Category Archives: Hedonism

The National Gallery in London's exhibition Poussin and the Dance (until 3 January)the UKs first significant show of the 17th century French painter for nearly 30 yearsclaims to reveal a new fun-loving side to this most erudite of artists artists. But while many of the paintings on show feature Dionysian revels and Bacchanalian cavortings, these shenanigans of gods and mortals are organised with a meticulous precision that seems the opposite of exuberant abandon.

A more hedonistic sensuousness is to be found in the stunning antique pieces which have been juxtaposed with the paintings inspired by them, most notably two vast marble vases from the first century CE: the Salpion of Athens, on loan from the archeological museum in Naples and the so-called Borghese Vase loaned by the Louvre. These are adorned with friezes of sensuously carved nymphs, satyrs and maenads who, several centuries later, crop up rather more clinically in Poussins compositions.

Poussin's Bacchanalian Revel Before a Term (1632-3). Courtesy of National Gallery, London

But while we might admire Poussins carefully choreographed frolickings, or appreciate the more ancient renderings of flesh into stone, its also impossible to ignore the dark side to all this mythical merrymaking and figurative grappling, where female flesh is served up in abundance and hedonism so often tips into orgy, abduction and rape.

Of course these old- masterly conundrums play out way beyond Poussin and the Dance and run throughout the entire National Galleryand indeed every museum in the Western world. Before so many of art historys greatest hits we now have to negotiate uncomfortably mixed feelings as painterly brilliance and sculptural gorgeousness distracts from what is actually being depicted, and the circumstances and value systems that shaped their form and content.

Performance of Florence Peake's Factual Actual (2021). Courtesy of Florence Peake

It was therefore an utter joy to see these vexed issues getting a robustly irreverent seeing-to in Florence Peakes Factual Actual (2021), a live work which involved striking and unexpected physical encounters between paintings, performers, and audience members. This multilayered performance took place upstairs from the Poussin show, in a gallery that, deliciously, was directly adjacent to Velazquezs Rokeby Venus (1647-1651). Here five dancers interacted with four giant vivid canvases painted by Peake, which were first suspended from the ceiling before being winched down to the floor to be dragged, crumpled, propped and used to cover, hide and house the performers.

Liberated from their gold frames, these giant lumps of cloth, which Peale had emblazoned with colossal tumbling multi-gendered figures bearing all manner of body parts, became further reanimated as active participants in the piece. No longer passive objects of veneration, the paintings took on a new role, getting down and dirty with the dancers and even, at one point, having their surfaces bumped and scratched with a microphone to form an aural backdrop to the action.

Here, despite being at the heart of the National Gallery and in close proximity to so many precious and revered masteryes masterpieces, nothing was sacrosanct: not even the audience, which often became engulfed in, or touched by, all the swooshing canvas-action. At times spectators were even forced to budge up to make room for one particularly disquieting performer, an impassive adorned and slightly sinister paint deity, covered Samurai-style in vivid scale-like armoured plates of painted canvas.

Factual Actual is part of Dance to the Music of Our Time, a programme of live works commissioned by National Gallery curator Priyesh Mistry in response to their Poussin exhibition. The other artists exploring assumptions around art history and messing with the canon are Hetain Patel, Zadie Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo and all of their performances as well as Factual Actual can now be viewed here.

Dance to the Music of Our Time is one of the many inventive initiatives take by the National Gallery in recent years to involve contemporary artists in its collection, with Kehinde Whileys exhibition The Prelude (until 18 April), a reclaiming and reframing of the sublime landscape tradition, another notable example.

More historic highlights include Michael Landys animatronic Saints Alive in 2013, Chris Ofilis 2017 Weaving Magic tapestry and wall paintings and George Shaws deliciously glum landscapes in 2016. However despite the debunking challenges to the white male establishment made by many of above, as well as Peake and her performers, the fact that the National Gallery saw nothing amiss in its decision to blow up Poussins postcard size pen and ink Study for the Abduction of the Sabine Women (around 1633) to more than metres high as part of its Poussin-themed caf dcor shows that there is still much work to be done.

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Liberated from their frames, paintings snap, crackle and pop in Florence Peake's irreverent dance performance at National Gallery, London - Art...

Theres a bit of a musical theme to this years fizzy Christmas gifts. Veuve Clicquot has gone retro, packaging up its Brut NV in a box shaped like a cassette tape that can be personalised with a message (its also 100 per cent recyclable); Krug has collaborated with Belgian musician and 3D composer Ozark Henry on an immersive audio experience that will tell you the story of Krugs Grande Cuve 169me Edition while you sip it; while Dom Prignon and Lady Gaga, straining every sinew of their shared belief in absolute creative freedom, bring us a 2006 ros and 2010 blanc. And for lovers of the visual arts, theres David Shrigley characteristically deadpanning it on two paper second skin cases for Ruinart: choose between You can judge the bottle by the label and Each bottle is the same. Each bottle is different the wrappers are recyclable, but maybe dont just toss them in the bin...

