77.Not only__polluted but _crowded.A.was the city；were the streetsB.the streets wereC.the streets wereD.the streets were【为什么不选D?】除了not only外还有什么是要用倒装的？
Not only引导的句子部分倒装,将前面句子的系动词提前,后面不变.否定词前移至句首的都要部分倒装,有很多的,学生常考的有:hardly(通常构成hardly...when结构),scarcely(scarcely...when),never
为您推荐：
其他类似问题
Not only要用倒装句，好象是这么回事
D也不是倒装啊
but (also)引起分句时，只有not only后面的分句需要倒装，因为not是一个否定副词位于句首；but also后的分句是不能倒装的。所以上题答案只能是c.
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Read the Original 32-Page Program for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)
August 19th, 2016
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One of the very first feature-length sci-fi films ever made, Fritz Lang’s
took a daring visual approach for its time, incorporating Bauhaus and Futurist influences in thrillingly designed sets and costumes. Lang’s visual language resonated strongly in later decades. The film’s rather stunning alchemical-electric transference of a woman’s physical traits onto the body of a destructive android—the so-called —for example, began a very long trend of
in film and television, most of them as dangerous and inscrutable as Lang’s. And yet, for all its many imitators, Metropolis continues to deliver surprises. Here, we bring you a new find: a .
In addition to underwriting almost one hundred years of science fiction film and television tropes, Metropolis has had a very long life in other ways: Inspiring an ,with Freddie Mercury, Loverboy, and Adam Ant, and a . In 2001, a reconstructed version received a screening at the Berlin Film Festival, and UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register added it to their roster. 2002 saw the release of an exceptional Metropolis-inspired anime with the same title. And in 2010 an of the long-incomplete film—recut from footage found in Argentina in 2008—appeared, adding a little more sophistication and coherence to the simplistic story line.
Even at the film’s initial reception, without any missing footage, critics did not warm to its story. For all its intense visual futurism, it has always seemed like a very quaint, na?ve tale, struck through with earnest religiosity and inexplicable archaisms.
found its narrative of generational and class conflict unconvincing. H.G. Wells—“something of an authority on science fiction”—pronounced it “the silliest film” full of “every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.” Few were kinder when it came to the story, and despite its overt religious themes, many saw it as Communist propaganda.
Viewed after subsequent events in 20th century Germany, many of the film’s scenes appear “disturbingly prescient,” , such as the vision of a huge industrial machine as Moloch, in which “bald, underfed humans are led in chains to a furnace.” Lang and his wife Thea von Harbau—who wrote the novel, then screenplay—were of course commenting on industrialization, labor conditions, and poverty in Weimar Germany. Metropolis‘s “clear message of classism,” as
writes, comes through most clearly in its arresting imagery, like that horrifying, monstrous furnace and the “looming symbol of wealth in the Tower of Babel.”
The visual effects and spectacular set pieces have worked their magic on almost everyone (Wells excluded) who has seen Metropolis. And they remain, for all its silliness, the primary reason for the movie’s cultural prevalence.
“probably the most influential sci-fi movie in history,” remarking that “a single movie poster from the original release sold for $690,000 seven years ago, and is expected to fetch even more at an auction later this year.”
We now have another artifact from the movie’s premiere, , that offers a rich feast for audiences, and text at times more interesting than the film’s script. (You .) One imagines had they possessed backlit smart phones, those early moviegoers might have found themselves struggling not to browse their programs while the film screened. But, of course, Metropolis’s visual excesses would hold their attention as they still do ours. Its scenes of a futuristic city have always enthralled viewers, filmmakers, and (most) critics, such that
of “vast futuristic cities” as a staple of some of the best science fiction in his review of the 21st-century animated Metropolis—“visions… goofy and yet at the same time exhilarating.”
