Category Archives: Trance

Jaden Ivey sat in the bowels of Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn, speechless and emotional. It was almost as if he was in a trance. The moment he had worked for his entire life had arrived. He was in the NBA, a member of the Detroit Pistons, who took the Purdue star with the No. 5 pick in the 2022 NBA Draft.

Unbeknownst to him, though, as the 20-year-old sat and stared at a screen, sporting a sharp, navy-colored velvet sport coat and Pistons cap, talking to the Detroit media, his future was still up in the air. Rival teams were blowing up the Pistons phones, per sources, trying their best to create the awkward draft moment when a player parades around in public wearing the wrong teams colors. The Knicks, per sources, were most aggressive in trying to land his services. The Pistons, though, stood firm and elected to move forward with Ivey, who they werent sure would be available at No. 5 coming into Thursday nights draft.

For Ivey, going to Detroit means more than achieving his dream. His mother, Niele, played for the WNBAs Detroit Shock in 2005 when Ivey was 2 years old. His father, Javin Hunter, was born in Detroit and is a former NFL wide receiver. His grandfather, James Hunter, was an all-pro defensive back for the Detroit Lions in the 1970s and 80s. Ivey was born in in Indiana, but Detroit is home. He still has family there. It was almost as if his life had come full circle.

The Pistons took Ivey to create what they hope will be a dynamic backcourt for the next decade-plus, pairing him with last years No. 1 pick Cade Cunningham. Ivey told The Athletic he has admired Cunningham from a distance. Cunningham, being the No. 1 pick, was an inspiration to the underrecruited guard. Now together, the two fight the same battle of turning Detroit back into a relevant entity in the NBA world.

Thursday night, as he made the media rounds following his ushering into the NBA, the newest Piston guard briefly chatted with The Athletic about his first conversations with Detroit general manager Troy Weaver and head coach Dwane Casey, the biggest misconception about his game and his relationships with the players on the Pistons roster.

You can read the exclusive interview below.

(Editors note: The conversation has been edited for both length and clarity.)

Did you ever get a sense during the pre-draft process that the Pistons would take you if available at No. 5?

Yeah. After my workout with the Pistons, I really liked the organization. Dwane Casey, what we were talking about. Troy Weaver. I felt comfortable with the organization and coaching staff. They were very genuine. The facility I was at, it was a very nice facility. I cant wait to get to work there.

Whats the biggest misconception about your game?

I feel like I can showcase my midrange game at the next level. Its something Ive been working on all summer. I feel like I can showcase that at a high level.

What were those first conversations with Troy Weaver and Dwane Casey like?

They were very intense. I felt like they really wanted me. They were very genuine conversations. They talked about winning, and thats what I want to do. We talked about setting a defensive presence when I get there and bringing back winning to Detroit.

(Weaver) challenged me to be a great defender. I want to do that. He wants me to be part of this culture that theyre building on that side of the ball. I want that challenge. They want to win. I want to help them win. I want to show that I have some dawg in me.

Do you have any relationships with the players in Detroit?

Yeah, I know Isaiah (Stewart), Saddiq (Bey) I know a lot of the guys. Isaiah Stewart went to La Lumiere (Indiana), so I keep in contact with him and support him. Its a brotherhood at La Lumiere. Cade Cunningham Ive seen him in the draft. He was the first pick in last years draft. He gave me a lot of inspiration, being the No. 1 pick. The fact I get to play with him will be very special.

Last thing: I heard Stephen A. Smith said he was happy for you but mad you arent a Knick. Spike Lee said something to you at the podium. Has this whole situation been weird? Can you put it into words?

Tonight is special, to be honest. Just to be here, knowing how hard I worked to be here, to be drafted to the Detroit Pistons, an organization that, as a kid, I went to Pistons games. Its a high-energy, high-level style of play. Theyve got that dawg type of play, too, which is what I like. I want to get back to that. Im looking forward to that.

(Top photo of Jaden Ivey: Brad Penner / USA Today)

Read the original post:

Jaden Ivey Q&A: Chatting with the Pistons No. 5 pick at the 2022 NBA Draft - The Athletic

I.

ACCORDING TO MAYA DEREN, the Ukrainian-born experimental filmmaker, writer, photographer, and choreographer, a truly creative work of art creates its own reality. When a friend once suggested to Deren that she become an anthropologist, given her interest in the field, she insisted that she would never be satisfied in analyzing the nature of an established reality but would always want to make her own.

Despite the brevity of her career, Derens influence as an avant-garde director and film theorist in the 1940s and 50s is more than safely established. Sally Berger has shown how important her work was to later artists, such as Carole Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and numerous others. But her original contributions to the study of rhythm and dance, and their connection to spirituality and trance, have been overlooked by specialists in those fields, as she remains a figure read almost exclusively by film scholars. But Derens work was not only wild but wildly interdisciplinary, drinking from, as well as collaborating with, radically disparate sources and traditions.

In particular, the critical comments in her notebooks on the cybernetic anthropology of Gregory Bateson (first published in the magazine October, in 1980), I believe, deserve much more attention than they have received from researchers on culture and cybernetics (the notable exception being Ute Holls remarkable 2002 book Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics, originally written in German and published in English in 2017).

Deren was born in Kyiv, in 1917, as Eleonora Derenkowska. After her family fled to the United States in 1922 to escape antisemitism, she studied journalism and political science at Syracuse University, where she met her first husband, the activist Gregory Bardacke. Together, they moved to New York, where she finished her degree at New York University in 1935 and became an active socialist agitator, working for the Young Peoples Socialist League. The couple separated before the end of the decade, and Deren went on to get a masters degree in literature in 1939, studying symbolism in French and English poetry. It was not until 1943, at the age of 26, that she made her first film, in collaboration with her second husband, Alexander Hammid.

With a modest budget of about $275, Meshes of the Afternoon is by far her most famous work, an almost mandatory presence in most lists of best American short films. The silent piece shows Deren in a disorienting and oneiric course in which she finds different versions of herself, as well as a dark figure that looks a bit like Death itself (with a mirror for a face). (Initially produced without a soundtrack, Derens third husband, Teiji Ito, would later compose a highly percussive musical accompaniment, a haunting track that heightens the anxious, dreamlike mood of the film.) At the time, many treated Meshes of the Afternoon as a psychoanalytical drama, others seeing a surrealist synthesis of film noir. And while the film has had its share of imitations, nothing else looks quite like it. Despite the simple narrative and editing elements, all repurposed from classical cinema, the combination that Deren and Hammid offer us is still familiar in an extremely disturbing way, not unlike the movies signature doppelgnger figures.

