Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) was formed in Birmingham, England, in 1970 by Jeff Lynne, Roy Wood, and Bev Bevan. The band’s initial aim was to create modern rock and pop songs with classical overtones, a goal they achieved through the innovative use of orchestral instruments like cellos and violins. ELO’s debut album, The Electric Light Orchestra, was released in 1971. Over the years, the lineup changed multiple times, with Jeff Lynne remaining the constant leader and creative force behind the band. ELO has released a total of fifteen studio albums, nine live albums, and numerous compilation albums. Their discography also The post Complete List Of Electric Light Orchestra Albums And Songs appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Movies & TV The Devil’s Bath The Devil’s Bath Finds Folk Horror in Historical Reality Where is the line between “folk horror” and “past reality”? By Leah Schnelbach | Published on July 2, 2024 Credit: Shudder Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Shudder This isn’t a spoiler but a warning: if you are particularly horrified by seeing the deaths of children or animals, stay far away from The Devil’s Bath, because it is built around those two things. The animal deaths are simply the texture of life in 1780s Austria; the children’s deaths are the movie’s fulcrum. The deaths are not gratuitous at all, but they are—especially in one case—drawn out, and awful to watch. The film was written and directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (Goodnight Mommy), and based on extensive historical research by Kathy Stewart. In The Devil’s Bath, life is brutal. You work from the moment you wake, and your only respite is church, or the occasional dance around a bonfire—or, you know, the occasional dance around a corpse after a public execution. I’ve seen people refer to this movie as “folk horror”, but part of the point is that it isn’t horror, for the most part; it’s just life. And as with Handling the Undead, which I reviewed last week, I’ve found myself asking whether this film is “horror”, really, or rather a slow and deeply sad historical drama. Credit: Shudder The plot is whisper thin: Agnes (Anja Plaschg) is a very religious young woman who lives in a small house with her mother and brother. At the opening of the film she’s marrying a man named Wolf (David Scheid), who seems kind and like he really cares for her—and that’s just it, he is kind. And he does really care for her. But they’re both doomed, because their society binds them into a structure that can’t allow for any autonomy, any dissent, any free thought or difference. As Agnes tries and fails to adjust to her new life, her mental health deteriorates, and she finally takes drastic measures to try to re-align herself with her society. That’s really all I can say plot-wise without spoiling things, because so much of The Devil’s Bath is about atmosphere that describing too much will rob you of the experience of the film. But let me back up slightly. The film doesn’t open on Agnes’ marriage, it opens with a murder. The nature of the murder sets an extremely ominous tone. (Basically this movie is two hours of dread.) And the murder does tie in to the rest of the movie’s plot—the only possible problem is that it sets up an expectation of a type of folk horror that the film isn’t really interested in exploring. Agnes and Wolf move into a house near his mother (Maria Hofstätter). There are the usual tensions between new bride and mother-in-law (though to be fair, Wolf’s mother does give Agnes a bucket of fish heads as a gift at one point—she’s trying) and the first part of the film is Agnes trying to fit in in her new community. Her mother and brother live a long hike through the woods away, and in this society the new wife is supposed to take her husband’s community as her own. Agnes is completely cut off from her old life, and any friends she had. As the months pass, and she doesn’t become pregnant, she becomes increasingly mentally unstable. Her physical health craters. A visit to a barber doesn’t really help, going to church doesn’t help—it actually adds to her problems, because she’s far more observant than her new community, who think she’s overdoing it. A whole lot of things that will appear to us in 2024 as symptoms of depression are seen more as the possible influence of a dark spirit. And then things take an inevitable turn for the even darker and more violent. Credit: Shudder We’re given a world where humans are tiny specks in nature. The world is lit by dim sun and guttering torches and that’s it. When Agnes works at her hearth, she holds a flaming stick in her mouth like a flashlight. The world is locked into gender roles—her purpose is to have children, her husband’s to father them. The twist here, if you want to call it that, is that Agnes desperately wants to be a mother, and it’s her husband who’s less keen on his role. But, of course, Agnes is the one who’s seen as the weak link in the society. The couple’s inability to communicate or redefine themselves