The , a treasure for fans of the film and for scholars. Full of production stills, behind-the-scenes articles and photos, technical minutiae, short columns by the actors, a bio of Thea von Harbau, the “authoress,” excerpts from her novel and screenplay placed side-by-side, and a short article by her. There’s a page called “” that tallies the production costs and cast and crew numbers (including very crude drawings and numbers of “Negroes” and “Chinese”). Lang himself , laconically, with a breezy introduction followed by a classic silent-era line: “if I cannot succeed in finding expression on the picture, I certainly cannot find it in speech.” Film history agrees, Lang found his expression “on the picture.”
“Only three surviving copies of this program are known to exist,” writes Wired, and one of them, from which these pages come, has gone on sale at the Peter Harrington rare book shop for 2,750 pounds ($4,244)—which seems rather low, given what an original Metropolis poster went for. But markets are fickle, and whatever its current or future price, ”Metropolis” Magazine is invaluable to cineastes. See .
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Hear Arthur C. Clarke Read 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Vintage 1976 Vinyl Recording
August 19th, 2016
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When we hear the opening of Also Sprach Zarathustra, we instinctively steel ourselves for enormous leaps through space and time. We have since 1968, when made
its theme music. (Kubrick, , did commission an original score, only to reject it as “completely inadequate for the film.”) If you saw and loved it during its original theatrical run, long before the advent of home video, you had only a limited set of ways to re-live it at will. The obvious choice included buying a copy of the soundtrack or
(or, for the kids, to go ), but in 1976, you could also buy a record that gave you a bit of both at once.
On this now out-of-print record, Clarke reads the final chapters of 2001 with the accompaniment of that most recognizable piece from the film score, all packaged in a sleeve featuring an image of Keir Dullea as Mission Commander David Bowman on one of the film’s immaculately crafted space-station sets. You can hear at the top, and
If all this strikes you as an unconscionable intermingling of book and movie, remember that Kubrick’s 2001 doesn’t straightforwardly adapt Clarke’s 2001. Both of those independent but complementary works grew from the seed of
Clarke’s 1948 short story about a dazzling and mystifying artifact left behind by an ancient alien civilization. Kubrick had originally tapped Clarke to write a whole new screenplay, but that collaboration ultimately turned into two parallel projects, with the novelist writing to his own sensibility and the filmmaker certainly directing to his. Some Clarke fans prefer
and some Kubrick fans prefer the film, but those who admire the virtues of both 2001s will appreciate the existence of this record, in its own way an impressive artifact of a distant era.
You can’t buy this album new these days, but used copies can .
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August 19th, 2016
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Latin is a language
It killed the Romans long ago,
And now it’s killing me.
That famed ditty isn’t likely to resonate with many modern school children, but interest in ancient Rome remains fairly robust.
We’ve come to accept that those stately ruins were once
from hors d’oevures (Boiled Eggs with Pine Nut Sauce) to dessert (Pear Patina).
, a popular Japanese manga-cum-feature-film, took us inside ’s bathhouse.
But what did the Romans sound like?
’ ? Or Laurence Olivier’s ?
The recent series
upheld the .
Animator Josh Rudder of
in service of finding out What Latin Sounded Like, above.
(And he seems to have done so without the help of Derek Jarman’s NSFW , the only feature film to be filmed entirely in
or vulgar Latin.)
Instead, he draws from ancient rhetorician
and . Scroll backward through the romance languages, and you’ll see Germanic tribes trading with and fighting ancient Roman troops.
The result is not so much a reconstructive pronunciation guide as a linguistic detective story.
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contrasts the birth of her second child with the uncensored gore of Game of Thrones. Follow her
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August 18th, 2016
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Procrastination is a skill, an art, a slight-of-hand technique. I’m procrastinating right now, but you’d never know it. How many tabs do I have open in my multiple browser windows? Pick a number, any number. How many tasks have I put off today? How many dreams have I deferred? I’ll never tell. The unskilled procrastinators stick out, they’re easy to spot. They talk a lot about what they’re not doing. They run around in circles of bewilderment like the troubled hero of Dr. Seuss’s . The skilled practitioner makes it look easy.
