TrendyWebAltar

@TrendyWebAltar@evil.social

PhD candidate in screen studies

thesis examines audiovisual and other non-aural means of delivering musical content (primarily #MusicVideo but not just)

(I currently focus on the work of South Korean pop group #BTS to demonstrate how intermedial performances of values, meanings, and identities connect with the broader phenomena of cosmopolitanism in pop music)

also at https://zirk.us/@TrendyWebAltar (but no longer actively posting there, because I may migrate from that account)

https://justmytoots.com/@TrendyWebAltar@evil.social

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TrendyWebAltar, to random

From my perspectives as a and an , every time people my age bring up the so-called "fragility" of young people today, all I can think of is how, if true, much of that is the fault of parents and teachers.

TrendyWebAltar, to MadMax

#Furiosa seems extremely niche. Casual audiences with only a marginal interest in the franchise may enjoy it but perhaps only to a limited extent. The diehard #MadMax #fan whose investment in the world of these movies is conflated with their investment in Max's perspective will probably dislike it.

I personally loved Furiosa, but throughout my multiple viewings of these movies, one constant has been that I find Max cool to watch but have little interest in him as a person/character and more of a figure around which other characters circle. Apart from the first act of the first movie, the scenes where Max is humanised mostly happen in Fury Road, the Mad Max movie where he isn't (quite) the protagonist.

I think of Furiosa as a better execution of the kind of mythic tendencies that Beyond Thunderdome tried to go for. That it does this without Max makes it an even more impressive feat of storytelling.

@movies

TrendyWebAltar, to music

Better a Modest Mouse than an Arrogant Rodent.

@music

TrendyWebAltar, to DaftPunk

Fine Young Cannibals is the band I think of whenever I read music crit (about any band, album, or song) that describe #pop #music in terms of "distillation."

In terms of their career, they gave us only two studio albums, each one lasting 35 minutes with ten #songs.

The records show the band's diverse musicality, presenting a range of pop sounds but not as a catalogue of musical style, moving from one song to the next. Instead, what they offer is more of a blend. Each song feels like it comes from the same musical stock but also gives us a distinct flavour that lingers for as long as the song lasts.

I also like how they had one cover for each record. On the first was Elvis Presley's "Suspicious Minds," and on the second was the Buzzcocks' "Ever Fallen in Love." That says a whole lot right there.

@music

TrendyWebAltar, to music

I'm listening to Control, a 2007 record by a band named GoodBooks.

I know very little about them, but I must have read something significant, because I saved that record to my YouTube library sometime before.

The algo reminded me about it, calling it a Forgotten Favorite or something like that, which is half-correct. I had Forgotten why I saved this record to listen to later.

You know what? It's really good though, and I think it might become a Favorite, so I guess the label is heading towards completely correct.

@music

TrendyWebAltar, to music

Eric Wolfson's Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular : From The Beatles to Beyoncé seems like a really fascinating book as a whole, but I can't stop thinking about how the Simple Minds record Once Upon a Time is a concept album...I had no idea!

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/fifty-years-of-the-concept-album-in-popular-music-9781501391804/

TrendyWebAltar, to Goth

Still thinking about #TheCrow and, among other things, genre purism.

By the time I was introduced to the character through the 1994 film, I had already been immersed in #goth culture for more than half a decade. That's more than enough time to be young and dumb and into the musical tribalism so common at the time. By the 1990s, however, I got all of that out of my system and so could recognise how the 1994 movie was goth but never purely so.

Even the soundtrack shows this. While it did have The Cure's "Burn," sounding like a 1990s version of "The Hanging Garden" (the lyrics of which were included in the comic) and one of my favourite Cure songs of all time, the song that seems most emblematic here might be "Dead Souls," not the Joy Division original but the Nine Inch Nails cover. A soundtrack gathering the Stone Temple Pilots, the Rollins Band, Helmet, Rage Against the Machine, Pantera, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Violent Femmes, etc. is not notable for being a goth record but for being representative of the mainstreaming of alt-rock in the 1990s and the breadth and range of the sounds at the time.

