My Favourite Cover Songs

Top Three Songs of Right Now

 

The Golden Age

Oh you don't known Woodkid is? Well I'm about to tell you because you should.

Born Yoann Lemoine, Woodkid, is an amzing illustartor and film director. He's directed some badass music videos including Lana Del Rey's Born to Die

And then all of a sudden, Lemoine started making his very own soundtracks.
Case in point: this short film he directed for Lolita Lempicka LeParfum featuring the delectable Elle Fanning.

And now is he is a fucking badass solo artist. ALSO DID I MENTION THAT HE IS FRENCH. RWOAR!

His first hit is Iron, from the EP of the same name. It was famouslly used in the Assassin's Creed video game and the music video features superscmodel Agyness Deyn weilding a bird of prey. Obvs he makes all his own videos.

And then came the second EP. All his music so far has addressed this grand coming of age narrative about a little boy and his videos portray the plot. Can you see my heart crumble?

This year Woodkid released his debut LP, called the Golden Age (melt). I Love You was the first single off the album and one of my favourite tracks.

Oh, and he's touring. He has super theatrical shows with a full orchestra and heaps of audiovisuals and lasers and shit. Oh, and he's still making new music: this is his latest composition.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that Lana Del Rey is his muse?
Here they are singing Video Games together.
Sex.

Casual Adele cover. No biggie.

And now this is coming.

I cannot bloody wait.

I Share Therefore I Am

I am a social media addict.
I really don't like what this video is saying. That doesn't make it untrue (or true for that matter). I just really don't like what it's saying.

Miley And Her Virtual Kitten Won The AMAs, The Internet, Life

First of all, Miley started on stage at the American Music Awards on Sunday and it was mostly black, but there was this giant virtual KITTEN UP THERE.

And Miley is standing in front of this adorable kitten singing her heart out.

And looking awesome because she’s Miley and she rocks.

AND she’s wearing a cool two-piece thing with CATS ON IT.

So she’s singing in a cat outfit with a giant kitten behind her and cool space graphics and everything is great.

And this kitten moves its mouth trying to sing.

So while Miley is singing this kitten is just, like, going “blahslhkdhlkghl” because it’s a cat and can’t really sing and it’s adorable.

And the kitten’s eyes also get all wide and cute and Miley is emotional and then we are all like omggggggg this is too much.

And then, as if “Wrecking Ball” wasn’t getting to you enough, the kitten starts CRYING.

Full tears come from the kitten and it’s heartbreaking.

And just when Miley is belting out the last bit of the song, and the kitten is staring at you…

THIS HAPPENS.

Sekgjrnkhjnsltrjkhnrk

And then it’s over and you realize why Miley is Miley.

The Enclave

I this was my absolute favourite work at the Venice Biennale this year.
Richard Mosse's The Enclave was eerie and dreamy and beautiful and fucking disturbing because the violence captured just looked so beautiful.

A friend of mine who has experience with shooting (she grew up in Soviet Russia and learned how to shoot in school) explained that the incongriuity in perspective created by the way the multiple video screens were installed, reminded her of looking down the barrel of a rifle.

Richard Mosse: The Impossible Image from Frieze on Vimeo.

If We’re Doing All The “Right” Things, Why Are We Still Unemployed?

Laura Koroski | On 13, Nov 2013

I am not an economist. But it doesn’t take an economist to realize that something is wrong with the economy. It doesn’t take an economist to realize that high unemployment is becoming a new standard, five years after the great crash of 2008. It doesn’t take an economist to realize that underemployment is becoming the new unemployment. And it doesn’t take an economist to realize that all of this is becoming the new normal.

Normal. 7.3% unemployment is normal. 14.3% underemployed and unemployed is normal. Yes. It is. At least for my generation.

That is depressing.

I realize I’m speaking from a position of privilege, someone who got a college degree, and didn’t have to dive deep into debt to do it. Someone who is currently getting their master’s degree thanks to fellowships and TA-ships. I grew up middle class. I’m also white and cis-gender.

I’m also aware of the fact that when I graduate in a year, with a master’s degree and a teaching license, I will be fighting tooth-and-nail for a job. I fully expect to send out upwards of 50 applications if I want to get one interview. And I’m scared shitless at the prospect that a year after I graduate with those degrees, I might still be unemployed.

Circumstance forces me to admit that I am one of the lucky ones.

And yet, the word “lucky” has a bitter taste of irony. Because in the same city where students are being squeezed into classrooms that don’t serve them, there have been 51 schools closed and 2,100 teachers laid off this year alone.

