Daily Archives: February 22, 2021

A government that wanted to protect people could have prevented whats happening right now in Texas.

Because of the winter storm freezing the state, basically every large source of energy in Texas is down or barely functioning, and rolling blackouts have been announced.

Predictably, the blackouts have not actually been rolling. Instead, they have been heavily weighted towards poorer areas and diverted away from richer, whiter areas. This could be seen coming from a mile away, since it happens every time a widespread disaster occurs. For its part, ERCOT, the nonprofit council that controls power in Texas, dodged questions about why blackouts were longer term and not rolling, simply saying that doing so prevented bigger problems, without elaborating.

This is a pattern. Time and time again, resources are shifted away from marginalized communities and towards the rich and the white. While SARS-CoV-2 does not discriminate in who it infects, the lions share of injuries and deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic have come at the expense of Black people and the poor. Climate change is affecting the entire planet, except its causes come from the wealthy, who can just flee to a mansion on higher ground when the waves inevitably roll in.

The results of the governments action are an admission. I cant read hearts or minds, but if a group of people wanted to protect, say, an energy sectors profit margin above all else, they could skip over needed infrastructure upgrades to save money. When, inevitably, a disaster struck, they would probably protect the wealthy and powerful, those who had the ability to change things, affect state politics, or make a lot of noise. They might even fall back on nonsense excuses for their failures that simultaneously attempt to stoke culture wars, the kind that have gotten many Republicans elected in the first place.

80% of the power used in Texas comes from natural gas. After the last time a winter storm came through, in 2011, Texas had the opportunity to winterize its energy infrastructure. Power companies operating in a deregulated state market simply declined. Since Texas has its own power grid, separate from the rest of the country, there was no one to answer to. Inevitably, another storm came, froze Texass natural gas production, and that was that. Prominent Texas politicians then tried to blame statewide blackouts on the 10% of the states power that comes from green energy sources like wind, an explanation that fails both smell and sight tests.

Now, Texas grocery stores are empty, people have gone days without heat or running water in freezing temperatures, and at least 30 people have died, with that number expected to grow in the coming days.

Another winter storm like 2011 was bound to come one of climate changes many effects is the disruption of the polar vortex, a swirl of cold air thats normally restricted to the Arctic. It may seem contradictory, but warming temperatures globally actually disrupt the polar vortexs normal pattern, sending it south, meaning that Canada and the continental United States will feel it more often and more intensely than they otherwise would. Theres nothing freak about this anymore, and doing nothing in 2011 was a dereliction of governance amounting to a humans rights violation.

Electric grids that answer to no one, by the way, are also contributing to Californias reoccurring wildfire catastrophes. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) simply prioritizes profits over updating its infrastructure, providing service to people, and protecting against climate change.

So of course this disaster happened. The Texas government simply didnt care to do anything about it. It wont be the last time climate change and profit margins butt up against human rights. Texas will freeze again. Gulf states will continue getting slammed multiple times per year by once-in-a-century hurricanes. Those storms will start creeping up the Eastern seaboard more and more often. California is going to continue burning to the ground year after year. Big Ones are just Normal Ones now.

Maybe the most frustrating part is that the solutions for many of these things are huge endeavors, but none of them are complex or hard to understand. Were past the point of climate denialism. Were in climate nihilism now, where climate change is so big, so obvious, so glaringly killing people today, right now, that government policy in places like Texas is a denial of the principles people in the 21st century need to live well into the 22nd.

Every government action is an admission. That every time the white and the wealthy are shielded from the worst of every climate change-induced catastrophe is an admission. Inaction is an admission from the government of Texas and the US government at large: poor, Black, and marginalized people are not worth protecting. The final admission, the thought that governs: if they die, so what?

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What's happening in Texas is climate nihilism Read now - Massive Science

Shades of nihilism are no stranger to the horror genre. The human body is so often manipulated and destroyed in the face of an evil force. However, in the 21st century, a new type of nihilistic cinema was born in France with the New French Extremity. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the world felt defenseless, and the films within this movement, such as Martyrs and High Tension, depend on the complete destruction of the human body to convey a sense of hopelessness: bad things happen to normal people and it cannot be stopped. But in the US, while there was a rise in torture porn films such as Saw and Hostel, there wasnt such a pervading sense of nihilism in mainstream American horror cinema.