It took another three years before I finally got around to reading the comic book, by the way, around 1997 maybe. While reading the comic drives home the sheer gothiness of it all--again we have lyrics and references to the Cure and Joy Division but also Baudelaire and Rimbaud and author James O'Barr's own poetry, etc.--it's kinda amusing that the additional Eric-Shelly flashbacks in the later special edition (that I don't have) include a Cheap Trick reference; "Surrender" is Shelly's fave song--not very goth, that one!

All this brings me to the upcoming Crow movie. If I have a worry with the film, it would have to be with director Rupert Sanders, whose previous movies Snow White and the Huntsman and Ghost in the Shell I didn't really enjoy. The cast seems great though. Main villain seems to be Danny Huston, who I've been absolutely entranced by since Thirty Days of Night. I also like Bill Skarsgård a great deal and though I've never seen FKA Twigs act, I not only like her music but also how she uses her body for expression. I'm really hoping to see her play to her strengths.

Some of the comments I've seen about the new Crow movie is really about how the movie looks, particularly Skarsgård as Eric. Yeah, he doesn't look as cool as Brandon Lee does, but it's really just hair and clothes that are radically different. I mean, his body is lean and muscular, sinewy, like in the comics. Perhaps the mistake here was making another Eric Draven story, which seems like an attempt to avoid the mediocrity of the Crow sequels by cashing in on nostalgia, a commercial decision that seems to have failed, since most people I know that remember Brandon Lee's Eric Draven hate Bill Skarsgård's Eric Draven.

I really wish FKA Twigs played the Crow. If they must, they can call her Erica Draven (but no, they don't have to). That said, I'm still looking forward to watching it, and I hope they didn't use up all the good scenes in the trailer.

@cinephile

RE: https://evil.social/notes/9rgysislgvwjs4xu

TrendyWebAltar, to movies

I'm playing Queen of the Damned (2002, Michael Ryman) in the background, and…

¹ Marguerite Moreau, who plays Jesse of the Talamasca, looks like a redhead Hailee Steinfeld.

² It would be hilarious to make the #Vampire Chronicles a daisy chain of unreliable narrators: Interview with the Vampire is "I'm Louis, let me tell you about Lestat" and then The Vampire Lestat is "I'm Lestat and this is what I say happened," which then becomes the pattern for some (but not all) of the other books. Imagine instead of Queen of the Damned was told from the perspective of Akasha.

³ This #movie isn't good by most critical standards, but it's fun to watch. It's like the missing link between Underworld (2003, Len Wiseman) and The Crow: City of Angels (1996, Tim Pope).

⁴ I remember intially feeling bugged about Queen of the Damned going nu-metal, but two decades down, I think it's fine. While I remain old-school-goth-at-heart, I think this movie is the reason why I'm not bugged about the new Crow looking like that like a lot of people I know "from the scene," back in the old days.

@cinephile

TrendyWebAltar,

@cinephile

Tangent: I'm probably one of the few old people I know not bugged by the new Crow movie. My only quibble is that they shouldn't have retold Eric Draven's story. Tell a new tale! I like Bill Skarsgård and I trust that he can do Eric Draven, but I'd have preferred if FKA Twigs was the new Crow. She's a dancer and would have done great fight scenes.

TrendyWebAltar, to academicchatter

"Drawing on multi-sited ethnography, I conceptualise structure of feeling as an affective principle regulating senses, imaginaries, and practical activities of local communities within socio-material infrastructures (Vanke, 2023, 2024). Thus, according to my approach, structure of feeling is a triadic concept assembling sensorial, imaginative, and practical experiences within physical space. This allows for a further understanding of structure of feeling not as a spirit of the time but as a multiple spirit of the time and place. And it is also partly influenced by Doreen Massey’s understanding of place as multiplicity imbued with temporality."

@academicchatter

https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/2024/03/27/structure-of-feeling-a-conceptual-tool-in-the-study-of-how-ordinary-people-live-and-struggle/

TrendyWebAltar, to TaylorSwift

A decade ago, I wouldn't have recommended that casual fans watch a 3-hour-24-minute concert, but now that can easily pull off shows of similar length to audiences who like her but don't really call themselves Swifties, here's playing 45 songs at the Royal Albert Hall in 2014.

https://youtu.be/cdf6CO_QUz0?si=WEvBR22_6f2uFWgr

@music

TrendyWebAltar, to music

I remember that time last year when I overheard my students talking about BeReal, and how I was so pleasantly surprised to hear them talking so excitedly about .

