Introduction

Hearing Aid (timotheories presents: Sound Culture)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

One of my favourite pastimes is listening to music. I like to have an album going on repeat in my car while I drive on my commute, when I’m running around town, and when I feel like taking a late night drive.

It gives me focus, makes me stronger. And I can drive faster.

Okay maybe that last part isn’t true. But certain music can definitely help with bolstering your mood and work performance. I written about the subject of music listening before, and it’s one of the main reasons I share album reviews with you creative cuties on the weekly. I’m providing a service to get you the tunes which will help inspire your creative passion projects.

That, and sometimes it’s just nice to have suggestions hand delivered to you.

I confide in musical experts all the time. Some of my favourites are The Needle Drop, Spectrum Pulse, and ARTV. And Spectrum Pulse and ARTV are known to collaborate on the regular.

Quick, Somebody Get A Guitar!

I recently started releasing a weekly video series called Watch Culture, where I share movie recommendations with you. Featuring a revolving door of familiar timotheories faces, these are short videos which give you examples of shows and films in the annals of history that deserve your attention, no matter how old you are.

It’s been a fun project so far, and I’ve learned a lot in giving my thoughts on pop culture in a short format. But seeing as how this is the year of campfire stories, I will continue to expand the social circle and branch out into other areas of the arts.

It makes perfect sense to add album recommendations to the rotation because I have a lot to sense about music too, dear readers. So I’m pre-emptively introducing a new series to you – Sound Culture.

The show where I, and sometimes guests, but mostly featuring one very special musician named Brendon Greene, will give you recommendations based on albums we think you should buy, stream, and listen to. We’ll ensure each month features albums from different eras, genres, and artists – I think you’ll enjoy what we have to say about albums that are either freshly pressed and or classics in their own right.

And besides, every campfire needs an acoustic guitar sessions or three.

theories Summarized

Time to get to stepping folks, I promised myself I wouldn’t share too much of this new endeavour, lest I reveal what’s coming up in future weeks and totally destroy the element of surprise! I’m out of theories for now, but please come back tomorrow and I’ll give you my thoughts on the new Calvin Harris album, Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1.

Tim!

Netflix and Take A Pill (timotheories presents: Watch Culture)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Internet culture is cool right? Reshoots and disputes and set leaks galore.

Oh wait, nope, that’s not cool at all.

It’s all just a hype machine and it sucks. Because legitimacy of so many of the films coming out right now aside (read: Justice League, Baywatch, Pirates of the Caribbean), we don’t need to spend hours upon hours of our time reading click-bait themed single paragraph articles from buzz sites, tweeting from similar newsfeeds that should be reporting on politics, and binging on YouTube video theories and opinions. I mention this because we’re talking about things which haven’t even come out yet.

It’s weird though, because culture has shifted.

You probably didn’t notice it, did you?

Yeah, funnily enough, the notion of hyping movies has been around for a while. You see dear readers, there used to be a time when we would get on a hype machine ahead of a release date, but we didn’t have a place to vomit all of our millions of ideas about it. And people didn’t capitalize on all of the theory, using their particular geek skills to funnel people Then the internet came along. And we lived a happy place between hype and geek culture for a few years.

So what happened and where’s the shift?

Culture Conundrum

Well, I think at some point publishers of ideas, and cultural icons realized that the volume of new content being created reached far beyond their own individual capacities to give opinions on it, so they instead choose to focus only on the new and glamorous, adding in their two cents as it were. Luckily for the vast majority of us, technology has shifted too and our attention spans for the new and novel are increasing, so we don’t have time to look at everything. We instead spend five minutes on one thing we care about, to then move onto another five minutes segment about the thing we care about.

Content creators benefit from this in a big way, and everyone is happy. Because we can all share in that hype machine, never really contributing anything in the way of constructive feedback and driving our subscribers to purpose.

Which is why I decided to introduce a new series of video posts called WatchCulture into the mix. In this series, I will be sharing brief recommendations on movies which have been around for more than a year, and which I think you should watch for your own cultural edification. These are going to be short videos on film, music, art, etc., which fit into the cultural norm, but the difference is that instead of saying netflix and chill, I’m going to ask you to take the red pill.

theories Summarized

You can thank André Lindo, the producer of my Cross Talk series, for this idea, and a greater insight into my own thoughts and feelings on what culture we should be consuming at any given time. Expect to see Watch Culture episodes cropping up every week, very soon.

But for now, I’ve no more theories to share. Only well wishes and a hope for a new tomorrow.

Tim!

 

 

Genre Benders (Cross Talk Ep. 19)

Posted on by Tim Kuefler

Some of the best experiences of life need to happen within a certain sequence. Otherwise they just won’t happen at all. For instance, you have to go through the standard education system, taking (and passing) classes throughout primary school, followed by middle school, and then working through secondary school, before you can finally go to that graduation ceremony and throw your cap in the air, like you just don’t care.

Except that you do care. And that’s okay.

Rituals are important in life, and we should experience them fully so that we can transition from one stage to the next with no regrets.

Except that no one gets through life without regrets.

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Life is interesting that way, while a coming of age story for one person can be seen as comedy, for some it’s a fantasy, for another it’s a drama, and for others a tale full of horror.

Movies always find the best ways to showcase the subtle difference of life and no matter with the core message of the movie at hand, you can be sure that numerous genres have tackled the story at hand…

Which is why today, Chris and I explore some of the more common themes we see in film and how they really do span genres. These are genre defying themes, if you will. We’ll be chasing after the loss of innocence, coping with loss, triumph over adversity, good vs evil, and overcoming differences.

Don’t expect this to be a deep dive of the themes I just mentioned though, I want to give a sense of what exists out there, before we decide to focus in on one or another, otherwise we’d have over an hour of content on our hands, and nobody’s got time for that!

This is episode nineteen of Cross Talk friends! It’s going to have laughter, tears, anger, excitement and all kinds of references to films you know and love. Some of them which you would never expect to share a connection. In some cases I was surprised at what we came up with, to be honest. But enough preamble… Dig in!

I hope you enjoy this one creative cuties. Were you surprised by what we came up with? Did you like our movie examples? Did you expect us to cover some different themes then we did? I’d love to hear what you thought! Cross Talk is a conversation, after all.

Please comment, subscribe, and share this video with friends. We want to hear your feedback!

Tim!