But no matter how much Facebook time you get in before lunch and still manage to ace those performance reviews, you’re really only cheating yourself, am I right? You wanted to finish that novel/symphony/improv class/physics theorem. But something stopped you. Something in your brain perhaps. That’s where these things usually happen. When Stuart Langfield asked a neuroscientist about the neuroscience of procrastination, he got the following answer: “People think that you can turn on an MRI and see where something’s happening in the brain, but the truth is that’s not so. This stuff is vastly more complicated, so we have theories.”
There are theories aplenty that tell us, says Langfield, “what’s probably happening” in the brain. Langfield explains his own: the primitive, pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding limbic system acts too quickly for our more deliberative, rational prefrontal cortex to catch up, rendering us stupefied by distractions. , Distinguished Research Chair at
and a procrastination expert, shares this view. You can see him explain it in the short video below. The evolutionary “design flaw,” says Langfield, might make the situation seem hopeless, were it not for “neuroplasticity,” a fancy buzzword that means we have the ability to change our brains.
Langfield’s purpose in his short video is not only to understand the biology of procrastination, but to overcome it. He asks psychologist , whose answers we see and hear as an incomprehensible jumble of ideas. But then Pychyl reduces the complicated theories to a simple solution. You guessed it, mindfulness meditation—to “downregulate the limbic system.” Really, that’s it? Just meditate? It is a .
But Pychyl and his research team
have a few more very practical suggestions, based on experimental data gathered by Steel and others.
offers this condensed list of tips:
Break a long-term project down into specific sub-goals. State the exact start time and how long (not just “tomorrow”) you plan to work on the task.
Just get started. It isn’t necessary to write a long list of tasks, or each intermediate step.
Remind yourself that finishing the task now helps you in the future. Putting off the task won’t make it more enjoyable.
Implement “microcosts,” or mini-delays, that require you to make a small effort to procrastinate, such as having to log on to a separate computer account for games.
Reward yourself not only for completing the entire project but also the sub-goals.
A Stockholm University study tested these strategies, assigning a group of 150 self-reported “high procrastinators” several of the self-help instructions over 10 weeks, and employing a reward system and varying levels of guidance. “The results,” , “showed that after intervention with both guided and unguided self-help, people improved their procrastination, though the guided therapy seemed to show greater benefit.”
Other times, adding self-help tasks to get us to the tasks we’re putting off doesn’t work so well. We can all take comfort in the fact that , dating back to ancient Egypt, Rome, and 18th century England. The wisdom of the ages could not defeat it, or as Samuel Johnson wrote, “even they who most steadily withstand it find it, if not the most violent, the most pertinacious of their passions, always renewing its attacks, and, though often vanquished, never destroyed.”
But there are people who procrastinate, beset by its pertinacity, and then there are chronic procrastinators. “If you’re an occasional procrastinator, says Pychyl, “quit thinking about your feelings and get to the next task.” Suck it up, in other words, and walk it off—maybe after a short course of self-help. For all the conflicting neuroscientific theory, “there is a quiet science behind procrastination,” , and “according to recent studies, procrastination is a learned habit.” Most research agrees it’s one we can unlearn through meditation and/or patient retraining of ourselves.
However if you’re of the chronic subset, say Pychyl, “you might need therapy to better understand your emotions and how you’re coping with them through avoidance.” Psychologist . Citing a figure of “20 percent of U.S. men and women” who “make procrastination their way of life,” he adds, “it is the person who does that habitually, always with plausible ‘excuses’ that has issues to address.” Only you can determine whether your trouble relates to bad habits or deeper psychological issues.