Her movies are carving of the visible, giving us little to no context or explanation besides their titles. Derens work lacks any of the conceptual excess or the abstract plasticity that would come to characterize so much of experimental cinema in the United States. While dealing with the tortuous relationship of the body in motion and all the spatial-temporal subversions made possible by montage, she put her own likeness at play. Each material was an inventive opening into a world, as well as the mode of its operational closure and its functional limits. As an artist, Deren mixed a passionate interest in the singular, technical affordances of the cinematographic form with a desire to reorganize our rhythmic perception.

This is made evident by works like An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1946) and Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality (1960). Deren wanted cinema to reformulate the dimensions of ritual and magic that have always accompanied our species. Cinema for her was not simply an ingenious way to display traditional narrative forms, like the epic poem or the novel, but a new irruption of the interactive trances otherwise so thoroughly repressed in modernity. She comes to the point of saying, in Anagram, that all art should be ritualistic, consciously manipulated to create effects and refashion reality. She understood this orientation toward ritual to be much more in phase with the epistemological state of scientific modernity than any notion of naturalistic expression in art, an extension of her overarching interest in anthropology and in dancing rites.

Deren completed six films in her whole career, four between the years of 1943 and 1946, including the hypnotic works At Land (1944) and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946); this was also the period in which she also wrote the texts most associated with her legacy. After her trips to Haiti, however, which began in February 1947, she took 14 years to finish her final two movies, often considered minor works Meditation on Violence (1948) and The Very Eye of Night (1958) both slightly awkward but conceptually original experiments in cinematic expression. Some historians suggest that Derens interest in Haiti acted as a sort of break or detour in her career as a filmmaker, but researcher Catrina Neiman points out that you could well argue the very opposite: Derens brief and intense career in cinema distracted her from her deep and systematic interest in studying dance and religion.

Her experience in Haiti clearly changed her in a singular manner, but her deep interest in the connection between dance and spirituality, rhythm and trance, started years before, when, in 1940, she came in contact with the work of choreographer Katherine Dunham. A student of anthropology from the University of Chicago, Dunham researched Afro-Caribbean dancing practices in Haiti and Jamaica before becoming a very successful performer and the director of one of the first African American dance groups in the country. Neiman describes how Deren worked as Dunhans assistant for nine months, traveling with her group during a tour along the West Coast, and considers how her own field work seemed to have influenced Derens later decision to travel to Haiti.

The fact is that Derens Divine Horsemen, the amateur ethnography that she produced from her time in that country, is a remarkable achievement. An intense and insightful work on spirituality and rhythm, the book is extraordinarily well written, if a bit disconnected from most of the conceptual dilemmas of academic ethnography at the time. Deren also filmed a series of rituals in Haiti which later became Divine Horsemen, a documentary only edited and released in 1985, more than two decades after her death.

Despite some informal training with Gregory Bateson and Joseph Campbell, Deren herself admits to being an amateur ethnographer, an artist who initially intended to use what she saw in Haiti as material for her work, but who found herself so thoroughly seduced by the surprising complexity and formal beauty of the spiritual practices that she encountered that she could not help but struggle to further understand them: I had begun as an artist, as one who would manipulate the elements of a reality into a work of art in the image of my creative integrity; I end by recording, as humbly and as accurately as I can, the logics of a reality which had forced me to recognize its integrity, and to abandon my manipulations.

Of course, that is only partially true. Deren did attempt to be scientific, but she was still an artist, and as much as the book is an attentive work of research, it is also a dazzling piece of writing made with powerful rhetorical, even lyrical, manipulations.

Her final description of ritual possession in the book, for instance, is a virtuosic performance in which Deren not only describes the rituals with careful prose, but also includes her own bodily engagement with the rhythmic trance. This is not participant observation but something else entirely. And after describing a protracted choreography of invocation, Deren submits that it is impossible to conceive how this culminating collective effort to establish contact with the world of les Invisibles could possibly fail. This is both a generous assessment and an indication of how Derens powerful emotional reactions deeply inform her account. When Deren describes Erzulie, the loa of love, it is difficult not to read it as a description of herself and her art, her finding in that divine entity the expression of human capacity to conceive beyond reality, to desire beyond adequacy, to create beyond need. This impression is only made stronger when we learn that she carried this identification with Erzulie with her upon returning to the United States, sometimes describing herself to friends at parties as a sort of avatar of that divine entity of love.

For Deren, an act of identification was always a process of transformation into something else. You cannot separate the artist from the theorist of religion and rhythm, the woman making trancelike movies from the woman writing hypnotically about trance. And why would you even want to? Her entire work can be said to reenact, by different strategies, a desire to use cinema to create radically new collective rituals and choreographies, by any medium necessary.

But what of the plateau in the title?

II.

In 1946, Deren started attending lectures by Gregory Bateson at the New School. Bateson was, at the time, developing his own singular style of anthropology, taking elements from the early developments of cybernetics, as well as from biology and ecological thinking. Deren also met Batesons wife, Margaret Mead, a distinguished anthropologist in her own right and, like her husband, a participant in the famous Macy Conferences on Circular and Causal Feedback Mechanisms. These conferences gathered, besides the couple, other towering figures of the blooming field of cybernetics, including Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, and Heinz von Foerster.

Bateson and Mead had recently done fieldwork on the Balinese culture of Indonesia, and they offered Deren the possibility of editing the material they had filmed. In her notebooks, Derens excitement is palpable when she picks up the rolls of film from the couple. She describes how incredible it is to manipulate the velocity of the recording with her own muscular energy, calling it the ultimate copulation between her and the film. Derens aim was to make a movie that would work as an intercultural fugue of ritual gestures, but she soon abandoned this objective when, after exchanging letters with Bateson and Mead on the subject, she realized the difficulty in establishing simple connections between such disparate contexts.