@music

TrendyWebAltar, to HashtagGames Romanian

Space!

Face hug!

Chest burst!

Scream!

TrendyWebAltar, to jpmusic

Nearly three decades since I wanted to watch The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and now I have my chance, but good God, it begins with "I've Never Been to Me," a I find really cloying. 😭

@music @movies

TrendyWebAltar, to Meme

Rather bold of the algorithm to recommend this to me, but truth be told, although I laughed when I saw this (and know who Ligeti and Boulez are and have some sort of understanding of tonality and the 12-tone scale), I don't think I fully understand the .

@music

TrendyWebAltar, to music

"George Michael, of course, was publicly closeted for a long time. It’s unsurprising that we see some horror motifs in this heterofest. The wide-angle shot of the isolated cabin, the close up of a brooding, tortured hero…There may well be a queerness in the absence of gendered pronouns and in the visual aesthetic of the . But the real disruption, I think, comes in the structural repetition, the rehearsal of the singer’s failure to reproduce each year at the moment that reproduction is most central. If circulate in a framework of reproductive futurity, “Last Christmas” Scrooges its way onto the airwaves every year and projects an utter failure of a future."

@music

https://soundstudiesblog.com/2020/01/06/the-queerness-of-whams-last-christmas/

TrendyWebAltar, to movies

I've seen at least three recent #Westerns that have been filmed before in decades past (i.e., they're not all "remakes"), and my hot take is that the new #movies are just as good as the old ones (one or two may even be better):

High Noon
3:10 to Yuma
The Magnificent Seven

@cinephile

TrendyWebAltar, to Cinema

The monologue that Michael Fassbender's character keeps repeating throughout The Killer is called an assassin's creed.

@cinephile

TrendyWebAltar, to HashtagGames

Melter Skelter (The Beatles)
Ice Hot the Sheriff (Bob Marley)
Heat & Warm (The Clash)

(I guess we can't count songs by these musicians that are already defrosted: "Happiness is a Warm Gun," "Simmer Down," and "London's Burning")


@music

TrendyWebAltar, to Halloween

I do want to know if there are others like me, over-stimulated right now about the simultaneous release today of 1989 TV, the album DANSE MACABRE, the new record BAUHAUS STAIRCASE, and a new song for an .

@music

TrendyWebAltar,

Holy shit, we also got new albums from Taking Back Sunday and the Gaslight Anthem today!

@music

TrendyWebAltar, to TaylorSwift

The five vault tracks for 1989 pleasantly shocked me with their stylistic consistency. I love these so much!

While I can appreciate a showcase of Taylor's varied styles, like what we got before and which the regular 1989 tracks also show, the five 1989 vault songs all together generate an expansive vibe and also present a powerful statement on the "pop purity" of this moment in Taylor's career.

I'm going to listen to the rest of the record now.


@music

TrendyWebAltar, to HashtagGames

If you consider That Thing You Do! as a comedy, this works.

If you're into Philippine love stories, That Thing Called Tadhana works too.

@cinephile


TrendyWebAltar, to academicchatter

Higher Ed should hire Ed.

The question is, which Ed?

First one that came to mind was Gein, so that's a big no-no.

(I also thought of Evil Ed from Fright Night but that's a no, too.)

Then I thought of Wood: imagine how wild that would be.

I'm also thinking Sheeran; while I'm not a fan of his music, he strikes me as a rather nice guy.

@academicchatter

TrendyWebAltar, to music

: "I wrote my entire first EP in C major, and I’m really into that kind of shit: how far can I go using the same technique, but changing it ever so slowly? Most of softscars is in open E. Historically, a lot of shoegaze has been written in open E, which is why people think this new album is shoegaze. Personally, I don’t think it is. When I was writing it, I was thinking more if My Chemical Romance was mixed with Arca. My non-binary romance."

@music

https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/features/interviews/yeule-scars-memory

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