Hello there!
Welcome to our daily scheduled post, the Daily Slow Chat.
If you want to just chat about your day, if you have questions for the moderators (please mark these [Mod] so we can find them), or if you just want talk about oatmeal then this is the thread for you!
Enjoying the small talk? We have a Discord server too! We'd love to have more of you over there. Do both of us a favour and use this link to join the fun.
The mod-team wishes you a nice day!
4 comments
So I read on another sub that it’s supposedly common for people in Serbia to travel to Austria for cheaper groceries.
That can’t be true, can it?! Serbia doesn’t even border Austria, you’d have to drive about 400 km through Hungary even at their closest point. May as well go to Bosnia or North Macedonia at that rate.
My friend cooked for me yesterday. When southeast Asians (and I think Chinese sometimes as well) cook chicken, they basically take the cleaver to the whole animal and chop it into bitesize bits, bones and everything. Now I am no stranger to eating bone-in meat and fish, but these have too many small bones 😅 Anyway the sauce was delicious and that’s where it’s at anyway.
My mom forwarded me one of those cute videos that get forwarded among friends a million times. A guy finds a frozen squirrel in snow and resuscitates it (small mammals can be cooled down quite a bit for a period of time without suffering long-lasting damage. There were a whole host of weird ass experiments about this in the 50s). They nurse the squirrel back to health, everyone loves it, the dog loves it, it sleeps curled up with the kid and it’s all adorable. When it is time to set it loose, the squirrel doesn’t want to leave and stays with the family. They name it Peanut. Adorable.
Except, it looked a little sus, so I did some googling. Apparently, the guy didn’t set the squirrel loose and kept it as a pet. He also had a social media account for seven years with a ton of following. Someone reported him, and the authorities raided his house. They not only found the squirrel inside the house, but they also found a raccoon. Both are illegal to keep as pets and since raccoons also have a rabies risk, both animals were taken and euthanized.
This turned into a massive shitshow. The guy sued the state for 10 million in damages (still ongoing I think), and the MAGA blamed the democrats for it, saying that they let so many criminals (immigrants) and instead of those they went for the squirrel. Also according to them obtaining pet licenses for wild animals should have been easier (the guy who took in the squirrel said he was in the process of obtaining a license, but didn’t say why he was sitting on his ass for the whole 7 years).
So, what we learn from this is, don’t believe cute internet videos, MAGA will blame everything on someone else, and if you find a frozen squirrel maybe just leave it where it is.
Also please don’t tell my mom.
Something I really enjoy thinking about in music is form and structure. Just like the traditional forms in classical music, for example sonata or rondo, pop also has a very traditional formula for structure that gets used a lot. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. Mild variation here and there, but you get that everywhere. For a reason, it works for pop very well, but sometimes it’s just so incredibly uninspired. I always think of Taylor Swift’s bridges, because as much as I enjoy a lot of her music, her bridges are always so purposeless. It’s like they just figured it has to have a bridge because the form calls for one, and then forced one in there. Her big hit from last year, The Fate of Ophelia, is a great example of it. The bridge sucks.
What got me thinking about this again was listening to a song called Hot & Sexy from Zara Larsson’s most recent album. Best song on the album to me, although not a single, and it doesn’t really follow the traditional pop structure. It’s more loose, it’s really not clear what the verse or chorus is or if there even is one. It’s more of a linear experience, and towards the end half you get a sense of a kind of a window form. The composer Salvatore Sciarrino made the term up, it refers to windows on a computer’s operating system. You jump from one window to another, they’re not necessarily related to each other, but they exist within the same system. It’s maybe even less about jumping from one thing to another, but more about bringing something different to the foreground. What was once there can still be recalled, it’s just a minimised window now. Sciarrino’s piece Efobo con radio is a great example of all this.
I’ve noticed this kind of more liberal exploration of form and structure creep up in pop in the recent years, and I’m loving it. So far it’s mostly been in more avant-garde pop, Charli xcx comes to mind first, but I feel like structures like this appearing in Zara Larsson’s music could be a litmus test for this. No shade, but her music has been kinda basic Swedish pop up until now. If it works there and if she is doing things like this, maybe pop too could free itself from the shackles of traditional forms.
LeBron James and his son Bronny James play on the same team in the NBA, which is wild btw, and I just watched some short clip of them two where LeBron called Bronny “bro”. It’s kinda weird calling your son “bro”, is it not?