During these lectures, Bateson was developing his reflections on the plateau, which came to be later used and expanded by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Bateson produces the concept (or image) while describing a scene in which a Balinese mother played an erotic game with her son, pulling on his penis in a playful manner. The anthropologist is struck by the fact that the mother seemed to provoke the son right to the point in which he was close to a small climax, only then to interrupt the game abruptly, much to his frustration.

Bateson is struck by this scene because of how it seemed to deviate from the general pattern of schismogenesis, a concept that he first proposed in 1935 after studying the Iatmul people of New Guinea. Schismogenesis is a concept that describes processes of cumulative social interactions that lead to inner division in social groups, and it comes from an understanding that the most basic characteristic that would make men prone to struggle would be this hope of release from tension through total involvement.

That is, Bateson speculated that nearly every social interaction that is cumulative and directed toward climax, such as war and social conflict in general, has curves that were bounded in a way that is comparable to orgasms. In other words, since the achievement of a certain degree of bodily intensity is usually followed by a release of tension, this meant that the orgasm could serve as a sort of basic prototype for social interaction. Bateson first recognized these circuits of behavior in the Iatmul, but he thought they could be found all over Western society as well. He came to use the concept to describe the arms race between the US and USSR as a case of symmetric schismogenesis, a cumulative escalation of tension which recursively intensifies the behavior on both sides, as opposed to cases of complementary schismogenesis, like that of a master and a slave or of Marxist class relations.

Going back to the Balinese mother and child, Bateson understood that in teaching the child to divert or defer the accumulated tension instead of dissipating it in immediate consummation, the Balinese offered another model for the social disposition of interactive tension. He saw other patterns of behavior in Balinese culture that would tend to avoid climax in such a manner (in trances, in social conflicts, and in their traditional forms of art). This libidinal economy departed from Western culture and from this general theory of schismogenesis.

Deren seemed excited about Batesons ideas, but she quickly grew skeptical. On her notebooks, she registers disagreement with the diagram that Bateson made of the process. She writes:

Batesons treatment of the frustrated Balinese climax principle has always bothered me, particularly as illustrated by that diagram of the ascending line, stopped off with a cross, and then just a dotted line indicating, I suppose, where it should have gone. It did not seem as simple a thing as a conclusive negative abortion.

Deren offers her own version of the process:

Actually, that line, after it gets ascending, does not merely disappear at the point of the X on Batesons diagram. What happens is that the energy which would be required for the ascendant acceleration of a climactic curve is channelized instead into a plateau of duration. The duration in time, therefore, is enormously extended and can even withstand interruption, as an accelerating curve cannot.

The main difference between Batesons and Derens definitions perhaps lies at the end, in which she says that the channeled duration of a plateau can bear interruption in a way that an ascending curve cannot. Pleasure does not only happen in quantized leaps; it can be gradually and continuously modulated, like the subtle toning of a muscle. This transformation of the ascending climax, as tension distended in another plateau of intensive interaction, resonates with elements from Deleuze and Guattaris own later reading, as Ute Holl has already pointed out.

Deren writes in her notebooks that this frustration of climaxes in the Balinese would have as its purpose: The channelization of energy which would, in climactic activity, be spent and really dissipated in conclusive exhaustion-that it is converted into a tension plateau which serves the continuity both of personal and communal relations. Where Bateson initially saw a sort of denial of culmination through intensive stabilization, Deren projects a progressive intensification, going beyond the dotted line of the curve without reaching permanent stability. This is not to deny the structure of the climax, but to distend and modulate its thickness.

Ultimately, Deren thought that Batesons diagram said more about Bateson and his method than it said about the Balinese. She also pointed out to him that taking a long time to reach climax in sexual activity is not considered a negation for many, but, is, in fact, a desirable feat. Where Bateson apparently saw a sort of denial of orgasm as principle of temporal modulation, Deren saw another version of orgasm and distention, one which could possibly result, of course, in a different vision of this libidinal economy.

This is all to say: Dissipative discharge after cumulative tension is not the only available model for an orgasm. To consider sexual climax a basic model of tensional activity for social interaction, at the very least, one must include the possibility of multiple discharges with no recovery time, in the female orgasm, and of dry discharges in the male apparatus (without even getting into further complications of distension and modulation, such as you can find in tantric practices, and so on). It is remarkable to note that Deren and Batesons debates are happening directly prior to and congruently with the Kinsey Reports in 1948 and 1953. Theirs is shaped by anthropological field work rather than the medical field, but all these studies circle similarly explosive questions of pleasure, sexual difference, and the social body. Deren also departs from other elements in Batesons models of social interaction, bothered by his tendency to model every social exchange as a directional signpost, which she thought indicated his inability to capture the energetic, dynamic dimension of sociality.

Even if Deren studied with Bateson, it is evident how much the teacher had to learn from his student, and how much the field had to gain from Deren. As Holl explains, Bateson seemed to have incorporated some of Derens criticisms in his later work, especially in his work on the social matrix of psychiatry, and she adds that Deleuze and Guattari would then serve themselves of Batesons idea of a plateau of duration to conceive of the structure of the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus. For them, the plateau constitutes a multiplicity that is always to be found in the middle, with no beginning or end. This ideal can be understood as the structural germ of their shared conceptual perspective; and the possibility of distending intensity further ties into their infamously cryptic notion of the Body Without Organs, inspired by Antonin Artaud, which proposes an active state of experimentation that can destitute our rigid and strictly functional relationship with our bodies.

Much more could be said about plateaus and bodies without organs, of course, and a lot of that work has been done to death. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Deren was inspired by this possibility of interactive distension in Bateson, but she diverged from him by gesturing toward the radically open ongoing possibility of plotting out new types of libidinal diagrams, predicated on different hydraulics of intensity.

All of this, not coincidentally, is what Deren produced with her cinema: choreographic experiments in possession that work their effects upon their audience through the use and subversion of climax and continuity, by opening to every artistic medium for what it can reveal, by using montage as a speculative toolkit for enacting old trances with new media. Bateson knew how to extract coherent circuits out of social interactions, but Deren discovered how art was capable of shaping and transfiguring these selfsame circuits into diagrams for living differently.

III.

In 1960, a young Korean artist named Nam June Paik visited the German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. His intention was to explain that fixed form would have to be maintained in experimental art because it was inspired in sex (a single direction, a single crescendo): ([C]an you imagine a multidirectional crescendo? We only have one heart), climax, catharsis human nature Ying Yang Nature of Nature Proton and Electron. But before Paik could say anything, almost as if anticipating his point, Stockhausen began to say that fixed form is like sex: it has no freedom whatsoever. Then Stockhausen told Paik of the possibility of a calm and free kind of love.

