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thesinglesjukebox · 5 years

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LUKAS GRAHAM - LOVE SOMEONE [1.50] After three songs covered here, their combined score has now reached [4.09]...

Will Rivitz: The epsilon-delta definition of a limit is, in layman's terms, generally as follows: if one plugs a number x into a function, that function's limit as x approaches some other number a is L if, no matter what arbitrarily small number ε you can come up with, you can find some x near a such that x plugged into the function is within ε of L. This is somewhat confusing, so a non-math example to illustrate: Let x be a band, and let the a that x approaches be Lukas Graham (for notation's sake, we'll call it the Graham limit). We find that the limit L of the function f(x), as x approaches a, is in fact negative infinity. To understand why this is, consider any arbitrary ε, and we find that no matter how low f(ε), the Graham limit allows for a lower f(x). For example, if we set ε fairly low, at, say, Five For Fighting, we find that a lower f(x) is possible. If we set ε even lower, at, for example, Meghan Trainor, we find that a lower f(x) is still achievable. In this sense, "Love Someone" is an effectively didactic example, as it uses an almost unimaginably low ε -- Train, in this case --- and demonstrates that the Graham limit is lower still. Math is wonderful, isn't it? [0]

Andy Hutchins: The exchange rate on Lukas Graham members to Jason Mraz is 3:1, in case you have interest in playing what I'm sure is the booming market for sub-Sheeran wedding dreck. (Play a song that includes the sniffing refrain "You've probably never loved someone like I do" at your wedding at your own peril.) [1]

Julian Axelrod: As long as dads are having first dances at their second weddings, Lukas Graham will have a career. [3]

Alfred Soto: Well, isn't he the hateful little shit: she should learn to love like he does. It's not Graham Cracker's first time stepping on a rake. Ed Sheeran is Otis Redding. [1]

Katherine St Asaph: Justin Bieber's "Love Yourself" is not improved by 50,000 times more singing. [1]

Jonathan Bradley: Imagine I had just fallen head-over-heels for someone. You know, right in the mushy marshes of new affection. A time in which I had been so disarmed by this new presence in my life that I grasped for sincerity and earnestness to account for it; a time when hearing such sentiments drawn with careless and vague strokes would make them seem nonetheless truthful and important. Even at such a time, I think that I would find Lukas Forchhammer's quivering soul tenor to be impossibly, intolerably weedy. [2]

Nicholas Donohoue: I could revert to my hate mindset and be a pedantic, over-intensive jerk, but the only thing that needs said is Lukas Graham should refrain from long, high notes. [3]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Jason Mraz-type schlock that's too boring to hate passionately. Since the music's too boilerplate, the lyrics come through with some solipsistic narcissism. Terrible, but easy to laugh at, which makes it a little less terrible. [2]

Taylor Alatorre: All three of Lukas Graham's self-titled albums feature the same painting of a nude woman on their cover but with a different color palette, like a lazier, hornier version of Weezer. The painting, entitled Damen med flaskerne (Lady with the Bottles), is Lars Helweg's depiction of Swedish-Italian actress Anita Ekberg, best known for her starring role in La Dolce Vita. Painted in 1992 but based on a 1956 Playboy photograph, it's become a minor cultural touchstone in Denmark; the hard rock band September also used the artwork for their 1995 album Many a Little. The original resides in Copenhagen's Cafe Wilder, which Lukas Graham's lead singer often visited as a child. He says the album art is intended as a tribute to his childhood, as well as a representation of the band's music: "naked and beautiful." Each of these facts is more interesting than anything found in this song, which devalues love by implying that yours isn't genuine unless you can squeeze a saccharine pseudo-devotional out of it. [2]

Alex Clifton: Is this the worst song Lukas Graham have ever recorded? No. That's either "7 Years," "Strip No More," or their newest single, which is an anti-suicide ballad (?) that involves the line "my stage show can light up the clouds," because somehow it has to have the self-aggrandizing turn that most Lukas Graham songs have. It depends on the day which song I hate more. But "Love Someone" is insipid and boring and clichéd and bad. It's like if the sappiest Jason Mraz song (also incidentally named "Love Someone") had a baby with Ed Sheeran's "Perfect" and a guy with less charisma than Pat Monahan tried to reassure you his Hefty bag of love is real. It's meaningless. It's supposed to be tender and kind but I can't get past the fact that this is the guy who once sang "HOW COME YOU DON'T STRIP NO MOOOOOOOOORE" so goddamn enthusiastically. Moreover, this song made me realize why I specifically hate Lukas Graham: they commit the sin of believing they're the only people in the world who have ever experienced feelings. "You'll probably never love someone like I do," Lukas Forchhammer sings, and in that moment I know he believes every word he says. It's the same story they've told with every other song: my emotion is the strongest and the worst and the most bad and the most valid, and you'll never understand. Lukas Graham have long left a bad taste in my mouth and this song makes me hate them more, to the point where it's a personal insult that Lukas Graham keeps releasing music. If they really loved someone other than themselves, they'd leave us alone. [0]

