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elitegymnastics · 3 years

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Q: What is this?

A: It’s a flyer for a virtual fundraiser on June 4th that Elite Gymnastics is playing. You can access the show at quietyear.com

Q: Hasn’t Elite Gymnastics been inactive for like, ten years?

A: Yes. This is the first Elite Gymnastics performance of any kind since November 30th 2012, at the Horn Gallery at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

Q: Why did Elite Gymnastics stop playing shows?

A: Elite Gymnastics started out as me (Jaime) and a bunch of my friends agreeing to help me play my songs live back in 2009. I made a lot of weird demos in GarageBand and my friend Dominique Davis from the band Dearling Physique got tired of watching me sit on them. So, he booked me to play at a show he was curating as part of a small local music and arts festival called Clapperclaw. For several months that’s mainly what EG was. At some point the focus shifted to making recordings rather than playing shows, to participate in the emergent culture of new music distributed via MP3 file-sharing. The lineup winnowed to just me and Josh Clancy, who began creating digital EPs that we posted on this Tumblr page as ZIP files full of MP3s accompanied by a PDF of artwork. This is the incarnation of the group that most people are familiar with.

This was before Patreon existed. If Bandcamp was around, we’d never heard of it. Though MP3 file-sharing culture and file transfer sites like MediaFire and MegaUpload allowed anyone to distribute music freely across the world via the internet, it was still pretty difficult to get people to pay you for it. I think it was for this reason that a lot of internet music back then featured a lot of sampling. A lot of artists’ first forays into the world of DAWs and production took the form of mash-ups, bootleg remixes, and DJ mixes. Artists like Animal Collective, MIA, Kanye West, and Daft Punk for whom sampling was a pillar of their creative process were extremely influential. Elite Gymnastics was no exception - the first song of ours to gain traction online was “Is This On Me?” which made no attempt to hide the fact that it heavily sampled Faye Wong’s “Eyes On Me.” The fact that it was so difficult to make money off MP3s pushed people to make different creative decisions than they would have otherwise. It was sort of a free-for-all.

Eventually, all of this started to change. The major labels started getting a lot more aggressive about trying to destroy MP3 file-sharing culture. Platforms like MegaUpload were raided and taken offline. The replacements that sprung up to replace them were increasingly infested with ads and malware. Corporate platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud adopted Content ID filters to prevent the proliferation of copyrighted music there. Blogs and private torrent trackers being taken down meant thousands of hours of labor were wiped out in an instant. Some of the best archives of the history of recorded music ever created were destroyed without hesitation. Even the most devoted participants lost the will to keep repairing and re-making the stuff that cops and record companies kept obliterating.

Josh and I both dreamed of being able to make a living as musicians. We still do. Back then, we were willing to accept a lot of changes in order to make that possible, which seemed necessary. A lot of the stuff that we were great at just didn’t make any money. Once, we were asked to do a remix of a song called “Sa Sa Samoa” by the band Korallreven. I did the remix by myself, which was normal for us, and Josh was so inspired by it that he spent a week working non-stop to create a video for it. People loved it - the day the video dropped, Pitchfork designated the song as a “Best New Track” and New York Magazine wrote about it in their “Approval Matrix.” The video led to a ton of exposure, but from a financial perspective, it just did not make sense to put that much effort into promoting a remix of someone else’s song. The stuff we were personally excited by just seemed to have less and less to do with what actually makes money.

A lot of internet bands during this era began to palpably shapeshift in an effort to succeed in music as a career. Artists who’d first attracted notice for sample-based bangers they made on a laptop started posing with vintage hardware in their press photos and trading in their laptops for live bands and recording studios. It became harder to distribute DJ mixes or mash-ups that contained copyrighted music in them. Influential bloggers either closed up shop or were absorbed into the traditional music industry in some way. Feeds that once touted bizarre songs by laptop-toting weirdos with no industry connections started to become populated mostly by artists with labels and publicists. The bottom rungs of festival lineups started to consist mostly of new major label signings who have lots of money to spend on stage production but not much in the way of grassroots fan enthusiasm or media buzz.

Internet music and what people tend to refer to as “indie music” split off into two separate streams. Today, there’s a pretty intense firewall between internet culture and whatever you want to call the culture of vinyl records, mid-sized indie labels with publicists, and positive reviews from the few remaining websites that still pay people to write about music. I call it “publicist indie,” “lifestyle techno,” or “prestige electronica” depending on whether or not the music features guitars and/or vocals. The recent online kerfuffle about NFTs really emphasized this split. The worlds of digital illustration and game development campaigned aggressively against mass adoption of cryptocurrency - if you saw any Medium posts explaining crypto’s environmental issues, chances are they were written by someone from those fields. Every new announcement by an artist that they had minted an NFT was met with a swift and vocal backlash from fans. Though I’ve never really been much of an Aphex Twin fan, it was still pretty startling to look at the replies under his NFT announcement tweet and see hundreds of furious people announcing that he was now dead to them. That’s an artist who has seemed more or less unimpeachable for most of my life up until this point! All of that seemed to change in an instant.

There is a massive disconnect between the insular world of the industry establishment and the cutting edge of online counterculture. We saw this again a couple of weeks ago with the online response to the crisis in Gaza. We saw passionate advocacy for Palestinians from games journalists and developers much more often than we saw it from musicians. This is a very serious problem for music! I do not believe it is possible to please both sides - that is to say, I do not believe it is possible to be part of internet counterculture and the industry establishment simultaneously. The music industry is too conservative, too compromised, too corrupt. If it weren’t for the ocean of valuable copyrights that labels are sitting on, most of them would be bankrupt within a year. If the industry was forced to live or die based on how they handle what’s happening right now in the present, it would most assuredly die. The only people who don’t realize this are those who are being paid to stay ignorant.

Josh and I did not know this back then. From where we were standing, it looked like internet culture and established media industries were on track to converge. A career in the arts seemed genuinely, tantalizingly possible, right up until the moment that it no longer did.

In my case, I had really been struggling up until that point. My life had been this ongoing sequence of evictions and hospitalizations, and it seemed to be getting worse, not better. I donated plasma twice a week to pay for groceries and while I was sitting there with a giant needle stuck in my left arm for an hour I would see my picture in The Fader or my songs being recommended by one of the Kings of Leon on Twitter or whatever. Music seemed like the only thing the world thought I was any good at. It felt like my only chance at a peaceful, happy life was somewhere out there in a world I could only perceive through a laptop screen.

Gender, for me, was a big factor in all of this. The more invested in the craft of songwriting I became, the harder it was to repress or ignore my gender stuff. At that time I’m not sure I even knew what the word “transgender” meant - I just knew that when I showed up at a venue wearing a skirt, no one would talk to me or look me in the eye, and that reading about people like Anohni or Terre Thaemlitz or on the internet made me feel like if I could get out of Minneapolis maybe I could find a place where people would accept me. The internet was like, a pretty toxic place for someone in my position. When I tried to find people to talk to about what I was feeling, nobody tried to tell me to read Judith Butler or ask me what pronouns I preferred. The internet was just like, overrun with predators who just wanted to fetishize me and exploit me. Music seemed like the only way I’d ever have an actual life as myself. I was desperate for that. I was well and truly desperate.

Between all the big changes that were happening to us individually and the music industry moving farther and farther away of the anarchic free-for-all of MP3 file-sharing culture, the strain on us just got to be too much. We stopped trusting each other. We became the unstoppable force and the immovable object, crashing haphazardly against one another’s resolve in a dazzling display of youthful futility. Our partnership ended, and after finishing out the remaining live shows on the calendar by myself, I retired the name “Elite Gymnastics” and started making music on my own under other names. That was that.

Q: Why is Elite Gymnastics coming back now, then?

A: Over the years, Josh and I eventually started talking again. Though there was a lot we did agree on, and potential future projects were discussed, nothing truly felt right. We haven’t been in the same room since Summer 2012, and we’ve both changed a lot since then. We both have other projects and we’ve both developed other ways of working since we stopped working together. It’s a pretty big commitment to put all of that aside in order to join your fortunes together with someone you haven’t seen in a decade.

Recently, Josh decided to leave Elite Gymnastics. His reasons are his own, and I was very surprised by his decision, but after having had time to adjust, I’m really grateful to him. I had kept these songs at a distance for many years, because it seemed foolish to allow myself to get too attached to songs I didn’t feel like I was allowed to think of as mine, if that makes any sense. The songs felt like casualties of a conflict that I had to bury in the ground and try to forget about. Being able to embrace them again felt like re-growing a severed limb or having a loved one come back to life, almost. Feeling like it was safe to love these songs again made me feel whole in a way I didn’t expect to. I became really excited by the prospect of revisiting them, so that’s what I decided to do.

Q: Does this mean you’re going to put RUIN back on Spotify?

A: No. Taking the record off Spotify was the right thing to do. That record was only ever intended to exist during the era of MP3 piracy. I never envisioned a world where the music industry would be so aggressive about policing the way that copyrighted music is allowed to exist online. If we hadn’t opted to take the record down when we did, someone would inevitably have forced us to. If you want to hear those specific recordings again, you’re going to have to do it the way we originally intended: by downloading MP3 files from the internet. Try SoulSeek.

Q: What’s next for Elite Gymnastics, then?

A: Here’s the situation currently. There is no Elite Gymnastics music available to stream or purchase in an official capacity anywhere on the internet. It wouldn’t really be possible for me to put the old stuff on Spotify or Bandcamp now because of all the samples. Like I said before, it was a different time. Those records were created to thrive on a past version of the internet that no longer exists. They weren’t designed to be compatible with the 2021 internet.

Technically, Elite Gymnastics didn’t ever release a debut album. We had EPs, a compilation, and a remix collection. We didn’t make an album, a record that existed as the distillation of all that experimentation that contained all of the songs that fans of the EPs would want to hear, all in one place. It’s like we did Good Fridays but stopped before we made My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

So, I am currently working on the first Elite Gymnastics album. If you were following my stuff as Default Genders, you may have noticed me posting demos on my SoundCloud page from 2015-2018 that were all eventually reworked into the album Main Pop Girl 2019. The album I am making is taking that approach to all the old EG songs, including some unreleased stuff. I’m collaborating with others on some songs and I honestly feel like it has resulted in some of the best and most exciting music I have ever been involved with. It is a drastic reinvention, but iteration and reinvention have always been a big part of what I do. I want to make something that feels like the culmination of everything that came before, and so far, I think I’m succeeding.

Q: When will I be able to hear this new music?

At a virtual fundraiser on June 4th, 2021, where there is a suggested donation of $10. You can access it at quietyear.com

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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Before TikTok, Witches Traded Their Spells on This Ancient Internet Forum

Long before the witches of Gen-Z claimed TikTok as their digital coven, and even before the Geocities-scattered digital landscapes of Web 1.0, a thousands-strong community once formed via the world’s phone lines to trade spells, advise on sigils, and correspond on spiritual guidance. It was called the Pagan And Occult Distribution Network, or PODSnet: a slice of occult internet history that helped pioneer mass online collaboration.

Today, it’s easy to take for granted that online communities are only a few taps away, but in the 1980s and early 1990s, finding like-minded individuals in niche subject areas was practically revolutionary. And in the case of PODSnet, it provided an unusually free space to discuss the esoteric arts—for many of its members, for the first time ever.

"In the 1990s and 1990s, accessing the social media of the day was very different than it is today,” Farrell McGovern, a PODSnet cofounder who came to Paganism through books about quantum physics such as The Dancing Wu Li Masters, told Motherboard. “It was louder, slower, and connectivity was perilous.”

In the early 1980s, computing enthusiasts began using Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) to communicate with each other. These systems were a precursor to the World Wide Web, and although relatively primitive, paved the way for the always-on communication of today.

Because BBS ran on phone lines, discussions were asynchronous and often confined to local groups due to the dramatic costs of dialing farther afield than your own state. What’s more, the boards were isolated from one another: an analogy might be if every single subreddit needed its own website, and you could only speak to users in your immediate area.

But in 1984, artist and technician Tom Jennings created FidoNet, a network that could connect all of these BBS systems. With the advent of cheaper modems, FidoNet’s popularity exploded into a huge 20,000-node network that connected users all around the world. Eventually, something called Echomail was introduced by a system operator, or sysop, called Jeff Rush, allowing for the support of public forums.

Instead of simply picking up your smartphone, BBS users would have to connect their computer to a modem, which was linked to a phone line—translating digital 1s and 0s into audio information and back again to the modem and terminal operating the BBS.

Popular BBSes would frequently return a busy signal: unlike today, actually logging off was necessary because only one connection was allowed at a time. A successful login returned a screen of text and a list of messages grouped into categories, with the software tracking the ones you had read. Here, users would respond to text, download what they could, and hang up.

Here, a BBS called "Magicknet" flourished, but one problem in particular spurred its users to found their own splinter network: Christian fundamentalists had infiltrated the group to spy on members.

This infiltration led to a number of incidents, including McGovern being written up in the magazine of infamous cult figure Lyndon Larouche as a “well-known witch from Toronto”. Given the various tabloid-led "Satanic panics" at the time, founding an independent BBS was not only right for promoting lively metaphysical discourse, it was a matter of safety too.

“People were losing their jobs, child custody, etc,” McGovern told Motherboard. “People had to move to escape persecution in some areas: very much so in the Bible Belt, but in other places, too. Unless you were in a major metropolitan area, and even then, you ran some degree of risk if you were outed.”

McGovern was first involved in his local BBS scene around Ottawa in the mid-1980s. Working at a local computer store that sold Apple and IBM PC clones, McGovern set up the Data/Sfnet BBS to advertise the business. In doing so, he became a SysOp—a system operator who ran, maintained, and in many cases built a network—granting him honorary entry to the computing elite at the time.

Being based in Canada, McGovern was the first to help Magicknet go international before it split into PODSnet, which would swell to 10,000 members who accessed the BBS by dialling into the 93 "zone number"—a reference to Thelema, the spiritual movement developed by Aleister Crowley.

The logo of the PODSnet bulletin board system.

For author and occult store supplier Dorothy Morrison, who was raised Catholic but eventually joined a coven of practicing witches in California before forming one of her own, discovering PODSnet was an “incredible way to find so many people of like mind at one place”.

“It was a place where I could be myself, regardless of the fact I really was living in a very conservative, buttoned-down state,” Morrison told Motherboard. “It wasn’t just a safe haven for me, it was an escape from having to appear to be someone I wasn’t for safety reasons."

