Category Archives: New Utopia

How will the advent of a centre-Left government in Germany affect Britain, Europe and the world? Yesterday Olaf Scholz (second from left), the new Chancellor-elect, presented his ministerial team, which includes the Green co-leaders Annalena Baerbock (middle) as Foreign Minister and Robert Habeck (third from right) as Minister for the Economy and Climate Change. He also announced a programme of liberal reform, with the motto Dare more progress. The traffic light coalition will now seek approval from members for the deal struck between its three constituent parties, before taking office in just over a fortnight. After 16 years of Angela Merkel, a new era in German politics is dawning.

In British terms, Scholz is more of a Gordon Brown than a Tony Blair. He has been a reliable Finance Minister, who has guided the Federal Republics through the pandemic with his reputation intact. Even so, his successor in that role, Christian Lindner (above, far left), will have his work cut out to allay German angst about rising inflation , now at 6 per cent higher than at any time since the 1970s. It is a shrewd move by the new Chancellor to make the leader of the most Right-leaning party in the coalition responsible for the nations finances. He will resist moves to raise taxes or lose control of public spending but radicals will blame Lindner rather than Scholz.

Germany, then, will continue to be a powerful force for economic stability and orthodoxy in the concert of Europe with one exception. On climate change, the new coalition has agreed to spend unprecedented sums to speed up the transition to a net zero economy. Coal will be phased out by 2030, much sooner than had been envisaged, and the sale of new petrol or diesel vehicles will be banned soon afterwards. Germany, which once pioneered environmental politics but in recent years has fallen behind on carbon emissions, will now redouble its efforts to lead Europe towards a green utopia.

However, there is a worm in the apple. Mrs Merkels fatal decision to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster means that in the short to medium term, in the absence of sufficient renewable energy supplies to replace fossil fuels, Europes largest economy will be even more dependent on Russian gas. Approval by regulators of the crucial Nord Stream 2 pipeline has been suspended, but Vladimir Putin is pressing hard to start pumping. It is hard to see how Scholz can resist that pressure, despite warnings from Joe Biden and other Western leaders that it will enable Russia to bypass Ukraine and Belarus, rendering both more vulnerable to Putins aggression.

Yesterdays press conference offered few clues to the foreign policy of the Scholz Government. The new Chancellor said merely that it would focus on our friendship with France, our partnership with the US and standing up for peace and prosperity in the world. Notable by its absence was Britain, still blamed for Brexit, which has raised the burden on Germany to pay for the EU. Scholz can safely praise his French and American allies as long as they are led by liberal Presidents Macron and Biden. What, though, if they were to be defeated in elections as soon as next year? With a Right-winger in the lyse and a lame duck in the White House, Scholz would need other allies to pursue his progressive agenda while maintaining peace and prosperity. He would be wise to pick up the phone to London sooner rather than later.

Brexit or no Brexit, the Anglo-German relationship remains a crucial one for Europe. Our two countries showed during the pandemic that they are in a different league from the rest when it comes to medical innovation, developing new vaccines and treatments on a par with the US. But Germany still relies on the UKs hard as well as its soft power. While the French still flirt with the idea of leaving Nato, most Germans know how exposed they would be without an alliance in which the British still do a lot of the heavy lifting. It is no accident that when Poland needed help to secure its eastern borders recently, it turned to the Royal Engineers not the Bundeswehr.

Like his Social Democratic predecessor during the Cold War, Helmut Schmidt, Olaf Scholz is a natural Anglophile, born and raised in Hamburg. Like another great Chancellor of that era, Willy Brandt, he hopes to offer strong moral leadership. He too must never forget that attitudes to Germany across Europe are still freighted with the Nazi past. Half a century ago, Brandts famous Kniefall (falling to his knees) at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising set a standard for German statesmanship, simultaneously demonstrating courage and humility, that the new Chancellor would do well to emulate. In standing up for peace, Scholz will have to defy those who threaten it, from Moscow to Beijing. That means hugging his key allies close.

For most of history, the North Sea has been a unifying rather than a dividing factor: Hamburgs prosperity was built on trade with London. The British and Germans have more in common than either does with any other European nation. If Scholz sees France as a friend and the US as a partner, he should see the UK as both. Indeed, we are more like brothers or sisters with the usual sibling rivalries. Boris Johnson should make a serious effort to put those rivalries behind us no Tommy and Jerry jokes, please and embrace his new counterpart in Berlin. They might both surprise themselves.

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What can we expect from the new German government? - TheArticle

David McDermott Hughes is a rare creature: an anthropologist with a working grasp of the energy economy. He proposes a new framework for divvying up the profits from one of Americas fastest-growing sources of energy.

In his new book, "Who Owns the Wind?: Climate Crisis and the Hope of Renewable Energy," he argues that wind that invisible, ubiquitous force that until recently was useful only to sailors and poets is fast becoming a finite resource with a clear set of economic winners and losers.

Hughes, 53, is a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and a self-professed liberal and scholar-activist. In 2017, after years studying land reform in Africa, he turned his attention to "Energy without Conscience," a book about the oil industry in Trinidad and Tobago.

He doesnt want America and the rest of the world to sleepwalk into an economic compact on wind, and later wake to find it propping up todays inequalities.

"If we decarbonize in thirty years as we must a single generation of firms and individuals will profit handsomely. There is an alternative to this atmospheric phase of capitalism," he writes. "Governments and other institutions may strike a new deal for energy, wherein the sky remains open to all."

And if the government fails to do so, he argues that the energy transition may fail with it.

"Who Owns the Wind?" summarizes field work he did over the span of four years in Spain. In the first decade of this century, Spain became one of the first countries to rapidly scale up its wind industry. Hughes spent months in a small, poor community near the Straits of Gibraltar that is surrounded by turbines turbines that the people came to view with a passionate resentment.

What does a community in Spain have to do with the energy transition in the United States? Quite a bit, Hughes says.

In Spain, the transition to wind meant legions of wind turbines lifted to the horizon in just a few short years. By 2013, wind machines were pumping a massive 55 gigawatt-hours of electricity onto Spains grid. And then momentum stalled. Hughes field work led him to believe a big reason is not-in-my-backyard opposition.

The U.S. wind industry is also poised for growth, with the Democrats reconciliation bill in Congress proposing the extension of tax credits for wind farms to 2026, and contemplating incentives for utilities to build more wind power.

That would mean more turbines in more places, and more neighbors contemplating a giant pinwheel interrupting their view of hill and sky.

"Steel," Hughes writes, "will loom above our heads."

And jobs may not materialize to create a counterbalance of goodwill. Since wind turbines operate with little maintenance, they wont bring communities the generations of jobs that came with oil, gas and coal.