Enter Bryan Bertino, who burst into the film world in 2008 with his home invasion thriller, The Strangers. With his killers reasoning simply being because you were home, Bertino established himself as a filmmaker who was not interested in happy endings. Instead, his work encapsulates the deep sense of insecurity that came with post-9/11 America and pervades today. His entire filmography speaks to the futility of humanity trying to gain control over danger and how sometimes terrible things just happen to good people. There is no rhyme or reason as to why Bertinos characters are targeted. Their horrific fate is nothing but random chance.

The shock of The Strangers during its initial release was particularly centered on that key phrase: Because you were home. Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman) are staying at his family cottage in the middle of nowhere. As they settle in for the night, they receive loud knocks at the door from a young woman who asks, Is Tamara home? This unsettling interaction launches a series of events where three people in masks terrorize the couple for no other reason except for their sick enjoyment. They have no history with Kristen and James and just so happened to choose the house because the couple opened the door. Common courtesy is weaponized as an invitation to kill.

Kristen and James are barely able to inflict injury on the masked assailants. Even when they find a gun or grab a knife, they are unable to ever gain the upper hand against the three strangers. These are not bumbling criminals, but sociopaths who do this for the thrill of the hunt. They know what to expect from a desperate couple trying to save themselves, and they toy with them all night as a sick game. The only goal is pain they dont want money or revenge. They just want blood.

This invasion of the domestic space has a close correlation to post-9/11 cinema, as genre film even more explicitly established homes as a place of danger rather than safety. While home invasion was not a new topic, in the 2000s, homes were most often invaded by random strangers rather than monsters or bloodthirsty serial killers. The monsters are the humans themselves, capable of horrific violence.

Released in 2014, Mockingbird is Bryan Bertinos venture into the found footage subgenre, which is arguably a nihilistic genre in general. A majority of films with that label contain raw footage of a person or groups final days and therefore end with the death of everyone on camera. But Mockingbird goes the extra mile in having unnamed people, similar to The Strangers, torture three separate groups of people who are eventually brought together in an act of extreme violence. They place mysterious boxes on front doorsteps, each containing a video camera and a set of instructions. If they dont follow instructions, they or someone they love will be killed.

Each group has a special label that makes them a figure instead of people: The Family, couple Tom and Emmy; The Woman, Beth; and The Clown, Leonard. Their humanity is removed and they are stripped of any illusion of agency; they become puppets for the sick enjoyment of whoever may be watching. Again, similar to The Strangers, the three groups of victims are never in control of the situation despite hiding in their homes with the doors and windows locked. Home means nothing when an assailant can predict every move.

But the most nihilistic element of Mockingbird is the reveal of who has always been in control of the situation: a group of children. Creepy, possessed children are a horror staple, but here, they are not possessed nor under the influence of an evil entity. Instead, it is implied, they are acting of their own volition and torturing adults as a sick game. Once again, human life is tossed around like a plaything, showing there is nothing left but the infliction of suffering.

Bryan Bertinos third film, The Monster, released in 2016, is perhaps the biggest deviation from his typical films, incorporating an actual monster instead of just cruel humans. The threat feels much further from reality as the creature is attacking a mother (Zoe Kazan) and daughter (Ella Ballentine after theyve broken down on a back road. The Monster more closely follows genre conventions in its setup and use of a fictional monster to create fear.

That is not to say that Bertino does not sprinkle in his love of misery, which is centered on the tumultuous relationship between a mother and her young daughter, who is painfully aware of her mothers alcoholism. As the two try to navigate each others emotions, they are pummeled by this creature, which doesnt care about their issues. They scream insults at one another, and neither mother nor daughter is safe from violence. Ultimately, Bertino continues to portray the death of the family not just by their resentment, but also by the mothers eventual death. Yes, she protected her child, but that still leads to a message of families unable to truly stay together in the face of violence.

Bertinos most recent film, 2020s The Dark and the Wicked, is the culmination of his previous three films in how families become random targets of violence with no rhyme or reason. Again, the family, the domestic unit that is supposed to be the backbone of America and a safe place shielded from the horrors of the world, is systematically destroyed. No longer is the home safe; the place that was once a shelter becomes a hellscape.

When they receive news that their father is dying, siblings Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbott, Jr.) return home to the family farm despite their mothers aggressive insistence that they dont come. Her vague words of warning wont stop her children, and upon their arrival, whatever is plaguing the farm extends its influence to Louise and Michael. It is an insidious force with only the goal to cause pain, and pain it brings as the entire family is haunted by horrific images that blur the lines between reality and delusion.