Whatever the causes, what might motivate us to meditate or seek therapy are the effects. Chronic procrastination is “not a time management issue,” says Ferrari, “it is a maladaptive lifestyle.” Habitual procrastinators, the WSJ writes, “have higher rates of depression and anxiety and poorer well-being.” We may think, , of procrastination as “an innocuous habit at worst, and maybe even a helpful one at best,” a strategy Stanford philosophy professor John Perry argued for in . Instead, Jaffe says, in a sobering summary of Pychyl’s research, “procrastination is really a self-inflicted wound that gradually chips away at the most valuable resource in the world: time.”
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August 18th, 2016
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Sometimes less is more. Sometimes silence says more than words or sound itself. John Cage . Ditto our finest filmmakers. That’s the takeaway from —a new video essay that stitches together 15 scenes from iconic films by Hitchcock, Kubrick, Fellini and others. Created by David Verdeure at , the clip lets us meditate on “the meaningful use of silence” in the sound-film era. Fandor has pulled together a list of scenes used in the montage. Find them below:
The Matrix, dir. Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski. Silver Pictures, USA,
The Godfather: Part III, dir. . Zoetrope Studios, USA,
, dir. . Specta films et al., France,
2001: A Space Odyssey, dir. . Stanley Kubrick Productions, UK / USA,
Lost in Translation, dir. Sofia Coppola. American Zoetrope et al., USA,
On the Waterfront, dir., Elia Kazan. Horizon Pictures et al., USA,
The Graduate, dir. Mike Nichols. Lawrence Turman, USA,
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, dir. . Woodfall Film Productions, UK,
North by Northwest, dir. . Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, USA,
In the Mood for Love, dir. . Block 2 Pictures et al., Hong Kong / China,
The Martian, dir. Ridley Scott. Scott Free Productions et al., USA,
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, dir. . Greenwich Film Productions, France,
The Conversation, dir. Francis Ford Coppola. American Zoetrope et al., USA,
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, dir. . Twin Peaks Productions et al., USA,
La Dolce Vita, dir. . Riama Film et al., Italy,
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August 18th, 2016
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Steve Buscemi’s roles in movies like In the Soup, The Big Lebowski, and Ghost World have associated him for life with a certain kind of character: awkward, ineffectual, and even slightly creepy, but nevertheless strangely endearing. But types and the actors who play them can, and usually do, diverge, and that goes especially for Buscemi. He may have made his name portraying a host of loser-ish men, but his skill at bringing them and other characters to distinctive life have kept him a highly successful performer for decades now. And what did he do before that? Why, he fought fires — and he didn’t hesitate to do it again after becoming famous.
quotes a post on the
which reveals how the Boardwalk Empire star entered his other profession: “In 1976 Steve Buscemi took the
civil service test when he was just 18 years old,” became a firefighter a few years later, and for four years “served on one of FDNY’s busiest, Engine Co. 55.” He returned to that very same engine after September 11, 2001, “and for several days following Brother Steve worked 12-hour shifts alongside other firefighters digging and sifting through the rubble from the World Trade Center looking for survivors.”
Though he avoided publicizing his brief return to firefighting at the time, Buscemi has spoken openly about it since, as he does in . Many who hear the story of a high-profile actor putting his life on hold and rushing right into a disaster site might rush right to the urban legend site , which doesn’t just verify it, but also collects some of Buscemi’s own words about his firefighting days. He started, he recalls, when he “was living in Manhattan, working as a furniture mover during the day, doing stand-up comedy at night and looking for a change. I liked the job — the guys I worked with and the nature of the work. I think I would have been happy doing it if I hadn’t had a greater passion for acting.”
Buscemi’s firefighting experience and ability to appear onscreen come together in , the documentary just above. Co-produced by Buscemi himself, the film goes “behind the scenes” of the New York City Fire Department, showing just what it takes to put out the blazes of America’s most demanding city. (You can see Buscemi talking about his experience during 9/11 around the 43 minute mark.) The “good job” of the title, one retired firefighter explains, means “a really tough fire.” And no matter what kind of “job,” Buscemi says, “they’re all frightening. Any time you go into a burning building, there’s the potential for disaster. I never had any real close calls, though there’s no such thing as a routine fire.” No doubt he keeps himself mentally prepared for another — just in case.