"To get rid of fossil fuels, we have to fundamentally rethink property, livelihood and aesthetics," Hughes writes. The world, he adds, "may be poorer in some ways. It may provide fewer opportunities for work and fewer occasions to admire our surroundings."

Hughes thinks the way to persuade communities to enter the wind bargain is to give everyone a piece of the action.

That, he asserts, is not the way the wind is blowing today.

In his book, Hughes explores the contracts that govern wind power. Most local profits flow to those who own the land where turbines are built. Left out of the bargain, he says, are neighbors who experience the turbine in their "viewshed." If they have no skin in the game, he reasons, those neighbors could insist local governments forbid new installations, and that could stall the wind-energy revolution before it really starts.

"I would like to prevent capitalists from gaining control over an asset only lately discovered and still largely unknown," Hughes writes, later adding: "on its current trajectory the energy transition will screw the renters and small-scale homeowners of this world."

Hughes spoke recently to E&E News about his research in Spain, the politics of wind and what it means to be an energy anthropologist.

You are an anthropologist of energy, which are two terms that are not usually in the same sentence. How do you see the connection?

The reasons that people dont associate energy with anthropology is that people mostly do associate energy with fields like engineering and physics and economics. And those are all fields which operate according to universal or general laws, like the law of gravity, the law of the conservation of energy. They dont vary according to time or place.

So we study human systems that vary across time and space.

What Im saying in this book is that you have to take local concerns, local context, local culture very, very seriously, and the real obstacles to the transition away from fossil fuels right now are not engineering. Weve had all the technology we need for some time. Theyre not economic, really, because were getting toward price parity in so many places.

The real obstacles are in local cultures, ideas, beliefs, and politics and power. And so thats why I think you need anthropologists on the scene. You need that kind of analysis, you need that kind of activism.

How did you end up focusing your work on Spain?

Ive been frustrated by how slowly this transition is happening. I wanted to look at where its gone comparatively fast, and I found possibly the village in the world most surrounded by wind turbines. I identified it because I happened to go by it on the national highway on a research trip for something else.

And then I searched around quite a bit on Google Earth to find someplace more surrounded by turbines, and I couldnt. And so I thought, well, this place represents the future, this place represents some sort of sustainability. Maybe even a utopia.

So, you know, I booked a trip.

In the book you explain how people detested the turbines and tried to prevent some of them from being built, but failed because this particular community lacked political power. What does this say about the politics of wind?

I found people who were not very excited about these turbines. They didnt see this as a future. The reason its the most turbine-surrounded village in the world is that the people didnt have enough power to prevent that outcome.

Ones immediate response is to say, oh, well, this is kind of NIMBY, reactionary or shallow movement that simply is backward, and that in order to preserve the conditions for life on Earth we have to roll right over them. That was my initial reaction, but I learned a lot more because Im an anthropologist, and you keep your ears and eyes open. and found that they have some very legitimate criticisms, some criticism that can and should be addressed.

And if theyre not addressed, then these kinds of people have the power in Europe and North America to stop the energy transition and keep us burning fossil fuels for another generation or two.

So, its necessary, important and just to listen and learn from the people.

You argue that we need to think about ownership of wind the rights to whats overhead differently than we think about ownership of whats underground. In the U.S., the landowner generally has rights over the fossil fuels under his or her land. Why should wind be different?

I advocate in this book coming up with a different property regime for wind. One would sever wind rights from land rights and say that the wind is a publicly owned resource.

The land owner didnt produce the wind, and even in physical terms, the wind isnt really a product or a property of land. It started someplace else, and its going to end someplace else. Its just passing through.

Why should the landowner be able to put up a big net there and capture value from it? Right? That would seem to be the landowner taking something from the larger community, republic or nation.

So what part of what I tried to do in the book is to persuade people to see the wind as a thing in the first place. In order to claim it, you have to know what it is, you have to look upon it as a treasure that you might want to own and might want to share with others, and we might not want to let any one person grab too much.

And this may sound a little fanciful to our readers. But in fact, this is how fossil fuels and other minerals work in Alaska, where theyre owned by the public, and the Alaska residents got a permanent fund check every year as their portion of the royalties for the exploitation of those subsurface resources.

There is some sign on this. New York state passed a recent law which allows counties to award a revenue streams or compensation to people in the view shed of wind turbines.

So if we can sever subsurface resources from the ownership of the surface, we ought to be able to do the same thing for supra-surface resources in other words, whats in the air.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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Who owns the wind? An anthropologist has ideas - E&E News

The activity: Apple Picking

Apple Valley Orchard in Llano

John and Susan Caballero wanted a retirement project. So, in 2005, they started Apple Valley Orchard (facebook.com/apple.v.orchard), south of Llano in the Hill Country. The orchard has around 500 trees now. Pick Gala apples or pick up some Fuji, Pink Lady, Granny Smith, and more varieties in store. Dont leave without grabbing a jar of apple butter or sweet jalapeos as well.12340 S. State Highway 16, Llano. facebook.com/apple.v.orchard

Eat/drink: At the original Coopers Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que (coopersbbqllano.com) in Llano, its all about the meat. Go wild on Central Texas cue, like brisket and sausage, and order apple cobbler for dessert.

Stay: Live like outlaws at the Dabbs Railroad Hotel and B&B (thedabbs.com), a favorite of Bonnie and Clyde. The historic hotel, built in 1907 on the Llano River, features concerts every other Thursday.

Also try: From the top of the orchards hill you can spot Enchanted Rock (tpwd.texas.gov), so take an afternoon to hike Texass pink granite mountain, about 24 miles south of Llano.

The Activity: Fall Festival

New Braunfels Wurstfest

Sprechen sie fun? Its sausage season in New Braunfels, and that means 10 whole days of the citys proudest and loudest festival: Wurstfest. Party with locals during this annual celebration of German culture in a town that regularly marries the modern way of life with the history of Comal County.510 p.m. MonWed, 511 p.m. ThursFri, 11 a.m. to midnight Sat, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sun, Nov. 514. 120 Landa St., New Braunfels. wurstfest.com

Eat/Drink: Any Wurstfest virtuoso will tell you to come to the festival hungry. With dusseldogs, potato skins, and various offerings of strudel on the menu, the Marktplatz is the place to go for all things schnitzel.

Stay: The Schlitterbahn Resort (schlitterbahn.com) offers entrance to the New Braunfels branch of the notorious waterpark many Houstonians already know and love, but with the added bonus of being the closest lodging to Wurstfest activities.

Also try: Be sure to sign yourself, or your frenemy, up for the Masskrugstemmen competition. Challengers must hold a stein full of beer in the air for longer than their adversaries to be crowned the victor. Watch that you dont spill a single drop!