Krug Grande Cuvee 169me Edition, with a QR code for an immersive binaural sound experience telling the wines story by 3D music pioneer Ozark Henry, 174,clos19.com

Veuve Clicquot Brut NV in a personalised 100 per cent recyclable cassette tape box, 59.99, selfridges.com

Dom Prignon x Lady Gaga Dom Perignon Rose Vintage 2006, 380, harrods.com

Ruinart Blanc de Blancs NV with a second skin label by artist David Shrigley, 76, clos19.com

Louis Roederer Cristal Ros Vinothque 2000, 2,000, hedonism.co.uk

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Five limited-edition champagnes for Santas stocking - Financial Times

December marked the passing of Robert Michael Nesmith and Robert Warren Dale Shakespeare two musicians whose names, Im pretty sure, will be unfamiliar to most readers. I never met either man, but both had, upon reflection, pretty profound impacts on my life.

Nesmith is best known as the tall, wool-cap wearing guitarist of The Monkees, the 1960s bubble-gum pop group. Four actors were hired for the gig, each one to fit a type: Nesmith was the quiet thoughtful guy. They were to play the role of musicians in a TV show that would re-create each week the manic insanity of the Beatles movie A Hard Days Night. The joke may have been on the producers. While the four were actors, they were also real musicians who quickly tired of being the public face of a manufactured band that had no say over their material.

They soon staged a coup, kicked out the musical mercenaries some of the top studio talent in LA and started writing, performing and producing their own songs. Despite starting out with more sales than the Beatles at their launch, The Monkees flamed out after two years and Nesmith moved on to more challenging projects.

He quickly formed another group, the First National Band, which while short lived, is credited with creating the country-rock sound that the Eagles used to fill stadiums and establish an image of blue-jean hedonism that remains the standard. (Nesmith probably didnt worry too much about the financial success: His mother invented Liquid Paper, a correction fluid for typewritten copy that became a staple of office life in the pre-computer era. She left him a $25 million inheritance.)

Nesmith is also credited with pretty much inventing the music video. There is a hilarious backstage MTV interview with Nesmith when he reunited with The Monkees for the first time in 20 years, joining the band for the encore after a 1986 performance. The interviewer is seemingly incredulous that he didnt join the band for the entire tour, and that he turned his back on the chance to go onstage every night. He pointed out that he had a (very successful) business to run and couldnt just drop everything for a 100-date tour, no matter how many screaming fans. His attitude that fame and adoring crowds arent everything is utterly foreign to the interviewer and she seems a bit flummoxed. As I think about it, its also pretty alien to our current culture.

The really funny part comes when she asked him about his business, a video production company called Pacific Arts Corporation. It is often credited with inventing the music video genre in other words, it pretty much spawned the entire industry within which she worked. In response to her question, Nesmith says, with a tone of bemusement, ask your bosses.

I didnt identify with Nesmith: He was the guitarist (I play drums), he was tall (Im not) and he wore a wool cap. But he was part of the group, and that is what he and the rest of The Monkees gave me: a powerful desire to be part of a band. I loved music before I heard The Monkees but they were the first group that I encountered watching them on TV and I wanted in on that action. It wasnt the fame, the money or the chicks (I wasnt even 10 then), but I craved the feeling of being on the inside as the rest of the world looked on. I didnt have to be in front being in the back had its own attractions but I wanted to be part of the group.

The camaraderie was always a big part of the attraction when I played music. I founded bands, joined groups that cycled through drummers, and was a hired gun for specific gigs, but the most important thing for me, regardless of the music and I played just about every genre was the degree to which I felt like I was part of the group. Watching The Monkees helped crystallize that desire and showed me what it meant to be part of something bigger than just me making noise, no matter how therapeutic it was to bang on the drums.

Robbie Shakespeare showed up in my life a decade later. He was a Jamaican bass player who teamed up with drummer Lowell Sly Dunbar to form Sly and Robbie, a rhythm duo that helped make reggae accessible to the world and transformed that genre in the process.

After the two men met in 1972 they were inseparable and indefatigable. Shakespeare once estimated that they had taken part in 200,000 recordings in one role or another, from musicians to producers. Their collaborations ranged from Bob Dylan to Peter Tosh. They are perhaps best known for their work with Grace Jones as disco raised its ugly head, but their rhythms defied easy categorization and they backed performers like Joe Cocker, Carly Simon and even Yoko Ono.

Sly and Robbie opened my ears to the possibilities in blending musical forms and styles. I had long been a fan of reggae, but it was, for me, a separate genre. Their ability to go into any studio and turn out something recognizable you can tell when they are playing without even seeing their names and simultaneously new was jaw-dropping. They had played with the hardest of the hard rockers in Jamaica, yet they could then go into a studio with Mick Jagger or Madonna and fuse their island-honed chops with the lead singers more traditional rock n roll inclinations. As one critic explained. Their whole career has been geared toward creating new stuff, what no one else had done before.

I saw Sly and Robbie a couple of times when they backed Black Uhuru, the group that they produced and whose 1983 album Anthem won them a Grammy. Dunbar had long been an inspiration, but I didnt appreciate the power of the partnership between drummer and bass player until I saw them perform. Good drummers are one thing, good bassists another; put them together as a single unit like those two, however, and its new musical territory.