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writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, , the video series , the crowdfunded journalism project , and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ . Follow him on Twitter at
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August 18th, 2016
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For those who write for a living, the issue of writer’s block doesn’t come up as often as television and movies may have others believe. Sure, there’s plenty of times where the words don’t flow like they should. Or a writer may find they’ve written drivel and start again. Or the beginning proves elusive. Or the end proves tricky.
Maybe not so much.
In this short video made for the
(a YouTube channel for the
in Denmark), the blank page is anything but terrifying for the eight authors interviewed.
“I don’t think writer’s block actually exists,” says . “It’s basically insecurity. It’s your own internal critic turned up to a higher level than it’s supposed to be at that moment…The point is to get something down on paper.”
makes the most philosophical point, calling writing the “conflict between what you want to say and what you could say.”
Many of the authors interviewed, like , , and
agree on a similar point: the writer’s mind must have prepped and written and researched long before the body sits and the hands write. “By the time I come to the blank page I have many things to say,” Oates says.
For other writers, the blank page is a symbol of potential. For
it’s a door that opens onto infinity. For , the page “beckons you in to write something on it. It must be filled.”
fills his in longhand and calls it “deeply satisfying” even though writing that first draft is the “least joyful part of writing.”
In the final minute, David Mitchell does tackle the idea of a writer’s block, but his suggestion is not worth spoiling, so go ahead and watch the whole thing. And if you’re a writer watching this video because you’re procrastinating…get back to work!
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based . You can also follow him on Twitter at , read his other arts writing at
and/or watch his films .
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August 17th, 2016
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Let down by the X-Files reboot? Maybe you never really dug the whole alien conspiracy thing with the bees and the black sludge in the first place. Maybe you didn’t need another convoluted, inscrutable, bonkers plotline. Maybe you wanted the truth. It’s out there. The CIA might know where it is.
In 1978, the agency known in some circles for masterminding nearly every world event since its inception declassified a vast number of files, “hundreds of documents… detailing the Agency’s investigations into Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOS). The documents date primarily from the late 1940s and 1950s.”
And since this past January the public has had
on the internet. To celebrate the seriousness of this archive’s widespread availability, the Agency
each, to “highlight a few documents both skeptics and believers will find interesting.”
Who do you think they picked for their model skeptic and believer? “The truth is out there,” as the CIA is , “click on the links to find it.”
The Mulder and Scully lists serve as lighthearted introductions to the sometimes bewildering array of documents in the CIA’s , which hosts those several hundred reports, memos, etc., sometimes redacted or written in Agency code.
Then, of course, there’s this precious , taken from a man in East Germany in 1952:
Now, the side of the object on which the holes had been opened began to glitter. Its color seemed green but later turned to red. At the same time I began to hear a slight hum. While the brightness and hum increased, the conical tower began to slide down into the center of the object. The whole object then began to rise slowly from the ground and rotate like a top.
If you’re seeing a description from a classic sci-fi radio drama or pulp magazine, read on. The craft becomes “surrounded by a ring of flames,” rises, and flies away. And, of course, the man had earlier witnessed men “dressed in some shiny metallic clothing.” It all sounds very silly except that many other unrelated people in the small town reported seeing something very strange in the sky that night. One witnesses’ overactive imagination does not invalidate the testimony of the others.
Or does it?
We’ve had many sightings of UFOs from astronauts and pilots in the last few decades (mostly debunked), and ordinary people on the ground have never stopped . So we might wonder why all of
come from the 1960s and before? Is this a sign of increased activity in the years after the supposed Roswell event? Perhaps the alien conspiracy’s feverish, devious start?
writes, was the CIA “worried about the potential threat that UFOs posed to national security… they assumed that the UFOs might be part of a Soviet weapons test program.” With the gradual warming of relations, then glasnost, the spies lost interest… (Or…?) … but we might wonder why the Agency used the
to draw attention to itself. Your conspiracy theory is probably as good as any other.