No matter what Louise and Michael do to try to stop the entity haunting their family, they are stopped in their tracks. In fact, the presence plaguing every second of their lives tells the siblings that their father did nothing wrong. They were just chosen at random. Just as in The Strangers, Mockingbird, and The Monster, these events dont necessarily have a catalyst. They were just the unlucky ones that gained the attention of a bored entity that wants to wreak havoc.

Their fathers nurse commits suicide via a knitting needle through the eye. Their mother chops off her fingers and hangs herself in the barn. There is no absolution of sins or purification that can save them. The story is an inversion of the typical possession plot where a family can band together and conquer the evil together as one unified front. Instead of the eventual happy ending and banishing of the demon, each family member slowly succumbs to their doomed fate.

Suffice to say, Bertinos filmography is universally bleak as he aims to navigate nihilism and the random nature of violence rather than creating mythical beings with elaborate backstories. In avoiding the characterization of his villains, they become all the more terrifying as they become looming and unknowable figures who enjoy nothing more than suffering.

In looking at how 21st-century cultural insecurities have been filtered through a genre lens, the work of Bryan Bertino should be at the top of the list as films that refuse to sugarcoat reality and instead lean into our deep sadness about the destruction of an illusion of safety.

Original post:

Bryan Bertino and 21st-Century Nihilism - Film School Rejects

"Its so funny and sharp. I especially appreciate all the vagina humour."

ABCs new series, Why Are You Like Thisfollows three Aussie besties bumbling with abandon through the crazy freedoms and responsibilities that are your early 20s.

Making up the series central trio is Mia, Penny and Austin. Mia is a south Asian bisexual woman with no desire to keep any job for long. Penny, Mias best friend, is white, riddled with anxiety and determined to prove herself the best friend and ally to everyone she meets. Completing the trio isAustin, Pennys housemate, and budding drag queen struggling with depression.

Across 6, 20-minute episodes, the series unfolds as a sitcom about these three against the world. More specifically, Mia, Penny and Austin againstthe divisive sociopolitical hellscape that is 2021, and its immensely fun.

With unabashedly upfront storylines from lost diva cups to lost jobs theres an optimistic nihilism to Why Are You Like This.Where most series about precarious 20-30-somethings feel concerned with how to justify themselves, the trio inWhy Are You Like Thisare refreshingly unconcerned with agonising over their own existence for validation.

Instead, they opt for relentless frankness that is as confronting as it is entertaining. During episode 3, scenes of Austin scrolling through memes about suicide are intercut with Penny drunkenly bonding with a random girl she met in the bathroom over her Venn diagram of friendship, while Mia fails at getting laid. Its a discomforting sequence held together brilliantly by the creators determination to present experiences as they simply are for so many young people.

No doubt the series addictively honest qualities is a credit to the creators. Comedian, Naomi Higgins (who also plays Penny), and writer, Humyara Mahbub wanted to make a show about their friendship. The pair then teamed upwith Aunty Donnas Mark Bonanno via ABCs comedy Fresh Blood initiative in 2018 and made the pilot.

As a long time addict of the 20-30 somethings figuring life out genre, the seriesfeels like an instant classic. The series follows in the more diverse and nuanced footsteps of series like Insecure, Chewing Gum,or Search Partybut with a distinctively late-millennial/Gen Z edge.

Why Are You Like Thisis currently streaming on ABC iview, and will be internationally released on Netflix later this year.

Merryana Salem is a proud Wonnarua and LebaneseAustralian writer, critic, teacher, researcher and podcaster on most social media as@akajustmerry. If you want, check out her podcast,GayV Clubwhere she gushes about LGBT rep in media with her best friend. Either way, she hopes you ate something nice today.

Read more from the original source:

'Why Are You Like This' Perfectly Captures The Nihilism Of Your Early 20s - Junkee

Many twists, many turns.

As the WSL (somehow) soldiers on, its easy to lose track of of the absurdity of the last eight months.

Lets examine.

July 17, 2020:

The WSL cancels the 2020 Tour, citing the health and safety of athletes and the challenges of international travel. While many lament the news, it seems rather prudent given the state of things.

Maybe a reset is just what the WSL needs.

In the same breath, the WSL introduces a new and improved Championship Tour. It boasts a revamped finals event (with a mystery location), new event locations, and kick-off events at Pipe and Maui.

The optimists among us muse about a finals event held at a tropical reef, but the realists remind us of a little cobblestone A-frame in Southern California.

November 10, 2020:

The WSL announces that the WSL Finals will be held at. . . Trestles.

Kolohe and Filipe rejoice.