I spent a lot of time trying to find my partner but it never happened. But they gave me a sense of what was possible and the fact that it remained beyond my reach may have been one of the frustrations that prompted me, like Nesmith, to move on from music.

I apologize to readers who have stuck with this contribution to this point: I dont have any profound insights, just a thank-you to two musicians who had an impact on my life that went well beyond the rhythms and the melodies. Funny, how music can do that.

Brad Glosserman is deputy director of and visiting professor at the Center for Rule-Making Strategies at Tama University as well as senior adviser (nonresident) at Pacific Forum. He is the author of Peak Japan: The End of Great Ambitions (Georgetown University Press, 2019). His musical ambitions remain unfulfilled.

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A fond farewell to two musical inspirations - The Japan Times

Penfolds has released a stellar line-up of reds and whites for holiday quaffing, says Des Houghton.

A tasting of two supremely glamourous superblends of cabernet sauvignon and shiraz was one of the highlights of my wine year.

Penfolds was in a creative mood designing both these experimental blockbusters to stand alongside its iconic Grange.

Penfolds 2018 802A Cabernet Shiraz (68% cabernet, 32% shiraz) was unashamedly bold said the firms chief winemaker Peter Gago. 802A components were aged separately in new American oak for 22 months prior to blending.

There are scents of cola and exotic spice leading to a palate of blood plum, fig and goji berries that add notes of cranberry and cherries.

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Penfolds 2018 802B Cabernet Shiraz (55% cabernet, 45% shiraz) was treated entirely differently with the components co-fermented in French oak for 19 months.

Scents of blackberry, spice and milk chocolate billow from the glass. Gagos tasting notes speak of a fruit-driven wine with a savoury demeanour; a textural dryness and a sprinkle of chocolate dust and sweet paprika.

The superblends were released in Adelaide alongside the 70th anniversary vintage of Grange.

The Grange ($950) may be this nations ultimate expression of hedonism, but there are more affordable options.

A personal favourite is Penfolds Bin 150 Marananga Shiraz 2019 ($99.99), an unashamedly old-fashioned Barossa shiraz with sweet, inky, juicy fruit with spicy oak and fine tannins.

Penfolds St Henri Shiraz 2018 ($135) is a multi-regional blend and this is a superb vintage, effortless, and mouth-watering.

Penfolds Bin 28 Shiraz 2019 ($45) is another gutsy, old fashioned offering to be devoured by red meat lovers.

Some said Penfolds Yattarna Chardonnay 2019 ($175) was the white wine of the year. Agreed. Its elegant and refined.

On the nose Yattarna delivers a wet stone minerality. On the palate there are citrus, white peach, pear and nectarine flavours. While Yattarna is a multi-regional blend the Penfolds Reserve Bin A Chardonnay 2020 ($125) is solely from Adelaide Hills fruit.

Bin A is more ostentatious. It and the Yattarna will improve with age. There was more peach and nectarine on the palate and a talc and chalk minerality in Penfolds Bin 311 Chardonnay 2020 ($50).

Schroeter and his team were also responsible for the Penfolds Bin 51 Eden Valley Riesling ($40). Cool fermentation and early bottling preserve the fruit quality. Bin 51 smells vaguely of lemon curd, honey and poached pears, and delivers attractive lime and barley water flavours..

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Penfolds releases glamorous holiday line up of red and white wines - Sky News Australia

What explains the lasting wonderment of French rococo, the theatrically frivolous, flauntingly costly mode in art, ceramics, furniture, dcor, and fashion that flourished in mid-eighteenth-century aristocratic circles before, having gradually given way to sober neoclassicism, being squelched utterly by the Revolution of 1789? And why did that bedazzling visual repertoire recur in twentieth-century America as a species of imitation artkitsch, in a word, although managed with undoubtable geniusin animated films branded by Walt Disney? Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts, a fun show at the Metropolitan Museum, answers the question by conjoining the pleasures of authentically froufrou historical objects, mostly from the museums collection, with their styles application in production drawings and video clips from Disney movies. The films include an early short, from 1934, called The China Shop, in which porcelain figurines have come to life and are prettily dancing minuets; two classics of the nineteen-fifties, Cinderella, released at the beginning of the decade, and Sleeping Beauty, which came out at the end of it; and, forming the pice de rsistance, an extravaganza in which atavistic pottery and candlesticks and clocks athletically celebrate a romance for their owner in Beauty and the Beast, from 1991.