If CIA did stop investigating alien invasions, you don’t have to. The Agency has left it in your capable hands, publishing “” to guide you in your quest for the truth. Be warned: it’s a very skeptic-friend one that—were everyone to follow it—might virtually eliminate every reported UFO sighting. Curious that. What are they hiding?
Find the list below, and see the complete explanation of each tip (such times we live in) at the .
1. Establish a group to investigate and evaluate sightings
2. Determine the objectives of your investigation
3. Consult with experts
4. Create a reporting system to organize incoming cases
5. Eliminate false positives
6. Develop methodology to identify aircraft and other aerial phenomena often mistaken for UFOs
7. Examine witness documentation
8. Conduct controlled experiments
9. Gather and test physical and forensic evidence
10. Discourage false reporting
Again, to dig deeper into the CIA’s fascinating archive of UFO sightings, visit its . True believers may want to know more, and they can, if they’re willing to follow the Byzantine research instructions on the UFO collection’s main page to find an Agency article about the “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, .” Or they could .
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When Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party Brought Klaus Nomi, Blondie & Basquiat to Public Access TV (1978-82)
August 17th, 2016
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“This is not a test!” the host shouts into his microphone. “This is an actual show!” If you lived in New York and had cable in the late 1970s, you may have witnessed it yourself — and you may well have needed the reminder, because this show neither looked nor felt like anything that ever aired before. A fixture on public access Channel D and Channel J from 1972 to 1982, it threw down a redefinition of televisual possibilities that hasn’t just survived as a time capsule of the downtown Manhattan scene at its creative rolling boil, but retains its anarchic charge to this day. Welcome, whether you first tuned in back then or have only just tuned in on the internet now, to Glenn O’Brien‘s TV Party.
, who co-created and presided over the show, didn’t always shout, but when he did, he managed to retain his deadpan self-possession. He even kept his cool when hanging out, live on the air, with the regulars of a guest list including “David Bowie, David Byrne, Robert Fripp, the B-52s, Chris Burden, George Clinton, Iggy Pop, Steven Meisel, Mick Jones, James Chance, John Lurie, Klaus Nomi, Kraftwerk, the Screamers, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nile Rodgers, Kid Creole, the Offs, Alex Chilton, the Brides of Funkenstein, Arthur Russell, David McDermott, and Charles Rocket, just to name a few.” At its height, TV Party let its audience hang out with such luminaries almost every week as well — literally, if they managed to find their way to the studio.
Having attained subcultural fame as the first editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, the Cleveland-born O’Brien also engaged in such straightforwardly countercultural efforts as writing for, and later editing, the infamous journal of the cannabis lifestyle High Times. That bit of status drew an invitation to appear on the early public-access variety program The Coca Crystal Show. The experience immediately inspired him to create one of his own, a strike against the threat to free speech he sensed when mass media meant just a few mainstream television channels. And so O’Brien, along with Blondie co-founder and guitarist Chris Stein, launched TV Party, a drug-fueled re-interpretation of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy After Dark, “the TV show that’s a party,” as he put it in a memorably askew phrasing on its , “but which could be a political party.”
Here we have a few particularly memorable TV Party evenings, including a performance by the not-of-this-earth proto-glam-rocker , an interview of painter
(who became a regular presence on the show and a “little brother” figure to the crew), and an episode with
(not just Stein but the whole band, including Deborah Harry, who would turn up on the show pretty often herself). Vice put up
a couple years ago, which has let a new generation experience what now seems strikingly like a predecessor of the shows created for the internet video platforms they frequent today. It also includes , which provides the necessary historical and cultural context for those unfamiliar with the New York O’Brien describes as “like a third-world country.” Shot in the ghostly black-and-white one associates with 1970s video artists, its visual elements either psychedelically bleeding into or jaggedly cutting between one another, “the show could get abstract quickly,” remembers O’Brien.
