Category Archives: Hedonism

Isabelle Schlegel

(The Weeknd released his new album After Hours on March 20 | Cartoon by Isabelle Schlegel )

Since Abel Tesfaye emerged as The Weeknd in 2011 with his moody and mesmerizing mixtape House of Balloons, hes kept listeners on their toes, intentionally or not, dividing his career into chapters marked by each albums distinctive sounds and aesthetics. Hes released three lo-fi R&B mixtapes, smashing pop hits like Cant Feel My Face and the Daft Punk-assisted Starboy in 2016. On his fourth studio album, After Hours, The Weeknd has returned to his early roots the dark, smoky atmospheres, fragile falsettos and quiet confessions. Its as if hes spent the last four years scouring the underground music scene, creating complex synth rhythms to support his lo-fi R&B style to make his balladry feel thrilling, alive and hedonistic again.

The Weeknd has launched his next era with After Hours, his most self-realized album yet. While his early blend of soulful R&B and lyrical tropes about unfulfilling drug-use and sex were fresh on his trilogy of mixtapes in 2011, his 2013 label debut Kiss Land proved to be a disappointment. The newness of his self-loathing lyrics and cutting beats had grown stale. A new approach was in order for The Weeknd with an ambitious pivot on the 2015 album Beauty Behind the Madness garnering massive commercial success. He showed his versatility by proving he could survive in the mainstream realm by incorporating a brightened sound and less overtly profound lyrics.

He carried this strategy into his 2016 album Starboy a glossy, disco-funk effort boasting collaborations with Kendrick Lamar, Future, Daft Punk and Lana Del Rey. Starboy solidified Tesfaye as a global superstar and shot him into uncharted territory sonically.

On Starboy, he ventured into the 80s realm, sampling The Romantics and Tears for Fears on one track. But with After Hours The Weeknd has recorded an almost entirely 80s R&B dream album. Sonically, After Hours features electronic keyboards, flourishing synths and punchy often dark bass lines. Its distinctively a Weeknd sounding album, with a suite of songs showing remorse for a failed relationship one that seemed doomed from the start and offering hints of self-reflection along the way.

The album has 14 tracks and runs 62 minutes long, beginning with gentler, quieter songs. The Weeknd sets the mood for After Hours with the haunting tracks Alone Again and Too Late loaded with ominous keyboards and bass before shifting into the achingly painful Hardest To Love.

Its followed by Scared To Live, a slow-burning ballad that has The Weeknd apologizing for mistakes he made in his past relationship. Next up is the autobiographical Snowchild featuring lyrical memories from the singers upbringing in Toronto, Canada, and his come up in the music industry.

Roughly 25 minutes into the album, the vibe changes and the bangers are introduced starting with Heartless, a dark, bass-heavy Metro Boomin-produced track that has The Weeknd leaning into the toxic side of his persona. He makes it immediately clear where his head is at with the blunt opening line, Never need a b-, Im what a b- need.

His hedonism continues in Blinding Lights a track packed with layers of luminous synth textures and trembling hooks that are unmistakably 80s-sounding. The Weeknd rounds out his 80s saga with In Your Eyes and Save Your Tears, both featuring groovy electro-keyboard synths that are destined to become hits.

The good times and upbeat melodies soon end as the ominous atmosphere looms over the final two tracks, After Hours a track with heavy, pulsating beats and desperate lyrics and Until I Bleed Out. The abrupt, distorted ending of Until I Bleed Out suggests an unhappy ending for The Weeknd.

On After Hours, The Weeknds vision is clear hes crafted a cohesive album and visuals with a real narrative arc. The songs bleed together in an effortless precision with sonic references tying any unraveling threads together in the end. After Hours is a balance of the beauty and the madness that consume The Weeknd.

5/5 Stars

[emailprotected]

@oakley_burt

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The Weeknd Returns to Hopeless, Loveless Hedonism on 'After Hours' - Daily Utah Chronicle

In his latest album, After Hours, The Weeknd appears as a 1970s synth-pop star overcome by his own dark side. He casts himself as the victim of his own fameashamed of his wickedness, but too far gone to changeand the ensuing identity crisis reverberates throughout the album. No matter how forced it becomes, The Weeknd is desperate to convince listeners that he remains the contemptible, womanizing, intoxicated anti-hero that first captivated fans of his 2012 Trilogy.

The enthusiasm with which After Hours commits to its pop-star nightmare vibe is admirable, and there are moments when it is contagious. Blinding Lights and Scared to Live are two of several spine-tingling intersections between sumptuous production and eerily perfect vocals. The albums peak is Faith, which climaxes in The Weeknds best lyrical moment of the album: but if I O.D. / I want you to O.D. right beside / I want you to follow right behind. This is the Weeknd at his most extreme; equal parts superstar and suicidal, teetering between exaltation and self-loathing, and entirely indifferent to the personal destruction he leaves in his wake.

The albums highlights, however, are eclipsed by lows, particularly lyrical ones, bound to leave listeners wincing. Hardest to Love is a little more than a half-baked preamble to Scared to Live, and Save Your Tears is so generic that it could conceivably have been intended for any of Max Martins clients. Escape From L.A. is the worst offender, responsible for such lapses as She pulled up to the studio / Nobodys watching / She closed the door and then she locked it / For me, for me / We had sex in the studio. Despite its triumphant production, After Hourss lyricism is amusing at best (Futuristic sex give her Phillip K. Dick) and downright cringeworthy at worst.

The Weeknds inability to match sonic form with lyrical content on After Hours is suggestive of his more damning problem: His inability to convince anyone that he truly is the wretched, guilt-ridden virtuoso that After Hours claims he is. The self-loathing rings hollow, the regret feels contrived, and next to the wicked splendour of Trilogy, After Hours is as empty as the celebrity lifestyle it is meant to denounce. For all its pretensions, maybe After Hours is just a really well-produced break-up album about Bella Hadid.