Walt Disney himself had admired the look from early onas witness amateur footage in the show of him with his family prowling Versailles in 1935and he came, shrewdly, to grasp its viability for his coming revolution in popular culture. At the age of twenty, in 1922, Disney had founded a studio called Laugh-O-Gram Films, in Kansas City, with aid from the artist Ub Iwerks. It soon went bankrupt. Within a year, he started up again in Los Angeles. Brief comic animations that came to star Mickey Mouse, who first appeared in 1928, and the growing cast of the amiable rodents animal pals delighted moviegoers worldwide. But Disney aspired beyond that rudimentary success and began to produce feature-length narratives of folklore provenance, often with grippingly sinister elements. I believe that his breakthrough in this regard, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), was the first movie I ever saw. I was told that I screamed at the first appearance of the witch-queen and kept it up until my removal from the theatre. (And dont get me started on the trauma, shared with other former tykes of my generation, of the killed-off mother in Bambi, from my birth year of 1942.) The Germanic source and pictured artifacts of Snow White would eventually be displaced by more reassuring enchantments of French origin, with an instinct that was sagely politic.

Disney steered his studio to exploit rococos gratuitous swank, emulating the feckless hedonism of the court of LouisXV while chastely suppressing its frequent eroticism. The language of antic curlicues, increasingly abstracted from film to film, blended smoothly into the insouciance of Disneys fairyland fantasies: escapist worlds, complete in themselves. Though thoroughly secular, like his nostalgic evocations of circa-1900 America, the pastiche has something churchy about it. Under the pretense of entertaining children (if childless, borrow one), I have enjoyed visits to the consummately engineered Disneyland and Walt Disney World while noting a peculiar solemnity in their transports of innocence. The impunity of a justly doomed French regime (not our problem!) translated perfectly to fabricated realms that are carefully alien to anyones troubling reality. Cinderellas castle, at Disney World, is modelled on Versailles, among other French chteaux. Centering Disneyland is a materialization of a related, crowning folly, the mad German king Ludwig IIs fantastical Neuschwanstein Castle (1868-92), which Disney adopted as the template for his studios logo. Nightly, Tinker Bell descends on a wire from its peak.

The Met show is replete with demonstrations of wizardly animation techniques, pre-digitally antique now, that take a viewer from sketch to cel to excerpted film. Notably transfixing is a pencilled sequence of the Beasts physical transformationairborne, cyclonic, a claw becoming a handinto a dashing prince in the 1991 movie. But the keynote is industrial. A few eccentricities briefly beguiled Disney, such as gloomily stylized settings for Sleeping Beauty, by one Eyvind Earle, which distressed some fellow-animators with backgrounds that distracted from their characters. More typically, Disney subsumed the talents of his crews within uniformly anodyne schemas, where they register, if at all, like bumps under a blanket.

The sameness of calculation wearies after a while. This redounds to the comparative advantage of such juxtaposed French authenticities as a Svres vase, made in 1758, with handles in the shape of elephant heads. Sconces make a very big deal of hoisting candles aloft, and furniture hardware ennobles the act of opening drawers. In no milieu before or since have accoutrements of daily life, for those who could glory in affording them, been so systemically saturated with beauty. Rococo design complemented figurative, architectural, and vegetal allusions with gorgeously lapidary patterning, slipping between representation and abstraction in ways that, as we experience them, are a joy forever.

Stylistic excess, wretched or otherwise, comes and goes in art history, almost always in periods of complacent political stability. This is no paradox. Worldly crisis tends to foster disciplined expression. Relative tranquillity tasks artists with reminding people, for their amusement, if not as a moral caution, of the ineluctable chaos of human nature. The show, as organized by Wolf Burchard, who oversees British decorative art at the museum, adduces prior examples of determinedly over-the-top seductiveness as old as an early-sixteenth-century, amorous tapestry, Shepherd and Shepherdess Making Music, that was probably designed in France and woven in the southern Netherlands. Disney and his staff funnelled centuries of serious artistic precedent into their rote stylings. Flowing out, the results wereand remainfleetingly delectable mush.

Before seeing the show, Id had misgivings about the august Mets hosting of what boded to be cynically corny corporate artifice. These faded, so engaging is the installationand far be it from me to snoot a dreamy concept rendering, by the designer Mary Blair, of Cinderellas pumpkin carriagebut the qualms reinfected me in the end. While we have grown used to crossovers of high and low in contemporary taste, the difference isnt meaningless when any use of the past not only sterilizes its original import but makes a fetish of doing so. The payoff is diverting and may seem funny. But it lacks fundamental humor, which cant do without at least a whisper of irony. We arent party to the Disney creative sorcery but only passive consumers of it. More humanly complex long-form animation arrived with the ongoing triumphs of Pixar, which the Walt Disney Company had the timely wit, in 2006, to acquire from Steve Jobs as a subsidiary.

How come I had never before now heard of the commercial poster designer E.McKnight Kauffer, the subject of a startlingly spectacular show, Underground Modernist, at the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum? I guess its because Im used to tracking raids by art on popular culture but less so the other way around. Kauffer, who died in 1954, was a magus of boundless resourcefulness in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. With assistance from his second wife, MarionV. Dorn, a master of fabric design who survived him by ten years, he minedand evangelized foradventurous aesthetics to change the street-level look of cities, invigorate book-cover design, and inflect theatre sets and interior decoration. He insisted on working directly with clients, intent on persuading them to take risks in far-out geometric and surreally contorted imagery. His influence proved so infectious that it was swallowed up by successive generations in a profession whose manufacture is inherently ephemeral.