“When someone wants to burn you at the stake—at that time Missouri was not a place that would’ve taken kindly to Witches—you certainly don’t tell them where you keep the gas can,” she said.

The atmosphere on PODSnet was typically collaborative and friendly, said Morrison, and the most arresting dramas on the board she was aware of usually related to the enormous phone bills that came from connecting to the network. (Although once or twice these charges “damned near landed some folks in divorce court.")

But, like the internet today, there were hints of gossip, rumours, and fake news. One popular cause for the community was the supposed persecution of 9 million witches by Christians (The whole idea was based on bad scholarship, according to McGovern). At one point, there was a six-year-long debate on whether or not Kate Bush is Wiccan—perhaps one of the most heated internet disputes of its time.

Whatever the topic, much of these PODSnet discussions would have been lost to time were it not for a community effort to archive the cherished message board. Still accessible in its archived ASCII form today, PODSnetters worked together to produce what was perhaps the first mass collaborative online project of its type: a massive, crowdsourced digital grimoire called the Internet Book of Shadows.

The name of the enormous seven-volume text references the catch-all "Book of Shadows," a name commonly used for tomes of spells and rituals, and the text covers the A-Zs of alternative spirituality from "Asatru to Zen Buddhism." Chapter one alone is 70,000 words long, and there’s a varied store of stuff available within, including an essay about bashing fluffy bunnies (the tendency among some well-seasoned practitioners to troll newbies, as opposed to bashing actual rabbits), a guide to cleansing rituals called "smudging," and an introduction to the suppressed traditions of Gnosticism.

Plenty of contributors to the Book of Shadows remain involved in esoteric spiritual communities today, and some, like Morrison, became authors in their own right.

One of Dorothy Morrison’s favorite contributions to the Internet Book of Shadows.

Morrison says the book of rituals, spells, stories, legends, and “other magic-related miscellany” took seven 5-inch loose-leaf binders to contain it when she once decided to print out the information the community had amassed. The community then began compiling the grimoire into downloadable digital files.

Once it was finished, PODSnet users agreed to offer the Book of Shadows as a gift, free of charge, to the community. While they were copyrighted, they were free to use and copy under the proviso that there was no charge for their acquisition—leading to later frustrations about unauthorized reproductions of the manuscript for profit.

“It’s probably the largest collection of pagan thought that was freely available to copy for non-commercial use,” McGovern added.

According to Dan Harms, an author and librarian at SUNY Cortland, magick practice has thrived on community-produced documents throughout history. Even during the print era, there was a “tremendous sort of traffic in books, manuscripts being passed back and forth between people,” chopping and changing aspects of the manuscripts they liked before copying them out.

“What was really different here, is that when the material was copied or created, it’s put up online for everybody to see,” Harms said. “It becomes a collective memory. It’s not something that’s stuck on somebody’s shelf, it’s something everybody can get into.”

Harms told Motherboard that communities like PODSnet were of enormous importance for establishing networks of occult practitioners and helped lay the groundwork for driving a boom in occult publishing.

“I was growing up in rural Kentucky with an interest in these kinds of arcane topics,” said Harms, who wasn't involved in the occult internet at the time of PODSnet but was an active Usenet user. “It was just so hard to find any sort of information – you would have to rely on the local library. But the local library in rural Kentucky is probably not looking to fill up its shelves with books about magic and paganism and things like that.”

Today, what was once a recondite pocket of the primordial internet has hit the mainstream, with even the Financial Times covering the "WitchTok" phenomenon. Speaking with PODSnetters, there’s a sense that in today's online spaces, community and information exchange can often take a backseat to clout and hostility. “[But] how much of that is getting older and yelling ‘get off my grass’,” asks McGovern, “or true insight – only time will say.”

Whatever the case, PODSnet—which closed around the turn of the millennium before hopping to Yahoo Groups, LiveJournal, and now with its remnants on Facebook—proved that digital technologies can bring disparate people together in a meaningful way, where they are happy to create and produce for the good of their communities.

“I remember those I met along that journey, what they taught me—not only about the Craft, but about myself—and the connections I made," said Morrison.“I remember how fortunate I was that PODSnet was there for me. To a large degree, that experience formed the person I am today, and I'll be forever grateful.”

Before TikTok, Witches Traded Their Spells on This Ancient Internet Forum syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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independentartistbuzz · 3 years

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Good News, Good Music 1.0

Here we are at the end of 2020. We don’t need to tell you that this has been a very hard year. We are feeling beaten down by the bad news and music is the one thing that lifted our spirits again and again and saw us through. We have partnered with our friends at Cyber PR Music to bring you a series of GOOD News from artists who carried on making music in spite of all of the insanity that was happening and continues to grip us. We have cried listening to some of the tracks, felt deeply inspired and yes we laughed as well. What we have seen is the Cyber PR artist community is rich and varied - there are artists from all across the USA included as well as Jamaica, Australia, South Africa, France, Sweden, The UK, Germany and Scotland.

So - we bring you part 1 of our 4 part series GOOD NEWS, GOOD MUSIC.

Please Follow the Spotify Playlist below to hear all of these amazing tracks.

Thanks to all of the artists who shared their music AND their good news.

JVMIE & Lionel Cohen | “We Will Rise Again”

Started A Collaboration From A Quarantine Hotel Room and Got Nominated For A Major Award

We had a crazy year but some great things came out of it! I was forced to leave LA and head back to Australia until things ‘calmed down’ but started a remote collaboration with LA based film composer Lionel Cohen - we received a grant from HOTA (Home Of The Arts Gold Coast) to create an album and we were just nominated for a HMMA Hollywood Music In Media Award :) The whole process of collaborating and talking every day was what helped me keep my sanity throughout this crazy year!

Perle Vybz | “Electric Dancefloor”

Almost Lost Her Partner To COVID And Took The Leap Of Faith To Release Music

My debut single 'Electric Dancefloor' was released on Dec 8th, against the odds. A few months ago , my partner almost lost his life (to COVID). He was hooked up on a ventilator and had a really rough time. At the same time, I lost my main source of income and so, during the pandemic lockdown I had more time on my hands to focus on my music. So I'm glad that in spite of what was happening around me I was able to take that leap of faith and get my music out there.

Arielle Silver | “What Really Matters”

Became Music Connection's Hot 100 Live Unsigned Artists and Bands and Top Prospects 2020 lists in their year-end issue

As COVID shut everything down in April, I leaned into my commitment to authentic connection and inspiring creative expression with the creation of two weekly livestreams: Tomes & Tunes, a weekly show where I interview songwriters about books, and Arielle's Acoustic Happy Hour, both of which are going strong. In June, I released a new album, A THOUSAND TINY TORCHES, along with two official music videos (one shot entirely during quarantine), which have been featured in American Songwriter, Music Connection, and more.And in September, in the wake of closing studios, my sweetheart and I launched a new online yoga studio, Bhavana Flow Yoga, with online classes, workshops, and retail.

Alongside my own sorrow at the pandemic, I have been living a year of creative expansion, and was recently featured in Music Connection's year-end issue on both their Hot 100 Live Unsigned Artists and Bands and Top Prospects 2020 lists.

Hannah Judson | “Deep Sea Diver”

Launched The Backwards Record Release Concept And It Worked!

The 2020 lockdown was an exploration of new ways of doing and connecting. Everything became an experiment as new processes were developed to replace the no longer actionable old ones. I launched the Backwards Record Release for "Stingray," a rock/folk collection of songs. The 8 week campaign started with a socially distanced concert in a chateau courtyard, was fueled by my new podcast the Hannah Judson Beat, conversations with women in music, and concluded with a capstone edition of MUSEfest Online, a music festival I normally produce in major cities that promotes women in music, film, art and culture. I stayed connected with colleagues and fans, envisioned future projects, and maintained momentum and enthusiasm for creative projects, present and future.

Evan Mazunik | “Comfort and Joy”

Funded, Recorded & Released A New Holiday Album

I’m grateful that I was able to successfully fund, record, release, and sell my new holiday album this year.

Eli Lev | “Anywhere We Can Go”

Released A Touching Global Fan Driven Music Video

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I had a powerful experience this year when my music community from all across the world helped me create the music video for 'Anywhere We Can Go.' I was in happy tears editing it and seeing all these wonderful faces come together and make something truly special. Here it is and I hope it brings some joy to folks.

Jeff Oster | “Five Great Mountains”

Found Solace (And Music) In Mother Nature

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I was lucky to spend three months in the fall of 2020 up in Vermont. In the midst of all of the turmoil, Mother Nature just kept on shining. I was able to create this video on my iPhone, in an attempt to capture her beauty.

Beca Dreams | “Calm Before the Storm”

Had A Creative Burst That Resulted In Ad Campaigns & New Singles

It’s been a very challenging year, and yet I’ve somehow managed to have some awesome wins I am super grateful for.

Partnered with Bounty to write/perform Quicker Picker Upper, currently streaming on all major platforms and has gotten over 7M views on Tik Tok and 150K streams on Spotify so far. Composed/performed song for an ad campaign for fashion designer Asher Levine on launching his new groundbreaking LED outerwear line (who’s recently worked with Doja Cat, Lil Nas, Lady Gaga). I also released 2 singles “Calm Before The Storm” and “Taking Time For Myself” and most recently was featured on “Dance Party In The Living Room” by UK producer Fritz von Runte, about making the most of the quarantine.

I feel so lucky to be making music and doing what I love, which has been a huge silver lining during these dark times.

AfriCali | “The Struggle”

Turned An Eviction Into A Special Retreat & Healing Place

Our landlord lost her pilates practice and couldn’t afford her Oakland home so

Our family of four with a baby due any month now had to figure it out and find the humanity in moving out before the lease was up. In the magic of mother earth and without knowing we were blessed with a beautiful place to be away and seven thousand feet above the mountains where we could have this beautiful bundle of joy. Which would turn into a special retreat healing place after our departure this past October.

Akira AK | “Pearl”

Completed His New Release Remotely Over Zoom

My "good news, good music" story is simply how I was able to release 2 major projects this year despite everything that is going on: putting out my second EP and my first music video. The EP in particular had been in the works for 3 years and was SO CLOSE to being done when everything started to shut down, so with the work of my engineer, we set up remote sessions via zoom that helped put the last song over the line and get the release out there! From there I was able to promote it with it's adjacent merch.

As far as my first music video is concerned; I was able to safely show up in person in NYC and film it with the help of a great videographer. The conceptualizing of the video is very special and I think speaks to the experiences some of us have had about going to that special place inside your head where you feel most powerful/comfortable/fierce to deal with whatever is going on externally. The promo for the video was also a success in terms of being able to schedule it on time and put it out there to hype the video itself. And once it was out it was really (unexpectedly) well received!

Those are just my personal success stories and I'm excited to see others' as well!

Monsterboy | “Ain’t Worth the Dime”

Played 60 Livestreams That Reached 7,000 Households

When my husband and I found ourselves without gigs and our small business closed, we decided to go live with our music and stay in touch with our fans. We cobbled together equipment from our home studio and gigging rig, going live in that first week. We really didn't know what to expect. The messages we got from people were so heartwarming, we built a little community for them night after night, reconnecting with existing fans and finding new. In total, we did over 60 live streams during the shutdown and reached over 7k households on some streams. Entertaining and interacting with people was our way to do our part for our community. A podcast found us via the streams and started hiring us to produce music for their shows from it.

Artist: Crotona P., Producer: Pablo Brownbeats | “Silk”

Forged An International Collaboration South Africa and the USA via A Chance Facebook Meeting

I'm Pablo Brownbeats, a producer who has been producing since my youth and creating music for the last 12 years. I just released my new Ep with Crotona P from Rochester New York featuring Street Da Villain, Dj Shawn Touch, KING Flamez all from Rochester New York and SOLO MAJITA from Free State South Africa. The African Ep is available on digital stores and Bandcamp. I enjoyed making this project and it will be an honor to share the leading single Titled Silk.

This project was recorded during the early days of Covid19. Me and Crotona met over Facebook and exchanged some few words and he agreed to do the single (silk) then African EP was born.

Scott Whitfield | “A Bi-Coastal Christmas, Vol. 1, by Scott Whitfield & Friends”

Released A Christmas Album That Features Artists Who Have Passed That Started Recording in 2004.

Despite the challenges, I was able to release a Christmas album on Bandcamp! It's available as a digital download OR a physical CD. This is the culmination of MANY years of work (some tracks date back to 2004, and, sadly, a few of the artists who played on them are no longer with us).

John Maksym | “Drinkin’ & Thinkin’”

Worked With 22 Collaborators Spanning 7 Countries and 16 Cities

I kicked off this year as a solo recording artist for the first time in my life and had an ambitious goal of releasing music every 5 weeks. When the pandemic struck, I had just started recording my 4th single in the studio and everything got shut down. Within a couple of weeks I was able to pivot and invest money into building my own little home studio, to continue to create. With every musician in the world stuck at home, I was able to connect with a dream team of collaborators who helped me finish the song that I had started and go on to record 8 more songs through remote session recording from their own home studios. All in all I worked with 22 collaborators, spanning 7 countries and 16 cities, which I would never have thought of doing had the world not been in lockdown. It also allowed me time to revise my original release plan and build a more robust plan to release a number of singles and eventually an album throughout 2021.

Stay tuned ...There’s more Good News Coming!

#2020 #2021 #independent artist buzz #indie music #music blog #spotify #spotify playlist #positive vibes #good vibes #cyberpr #cyberprmusic

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scribblewriting65 · 5 years

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Top 5 YouTube Channels

Intro

Communication is a powerful and ever-changing force; especially with the rise of the Internet in recent decades. And no online service knows this better than YouTube. Hosting thousands of channels and millions of videos, no website has sucked away our free time quite like Big Red.

Today I would like to acknowledge 5 of the platform’s strongest creators, in my eyes. Whether it be for their intelligent content or the sheer fun they bring, to me, these guys are some of the best of the best; and proudly hold some of my greatest respect.

Quick disclaimers: This is my first writing like this, and as you know, opinions can change over time; so please lower your pitchforks and know that there are plenty of channels I love. Also, when writing this, I don’t have a particular order in mind (Except for #1). Whether you find your favorite on the bottom, top, or nowhere at all, know that these guys deserve a watch (if my digital mouth has any impact on your choices, that is).

Enough talk though. Onward, to appreciation!