The activity: Haunted Hotel

The Menger Hotel in San Antonio

The city of San Antonio attracts tourists like a moth to a flame. Some guests are so attached to the area that they simply refuse to leaveso what if their check-in date was in the 1890s? The oldest continuously operating hotel west of the Mississippi, the Menger Hotel houses a rumored 32 ghostly entities, ranging from President Teddy Roosevelt to Captain Richard King, founder of the one and only King Ranch.From $149. 204 Alamo Plaza, San Antonio. mengerhotel.com

Eat/Drink: With temperatures dropping and spirits stirring, theres no better time to grab a seat and test your ghost-hunting know-how at the Menger Bar. Voted one of the Top 10 Most Historic Bars in the United States, the space was constructed in 1887 as an exact replica of Londons House of Lords Pub.

Stay: Youre going to want to request a room on the third floor, where poor, sweet Sallie White, a deceased chambermaid from 1876, is said to regularly make her appearance.

Also try: If thats not enough ghoulish yesteryear for you, hop onto the Sisters Grimm Ghost Bus (sistersgrimmghosttour.com) for a truly wild ride through the old Bexar County jail and San Antonios most historic cemetery.

The activity: Da de los Muertos

Da de los Muertos Street Festival in Corpus Christi

Watch the streets of Corpus Christi come to life as the city joins together for its massive, colorful Day of the Dead fest, which honors the Mexican holiday with plenty of dancing, crafts, face painting, food, games, and more. Buy a calavera (sugar skull) at the juried Hecho-A-Mano Art Expo, admire the ofrendas (altars to guide spirits home) downtown, and pick your favorite piatas in the kids competition.

3 p.m. to midnight Oct 30. Free. 619 N. Chaparral St., Corpus Christi. diadelosmuertoscc.com

Eat/drink: You know the seafoods fresh when the restaurants right on the water. Former bait stand and burger joint Snoopys Pier (snoopys.cc) offers deliciously cheap seafood baskets and breathtaking sunset views.

Stay: They say when in Rome, so when in Corpus, stay by the water. The beachfront Emerald Beach Hotel (hotelemeraldbeach.com) is right on Corpus Christi Bay, but if its too chilly to relax by the shore, try the heated indoor swimming pool.

Also try: Have an otterly amazing time right on the water at Texas State Aquarium (texasstateaquarium.org). See a show at Dolphin Bay, feed a stingray in the lagoon, and even learn about raptors in Eagle Pass.

The activity: Leaf Peeping

Lost Maple State Natural Area

This fall, go leaf peeping at Lost Maple State Natural Area out in Vanderpool. From mid-October to mid-November, the parks Uvalde bigtooth maples explode in spectacular red, orange, and yellow leaves, the closest impression of New England well get this far south of Vermont.8 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily. $6, free for kids 12 & under. Lost Maple State Natural Area, 37221 F.M. 187, Vanderpool. tpwd.texas.gov

Eat/drink: After a long day of hiking, youll want to kick back with some home cooking. Head to Lost Maples Cafe (lostmaplescafe.com) in Utopia for a burger, or maybe enchiladas, and a slice of pie.

Stay: The Lodges at Lost Maples are nestled 2,100 feet above sea level in the Swiss Alps of Texas. We recommend booking the Villa at Polvadeau Vineyards. Wine and mountains? Maybe this is Vermont (lostmaplescabind.com).

Also try:Speed through more than 100 years of motorcycle cycle history at the Lone Star Motorcycle Museum (lonestarmotorcyclemuseum.com) in Vanderpool. Be sure to ask owners Allen and Debbie Johncock about their racing days.

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Take A Weekend Trip To One Of The Fun Spots In Texas - Houstonia Magazine

Just like a songwriter suffering from writers block or an artist hitting a creative wall, all founders, at some point, must face the music of balancing competitive analysis and its evil nemesis, paralysis.

For startup founders in any industry, its natural to overanalyze your product, and sometimes that ends up with you positioning yourself too specifically in the market. However, if youre deep in an existential crisis moment, fearing the damage that could be caused by adjusting the dial too much, you may be stifling innovation by missing out on the unexpected benefits that come with making quick decisions. Remember, theres only room for one twelve-minute guitar solo on an album. Knowing what your audience wants when to try something new and when to play a hit could be the difference between creating a unicorn or a donkey.

My company has helped hundreds of startups launch and evolve. Along these founder journeys, weve seen plenty of hits, misses, and one-hit-wonders. Press pause on your founder soundtrack and consider the following startup tips (reimagined as terrible band names) before your next set.

Theres an old Aesop fable about a fox and a cat who discuss the ways they can escape from a hunter. The fox boasts he has a whole sackful of tricks and the cat has just one. The cat doesnt disagree, but insists his one trick is worth a thousand of the foxs. When the hunters arrive, the cat quickly scurries up a tree (his solution) while the fox debates all the ways he could escape. Unable to decide which is best, the fox ultimately fails to act at all and is caught.

This childrens story is the perfect example of analysis paralysis. This is a lesson to repeat to yourself when you cant sleep and are wondering if you should have done a little more research before launching your product. Spoiler alert: The answer (and the bands chances of recording their next studio album) is unlikely.

American psychologist Herbert Simon (also could be the lead singers real name) says people make decisions in one of two ways: We either satisfice or we maximize. (I promise thats not a typo). If youre a satisficer, you pick the option that best fits your needs. Maximizers never settle and always look for better options, ones that will provide maximum benefits later on. They pride themselves in making the most informed decisions possible.

Hang on a second, youre thinking. Isnt that a magnificent approach?

Sure, its reasonable to expect making the most informed and beneficial decision would lead to the best outcome, but studies contradict this. Believe it or not, maximizers have been found to be less effective in decision making, actually. They also suffer from the self-inflicted pressures of impossible expectations. Sounds like every founder, right?

Psychologists say the root cause of this founder dilemma is anxiety. As a founder, its hard to avoid being consumed with the fear of choosing the wrong option or launching a product that maybe isnt quite ready for market. You burn the midnight oil weighing the variables, examining the competition, imagining all the ways even the smallest decision (or lack thereof) can blow up in your face. Did I remember to hit save?

The more data we have, the harder it becomes to process it. Choice overload leads to analysis paralysis and takes a direct hit on productivity and creativity the two things you need to design and launch a killer product.

As a founder whos been there and trust me, Ive been there let me share a cautionary tale. Our agency once worked with a unique client that insisted on iterating their product behind closed doors for months on end without any user feedback or testing. Months of development eventually became years of pivots without ever testing their concept or hypotheses with any real users for fear that a competitor would steal their thunder. Although the project started with a frantic rush to design and build out the platform, countless business pivots driven by the CEOs gut feelings dramatically slowed their launch.

We eventually realized that each new feature the CEO added was his attempt to keep up with the Joneses, churning out comparable features, and ultimately losing out on a timely launch. Three years later, they finally launched with a whimper and a subsequent backslide while still being guided by the CEOs now nauseated gut.