Deren was not saying what Stockhausen was saying. Besides affirming that dissipative discharge is not the only kind of culmination, Deren knew that there are multiple ways of composing a crescendo. In other words, she not only questioned the totalizing dominance of the dissipative climax, but she regularly offered alternatives through art. In her films, she invokes a successive frustration of climaxes so as to erect plateaus of tension, circuits which, as Sarah Keller writes, construct meaning through resonances, not resolutions. Even when a form is completed, it is only an illusory gesture which can be unmade in the next movement. Her cinema is made from sustained and ingenious sets of frustrations, amplifying the usual deceptive ambivalence of montage, as deployed in more traditional filmic narrative, or even most experimental film. Its the kind of simple but brilliant reversal of expectations that you get in the impossible gags of Buster Keaton, but with a kind of ritualistic cyclicity as its motor, in place of vaudeville.

Philosopher of art Susanne Langer defines rhythm as the the setting-up of new tensions by the resolution of former ones. In Derens work, because the resolution is always reversible, the circuit always carries along with itself the possibility of its own undoing, of dissolving and being reassembled in another plane. The repeated movements in At Land create an almost abstract space, in which gesture becomes iterative protocol, seeming to happen both before and after it appears on screen. And in her article on editing, Creative Cutting (1947) (composed while she was attending Batesons lectures), Deren writes that [i]t is impossible to overestimate the compelling continuity of duration which movement carried along the splice can create. This carrying of movement along the splice seems to be the most essential procedure of Derens cinema. In her notebooks, she describes the same idea by saying that continuity and intensified duration is achieved in film by not letting any movement be completed.

For Deren, the interruption of a gesture deepens the tension rather than dissipating it. A step begins on the beach but finishes on a dining room; a character seems to approach the viewer, but the movement keeps repeating with no conclusion, modulating its tensive disposition. Thus, a leap can encompass the whole cosmic span of time. Made partly through a desire to reconcile contemporary art with 20th-century physics, Derens metamorphic montage is a thorough demonstration of Alfred North Whiteheads idea that, in time, there is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming.

In her writings, Deren suggests that every cinematographic composition is based on the transformation of duration into tension. If cinema does that explicitly, or didactically, we can say that of any art form that it negotiates the transformation of a set of material tensions inside a field of formal problems, turning it into a game of rhythmic intensity. Every form of art is choreographic in so far as it binds and unbinds the bodily appetites of an audience through a diagrammatic interaction with an ordered set of material tensions. This also means that every form of art is erotic in the rhythmic modality of its negotiation of pleasure and pain.

Considering Derens reiterated resistance to the application of psychoanalytical theory to art, it is as if she were arguing against the notion of pleasure as a reduction of tension, one which Freud himself would come to complicate in his 1924 text on masochism. (You dont have to be a practicing masochist to surmise that pleasure can reach unbearable levels of intensive interaction.) To theorist Elizabeth Grosz, Freuds entire work can be understood to be a generalization of and abstraction from the model of male orgasm to the fundamental principle of life itself.

Instead of thinking about art and sex as ever more complicated detours toward death, fatal iterations of the same tensive arc of predictable discharge, Deren helps us think about life as a spiraling deferral of pleasure and pain, ever binding and unbinding, a complicated, discrete and unstable flow of contingent creation. These ideas help refine our understanding of her rich, if limited, body of film work, just as her art helps us see a rhythmic actualization of her conceptual notions on life, death, and the spaces between.

Deren dedicates one of her texts to her father, who first talked to her about life as unstable equilibrium (an idea which she surely took to heart). She is that rare artist who reveals and points to the mechanisms behind the effects, while, at the same time, avails herself, shamelessly, of all available tricks and gimmicks. She chose the name Maya herself, after all, which in Sanskrit means illusion or magic, the powerful but illusory dimension of matter, which the German idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling understood to mean potency and possibility, materiality and illusion all wrapped into one. As Holl suggests, Derens knowledge of the rules of transformation did not stop her from becoming possessed by the trances she herself created.

She thought that she was a deviant Bateson and Margaret Mead too, for anthropology was the study of deviancy from social norms, best advanced by deviants. Like Georges Canguilhem, whom she probably did not read, Deren understood that deviancy is not a diagnosis but an orientation toward, or away from, a given norm. In some way, she understood herself to be a witch, an agent of catalyst, an advocate for change, for experimentation with new dimensions of interactivity. Witchcraft worked, she wrote in her notebooks, as an activated projection, in material terms, of how a witch functions. She also thought, in what I think is a non-trivial insight on the theory of social organization, there is no society or organization designed to change itself, and this is what the whole hitch is.

If the current collapse of civilization involves the excavation of old libidinal plumbing if Bolsonarismo in Brazil, for instance, is mainly a morbid gathering of juvenile discharges and decrepit, impotent masculine drives we need the power of both avant-garde and popular art forms to draw up some powerfully new erotic possibilities. Derens movies offer these, just as her writings invoke radical possibilities for rhythmic interaction. Tension, sexual and otherwise, is the interactive thickness of life itself, and its phase-space contains many more possible rhythms than the selfsame contours of discharge, our familiar, anxious cumming-unto-death.

See the rest here:

Tension and Drive: Maya Deren and Gregory Bateson's Plateau - lareviewofbooks

After the trade deadline passed last year, I wrote about your dads favorite player on the Minnesota Twins. Of course, Im talking about Luis Arraez.

I examined the then-24-year-old and his place among the core players on the club going forward. At the time, there were questions about where he would find a defensive home, especially with an incoming wave of young slugging prospects. Some of those questions remain to this day, but his spot among the Twins core is no longer up for debate. Arraez is in the inner ring of that core.

His old-school hitting approach is not only effective, but it puts local dads in a trance faster than a fresh pair of New Balances and a Ken Burns documentary ever could. Arraez reminds them of the hitting savants of their youth a time when it paid off to be a brainy hitter who can find holes in the opponents defense. And in todays game, which widely leans on a boom-or-bust approach, its a breath of fresh air.