#5: JT Music

Art is mankind’s most unique unifier, and no art brings people together quite like music. Whether it be country, funk, or rap in this pick’s case, you can look just about anywhere for a good time. And while rock star NateWantstoBattle is a close second in this regard, no musician really does it for me quite like JT.

While most would look at the genre “Video Game Rap” with an upturned nose, those that stick around won’t find anything quite like what Skull and Pat bring to the table. Their weekly tunes always bring a fire to my subscription feed, whether they’re putting me into the role of a badass superhero, or dragging me into the darkest abyss, I can just about always have a good time nodding my head to the beat.

Not only is their work consistently fun, but it’s also wide in diversity, and constant in quality. Hits like Follow Father, No Hero, and Hungry for Another One capture their source material perfectly within a musical context. Even their cameo appearances in tracks like DAGames’ We Want Out and Zack Boucher’s Ultimate Super Smash Bros. Rap steal the show with their wild energy. I always find myself smiling when I find their newest song; getting a small amount of enjoyment even in my less liked tracks.

Consistent fun and passion can be felt in the notes, and I can’t help but rock my skull out when JT Music starts playing.

#4: GameXplain

Games offer a wide variety no matter where you look. No matter if you’re looking for a deep insight into 30 second clips, latest updates on a title, or general thoughts on an event, you can always find something, or someone, explaining the perspective for you.

I’m a funny guy, aren’t I?

GameXplain has certainly explored over the years. From Cool Bits and Missing In Action in the past, to their famous modern Analyses and Discussions, Andre and friends have always hosted an approachable place with a variety of outlooks from its diverse crew, like Andre’s obsession with Stunt Race FX and Ash’s knowledge and love of Mega Man.

Even if you aren’t super into any of their interests, you’ll still find a laid-back but insightful pool of content. Their discussions are a personal favorite of mine, bringing fun, thoughtful ideas to events or ideas occurring in the gaming industry. I can’t help but get caught up in their hype, especially for Nintendo Directs or the annual E3 Show.

Even if I don’t quite understand the excitement that something is receiving, I can always go to these guys for a solid explanation and platform to join the hype train.

#3: Mithzan

It seems that no matter where you go, Minecraft can be found there. Games, books, plushies, animations, even an entire convention; those familiar blocks pervade some space of modern culture. While this space has hosted some incredible creations, simplicity also has its own beauty.

Mithzan uses this simplicity to great effect. With his buddies Ross, Pooki, Jerry and frequent guests, Max is always there to give me a laugh. And while Minecraft holds a variety of fun games like Would You Rather and Never Have I Ever, Mithzan also offers experiences outside of the blocks, like Uno and Dead by Daylight.

Along with the wide content, the experiences and humor are also varied, sometimes employing puns or old-fashioned smack talk, to name a few. Even with the different conversations and games, the fun and heart are always there. Whether he’s playing a wacky or horrifying game, Mithzan is approachable and honest with his style of play.

#2: Mother’s Basement

Appearances can be deceiving, no matter where you look. Assumed bullies are victims themselves, ‘loner’ people are simply introverted, and the most stubborn ones find themselves lost in an unexpected niche. All it takes is a little looking around, and you’ll find a new lesson or friend more often than not.

And what better place to look for insight than in a Mother’s Basement?

While not all people can see the artistry that anime brings to the table, Mother’s Basement brings its potential to the limelight. With weekly insights and discussions on things like how animation enhances an atmosphere or what makes a fight extraordinary in Animelee, the ideas and thought put into these discussions is top-notch.

Along with this, Geoff (the host)’s voice is great support, staying calm but strong, adding great emphasis on major points. He even provides touches of comedy and actual life advice into his videos. I find myself especially entertained with his analyses on My Hero Academia and Fullmetal Alchemist, but Geoff also covers topics like best romantic partners and essential shows to watch (and avoid), and pointing out his reasons why. Even if anime isn’t your style, there are some videos dotted in discussing topics like the nuances of binge-watching in “Is Binge Watching Bad for Us? (Netflix vs. Disney+)” and other media like movies (“Spider-Verse: The Ultimate Spider-Man Movie”) and video games (“Insomniac’s Spider-Man is Truly Superior”).

While it took some time to grow on me, I’m glad to have been welcomed into Mother’s Basement. With plenty of insight and care put into each video, Geoff is just about always a good choice for fun education on how artistic Japanese animation can be.

#1:Fawful’s Minion

The world is full of stories; they’re simply part of human nature. Whether it be fantasy, drama, or comedy, all of us have the potential to weave tales that inspire. And none have inspired me on YouTube quite like Fawful’s Minion.

This mean bean gaming machine has the mouth of a divine artist. His videos always bring a bright smile and incredible awe to me for just how much quality and care goes into each video. Fawful’s Top 10’s have never let me down with their fun, reasons, and pure passion that is tangible in every project.

Not only are the videos fun, but they’re also inspiring too. Fawful’s linguistics is beyond captivating, even partially motivating how I speak and write. Along with constantly being a good time, I’m always inspired to write or gain a storytelling voice whenever I watch an FM video.

And the touches of insight into his personal life give Fawful an air of relatability. Now, I realize I may make him sound like some sort of Shakespearian poet, but he also dispels this through his more colorful language, bringing in modern terms (and curses) and joyful, nearly maniacal at times, laughter and emotion into his speech, making himself grounded and relatable.

Most of all, Fawful’s storytelling skills were, and still are, a big reason why I write and tell my own stories. I want to enrapture others with my words like Fawful does, so he gets a big thanks and respect in my book. Balancing fun, humor, emotion, and creativity, Fawful’s Minion has made a goon out of me, running towards the goal of becoming a true storyteller.

Outro

If you made it here, thanks for sticking around! I wanna maybe try these sorts of blog/list posts more often, so tell me what you think! If you like this and want to see more, feel free to check out my AO3 Page: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScribbleWriting65. I hope you enjoyed this little list, and I’ll see you next time!

#scribblewriting65 #top 5 #list #jt music #mithzan #gameXplain #opinion

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is6621 · 5 years

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Social Media and Artists: A Love Story - Shane Leonard

When considering what topic I wanted to do my blog on I am inherently drawn towards topics that I one can relate to and would enjoy reading myself. I also turn to things I feel I can provide a unique viewpoint on. In my previous blog I mentioned the relationship of social media and artists but focused primarily on the cons of posting on social media and how an artists name can get lost in the sharing, reposting, or marketing of their artwork. In the big picture however I would say that social media has allowed everyone from the starving artists to some of the biggest names to reach places they would never even fathomed reaching if not for social media. There are many scholarly articles available that detail the effects that social media has on the outreach it provides for people in all areas of business or in general just all the different walks of life. For the artists however, it is a way to self promote and connect directly to those that appreciate or view your art. Speaking for myself it has opened more doors than I would have ever imagined just starting to become an artist. On Instagram alone I doubled my follower count in a span of about four months and have met people and had conversations with those I never thought I would have before. In class whenever the question of “What does social media allow companies or personalities do?”, one of the more popular answers to this question is the ability to interact with customers or fans directly. Back fifteen years ago if you were to go to view an artist’s work either in person or on their website, for example, you would not be able to say something like “Wow, I love this work!” or “Wow this makes me uncomfortable!” to whoever made what you are looking at and these responses both in their own ways they both pose a special form of interaction that no where but social media makes so easy to exist.

More specifically, social media allows artists to do things like skip showing in a gallery for thousands of people to see your work or to sell a piece. I learned this to be true quickly with the amount of people that would contact me with commission inquiries or just general comments on my artwork. As an artist you do not care too much what people have to say about your work, rather the goal is to just make the person feel something when they see something you made whether it be good bad or indifferent. Social media has also drastically changed the art world in the sense that you no longer need something like museum or gallery validation to become an established artist, the platform you use to build a brand or name is enough in the year 2019. I am not saying that showing in a museum or gallery is bad, that is still the top goal for most artists if you ask, social media just allows for the same recognition which is something most would have never guessed if asked ten to fifteen years ago.

From a technological standpoint platforms like Instagram also allow artists to post progress shots or other forms of content like time lapses or digital art that would otherwise be hard to share or not seen at all. There are also Instagram live sessions where some artists use this to their advantage to host question and answer sessions or even show them creating live. This entire conversation is also not limited to artists of a painting or general creating sense but also those like musicians as well. Social media has also been instrumental in the rise of independent artists and allowing those not signed to a label do their own promotion of their image and of the music they create. Most recently a musician named Lauren Sandersen began promoting her new album and single “Hotel Room” along with a single called “Creative Freedom” where she details her struggles with not being an independent artist and how now not being signed to a label she can make, post, and share what she wants when she wants. That song alone does a great job at illustrating the things that social media alone allows an independent artist to do.

Creative Freedom Video:

youtube

https://www.artworkarchive.com/blog/how-social-media-is-changing-our-art-experience

https://blog.society6.com/serious-creatives-seriously-consider-social-platforms/

#is6621

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scullyeffect · 5 years

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how do you feel about younger people in fandom? like the youngest side that are probably on tumblr i.e 13/14ish?

i don’t know if you mean in the x-files fandom, or just younger people getting involved into fandom stuff online nowadays so i’m just going to go with a generalization.

i’m nobody’s mother and interests are healthy, and honestly i’m 23 so i don’t know anything about anything yet, but i will say that i live with a 15 y/o girl, a 13 y/o girl, and an 11 y/o girl, and i find myself very sad when all they want to do is go on a phone and watch youtube videos and be online instead of doing something more creative or intellectual.

we had a birthday party for 11 last night, and we had to take phones away from like six 10-11 year olds, which is ridiculous. i do understand that we live in a big city (paris, which isn’t exactly the safest) and lots of kids do things independently (walk to school, walk to friends’ houses, take the métro) so sometimes i worry about 11 (who doesn’t have a phone) if she needs to take the métro alone or walk somewhere alone, and i wish she did have some way to reach me if ever she got lost or something, but 11 is so young.

i think in a world that’s become so increasingly digitized and almost making it necessary to be connected in some way, kids are growing up faster, and some of the posts online and on tumblr talk about things they might not understand yet, and cause them to form opinions based on a text post some 18 y/o wrote. i’m even guilty of this. i’ll get too lazy to keep up with the real world and get my politics from tumblr sometimes, and that’s probably not good, even though mainstream news sources can do the same thing. my mom worked for the washington post, and that’s pretty much the only place i get my news from.

i probably got my first tumblr account when i was 15, and honestly i regret it. i was a pretty sheltered kid/teenager who really enjoyed reading, doing art, writing, and watching sad european dramas about dead sovereigns and suffering artists. i somehow discovered pro-ana blogs (blogs that share and encourage eating disorders to the point where healthy people can begin to actively attempt to follow insane tips in order to lose weight), and since i actually had been having trouble with my own eating habits but never really known that those behaviors were bizarre, i self-diagnosed and was part of that “community” for awhile.

i was interested/ in love with lots of actors and actresses, and as i made it out of kind of the pro-ana area which i realized which was unhealthy lol i found out about stan culture and just real obsession with movie stars/celebrities. when i was a younger teen i was “obsessed” with meryl streep, which at that time meant that i watched all her films repeatedly. i didn’t realize people cared about the actors/actresses’ personal lives until i got on tumblr, and at the time it was really exciting to discover things about my favorite celebrities (i mean, being a fan of someone obviously isn’t new, but it was to me). now that i’m 23 i find it very invasive and somewhat creepy that we’re so interested in someone’s life, sometimes even more than their body of work. we’ll probably never meet that person, and if we do they’re not going to think about you or remember you forever, because there are thousands of other people out there who feel the same way, and they just can’t keep track (at least the huge stars).

on the flip side, i think it’s good to have role models and people to look up to, but sometimes there’s a thin line there. i’m blonde, but i dyed my hair brown in my first year of high school because i was obsessed with marion cotillard and wanted to look like her. i kept the brown throughout high school because i liked it, and sort of forgot i ever did it because of her, but now i’m blonde again and it looks so much better haha. ALSO i got really interested in france/speaking french because of her (and juliette binoche), although i had a fantastic and enthusiastic french teacher in high school to help fuel my desire to speak french. and now i’m fluent in french and live in france. wow. so, if there are people you look up to in the public eye and they’re influencing you in positive ways, that’s great! i do get suspicious when very influential celebrities share their political views, though. i think we have a tendency to follow in people’s footsteps either subconsciously or in full awareness. that could be in any field. i like certain authors, and sometimes my own writing is heavily influenced by their work. it’s a natural thing that happens. but voting really should be an informed decision...just my opinion.

let’s talk about “just my opinion”. online bullying is real and can sometimes be rampant if there are dividing views on someone and their perceived private life. for example, in the x-files fandom we will, for the most part, absolutely convince you that mulder and scully are fucking like bunnies, when the show’s own creator won’t lol. but there are also people who think that gillian anderson and david duchovny (the leads) were/are/could be at some point in a romantic relationship with each other. they (anderson and duchovny) even cater to the fans a bit, but at the end of the day that’s their business and they don’t owe us an explanation, and a lot of people in fandom sort of act like they do. the point of this example was that because people in fandom are divided about this point of view, if you talk about one side or the other, there are some people who will come at you and say mean things for not agreeing with you, and try to convince you of a truth they have no real authority to speak about. this is obviously just an example, but online bullying is rampant and is often taken personally and can really affect the person being bullied, especially someone younger who may or may not be already facing that in real life at school lol.

i think tumblr is a good place for people who suffer from mental illness to come together in a healthy way to talk through their problems (god i hope i’m telling the truth), and there’s definitely tons of awareness and support that you’ll get on tumblr that you may not find in the real world. for example, i don’t know anyone irl who has epilepsy who i can talk to about mine. on tumblr i’ve talked with people who understand what i’m going through. i think that self diagnosis online, just as much on tumblr as it is when i cough and search “signs of throat cancer or tuberculosis’, read up on web md, and immediately fear my days might be numbered, is a problem. on tumblr i think we’re introduced to concepts and can sometimes treat mental illness lightly, when it shouldn’t. if you’re suffering from a mental illness, the online world isn’t going to be the place that can completely help you (says the girl who refuses to go to therapy and instead complains online about how she’s not getting any better).

being online immediately takes us out of life and into a different world. we become observers instead of experiencing the world. there’s good stuff about observation, but being online and attached to a website that is more or less just a vice for people will often make us choose to be on our phones instead of doing stuff in real life.

all of these points being said, i’m guilty of a lot of the “bad/unhealthy” facets of tumblr, but as i’ve “grown up” (unfortunately still staying on tumblr for a good portion of that time) i’ve grown out of a lot of these things and can see the good and the bad that the online world has to offer, and know which parts to stay away from. i can recognize that spending too much time on here does nothing for my desire to stay inside and not experience the real world. it also makes me think a lot more about tv shows/films/celebrities than i need to. but i’ve also made great friends from being on tumblr over the years, and gotten support i definitely wouldn’t have gotten in real life.

back to my real life. do i encourage the girls i live with to be interested in certain media? yes, especially stuff i feel has a good message. i basically sat the two older ones down and showed them the pilot of the x-files. do they experience the same high level obsession i do with tv shows/movies? no. and i’m glad for that. they like to lose themselves in certain tv shows, but when the tv is off they don’t really talk about it. do i introduce them to things i’m interested in media-wise? yes. do i introduce them to books and music i was/am interested in? yes. have i told them about tumblr? no. they don’t have any access to my online “presence” (they don’t know my instagram, twitter, etc), and i don’t talk about it. when my computer is out and they’re in the room doing homework, i’m usually writing. granted, that’s usually fanfiction, but at least i’m writing something.

one of the boys i tutor is writing a book (he’s 11) which is basically a self insert that takes place in the harry potter universe. he doesn’t know what fanfiction is, and i haven’t told him (although he’d never type it up and put it online lol he barely knows how to turn the computer on), but i’m so thrilled he’s even writing that i make him sit down and write for 10 minutes before we ever start watching a movie (in english).