The WSL also announces a myriad of new event locations for the 2021 Tour, axing Portugal and G-Land for Sunset and Santa Cruz.

The WSL never releases a formal statement regarding Portugal and G-Land. The November 10th press release simply reads postponed and TBD, respectively.

December 2020:

The first leg of the Tour kicks off, with the women at Honolulu Bay and the men at Pipe.

The morning before the womens finals, a man is attacked and killed by a shark, putting the event on hold. Elo introduces us all to some new corpospeak, calling it a shark incident.

The womens event is subsequently moved to Pipe, where the competitors opt for turns in lieu of tubes. Tyler Wright is crowned the winner of the Maui Pro at Pipeline.

Meanwhile, the men start the 2021 Tour at Pipe in pumping surf. Surf fans rejoice.

Then, the Billabong Pipe Masters is suddenly suspended as a result of positive COVID-19 tests within the WSL staff, including WSL CEO Erik Logan.

WSL viewers are largely left in the dark. Pipe continues to pump, unsullied by professional competition. Rumors abound about patient zero.

On December 15 the event resumes, albeit in smaller surf. John Florence banishes Gabriel Medina for the win and old man Slater takes a third place finish alongside Italo.

January 5, 2021:

Hawaii suspends all surfing competitions, forcing the WSL to cancel the Sunset Open and Jaws.

The WSL additionally announces the suspension of the Santa Cruz Pro, scheduled for February, citing the surge of cases in California.

Surf fans are left in the lurch. The next event isnt scheduled until April.

January 7, 2021:

A Pulitzer Prize worthy bit of investigative journalism (snub of the year!) reveals that the WSL has failed to acquire the necessary permitting for the Trestles Final Event.

A finals event in Californias Central Valley seems more and more likely.

Kelly celebrates.

January 31, 2021:

Rumors abound of a potential CT event at Lennox Head, adding an additional contest to the Australian leg.

February 2-3, 2021:

The Lennox community rebels against the WSL, threatening protest paddle outs, while the WSL claims community support.

It appears the WSL has largely acted in the dark, leaving many community members out of the loop.

Surf journalism takes yet another step towards the edge of the cliff, with the likes of Stab and The Inertia ignoring the fallout.

Said community quickly mobilizes, forcing the issue to a head. Ballina Councillors reject the event.

WSL General Manager for Australia Andrew Stark says, If you dont want us to come to your town, were not coming.

I mull staging a protest in Lemoore.

February 6, 2021:

The WSL quickly pivots, securing an event at Merewether.

The intention is to charter a plane for both Tours from Los Angeles to Sydney for a two-week quarantine in mid-March.

February 7, 2021:

Bells is cancelled, resulting in a reported $8 million loss for Torquay.

The WSL cites the governments failure to approve a plan for quarantining the athletes.

The Newcastle Cup is scheduled for April 1-11. Mayor claims $15 million boost for economy.

February 15, 2021:

The WSL releases yet another updated schedule.

The new Australian leg will include events at Newcastle, Narrabeen, Margaret River, and Rottnest.

Snapper is the latest casualty, along with Pat OConnell, who after only a year will be replaced by Jessi Miley-Dyer, the new Head of Competition.

Eight months. Six cancellations. Two Heads of Competition. Mass COVID infections. One shark incident.

Too many press releases.

Visit link:

Scientific research paper on international surf travel reveals intrinsic nihilism of shredders: The greater the surfer's ability, the less they value...

Serving veterans as executive director at Huts For Vets has taught me two key things. First: strive to be nonjudgmental. Second: offer love as a healing balm. Neither one is easy because, by nature, were prone to judgments, and love is an abstract, if many-splendored, thing.

Veterans of the war in Vietnam were horribly judged. They were hated and spit upon. Their healing was not allowed because there was no love. Since that war, more than three times the names on the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington have taken their own lives.

Today, the veteran suicide rate hovers around 22 per day. Isolation, despair and moral injury attribute to that grossly high number, a mournful metric that is not only a national crisis but a national scandal.

For the men and women veterans who have served in Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, many suffer moral injury from violations to their deepest selves. Part of our role at Huts For Vets is to enable them talk with other veterans and realize they are not alone. Atonement comes from acceptance and forgiveness.

Our world needs healing. Such an understatement stands out by the acquittal last week of the sociopath who took America to the dark side. Those who voted for acquittal stand on the brink of nihilism, where nothing is sacred.