When Arraez went 2-5 with a go-ahead bomb to right field in Tuesdays game against the Cleveland Guardians, faint echoes of an MVP chant rang through the hallowed halls of Target Field. While that might be somewhat premature at this point in the season, its clear that fans can see his value to a club that is fighting for a division lead in late June.

Just ask your dad.

With league-leading on-base and contact skills, multiple years of team control, and young complementary bats surrounding him, Arraez has cemented his place in the Twins core, and the fanbases hearts, for the foreseeable future.

When I questioned the future role for La Regadera in August of last year, I examined it through the scope of considering the young players who had a more defined role on the team, both in the batting order and in a defensive capacity. At the time, Arraez certainly had the upside of a traditional everyday leadoff hitter, but his splits against lefties were concerning, as was his potential defensive home in the field. Since then, his bat has certainly exceeded expectations, and he has found a passable defensive home at first base. (Still, lets consider it more of a rental than a long-term lease).

Looking at his stat line this year, its crystal clear he needs to be planted atop the lineup versus virtually all right-handed starting pitchers. So far this season, he has a .404/.481/.522 slash line in those instances. Thats the stuff of legend, and his under-the-hood numbers back that up. Heres a list of instances where Arraez ranks in the top-10 in all of MLB against right-handed pitchers, according to Inside Edge:

Its hard to come up with a better option to get the most at-bats against righties than Arraez this year. Certainly, his numbers against lefties hold him back from being an elite all-around player. His .224/.309/.245 in that regard is pretty ugly. Still, when he gets those opportunities, at least he is only striking out at a 10% rate, and hes still drawing a walk 9% of the time.

Plus, thats the nice part of being just one part of the teams multi-player core if all goes as planned, there will be suitable right-handed bat options to carry the load. From Jose Miranda (.721 OPS vs. LHP) to Spencer Steer (.918 OPS in Triple-A) and even eventually the return of rookie sensation Royce Lewis, the team will have no shortage of options to shuffle the infield around to maximize their efficiency in the next few years.

As far as his defensive home, Arraez hasnt wowed anyone at first base, but hes been passable enough to keep him in the lineup consistently while manager Rocco Baldelli juggles rest days for his team. Second base is another option that isnt ideal from a defensive range point of view but will work in the short term. But thats how you know Arraez is essential to the core of this team. Its a pretty easy call to make room for this lackluster fielder because his approach at the plate is that good.

Beyond the schematic outlook of Arraezs place in the Twins core, he is a perfect fit in regards to clubhouse chemistry. Hes a young player with plenty of big-league experience who is beloved by his teammates, fans, and even by the members of the media that cover him daily. Its one thing to be a must-see player because of immense skill. Its another level when the player captures attention with infectious enthusiasm and genuine enjoyment of the game. Not to mention, he is under team control through the 2025 season, so fans can get used to his pairing with franchise centerpiece Byron Buxton.

Is Luis Arraez the whole package? Certainly not. But hes a foundational piece to a transitioning Twins team over the next few years. And if its good enough for Dad, then it should be good enough for you.

See the article here:

Re-Examining Luis Arraez's Place In the Twins' Core - Zone Coverage

Superstar DJ and producer duo KAS:ST premiered their brand new track Leaving Earth released on June 23rd on Cercle Records during the Cercle Festival 2022.

Leaving Earth is a hypnotic, aerial track mixing melodic and powerful techno. The track offers a well-worked break, accompanied by Kis spellbinding vocals and co-produced by Gordo, the alter-ego of the successful producer Carnage. The emotion expressed through the track is gripping, at the border between melancholy and a certain darkness.

Quite used to the cosmos theme, KAS:ST inspired themselves through Ariane Rocket stage, where they premiered track at the Cercle Festival 2022. The superb Leaving Earth is a big room cut with rolling drums and bright, trance-like synths that bring a subtle sense of euphoria. The mood is epic and the emotions from the futuristic vocal that is deeply buried in the mix is spine tingling.

Each KAS:ST track released is a journey bringing together dark and melancholic emotions without ever losing touch with the clubbing aspect of techno. KAS:ST never cease to push their music beyond techno boundaries, they create an atypical and avantgarde blend of electronic music. Presenting on the world electronic circuit as both DJ and Live duo. Producing and directing their own music videos they have cumulating over 15 million plays, 30 million Spotify streams, 80k instagram followers, sold out merchandising. They have remixed legends Moby, Monolink and NTO and also been remixed by renowned artists at the polar opposite of the techno sphere, like 999999999 or Tale Of Us. KAS:ST bring their own synth laden and stylish yet emotive take to the genre each time.

Both acts started sending beats and vocals to each other some months ago. It all came together for this special occasion. Their desire to gather different aspects of the musical prism led them to exchange with the renowned producer Gordo. It all came together for this special occasion. Gordo is one of the few artists to ever dominate both the hip hop and dance music charts. He recently co-produced half of Drakes last album which already break the most first-day streams for a dance album on Apple Music.

After breathtaking livestreams, Cercle has launched the Cercle Records label signing with talented and worldwide artists. The French label is dedicated to promoting artists and venues with an exceptional production. Cercle Records goal is to raise awareness around art, cultural heritage sites and great sceneries through a unique music journey.

The year 2022 marks the launch of a new concept for the label: exclusive in-person parties which will not be streamed. To have the chance to live these special episodes, it is necessary to go on the unique spots finely selected following the Cercle and Cercle Records DNA.

Listen to the track below.

Continue reading here:

KAS:ST released their track "Leaving Earth" on Cercle Records - Rave Jungle

Three years in the making, Risings much-anticipated first edition brought to Melbournes festival-deprived audiences a rich program featuring 225 events.

With former Chunky Move founder and choreographer Gideon Obarzanek as co-director, it was only natural to expect a dance-heavy presence with eight local and international productions.

The works ranged from incredible local performer Jo Lloyd and her dancers in dialogue with drummer Jim White and guitarist Emmett Kelly, to the exquisite Indonesian dancer and choreographer Riantos ritualistic Hijra'h, but there were three works which I felt particularly captured something of this post-pandemic age.

Jurrungu Ngan-ga/Straight Talk

Marrugekus productions have often been straight talk powerful invitations to reflect on the devastating effects of ongoing colonialism as experienced daily by Indigenous people and other marginalised communities.