ANYWAY. i’m nobody’s mother and at the end of the day i’m posting this online on my stupid blog where nothing i say matters or has any influence anywhere, but i think kids should be able to enjoy a non-internet related childhood as long as possible. some of us on tumblr are old enough to actually have children that age, and as much as we like having an account on this site, if asked this same question we might not as readily say ‘yeah it’s great! i want my teenagers to have the same experience as me!’

there’s my two centimes. hope i answered your question. JuST MY OPINION.

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somethingdamnedgy-blog · 5 years

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Indian cinema: hundred gods, a million more possibilities

Here is an image: I’m lying down on my bed, I have a buzzing headache. The expression on my face is not one of pain, but interestingly, of bewilderment. I get up, scratch my head, and trod over to my bench that is roughly 5 feet away from my bed. I open my laptop, and begin watching something I’ve never seen before. I could say that was my first taste of ‘experimental’ film. I’d just seen Stom Sogo’s Ya Private Sky (2001) and my head was buzzing from the assault on my senses. I had the weirdest headache ever, because it didn’t hurt, but sort of buzzed with a curious puzzlement. Shortly after that, I began watching Kamal Swaroop’s masterpiece, Om Dar-B-Dar (1988). And you could say this was my first taste of Indian ‘experimental film.’ The imageries, setting, references to mythology, all distinctly Indian, but the narrative and idea, freakishly alien to someone who was just beginning to get into alternative film. I would go on to watch Om Dar-B-Dar four more times during the next few months, ecstatically sharing my experience with people, urging them to see for themselves that brilliant work of art. The few who did, scratched their heads and probably repeatedly muttered “what the fuck?”

It is possible that the first formal experiment in Indian cinema was Mani Kaul’s debut film, Uski Roti (1969). And it is also worth noting that because of it’s unconventional elements, it wasn’t exactly well received, it was attacked by popular media to the extent where it didn’t get a commercial release. It did however, go on to win the favour of the aesthetically aware critics who defended it and it even went on to win a Filmfare Critic’s award in 1970. This new movement of Parallel Cinema, or the “Indian New Wave,” interestingly, was possibly birthed by a bureaucratic decision, rather than a resistance against a tide of popular and commercial cinema. It is possible that this interest in fostering the growth of the film industry was a result of Satyajit Ray’s international success in the 1950’s. The state attempted to promote and advance a new Indian cinema as an alternative to commercial productions. During Nehru’s reign as PM, the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) was initiated, and would later go on to become the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), a merger of two agencies (the FFC and the Film Export Corporation), which sought to diversify funding sources for filmmakers, promoting independent, “quality”, or art films. The effect of this public institutional aid was questionable, the financial aid was meagre and sometimes could not aid in the realisation of many a filmmakers vision. While many said it was a waste of funds that could otherwise be used for the development of far more serious things, state funded filmmakers scrupulously experimented with the camera and its possibilities. Parallel Cinema, as it was called, referenced the growth of a line of smaller, low budget, yet artistic films alongside larger, big budget commercial films for entertainment.

Fast forward to India today, and one can see some of the most peculiar cultural imageries and art that absolutely smashes any preset rules, and interestingly, a stark contrast on the cinema end, which shies away from any experimentation. Unfortunately, this lack of forward thinking work traces back to political and moral censorship because of pressure from different groups. Some might even argue that the so called B grade films are more interesting in their form, because it is possible a majority of the Westernised youth in India find commercial films lacking in any artistic thought, or perhaps even because of the hilariously tacky tropes and plots. It is no secret that this kind of resistance to forward thinking cinema or simply, cinema that is confrontational and personal, is stunting the growth of Indian cinema, which in all possibility has an incredible amount of artistic potential due to the evergreen cultures, languages, mythologies and ideas that surround it, both in the present and the past. The state funding for art like the 60’s and 70’s isn’t exactly ubiquitous, as it is apparent that the film industry is now developing towards a more capitalist structure. However, with this change of seasons, the development of individualised technology like digital video, where anyone can put forth their vision. Whether an audience for their vision exists or not, is another problem by itself. Amrit Gangar, Indian film scholar and writer (among other things) coined the term Cinema of Prayoga, which aims at recontextualising the English word ‘experimental’ which is inherently Euro-centric in its context. In a conversation with Shai Heredia, curator and filmmaker, Gangar said, “I thought the English word ‘experimental’ that is generally used in the film vocabulary especially in the West and accepted by the rest of the world is either not adequate or doesn’t represent the essence of a particular filmmaking praxis. So I thought our own Sanskrit word ‘prayoga’ could be a better alternative. The compound word prayog is made up of pra + yoga (pronounced yog), where ‘pra’ as a prefix to verbs would mean ‘forward’, ‘onward’ or ‘before’ and with adjectives it would mean ‘very’ ‘excessively’ and with nouns, whether derived from verbs or not, it is used in several senses. Among other means, ‘yog’ means a ‘deep and abstract meditation’. In a dramatic sense, ‘prayog’ also means ‘representation’.”

The term ‘experimental’ does often become problematic in this modern age, because so called experimental films are all done with clear intent, and not born out of mere experiments, as Gangar said, “there is an element of chance; there is a joy of an unexpected discovery of a relationship between images. But in a capital-intensive medium such as cinema, the risk-taking element plays a crucial role” The term Prayoga is a word that is more profound and dare I say, appropriate with respect to Indian cinema. But is there any hope for Indian Cinema at all? In a system that limits artistic parameters, where everything is market driven, can forward thinking alternative, inventive cinema still bloom? There is evidence that all is not lost. Filmmakers like Amit Dutta, Ashish Avikunthak, Kamal Swaroop, Vipin Vijay and many others continue to push the boundaries and create rich pieces of art that are equal parts impactful, surreal and personal. Amit Dutta’s Nainsukh (2010) is a visually spectacular, dreamy tribute to the Pahari painter of the same name, channels the same poetic spirit of Mani Kaul. It is also reminiscent of another master of poetic cinema, Sergei Parajanov, whose film Color of Pomegranates, is a work so ingrained into the psyche of its subject that it requires every cell in your body to be tuned to its wavelength, rewarding a viewer with some of the most breathtakingly beautiful images in the history of cinema. The same could be said for Nainsukh, which reminds me of being instantly transported to the inside of a painting. Ashish Avikunthak’s Katho Upanishad (2011) which is a metaphysical dialogue between Nachiketa, a young Brahmin boy and Yama, the God of Death. It is an adaptation of a two and half thousand years old Sanskrit treatise of the same name, where Yama instructs Nachiketa about the path towards enlightenment; or even his film Vakratunda Swaha (2010) a short film which could be described as a pilgrimage through the concurrent forwards and backwards of time, which Avikunthak himself calls a “requiem to a dead friend”

I often think about the possibilities in Indian cinema. What it could be. In a country that is rife with religion, mythology, culture and experience, the possibilities for inventive cinema are endless. There is so much scope to create intensely artistic, personal, deep and subjective work that uses all the spaces that the beautiful medium of film gives us. The deeply market driven film industry also limits the exposure of artists who actually committed to creating intensely personal, formally radical cinema. It is unfortunate, because it feels like artists do not aspire to create great work, to truly experiment and make art with their whole being rather than pander to the needs of an entertainment hungry audience.

Rouzbeh Rashidi, founder of the Dublin based Experimental Film Society explains this resistance against the growth of cinema in an interesting way, he says, “Perhaps this reaction of violent rejection is a natural defence mechanism that kicks in when someone is confronted with the shock of an idea that is so alien as to seem fundamentally inappropriate. Of course, the history of alternative cinema is also a history of such confrontations. When a filmmaker gets this type of response, unless he or she is interested in provoking the audience for the sheer sake of provocation, it is because the viewer’s received understanding of how to ‘communicate’ with a film has been thrown into crisis. As an experimental filmmaker, one hopes that if the film works, this confrontation will result in the viewer’s perception rising to the challenge and that ideally he or she will leave with an ‘opened’ mind or even an expanded consciousness. And not just with a broadened understanding of cinema but with a somehow enriched (or, indeed, disturbed) sense of perception itself.” One can only hope that people will begin to become aware of this side of cinema, that unknown artists who create art from within will soon become known and that this country with endless possibilities eventually develops a filmic pantheon of its own. Until then, I suppose we’ll continue to drop our panties every time a new Dhoom movie comes out. by Nisanth S

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armeniaitn · 3 years

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Virtual Exhibition Highlighting Diasporan Armenian Responses to Occupied Artsakh Launched in April

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/culture/virtual-exhibition-highlighting-diasporan-armenian-responses-to-occupied-artsakh-launched-in-april-72970-04-05-2021/

Virtual Exhibition Highlighting Diasporan Armenian Responses to Occupied Artsakh Launched in April

“Sites of Fracture: Diasporic “Imaginings of Occupied Artsakh” exhibition launched on April 19

GLENDALE—Glendale Library Arts & Culture and ReflectSpace Gallery present “Sites of Fracture: Diasporic Imaginings of Occupied Artsakh,” a virtual exhibition that brings together diasporan Armenian artists—from the United States, Canada, and Germany—to build collective counter-narratives to the forces of occupation and cultural erasure in the Republic of Artsakh. The exhibition launched on April 19.

In September 2020, the autocratic state of Azerbaijan invaded the Republic of Artsakh and initiated an campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting its Indigenous Armenian population. With a vastly out-financed military and direct support from Turkey, Azerbaijan succeeded in occupying large swaths of Artsakh. In the process, thousands lost their lives and 100,000 Armenians were displaced from their ancestral homes.

The global Armenian diaspora was gripped by the collective trauma of watching a campaign of ethnic cleansing unfold via digital screens and televisual transmissions. As Indigenous Armenian heritage faced systematic destruction, a cadre of diasporan Armenian artists responded with projects that counter the attempted erasure of Armenian identities, histories, and cultural artifacts.

Artists and cultural workers in the exhibit include Kamee Abrahamian, Ali Cat/Entangled Roots Press, Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, Naré Mkrtchyan, Nelli Sargsyan, She Loves Collective, Scout Tufankjian, Anahid Yahjian and Yerazad Coalition.

“Sites of Fracture” also gestures towards the repatriation of ancestral lands. The virtual exhibition takes place in the photographically reconstructed fortress of the city of Shushi—Artsakh’s historical cultural capital, now occupied by Azerbaijan. In the process, “Sites of Fracture” imagines decolonized futures for Shushi, envisioning an independent Republic of Artsakh wherein Indigenous communities exercise the right to have been granted the right to self-governance and cultural autonomy.

“Sites of Fracture: Diasporic Imaginings of Occupied Artsakh” is co-curated by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Ara Oshagan, and Anahid Oshagan and is part of the Glendale Library Arts & Culture’s Armenian Genocide Remembrance Month. The exhibition launches on April 19 in a 3D virtual gallery accessible through the ReflectSpace Gallery website: www.reflectspace.org.

“Sites of Fracture” is also part of the Glendale Library Arts & Culture’s “Be the Change” series focuses on: Inclusion – Diversity – Equity – Antiracism. “Be The Change” events will build collective understanding of systemic racism, elevate the voices and stories of BIPOC, and inspire our community to be the change. “Be The Change” is sponsored by the City of Glendale, California Arts and Culture Commission, with funding from the City of Glendale Urban Art Fund.

ReflectSpace Gallery at the Glendale Central Library opened in 2017 when the library reopened after a major renovation. It came at the behest of The Glendale City Council for a city space to address the Armenian Genocide and other human atrocities. ReflectSpace is an exhibition space designed to explore and reflect on genocides, human and civil rights violations. Immersive in conception, ReflectSpace is a hybrid space that exhibits contemporary art as well as archives, employing installation, technology and interactive media to engage viewers on an emotional and personal level. ReflectSpace strives to reflect the past and present of Glendale’s communal fabric and interrogate current-day global human rights issues.

Kamee Abrahamian is a supreme hyphenate who arrives in the world today as an interdisciplinary writer-artist-producer-performer-organizer and a non-binary, queer-feminist caregiver. They grew up in an immigrant suburb of Toronto and was born into an Armenian family displaced from the SWANA region. Kamee’s work is steeped with relational and generative practices oriented towards ancestral reclamation, visionary fiction, and diasporic futurism. They hold a BFA/BA in film and political science (Concordia University), an MA in expressive art therapy (European Graduate Institute), and a PhD (ABD) in community liberation, indigenous and eco psychologies (Pacifica Graduate Institute). Kamee has published plays, literary and academic writing, while organizing and presenting films, artwork, staged performances and workshops internationally. Recent projects worth mention are “Ensouled,” “Hok Danil,” “Transmission,” and “Dear Armen.”

Ali Cat/Entangled Roots Press is an artist and print maker living on unceded Cowlitz, Multnomah and Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde land at the confluence of two rivers, also known as Portland, Oregon. She produces her work under the name Entangled Roots Press. Her prints mingle the literal and metaphorical to illuminate and comment upon the world around us. Relief, screen, and letterpress prints span from the carnage of clear-cuts to the beauty of peoples movements. Ali’s prints pull from ancestral herstories and push towards liberatory futures; entangling lessons from gardens, symbols in coffee cups, woven threads from Armenia and Euskal Herria, to the printed page. Ali received her BFA at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. She completed an artist-residency at Proyecto’ace in Buenos Aires in 2014, and was a member of Flight 64, a member-run, nonprofit print studio, from 2015 to 2018. Ali currently works as the Print Studio Technician at PNCA.

Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, born in Buenos Aires, lives and works in Berlin. Her work explores themes of belonging, the role of minorities in society, and the potential of an “in-between” space. Memory and working with archives are the focus of her artistic exploration. She is the artistic director of the Houshamadyan project, a multimedia memory book for Armenian Ottoman history. Silvina Der-Meguerditchian was a fellow at the Tarabya Academy of Culture in 2014/15. In the summer of 2015, she participated in Armenity, the Armenian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, which was awarded the Golden Lion for the best national representation. In the fall of 2015, she curated the exhibition “ENKEL, new geographies of belonging” in Istanbul. Since 2014, she has worked with “Women mobilizing memory,” a group of artists, writers, museologists, social activists, and memory and memorial scholars working internationally. In 2020, her film “The Wishing Tree” was awarded with a Special Mention at the Sharjah Film Platform. Her first personal catalog with VFMK (Verlag für Moderne Kunst) has just been published in January 2021.

Naré Mkrtchyan was born in Armenia and raised in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. She has written, directed and produced over sixty projects, including her latest which was a Netflix original. Her documentary The Other Side of Home remains the only Armenian Genocide film to be shortlisted for Oscar. Her passion is telling unique human stories that connect people and move beyond the boundaries of nationality, gender, and religion.

Nelli Sargsyan is an associate professor of anthropology at Emerson College, Boston, MA. As a feminist, Sargsyan situates herself at the disciplinary intersections of political anthropology, queer studies, and critical race studies, among others. In her scholarly-poetic work and teaching Sargsyan is interested in stretching disciplinary and genre boundaries to explore the multi-sensory possibilities of feminist world-making. Most recently she has been interested in political work that cultivates feminist consciousness and collective care, whether it be through direct street action, public performance, or feminist fabulation. Sargsyan’s work has appeared in academic journals such as “Feminist Formations, History and Anthropology,” and “Feminist Anthropology,” as well as on online platforms such as “ARTMargins,” “Public Seminar,” and “Socioscope.”

SheLovesCollective is an alliance of women artists who share a strong belief in the power of creating social change through art. On October 11th, 2020 the collective launched a performance art piece entitled, The Rifles Our Ancestors Didn’t Have in response to the war that reignited on September 27, 2020 in the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Artsakh.

Scout Tufankjian has spent the bulk of her career working in the Middle East, but is best known for her work documenting both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. Her book on the 2007 to 2008 campaign, “Yes We Can: Barack Obama’s History-Making Presidential Campaign” was a New York Times and LA Times bestseller. Her second book, “There is Only the Earth: Images from the Armenian Diaspora Project,” is the culmination of six years documenting Armenian communities in over 20 different countries. More recently, she has worked for the HALO Trust in Nagorno-Karabakh and Angola, and has served as a temporary acting director of Committee to Protect Journalists’s Emergency Response Team. She is a two-time TUMO Workshop leader, in Yerevan and Stepanakert, and continues to work as a freelance photographer and as a consultant for both RISC Training and Committee to Protect Journalists. More of her work can be seen on her website.

Anahid Yahjian is an independent writer, director and producer of experimental, documentary and narrative cinema. Her commitment to telling true stories (even if they come from her imagination) was shaped by an early love for visual storytelling that was formalized in college and took flight during her coming of age in Armenia. There, she produced the internationally-awarded narrative short 140 Drams (Camerimage, Clermont-Ferrand 2013), laid the creative groundwork for the feature documentary Spiral (IDFA Bertha Fund 2015, Golden Apricot 2017) and shot and directed the viral digital documentary LEVON: A Wondrous Life (2013). Since returning to her native Los Angeles, she shot and directed the experimental cine-triptych, Corpus Callosum (2014-2016) and directed the narrative science-fiction short Transmission (BFI Flare, Vancouver QFF 2019). She splits her time between Yerevan, Sofia (her birthplace), Los Angeles (her home), and New York City.

Yerazad Coalition is an action coalition dedicated to Armenian liberation and building transnational solidarity. Yerazad’s work encompasses policy action, coalition building, and environmental justice. Its core members include Carene Rose Mekertichyan, Joel Mardirossian, Joy Mardirossian, Brian Damerau, and Arya Jamal.

Read original article here.

#Armenia #Armenians #Artsakh #Karabakh #Yerevan #Culture

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coldlipsmag · 6 years

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New Fiction from Nina Antonia.

Nina Antonia is best known for writing the most stolen book in rock n roll's history, In Cold Blood about Johnny Thunders (currently in development in Hollywood). But she has scribed and edited on a wealth of others: Peter Perret from the Only Ones, Peter Doherty, The Mission's Wayne Hussey. A rare force of true independence, this tarot reading tour-de-force was a regular at the anti-literary night that led to Cold Lips, and she performed with Thunders' drummer, Chris Musto, at the launch party for the second edition which this is grabbed from...

It was difficult to imagine that Shepherd’s Bush had once been a genteel neighbourhood. If Celia Gardener had paused for a moment she might have noticed the parallels between herself and the area that she had always called home. There were still some lovely Victorian buildings; the sort of places where Mary Poppins might have alighted a century before, to lend a hand to a picture book family. But swathes of the neighbourhood had fallen prey to a blight identifiable by the peeling facades of former grandeur, as if the tenants had overslept life itself, much like Celia Gardner, who knew every drug den on the street. Head bowed against the rain, she scurried towards a drab little clinic with a trash strewn drive. A crack pipe constructed from a mini-Martell bottle had been thrown into a pile of leaves by the door. She rang the buzzer and was ushered in by Gavin, her key-worker. Celia was good at playing penitent. Although achingly remorseful for a past she’d lost control of, she owed Gavin nothin but her time. Gavin’s solutions were made of paper, ‘Care-Plans’ he called them, consisting of plenty of planning but not much care, or that was how it appeared to Celia.

The supply room was tiny and airless. A variety of warning posters covered the walls, anthrax contamination, overdose, arrest; the myriad risks that injecting drug user’s face. An A4 drawing of a mad looking monkey with the words ‘Worth an arm or a leg?’ beneath it caught Celia’s eye. Gavin assumed a posture of casual concern as he doled out the particulars of her kit: “Just the usual then?” She nodded as he put 20 1ml needles, citric, sterile water, wipes and steri-cups into a small, anonymous bag. “I suppose” he began “that you’ve heard they are holding auditions for ‘Funky Monkey’ at the Tesco Apollo?” She’d thought of nothing else. “We’ve been warning all of our clients to stay well clear and Celia, I’m sure you’re smarter than that….” It wasn’t a question of intelligence but atonement.

No one was sure where ‘Funky Monkey’ had originated from, possibly Mexico or Bolivia. It was rumoured that the programme had been the brainchild of a psychotic drugs baron who’d grown bored of issuing threats to poor saps that couldn’t pay off their debts. As a warning, the baron began filming his machete wielding heavies taking payment in kind, lopping off digits and limbs as bloody remuneration. The show got its name from the Baron’s crew of thugs who donned leering monkey masks to disguise their identities. Debates ensued, just as they had about snuff films, viewers oscillating between horrified disbelief and curiosity. Several media pundits claimed that it was a hoax. One thing was certain however, ‘Funky Monkey’ got thousands of hits. It wasn’t as if the victims were innocent, after all. Indebted scag-heads were considered fair game by the righteous majority. In 2022 the Oblivia Corporation purchased the rights from the baron and modified the rules. ‘Funky Monkey’ went world-wide. No one listened to liberals anymore. The television ratings spoke for themselves. Ritual humiliation and suffering had become entertainment staples. Losers made good sport. ‘Destitution’ had been an instant hit as dotty pensioners and impoverished families slugged it out with bailiffs and ‘The Wheel of Misfortune’ was a Saturday night highlight, the contestants like fish in a barrel waiting to be speared. Celia remembered her father telling her that in the early days of television, toilets were thought too vulgar to show. Now just about everything was permissible as long as it wasn’t the truth.

Celia Gardener was in the twentieth year of her habit and felt every minute of it. With the frayed cuff of her cardigan, she wiped at the grubby bathroom mirror and glanced at her reflection. The lines around her taut mouth formed trenches of need and her skin was like ruined rice paper. When was the last time she’d worn make-up? Had a hair cut? Bought a new dress? She sighed and lit a cigarette. In the final moments before nicotine prohibition, dissenters had sited Clash icon Joe Strummer, who had claimed that he wouldn’t read a book written by an author who hadn’t smoked. These days’ people neither read nor smoked but they did wear Joe Strummer tee-shirts. Celia wrapped a belt around her arm to make a tourniquet and began the desultory process of trying to find a vein. The addict’s world is a narrow one made up of habit and ritual. Apart from short stays in Holloway, a consequence of getting caught shoplifting, Celia Gardener was unstintingly predictable. Raise cash, buy drugs, get high. Though Celia was now the kind of woman that people tried to avoid, she had once been a picture book mother and wife.

The Gardener family had dwelled in the realm of cherries, abundant with sweetness. Hailed by critics, her husband, Davey, had been a promising artist and Celia his beloved muse. Together they’d presided over a bustling milieu of alternative art exhibitions and lengthy Sunday soirees spent with friends, whilst their children played in the garden. Once the twins had been tucked up in bed, they’d round off the night with opium tea, poured from a polka- dot teapot that Celia had found in Portobello market. When high, they’d laugh at the scatty alliteration of ‘Polka dot tea pot.’ Davey and Celia considered their famed opium tea a sacrament to England’s bohemian past. Money had been a bit tight yet they got by on shabby chic. ‘Creative Life’ magazine had done a feature on their idyllic existence, which included a family portrait; Celia and Davey in the garden with Tilly and Oskar, adorable in matching vintage outfits. She still had a copy of the photograph, creased now with age, like her.

The lights had gone out more swiftly than the space between breaths. It was 4 am and Davey would later admit he’d been tipsy but that was his only trespass. Speeding over the Westway on his motorbike, he’d taken an unusually sharp turn and been catapulted into a night of steel stars. The screech of chrome on gravel came as an abstraction. Later, the police told Celia that if the bike had been a horse it would have been shot on sight. In time, Davey Gardener would wish the same for himself. He’d survived but his right arm had been crushed. The magic limb, conductor of inspiration was reduced to a withered stump. There were some minor headlines, a flurry of gratuitous interest in the artist who could paint no more. The couple descended into a winter of opium tea, unpaid bills and dust. Tilly and Oskar’s luscious sparkle noticeably diminished, they no longer possessed the lustre of well-cared for children. Celia loved them as much as ever, it was just that she loved life less.

The alarm was raised by the twin’s teacher after they’d been late for school three times in a row. Social services didn’t much like the Gardener’s type, artsy at best, lacksadaisical at worst. Drug testing for all parents called to account for lateness, was mandatory. It mattered not to social services that the Gardener’s drug use was confined to a polka-dot tea pot; they took note only of a positive test result for opiates. This was the big red button inside every social worker’s head, the nuclear reactor about to explode. Tilly and Oskar were put on the ‘At Risk’ register. Using the last of their money, Celia and Davey hired a solicitor but the courts had no clemency for parents like them. With the efficacy of storm troopers, four police men and three senior social workers removed Tilly and Oskar from their beds. Where was Mary Poppins when you needed her? Cloud-hopping over the houses of the fortunate. As the front door slammed and the children’s cries receded into a bitterly cold night, the young woman once renowned for her Sunday soirees and polka dot tea pot, shattered.

The huge billboard announcing the arrival of ‘Funky Monkey’ had been erected in front of the theatre. Portrayed as a grinning cartoon, the Funky Monkey grasped a surgeon’s knife in one paw and a wad of cash in the other. Funky Monkey was always game if the public were up for the challenge. Judging by the untidy queue that was growing by the minute, plenty were more than willing. Although Celia had got to the venue early, there were already a couple of hundred would-be contestants ahead of her. When the programme had first aired on mainstream television, there had been a flurry of dismay but a deal had already been worked out between the government and the Oblivia Corporation. As the tabloids opined, no one of social value would wind up on ‘Funky Monkey’. If it got contestants off benefits, society prospered. At least that was the rhetoric employed by a government spokesperson. The ‘Economics of Cruelty’ was one of the most popular university courses in the UK. Acts of charity were deemed insurgent. Hostels had been replaced by workhouses, donating food to the poor was illegal and the Salvation Army had been banned. Christ had died so we may prosper.

Celia surveyed the gathering swell of no hopers; the nutters, nihilists, desperados, dopers, itinerants, transients, low lifes, loners, scavengers, losers, freaks, creeps and misfits, the laughing, crying, sweating, shaking, chattering, moaning carnie side-show of human wreckage to which she belonged. In the old days, Celia would have smoked a cigarette while she waited in line, but now even that small pleasure came with the fear of a week’s remand in a social correction unit if caught. Eventually, she became aware that a slick looking couple followed by a camera crew where working their way through the crowd. Now and again, someone would be singled out and led into the theatre. To her dismay, Gavin and some of his colleagues from the needle exchange were distributing flyers offering freedom from addiction. They went about their task with a friendly zeal, targeting the most likely candidates. Amiable though they appeared to be, she had never been too sure if drug workers realised that every shred of information gleaned by them from their ragged clientele was fed straight to the government, police and social services. Tired of waiting, Celia had just sat down on the pavement when the camera crew arrived, led by the Oblivia Corporation employees. The couple looked like models, imbued with a well-being that Celia had forgotten existed. “What brings you here Miss?” asked the women with a robotic courtesy: “I want the money to find my children, they have to know it was all a terrible mistake, we loved them so”. With that, the tears began to flow. Pathos made for good viewing.

The white wine was chilled, just the way Celia Gardener liked it and the powerful painkillers administered by a nurse calmed her nerves. All of those sinister stories about the Oblivia Corporation that Celia had heard evaporated as she settled into a soft armchair in the pleasant backstage room that had been designated to her. Celia Gardener couldn’t believe her luck. A waitress placed a bowl of chocolate coated strawberries on the table in front of her. Every contender was allowed a treat of their choice, so long as it was legal. The Oblivia Corporation’s catering crew called it ‘Death Row din-dins’. Ensconced in the chill-out room, Celia savoured the strawberry’s sweet flesh inside the creamy chocolate. They reminded her of Sunday soirees. How she wished that Davey and the twins could be with her now. Celia had just dozed off when the show’s surgeon came to prep her, gently wiping her hands with a numbing sterile solution. She had agreed in advance that she was prepared to lose five fingers. That was all she could realistically cope with. If she could make this sacrifice then surely Tilly and Oskar would realise how much they meant to her.