Such depths of national cynicism incite the hate-filled message of a death threat T-shirt: Rope Tree Journalistsome assembly required. Such gallows humor, if you will, is apparently amusing to psychopaths enabled by the sociopath who cheered on the mob to act out his willful insurrection Jan. 6.

Encouraging hate and violence should be repugnant to anyone with human decency. And remember, death threat targets can be changed by just filling in the blank.

Have we back-stepped so far into the Dark Ages that murderous intent can be so visibly displayed? Im feeling this acutely because Im a journalist. I am the target of a hate group that would incite lynchings. Their hatred has targeted me.

Until you are in the crosshairs, threats seem removed and impersonal. For many veterans, being in the crosshairs was an occupational risk from which they now seek reentry into a society that doesnt know how to value the risks they shared.

Society fails them and the rest of us by perpetuating a debased culture that glorifies violence as popular entertainment. Here lies stark evidence of moral failure in education, religion, family and commercial media.

A Hebrew phrase, Tikkun olam, offers a vital shift with a directive to heal the world, to become an agent of change. Each of us must bear responsibility, not only for our own moral, spiritual and material welfare, but also for the welfare of society.

A modern understanding of tikkun olam explains that we share a partnership with God and are instructed to take steps toward improving the state of the world by helping others. This brings more honor to Gods sovereignty by affirming human dignity.

Im not usually prone to religiosity, but something of the divine must intervene when nihilism threatens common decency and the sacred respect for life. Laws and policies have their place, but the moral heart in each of us must ultimately steer the course of society with spiritual guidance.

Tikkun olam is an aspiration to behave and act constructively and beneficially, to work charitably and altruistically. A higher, nobler purpose is necessary to dissipate the hate and animosity that leads to printing death-threat T-shirts.

Fixing the world must become a socially embraced goal, a way of life for each of us. It begins with attention to every interaction, every word spoken, every gesture made, every thought contemplated. It begins with awareness of how we can improve ourselves and improve the whole.

These are fine, high-sounding words that my fingers spill out rapid fire over the keyboard. Taking them seriously requires sitting back, pondering, assessing, taking honest accounts of ourselves and modeling positive behaviors and attitudes.

Tikkun olam means reinventing ourselves with constructive building blocks. Only then can our individual contributions aggregate into a whole that might truly fix the world.

Paul Andersens column appears on Mondays. He may be reached at: andersen@rof.net

Continued here:

Paul Andersen: What the world needs now is tikkun olam - Aspen Times

Its tough to sum up all of my feelings about Palm Springs. Not because of an exaggerated sentimentality or that its some enigmatic art piece that should be left up to audiences to decipher. Quite the opposite, actually. My memory is just terrible, and 2020 made it so much worse.

The last five years feel like a meandering journey to discovering what this story really wanted to be about. In hindsight, the movie was mostly an attempt to capture the feeling of being in love and making that terrifying leap of commitment. But its also the culmination of a creative friendship. Maybe a reaction to 2016. Maybe its a look at depression, the wedding industrial complex, or some journey through the subconscious. Or maybe it was just my long-winded attempt at getting dinosaurs into a movie because thats all Ive ever wanted to do since the summer of 93. Ill try to distill what I do remember into something coherent.

June 2015. Max Barbakow (director) and I headed out to Palm Springs for a creative retreat of sorts two buds playing make-believe in a therapeutic sandbox. The simple goal was to throw around ideas for a micro-budget indie that we could feasibly get off the ground. How one gets that off the ground, I had no clue. I was living with crippling debt, so the idea of finding a way to finance this nonexistent dream project was already outside the realm of possibility.

Our conversations didnt have much of a shape, either they were more like stews of love, fear, shame and armchair nihilism brought on by mai tais and existential angst. But we left the desert with the seed of an idea to see if itd be possible to take a character on a journey from caring about nothing to finding a reason to care. And that was pretty much it. This wasnt a time loop love story at a desert wedding yet. I didnt really know what it was.

So, of course, I carried that ignorant confidence forward and started writing, without a real plan or outline. Turns out thats a super inefficient way to write a screenplay.

There were countless false starts, abandoned drafts, a version thats one extended bender-montage. I wouldnt call the exploratory nature an act of rebellion, because that implies that someone cares about what youre doing; no one was keeping tabs on us. That lack of oversight freed us up to draw inspiration in everything from The Great Beauty to Dumb and Dumber to Saving Private Ryan to Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, because why not? And thanks to this inefficient approach, I eventually stumbled upon a magical cave.