Their works are almost always the result of intercultural collaborations, expressed through complex choreography expanding into spoken text, multimedia installations and diverse styles of dance.

Jurrungu Ngan Marrugeku is complex choreography expanding into spoken text, multimedia installations and diverse styles of dance. Prudence Upton/ Rising

This production is no different, inspired by ideas and experience contributed as material by choreographer Dalisa Pigrams own grandfather Yawuru leader and senator Patrick Dodson, Kurdish Iranian writer and former Manus Island detainee Behrouz Boochani and Iranian-Australian scholar-activist Omid Tofighian.

Jurrungu Ngan-ga tackles the devastating consequences of Australias entrenched, government-sanctioned fixation with punishment through detention and incarceration.

The show brings together a cast of nine dancers of multiple backgrounds (from First Peoples, refugee, transgender and settler communities) who also contribute their embodied stories and histories to the piece.

It starts with a subtly exquisite solo, the dancer embracing the space with ample movement flowing freely. As it unfolds, movement becomes cagier, as if restrained, constrained by invisible barriers. It prefaces the next solo, a man pacing in a cell of light watched by a camera. He is in turn surveying by us watching the camera footage.

This is a man caged in a prison, caged in a body, and the movement no longer ample pulsates with repressed anger.

From here, the choreography grows into dizzying ensemble moments, including a surreal moment when the dancers navigate their way through a stage occupied by glowing crystal chandeliers lowered to the ground.

The choreography grows into dizzying ensemble moments. Abby Murray/Rising

There is everything in this piece, from police abuse to spit-hoods to video surveillance, to naked bodies dumped on the floor with a muffled thump, to names of those who have perished in police custody or in detention. There is abuse and humiliation and moments of protest, of fury, and joy, wild and unapologetic.

The choreography is a breathtaking tour de force delivered by fierce bodies telling their dire stories. Although nothing is accusatory here, there is no breathing space for the audiences but to take it all in. As the final solo arrives, soothing and somewhat majestic, ears still resonate with the powerful rapping this is Australia.

This is Australia at its ugliest, in its fear of everything not from here, of everyone not like us, a mirror talking back at us.

Jurrungu Ngan-ga is truly a piece of its plagued times, viscerally sharp and brutally raw, so raw that it cuts to the bone, and the call to action at the end may well be the only way to catch the breath.

The Dancing Public

Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsens The Dancing Public is also a piece about plagued times and as visceral as Marrugekus, yet very different.

We step into the dimly lit space. The music is raving and Ingvartsen, mingling with the audience, is inviting everyone to spread around. Some are starting to move with the music as they inspect the space. Then Ingvartsen gets up on one of the three platforms placed here and there, and starts to dance.

Furiously, relentlessly, her body pulses, throbs, possessed by the beats, convulsing in trance-like gestures.

Furiously, relentlessly, her body pulses, throbs, possessed by the beats, convulsing in trance-like gestures. Michael Pham/Rising

As she dances, she chants about the unexplained hysterical mass dancing episodes that started in the 1300 in south of France and continued over time. People danced till they dropped, their feet covered in blood and their minds covered in fog. It was the time of mediaeval plaques and poverty.

She joins the crowds again and dances with anyone as she swirls her way to the other platform to tell us some more. She keeps dancing. There is no sweat dripping off her body, no heavy breathing. She is fury unleashed and it is mesmerising to watch. We forget about dancing.

Suddenly, she hurls her body over the platform railing and leaves it hanging there, in a rare moment of stillness, no sweat dripping, and we, with her, suspend our breath. And the dancing kicks off again, and goes on and on and at the end, she leaves us alone, to dance or not.

If Dancing Public is about the public dancing it fails. The contagion from one body to the other does not take. Participatory dance shows are always tricky they really depend on the audience mood and the dramaturgical tricks giving the cues. They also depend on who is in the room, and in Melbourne, given the ticket price, it wasnt exactly the crowd most inclined to dance.

She is fury unleashed and it is mesmerising to watch. We forget about dancing. Michael Pham/Rising

Dancing Public is indeed an experiment that needs to be experienced with the body, through the body. It is all that we have missed during these last two years. And here lies the merit of this show, in it turning a story from the past into some important questions for today: would we have all taken to the streets dancing if confinement had continued?

Could this be a new form of protest in our heavily policed socially-distanced post pandemic reality? Dancing manias were considered a threat to public order as crowds could be neither controlled nor explained.

In this sense, this show is more an invitation to consider our relationship to social norms, to being together, to acting collectively. How we respond to this invitation will depend on who is ready to let go.

At the start of Multitud, from the Uruguayan choreographer Tamara Cubas, the 72 volunteer performers are part of the audience then, they step onto the stage, one by one, facing us. Bodies standing tall, lit by discreet fluoro lights.

Suddenly one bends, like a broken puppet, then another. Some fall to the ground, some crouch. Some rise back up, some dont.

Later, they start running in circles. The circles grow into a spinning whirlwind.

They all coalesce into a vortex of piled, panting bodies, pulsing like magma, until they breathe as one: one single breath. A pause, and they erupt into a thunderous laughter. It is hilarious. It is hysterical, too, as they come together again into a crowd, frenzied and threatening this time, out of control, taking aim and tugging ferociously at a teenager in a green jumper.

They are vile.

They step onto the stage, one by one, facing us. Bodies standing tall. Michelle Li/Rising

The teenager stares at us as we witness what may turn into a public lynching. But the crowd calms down and there is silence and stillness again as they all watch us, the teenager and the attackers. In this suspended moment, one piercing cry is made of everyones cry. There is fury and anger and tears, real tears.

One wonders if we have caused them, placid witnesses of someones misery. Appeased, the crowd slowly disintegrates and retreats in the shadows backstage. In their final coming together, somehow they have lost their clothes. No, they have exchanged their clothes, nonchalantly at first, with sharper precision as they take or give, some are naked, some wear the wrong shoes, clothes fly everywhere, scattered now on the floor, some keep searching, some let go.

Multitud places the directions and the power of the actual choreography in the hands of the group they decide where to start, what to do, how to end. They can opt out too. Every night is different. Every time is different.

Multitud RISING. Michelle Li/ RISING

Multitud succeeds where The Dancing Public fails. This, too, is an exquisite reflection on being together and acting collectively, yet this is about what holds us together as a collective.