Star Rating:

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The unconvincing hedonism of The Weeknd's After Hours - McGill Tribune

This is even bigger than an extenuating circumstance

Look, were all sick of hearing about coronavirus. You literally cannot escape from it, especially now that Boris has put Britain on lockdown. Its made life for everyone a hundred times more stressful, but particularly for students.

GCSEs and A-levels have been cancelled. Unis have suspended face to face teaching, seminars and lectures are done over Hangouts and Zoom calls and most exams and assessments have moved online.

Universities have tried to adapt, and this might be fine for some students, but what about those who are suddenly at a disadvantage as a result this? Not everyone has an expensive laptop, fast wifi, or the peace and quiet at home thats required to concentrate? What if students have a vulnerable family member that they need to care for, or cannot effectively access the internet? This could result in their grade for this year being significantly lower than if they had been able to access the resources available to other students, or that would have been available to us had we remained at uni if the world was back to normal.

I am struggling with exactly this. I study English at Aberdeen University, and personally, Im finding online learning impossible. I live in the countryside, without a stable internet connection. I have to sit on a particular step on my stairs to access Blackboard. I also have to assist with the care of my disabled sister, because the nurses and carers who would previously help us can no longer come to our house. Caring for someone is a 24/7 job, so where do I find the time to write an essay and teach myself exam material? Why should I have to be banished to sit halfway up the staircase for hours at a time, trying to find good referencing material without access to a library? The effort required is so extensive, far more than that required of students with adequate and comfortable surroundings, that it will undoubtedly set me back in terms of time and mental effort. I am not able to produce my best work, or be assessed accurately, in this kind of environment. Its not fair.

Also, it feels as this the universities across the UK have forgotten that there is also the issue of a global pandemic occurring outside? GCSEs and A Levels are cancelled for this very reason, why do they expect university exams to keep going? Universities are more likely to have summatives, January exams and coursework to base grades on anyway. These final assessments are not necessary. There are more pressing issues to focus on, compared to writing an essay about posthumanism literature, or filling in an exam about hedonism? I am struggling to teach myself the information I need to sit an exam. My current grades are not the best, due to a year filled with mental health issues. But even with that, I would much rather take the poor grades (still a pass), and have the rest of the year voided, than continue to have sleepless nights on my staircase, trying to listen to a lecture recording about modern literature.

There have been several petitions to cancel exams and coursework for university students since the majority of students were sent home and classes moved online. This is a very fair demand, and Im calling for it too. Especially for first and second years, since these results do not count towards our final grades later on in our courses. Third years, additionally, should not have to worry about their final degree outcome being affected by such a massive disruption. And the universities must also consider the fact that staff have been striking throughout March. Our learning process has been disrupted constantly, all year, and yet we are expected to carry on at home as if nothing is wrong!

Forcing students to continue studying for exams and submitting coursework is anxiety-inducing and unreasonable, especially for those who, like myself, do not have the easiest home circumstances. Surely there are more important things to be worrying about in the current times? I am asking for allowances to be made, because students deserve what has been widely described as exceptional circumstances to be treated as an extenuating circumstance. Void this year, please, and save your students grades from suffering any more than they already have.

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Working from home seriously disadvantages me, so I'm calling for unis to void this year - The Tab

Ive just published a novel called Sweetness and Light, a kind of thriller set in the seedy underbelly of expat hangouts on the international tourist circuit. It was a love letter to travel, something I always thought of as a wonderful, consciousness expanding thing. Once in a while you would find yourself in an unfamiliar place and experience a true intellectual or spiritual epiphany through exposure to different cultures and unfamiliar places. You would realise, fundamentally, were all in this together.

As of last weekend, this all seems hopelessly nostalgic.

As I write this, Ive got friends all over the world who a week ago were living and working overseas and are now being corralled into cramped holding areas in airports, trying desperately to get home. The Covid-19 outbreak, and the consequent implosion of social and political norms, has thrown into sharp relief how much about travelling we take for granted.

Some of those friends are tossing up whether to stay where they are: in countries where deeply ingrained social and political contracts seem to be containing the virus better than we are. This is a confronting idea in times of crisis its hard to shake the feeling that home is the safest place to be. Or that there might be better homes out there.

Im one of the lucky ones: Ive never had to worry that the invisible lines on the map would become impermeable; that freedom of movement was anything but an inalienable right. Travel was something I used to live for, in the halcyon days before I became aware that every flight I took inched the world closer to climate crisis, viral pandemic and/or economic collapse.

In the space of a week, aeroplanes went from a symbol of privilege, to a flying petri dish of nightmares, real and imagined, to something I would only get on in the case of emergency, to something jarringly absent from our skies. Australia is a big country. It suddenly feels claustrophobic.

States are shutting borders and families dispersed across the continents are having to make snap decisions to uproot and abandon homes, careers, partners, in order to be close to loved ones before the lockdowns.

When I started writing Sweetness and Light, I imagined the sort of book you might pick up from the bookshop to read on an aeroplane. It published into a world where both airlines and bookshops are shuttering up. Being a novelist has never seemed more farcically anachronistic.

In the novel I tried very hard to evoke a world where travellers are undone by their own hubris and privilege, where a vaguely sinister religious fundamentalist preyed on complacency and confusion.

A society with few uniting principles beyond hedonism and the acquisition of wealth is always going to be sorely tested under hardship

Then I turn on the television to find that an administration whose political rise was framed around stopping the boats had failed to prevent landfall of what is, for all intents and purposes, a medieval plague ship. The prime minister deals with it by handing down new policy at midnight in the form of a sphinx-like riddle and all I can do is throw my hands up in defeat. On a purely narrative level, I cant compete with this level of absurdity.