October 2015. Max was filming my own Palm Springs wedding as I broke down into a blubbering mess during the vows. In the movie, Sarah (Cristin Milioti) tears apart the whole idea of weddings and marriage and I agree with her. At the same time, I also share some of Nyles point of view: Bask in the love. Maybe the pageantry is archaic and detrimental to the progress of humanity, yet here I bought right into it and I loved my wedding. Theyre strange affairs, where hundreds of people can come together for the purpose of connection and while Ive watched countless new relationships form at weddings, Ive seen just as many old relationships crumble to their death. They manage to bring out the best and worst in people. Its great!

Suddenly, Palm Springs wanted to be about a relationship at a wedding. What better way of torturing your main character, a guy who cares about nothing, than to trap him for all eternity in a place where people care perhaps too much about the trivial details that have no real significance in the grand scheme of things.

2016-17. The script evolved into this tale of two people who decide to give up on the disappointing real world, because floating on pizza rafts, eating burritos and drinking away their life is so much easier than actually doing something to change their miserable existence. But apathy can get tiresome, they meet in the middle on the spectrum of caring, and so on. Plot stuff, quantum physics, Irvine, etc.

January 2018. We knew itd be hard to find the right partners to get behind the movie. I failed at hitting that micro-budget mark with all the plane crashes, dinos, goats . And with a tone that intentionally shifted from silly to sincere, thats tough to pull off in execution. Luckily, we found the one guy who said: Lets do all of that and more! Maybe we should put a bomb in the wedding cake, too? Suddenly, with Andy Samberg, this nonexistent dream project found a way.

Here is the original post:

Andy Siara got past the endless drafts to find 'Palm Springs' - Los Angeles Times

In Adam Curtiss recently released documentary series Cant Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World, Curtis describes a world that has been damaged by the infection of individualism in our modern societies and how this infection has caused any real change to feel like an impossibility. Issues like climate change, corruption and alienation are almost innate, and theres seemingly nothing that we can do about it.

In Ignorance, the new album from The Weather Station, each song also concerns itself with these modern anxieties. In 2021, were now realizing that our lives are becoming increasingly inhuman, and whether we fall into the established nihilism of our political structures is up for debate.

Fronted by Tamara Lindeman, The Weather Station group has been active for more than a decade. In the current era, where crises loom in our minds, Lindeman made her album about these pressing issues. Robbers is about those who steal and exploit, the ber rich and colonization in general. The lines, No, the robber dont hate you, he had permission / Permission by words, permission of thanks / Permission by laws, permission of banks are especially poignant.

Atlantic is directly about climate change: My god, I thought / My god, what a sunset / Blood red floods the Atlantic, and then later: Thinking I should get all this dying off of my mind / I should really know better than to read the headlines.

Finally, Separated pulls this together with the topic of how technology actually is pulling us apart: Separated by all the work we had to do / Separated by all the arguments you lose / Separated by all the things you thought you knew.

Lindeman focuses on the hollow promises of our modern systems. The race to the bottom, a term for government deregulation, is in full force, and the purveyors of power no longer need to actually provide anything to rake in money from the people, which is all they want. Curtiss documentary tells us how we got here; Lindemans words reflect the present.

Sonically, Lindemans album has a dream-like, stream-of-consciousness feel. Much like Destroyers 2010s output or albums like Montreals Paralytic Stalks or Julia Holters Have You in My Wilderness, Ignorance is lush with distant strings and continuous percussion to convey Lindemans messaging and musings in an incredibly digestible way. Her lyrics are direct and lock together seamlessly with her hooks and choruses.

Listeners will find a pleasant nostalgia for her NPR Tiny Desk Concerts, or, more broadly, the indie sounds that were most likely to appear on the channel around 2010 to 2014. The Weather Stations sound is organic and dedicated to the canonized instrumentation of piano, drums and strings.

Together, with the songs that have themes of societal collapse and degradation, theres a balance with more personal songs like Trust, Heart and Loss. To create a snapshot of a certain moment in time, its important to have those kinds of messages as well.

In Heart, she sings, My dumb eyes turn toward beauty / Turn towards sky, renewing / My dumb touch is always reaching / For green, for soft, for yielding. Lindeman finds herself digging deeper for something more important, something that has actual meaning, since it is no longer provided by the world around us. The myth is ours to make, for better or for worse.

Daily Arts writer Vivian Istomin can be reached at vivaust@umich.edu

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The Weather Station corrects the record that 'Ignorance' is not in us, but in what controls us. - The Michigan Daily

Thefinal episode ofClassic Rock's new podcast seriesThe 20 Million Clubis out now, with a look atMeat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell, the third best-selling album of all-time.

