Week of July 24

 Week of July 24

Music 

Daliborovo Granje - Hainin (2020)This band is Croatian, they play psychadelic and prog rock. Sometimes it verges on the heavy. Their tunes have been in my ear this week.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neh4ZAGBdUs&pp=ygURZGFsaWJvcm92byBncmFuamU%3D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odmYh_68sHg&t=326s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC4XpHEd35M&pp=ygUIbmF4YXRyYXM%3D

Aphex Twin-Alberto Balsalm (1995)

I have recently become aware of this song by Aphex Twin. It's a great piece of IDM and electronic music. The percussion and the synths steal the show, they are really the only things going on but the simple melodies and drum patterns that he uses blend in and out and warp into a hypnotic yet complex song. The song is nocturnal and subtly industrial like much of his work.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZVZgCrHy5E&ab_channel=AphexTwin-Topic

Literature

The Queen of Spades-Pushkin (1833)

This short story is a wonderful tale of the seemingly rigid and principled engineer Hermann who becomes enticed to gamble only after attaining knowledge of the predestined winning hand. He attains this knowledge by infiltrating into the life of an old woman who later shares the winning hand with the young man in a dream. As the man becomes enamored with the prospect of winning, he disregards love and becomes enveloped in greed only to lose his fortune. Magic Realism is employed in this narrative through the blending of the supernatural and the real.

Film and Television

Barbie-Greta Gerwig (2023)

The Barbie movie is a bright, occasionally funny, confused mash of feminism and existentialism. Was it about motherhood? The issues with patriarchy? About existentialism? You can interpret however you want, but in its most apparent purpose, the film was a 2 hour long attempted rebranding of Barbie as enforced by the movie's Mattell meta-narrative and the extensive self-referential humor, which can only be zoomed out and interpreted as a real-life marketing ploy. Feminism and existentialism are useful ornaments to give this story a sense of emotion. The performances and the visuals are well done and cartoonish for the most part but can become cloying. In the end, the Barbie movie feels like watching Mattell pull its pants down and act a fool in an act of bombastic marketing only to realize at the end of the movie that all while you have been laughing you yourself have been pantsed and 15$. poorer.

5/10.

Blue Velvet-David Lynch (1986)

Blue Velvet is an often terrifying dreamscape of Oedipal surrealism. Not as demanding of the viewer from an interpretive point as some of Lynch's other work, Blue Velvet is still chock-full of absurd scenes that are equally frightening, and oddly humorous. The movie consists of many triads of relationships, the most evident the Oedipal triad of Son (Jeffery; Kyle Maclachlan), Mother (Dorothy Vallens; Isabella Rossellini), and Father (Frank Booth; Denis Hooper)

Laura Derne's character can also be seen in a romantic Triad with Jeffrey and Dorothy as well as Jeffrey and her Boyfriend Mike, furthermore, Dorothy's actual family triad between her husband and her son is rendered fractured in the story. 

8/10