Theme, you are greeted with an uncluttered homepage that you can customize to your heart’s content. Each theme option have corresponding backend (or dashboard) options where you can add, change, or remove headers, menus, texts, backgrounds, and other design themes. The theme also boasts unlimited color options that you can mix and match depending on your site’s design. The theme’s main advantage is its built-in Slideshow feature where you can add on the homepage or on its own page.

The Awesome Theme supports various posting formats and makes it easier to post images and videos in their own galleries. Audio, links, and quote formats are also supported by the Awesome Theme.

Widgets for subscription forms, contact forms, images, blocks of texts, and other pieces of code can also be added on any area of your webpage running the Awesome Theme. As with all themes created by Graph Paper Press, the Awesome Theme has a mobile-friendly design, includes automatic updates for all active members, includes translation-ready .mo and .po files, and comes with html5 markup codes.

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Underwood

Underwood is a modern and masculine, minimal and well made blogging theme from Adella / called theme shift. This is a template for folks who have something to say, and want to say it in a very impactful way. It’s chock-full of bold elements and modern code, it perfectly sets the stage for your written and visual content to be Center Stage. There are plenty of impressive features to really make a statement, despite the fact that the theme has a generally minimalist style. This template was Bill on the bootstrap framework, it is mobile friendly and fully responsive. That means that folks who access your site from laptops or tablets, even mobile devices, are going to get the same great experience. Underwood support WP Super Cache, yoast SEO, contact form 7 and even WooCommerce, allowing you to set up flexible and Powerful online store. There are nine post formats, unlimited color options and you’ll get to choose from hundreds of different Google fonts for typography.

Simple, modern, minimalist, those are three words I’d use to describe Underwood, a wonderful personal blog and WooCommerce theme from ThemeShift. ThemeShift is known for well designed themes based on Bootstrap and Underwood absolutely knocks it out of the park. The design is simple and effective, easy to use and flexible, modern and classic at the same time. The support, documentation and code is absolutely top notch, which means you won’t run into problems integrating new features or while customizing your website. With Underwood, you can create a website that looks just like you imagined and if you want a simple, classical looking theme that puts all the focus and attention on your content, this minimalist WordPress theme could be just what you’ve been searching for.

Underwood is a simple, clean and minimalist WordPress blog theme by ThemeShift. I’ve reviewed a handful of their themes and I really like their designs, classic and simple but with enough style to make your content look fresh. Incredibly versatile and well structured, bold and stylish, basic looking and powerful, that’s what Underwood brings to the table. The best minimal WordPress themes are a simple, fun and absolutely perfect way to get online with a WP webpage fast and that’s what Underwood aims to do. While any of these extraordinary top quality styles offer scores of advantages, I think Underwood does a particularly nice job of combining splendid support as you set the theme up, plain capability, first-rate style. Your business is extremely vital, your blog absolutely must be magnificent. Underwood is a WordPress minimalist theme that’s great for businesses, blogging or revealing your incredible portfolio.

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Collecto

Collecto is a minimal WordPress theme that was inspired by modern magazines. This theme is like holding a magazine in your hands. Well, practically anyway! This template has a crisp style that really speaks to readers and in terms of it’s ease of use, it’s among the best. Collecto was created by Themes Kingdom, among the best theme developers around. Their support is fast and friendly, the documentation is complete and easy to understand. For basic edits to the look of your site, the admin panel is comprehensive and delivers a wonderful user experience. For more advanced users, the code is clean and well commented for more adaptability. This theme works hand in hand with all the most popular plugins from stuff Contact Form 7 to keep you in contact with your audience, to SEO plugins like Yoast that can help readers find you in the first place. This is definitely one of the better minimalist WordPress themes around.