is what drives the story along its tragic path, but there isn’t even the language to broach the gulf between them. Anja Plaschg is unbelievably good as Agnes. This is an impossible role, and I never doubted her for a second. At the opening of the film, the role demands that she be an innocent child of nature. Often she has only trees or her own house for scene partners, or perhaps the rotting corpse of a murderess. As her health deteriorates she has to move through a near-catatonic depression, and into behavior that I can only call feral cat-adjacent. There is a long confession scene, basically Plaschg speaking into the camera. While the actual priest sits on the other side of a screen, facing forward rather than looking at her, we the audience are trapped staring into her face. It’s an extraordinary performance, calling to mind Falconetti’s work in Passion of Joan of Arc in the sheer pain and vulnerability. It stretches the boundaries of horror. Last year, people were arguing online about whether “cozy horror” could be a thing—personally I think it’s encompassed in the concept of “spooky”—but I found myself mulling the conversation again after The Devil’s Bath. Is The Devil’s Bath horror? Credit: Shudder As I said, I asked the question about Handling the Undead last week, and honestly I think that while I would call The Devil’s Bath horror, I would say it’s less solidly genre than Undead. It’s a slow, sad, grueling drama, with things that read as horror to a modern eye, but would be recognized as “normal life” by a lot of our great-grandmothers. Hell, even some of our grandmothers. The life the tradwives and cottagecore folk think they want. What of our current life will be cast as horror in the future, if some form of movies are still made 250 years from now? As the film churns towards its ending, it promises a type of folk horror that never really materializes. Where The VVitch and Hereditary play with the gap between modern sensibilities and those of a past age, The Devil’s Bath does not give us the comforting illusion of the gap. We’re with Agnes in this world. We’re under her sacred canopy, with no other sky to look to. If a person is out of joint with society enough to be executed, that execution happens where the community can see it. This is right and proper. The body is displayed as its rots, because it’s necessary to see what happens to people who have created a rift in society. Especially the children, of course, how else will they learn? Suicides do not get a real burial, and their souls go to Hell, which is a real place, and leaving their corpses exposed acts as a reminder to others not to commit such a crime against God. If you want to hide a suicide, or show them mercy, then you, too, are committing a crime against God. God and Mary are watching everything you do. If you want to go to Heaven, which is a place as real as your mother-in-law’s cottage, you must be a good wife and mother and community member, and if you fail at all of that, even if it isn’t your fault, you have to find a way, any way, to make things right with your world, or else you will suffer when you die. The folkways and household rituals tangle into the official religion—in this case German Catholicism—until they are one terrifying stew of sacrificial blood, dead bugs, guilt, pleas for forgiveness, and lilting songs to Mary. If this movie has a monster, it might actually be Mary? The ultimate woman in the culture, a pure virgin but also the greatest mother who ever lived. All our protagonist wants to do is to live up to that icon, in her behavior before marriage and in her life as a wife and mother after it. And when she fails, through no fault of her own, there is no place for her in society. In her failure, she is alienated from her own mind and self and has to take drastic action to use loopholes in her world to redeem herself. So again, if you have the right kind of mindset, The Devil’s Bath is absolutely horror, no ghosts or demons required.[end-mark] The Devil’s Bath is now playing on Shudder.   The post <i>The Devil’s Bath</i> Finds Folk Horror in Historical Reality appeared first on Reactor.

Those who have paid for the XDefiant Battlepass may experience issues with it as it appears not to be active. If you’re having such issues, read on to try and fix it. How to fix Battlepass errors for XDefiant XDefiant has just launched Season One, which comes with a whole new Battlepass. Naturally, this means that it doesn’t work for many. Image: Ubisoft This is a standard Ubisoft practice, as Rainbow Six Siege has Battlepass errors at the beginning of every season, so I wouldn’t be worried if I were you. That being said, there are some things you should keep in mind. The Founder’s Pack doesn’t include the XDefiant Season One Battlepass If you purchased the Founder’s Pack for XDefiant, you may be disappointed to know that it only included the pre-season Battlepass, not the Season One Battlepass, meaning that you will have to purchase this one separately. If you’ve bought the Founder’s Pack but not the Season One Battl...