Maybe this was inevitable. A society with few uniting principles beyond hedonism and the acquisition of wealth is always going to be sorely tested under hardship. But I didnt expect us to figuratively shit the bed and literally shiv each other over toilet roll so quickly.

Ive never wanted to get out of Sydney more, and Ive never been more cognisant of the hubris and selfishness of running away from ones problems a thing Ive literally just written the book on.

It was my hope that this book would make people think about what they took for granted about their own travel habits those foundational, opaque layers of privilege that so many of us abused for so long. In some ways, its a horror story about the limits of empathy, the dehumanising of people born across the border from you.

Its about people who talk about wanting to find themselves, when what they mean is they want to find themselves in an economy where the exchange rate lets them live life with the consequence of a Monopoly game. Now Covid-19 has made clear that none of us are insulated from whats coming.

As a species we are careening into unprecedented territory, a viral epidemic that far outstrips our global capacity to treat it and an extant global crisis in trust and empathy.

The planes are grounded, and for the feckless and flighty like me, theres no running away from whats coming. It could be that those layers of privilege, comfort and safety we never think to appreciate are on their way out. Once again, the epiphany: were all in this. And were in it together. Stay inside. Look after each other. And please buy my book.

Sweetness and Light by Liam Pieper is out now through Penguin Random House.

Excerpt from:

I used to live for travel in fact, I just wrote the book on it. But theres no running away now - The Guardian

Alexandra Lange, Staff WriterMarch 25, 2020

Every album by The Weeknd gives listeners a glimpse into the sad-boy universe of Abel Tesfaye. Often singing about loneliness, failed romance, his inability to love and battles with his inner self, The Weeknd never fails to get his XO fanbase in their feels. At a time in which the streets are all but deserted and people are isolated across the globe, The Weeknds dark, solitary universe has become more relatable than ever.

After Hours, The Weeknds long-awaited fourth studio album, is a spookily appropriate reflection of the times we are living in. Dark, moody and told from the perspective of a lonely narrator, the album captures the way many of us are feeling in a world filled with anxiety and uncertainty. Although the projects eerily timed drop may seem as if The Weeknd is capitalizing on this bleak moment in time, After Hours was long in the making. In fact, it is Tesfayes most cohesive and fully realized album to date, meshing the pop-noir of his early career with the glitzy 80s nostalgia of his more recent releases.

The Weeknd established himself as an R&B star thanks to three 2011 mixtapes, in which he crafted an entirely new strain of R&B, reveling in his own hedonism and singing in his signature piercing falsetto about despondent narratives. His dark introspection bled into his debut album Kiss Land, giving Tesfaye cult status among R&B fans. However, it was his 2015 album Beauty Behind The Madness that truly made The Weeknd a superstar. Teaming up with Max Martin, arguably the most successful producer-songwriter of the past 25 years, the album spawned several massive singles, including I Cant Feel My Face and In The Night. A year later, he followed up his Grammy-winning album with the pop-centric Starboy, which was filled with radio-friendly, groove-heavy tracks. This project was followed up by a four-year hiatus in which The Weeknd released a low-key EP and embarked on two tours.

After Hours is a cohesive blend of all The Weeknds phases. It strikes a seamless balance between the hazy trap beats of Kiss Land and the upbeat 80s synths of Starboy. The only notable change in Tesfayes sad-boy persona is the tinge of remorse that runs through his latest project, compared to the cold tone of his earlier tracks.

Promising his latest release would feature no more daytime music and would be a new brain melting psychotic chapter, The Weeknd begins After Hours unexpectedly with a string of quiet, gentler songs. The opener, Alone Again, is loaded with cinematic, ominous keyboards and twinkling synths, setting the throwback mood for the album as Tesfaye begs his lover to break (his) little, cold heart. He continues to deal with his loneliness and places the blame for his failed romances on himself on the throbbing, unplugged Too Late and the Max Martin co-produced Hardest to Love.

The project smoothly transitions into Scared To Live, a slow-burning ballad that interpolates Elton Johns Your Song. The Weeknd touches on his on-again-off-again relationship with Bella Hadid, encouraging his ex to not be afraid to move on while still longing for her when he sings I should have made you my only / When its said and done. On Snowchild, the albums most visceral track, Tesfaye reminisces about life before his come-up: memories of his Toronto childhood, drug-filled teen years and contemporary references to his lack of fulfillment with fame. Cali was the mission, he says before expressing a desire to leave, displaying his growth from his 2011 song The Morning when he sang Order plane tickets / Cali is the mission and the 2015 Tell Your Friends when he sang MIA a habit / Cali was the mission.

Side B of the album is packed with pop-bangers, including Blinding Lights and Heartless, which are already among the biggest hits of Tesfayes career. One of the projects standout moments comes on In Your Eyes, thanks to the Careless Whisper-esque saxophone solo that takes the track to a truly nostalgic level.

The Weeknd returns to his typical cold nature on Save Your Tears. Although it is one of the most pop-driven songs on the album, it is filled with personal anecdotes. Tesfaye refers to the impact both Hadid and his other famous ex-girlfriend, Selena Gomez, had on him. He acknowledges that his heartlessness in his breakup with Hadid stemmed from the heartbreak he felt when Gomez left him, singing, I broke your heart like someone did to mine / And now you wont love me for a second time.

The moody album comes to a close with the pulsating title track and then the tragic finale Until I Bleed Out, in which The Weeknd admits he feels paralyzed and terrified after giving his entire heart to someone and realizing it still wasnt enough. I wanna cut you outta my dreams, he cries.