If you want to get your startup going, define your goals, do the research and the networking your industry requires, but dont ignore the value of bringing some naivety to the table. What may start as ignorance can sometimes develop into a novel way of solving a common industry problem. Sometimes, it doesnt matter which direction you move, as long as you just move, man. Breaking this into steps can help you put one foot in front of the other (and meanwhile, help name our cringeworthy bands first singles):

Not every decision you make is going to bear the same impact on your work. Start with a list of your most impactful business decisions and prioritize those with the shortest time until you feel the benefit. Consider what may go wrong, but dont dwell. Once you have your setlist, start the show.

This is pretty self-explanatory, but its important to mention because you want to make sure your goals dont contradict one another. It helps to establish goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based.

What does your plan of action to accomplish your goals look like? How will you navigate from start to finish? If you like to operate with deadlines, you can take steps based on a set timeline. That might be researching for two months, prototyping, then testing for another two months, doing a month of PR, then a few weeks of networking. Tackling it in steps can help keep on track for an efficient launch.

This may sound crazy, but sometimes good enough for now really is good enough. Im not saying to send garbage out the door, but if youre confident enough in your product to launchyouve put in the research, tested that it works with minimal bugs, and youre open to constructive criticism stop wasting time, get to market and start gaining valuable insights from users.

It all comes down to the build-measure-learn feedback loop, and all successful startups have this mastered. Seeing what customers actually do with a product is much more valuable than asking them what they might do. It can be tricky to rock a rhyme to walk the line of just enough, and there are pitfalls in both under- or over-developing your product.

What if you only did enough research to justify what you already wanted to believe? This seemingly ridiculous concept is called utopia myopia and is very common among Type A founders. This concept, also known as confirmation bias, can be just as damaging as analysis paralysis. Finding your perfect balance between having enough research and not enough should become your signature move.

Stay aware, but not obsessed, and youll keep your competitive analysis paralysis at bay satisfy your fans and they just might bring you out for an encore.

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Fight Analysis Paralysis With Advice From These Terrible (Fake) Bands - Built In

(L-R): Kristen Stewart; Peter DinklagePhoto: Amy Sussman;Frazer Harrison (Getty Images)

The 2021 Gotham Awards are next week which means awards season is officially nigh. This years ceremony will take place on Monday, November 29 in New York Citywhich means you can tune in after youve spent your weekend filling up on turkey and arguing about football with your extended family.

Though the Gotham Awards arent always a reliable indicator of Oscars wins, sometimes the films that win big at the Gothams also win big with the Academy. For example, A.V. Club favorite Nomadlandtook home the Gotham Award for Best Feature and it also won Best Picture at both the Golden Globes and the Oscars.

This year, Spencers Kristen Stewart and Cyranos Peter Dinklage will receive the Gotham Awards Performer Tributes, but they arent the only ones receiving tributes that evening. The Power Of The Dogdirector Jane Campion will get the Director Tribute, the cast of The Harder They Fallwill get the Ensemble Tribute, Kathleen Collins will get the Icon Tribute, and Eamonn Bowles will get the Industry Tribute.

The Gotham Awards will also give The Actors Fundits Impact Salute, giving recognition to the way the Fund provided support to the acting and performing arts community during the height of the pandemic.

This is also the first year that the Gothams has gender-neutral categories. The previously split, gendered categories are now combined simply under performer.

The A.V. Club will be on the red carpet and in the building for the evenings ceremony, but if youd like to watch along from the comfort of your own home, you can stream it over on Facebook. The Gotham Awards are slated to begin at 7PM CT/8PM EST.

And just in case you needed a fresher, here s the full list of nominees for this years Gotham Awards:

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The Green Knight (A24)

The Lost Daughter (Netflix)

Passing (Netflix)

Pig (NEON)

Test Pattern (Kino Lorber)

Ascension (MTV Documentary Films)

Faya Dayi (Janus Films)

Flee (NEON)

President (Greenwich Entertainment)

Summer of Soul (or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Searchlight Pictures, Onyx Collective, Hulu)

Azor (MUBI)

Drive My Car (Sideshow and Janus Films)

The Souvenir Part II (A24)

Titane (NEON)

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (MUBI)

The Worst Person in the World (NEON)

Maggie Gyllenhaal for The Lost Daughter (Netflix)

Edson Oda for Nine Days (Sony Pictures Classics)

Rebecca Hall for Passing (Netflix)

Emma Seligman for Shiva Baby (Utopia Distribution)

Shatara Michelle Ford for Test Pattern (Kino Lorber)

The Card Counter, Paul Schrader (Focus Features)

El Planeta, Amalia Ulman (Utopia Distribution)

The Green Knight, David Lowery (A24)

The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal (Netflix)

Passing, Rebecca Hall (Netflix)

Red Rocket, Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch (A24)

Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter (Netflix)

Frankie Faison in The Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain (Gravitas Ventures)

Michael Greyeyes in Wild Indian (Vertical Entertainment)

Brittany S. Hall in Test Pattern (Kino Lorber)

Oscar Isaac in The Card Counter (Focus Features)

Taylour Paige in Zola (A24)

Joaquin Phoenix in Cmon Cmon (A24)

Simon Rex in Red Rocket (A24)

Lili Taylor in Paper Spiders (Entertainment Squad)

Tessa Thompson in Passing (Netflix)

Reed Birney in Mass (Bleecker Street)

Jessie Buckley in The Lost Daughter (Netflix)

Colman Domingo in Zola (A24)

Gaby Hoffmann in Cmon Cmon (A24)

Troy Kotsur in CODA (Apple)

Marlee Matlin in CODA (Apple)

Ruth Negga in Passing (Netflix)

Emilia Jones in CODA (Apple)

Natalie Morales in Language Lessons (Shout! Studios)

Rachel Sennott in Shiva Baby (Utopia Distribution)

Suzanna Son in Red Rocket (A24)

Amalia Ulman in El Planeta (Utopia Distribution)

The Good Lord Bird (Showtime)

Its a Sin (HBO Max)

Small Axe (Amazon Studios)

Squid Game (Netflix)

The Underground Railroad (Amazon Studios)

The White Lotus (HBO Max/HBO)

Blindspotting (STARZ)

Hacks (HBO Max/HBO)

Reservation Dogs (FX)

Run the World (STARZ)

We Are Lady Parts (Peacock)

City So Real, (National Geographic)

Exterminate All the Brutes (HBO/HBO Max)

How to With John Wilson (HBO/HBO Max)

Philly D.A. (Topic, Independent Lens, PBS)

Pride (FX)

Jennifer Coolidge in The White Lotus (HBO Max/HBO)