This is not choreography for the masses, rather it is a multitude of relations between individual bodies, each affecting or being affected by the other. It is about being in communion; attentive, alert, attuned to the other. Then we become responsible for what we do collectively.

Multitud is fiercely political and delicately poetic, a tribute to what dance can (still) do in times of plague.

Follow this link:

How Rising festival brought us dance in times of plague - EconoTimes

words by sidonie bird de la coeur

Kicking off the party at Bourke Street Courtyard as part of Novels series React tomorrow is NAK, an up-and-coming Melbourne-based DJ. The React event series is really special to me because it was where I was introduced to those deeper and darker shades of techno genres like breaks, trance and electro that are all hallmarks of my sound now, she told us.

I have a really particular memory where I saw Jennifer Loveless play at one of the Reacts, maybe 2 years ago.

She played a phenomenal set that night, and seeing an Asian woman up on the stage made me think for the first time that DJing was something I could do too, as someone of Asian background myself.

It was like before Id reserved the idea of DJing in my head as a man-only activity, unless you were a super influential, international or cool white woman.

The opportunity to see someone with the same cultural background as me up on stage was so empowering which is why its so important that we have more POC, fem and gender non-conforming DJs.

Keep up with the latest music news, features, festivals, interviews and reviewshere.

Now, two years on, NAK is opening set for Novels takeover of Bourke Street Courtyard tomorrow. The setup Novel does for their Bourke St Courtyard is insane speakers, lights, projections so Im stoked to be a part of that. Also feels like such a full circle moment, I remember listening to Schackes Kisloty People on repeat with my friends a couple years ago.

If Im recording a mix at home, thats completely planned I usually have an idea in my head of the journey I want to take the listener through, she said when I asked her what her process for planning mixes is. If its a DJ set at an event, Ive actually been trying to walk in without a plan Ill just prep a playlist beforehand with way more songs than I need that I think will fit the vibe of the event.

Someone once told me that all their best DJ sets have been entirely improvised, as you have to read the crowd throughout the event you really cant perfectly plan and predict where the set will go.

Since Im opening this event, Im more so setting the mood for the night, warming up the dance floor etc. so that means slower tempos, grooves, breaks as people start to fill in. Lowkey, opening sets are hard because everyones sober

Im genuinely just excited to play my music on nice speakers, it makes such a huge difference, Novel has so many resources and they really know how to pull off a party so this is gonna be sick. Literally my React playlist at the moment is just every song I want played on big speakers.

Its really nice full circle moment to return to React, so surreal to think Im going to be standing right where I saw Jennifer play.

React at Bourke Street Courtyard is on from 3pm, on Saturday 25 June. Grab your tickets by heading here.

See the article here:

'It's so important that we have more POC and fem DJs'; NAK on opening at Bourke St's React - Beat Magazine

7 June 2022, 16:55

We regret to inform that it looks like Lucas Sinclair is about to get Vecna'd in Volume 2.

Vecna, Vecna, Vecna. Stranger Things 4's hellish new villain has been hard at work, terrorising our faves one by one. And now it looks like his next victim has been revealed...

We've already seen Vecna catch and kill Chrissy, Fred and Patrick. We've also seen Max manage to escape Vecna with the help of Kate Bush. When the credits roll on Volume 1, Nancy is still stuck in Vecna's trance with no clear path to safety just yet.

With the villain still at large going into Volume 2, it's only a matter of time before more of our Hawkins heroes end up scrambling to remember their fave songs to escape his torture. But who will be next to fall under his curse?

Well, thanks to a brief chat between Caleb McLaughlin and Gaten Matarazzo in a behind-the-scenes video shared by Stranger Things on YouTube, fans believe Lucas will get caught by Vecna in Volume 2.

Based on the trailer for Volume 2, it looks like Max, Lucas and Erica end up re-exploring the Creel house in the real world as Nancy, Robin and Steve attempt to enter Vecna's Upside Down lair with Eddie and Dustin guarding the gate at the trailer.

In the trailer, we see Erica looking on in horror as the light she's carrying starts to get brighter. We also see Max appear to be trapped against the same wooden panels that Chrissy found herself trapped when she got caught by Vecna.

And, most worryingly of all, we see two shots of Lucas looking absolutely terrified.

While fans already had their suspicions that Lucas might get caught in a trance by Vecna, it now appears that there's reason to believe that he's definitely getting caught in a trance by Vecna.

In a YouTube video shared yesterday (June 6), titled 'On the Set of Stranger Things,' Caleb and Gaten can be seen greeting each other in the makeup trailer before Caleb shows Gaten a picture of him at work the previous day, which has been censored out by a big 'Stranger Things 4' logo to avoid any spoilers.

"Your eyes! Oh man, did they put contacts in?" Gaten asks, as Caleb replies with a yes.

Fans immediately picked up on the little interaction and took to the comments to theorise about why Caleb was wearing contacts in the scene he had just filmed.

"Now why would Lucas need contacts... and the way Gaten reacted to how the contacts looked... they're definitely the contacts that Max, Nancy and the other Vecna victims wore," one user wrote.

Another added: "Judging by the interaction between Gaten and Caleb, when gaten said looking at the picture "did they put contacts", I guess Lucas also is tranced by Vecna, because Sadie [Sink] too wore the lens for the eye when their eye balls just roll backwards."

Lucas is not the only one who fans think Vecna will catch in a trance in Volume 2 either...

Noah Schnapp recently shared a behind-the-scenes photo of himself wearing a harness, and considering Will didn't do much other than ride around in a Pizza van in Volume 1, fans believe he might end up getting Vecna'd too.

Max, Nancy... maybe Lucas, maybe Will... Vecna is gonna get everyone in Volume 2, isn't he?

See the article here:

Stranger Things 4 fans think Lucas gets caught by Vecna thanks to behind-the-scenes video - PopBuzz

Published on June 10, 2022

The Italian Brazilian producer and DJ Mildenhaus is expecting his India tour soon. After his release with the EDM giants he believes India is the best market which he would want to capture. He also says There is a great possibilities of me and my team doing a big show in India. I love the culture and the people there.

Currently Signed to labels like Spinnin, Mildenhauss is the best at what he does and his rein in the world of edm might be unstoppable one.