The Weeknd has always been a master at contrasts and is at his finest on his latest project. Smoothly integrating beauty and madness, innovation and commerciality and loneliness and togetherness, After Hours is one of The Weeknds greatest gifts. It is a blinding light amid the worst of situations, distracting listeners from their loneliness and comforting them in the fact that someone else is experiencing the same isolation we all are feeling.

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The Weeknd's New Album Cuts Through the Isolation - Fordham Ram

TAPE, a #MeToo-era film, manages to be both overwrought and hyperliteral. In the films opening sequence, Rosa (Annarosa Mudd, who also produced), a former actress, pierces her own tongue, shaves her head, and (trigger warning) slits her wristsbut not quite suicidally. Shes on a revenge mission to get evidence against an abusive movie producer who now has a new crop of identical young women to prey on.

A compelling aspect of TAPE is that it refuses to render the abuser, a guy simply named Lux (Tarek Bishara), monstrous. Hes conventionally attractive, charming, and, at first, professional. He uses nonviolent communication and reels in his victims with finely-tuned grooming techniques. Unfortunately, writer-director Deborah Kampmeiers script is full of cliches and histrionics that spin the film into an after school special rather than a searing commentary; the ways abusers can insinuate themselves into the lives of others and manufacture their consent by exploiting not just naked ambition but existential fear gets lost in the films artless noise.

As a director, Kampmeier fashions Rosas spying into a multilayered gaze, but weve seen the gimmick before. The film relies too heavily on foregrounding the digital technology Rosa uses to spy on Lux and his new conquestthe kind, desperate, and lonely upstart actress Jessica (Isabelle Fuhrman)seemingly under the illusion that hidden cameras and an iPad offer a bold and empowered way of seeing.

Julie Taymors 1999 Titus Andronicus film adaptation is the films central inspiration, but Kampmeier takes surface-level notes from Taymors innovations. Rosas opening scene costumes her as Lavinia, the tragedys sacrifice to unchecked hedonism, but TAPE is uninterested in the major theme of female complicity in abuse and destruction in the playTamora, the mother of Lavinias rapists, revels in violencenor does it examine the sexist virgin and whore castings that determine the demises of both women. In that way, TAPE is a simplification of the plays female subjectivities. Rosas drive is to expose her abuser and Jessicas is to succeed as an actress; both are virgins merely manipulated into whores, and the viewer is meant to believe Lux is the evil genius behind it all, about to be bested by very expensive home video technology.

The trouble with this perspective on abuseparticularly the kinds of abuse that are difficult to make sense of through the narratives the law providesis that it turns women into infants who can only defend themselves with the tools, if not the direct intervention, of the state. Rosa rejects a carceral approach to punishing Lux (to her, the prison sentences for sexual abuse are not long enough); instead, she accepts extreme surveillance as an alternative. Rosa is even willing to (spoiler) expose Jessicas private interactions with Lux to the public without her consent. In that way, Rosas Lavinia morphs into a hackneyed Tamora by using the violence of others as the means for her own bloodied liberation.

In the end, TAPE seems to land on disclosure, the very mechanism of the Hollywood #MeToo movement, as the wisest method for liberation or healing. A journalist gets the tapes Lux made of both Rosa and Jessica with contextual information showing his methods of manipulation; meanwhile, Rosa and Jessica are finally able to bond in a caf as women tell the stories of their rapes to each other. There are no revelations in these scenes, but rather, a breathless restaging of the age-old storytelling methodology.

But what are struggling actresses to do? Throughout the film, Jessica dutifully rattles off reasons why its easy to exploit and manipulate actresses in the film and television industry: misogyny, hierarchy, scarcity, precariousness. In other words, capitalism reinforces the various abuses of power that working women are subject to. Because these actresses must not only do good work but make money for producers and corporations, they are often at the mercy of their handlers and benefactors. Even if these actresses become wise and hardened, at the end of the day, their images are up for sale, and the profits go to the highest bidders.

Under the current system, for actors to form collectives or cooperatives without ample money or status to back it up would ensure a kind of lifelong poverty and obscurity thats only normalized in the theater (a sphere racked with economic exploitations that depend on both passion and patronage). Thats showbiz, anyhow. To my great disappointment, TAPE has nothing new or generative to say about it.

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The Hollywood #MeToo Movie Inspired by a Weinstein-Esque Creep - The Daily Beast

In the midst of the greatest threat to individual liberty not to mention health and livelihood that most of us have experienced in our lives, it is a sad inevitability that the hospitality industry has taken the first economic hit. What we dont know at the moment is if this is a recoverable, if irritating, situation that can be overcome with patience, good humour and forbearance, or if it spells the end of many of the interesting drinking and dining options that we have in this country.

Yet there is something that individuals can do to support their local restaurant rather than simply writing posts of solidarity on social media (and those help, too). A surprisingly and hearteningly large number have converted themselves into temporary takeaways, with many also offering home delivery.

It has now become something of a civic duty to support your local restaurant or pub in these straitened and deeply unsettling times. As Geoff Norcott remarked on social media recently, announcing his intention to go 100% takeaway, 1. Supermarkets have earned enough, 2. Local businesses need support 3. Ive always wanted to live like this.