Hosted by British broadcasting legend Nicky Horne,The 20 Million Clubalso features guests appearances from Classic RockEditor Sin Llewellyn, alongside Scott Rowley, former Classic Rock Editor-In-Chief (and current Content Director of Music at Future).

On its release in 1977, few people would have put money on Bat Out Of Hell becoming the third best-selling album of all time. The week that it entered the UK album charts released October 1977, it didn't hit the chart until March 1978 an album called Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols sat at 31. Meat Loaf scraped in at 60.

In a year of massive change for the music business, Bat Out Of Hell seemed out of step: theatrical and overblown at a time when punk was seemingly ushering in a new wave of gritty realism and anti-rock stars. But maybe that was the secret to its success. Maybe it was the fun antidote to punk's nihilism and prog's navel-gazing. And what was Meat Loaf if not a new kind of rock star? Big and daft, with gloriously huge songs about teenage love and going-all-the-way, Bat Out Of Hell is both preposterous and actually very relatable.

This is the final episode of season 1 of The 20 Million Club, but you can catch up on the whole series now. Since launch the team have argued the merits ofAC/DCsBack In Black, Led Zeppelin's 4th album, Alanis Morisette's Jagged Little Pill, Queen's Greatest Hits, Prince's Purple Rain and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon.

The 20 Million Clubcan be listened to right now onApple Podcasts and Spotify or anywhere you get podcasts.Subscribe to never miss an episode and please leave a review.

According to the Official Charts Company, Bat was in the UK Albums Charts for 522 weeks, and reached a high point of 9. Bat Out of Hell II went to number 1 but only stayed in the charts for 67 weeks. Bat Out Of Hell entered The UK Album Charts on March 5, 1978 for the first time (at no.60).

The picture above is a reissue of the Stoney and Meatloaf album from 1971. You can tell it's a reissue because the sleeve has Meatloaf (one word) as the lead artist, hoping to capitalise on the success of Bat Out Of Hell. But back in 1971, original sleeves had 'Stoney and Meatloaf' at the top. Stoney was Shaun Murphy, a singer who worked with Bob Seeger, Eric Clapton and later fronted Little Feat. The album was released on Rare Earth records, an imprint of Motown.

Even back in 1971, Meat's weight was used as a marketing device. Check out (I'd Love to be) As Heavy as Jesus:

A: Yes, there are millions. Just to choose one: Olias Of Sunhillow by Jon Anderson is more ridiculous than Bat Out Of Hell.Gentle Giant, Gong, Rush they had some crazy ideas for albums. In comparison, Bat is just a bunch of horny love songs.

In the podcast, Scott comments that he'd probably been sent an album that day that was more ridiculous. Was that true? "Well today," he said, "I got sent a press release for a band calledSuffocate For Fuck Sakebut yesterday's press release for'UK underground shitgrind act' Shiteater probably beats that: their album is called Annointed In Urine, Crowned in Faeces and the press release boasts that it contains 'elements of old school death metal, grindcore, and thrash for one thrilling stool loosening experience' and songs like Reigning From a Throne of Cold Porcelain, Uncontrolled Projectile Defecation, Left Hand Cack and Wicked Tyrant of Repugnant Feculence.

"C'mon: that is more ridiculous than Bat Out Of Hell."

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The 20 Million Club podcast: Is Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell the most ridiculous album of all time ? - Louder

"God has given us the internet as a hamster wheel... strap in and ride, bitch, Patricia Lockwood tweeted gleefully in January. The droll author has just released her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, in which she channels the whirling dervish of feeling awestruck/horrified/seduced by the online experience: that new slipstream of information, that locus of context collapse! Lockwood has previously published two books of poetry and the 2017 memoir Priestdaddy and contributes to the London Review of Books (including an uproarious deep dive into John Updikes slimy catalogue). Her latest work features an unnamed woman with ascendant social media notoriety navigating what she terms the portal, a Donnie Darko-sounding term for inglorious Twitter.

The portal is a mlange of observations (Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money) and imagistic curios (a chihuahua perched on a mans erection, memorably). A critic for Bookforum marveled of Lockwood: Reading her metaphors is like watching someone pull out a scalpel and cut the cleanest line youve ever seen, and then in the next sentence throw the knife over her shoulder with her eyes closed, grinning. In a whiplash shift of tone, the novels second half shifts the stakes from digital absurdities to heartsick circumstances around early mortality and deep loss.