Starting as a restless lad from Montana, where he was born, in 1890, the then named Edward Kauffer spent his childhood in Evansville, Indiana. He dropped out of school at twelve or thirteen with aspirations to paint and, while still a teen-ager, went West, working odd jobsbouncing from a travelling theatre company to a fruit ranch. Then, in San Francisco, he began an education in advanced art while working at a bookstore. His work caught the attention of a regular customer, JosephE. McKnight, who so believed in Kauffers abilities that he offered to sponsor the young artists studies in Paris. Kauffer altered his name in homage to his benefactor. He furthered his schooling in Chicago (where he was exposed to the avant-garde marvels of the 1913 Armory Show, after its New York unveiling), and then Munich, before arriving in Paris. Based in England from 1915 to 1940, he became a live-wire cosmopolitan. A vast chart spanning a wall of the Cooper Hewitt show amounts to a name-drop constellation, with lines of association that radiate from a portrayal of his handsome face to the likes of, among other starry personages, Alfred Hitchcock, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes, Man Ray, and Sir Kenneth Clark.

Another factor obscuring Kauffers reputation is his practically exotic integrity, public-spirited in service to civic and political causes and holding that a proper designer must remain an artist. Working mainly with small agencies, though winning commissions including the creation of some hundred and twenty-five posters for the London Underground, he denounced, in a lecture at New Yorks Museum of Modern Art in 1948, the recourse of the dominant firms to the usual methods of appeal through sex, snobbism, fear and corruptive sentimentality. Never settling on a signature style, he said that his criteria for posters were attraction, interest, and stimulation, deeming no means too arbitrary or too classicalApollonian values.

Moving with Dorn to New York in 1940, he had intermittent success with campaigns for such businesses as American Airlines and with distinctive cover designs for modern classics published by AlfredA. Knopf, Random House, and Pantheon, including James Joyces Ulysses (the fat white U and the skinny blue l, both radically elongated, seize attention) and Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man (a shadowed face crossed by white lines and granted one staring eye). But he suffered declines in both his health and his productiveness. He never felt at home in his native land, he said. Sorely missing his overseas friends, estranged from Dorn, and alcoholic, he came to a sad end. Even then, his prestige among colleagues who had known his work lived on long afterward. You will see why if you attend this show.

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When Pop Culture Raids Artand the Reverse - The New Yorker

To the editor:

What was life like before the influence of Christianity? A recent study of moral conditions in the Roman Empire revealed some sorry facts. Outside of Judaism, there was no relationship between religion and morals. The people were depraved, corrupt, wicked. The pagans worshiped anything, including the sun, animals, images of Greek gods of mythology. Their temples were staffed with prostitutes and sodomites. Divorce, adultery, fornication, abortion and suicide were extensively practiced; children were offered to idols and girl babies were exposed.

Life was not sacred and they had a morbid craving for bloodshed. Hence, the amusement at throwing people to the lions and the gladiatorial combats. It took the moral power of Christ's gospel to check the inhumanity. It's no wonder that so many appreciated the love, joy, peace and hope seen in their Christian neighbors.

Looking at these characteristics, do we recognize how many of them to which we have reverted? Another school shooting. Another example of the lack of respect for life or of a concern for one's soul. Hedonism is the belief that pleasure is the highest good of life. Have we also resorted to that?

The major question now is why do we want to go back to these sordid practices that separate us from God?

BARBARA PHILLIPS

Freeland

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Reader: Have we resorted to hedonism? - Midland Daily News

Drawing attention to the Tory partys transformation from a traditional Conservative political party to a ragbag of dangerously self-interested diehards ought to be the focus of opposition to the government, rather than the irresponsible hedonism of Johnson, who looks unlikely to be leading the party into the next election.

Polly Toynbee rightly draws attention to the pervasive influence of Steve Baker MP (Fear for a party that sees Boris Johnson as too far to the left, 14 December). Opportunism, short-termism and entryism mean that a party whose leader described Ukip as fruitcakes and closet racists 15 years ago has now welcomed those same people, and also become a party where Baker and his ilk hold sway without taking any responsibility.Les Bright Exeter

In her frightening article about the growing power of the extreme right within the Conservative party, Polly Toynbee omits to mention one glaring reason why this has come about. Under Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour party made itself unelectable, sending millions of voters into the arms of the Tories.

Thus, what Shirley Williams once called the fascism of the left has facilitated the rise of fascism on the right. It seems to me that the solitary hope for this country lies in an alliance of Keir Starmers more moderate Labour and the other progressive parties. In the dire situation in which this country now finds itself, I have never been more proud to be a centrist. Just look at what extremism, at both ends of the spectrum, has brought us to.Alan ClarkLondon

Polly Toynbee misses one vital point. The problem for the Tories, and for Labour, is that they represent such a broad coalition of views. The need for these internal coalitions is based on our undemocratic voting system. When we finally get a fair proportional system I am an eternal optimist the Conservatives and Labour will split into at least two parties each, on the basis of their natural factions. Then, as in most true democracies, governments formed from external coalitions between parties will become the norm in the UK. Better government will surely be the outcome.Richard Carden Denton, Norfolk

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How Tory zealots took control of their party - The Guardian

The first season of HBO Maxs Music Box anthology series closes out with Juice Wrld: Into the Abyss. The documentary premieres alongside Fighting Demons, the late rappers second posthumous album, and the announcement that HBO has renewed Music Box for a second season. Into the Abyss, directed by Tommy Oliver (Black Love, 1982) is culled from two years of footage filmed during Juice Wrlds ascendance to worldwide fame, and also features interviews with his loved ones, friends, and music industry peers.