Here are some of the best and most interesting ones (although, of course, this is all subject to rapid change; some places that initially announced that they would do takeaway and home delivery sadly realised that it was logistically impossible):

Mackerel dish at Hide, London

Ollie Dabbous Michelin-starred Mecca in Central London is launching a distinctly upmarket delivery service. A glance at the menu reveals that caviar, 50 day aged short-horn-beef rib and barbecued octopus are just a few of the delights that can be ordered, on the grounds that they travel particularly well. To make the whole experience that bit more upmarket, wines from Hedonism can be selected alongside them to pair perfectly.

https://www.hide.co.uk

12.51, Islington

If youre an Islington resident who has fancied trying James Cochrans much-acclaimed restaurant, but has somehow never found the time to visit, then his new Around the Cluck service will surely answer your prayers. Offering a range of casual and inexpensively priced dishes, including Jamaican jerk chicken with Scotch bonnet jam and glazed crispy pork belly, they offer collection, or for the elderly, vulnerable or public sector workers, James will deliver it to your house himself on his bike.

https://www.1251.co.uk

Spinach pasta, crucsco chilli, agretti, breadcrumbs at Pastaio

Stevie Parles much-beloved pasta restaurant has traditionally been tricky to nab a spot at, which makes its advent to your homes all the better an opportunity to sample it. However, Parle and his team are going a step further at this trickiest of times, offering a special delivery service of freshly made pasta, at 5 for 500g, and store cupboard staples including semolina flour. Or maybe youd want just to dive straight into the carbonara bucatini and rigatoni with wild mushrooms and garlic, parmesan and olive oil.

https://pastaio.co.uk

Indian small plates from Kricket, London

The Indian small plates specialist Kricket has never been behind the curve since it opened, and so it continues to innovate and look forward now. Diners can enjoy some truly special treats including pork cheek vindaloo, keralan fried chicken and hyderabadi baby aubergine, or treat themselves to an isolation feast for one, which will include a main dish, a pilau rice, a papad, mango chutney and raita, and a sharing starter with the main for two.

https://kricket.co.uk

Aged parmesan risotto with truffle, Margot

It is particularly sad that Italy has been so horribly affected by the current crisis, but their cuisine is never going to pall. Covent Gardens exemplary restaurant has joined the band of places offering top-quality dishes that can now be enjoyed at home, and we have high hopes that the gnocchi with veal ragu, lobster ravioli and perfect spicy baby chicken will be a few included. A shame, really, that the exemplary service cant be included but soon it can be enjoyed in situ once again.

https://www.margotrestaurant.com

Black Axe Mangal, Highbury

Highburys ace kebab emporium has attracted endless praise for its superb, boundary-pushing food, but people have occasionally winced at the lengthy queues and ear-splitting music. Well, they talk about clouds and silver linings, and now you can enjoy their deliciousness at home, without any need to wait in line or to hear loud heavy metal at top decibels; we do, of course, understand that this also adds to the appeal for many.

https://www.blackaxemangal.com

Angelina, Dalston, London

This Dalston Italian-Japanese spot opened to critical praise a little while ago, and now theyre ahead of the curve with the response to the crisis. Not only can you get their ramen and risotto delivered to your home, but theyve gone the extra mile to make sure that you can have a decent drink to go along with it. Their cocktail selection is vacuum packed for transportation, and their wine list is available, so if you wanted a Venetian Sour or Waquila, now is your chance.

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Crisp fried herbed polenta, mixed kale, tenderstem broccoli and a pumpkin seed, shallot & fig leaf dressing from Hood, Streatham

I asked for recommendations of local places on social media, and several different people recommended this exemplary spot separately. Their response to the situation was to reinvent themselves as a pop-up shop, open from Monday to Friday and selling everything from comfort food like Cornish fish pie and braised lamb with pearl barley and root vegetables to supplies like craft beer, wine and, for the non-alcoholically inclined, lots of soft drinks too.

Read more from the original source:

8 London restaurants that will deliver during lockdown - Spectator.co.uk

Crisis. A situation where danger and opportunity intersect. In the last several weeks, weve heard and learned a lot about the danger and suffering caused by Covid-19. But opportunities are here too, and not only for soap producers and bitcoin holders. This is not to downplay the gravity of the situation, but rather go back to the root of the word crisis, and its original meaning of choice. This brutal challenge to our existing systems may open new windows of opportunity for long-awaited change.

Heres a list of 16 positive changes to the collective mindset this era of emergency may bring.

From aquaponics to vertical urban gardens, plant-based diets, and desktop 3D printers, this situation will make many of us see the benefits of relying on locally sourced food and goodsinstead of products demanding long and distant supply chains. These practices have been widely advocated for from a sustainability point of view, but this kind of self-sufficiency is ultimately about power. About how independence brings you to a position where, instead of just crossing your fingers and hoping government leaders will do a good enough job protecting you, you can maintain some influence over your own destiny and that of your loved ones.

As yet, no region has experienced a power outage due to the systemic consequences of this pandemic. It would, however, be naive to think that it will not happen in certain places. Whether you end up personally affected currently depends on the border lotterywhere you happened to be born and where you happened to be stranded during the outbreak. Solar panels mark the move away from a more or less centralized system supplying the juicy electricity we all love. The benefit of decentralized systems is, simply put, that they dont have central points of failure. Again, solar panels have been sold as a morally superior option, a way to do the right thing for the planetbut the Covid times will reveal how much they can also be a matter of personal agency.

Our species now has the technology to deliver all sorts of products to the doors of any self- or forcefully quarantined person. So far, drones have largely been known as a way to deliver violence and conduct surveillance. But as with any technology, they function like muscles, helping us realize our desires, constructive or destructive. In the case of Covid, this could mean automating many systems at scale, delivery drones and disinfecting robots marking a mere humble beginning. There are already examples of NGOs using drones to carry medicines to remote locations with impressive precision. Now that the ability to get goods without human touch is a more appealing value proposition than ever, mainstream adoption could be driven forward by an immense increase in drone delivery demand.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Bertrand Russell, Milton Friedman, and many others agreed that a civilized society ought to provide its citizens with money for basic needs to ensure no one ever has to live in a state of indecent desperation.