As Celia stepped out on to the stage, accompanied by two men in monkey suits, the audience began the customary chant of ‘An arm and a leg, you’d be better off dead’. The crowd’s feral arousal alarmed her. A reprise of the show’s dreadful loping theme tune blared from the speakers, as she was guided to a seat opposite the surgeon. Then came the thundering announcement ‘Will the plucky lady take on the ‘Funky Monkey?’ Judging by the howls of derision, the audience thought not but Celia had attained a resolved calm that didn’t falter even when the surgeon swiped the air with an oversize scalpel. He reminded her of a fencing teacher doing warm up exercises. The Oblivia Corporation had ditched the machetes early on as being too extreme, substituting it with a scalpel. With methodical strokes, the surgeon began removing her fingers, placing each one on a silver platter. In the distance she could hear the audience roaring but it was an abstraction, like the sound of the sea remembered.

Tilly and Oskar thought of their birth mother rarely, if at all. Their dreams had come true when Mary Poppins had carried them to safety; whisking them over the roof tops to gentler climes. They had woken up in the warmest, softest beds imaginable. In time, they regained the honey lustre of the well-cared for. On the twin’s sixteenth birthday, social services had presented Tilly and Oskar with a report on their parents, should they wish to find them. Celia’s various charges for shoplifting and drug possession were included in the dossier whilst a death certificate was proof that Davey Gardener had drunk himself to death in a Bristol workhouse. Having no love of art, social services failed to mention that Davey’s paintings were highly collectable. Sotheby’s had auctioned ‘Woman with a Polka-Dot Tea Pot’ for a tidy sum. Poor Celia Gardener, an eternity of night had passed her by. Overtaken by decades, she’d been watching the horizon, not the time. Her family were a still life. She blinked at the television lights, smiled like a beauty queen and waved at the crowd with her good hand. Oskar pointed at the plasma screen television and grinned ‘Look at this one, she’s mad as a box of badgers.’ ‘Funky Monkey’ was his favourite show but Tilly couldn’t stand it. She nudged him hard in the ribs, ‘Don’t be so rotten’ she chided. ‘Imagine having that for a mother’, Oskar chortled, rubbing his eyes, unaware that he was erasing a memory before it could take recognisable form.

@NinaAntonia13

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'Still Life' is a short story by Nina Antonia published exclusively in the sold out Cold Lips II, also featuring writers Irvine Welsh and Geoff Nicholson. To support other activities of Cold Lips, visit our online store.

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emeraldcolour · 4 years

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WHAT IS STOP MOTION ANIMATION — A BEGINNER’S GUIDE

Ever wonder how movies like Jurassic Park, King Kong, Toy Story, etc., feel and look so real? Well, it is all thanks to stop motion animation.

Are you looking to learn about stop motion animation? Then you have come to the right place. In this article, we are going to talk about stop motion animation, its techniques, and its origins.

So without further ado, let’s get into it.

WHAT IS STOP MOTION ANIMATION?

The technique of bringing static on-screen animated objects to life is called Stop Motion Animation. This highly detailed technique is possible by moving an object in increments when filming a specific frame.

For stop motion animation, an artist places objects that are to be animated in their initial positions. A picture of the objects in that particular position is captured on a memory card or film. The artist then moves on to hustle the objects in slightly varying positions, capturing another image. This entire process is repeated hundreds and thousands of times to shoot a single scene. Once all the frames are completed and played in sequence, the stop motion animation after effects give an illusion of the movement of the animated objects.

Some of the most popular objects used in stop motion animation are paper cut-outs, puppets, clay figurines, and miniatures. These objects are used because they are convenient and easy to manage and reposition.

An easy way to understand stop motion animations is to think of them as an elongated serious of still images and photographs. The objects included are moved, fixed, and filmed on a frame by frame basis to simulate movement.

An extremely popular movie that made heavy use of stop motion animation using puppets and other miniatures was the uber-famous Star Wars. Using the great technique, this movie successfully brought objects that cannot move by themselves to life.

The introduction of computer-generated graphics, images and videos has dimmed the light of stop motion animation. However, due to its unique impact and realistic texture, you can’t expect this great technique to die out anytime soon. Many stop motion animation studios are still popularly using these animations in TV advertisements, short films and even artistic films.

STOP-MOTION ANIMATION TECHNIQUES

Various techniques are used to create stop motion animation. Some techniques include clay, cut-out, puppet and object animations. The main difference amongst all these techniques is the kind of object that is used in the creation of an animation.

An extremely popular and widely used stop motion technique is object animation. This animation type entails the use of simple objects, such as children’s toys and dolls, to create an animation.

Animations that use more detailed and complex movable objects are referred to as puppet animations. Cut-out animations, as the name suggests, uses paper and cardboard cut-outs of objects and characters. An artist then adds life to these cut-outs using their artistic and creative skills. Stop action animations are also popularly used in various movies and films.

BENEFITS OF STOP MOTION ANIMATION

Here are a few advantages of stop motion animations.

INNOVATION

One of the biggest advantages of using stop motion animations is innovation. The modern revival of this kind of animation entails using some super-creative and fantastic props and methods for filming. Artists are now using plasticine models, moving them only few millimetres to deliver a more intense and realistic effect. This highly effective method enables animators to animate any object that can’t move by itself. All in all, stop motion offers an endless number of possibilities!

INFORMATIONAL VIDEOS

Stop motion videos are becoming more creative and imaginative. Its effective techniques are being used to create all forms of content, ranging from informational videos to uber-cute advertisements. Today, marketers are using stop motion animation due to its high versatility. If you want to deliver a message in a truly unique and creative way, incorporating stop motion animations in informational videos or your ads is the way to go!

The intricate techniques and detailing used in these animations engage your audience and ensure that they watch the entire video.

ENHANCES BRAND IMAGE

The use of stop motion animations in advertisements and commercials is trending these days. The creativity of these videos makes it easy for the audience to retain your brand message, helping you build a positive brand image while encouraging brand recall.

A great attribute of stop motion animations is that it is inspiring and thought-provoking. It helps create quality content that individuals not only remember for an extended period of time but are also motivated to share with those they know.

A wide number of businesses belonging to different industries are gradually recognizing the true potential of stop motion graphics. This has motivated them to incorporate these animations into their digital marketing content, which is then posted on social media and other video-sharing websites.

HIGHLY VERSATILE TOOL

The use of stop motion animations is not only limited to the filming or advertising industry. This highly versatile tool is very useful in education and business. Stop motion animation is an incredibly fun way of delivering information and boring concepts. It helps make topics more interesting, motivating and encouraging students and other individuals to engage more. Stop motion also helps explain topics in a slow yet more effective manner.

USED IN DEMONSTRATIONS

Stop motion animations are an effective tool that can be used for product and other demonstrations. You can arrange and set the time frames according to your liking to speed up the demonstration. Stop motion animations can also be incorporated in explainer videos to communicate pivotal messages in an engaging manner. Since these videos are extremely creative and unique, they help retain the audience’s attention for a longer period of time and ensure that your customers understand the message effectively.

MUSIC VIDEOS

Due to their versatility, stop motion animations can also be incorporated in music videos to make them more creative and imaginative. There are no limitations on what you can achieve using different props to convey a message in an innovative way. You can use these creative animations to deliver different emotions and inspire people along the way.

Many animation studios in London are adopting these techniques.

HISTORY OF STOP MOTION ANIMATION

Released in the year 1898, “The Humpty Dumpty Circus” is considered to be the first documented movie that used stop motion animations. Directed by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton, this classic movie brought wooden toys to life.

A few years later, in 1907, another film by the name “The Haunted Hotel” used stop animation. Produced by J. Stuart Blackton, this movie was applauded for demonstrating moving furniture using object animation, a popular stop motion technique. The Haunted Hotel went on to become one of the biggest hits of its time due to its incredible effects.

By this point in time, many filmmakers were adopting the use of different stop motion techniques to tell their story. Wladyslaw Starewicz is considered as one of the global pioneers of stop motion animations. He was a renowned genius when it came to storytelling through the art of stop motion. The most common type of object that he used in his stop motion animated films was puppets. Two of his classic works included “Tale of the Fox” and “Along With the Mascot”.

Another milestone in the stop motion animation industry was when famous animator Willis O’Brien made his entry into the mainstream movie industry through his work “The Lost World” in 1925. This major hit entailed the use of dinosaur animations alongside live actors. Another great hit by Willis O’Brien was the popular King Kong movie in 1933. This brilliant film took stop motion animation to the next level.

“King Kong” turned out to be a massive hit as O’Brien perfected the 2d stop motion animal techniques that he had used in “The Lost World”. He incorporated more smooth motions and realistic expressions in the film, delivering an incredibly realistic experience to the audience. Because of this masterpiece, Willis O’Brien earned the title “Father of Modern Stop Motion Animation.”

O’Brien also volunteered to supervise the stop motion special effects of the 1949 popular movie, Mighty Joe Young. In 1950, this movie won him an Oscar for best visual effects.

Stop motion animations were taken to another level by O’Brien’s protégé, Harryhausen. He made various films from the 1950’s to the 1980’s, making use of new techniques in stop motion animation.

HOW IS STOP MOTION BETTER THAN CGI ANIMATION?

Only a few decades ago, a vast majority of animations were being created using the popular stop motion technique. However, the technological revolution offered the world a faster and much less technical technique to deliver animated effects, known as the Computer Generated Imagery (CGI).

This gave birth to one of the most popular debates — the Stop Motion vs. CGI debate.

Here are a few reasons why stop motion animations are better than CGI animations.

ARTISAN FILMMAKING

Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) can’t compete with the rich history of stop motion animations. Stop motion was used to deliver realistic experiences to the audience way before the first computer was even introduced to the world. Stop motion helped create live action filmmaking in a creative and innovative manner in the pre-1900 era. It encouraged filmmakers and artists to display their creativity and show their out-of-the-box thinking through animations.

EFFECTS

Stop motion animations paved the way for many CGI effects that are seen in movies today. It gave birth to special effects to deliver an incredible cinematic experience. It’s important to acknowledge that even the epic Star Wars Trilogy was brought to life using special stop motion animations and effects. Hence, it has a rich heritage that cannot be underappreciated at any cost.

QUALITY

Contrary to popular opinion, stop motion is a high quality medium, just like CGI. There are various films with incredible effects that never fail to make an impression on its audience. Moreover, CGI can be of low quality depending on the budget, which ultimately delivers a disappointing experience to the audience. Stop motion, on the other hand, never compromises on quality.

COST

A popular myth in the animation industry is that stop motion animations are way more costly than CGI. However, like we mentioned, it’s nothing but a myth. Like other animation techniques, the cost of a stop motion project depends on the time required to create the extensive artwork. Since you are paying for the precious time and experience of the animators, you will have to compensate likewise.

Similarly, high quality CGI can be super-expensive to create. Even though you can opt for cheaper CGI, at the end of the day, it will not be able to deliver the same impact and experience as high quality CGI.

Stop motion animations can be created according to varying budgets without compromising on the quality, even though it requires more effort.

CHARM

Stop motion animations stand out from CGI; they hold a unique charm that can’t possibly be replicated using computer-generated techniques. Beautifully handcrafted with minute details, stop motion delivers a whole new experience to the audience. Moreover, stop motion just seems like a more personalized technique that gives a sense of warmth to the audience as compared to computer manufacture images.

RENDERING

After an animated film or video is created, it often has to be rendered into a particular video file. The rendering process is extremely time-consuming, adding to the turnaround time considerably. Even if you add the best textures, effects, and lighting for an incredible experience, this can easily be dimmed down if you don’t have a great render system. CGI requires a considerably long time to render as compared to stop animation, which requires only a few basic touches and edits.

All in all, stop motion animation will forever remain an incredible technique that offers a great experience to the audience.

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theparaminds · 7 years

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It is almost unimaginable how many musicians have been given a listen due to their album artwork. Being the first impression itself, the artwork obviously holds the same weight as the music in many cases. Back in the days of record stores, there was no 10-second preview; the artwork was all there was between the consumer and the artist. Though, it is now a digital age in which attention is the most valuable commodity, in which standing out is just as difficult as ever. Some believe that the artistry of an album has been lost and in a sense it is arguable that the lack of physicality within the medium has hindered the appreciation of the art form. But many on the other side of the scale believe that is completely wrong in every sense, many being the graphic designers themselves; one of which is pushing to retain the art form he built his base on.

Max Cohen is a Waterloo, Ontario born and raised creative director and designer who has established himself a major player in the hip hop scene; creating artwork for some of the hottest acts currently, which include: Killy, Pierre Bourne, Murda Beatz, Smokepurpp and of course many more. Max understands the importance of branding as well as the visuals themselves, hoping to share it with those unaware of its essentialness. Parmaind sat down and spoke to Max about his work and visions, the rap industry as well as his views on the future of music marketing.

Paramind: First question as always, how’s your day going?

Max: Good man, it was ok; school was school. I’m living bro, living good.

PM: So, why don’t you tell everyone who Max is?

M: Oh god, my name is Max Cohen; I am a student, I am an artist, I make album covers and work on branding for a bunch of different artists and labels, just an overall creative.

PM: So of all those projects you’ve done, what are the three you’re most proud of?

M: Oh, Killamonjaro for Killy, Bloody Hands…this is tough… oh the Fiji and Yachty one for sure.

PM: It is seen in those projects that you work tightly in the hip hop community, but do you think that’s where you’re happy staying? Or would you want to expand and if so, where?

M: I mean I love all genres of music so I’ll do anyone I listen to and primarily listen to the people I work with. It’s nice to have that personal connection with the artists. But in general with rap its probably where I’ll stay, it’s what’s popular and what I enjoy the most; it’s the black renaissance coming into play and that will be prevalent as time goes on. Also I work more on an industry level than a Soundcloud one now as well. I’ve worked with Universal, Interscope, real label shit. It’s my niche and I’m enjoying it and once I continue to expand my range of talents it’ll just get better and I plan to stay prevalent and influential in the industry.