The Gist: When Juice Wrld died from a drug overdose in December 2019, the 21-year-old rapper, singer, and songwriter had already hit the career stratosphere. Initial singles in 2017, and in particular his May 2018 track Lucid Dreams, logged streams by the billions and prime placements in the Billboard Hot 100. His debut album promptly went Platinum. And lyrics that frequently explored depression, anxiety, heartbreak and exclusion resonated with a youthful fanbase attuned to emo themes as well as the shifty, permuting landscape of a contemporary hip-hop sound born and nurtured in the online space. But by the time he was regularly putting up streaming numbers that rivaled Drake and Taylor Swift, Juice Wrld was also well and truly in the grip of his drugs of choice, percocet and ounce after ounce of liquid codeine. Lean is a constant presence in Into the Abyss, as are the pills; the doc is made up largely of footage shot over the last two years of Juices life, as he and his entourage fully indulged in the hedonism that comes hand in hand with fame. But Abyss also offers unfettered access to a relentlessly creative mind. Throughout, Juice Wrld seems to express himself almost exclusively in freestyle, the intricate rhymes falling from his mouth like the perpetual comment stream populating the bottom corner of a TikTok.

Into the Abyss includes talking head interviews with principals in the world of Juice, from girlfriend Ally Lotti, manager Lil Bibby, and producer Benny Blanco to friends and collaborators Polo G, G Herbo, The Kid Laroi, and music video director Cole Bennett. All of them were conducted by Abyss director Tommy Oliver after Juices death, and they bracket the docs verite bulk, where the videographers cameras dutifully follow Juice and his entourage through blistering, often ecstatic live performances, late-night, freestyle-laced sessions in the recording studio, lengthy stretches of unstructured banter and chopping it up, and more confessional moments of self-examination that are as revealing as they are populated with percocet drops and sips on lean. Abyss also eschews the outsider take of narration, which further immerses the viewer in Juices insular world.

To a person, those interviewed in Into the Abyss describe Juice Wrld as a singular presence, a generational talent, and above all a goodhearted individual. Whether he knew it or not, Juice was a therapist to millions of kids, Blanco says. But in the end, theres also a dazed kind of acceptance that his death from a toxic cocktail of codeine and oxycodone was entirely preventable, if only theyd policed his intake just a little bit more.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? In A Man Named Scott, the recent doc about his life and come-up, rapper, singer and songwriter Kid Cudi discusses his own struggles with anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. The friends and colleagues of Cudi interviewed also echo what so many of Juices crew say that they didnt know how deep the depression went or how powerful the anxiety was. The difference, of course, is that Cudi survived while Juice didnt, and neither did Lil Peep, the emo rapper who died of a drug overdose in 2017 and who is the subject of the Netflix documentary Everybodys Everything.

Performance Worth Watching: Juice Wrld himself is a captivating presence here, a combustible mix of sensitivity, offhand charm, thoughtfulness, performative brio, and startling rap erudition.

Memorable Dialogue: I heard, likeI swear it was his demons leaving him, girlfriend Ally Lotti says of the chaotic moments just before his death, as authorities approached Juice Wrlds Gulfstream on the Midway Airport tarmac. He called out my name, and he seized up.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Juice Wrld: Into the Abyss begins right inside the maelstrom, with a lingering close-up on the rapper as he freestyles. It lasts for minutes, but it could easily be hours. Juices rhymes interlock on words and phrases that grow into and over each other, and exuberant throwbacks to childhood memories mix with mercurial references to the chemical management of anxiety and mortal thoughts. For Juice, this is just another night. (In Abyss, its often night the rapper and his crew are definitely nocturnal.) But for the viewer, its a singular example of his spellbinding talent, and how it often emerged fully-formed and spontaneous all at once. This is a theme of the interviews in Abyss, too, how the rappers talent was so bountiful that it couldnt even be held in something as rote as a song. But if he was always craving more space to work, Juice was also craving more pills and lean. It gets to the point in Abyss that Juice is so far inside his world, he no longer knows which way is up. In one moment, he admits that making better choices with his life might be paramount moving forward. In the next, a friend describes Juice as having drank a pint of liquid codeine all on his own.