Automation has made this topic steaming hot, with US presidential hopeful Andrew Yang running on the policy, before suspending his campaign. During the current (or impending) lockdown, many jobs will, and have already, vanished overnight. Stock market losses reflect a concern for just how big a change in consumption this could bring.

In light of this, Hong Kong already approved a kind of emergency UBI, giving each citizen 10,000 Hong Kong dollars (about $1,290). Proposals to grant a monthly cash transfer to all citizens over the course of the pandemic have been supported by liberals and conservatives alike in many other states too. Learnings from these experiments, others already underway, and those very likely to follow, will yield considerable new knowledge and help complete the picture Rutger Bregman skillfully depicted on previous UBI experiments in his book Utopia for Realists (2017).

Citizens of the world right now have a front-row seat to watch how differently leaders around the world are handling the very same disease. Once the dust settles and figures can be studied, well be able to see what worked and what didnt. But more than that, well have a strong example of how arbitrary the choices that leaders make can be. People have already died because a certain leader took the wrong approach at the wrong time. This doesnt have to mean citizens no longer trust anyone. Rather, we should demand that more than success at the polls or holding an office be treated as sufficient authority in questions where there is science to consider.

What do we need? Jenny Odells How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) ignited a lot of excitement last year. It questioned how many of the activities were involved in every day actually benefit us. Doing less has its perks, for the climate and the environment as a whole, as well as for our stress levels and peace of mind. Covid-19 will, at least for a time, bring an extreme decrease in productivity. This will also give us a new baseline to compare with our normal lives. When we find ourselves forced to stop for a while, what will we end up really missingand what wont we miss at all? Hitting the pause button will give us an opportunity to take stock of what really deserves the glory in our glorification of being busy.

Quarantine can be an introverts dreamuntil the internet stops working. Hopefully, this wont happen. But if we were running decentralized internet protocols, we could move from hoping to knowing. The internet was built to be resilient in times of crisis.Over time, however, a small number of companies have come to own a large number of the servers directing traffic. This undercuts the internets celebrated design feature of decentralization. Amazon Web Services, for example, operates a whopping third of the servers running the cloud. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a new protocol we could adopt to make the internet properly peer-to-peer againmeaning, it might give us an internet more equipped for a crisis.

And just like that, accuracy mattered. As we face a range of possible scenarios, from the mild to the frankly catastrophic, we can feel it collectively now: We want to know the facts. How much should we fear a sneeze? A handshake? Is everything under control, or should we stock up on food and water at home? We want to know. Not guess, but know. And even though doubt in science has grown ever greater in recent years, you dont see hordes of people turning down the thought of a vaccine now.

Social distancing is luckily happening in a time when we already love to be social far, far away from one another. The meetings that could have been emails have quickly turned into emails. For the rest, theres telepresence, video conferencing, and even digital avatars and virtual stages. The longer the quarantine, the more well see whatever brings us our loved ones and colleagues in high definition as the best thing since stock crackers. That summits and concerts are finding digital iterations is all great news for a world thats been relying on air travel far more than carbon budgets allow. In terms of aviation, what is a state of emergency now, great telepresence services could help make far more normal after the virus.

Blackouts and snow-ins result in baby bumps: this has been commonly observed. Is it that when youre stuck at home, sex is the next best option? Or is it that in times of despair, the prospect of bringing a new life into the world is a bulwark against the sense of impending doom? Whatever it is, you might look forward to some lustful pleasures during the quarantine. And if you dont feel like this is the right time for you to conceive the next generation, you might consider stocking up on contraceptives while (or if) you can. Suggested names of this generation to come: Quaranteens or Coronials.

The true value of the labor that keeps societyand our sanityafloat, is now being keenly felt. People homeschooling their children are expressing new appreciation for teachers day-to-day. Garbage collectors and delivery people are receiving proper thank-yous for usually thankless services. And the health care providers risking their own health for the sake of others are now receiving a measure of gratitude. Were learning whats essential. Now, instead of paying the heroes of this crisis with nothing but applause, could this sudden appreciation instead take a monetary form and translate into better pay for our most crucial professions?

And just like that, you did get the time to finish your novel. The same is true for a myriad of artists, currently in lockdown, many of them likely creating their most inspired pieces yet. Shakespeare famously wrote King Lear during his time in quarantine. From the existential motives of serious filmmakers to the escapist hedonism and meme extraordinairesa pandemic, in all its brutality, can be quite the muse.

As bad as Covid-19 is, those of us in the global catastrophic risk community know there are far worse scenarios, and we can get far better at preparing and de-risking our lives. Books like Feeding Everyone No Matter What (2014) by David Denkenberger has never before gotten the attention they deserve. We could use this situation to change that, making us wiser and more resilient in the face of vaster issues. Proposals like Denkenbergers to develop large-scale storage, underground mushroom farms, or even bacteria-based foods to survive a potential nuclear winter or supervolcanic eruption no longer seem as eccentric as they once did. Rather, they seem wise and considered, as the words hope for the best, plan for the worst are beginning to more widely resonate.

The status and suffering of the elderly is generally scarcely covered. Before this pandemic, 100,000 people died from illnesses directly related to the underlying condition of an aged bodyevery single day. As Covid-19 is disproportionately affecting the older part of the population and medical professionals are making calls based on age, this issue ought to see serious momentum. Intergenerational solidarity could become more of a thing as we come to fully realize that an able-bodied condition is ever so temporary. Healthspanand lifespanextension is a problem we might more seriously use our collective talent to combat, as we give more weight to the argument often put forward by those in the field that aging ought to be classified as a disease.