PM: So do you plan to move towards shooting concerts, live visuals, etc. as arguably album artwork is static as an art form?

M: Yeah it can be sometimes, but photography is so saturated right now that it’s hard to stand out at all because thousands of them exist, so there’s no real point. People have asked me to shoot or do video work and my friend who goes by the name Sogross basically just taught me to diversify my skillset and so if an artist wants me to go on tour for a couple months and do all the visuals and creatives I can do that.

PM: But you’re still doing album art, it is still your main focus; and there is now the question of why it’s relevant. Akon recently tweeted making fun of even caring about album artwork anymore...

M: Akon’s on bullshit man

PM: [Laughs] so then why is it relevant then in your mind?

M: It’s the most important thing towards marketing and building your brand and fan base. Off the top, cover art is an art form so it needs to be maintained. But that whole idea of branding is important, it’s like saying ‘why do we need advertisements for companies?’ It makes no sense. That is literally the equivalant. Its part of the marketing, and of course, its part of the vision.

PM: But what about album covers with no art? Like Yeezus?

M: Still art. Still branding. That’s totally art and expression and what the artist wanted to display. It was curated by Joe Perez , dude is so smart. But it’s a message against the music industry.

PM: Kanye called it the coffin or death of album covers, does he have a point?

M: Kanye is a visionary but he’s also dramatic and sometimes stupid so take everything he says with a grain of salt.

PM: While on the topic of album covers, can you tell me some that have influenced you in some way?

M: Anything Bryan Rivera does, he does Post Malone’s stuff, I don’t have specific influence from one piece or it else my art wouldn’t be my own. So maybe not specific covers but more portfolios.

PM: Can you give any secrets or hints at album covers or work you have coming soon?

M: Geez, lot of Toronto work. I don’t like talking on my moves before I make them. No reason to flex a piece before it’s done. I can speak on the fact I’ll keep working with Murda Beatz if all goes good.

PM: Nice, on top of working with musicians you’ve also worked with some other graphic designers like your friend Jeff and I know you’ve been shouted out in Justin Wilson’s interview with Untitled, so can you speak on your connections or your future in terms of collaboration?

M: The community is very tight knit. You have very industry based designers who only fuck with people in their circle and no one else. But that’s some drama LA shit. But in terms of the community, I’m in a lower tier but it’s so tight knit. I’m in group chats of about 40 different designers and creatives in the industry and everyone’s friends. The piece I recently did with Jeff for bloody hands was me just not being able to do the edits because I went out one night so I sent it to him and he got it done no problem.

PM: So what would be the dream for you then? What is the end goal or place you’d be happy ending up at?

M: I mean, I’m not going to university for graphic design; I’m going for creative industries, which is more the business behind everything I’m into. But if I could make graphic design my career I’d be the dream. Vision wise, I will realistically work with Ovo in the next 6-8 months and they’re the biggest Canadian entity and I already have work that’s been viewed millions of times by millions of people, which is unreal. I’m so happy where I am and I just enjoy being in the scene and reaping the benefits of working in music. I want to have a presence and make great work...

In the end, it comes down to the art not the clout.

PM: True, you’ve worked with some big artists such as Pierre Bourne and Killy as well as SmokePurpp. But you have to wonder who those out of reach people are for you that you desperately want to work with.

M: Migos. No doubt. Coach K and Quality Control are tight knit on what they do. But if I can work with them It’d be crazy. And anyone large and I respect. Even like on a lower scale, like Yellow days. That’d be lit. But I try not to be driven by who I’m working with and rather be driven by the quality of the art and how much money I’m making. [laughs]

PM: [laughs] Do you lose your artistic integrity in the pursuit of money or social media numbers?

M: When you work in a service industry, like I do, its not necessary sacrificing artistic integrity and instead doing what the customer wants and doing it the best I can. I will sometimes make a piece I don’t love but that my client will love because that’s what they wanted. So yeah that could be seen as losing integrity. It’s a hobby and I love it but it’s also a job, this is my part time job. Sometimes if someone does something I can’t support I’ll have to turn it down but that’s it

PM: So in those cases is it about them as a person or just not enjoying their music or vision?

M: That’s hard because so many rappers are fucking scumbags. There are so many bad people popular in rap right now, its difficult to find that line lately… actually lets stop that topic [laughs]

PM: [laughs] Yeah best to move on for now… going back to album art and design, how do you feel you’re making yourself stand out and why do you matter?

M: My shit’s hot man, my art’s sick and I can make anything anyone wants. Perfect example is Killamanjaro... Wait hold on let me pull out these texts…

[Max pulls out his phone and finds a conversation with Killy]

M: He gave me the vision of “crazy dystopian dark world art cover, needs to be crazy and memorable” and It was my job to make something sick and something worthwhile. And that’s what I want to keep having is the ability to see something in my head and then execute it to the highest degree, because that’s what makes me worthwhile and unique.

PM: For sure, thanks so much for your time man, anyone you want to shout out?

M: Shout out Liam, shout out Luke, shout out Tuti; Tuti’s my Brazilian homie who I’ve known for like 3 years and has been on this design shit forever. Also; Jeff, Dj, Trap, Zero, Jermane cause he’s putting me on right now, my parents, my sister, oh and my dog.

Paramind would like to thank Max for his time, as well as speaking his mind and giving us insight into his art and future.

Follow Max online:

Twitter: @Mxxchn

Instagram: @Mxxchn

Words and photos by Guy Mizrahi

#art #music #album art #killy #asap mob #deisgn #toronto #graphic design #rap #soundcloud #hiphop #albumcovers

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exhibitionproposaltianjian · 5 years

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Exhibition Proposal plan#1

I want to plan an exhibition themed on time. Time itself is invisible and untouchable, but it is always there and moving. Time follows all human actions. Most of the time, human beings do not realize the existence of time, but they survive in time. Time is a good human thinking and eternal theme. When human beings consciously use art to express time, time gradually changes from intangible to tangible, but often in an abstract way. Human beings have a different understanding of time, which leads to different ways of expressing time. In this exhibition, I have selected four digital artworks that can trigger people to think seriously about time.

Anna Frants, Shadows, CYLAND MediaArtLab

Projector, proximity sensors, speakers, programming

2012

Artists visualize time and make it audible. Anna Frants analyzed and disassembled the abstract time and finally expressed it in an Animated video. When the audience walks past the projector, the device projects video from the ceiling to the floor with sound. The audience can stand in the middle of the video, watching the repeated images in video and feeling the passage of time. Four projectors open as the audience moves.

http://cyland.org/lab/anna-frants-shadows/

Tatsuo Miyajima, Mega Death, 1999/2016. Installation view, Tatsuo Miyajima: Connect with Everything, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2016. LED, IC, electric wire, infrared sensor. Domus Collection. Image courtesy and © the artist. Photograph: Alex Davies. All rights reserved.

I learned about Tatsuo Miyajima from the textbook. His work "Clock for 3000 Thousand years" is also based on Time theme. After I did some research about him, I learned that he likes to do artworks based on time and religions.

This device includes lots of timing devices. Each timing devices represents a human being. These Numbers will gradually increase from 0 to 9. Tatsuo Miyajima thinks 0 is the beginning of life, also is the ending of the living. In this large device, human life is digitized and continuously recycled. And at some point, all the devices will go out. The author used it to commemorate the lives lost in the second world war.

https://anti-utopias.com/newswire/tatsuo-miyajima-connect-with-everything/

Nam June Paik (1932–2006) TV Buddha (1974) Closed circuit video installation, bronze sculpture.

Nam June Paik set a Buddha on the opposite side of the TV, which also shows the Buddha's image. The television camera records the motionless Buddha. It is a tranquil piece. The Buddha seems to be meditating, and so does the Buddha on TV. Is the image the Buddha sees now the Buddha of the past? Is the Buddha in the TV watching the present Buddha of the Buddha in the past? Time and space in the past, and time and space in the present appear simultaneously. It leads to the contemplation of time.

Wangechi Mutu

Poems by my great grandmother I, 2017, Mixed media, red soil, cow born, wood(Rhus natalensis ), paper pulp, aluminum pots, metal rods, and graphite

The artist wanted to use the voice to represent the cliched old history dictated by his great grandmother and to show the past time and the changes. When I walked in, I saw it was suspended from several pieces of wire, controlled to have a circular motion by a ceiling device. It has a long needle under it. As it turns in a circle, its needles leave circles on the metal plate. With repeated rubbing, the metal plate left deep marks on several rings. It reminds me of the rings of tree trunks. The author tries to use this way to draw and capture the passage of time. This quiet depiction represented time, which goes by for a long time without attention and leaves its massive mark.

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annashipper · 7 years

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Anonymous Submission - The Lost Ophie Hunter Interview

In an exciting and exclusive interview Rachel Cumberbatch breaks her silence and speaks publicly for the first time in 3 years!

Interviewer: Hello Mrs. Rachel Hunter. Can I call you Ophie? Rachel: You can call me Mrs. Cumberbatch. Interviewer: Tell us something about yourself. Ophie: Where should I start ? I am an Oscar® award nominee, a 7th time BAFTA-nominee, I won an Emmy Award and a Lawrence Olivier award. Interviewer: Those are your husband’s awards… Ophie: Making those kind of distinctions is so terribly middle-class. Bob’s awards are my awards, his accomplishments are my accomplishments.

Interviewer: Talking about the latest news, how does a woman who was notorious for not wanting to be called maternal, get involved in a project which depicts motherhood in a dystopian world? What made you change your mind?

Rachel Hunter: It was always a firm belief of mine that Motherwood is not so much about being a mother per se, it is not about giving birth to a baby as much as it is about the power to create an ilusion, to give birth to your avant-garde art. Biology is not your destiny and yet it is. When I finished reading my sister-in-law’s manuscript, I saw opera and I saw art in it, a narrative of the individual so utterly unique and so powerful that I felt a moral obligation to share it with the masses. I owe to the world to share my hidden Production talents.

Interviewer: What happened next? Ophie: I went into to my craft’s room and started to create moodboard after moodboard searching for the perfect one which could reflect my creative vision: a vision that included Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture in Saint Peter’s Cathedral, the Norwegian born, expressionist painter and printer Edward Munch’s 1899 lithograph “Woman in Three Stages (Sphinx), American photographer Gertrude Käsebier’s 1899 “Blessed Art Thou Among Women,” and Pablo Picasso’s 1901 painting from his blue period “Woman and Child”. My aim is to challenge all the preconceptions of underrepresented mothers with ambitious, alternative narratives. Something I as an avant-garde artist tried to do in the 2015 Oscar campaign.

Interviewer: Some people say that you do not have the knowledge, skills or the background experience to do such a job… Rachel: Nonsense. My past work, my acting, writing, producing and directorial credentials during the 2015 Oscar campaign speak for themselves. People seem to forget that I was casted by Harvey Weinstein himself, chosen out of thousands of auditions conducted throughout the world. The Oscar campaing director, the casting director, the Publicists, the PR teams, the Agents, they All praised my natural acting talent.

Interviewer: Some people say that you didn’t do your job properly, and you went rogue on the Red Carpet… Whoever he married: If that production was a flop it was not my fault. It was entirely Bob’s fault. I had a silent acting part and yet you can see my trademark comedy, brilliant timing and patented facial expressions! Bob is an oscar nominee and yet he was the one who could not improvise like I did. He didn’t understand that going “off script” could offer the audience moments of magic in the Red Carpet events. That’s what I did during the entire course of the scripted oscar campaign. Unscripted and improvised acting (as the one I did when I lowered my clutch and revelead my nascent bump on a RC event to Bob) - that was amazing and an established art form in his own right.

Interviewer: ….

Interviewer: But exactly how did you get hired as a Producer for this upcoming film ? Rachel Hunter: I went straight to Bob and asked him if he was interested in providing invaluable support and funding to one of the UK’s most promising producers so that this person could build her career and develop relationships and projects with some of the UK’s most exciting and creative emerging filmmakers and at the same time contributing to the cultural and economic success of the UK’s film industry… Bob said that he would be interested in meeting such a person. And I told him that he had already met her. You can imagine his surprise and his amazement.

Interviewer: And what is your response to those who accuse you of Nepotism ? Ophie: Those accusations are beyond ridiculous and are extremely offensive. I want to be crystal clear: there was no nepotism. The only thing that happened was that favoritism was granted to Bob’s relatives based on their connections and relationships, instead of their credentials and merits. Maybe some outsiders were better experienced and qualified for the jobs but they were not his relatives like I was, so they were not considered. THAT was all that happened.

Interviewer: You just gave the exact definition of Nepotism… Whoever He married: Oh.

Interviewer: What are your career plans for the future? Mrs Rachel Cumberbatch: My immediate goal is to demonstrate through this film my ground-breaking style and my original and unique vision for the future of UK film. After this project’s sucess I expect to branch out, to develop my own projects. I have a reputation for driving forward award-winning, ambitious work in a variety of forms – red carpet and live events, art installations, digital media – as well as continue my innovative collaborations with UK filmmakers, Freelance paparazzi Tabloid newspapers, Gossip blogs and Haute-couture fashion designers. I also have plans to write a semi autobiographical play based on my own life experience as a Star entitled: “EXCUSE ME, maybe you don’t know who I’m married to!” It’s a critique to those people who are self-entitled star wannabes, with no sense of self-awareness or detachment whatsoever.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

You, dearest Nonny, are an evil genius!

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sackface93 · 5 years

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NHS GPs to prescribe 800 calorie 'liquid diet' of shakes and soups to tackle type 2 diabetes - The Independent

Thousands of NHS patients are set to be prescribed a “liquid diet” of soups and shakes which limit them to just 800 calories a day in a bid to address soaring rates of type 2 diabetes.

Very low-calorie diets will be available with a GP referral for the first time as NHS bosses say they are “ramping up” action to prevent hundreds of thousands of obesity linked diseases.

NHS England’s pilot will see 5,000 patients offered the diet, which substitutes all meals with nutritionally balanced drinks for three months before gradually returning to a regular diet with support to adopt healthier eating habits.

Experts told The Independent that around one in eight patients offered the diet could “reverse their diabetes” and reduce the risk of amputations and other complications.

Watch more

However, it is not an option that is attractive to everyone – and while it appears to be more effective than other diet trends, patients’ ability to keep weight off longer term is still being reviewed.

“This is not for Mr Joe Bloggs who is a bit overweight and doesn’t have diabetes,” Professor Naveed Sattar, an expert in metabolic medicine from Glasgow University, told The Independent.