While the interviews in Into the Abyss offer some insight into the talent and drive of an artist at work, its in the docs immersive midsection that we truly see him. Juices world was the environment of modern performance and stardom, and the camera moves with him through the interconnected chambers of that existence. The stage and its strobes and smoke gives way to a movable wall, revealing an idling tour bus at the ready, and in turn its exclusive inner sanctum, ferrying the rapper and his retinue to the enveloping world of a recording studio or the private space of his spacious modernist home. And since hes rarely doing anything that isnt directly related to his career or existence as a moneyed recording artist, those activities become the only tangible elements in Juices life. The rulebook of the everyday doesnt apply, and neither does normal fuel. Instead its weed pens, and 20 percs a day, and a cup of lean perpetually at arms reach. If the abyss is, as G Herbo describes it, the place where depression lives, a place populated with sadness and the fear of always falling, its also an apt description of the blinkered personal universe that Juice Wrld inhabited in his final years of life.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Season one of the Music Box documentary series closes with what might be its most tragic entry. Juice Wrld: Into the Abyss is a you-were-there portrait of a young artists span as a meteoric hip-hop presence, his descent into drug addiction, and the aftermath of his tragic end.

Watch Juice Wrld: Into The Abyss on HBO Max

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Stream It Or Skip It: 'Juice Wrld: Into The Abyss' on HBO Max, Documenting The Rappers Skyrocket And Descent - Decider

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For fans of Chinese celebrities, the summer of 2021 was a rough one. On August 18, Kris Wu, a Canadian Chinese actor and singer who was a former member of the popular K-pop group Exo, was arrested and charged with sexual assault. Days later, the government fined Chinese young actress Zheng Shuang $299 million for tax evasion. In addition, in late August, Zhao Wei, one of Chinas most well-known actresses since the late 1990s, disappeared. Overnight, her social media accounts, fan sites, and her films and television shows all vanished without a trace.

These are not individual cases; these celebrities were caught in a much larger political movement. During the summer of 2021, the Chinese government announced a heightened crackdown on internet celebrities. The government accused them of promoting lavish lifestyles and creating online chaos. As more evidence emerged, scholars concluded that cracking down on celebrities was the first step of Xi Jinpings new common prosperity campaign.

Celebrities and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) represent two different sources of mobilization, and this difference drives the conflict between the party and the entertainment industry. Mass mobilization is embedded in the CCPs identity; it is the partys secret weapon and route to victory. Mobilization played a fundamental role in the CCPs victory during the Chinese Civil War. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese government launched a peoples war against COVID-19, illustrating the critical role of mass mobilization in Chinas pandemic containment. As a result, the CCP carefully maintains itself as the only source of mobilization in China and crushes other mobilization efforts, such as religious groups, labor movements, and civil society.

The Chinese government has been using celebrities as part of its mobilization effort. A Peoples Daily article explains that celebrities fans possess tremendous mobilization power and organizational power. When utilized positively, the Peoples Daily article continues, it can release an unimaginable amount of positive energy.

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As a result, the government places celebrities at the front and center of the mobilization process and recruits them to send propaganda messages to the young population. Every year, celebrities sing patriotic songs during the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, Chinas most famous and perhaps most important television show, hosted by the state television station on the Chinese New Year Eve. The Founding of An Army, a 2017 film celebrating the centennial anniversary of the birth of the Peoples Liberation Army, was packed with xiao xian rou (little fresh meat), young male celebrities popular among Chinese youth, to attract younger audiences to the movie theater. During the 2019 Hong Kong protest, celebrities condemned the Hong Kong protesters and conveyed patriot messages to their fans. The fans even idolized the Chinese state, called it Brother China (a zhong ge ge), and made it the most influential celebrity on the internet.

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However, celebrities are not merely the dutiful soldiers of the CCPs propaganda machine. Celebrities become potential challengers of the partys monopoly on mobilization when they become active in influencing public opinion outside government control. In 2013, several famous Chinese actresses used their social media platforms to subtly criticize the censorship of Southern Weekly, a Guangdong-based newspaper famous for its muckraking and liberal tendencies. Li Bingbing, a famous Chinese actress who has also appeared in Hollywood movies, posted there is no warmth in the South and waiting for Spring in the Cold Winter. Yao Chen, another well-known actress, quoted Alexander Solzhenitsyns Nobel lecture: One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.

In addition, when the Chinese government regulates celebrities, fans often side with their idols and criticize the government. The fans of Zheng Shuang harshly criticized the government decision to cancel her online. The fans of Kris Wu, the disgraced singer who was charged with sexual assault, even planned to protest the arrest and free him from prison. Thus, the crackdown on celebrities is an attempt to kill the chicken to scare the monkeys; the CCP is reminding the entertainment industry who really has the power. As University of Southern California professor Stanley Rosen said, the crackdown demonstrates that no one, no matter how wealthy or popular, is too big to pursue.

Another reason for the crackdown comes from the ideological realm. The CCP views Western ideology as a threat to China. Wang Huning, the ideological tsar of the CCP, outlined the danger of individualism as a force dividing and eroding the American society in his early book America Against America. Therefore, Wang concluded that the infiltration of Western culture would corrode internal political unity and destroy the foundation of the socialist regime. In addition, the CCP views Western liberalism as a source of political instability. The party pegged the spread of Western liberalism as one of the root causes of the 1989 student protests. It also views the spread of liberalism worldwide as the reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Color Revolutions, and the Arab Spring.