Michael Greyeyes in Rutherford Falls (Peacock)

Ethan Hawke in The Good Lord Bird (Showtime)

Devery Jacobs in Reservation Dogs (FX)

Lee Jung-jae in Squid Game (Netflix)

Thuso Mbedu in The Underground Railroad (Amazon Studios)

Jean Smart in Hacks (HBO Max/HBO)

Omar Sy in Lupin (Netflix)

Anya Taylor-Joy in The Queens Gambit (Netflix)

Anjana Vasan in We Are Lady Parts (Peacock)

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Here's everything you need to know about this year's Gotham Awards - The A.V. Club

Diane Di Prima. (Photo by Daniel Entin)

Freddie was running late. He was supposed to be in the East Village at the Poets Theatre, where his closest friend, the poet Diane di Prima, was hosting a night of dance performances. Recently, the friends had lost one of their number, to drugs or suicide, they werent sure which. Freddie was going to dance in their memory. As the audience waited, di Prima paced the lobby, worried that something similarly awful had happened to Freddie; she could tell amphetamines were starting to unravel him. But then he appeared, in black tights, a black leotard, toe shoes, and a mask painted on his face. Kill all the lights, he told di Prima. It was the spring of 1964, and the dance, For Sergio, had begun. BOOKS IN REVIEW

In silence except for his labored breathing and the sound of his shoes scraping the floor, Freddie Herko held a candle up to a mirror and walked en pointe down one aisle, across the front of the theater, up the other aisle, then out of the building, vanishing into the night. It was a rite of mourning, di Prima wrote in her 2001 memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman. Soon after, Freddie Herko would die by leapingin a perfect jet, according to the sole witnessfrom a fifth-story Greenwich Village window. Di Primas friendship with him and his death at age 28 were defining experiences of her life, and he has been the focus of several of her books, including Freddie Poems (1974) and Recollections. (He also appeared, lightly fictionalized, as the character of Leslie in her 1969 Memoirs of a Beatnik.) A new book by di Prima, who died last year at the age of 86, offers another view of Herko and the downtown bohemian scene of early 1960s New York of which they were a part. Composed the year following his death but unpublished until now, Spring and Autumn Annals: A Celebration of the Seasons for Freddie takes the reader through di Primas own rite of mourningfor her friend, for the changing milieu of their scene, and for a city that, without Freddie, could no longer hold her.

Di Prima is often labeled a Beat writer, and the formative years of her long career were indeed spent in the downtown haunts (bookstores, lofts, cafes) of Manhattan in the late 1950s. She moved among not just the Beats but the New York School, Black Mountain, and the Warholians, too. In fact, she was central to all these communities. With LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Alan Marlowe, James Waring, and Herko, she cofounded the Poets Theatre, which staged experimental one-act plays by poets, including several of her own. In partnership with Jones, she created The Floating Bear in 1961, a mimeographed newsletter of poetry, prose, and art that connected the artists of the avant-garde and disseminated its multifarious styles. Charles Olson, Barbara Guest, Robert Creeley, and many others appeared in its pages; troupes of artists, including the jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, who ran the mimeograph machine for the early issues, participated in its assemblage. In 1964, she bought a Fairchild-Davidson offset press, took a free week-long course on how to use it, and founded the Poets Press. Under its imprint, di Prima put out the first books of A.B. Spellman, Herbert Huncke, and Audre Lorde.

Spring and Autumn Annals gives a diaristic account of many of these events and personalities, and it shows how strongly linked they were to di Primas friendship with Herko. After his death in October 1964, di Prima began the daily practice of lighting incense and writing to her departed friend until it burned out. The books four parts are structured around the seasons, starting with the fall after his death, and each section conjures seasonal memories of the time the friends spent together after their chance meeting in Washington Square Park in 1954, such that the fall section roves around 10 different falls, the winter around 10 different winters. The sections dwell especially on di Primas memories of Freddie from the final trip he took around the sun, 196364, and on her grief during the first trip she took without him.

The year that followed Herkos death was a year of many endings. As a work of documentary history, Annals follows the shuttering of the Poets Theatre, the dissolution of di Primas marriage to Alan Marlowe, and her dislocation from New York, an exile that spurred two years of nom1adic wandering before she settled permanently in San Francisco. It is clear that by 1964, di Prima felt that something had changed: I am not, as I was, among friends, she writes. In retrospect, her memoir documents the moment when the bohemianism of 1950s New York merged, sometimes dissonantly, into the counterculture of the 1960s, when the Beats met the hippies. It is a shift that di Prima feels but cannot name, experienced mostly as the sense that everything seemed to be getting harder and realer: the drugs, the poverty, the politics. It manifests in the memoirs inklings of what will come next for di Prima, her acid experiments with Timothy Leary at Millbrook and her further politicization in San Francisco. The time has come to put a stop to it, war and the memory of war, she writes: I shall print a thousand Stop America Now signs, in red ink. Annals shows that this evolution initially felt like loss for di Prima as much as growth. In mourning Freddie, she mourns their moment: The tribe will meet again in another aeon.

As a work of nonfiction, Annals adds to a cluster of memoirs by the women of the Beat Generation. Most prominent among these are Joyce Johnsons Minor Characters (1983), Hettie Joness How I Became Hettie Jones (1990), and Carolyn Cassadys Off the Road (1990). All three relate the womens artistic becoming in the context of their tumultuous relationships with their now-famous male partners: Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones, and Neal Cassady. They share in the sense that their authors were both inside and outside the male-dominated movement, both present at key moments and relegated to the background, often torn between pursuing their own literary careers and supporting those of their more famous male counterparts (often literally, in the form of providing money, meals, and a place to live). Di Primas own Recollections of My Life as Woman similarly presents these pressures, particularly those around raising children while making a life as an artist. But Annals is a different kind of book in its in-the-moment-ness. Unlike memoirs written decades after the fact, where events are shaded with the wisdom gained in the intervening years, Annals understands much less about the significance of its events. It is raw, immediate, and vulnerable.

Yet to treat Annals purely as documentation would be to diminish its literary dimensions. As a work of prose, the famous names and places of cultural history give way to a greater thematic arc: It is the story of an artist who, in the wake of her friends death, trades the ephemeral, communal space of the theater for the more solid, solitary work of the printing press. After Herko dies, di Prima feels her life split in two. Cleft. By the leap. She holds the present and future in one hand, the past in the other, patiently, endlessly trying to mesh the edges, but failing. In the past, theres her husband, Alan; her lover, LeRoi; and the theater they built together, a place for Freddie to dance. Having made the theatre, red satin, a place for you, we are leaving it, di Prima writes to Freddie. As the first anniversary of his death approaches, she rents a storefront to run her press, the shop I cannot help feeling that you gave me. As if the ephemerality of Freddies art and life had been a cue, it is here that she begins to take the work of her friends and set it down, with some permanence, in print. I cling to my press, it weighs 900 pounds, she writes: And I hope that is enough to weigh me down.