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Required Reading

MASS MoCA will unveil what it’s claiming is the “world’s largest watercolor painting,” a 120-square-foot (8′ x 15′), site-specific commission by Barbara Prey. That’s quite a claim, though I do wish the painting was a little more exciting. (via MASS MoCA)

This article about a family “slave” in the US has been much discussed this week. Alex Tizon, who died at the age of 57 this year, writes about when he realized who the woman who lived with his family was. The whole story is chilling:

To our American neighbors, we were model immigrants, a poster family. They told us so. My father had a law degree, my mother was on her way to becoming a doctor, and my siblings and I got good grades and always said “please” and “thank you.” We never talked about Lola. Our secret went to the core of who we were and, at least for us kids, who we wanted to be.

After my mother died of leukemia, in 1999, Lola came to live with me in a small town north of Seattle. I had a family, a career, a house in the suburbs—the American dream. And then I had a slave.

RELATED: Some interesting responses:

"My Family's Slave" is now trending in the Philippines, where it's lunch time. I'm going to share a few interesting threads from Filipinos:

— Adrian Chen (@AdrianChen) May 17, 2017

Honestly I'm convinced 3/4 of you who are opining about the Tizon piece didn't finish reading it

— Sarah Jeong (@sarahjeong) May 17, 2017

Eudocia Polida was an enslaved person whose hopes and dreams we know filtered only through the service of others by system not choice

— Sydette (@Blackamazon) May 17, 2017

Read "My Family's Slave" &I just literally wanted to reach into the story and punch every fucker in the Tizon family, including the author.

— ✡️Josh Shahryar ☪ (@JShahryar) May 16, 2017

I hate Interview, which is a celebrity-obsessed rag full of starfuckers, but I do always love Antwaun Sargent’s perspective, so I really enjoyed his interview with painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye:

SARGENT: One signature aspect of your painting is that the figure almost blends into its surroundings, because the earth tones of your backdrops are reflective of the character’s dark brown skin tones. There are a lot of things that are being signified but particularly there’s a critique of the hypervisibility, which Ralph Ellison talked about, that renders blackness completely seen and unseen. Is that part of the negotiation between the figure and its surroundings in your work?

YIADOM-BOAKYE: Maybe I think more about black thought than black bodies. When people ask about the aspect of race in the work, they are looking for very simple or easy answers. Part of it is when you think other people are so different than yourself, you imagine that their thoughts aren’t the same. When I think about thought, I think about how much there is that is common.

Robert Rauschenberg’s “Bed” (1955) piece includes a “stolen” bedcover from another artist:

But for the artist Dorothea Rockburne, the painting carries a more personal charge. She first met Rauschenberg during their student days at Black Mountain College, the fabled school near Asheville, N.C., that was briefly the epicenter of the American avant-garde. One day, Ms. Rockburne was in the college laundry room unloading her wash from the dryer when she realized that her patchwork quilt was missing. “The next time I saw it was at the Leo Castelli Gallery,” she recently recalled in a tone of disbelief, referring to the public debut of “Bed.” “My first thought was: Son of a bitch! We were close friends.”

Masha Gessen writes about the language of autocrats:

A Russian poet named Sergei Gandlevsky once said that in the late Soviet period he became obsessed with hardware-store nomenclature. He loved the word secateurs, for example. Garden shears, that is. Secateurs is a great word. It has a shape. It has weight. It has a function. It is not ambiguous. It is also not a hammer, a rake, or a plow. It is not even scissors. In a world where words were constantly used to mean their opposite, being able to call secateurs “secateurs”—and nothing else—was freedom.

“Freedom,” on the other hand, was, as you know, slavery. That’s Orwell’s 1984. And it is also the USSR, a country that had “laws,” a “constitution,” and even “elections,” also known as the “free expression of citizen will.” The elections, which were mandatory, involved showing up at the so-called polling place, receiving a pre-filled ballot—each office had one name matched to it—and depositing it in the ballot box, out in the open. Again, this was called the “free expression of citizen will.” There was nothing free about it, it did not constitute expression, it had no relationship to citizenship or will because it granted the subject no agency. Calling this ritual either an “election” or the “free expression of citizen will” had a dual effect: it eviscerated the words “election,” “free,” “expression,” “citizen,” and “will,” and it also left the thing itself undescribed. When something cannot be described, it does not become a fact of shared reality. Hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens had an experience of the thing that could not be described, but I would argue that they did not share that experience, because they had no language for doing so. At the same time, an experience that could be accurately described as, say, an “election,” or “free,” had been preemptively discredited because those words had been used to denote something entirely different.