Building a simple and attractive travel magazine theme? Want a minimalist option? Then consider Collecto. Collecto is a beautiful, simple, smart and minimal portfolio, blog and magazine theme for WordPress. This is something completely new and innovative, Collecto is a grid based newspaper inspired theme that is contemporary in style, yet timeless, since much of the design is so simple, it’s evocative of a previous time and place. With Collecto, the dynamic grid is constantly adapting to the length and order of your content, so it looks professional and elegant on every device, no matter the size and shape of your images or the length of your posts. You can even sticky posts on the front page, which causes them to take up two columns. It’s a great, simple and elegant way to highlight your most important or newest articles. For a minimalist theme, typography can be a very important consideration and Collecto offers over 800+ Google fonts, so you don’t have to settle for something that’s not quite right.

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Eero

This theme, Eero, is a minimal masterpiece that has plenty of white space and all the features you need to create a solid portfolio or blog website. Want to sell some products? That’s well within the scope of what Eero does well too, it’s compatible with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads and all the other popular eCommerce plugins for WordPress. This theme has support for Vimeo, it’s got a handful of different layouts to develop a nice looking website with a clean, simple style. There’s a masonry gallery with column control, multiple gallery types, custom logo and tagline support, advanced integration of Google fonts and even social icon integration. For fans of Adobe Typekit, that’s an option as well. There’s a lot to like with the Eero theme, so check it out and let us know if it works for you in the comments below.

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Moment

Moment is a really unique looking WordPress blog theme that will keep your readers engaged with a fun and innovative look and layout, bold images and fantastic typography are really eye-catching with this theme. Moment uses a unique layout, that’s for sure, and your audience will notice the difference between your site and others in your niche. The masonry layout smartly adapts to the surrounding images, perfectly fitting together like a puzzle. Pretty cool. There are more than one article layouts in Moment too, four of them to be exact. Put your content on either side of your gorgeous featured image, center it with a rock-solid fixed image or even set it up to be centered with a bold full-width image. No matter what, your content will look stunning. Jetpack support, incredibly detailed documentation and dedicated support all help this responsive theme to be one of the best blog themes you can find.

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Brittany

Brittany is an appealing minimalist site WordPress theme. Brittany lets you make a layout and look for your web site which is unique, and that’s just what the Zoom Framework’s drag and drop homepage builder provides. You’ll get hyper fast access to everything you want your visitors, clients and customers to pay particular attention to, all without having to even look at a single line of code.

You’ve got to ask yourself a few questions before you get started with a theme like Brittany. First, what size should this site be? Big? Small? Teeny-tiny! Ultimately, that choice is up to you. Brittany provides flexibility, power and the aggressive features to handle it. Brittany possesses an option to highlight it to maximum advantage. There’s absolutely nothing to it, whatever you decide to add to this theme, take away from it, multiply or divide it too, the Brittany theme ends up looking great.

The stunning Portfolio Module should allow Brittany to be well suited for all kinds of consumers. With a dependable Visual Customizer ,in addition to the popular and well coded ‘Zoom Framework’, Brittany here instantly gives you an infinite amount of potential layouts. Considering this theme is anything but ornate, the level of sophistication in terms of customization is certainly no abomination. (Guh, readability is going to be poor for this post! Don’t hate me Google!) Toss in some widgets, create multiple menus, do the things it takes to craft a winning website. Do it with Brittany! (tee-hee)

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Beatrix

Tesla Themes created Beatrix for creative folks who want a simple, yet full featured web template for promoting and selling handmade products. I think this theme has a certain DIY style that makes it perfect for that purpose. It’s great for hand crafted goods, jewelry or handbags, clothing and accessories. It even works great for selling digital products like WordPress themes! This theme is fully responsive from the ground up, it looks perfect on all screen sizes and there are a wide range of features that you can add to your site to help make it as good as you want it to be. Modern and clean, simple and straightforward, this is a beginner friendly WordPress theme that’s great for simple shops. I also really like the Typography, it’s not overused and trite, the combination of Aleo and Fira Sans isn’t one that you see on every theme that comes on the market. There’s a lot to like, so Beatrix is well worth taking a look at.

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#Minimalist #Modern

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