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, is calling on President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race. Doggett is the first elected Democrat to call for Biden to step aside from the race after most Democrat leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries–both of New York, as well as former President Barack Obama and others publicly supported Biden after the what many Democrats and even liberal pundits conceded was a poor debate performance on Thursday. ? Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, calls on Biden to WITHDRAW from the 2024 election. "Too much is at stake to risk a Trump victory," he says. "President Biden saved our democracy by delivering us from Trump in 2020. He must not deliver us to Trump in 2024."His full statement: pic.twitter.com/DTS0SolCnl— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) July 2, 2024 Polling after the presidential debate show Biden’s Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, gaining a more decisive lead. “My decision to make these strong reservations public is not done lightly nor does it in any way diminish my respect for all that President Biden has achieved,” Doggett said in a public statement. “Recognizing that, unlike Trump, President Biden’s first commitment has always been to our country, not himself, I am hopeful that he will make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw. I respectfully call on him to do so.” Biden has reportedly not called congressional Democrats since was deemed a disastrous debate. Doggett made a historical comparison to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who withdrew from the presidential race in March 1968 amid deep unpopularity. “I represent the heart of a congressional district once represented by Lyndon Johnson. Under very different circumstances, he made the painful decision to withdraw,” Doggett said in his statement. “President Biden should do the same.” Doggett’s announcement comes the same day as a report that Democrat governors had a teleconference organized by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, CNN’s Jake Tapper reported. The governors did not have a specific message, but expressed they wanted to hear from Biden. A recent CNN poll found Trump leading Biden by 49% to 43%. Most pre-debate polls found Trump leading by one or two points. Biden won every Democrat presidential state primary this year, with overwhelming victories over Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn. However, the nomination isn’t formal until delegates to the Democratic National Convention vote to nominate a candidate for president and vice president. The delegates are schedule to vote by a virtual roll call the week before meeting in Chicago for the formal convention. However, swapping out Biden for another candidate could run into legal hurdles. The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project noted last month that a national party can nominate a candidate, but state ballot laws might not allow for that type change. This is a breaking news story and will be updated The post BREAKING: First Democrat Lawmaker Calls on Biden to Exit 2024 Race appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The EU Council has managed to nestle fighting “disinformation and hate speech” between such issues as the Middle East, Ukraine, and migration – not to mention while at the same time appointing a new set of “apparatchiks,” in the wake of the European Parliament elections. This proceeds from the Council’s 2024-2029 strategic agenda, adopted on June 27. This document represents a “five-year plan” to guide the bloc’s policy and goals. Under the heading, “A free and democratic Europe,” the document addresses different ways in which “European values” will be upheld going forward. The Council’s conclusions state that in order to strengthen the EU’s “democratic resilience,” what it decides is disinformation and hate speech will have to be countered. These categories of speech are infamously arbitrarily defined, even in legislation, and habitually used as a tool of censorship – but the conclusions count combating them among the strategic goal of fending off foreign interference and destabilization. In other words, those individuals or organizations that are found to be “guilty” of hate speech or disinformation might face the grim possibility of being treated as, essentially, a threat to the EU’s security. Another promise the document makes in the same breath is that tech giants will be made to “take their responsibility for safeguarding democratic dialogue online.” Does this mean there will be more or less censorship in the EU over the next five years? The Brussels bureaucrats are at this point so practiced at churning out platitudes that, theoretically, this statement could be interpreted either way. However, in conjunction with the “misinformation” etc., talk, it is fairly clear which course the EU intends to keep when it comes to online freedom of expression. AI is not explicitly mentioned as a threat (either to the EU or by the EU, as the technology that can be used to ramp up censorship, aka, “combat misinformation”). However, you name it, the EU supposedly has it: under the part of the conclusions addressing competitiveness, increasing capacities related to AI sits right there with growing defense, space, quantum technologies, semiconductors, health, biotechnologies capabilities – not to mention “net-zero technologies, mobility, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and advanced materials.” It’s a pretty comprehensive bridge the EU appears to be trying to sell to its member-states and their citizens. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post European Council Makes Countering “Disinformation and Hate Speech” Part of Its Strategic Agenda appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Here We Go: House Dem Defies Debate Spin, Calls for Biden to Withdraw

Politico: Biden is a Cranky Old Man Being Isolated by His Wife and Top Advisors

In a delightful and heartwarming twist of events, a British cat has recently become a father, and his reactions are nothing short of hilarious and relatable. The video documenting this feline father’s journey is a charming portrayal of the unexpected emotions that come with newfound parenthood. As the viewers watch the cat’s humorous and sometimes... The post Dad cat sees newborn for the first time and his response has the internet laughing appeared first on Animal Channel.