There is a similar impulse in Annals to commit Herko to writing, to materialize him. Given the fleeting nature of his art form, dance, so much of his work cannot be accessed directly. Accounts from the period present a figure who was both at the center of the postmodern dance revolution and yet somehow out of step with it. Herko was a founding member of the Judson Dance Theatre, a crucible of the avant-garde known for ushering minimalism and everyday movement into the field of modern dance. He was a student of the choreographer James Waring, and among his Judson cofounders was Yvonne Rainer, whose minimalism has become iconic and now defines the movement. But Herko was no minimalist: His style was baroqueornamental, in the words of the queer theorist Jos Esteban Muoz. He was a dancer of expressive exuberance, who did not conform with the aesthetic codes that dominated the movements of which he was a part, Muoz writes in Cruising Utopia. Di Primas book is itself ornamented with her friends exuberance: the velvet capes and schmatta he was in the habit of wearing toward the end of his life (the neighborhood kids took to calling him Zorro), the copy of Gertrude Steins Portraits and Prayers he gave to di Prima, the amphetamine he always had on hand to add to their morning cups of coffee together, and his final apartment on Ridge Street, which the two named the Opulent Tower.

Muoz exalts Herkos excessively campy, neoromantic style, his untimely queerness. He sees him as a utopian figure whose life and career did not abide the demands of capitalist production or compulsory heterosexuality, and whose jet out the window was a final, culminating performance of his excessive style. The incandescent Herko is present in Annals, particularly in di Primas descriptions of his performances. Discarded clean line, exclusion of emotion, old rags and shawls taken from whatever closets, she writes of The Palace of the Dragon Prince: The beauty and grace of your self-abnegation. Yet, after visiting the scene of Herkos death, Muoz concludes on a slightly different note: This stroll made me think about the abstraction of writing about a suicide as performance and how that misses something. It obfuscates, Muoz writes, what Herkos death symbolize[d] for a larger collectivity. Annals, a book that mourns as much as it exalts, fills in this picture. For di Prima, Freddie Herkos death symbolized the end of an era, and that unquestionably youth was past, and thoughtlessness.

Continued here:

Diane di Prima and the Dream of the East Village Avant-Garde - The Nation

A new Aardman short is being released on Netflix in time for Christmas with Robin Robin set to tell the heartwarming story of a small bird who sets off on a quest to prove herself to the family of mice burglars who raised her.

As you might expect, the beloved stop-motion animation studio has been able to draft in some big names to lend their voices to the characters read on for everything you need to know about the cast.

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Who is Robin? The main character in the film, Robin is described as a small bird with a very big heart. Having been raised by a family of mice burglars, as she grows up Robin begins to become more aware of her differences and sets off on the ultimate heist to prove her worth to the mice discovering a lot about herself in the process.

What else has Bronte Carmichael been in? Young star Carmichael has a number of film credits to her name including roles in Darkest Hour, On Chesil Beach, and Christopher Robin. She also appeared as Martha in two episodes of the final season of Game of Thrones and has a regular role as Skye on Sci-Fi series Nightflyers.

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Who is Dad Mouse? The head of the mice burglar clan that raised Robin, Dad Mouse is described as a bit bumbling and a little bit clumsy by actor Adeel Akhtar.

What else has Adeel Akhtar been in? Akhtar has many TV and film credits to his name, and won particular praise for his roles as Wilson Wilson in Utopia and as Shazad in the TV film Murdered by My Father. Other recent credits include roles in films such as The Nest, Enola Holmes, Everybodys Talking About Jamie and Ali and Ava, in addition to a main role in the Netflix series Sweet Tooth.

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Who is Cat? The villain of the piece, Cat is described as amenacing, yet very cool Cat who would like nothing more than to gobble Robin up.

What else has Gillian Anderson been in? Anderson has played a number of iconic roles in her career from Special AgentDana Scully in The X-Files and DSU Stella Gibson in The Fall to Jean Milburn in Sex Education and Margaret Thatcher in The Crown. Film credits include The Last King of Scotland, Viceroys House and The House of Mirth, while she will play Eleanor Roosevelt in the upcoming Showtime series The First Lady.

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Who is Magpie? A curmudgeonly old magpie who Robin encounters on her journey, Magpie has a house full of glittery things that hes stolen and an unlikely heart of gold. He is desperate to steal the sparkling star from the top of a local Christmas tree and enlists Robins help in his endeavour.

What else has Richard E Grant been in? One of the nations most popular actors, Grants most famous roles include the title character in cult comedy film Withnail and I and his Academy Award-nominated turn as Jack Hock in Can You Ever Forgive Me?. Other film credits include How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Hudson Hawk, The Player, Bram Stokers Dracula, The Age of Innocence, Spice World, Gosford Park, The Iron Lady, Logan, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and Everybodys Talking About Jamie.

Who is Dink? Dink is the youngest member of the mouse family with whom Robin has grown up.

What else has Amira Macey-Micahel been in? Macey-Michaels only other credit is in the film Out of Orbit.

Robin Robin will be available on Netflix from 24th November check out our guide to thebest TV series on Netflixandbest movies on Netflix, or take a look at ourTV Guide. Visit ourMovies hub for more news and features.

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Meet the voice cast of Robin Robin - Radio Times

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Theres a long-standing conundrum in ecology called the paradox of the plankton. Famously articulated by ecologist George Evelyn Hutchinson in 1961, the paradox explores how odd it is that there are thousands of species of phytoplankton in the upper reaches of the ocean. The top few meters of water are basically a well-mixed soup, meaning all of these species of phytoplankton are relying on the same nutrients. The theory of competitive exclusion says that one of these species ought to be a little stronger, and should out-compete the rest. But none has. Why?

Hutchinson published the paradox at the height of the Cold War, when the air was thick with debates over the values of competition and the sharing of resources. Ecological thinking was itself dominated by the idea that competition drives some species to thrive and others to go extinct. But Hutchinson saw this way of thinking as an oversimplification, and he held up phytoplankton as an example of how there must be additional forces shaping biodiversity.

Over the past few decades, ecologists have suggested many explanations for why multiple phytoplankton species persist, including the effects of rapid environmental shifts, the existence of species codependencies, the uneven distributions of phytoplankton species, and the fact that some phytoplankton release toxins that may give them an edge over the competition. But a new study by Oregon State University ecologist Michael Behrenfeld and his colleagues seeks to solve the dilemma by taking a different perspective: the planktons.

Phytoplankton are so small, and the distances between them so vastfrom their perspectivethat its likely phytoplankton arent competing at all, says Behrenfeld. If you imagine that a phytoplankton is roughly the size of a trees rootball, he says, the next nearest phytoplankton would be kilometers away.