Particularly when it comes to debt. The Federal Reserve is offering $1.5 trillion in short-term loans (and a whole lot more is on the way) to stabilize the market due to Covid-19. In a world where fiat currencies are only backed by belief, a lot can be done once there is sufficient support. By comparison, the total amount of student loan debt in the US is $1.6 trillion. If you want to study a concept during all your in-house downtime, maybe look up debt jubilee. Or, if youre looking for a longer read, theres David Graebers Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011). A lot of time in your house means a lot of time to learn and organize for change with people who share your beliefs and could amplify them. Whether in relation to debt, or something else.

In the 90s, some thinkers focused on globalization argued that our shared global village was turning into a McWorld, with consumer culture as its common denominator. Arguably, there is something far more wholesome all humans have in common: We all want a safe tomorrow. In Covid-19, weve found a common enemy, attacking people regardless of their appearance or passport.

This takes us back to that original meaning of crisis: the present situation offers a choice. Either we try to piece the world back together as it was before this catastrophic occurrence, or we can use this shared event as the founding moment of a unifying global narrative. One acknowledging that underneath our badges of belonging we are all vulnerable bodies, very much dependent on each other and on systems of governance.

Weve been aware of our global interconnectedness for some time, every second TED talk makes reference to it. But weve never felt it as much as we do now. Weve already witnessed the lack of global coordination to control the spread of the virus early on. We are now witnessing how the government of each state is turning this shared global event into so many singular, nationally defined experiences.

All this tells the tale of a world that has become interlinked, yet holds on to a governance model pretending were not. This can change. We can tell another story. One that demands global risks receive a global response and proclaims that certain issues are so important they stand above all partisanship. A virus can spread quickly and change us profoundly. So can an idea. Stuck, alone in our houses, there has never been a better time to come together.

Image Credit: Ahmed Zayan /Unsplash

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16 Ways Coronavirus May Change the Way We Look at the World - Singularity Hub

I changed music five or six times what have you done? Miles Davis famously crowed at a White House dinner late in his life. Never a man known for his modesty, for once the Prince of Darkness was selling himself short.

By our count, there are at least eight occasions on which the worlds most recognisable (and bestselling) jazz musician has played a pivotal role in changing the course of music for evermore.

A major career-spanning documentary Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool is now on Netflix a film that charts the musical pioneers career and features previously unseen interviews with his friends, family, collaborators and admirers, including guitarist Carlos Santana. Its timely release isnt coincidental, either, and comes 50 years after Daviss most commercial period was about to begin. Lets take a walk through the history of post-war improvised music via the work of its most restless innovator.

In 1944, an 18-year-old Miles Davis left East St Louis to study music at New Yorks prestigious Juilliard School. His real education, however, was in the clubs of 52nd Street, then booming with the frenetic, virtuosic, breakneck-tempo bebop of the time.

Within months, Davis was cutting his teeth as a member of troubled sax player Charlie Parkers band, but in truth, the trumpeters own improvisational flights were never as sharp or showy as those of his contemporaries.

His answer was to slow tempos, bring in extra harmonies and horns, and alongside arranger Gil Evans, make a series of chilled, classically influenced nonet chamber recordings that would later be collected as the album Birth of the Cool and credited with kick-starting the cool jazz wave to come.

Before the LP age, jazz records were typically bite-sized, few-minute snapshots often offering star soloists just a 32-bar cycle to blow and shine.

Taking cues from the bandstand workouts of the day, Davis let his players stretch out over the basic blues progression Walkin (1954), which wound up at 13 minutes long, a showy swagger steeped in the groovy R&B and earthy gospel influences that came to characterise the hard-bop sound which would dominate the next decade of jazz most especially on the music of era-defining Blue Note Records.

In 1955, Davis ascended from being a jazz star to a household name after signing with the mainstream might of Columbia Records.

He put this new influence and budget to good use, reviving his partnership with Evans to conceive Miles Ahead (1957), the first of three seminal albums that pit his breathy, tender trumpet exertions over the luscious textures of a 19-piece orchestra.

Followed by the Gershwin collection Porgy and Bess (1959) and flamenco-flavoured Sketches of Spain (1960), this trio collectively popularised the jazz-classical hybrid known as Third Stream.

Davis severed himself from 50 years of harmonic jazz convention with the 1958 composition Milestones and, most famously, the ever-enduring, first-take-only sextet session of 1959 Kind of Blue, which is widely celebrated as the bestselling jazz album ever.

Davis' pioneering approach to composition freed players up to stretch out in a single tonality, in the same way trippy blues-rock musicians would play 10 years later. On the revelatory track Flamenco Sketches, soloists were presented a list of five modes to improvise in at leisure, the rhythm section following rather than dictating the harmony, shifting chord only when the soloist chose to move to a new tonality. Breathtaking.

Craving new ideas, in the mid-1960s, when he was in his mid-forties, Davis began assembling a new band of musicians half his age including future stars Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter who would collectively usher in a new democratic musical model known as post-bop, which would change jazz for ever.

miOften using Shorters oblique compositions for fuel, the Second Great Quintet broke down the conventional soloist and rhythm section approach with a telepathic time, no changes philosophy that allowed song structures to unfold in real-time. The highest form of spontaneous musical expression.

For all his earlier innovations in jazz, arguably none of Daviss skin-shedding stunts had a wider influence on pop culture than his early 1970s electric reinvention, heralded by the arrival of ... Brew the undefinable improvisatory assault of an album that celebrates its 50th anniversary on Monday, March 30.

About seven months earlier, Davis assembled more than a dozen musicians including two drummers, two bassists and three electric keyboardists at Columbias New York studios, and over only three days, directed deep, dark, shamanic jams that conjured something entirely new and utterly beguiling.

Intoxicating to rock fans and festivals, once-slick-suited Davis was reborn as a scarf-toting counterculture hero, while the records principle players would go on to pack arenas playing that much-maligned marriage of jazz and rock that came to be known as fusion.