The CCP believes Western countries are using the entertainment industry to infiltrate Chinas ideological front. These hostile countries supposedly use the force of capital to control the Chinese entertainment industry. As a result, they spread universal values, liberalism, and ideological liberalization through movies and music. Therefore, the CCP believes that the crackdown on the entertainment industry is a life-or-death struggle to capture the ideological commanding heights. If the CCP doesnt succeed, then the hostile Western forces will destroy China.

Furthermore, the party believes that its crackdown protects young people in this ideological smokeless war. The CCP views celebrities as dangerous influences on young people, outweighing their contribution as megaphones of party propaganda. The party prioritizes shaping the young people into an ideal population. Xi Jinping has said that the value orientation among young people determines the future of social value. Thus, he believes that young people must be patriotic (which means the love of the party-state and the socialist system), hardworking, dedicating, and self-sacrificing for the greater interest of the society.

The entertainment industry primarily targets the young population; it plays an important role in shaping their values. The CCP has accused celebrities of brainwashing the youth and spreading negative values such as anarchism, hegemony, money-worship, pragmatism, and hedonism. Therefore, the crackdown on celebrities is necessary to establish the right value orientation for the young people.

The crackdown on celebrities reflects the continuation of the CCPs social control methods. On the one hand, the crackdown demonstrates the partys monopoly over mobilization and the suppression of alternative ways to organize society. On the other hand, the crackdown illustrates that the party will not loosen its grip over the ideological commanding heights. The CCP worries that the spread of non-socialist ideologies including fandom culture will lead to the collapse of socialism.

Special thanks to University of Southern California professor Stanley Rosen for his help and mentorship.

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What's Behind China's Crackdown on Celebrities? The Diplomat - The Diplomat

Kevin Wendt| The Destin Log

In Luke 21:25-36, Jesus says two things about Judgment Day. It can be a trap day of condemnation to eternal death. And it can be a freedom day of redemption to eternal life.

How are we to be certain which it will be?

Jesus warned, ... watch yourselves lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap.(verse 34)

Dissipation and drunkenness manifest themselves in the hedonism of our nature, the disposition we have to pursue pleasure. Cares of this life manifest themselves in the worry of our nature, the disposition we have to conjure fear.

In a certain way, hedonism and worry are two sides of the same coin. Hedonism is about pleasing self. Worry is about preserving self. Which means they both fit the classic definition of sin, that is, self-curved inward." In other words, hedonism and worry are the spectrum of love of self.

Love of self is the nature we inherited from Adam. With this nature we look to ourselves as the source of all good and the refuge from all evil. And with this nature we leave ourselves vulnerable to the arrival of Judgment Day, perpetually unready, ultimately unable to stand before the Judge.

But we will be perpetually ready, if we watch and pray. Jesus promised, ... stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man. (verse 26)

That is, where hedonism and worry will trip the inescapable trap of condemnation to eternal death, watching and praying will save us from that trap.

So how are we to watch and pray? Watching and praying are not our skill. They are Gods gift. They come to us by the Word of God.2 Timothy 3:16-17 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

That is, the Word of God is his means of reproving and correcting us for our sin and all its manifestations, such as in hedonism and worry, even as it teaches and trains us for faith and its manifestations in watching and praying.

In other words, left to our flesh, we will be nothing but carnal and troubled. But brought to faith by the Word of God, we are made to be alert in watchfulness and pleading in prayer. Because faith binds us to Jesus.

Consider Gods response to our infatuation with pleasure and our obsession with worry. He became infatuated with suffering and obsessed with people. People are Gods supreme love. So much so that he sent his only Son who, himself, embraced self-denial and became carefree with his very life. The pleasure of God the Son was to obey God the Father. The worry of God the Son was to provide for people the escape from the trap of condemnation to eternal death. So God the Son took on flesh to be the substitute. So that where the sin of man is rejection of God to assume his place in heaven, Gods response was rejection of his place in heaven to assume the sin of man. To redeem people curved in on themselves, he was crucified to offer himself the blood sacrifice for the world and was condemned to death. On the cross, God thoroughly rejected God. And on the third day God raised God from the dead and accepted him as the sacrifice payment for the sin of the world. Jesus Christ is the mercy of God.

By baptism into faith, God joins us to Jesus. Thereby, the Holy Spirit bends the inward curve of our self-love into the outward curve of Jesus love. So Jesus refusal of hedonism, his joy in suffering, they become ours through faith.

When it comes to Jesus Judgment Day warning, we repent confessing that our flesh is carnal and troubled and believing that we have Gods mercy in Jesus in whom, through faith, we are kept watchful and praying.

The flesh sleeps. Faith watches. The flesh worries. Faith prays. The flesh flirts with the trap. Faith goes not near the trap. The flesh flees Gods Word. Faith runs to Gods Word. On Judgment Day, the flesh will fall before the Son of Man. Faith will stand.

The Good News is that Judgment Day will be a freedom day of redemption to eternal life only in Jesus, the mercy of God.

Kevin Wendt is pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Destin.

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THE GOOD NEWS: Jesus is the mercy of God - Destin Log