But in upholding its mission to erase the distinction between performer and audience, TV Party belongs as much to the late 70s as it does to the 21st century. It used to the fullest extent possible the freedom of public-access television, very much the Youtube of its day. (Certainly the callers-in could sound just as abusive as Youtube commenters.) It even ended in the highly modern fashion of not getting canceled, but simply fading away, the stretches between episodes growing longer and longer. “Maybe Chris and I will start it up again,” O’Brien speculates in the documentary, but he presumably has his hands full with his latest talk show: , created especially for the internet. The sensibility may have changed — nobody fires up a joint on camera anymore — but the excitement of exploring uncharted media territory remains.
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Based in Seoul,
writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, , the video series , the crowdfunded journalism project , and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ . Follow him on Twitter at
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August 17th, 2016
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Why, in my day we called it “post-punk” and we walked miles to find it in catacombs with secret passwords, far away from any mall apparel stores or beverage-sponsored music festivals….
Mostly rubbish, though I have heard many an old campaigner say as much, decrying Goth rock as a recent, devolution from more serious, avant-garde trends. Some amalgam of The Doors, Leonard Cohen, Nico and the Velvet Underground, The Damned, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and Hammer horror films, early goth rock went spare, atmospheric, and punky, like the early Cure, or baroque, morose, and cabaret like Bauhaus, or any other number of respectable art-rock directions.
These bands, many of my cohort believe, had integrity, and much better taste than kids today. All that get off my lawn-ness makes , as does the increasing popularity of a genre of music made for and by unpopular people.
Mix blog , curator of the goth rock mix above, admits as much. “Goth has never been an easy affair to discuss,” reads the
in idiosyncratic English: “Kitschy atmosphere of massive contemporary goth festivals and stereotyping discourses usually overwhelmed the textural and emotional core of goth.” Contemporary perceptions, fair or not, obscure the diversity—stylistically, that is… of the music, with its “diverse elements including Dada movement, surrealist aesthetics, post-modernism, French ‘fin-de-siecle’ poetry, 19th century romanticism, punk, kraut, glam, shoegaze, ambient, folk, etc….”
Indeed, it’s all there, when a band with the abrasive low-camp, grindhouse punk of Nick Cave’s
shares a musical lineage with the
(with DJ-scratching!) and the medieval- and world music-obsessed . But the key operator in these extremes is theatricality. Since Siouxsie Sioux’s fishnets and swastikas, Dave Vanian’s vampire costumes and pancake makeup, and Robert Smith’s enormous weeping willow hair and
mist-shrouded cathedrals of despair, goth has had to make overwrought spectacles of itself, at times .
But the Secret Thirteen mix, compiled by founder Justinas Mikulskis, reminds us it’s really about the music, by putting together “the deep cuts,” writes , “none of this ‘Bela’s Lugosi’s Dead’ stuff” (referring to Bauhaus’ biggest hit).
Here instead we find “the boisterous deathrock of Mighty Sphincter, Specimen’s Batcave thrashiness, the artsy weirdness of Red Wedding and early 4AD stalwarts Mass.” It’s a very 80s mix, but unless you were digging deep in the crates of alternative record stores at the time, few names may be familiar. The Birthday Party shows up, and a band called Kommunity FK that had a very minor hit. Former Sex Pistol John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd. appears with their pounding rant “.” The
also make the cut, number 42 in the mix—a very much overlooked, and
band, often only known for their childhood and family association with U2. Find .
It is overall, I think, an excellent way to approach “goth”—or one definition of it—free from the wardrobe squabbles and generational condescension. The mix, , isn’t intended as “encyclopedic or anthological” in nature, but is “rather presented as a narrative with unexpected twists and turns showcasing a wide variety of elements, moods.” Sort of like a good story by Poe, or a good B horror movie.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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