A phytoplanktons small size also means that it experiences water as a thick substance, perhaps akin to how honey feels to us. When an individual phytoplankton moves, a layer of water called the boundary layer moves with it. This means that phytoplankton spend most of their time firmly separated from each other.

When you think of it that way, its like, well, how can phytoplankton that are that physically distant actually directly compete with each other? says Behrenfeld.

Inspired by this insight, Behrenfeld decided to model phytoplankton biodiversity using an approach called neutral theory. Rather than modeling the ecosystem dynamics as competition fueled, this framework says that a community only loses species when, by chance, too many members die at the same time, and only gains species when they immigrate or when genetic mutations create them anew.

For about a thimbleful of water, neutral theory worked greatthe number of species Behrenfelds model predicted to be present was around what scientists have observed in at-sea surveys. But when he scaled the model up to represent a larger body of water, a crack began to form.

We have to remember that the water is being mixed continuously, Behrenfeld says. In a world dictated by neutral theory, phytoplankton would have to die at an unreasonable rate to make room for all of the new plankton coming in from other parts of the ocean. Instead of explaining why there is more than one phytoplankton species, Behrenfelds neutral theory-based model predicted that there should actually be an astronomical number of phytoplankton species.

So Behrenfeld and his colleagues considered other forces that could limit the number of plankton species even in a competition-free utopia, such as how attractive phytoplankton are to predators, how fast they reproduce, and how asexual reproduction affects genetic variation within a species. Their work paid offadding these elements to their model gave them close to the same number of species that scientists have observed in the ocean.

Nick Record, a computational ecologist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, says Behrenfelds results highlight how the oceans constant churning forces scientists to come up with new ways of thinking about relationships between species. Marine systems are really different from those on land, he says. And they behave in these really different ways.

Yet Record has a different take on the paradox of the plankton. Its not really a paradox to be solved, Record says. Its part of a narrative.

Rather than assuming that some solutions are right while others are wrong, Record thinks that all proposed solutions to the paradox point to a bigger truth about marine ecosystemsthat they are complex enough that ecologists may never find a one-size-fits-all model to describe how they function.

Perhaps the next 60 years will see just as many proposed solutions to the paradox as the last. And maybe thats exactly how it should be when it comes to a good paradox.

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Why Are There So Many Kinds of Phytoplankton? - Hakai Magazine

Madeline Hollander, Review, 2021, Performa Commission for the Performa 2021 Biennial. From left: Ashley Hill, Jodi Melnick, Frances Samson, Savannah Spratt, MeghanManning, Michael Greenberg, Megan LeCrone, Eloise Deluca, Olivia Boisson, Miriam Miller, Alexa De Barr (far back) Kevin Zambrano, Lauren Newman, Misha Culver. Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk, courtesy of Performa.

STRANGE THAT IT'S BEENyears since I last saw live performance. But everyone was exclaiming this now-familiar platitude as they busily embraced on the sidewalk at the intersection of Rivington and Orchard the past October, during the collective reunion which took as its backdrop and pretext Kevin Beasleys The Sound of Morning. The first of eight commissions realized for this years Performa Biennial, the performance began almost unnoticeably. One of Beasleys collaborators flung a deflated basketball into the air; another began methodically disassembling a black metal barrier that had been provisionally erected on the sidewalk. (By the end of the hour-and-a-half event, the gates beams were piled up like flotsam in the middle of the street, a makeshift stage on which the performers assembled, posed, read, etc.). Another performer dragged a loose bike rack here and there. Ten in all were enfolded, at first unrecognizably, in the ambulating audience, their activities initially so fragmented and dispersed, so quotidian and unremarkable, as to warrant the question: Is anything going on?

You could lose them, Beasley said about the dancers in this work, which put pressure on some familiar but still productive questionsof presence and embodiment in the urban landscape, and what passes as noticeablewhile inversely drawing attention to the perverse spectacularization of these dynamics. (Note how many iPhones were brandished throughout the proceedings, snapping photos and videos of the performers). At one corner of the intersection, Beasley and his team mixed sounds picked up from contact mics secured to a crushed plastic bottle, newspaper broadsides, collapsed cardboard boxes, or clasped in the performers hands. As the sun began to set, the energy began to feel anarchic, the sound rawer, the audience more diffuse and less immediately identifiable (after all, it was an early weekend evening in the LES). When the performers and spectators walked off into the night, I was left with a lingering ambivalence toward this works provisional offering: that a routine-puncturing event was no sooner recognized than it was returned to the ambient texture of the city; that bodies had appeared in all their singularity and collective assembly one moment only to disappear again the next; that what is palpable could just as quickly become untraceable, like that fleeting sound produced by steel scraping against concrete.

Starkly different in style was the next piece on view: Sara Cwynars Down at the Arcade, which also took attention as its subject, though this time via an ever-growing cache of images, texts, objects, and artifacts that form the expanded imaginary of this kitsch encyclopedists maximalist archive. Produced in the former fast-fashion Topshop flagship on Fifth Avenue (one of the many vacated commercial buildings in Midtown), Down at the Arcade reimagined the photographers studio as a set for a three-act rumination on archival excess, digital economies, and the bewildering endeavor of locating desire, the real, and the self (if these categories even still apply) within an industry of simulacral perceptual experiences. A conveyor belt supplied a steady stream of objects selected to illustrate a lecture, delivered by Cwynars frequent collaborator Paul Cooper in a soothing voiceover with the artist regularly chiming in, while a performer manipulated the scattered elements on set. Multiple cameras framed and live-streamed the continuous deluge of content, instantly remediating what appeared on set into a packaged, prosumer montage.

Other commissions, Danielle Deans Amazon (Proxy) and Ericka Beckmans STALK, took on allegorical dimensions. Deans production at the new Bushwick art complex, Amant, invoked Fordlandiathe Detroit automobile industrialists short-lived 1920s rubber plantation in the Brazilian rainforesttelescoping it through the contemporary lens of Amazons Mechanical Turk (AMT) platform, through which companies can crowdsource remote human labor to harvest data for AI optimization. (Instead of extracting rubber, were extracting human emotions, the actors intoned.) Amid idyllic, pastoral decor, four performers (Proxies) reenacted conversations with Turkers, with whom Dean communicated over several months to collect testimonies about their experiences; these played on two monitors and informed part of the script, which details the kinds of surveys AMTs complete daily, probing their perceptual responses, emotional states, and moral orientations. Fords extractive capitalist utopia was a failure, collapsing in 1934 after workers rebelledan ending echoed here as the jungles climate compromises the ill-adapted corporate settlements operations, and as the Proxies mount an uprising to protest working conditions. Deans conflation of these contexts in Amazon rehearses critiques of post-Fordism and its injunction to perform soft skills (read: be flexible, motivated, communicative, competitive, resourceful, and so forth), showing the pernicious effects of these qualities as they become compulsorynow more than everin decentralized, virtual, and alienating labor contexts. Beckman, for her part, presented STALK at Brooklyn Bridge Park, her first off-camera performance. Refashioning the fairytale of Jack and the Beanstalk as a critique of capitalism, financialization, and climate destruction, with a pun on stalks/stocks (and the lower Manhattan skyline as a backdrop to bring the point home), Beckman transposed her signature profilmic performance to a live setting, with slightly asynchronous visual and sonic tracks underscoring the farmers-cum-investors task-based, mechanized repetition of phrases and actions. The result was uneven, but the sight of an aerial gymnast climbing a taught rope as if she were scaling the skyscrapers in the distance was impressive.