The Dog Dancing World Championship 2022 was a spectacle of grace and precision, capturing the hearts of dog enthusiasts worldwide. Among the many talented participants, one duo stood out: Anastasiia Beaumont and her border collie, Yuki. They showed that a pet-owner bond can reach new heights and make things like this possible. This bond was... The post Border collie and girl blow the roof off of Dog Dancing World Championship appeared first on Animal Channel.

Even after having a full day to digest the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, the Tuesday cast of MSNBC's Jose Diaz-Balart Reports could not manage to accurately inform their audience of what the Court actually ruled. Instead, guest host Katy Tour and her roundtable of legal analysts claimed the Court’s “circular” and “illogical” ruling held the Constitution gives the president the power to violate the Constitution. Asking no one in particular, Tur wondered, “I want to ask one more question. So, and this is how I read it, you tell me if it's wrong because you guys are legal minds and I am, you know, just playing one on television. I read it as you can use it—they're reading the Constitution as saying it implies an authority or implies immunity to a president so much so, so broadly, that even his motivations can't be questioned if he was trying to violate the Constitution, so it was circular. Is that an incorrect reading of it?”     Legal correspondent Lisa Rubin concurred with Tur’s assessment, “No, I don't think so. There are a lot of things about the decision that are sort of tautological and there are a lot of things about it that are just simply illogical.” After Rubin went on about Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s concurrence, where she argued that former President Donald Trump’s conduct in the Georgia election case does not constitute an official act, Tur asked, “Are they saying the Constitution protects the president from—allows the president to violate the Constitution?” They are not. You can still sue to stop an action you believe is unconstitutional or illegal, but you can’t throw former President Barack Obama in jail for signing an executive order he previously admitted he didn’t have the authority to enact.   “If the President claims authority to act but in fact exercises mere ‘individual will’ and ‘authority without law,’ the courts may say so” pic.twitter.com/q9fYUTH46R — John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) July 1, 2024   Nevertheless, former Manhattan assistant D.A. and MSNBC legal analyst Catherine Christian also affirmed Tur’s reading of the majority opinion, “Well, put that way, yes, basically, he has absolute immunity for his core constitutional function.” Tur imagined a hypothetical where, “I’m the president, so I can do what I want even if I am trying to violate the Constitution, which is what Donald Trump was accused of doing in 2020.” Again, that is not what the Court held, but Tur’s misrepresentation of the ruling plus an echo chamber of multiple legal analysts will not stop her from trending on Twitter as MSNBC viewers rage that she’s a secret Republican. Here is a transcript for the July 2 show: MSNBC Jose Diaz-Balart Reports 7/2/2024 11:09 PM ET KATY TUR: I want to ask one more question. So, and this is how I read it, you tell me if it's wrong because you guys are legal minds and I am, you know, just playing one on television. I read it as you can use – they’re reading the Constitution as saying it implies an authority or implies immunity to a president so much so, so broadly, that even his motivations can't be questioned if he was trying to violate the Constitution, so it was circular. Is that an incorrect reading of it? LISA RUBIN: No, I don't think so. There are a lot of things about the decision that are sort of tautological and there are a lot of things about it that are just simply illogical. You know, to point out, to pick up on Catherine’s point about Amy Coney Barrett and her concurrence in part. She drops a footnote saying, like, it's lost on her why the fake elector scheme could plausibly be official, that the president has no role whatsoever in the administration of federal elections. To her, there's no analysis that needs to be done. She says squarely the fake elector scheme in its totality is private conduct, but that's not how the majority sees it despite admissions from Trump’s lawyers at oral argument. TUR: Are they saying the Constitution protects the president from —allows the president to violate the Constitution? CATHERINE CHRISTIAN: Well, put that way, yes, basically, he has absolute immunity for his core constitutional function. TUR: So, I’m the president, so I can do what I want even if I am trying to violate the Constitution, which is what Donald Trump was accused of doing in 2020.