No One Is Talking about This

Lockwood spoke to ELLE.com via email about rethinking approaches to history, replicating internet behavioral patterns in literature, and the real necessity of charging ones phone in a separate room at night.

I liked the idea of there being an echo of internet language in the title, something almost co-written, that had been passed from hand to hand and put to many different purposes. And the protagonist puts the line to her own purpose in the second half of the book; she speaks of wanting to stop people in the hallways, grip them by the arm, and tell them what is happening to her and the people she loves. Do you know about this? No one is talking about this! I think in that moment, this becomes an all-encompassing word, able to contain anything, even a whole human life.

I dont think I couldve written it any other wayI had to work in the portals own form. The book had to resemble that reading experience, both in its fragmented nature and its sense of falling through a series of someone elses thoughts.

And as for it coalescing, part of the danger and the exhilaration of working on a book like this is that you dont know if it ever fully does. Its like the mercury the protagonist speaks of in the novels second half; the beads of it are always trembling toward each other, trying to come together into one shining piece.

Disparate-feeling moods is probably an understatement, haha. The first part takes place mostly inside the internet, so we see the protagonists face lit by that gentle blue glow. The second part is set in the heart of her family, and the light is that fluorescent light that we experience in the most urgent human situations. I united those moods for the simple reason that life unites them: Real life breaks in on us when we are doing something else, mindlessly moving among unexamined others, wasting our wonderful time.

Real life breaks in on us when we are doing something else, mindlessly moving among unexamined others, wasting our wonderful time.

Are we even in charge of our own informational hierarchies? I dont know the date of the Treaty of Versailles, but in its place Im storing the memory of that video a woman made to explain Gritty to the French. Gritty is popular because of nihilism. For some time, Americans have felt that life has no meaning. Gritty also has no meaning. It might seem that we have willfully and obstinately chosen the path of the absurd, but I think we have done so for a reason. The stones of historythe facts, the dates, the interpretationsno longer march in any sort of order, and neither does there seem to be an overarching narrative to modern life. How else have we experienced the last four, ten, twenty years but as an endless series of absurdities? To reflect that is realism, not perversity.

Perhaps I should have said that I wasnt concerned about having good taste, because I knew that was a standard I would never meet. But this knowledge freed me too. It allowed me tohunt my own Bigfoot, is what I wanted to write, so Ill just go with that. I was able to be idiosyncratic in my reading, my obsessions, the literary routes I traveled. As for my own criticism, I do write about a lot of dead people, and its hard to be wrong about dead people in a way that anyone cares about. So I wouldnt describe myself as a tastemaker so much as a little freaky clerk in the dead letter office, or a silverfish that has turned completely transparent in a library.

As a critic you pay more attention to structureyou often have to reverse-engineer a novel in order to think about it roundly. So probably some of those thoughts about structure do make their way into my own work, buttress it a bit, give it a nice bony nose. But my turn as a critic is also fairly recent, within the last few years, and I developed my voice and my aesthetic long before I thought of writing from the other side.

How else have we experienced the last four, ten, twenty years but as an endless series of absurdities? To reflect that is realism, not perversity.

2011 Twitter was truly a wild wild west; we followed each other early on and I think I just asked her! I even paid myself for her cover art for Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, which I love so much. We definitely share an aesthetic that is very centered on the body but also out in space, shooting starlight from every hole. Cartoonish, in the most playful sense of the word.

I do often have a vision of my workIm an unusually visual reader and that extends to my writing as well. I experience individual words as both images and tactile sensations, which I guess qualifies as synesthesia, though my form of it is not very flashy. Actually, I had a bit in the book for a while that talked about the protagonists overly literal case of synesthesia, where she saw ice cubes when she read the word refrigerator and heard a fife whenever she thought about the Revolutionary War, and thats pretty much me.

Its the easiest rule, and so impossible to live by: Dont look at your phone first thing in the morning! Charge it in another room, so you dont wake up at 4 a.m. and accidentally learn something new from British Twitter about Piers Morgan! No, when Im living my best life Im surrounded by books and pens and papers until three or four in the afternoon, totally absorbed, with a cat spread completely across my notebook because she hates all my ideas and wants me to become a tuna fisherman. Too online for me is absolutely a physical sensation, as it must be for all of us. When my blood starts to feel like Predator blood, I know that I have to get off.

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Excerpt from:

Patricia Lockwood on the Absurdity of Modern Life and Being Too Online - ELLE.com