Siobhan Burke is speaking out against imagery in dance that exploits women (including images of sexual violence):

By “images of violence against women,” I mean not just depictions of violent acts but also the kind of forceful partnering that’s become so ubiquitous, so gratuitous, so banal in ballet — the yanking, dragging, prying open of women’s bodies by men — both with and without a narrative pretext. Calling it out, as I did after seeing Angelin Preljocaj’s “La Stravaganza” (1997) for City Ballet in 2014, or Mauro Bigonzetti’s “Cantata” (2000), performed by Gauthier Dance in 2016 — feels as tiresome as watching it, and unpacking its history would take more space than I have here.

… My disappointment with “Odessa” led me to post a photo on Instagram — my favorite place to air an impulsive thought — with the caption “no more gang rape scenes in ballets, please.” (The photo was of my face, looking directly at the camera, wearing what I consider an “over it” kind of expression.) This prompted an expansive thread of comments, including by my colleague Alastair Macaulay, who had reviewed “Odessa” for The New York Times. He asked whether my call for “no more” was a call for censorship: “Must works of art only depict people behaving correctly?”

The answer, of course, is no. If artists want to deal with rape, gang or otherwise, as subject matter, they should, as they should grapple with any difficult issue. But they must really deal with it: Say something. Don’t just toss it in as one more incidental plot twist, one more exquisite thing to behold. Acknowledge its urgency, its complexity and the fact that to many in the audience, it may not be so abstract.

Documenta or Crapumenta?

Graffiti castigating the spectacle as “Crapumenta 14” soon appeared. “I refuse to exoticize myself to increase your cultural capital. Signed: The People,” has been a particular favourite. While Giorgos Kaminis, the city’s mayor, maintained Documenta was fantastic for tourism (as Aegean Airlines’ new and fully booked Kassel to Athens route has proved), critics complained that it amounted to the worst kind of crisis tourism.

“There’s anger because they haven’t taken circumstance into account,” says Nadja Argyropoulou, a curator in Athens. “Their theory is beautiful, radical and timely, but they didn’t mingle or take the leap into the everyday or address the reality here. Circumstance is what humbles theory and makes art as important as real life.”

For detractors, Szymczyk had become the embodiment of the corporate, neo-liberal order he professes to abhor, a purveyor of the worst kind of soft German power. Not only was the exhibition abstruse, it had committed the cardinal sin of omitting Greek artists and curators. “There are so many names,” Argyropoulou says. “People who should have been in it but were never approached. But please also write that we want them to succeed. If they fail, it is us who will be left with their ruins of contemporary art – and in a country that is continually looking to its past, with unresolved questions of identity, that would be disastrous.”

An obsessive fan found the source for the cover image of Radiohead’s OK Computer album (it’s a highway in Hartford):

After looking at 2,000 scripts, 25,000 actors, 4 million lines, and analyzing them by gender, this is what Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels (writing for the Pudding) found:

A tour of the new Foster Partners–designed Apple HQ, where the tech company even designed a special pizza box for employees:

For workers who want to take the café’s pizza back to their pods, Apple created (and patented) a container that lets air and moisture escape so the crust won’t get soggy. (via Wired)

Jack O’Donnell worked for Trump in the 1980s, and he reminds us that everything he’s doing is NOT a surprise:

After I resigned in April 1990, I wrote a book about my time with him, Trumped: The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump, His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall, in 1991. In the book, I told stories about Trump’s leadership style that would come to echo his presidency years later.

I witnessed him make public phone calls that he insisted were private and use those conversations to humiliate and corner the person on the other end. I witnessed him demand loyalty from those who worked for him. I witnessed him make impulsive decisions as a result of his short attention span.

RELATED: Did you know Nixon wrote to Donald Trump in 1987? Presidential historian Michael Beschloss posted this:

Nixon writes to Trump, 30 years ago this year: http://pic.twitter.com/rKxHBXNuXO

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) May 17, 2017

ALSO RELATED: A new poll suggests a majority of Americans believe Trump is a liar and wish Obama was still president. More data from Public Policy Polling:

Only 40% of voters approve of the job Trump is doing to 54% who disapprove. For the first time we find more voters (48%) in support of impeaching Trump than there are (41%) opposed to the idea. Only 43% of voters think Trump is actually going to end up serving his full term as President, while 45% think he won’t, and 12% aren’t sure one way or the other.

… By an 8 point margin, 49/41, they say they wish Hillary Clinton was President instead of Trump. And by a 16 point margin, 55/39, they say they wish Barack Obama was still in office instead of Trump.

And Time Magazine‘s new cover became a topic of discussion on social media. This is probably the funniest take on it:

@TIME Fixed this for you. *Turn on audio* http://pic.twitter.com/7soqnUZI7r

— Matthew A. Cherry (@MatthewACherry) May 18, 2017

Or did Time rip off Mad Magazine?

Once More, With Stealing Dept. TIME MAGAZINE RIPS OFF MAD MAGAZINE?https://t.co/dWYykrr4tJ http://pic.twitter.com/bfYrj2DpUb

— MAD Magazine (@MADmagazine) May 18, 2017

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

The post Required Reading appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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