James Brown invented funk in the mid-1960s. Sly Stone channelled Jimi Hendrix and helped birth funk-rock. Davis took note and wanted a piece of that lucrative, block-party-starting pie. The term jazz-funk would soon come to epitomise smooth, smoochy, noodly, blandness, thats no charge you can level at Davis dense, groovy improvised On the Corner LP. It again featured Hancock, whose own subsequent 1970s recordings, beginning a year later with million-seller Head Hunters, would go on to define the genre more than anybodys.

Sounds crazy, right? But there are semi-legitimate arguments and compelling corners of the internet that argue that the relentless, polyrhythmic wig-out Rated X laid the tracks for the genre to emerge across the pond two decades later. Just listen to the way backbeats and downbeats are reversed (or what translates as a bass drum and a snare), creating a squelching percussive tumult that overrode discernible melody in a way that biographer John Szwed calls the birth of ambient jazz. Its not even the weirdest moment on Get Up with It (1974), a two-hour opus of unnerving offcuts that contained Daviss final studio recordings before a six-year hiatus.

After a lost half-decade of hedonism and health problems, Davis re-emerged in 1981 with another sonic reinvention awkwardly reconciling a 1980s pop aesthetic with some pretty deep jamming. A period that remains divisive to this day, things reached a peak, of sorts, with Youre Under Arrest (1985), which included Daviss instrumental takes on Michael Jacksons Human Nature and Cyndi Laupers Time After Time which offered a sense of legitimacy to the smooth jazz that was to haunt US radio for decades to come.

Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool is on Netflix now

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Updated: March 26, 2020 11:03 AM

Originally posted here:

'Birth of the Cool': 9 ways Miles Davis changed the music scene forever - The National

We could kind of understand the logic of museums and galleries still being open, and we looked at what [other museums] were doing, taking away their interactive components or reducing their touch screens, MOD. director Kristin Alford tells The Adelaide Review. But for us, when we did the risk management, there was literally one gallery left and that was watching a film. Everything else is hands on and touching.

Although we increased the cleaning regime and encouraged people to wash their hands before and after, and social distancing, for me it just got to the point where we couldnt give people a great experience in the gallery. And, as a museum thats focussed on the future and the communication of science, I felt it was far more responsible of us to close early.

With the federal government officially forcing all museums and galleries around the country to close last night, MOD. now finds itself charging headfirst into a bold and challenging new reality for the sector. But with no traditional collection, and a fairly agnostic definition of what makes a museum at the best of times, MOD. was already geared towards adaptation.

At the beginning of the year when people started coming back into the [Seven Siblings from the Future] exhibition after the bushfires, there were lots of really important conversations with the community [who were] grappling with that. So we made some alterations to the exhibition to account for how people were feeling.

Then a few weeks ago we started thinking, we should really add some things to the gallery to help people process what theyre hearing about COVID-19. We designed these additions but just didnt get them in in time!

What closing early has enabled us to do is rather than focussing on mitigating a risk bit by bit, weve been able to refocus and settle on what a new normal might be. Which has allowed us to then think through what we would like to do, and, admittedly very quickly, come up with the skeleton of a new exhibition. Thats more rewarding than constantly mitigating risk.

So for us closing early was definitely driven by the type of interactive we have, but doing that has allowed us to rethink what the next six months could be like, while still delivering our mission.

First, that involved taking to Facebook Live for daily virtual tours and deep and meaningful sessions tied to Seven Siblings from the Future, an exhibition exploring the complex ethical and philosophical questions of a recognisable future Australia transformed by technological and environmental change. Its only taken a few months, Alford says, for the real world to start making up the distance. Take the character of Alex, for instance, one of the siblings whose work as a remotely-based, teleconferencing nurse raises questions of privacy and bioethics.

We know that Alex works in e-health, and theres lots of information coming in about his patients, she says. But how did that happen? I think COVID-19 offers a fairly good example of how that 2050, that future, would make sense how we might have circumvented a lot of the regulatory environment or concerns that people had prior to March 2020.

This week, MOD. will launch Life Interrupted, its first online-only exhibition since the beginning of the crisis. The exhibition itself is a mixture of some things weve created for previous exhibitions that were repurposing and remodelling for a digital environment. Some of this includes the compliments booth from Hedonism were looking at redoing that for a digital environment, so people have a simulated way of making themselves feel good. People might need that a lot.

Weve also got a group of our moderators setting up a space in Minecraft where people can create nature in Minecraft, to see if we can get the same feeling of being in a natural space online. Other planned programs, such as its Futures Unlearned talks, will be run online, covering such topical questions as what does leadership look like in an age of uncertainty?

But looking more broadly, Alford suspects the period of downtime will usher in some long-lasting, and perhaps overdue, shifts in how the public engages with museums and vice versa.

The indicators towards collapse or transformation are very similar it just depends what happens next, she reflects. We have to get through the now, but as we move through the recovery period and start to go back to normal, we will be altered by this experience. Its hard to go back to how things were, and for museums or gallery spaces that might mean rethinking the types of topics they talk about, it might be rethinking the types of spaces theyve created, it might be rethinking the architecture of spaces.

There are questions of whether this environment will allow some better practices around online learning to emerge; we have to start thinking, is a mix of physical and online exhibitions what we should be doing in the future? And how do we do things in both spaces?

Digital Editor

Walter is a writer, editor and broadcaster living on Kaurna Country. His work has appeared in Rip It Up, The Saturday Paper, Smith Journal, Royal Auto, Swampland Magazine, Broadsheet andThe Thousands.

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From Zoom to Minecraft, what will the 'new normal' for Australian museums look like? - The Adelaide Review