tagged w/ anhedonia
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Seven-time Grammy Award winning musician John Mayer’s new album “Battle Studies” was released on Tuesday. And if Mayer has ever been successful at putting all of his pessimism about romance into a single album, then “Battle Studies” is certainly the one. “It’s one record about one thing,” Mayer said. The underlying emotional tone that runs throughout the songs in the album is one of discomfort with close relationships and a relatively pervasive dark, dysphoric mood. Most of the songs in his album convey a sense of skepticism about love, lovers and anyone looking and passing judgment from the outside in.
Reviewers have described Mayer's new album as a revival of the spirit of adult-oriented rock, saying it is a reflection of how assured he has become and that it may well make some of his detractors admit that John Mayer has grown up some. Talking about his critics, Mayer described his thoughts about having to cope with his public face as a celebrity and with his detractors in the media, as opposed to Mayer the musician.
He argued, “What do you think is stronger: a dozen press articles that say I’m this guy, or a record with 10 songs on it that you enjoy? Which has greater staying power? At the end of the day, all I owe the world in exchange for my dumb face being in their lives are the 10 songs every couple years that are hopefully of greater magnitude than somebody’s press story about me.”
This piece includes b&w photographs and two videos of music from Mayer's new album.
Please visit my website to view the photographs in high-resolution, and to watch the two music videos:
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/john-mayer-just-half-of-my-heart/Seven-time Grammy Award winning musician John Mayer’s new album “Battle... more
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“Drift Away” is a beautiful, but sadly melancholy 4-minute short film directed by Jean-Julien Pous and produced by Sophia Shek. During the course of the film, a gracious and ethereal young woman slowly and silently glides all alone through the busily teeming streets of Hong Kong. During the earliest part of the film, it’s somewhat difficult to discern exactly what’s going on, or even what the movie’s theme might be, except possibly a visual rendering of the emotional deadness of anomie and anhedonia in contemporary urban life. The attractive young woman’s eyes acutely capture everything around her, but only the movie’s camera can catch her own eyes.
Sadly, it’s probably true that only when you’re really able to lose yourself in something or someone else, only then will you finally become capable of an emotional investment in yourself, another person and/or the world around you. Lacking that, the despairing message for people left with a desolately barren life in the midst of the intensely seething modern world is something like: “Pour your misery down, pour your misery down on me.”
This piece includes a number of color photographs from the film, as well as the beautiful short film, “Drift Away.”“Drift Away” is a beautiful, but sadly melancholy 4-minute short film... more
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