People tell me that I was silly to get a major in the humanities. Which is why I’m getting a teaching license. They tell me that I should have had a better plan. Except that this was my better plan – my original dream was to be a living history interpreter, which pays hourly. (Previous dreams included figure skater, singer, and writer, respectively. Society talked me out of them all.) They tell me that I should have had fail-safe career. Isn’t public education – an industry that our society is built on, and will always need – fail-safe?

I’m tired of being told that I should have been a STEM major. We can’t all be. We shouldn’t all be. This country, counter to current myth, is not going to shrivel up and die for lack of science and math folks. And what’s more, a STEM major doesn’t guarantee a job like the conventional wisdom says it does. 9% of computer science recent grads are unemployed and only 6% of theater majors are searching for jobs.

I’m tired of some careers being ranked as “smart” and “practical” and others being ranked as “stupid decisions.” I’m tired of different types of people being cast as “marketable” and others as “worthless.” I’m tired of various work being deemed to have more value than other work. I’m tired of being told by the older generations that we’re just not working hard enough, and we expect to have it all. I never thought I would have it all. But I did think that I would have half a shot at getting a full-time job when I graduated with a B.A.

It’s all backwards. It’s all wrong. And yet, wrong and backwards are the new norm.

Written by Laura Koroski

Accessed at Feminspire

Art Makes You Smart

Alain Pilon

By BRIAN KISIDA, JAY P. GREENE and DANIEL H. BOWEN

Published: November 23, 2013

FOR many education advocates, the arts are a panacea: They supposedly increase test scores, generate social responsibility and turn around failing schools. Most of the supporting evidence, though, does little more than establish correlations between exposure to the arts and certain outcomes. Research that demonstrates a causal relationship has been virtually nonexistent.

A few years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.

Students who, by lottery, were selected to visit the museum on a field trip demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions.

Crystal Bridges, which opened in November 2011, was founded by Alice Walton, the daughter of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. It is impressive, with 50,000 square feet of gallery space and an endowment of more than $800 million.

Thanks to a generous private gift, the museum has a program that allows school groups to visit at no cost to students or schools.

Before the opening, we were contacted by the museum’s education department. They recognized that the opening of a major museum in an area that had never had one before was an unusual event that ought to be studied. But they also had a problem. Because the school tours were being offered free, in an area where most children had very little prior exposure to cultural institutions, demand for visits far exceeded available slots. In the first year alone, the museum received applications from 525 school groups requesting tours for more than 38,000 students.

As social scientists, we knew exactly how to solve this problem. We partnered with the museum and conducted a lottery to fill the available slots. By randomly assigning school tours, we were able to allocate spots fairly. Doing so also created a natural experiment to study the effects of museum visits on students, the results of which we published in the journals Education Next and Educational Researcher.

Over the course of the following year, nearly 11,000 students and almost 500 teachers participated in our study, roughly half of whom had been selected by lottery to visit the museum. Applicant groups who won the lottery constituted our treatment group, while those who did not win an immediate tour served as our control group.

Several weeks after the students in the treatment group visited the museum, we administered surveys to all of the students. The surveys included multiple items that assessed knowledge about art, as well as measures of tolerance, historical empathy and sustained interest in visiting art museums and other cultural institutions. We also asked them to write an essay in response to a work of art that was unfamiliar to them.

These essays were then coded using a critical-thinking-skills assessment program developed by researchers working with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Further, we directly measured whether students are more likely to return to Crystal Bridges as a result of going on a school tour. Students who participated in the study were given a coupon that gave them and their families free entry to a special exhibit at the museum. The coupons were coded so that we could determine the group to which students belonged. Students in the treatment group were 18 percent more likely to attend the exhibit than students in the control group.

Moreover, most of the benefits we observed are significantly larger for minority students, low-income students and students from rural schools — typically two to three times larger than for white, middle-class, suburban students — owing perhaps to the fact that the tour was the first time they had visited an art museum.

Further research is needed to determine what exactly about the museum-going experience determines the strength of the outcomes. How important is the structure of the tour? The size of the group? The type of art presented?

Clearly, however, we can conclude that visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas that challenge them with different perspectives on the human condition. Expanding access to art, whether through programs in schools or through visits to area museums and galleries, should be a central part of any school’s curriculum. 

Brian Kisida is a senior research associate and Jay P. Greene is a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas. Daniel H. Bowen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute of Rice University.

Acessed at The New York Times