His recent psy trance single Ininna Tora with Mainstage EDM giants KSHMR & Timmy Trumpet has been buzzing all around the world. The track has garnered support from biggies like Blasterjaxx, Tiesto, W&W, Spinnin Session, DVLM, Mariana Bo and more. Its a perfect track to get the party started.

Brazilian vocals combined with Psy Trance bass makes the track larger than life. Its a perfect mainstream banger for your playlist.

The track has already got 2 Million+ streams on Spotify and is still strong.

Listen to Ininna Tora now-https://open.spotify.com/track/2iQMxfQyEyypb0MCFYaLlE?si=4CEdQA64QfGkpvaaJ0UkdQ

Mildenhauss Socials-Instagram-https://www.instagram.com/mildenhaus_music/?hl=enSoundcloud-https://soundcloud.com/mildenhausYoutube-https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEsoxwQrJMP_plOa6unEKOw

Continued here:

Mildenhaus takes about his love for India and the success of Ininna Tora - APN News

Neha Kakkar has become one of the most prominent singers in Bollywood. She has been the voice behind hit songs like Manali Trance, Mahhi Ve, Aankh Marey from Simmba, Garmi from Street Dancer 3D, Badri Ki Dulhania, Sunny Sunny and many more. She has also been a very popular judge of the TV reality shows like Indian Idol and more. Well, it is her birthday today and we bring to you a very interesting piece from her life. Did you know that Neha Kakkar's parents wanted to abort her but couldn't? This revelation was made by Neha Kakkar's brother Tony Kakkar. Also Read - Neha Kakkar Birthday: From one-room house to a lavish bungalow, the singers rags to riches journey is inspiring

Story behind Neha Kakkar's parents wanting an abortion Also Read - IIFA 2022 WORST dressed celebs: Neha Kakkar, Sara Ali Khan, Tiger Shroff and more stars fail to impress with their choices

In a video titled 'Story of Kakkar - part 2', Tony Kakkar who is also a known rapper, revealed the same. Through his song, he revealed that their parents did not have money and hence wanted to abort Neha. However, their mother was already 8 weeks pregnant and hence abortion could not take place. The lyrics of the song go like, "Halaat itne kharaab the, khaali khaali se haath the, Na zada pade likhe, bhole se maa baap the. Paise nahi hote the, raato mei wo rote the, Garbh tha giraana, par beete hafte 8 the, Garmi ka maheena, din tha 6 June ka, shaam dhal rahi thi janam hua junoon ka." Neha Kakkar has often spoken about the struggles of her family and in the video, Tony Kakkar revealed the most heartwrenching parts. Check out the video below: Also Read - Neha Dhupia to Neena Gupta: Bollywood actresses who were pregnant before their marriage

Neha Kakkar's life

From not having money to being the singing sensation of India, Neha Kakkar has surely come a long way in life. The singer is now happily married to Rohanpreet Singh who is also a singer. The couple have been churning out back to back hit songs. Their recent song together is La La La. We wish Neha Kakkar a very happy birthday.

Continued here:

Neha Kakkar birthday: Did you know Manali Trance singer's mom wanted to abort her? Brother Tony Kakkar shares - Bollywood Life

Keaton Featherstone June 9th, 2022 - 9:00 AM

Australian DJ, HAAi, real name Teneil Throssell, showcases a blend of house, techno and ambient sounds in her latest project Baby, Were Ascending. The sample of a cassette being played in the opening track Channels, indicates that there is soon to be a highlight of nostalgic electronic sounds. As Channels morphs and contorts itself into a multitude of unnatural sounds all ramping up into something lighter than expected, there is awareness of building something new and unique around the underground house scene of the 90s and 2000s.

Throssell focuses on this integration of new and old throughout Baby Were Ascending while forming a fully-connected project that only rarely strays too far. The energy within the track list rarely lets up, and when it does, its to build awareness of what is presented musically. Pigeon Barron sets the rave and techno basis for the rest of the tracklist while demonstrating quality beat cuts and production within the full-length project. With its satisfying industrial drums and synths, its layered sounds create a lifted experience that grasps your ears the longer the track plays. Bodies of Water layers multiple distorted lyrical tones with a central harmony. Combining, they all blend into a singular sound that doesnt stumble and bump into each other, but rather balances the chaos out.

Human Sound creates one of the more memorable features, highlighting the spoken poetry performance of Kai-Isaiah Jamal. The track allows for the poetry to stand alone in its intro and ramps up after its performance to complement its impact. The other memorable performance is from the lead vocalist of Hot Chip, Alexis Taylor. The two pair nicely on Biggest Mood Ever, forming a soft dream-pop melody that is reminiscent of a hot summer in the 80s. The breezy piano within Biggest Mood Ever encourages tied-up hair to be let down and flow in the wind, truly creating a relaxing dream-like trance.

Later on in the album, AM samples radio broadcasts and tuning radio station sounds, interlaced with such an abrasive Mach ten-speed techno beat that feels like an entire spring break party in one minute. AM is a great transition piece into a softer low fi tone in FM.

While Baby Were Ascending has energy in every song, it feels contained and paced awkwardly at times, making some songs less exciting than others. Where AM and Purple Jelly Disc are warzones of techno explosions and beat cuts, Orca and Baby, Were Ascending are trying to build an experience over time. Baby Were Ascending, particularly, is building the feeling of being lifted into space. Its harmonic vocals and monumental build-up feels epic, but its ending doesnt feel justified. Orca creates oceanic electronic sounds that work around its topical idea of something aquatic, developing a techno beat that feels alien and angelic. Its sound isnt the problem, rather its too out of place compared to the other songs on Baby Were Ascending. There is a strange disconnect within the last three songs. Baby Were Ascending feels more like a closing track than Tardigrade, and the slower pace makes their run time feel elongated.

There is a serious energy within Baby Were Ascending that is only further highlighted by its smooth transitions from track to track, and expert highlighting of cuts that make drops feel worthwhile. The tension builds within the tracks, all leading up to a high point which never falls too flat. The hour-long projects largest flaw is its incorporation of atmosphere and vocal incorporation. Both while intriguing on their own, sometimes divert attention away from the bombastic dance chaos.

Read the original here:

Album Review: HAAi Baby, Were Ascending - mxdwn.com