The most arresting moments in this years biennial were also the most evanescentthe ones that interrupted performances recent, long disappearing act by transforming that absence into a capacious and expressive presence (call me sentimental). Take Shikeiths notes toward becoming a spill, staged to overlook the Atlantic Ocean from Rockaway Beach. A gospel choir flanked an illuminated platform, giving breath to the ecstatic and vital choreography of four dancers, clad in diaphanous mesh costumes in various hues of blue that echoed the shifting luminosity of the sea and the sky. Shikeiths moving work, which continues his ongoing study of blue spaces, boundlessness, and contemporary Black queer identity, metaphorized diasporic longing, ancestral histories, and the ocean as a site of loss and refuge. At the golden hour, the choir repeated We wont rest until were free. When the performance closed, the cast walked down to the waterfront, turning its back on a rapt audience for a minute of silence. In another vein, Madeline Hollanders Review paid homage to the many performances canceled, postponed, or curtailed by the pandemic, bringing together twenty-four dancers from several New York-based companies to embody everything we missed. On one of falls first crisp nights, with the audience seated on either side of the LESs empty Hamilton Fish public pool, dancers marked their motions in the choreographic short-hand used in rehearsals to preserve energy. Dancers conjoined into solos, duos, and trios in this manifold collection of repertoires, producing a dialogue of echoes, affinities, and unlikely counterpoints. After each finished their sequence, they bowed, and returned to their stations behind a tall spotlight, which they promptly turned off, leaving the stage dark. They bowed over and over again in their own idiosyncratic styles, marking a continuous cycle of beginning and ending. After two yearsamidst the pandemic, between biennialsthat have felt like a rehearsal for a future perpetually delayed, this show of endurance in practice was welcome. As in Shikeiths gripping closing act, the abundant applause that followed spilled out, evaporating into the air.

Rachel Valinsky

The 2021 Performa Biennialtook place in New York City from October 1630.

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Rachel Valinsky on the 2021 Performa Biennial - Artforum

Just like they push the boundaries of what can be considered music, artists within the realm of ambient and drone music tend to make interesting forays into complex subject matters, attacking concepts in ways that genres more tied to song structure and cadence cannot. Incoherency and unpredictability actually work in the music's favor in this case, authentically rendering the chaos of existence. Pseudodoxia and The Sun and the Mirror bend this to their advantage on their new split The Eerie and Radiant Doorless Rooms of Pain, exploring the concept of memory and the need to live in the moment, respectively. Both these ideas hinge on abandoning a traditional start-to-finish flowin Pseudodoxia's case, due to the inherent unreliability of our recollection, while The Sun and the Mirror suggest that what's to come is immaterial compared to the present. Though they take vastly different sonic approaches, the two halves of the split rely on drawn-out, engrossing soundscapes that interweave ambient and drone-doom musings, offering flashes of intensity and tension that are best experienced without any thought to what comes next. Skip all the guessing and just absorb each moment as it arriveslisten to the split now with our full stream here.

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We last heard from The Sun and the Mirror earlier this year when they released their debut full-length Dissolution to Sun and Bone [interview here]. Their merger of powerful doom and gripping ambient textures is in full effect here, though it's cast in a different light: while the harsher tones and angrier edges on that album fit its themes of grief and resolution, on The Eerie and Radiant Doorless Rooms of Pain the duo opt for an intimate and almost reassuring sense of up-close doom. Clean vocals and cello textures add an organic warmth to the gloomy riffs, reaching out to the heart even as the rumbling bass and blown-out snare threaten your speakers' livelihood.

This warmth serves as a vital contrast to Pseudodoxia, who craft the first half of the split from bleak, inhuman raw materials. Relying on a sort of corrupted musique concrte, angry synthesizers thrum atop muffled, dour backing riffs (there's no telling what instrument is creating them) and confoundingly distorted vocals. The 'doom' region of their ambient-doom-drone continuum is no less fractured, pitting discordant leads against moody vocals as drums thrash almost arrhythmically behind it all. It's jarring and often rather uncomfortable, but due to this, all the weirdness has a habit of aligning into unpredictably excellent moments. This new group consists of members of Feed Them Death and LaColpa (the latter having crafted one of the scarier records I listened to last year), so this fusing of twisted, avant-garde minds has borne exactly the hideous fruit one could hope for.

United, at least broadly, by the idea of 'now' mattering more than anything else, the two halves of The Eerie and Radiant Doorless Rooms of Pain actually do create a narrative, or at least a journey: Psuedodoxia erodes the listener's need for structure and The Sun and the Mirror then contemplates this change in perspective. It's not really a good thing that we can't trust our memories, or that our hopes for the future can destroy our present, but this is doom metal (in part)diving into sad truths is a reward in itself.

Psuedodoxia comments:

Pseudodoxia is interested in exploring the notion of memory - its unreliability and the transitoriety of our knowledge and understanding of it.

The intention from the get go was to treat our music like the aural version of a book by W.G. Sebald, therefore stylistically exploring the option of a narrative that is ultimately incohesive and yet able to tell a story through multiple fragments of memory. The layers comprising our soundscapes are juxtaposed fluidly rather forced into cohesion for conscious interpretation, and so our songs titles are all acronyms - debris of logic rearranged to represent the unthinkable.

The Sun and the Mirror comments:

The Relinquishment of Hope is a meditation on the life denying temptation of escapism, the longing for utopia and salvation that keeps us from experiencing each moment fully, whether that be joy or immense sorrow and pain. It is about letting go of the impulse to wait for life to begin when things are better. It is a full acceptance that utopia may never come, that we have to live fully while were alive, through fortunate circumstances as well as tragedy and unmitigated disaster.

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The Eerie and Radiant Doorless Rooms of Pain releases on November 26th via Brucia Records.

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There Is No Entry or Exit to The Eerie and Radiant Doorless Rooms of Pain (Split Premiere) - Invisible Oranges