“This is for people with diabetes who have a strong incentive to lose that weight.”

Mr Sattar was part of the initial trial that showed the scheme can induce diabetes remission and said that while it isn’t cheap – the drinks cost around £40-50 a month and there needs to be significant support from staff – it was “definitely cost-effective for the NHS”.

“If this works it might end up reversing diabetes in one in eight, that’s a best-case scenario, but it does work in people who are motivated and want to take it up.”

The escalation of the NHS fight against type 2 diabetes comes as a group of doctors and researchers, including Mr Sattar, said the government is not doing enough to counter the obesity epidemic.

In the same mould as the sugar tax, they called for more legislation to force food manufacturers to reduce fat and label calories in takeaway meals, and challenged “conspiracy thinking” which is causing a boom in high fat diets.

One consequence of rising obesity is that diabetes rates have doubled since 1998. The condition now affects 3.7 million people in the UK and nine in 10 of these patients have type 2 diabetes, which is closely linked to weight and diet.

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1/50 29 November 2018

Waves hit the British coast as Storm Diana approaches, in Portreath, Cornwall

StuCornell/Twitter/Reuters

2/50 28 November 2018

Duke and Duchess of Cambridge stand with Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha (left), the son of Leicester City's chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, and his mother Aimon watched by Leicester City players (right) as they pause after laying flowers during their visit to the King Power Stadium in Leicester, to pay tribute to those who lost their lives in the October 27 helicopter crash at the stadium. The chairman was among five people killed when his helicopter crashed in the side's stadium car park moments after taking off from the pitch

AFP/Getty

3/50 27 November 2018

A demonstrator wearing a mask of Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg poses outside Portcullis house to question the refusal of Zuckerberg to give evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee investigation into disinformation and fake news at the Houses of Parliament in London. Facebook boss Richard Allan is expected to be among a number of officials giving evidence to an "international grand committee" on disinformation and fake news

AFP/Getty

4/50 26 November 2018

Artist Joseph Hillier and his sculpture - Messenger, depicting "a young powerful woman", which will be unveiled next year for Theatre Royal Plymouth. The sculpture, spanning seven metres high and nine metres wide, is too large to be put together at Castle Fine Arts foundry, near Oswestry, so it's being made in sections with 30 master craftsmen to weld them together

5/50 25 November 2018

Prime Minister Theresa May gives a press conference at the end of the European Council meeting in Brussels. The leaders of the 27 remaining EU member countries (EU27) have endorsed the draft Brexit withdrawal agreement and approved the draft political declaration on future EU-UK relations in a special meeting of the European Council on Britain leaving the EU under Article 50

EPA

6/50 24 November 2018

Environmental activists gather around a mock 'coffin', with "our future" written on it, on the green in Parliament Square during a demonstration organised by the movement Extinction Rebellion, calling on the British government to take action on climate and ecological issues. After a week of protest action disrupting the traffic on bridges in central London over the Thames, the social movement Extinction Rebellion, planned a 'funeral march' to highlight what they describe as a climate and ecological emergency. Extinction Rebellion demands that the UK government reduces to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 and creates a citizens assembly to oversee changes in environmental policies

AFP/Getty

7/50 23 November 2018

England batsman Jonny Bairstow celebrates after reaching his century during Day One of the Third Test match against Sri Lanka at Sinhalese Sports Club in Colombo

Getty

8/50 22 November 2018

Prime Minister Theresa May joins a parent and baby group during a visit to the Kentish Town Health Centre in London

Reuters

9/50 21 November 2018

A crashed car, with an object protruding through the windscreen, sits abandoned on the A628 in the Peak District, as a blast of snow hit the north of England

10/50 20 November 2018

Waves crash over Seaham lighthouse near Durham as the cold and wet weather continues

11/50 19 November 2018

Prime Minister Theresa May speaking at the CBI annual conference at InterContinental Hotel. Ms May, speaking at the CBI conference, said it was “important” that the UK had escaped EU rules by the 2022 election, but did not give a guarantee

12/50 18 November 2018

England's Harry Kane celebrates with team mate Jesse Lingard after he scored the winning goal against Croatia, after coming from 0-1 down during their Nations League match at Wembley Stadium. The win means that England process to the semi-finals of the new competition and relegate Croatia

AFP/Getty

13/50 17 November 2018

Demonstrators on Westminster Bridge in London for a protest called by Extinction Rebellion to raise awareness of the dangers posed by climate change

14/50 16 November 2018

Environment Secretary Michael Gove speaking outside the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs offices. He confirmed he will remain in post and thinks it is important to continue working with Cabinet colleagues to ensure the best Brexit outcome for the country

15/50 15 November 2018

Theresa May chuckles at a press conference in Downing Street after a tough day in which multiple cabinet members have resigned and a number of MPs have tabled votes of no confidence in her leadership

Reuters

16/50 14 November 2018

Pro-European Union, anti-Brexit demonstrators hold placards and wave Union and EU flags as they protest outside of the Houses of Parliament. British and European Union negotiators have reached a draft agreement on Brexit

AFP/Getty

17/50 13 November 2018

Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab leaves Downing Street. Prime Minister Theresa May today faced her divided ministers as negotiators scrambled to secure a divorce agreement with the European Union and anxiety mounted over the risk of a no-deal Brexit

18/50 12 November 2018

Berlin Mayor Michael Mueller (centre) welcomes Madrid Mayor Manuela Carmena (left) and London Mayor Sadiq Khan at City Hall in Berlin. The three city leaders are meeting to discuss common challenges, including the consequences of Brexit, immigration and the growth of right-wing populism

Getty

19/50 11 November 2018

Prince Charles, and President of Germany, Frank-Walter Steinmeier face the Cenotaph during the Remembrance Sunday ceremony on Whitehall in London. On the 100th anniversary of the World War I armistice, the day's events mark the final First World War Centenary commemoration events hosted by the UK Government

AFP/Getty

20/50 10 November 2018

Fans, players and staff pay tribute inside of the King Power stadium as a silence is observed in memory of Leicester City chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha prior to their Premier League match against Burnley. The first time a match has been played in the stadium since the owners helicopter crash

Getty

21/50 9 November 2018

Transport Minister Jo Johnson has resigned in protest of the Government's Brexit plan and called for a Final Say referendum

EPA

22/50 8 November 2018

Britain's Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt delivers a speech at the British embassy in Paris. Britain's foreign secretary says Brexit negotiations are in "the final phase" and that he is confident that an agreement will be reached with the European Union.

23/50 7 November 2018

Captain James Pugh places a figure among artist Rob Heard's installation Shrouds of the Somme, which honours the dead of the First World War, at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London. 72,396 small shrouded figures, representing soldiers who died and were never recovered from the Somme battlefields, have been laid out by volunteers and members of 1 Royal Anglian Regiment

24/50 6 November 2018

Adrian Lester, Sir Lenny Henry, Ade Adepitan, Nadine Marsh-Edwards, Marcus Ryder and Meera Syal, as they deliver a letter, signed by a string of stars, to 10 Downing Street, calling for tax breaks to effect change and boost diversity behind the camera

25/50 5 November 2018

EU nationals, living in the UK take part in a demonstration along Whitehall. Three campaign groups, 'the3million', 'British in Europe', and UNISON came together to form a human chain from Downing Street to Parliament Square and lobby MPs

Getty

26/50 4 November 2018

The Leicester City team with Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha (centre in white uniform) son of Leicester City's Thai owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha while they pay their respects during the second day of the funeral ceremony at Wat Thepsirin Buddhist temple in Bangkok. Players and staff from the club arrived in Bangkok to attend a mourning rite for the club's chairman, whose death last week in a helicopter crash stunned the Premier League club

King Power/AFP/Getty

27/50 3 November 2018

The Edenbridge Bonfire Society celebrity guy, Boris Johnson, is set on fire in Kent

28/50 2 November 2018

Wreaths reading 'THE BOSS', for Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, left by Leicester City players outside the King Power stadium. Chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, was among those to have tragically lost their lives on Saturday evening when a helicopter carrying him and four other people crashed outside the stadium

29/50 1 November 2018

Google staff stage a walkout at the company's UK headquarters in London as part of a global campaign over the US tech giant's handling of sexual harassment. Hundreds of employees also walked out of their European headquarters in Dublin, as well as, other offices in different parts of the world

AFP/Getty

30/50 31 October 2018

Protesters block Parliament Square in London as the environmental group Extinction Rebellion launches a mass civil disobedience campaign demanding action on climate change

31/50 30 October 2018

British Prime Minister Theresa May, right, listens to Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, center, flanked by Lithuania's Health Minister, Aurelijus Veryga at the Oslo Cancer Cluster for a summit to discuss the role of health technology. Speaking from Oslo, May says this week's austerity-easing British budget does not signal an impending election

NTB scanpix via AP

32/50 29 October 2018

Chancellor Philip Hammond holds his red ministerial box outside 11 Downing Street flanked by Treasury colleagues (left to right) Robert Jenrick, Liz Truss, Mel Stride and John Glen, before heading to the House of Commons to deliver his Budget

33/50 28 October 2018

Supporters pause to look at floral tributes outside Leicester City Football Club's King Power Stadium after a helicopter belonging to the club's chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha crashed outside the stadium the night before. It was confirmed late on Sunday evening that the charismatic Thai chairman died alongside four other people in the crash

AFP/Getty

34/50 27 October 2018

Glenn Hoddle is taken to hospital after falling ill at the BT Sport studio

Getty

35/50 26 October 2018

A man has been arrested for the attempted theft of a copy of Magna Carta from Salisbury Cathedral, one of the four remaining originals of the historic document of English liberty

Reuters

36/50 25 October 2018

Retail business man Sir Philip Green has been named in Parliament for sexual harassment of staff

Getty

37/50 24 October 2018

The Daily Telegraph today reports that they were subject to a gagging order to prohibit them publishing the details of a leading businessman who is facing allegations of sexual assault and racial abuse

38/50 23 October 2018

Thousands of female workers have today taken to the streets of Glasgow over an equal pay dispute with the City Council

39/50 22 October 2018

Former Metropolitan Police commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe who has called for an "urgent review" of the evidence around legislation of cannabis. Hogan-Howe, who has always supported tough laws on cannabis, investigated the issue for Channel 4's Dispatches programme.

40/50 21 October 2018

The Red Funnel car ferry, Red Falcon, which earlier collided with several small boats due to bad weather, passes the mast of a submerged yacht as she leaves East Cowes on the Isle of Wight bound for Southampton

41/50 20 October 2018

Anti-Brexit campaigners lowering a banner off Westminster Bridge in London before taking part in the People's Vote March for the Future in London, a march and rally in support of a second EU referendum

42/50 19 October 2018

Members of a grooming gang who abused vulnerable girls in Huddersfield have been jailed for a total of more than 220 years. Three trials at Leeds Crown Court this year heard how at least 15 victims were groomed and raped in the West Yorkshire town between 2004 and 2011. They were aged between 11 and 17 when they were "deliberately targeted" by older men and trafficked across the region

West Yorkshire Police

43/50 18 October 2018

Theresa May leaves after a news conference at the European Union leaders summit in Brussels

Reuters

44/50 17 October 2018

Police officers with a bomb disposal robot on Victoria Embankment opposite Scotland Yard police headquarters in central London after emergency services were alerted to reports of a suspicious package

AFP/Getty

45/50 16 October 2018

Scottish Power will become the first major UK energy company to generate the entirety of its power from wind after selling its remaining gas and hydro stations to Drax in a £702 million deal

Getty

46/50 15 October 2018

Prime Minister Theresa May peers into a hot water urn during a meeting at a social group in Vauxhall from a charity working to combat loneliness at the launch of the first loneliness strategy. Launching the strategy, May confirmed English GPs will be able to refer lonely people to community and voluntary activities by 2023, as she paid tribute to murdered Labour MP Jo Cox, who had campaigned to end loneliness before her death

47/50 14 October 2018

Jeremy Hunt hosting eastern European Foreign Ministers at the Foreign Secretary's official country residence ahead of tomorrow's meetings at the Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg where chemical weapons sanctions will be formally adopted

48/50 13 October 2018

Police stop a breakaway from the main Football Lads alliance march, as they attempt to get close to a rival anti-facist demonstration in London

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Treatment and complications of diabetes account for 10 per cent of the NHS budget, and the health service predicts the disease will contribute to 39,000 heart attacks, 50,000 strokes and a host of cancers by 2035.

To curb this NHS England is doubling the size of its diabetes prevention programme, which the 800 calorie diet is part of, and will offer 200,000 people who are obese and at risk of diabetes weight loss support.

Diabetes UK was one of the funders of the DiRECT trial, which helped established the benefits of the very low-calorie diet, and said it was “delighted that NHS England have been inspired by this work to pilot a type 2 remission programme through the NHS”.

The trial showed that around a quarter of patients were willing to try the diet, and half of those achieved remission of their diabetes – while a quarter lost 15kg or more over the year.

NHS England will evaluate its own pilot findings after a year before deciding on whether to expand the scheme.

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“The NHS is now going to be ramping up practical action to support hundreds of thousands people avoid obesity induced heart attacks, strokes, cancers and type 2 diabetes,” NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens said.

“What’s good for our waistlines is also good for our wallets, given the huge costs to all of us as taxpayers from these largely preventable illnesses.

“However, this isn’t a battle that the NHS can win on its own. The NHS pound will go further if the food industry also takes action to cut junk calories and added sugar and salt from processed food, TV suppers and fast food takeaways.”

This echoes the words of Professor Christine Williams, a specialist in human nutrition at Reading University, who told a briefing in London that on average the public under-report the calories they consume by 34 per cent.

“It’s quite extraordinary. We’re fooling ourselves – if you want to be polite,” she said.

“Calorie labelling on food eaten outside the home is a really important measure, and they [ministers] need to get on with it.”

She said people were increasingly being given the impression that fats were healthy, despite containing pure calories and there being good evidence that saturated fats, in dairy and meat, are linked to heart disease.

“People almost want to hear the opposite of what they’ve been doing is true,” she said. “It’s like a conspiracy theory.”

Mr Sattar told the same meeting there “needs to be legislation to change food formulations”, and called for a taskforce to be set up to address this.

“The food and drink companies want to make a profit, they’re making huge profits, they’re not going to take advice to change formulations,” he added.

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/diabletes-liquid-diet-calories-weight-loss-remission-nhs-gp-prescription-a8660051.html

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