And why or how exactly ? I dunno… Seems notable, though.

 
via Laughing Squid
 
Thanks Aaron Dilloway !

 
One of the things I enjoy most about reading biographies is the little personal details, which reveal much of what a subject liked or disliked. For example, Freddie Mercury liked Quality Street assorted candies; enjoyed Stolichnaya vodka; and had a love of spicy food.

According to Peter Freestone, who worked as Freddie’s personal assistant for more than a decade, Chicken Dhansak was one of the singer’s favorite meals. Peter (aka Phoebe) has now written-up the recipe for this mouth-watering dish over at FreddieMercury.com, where he explains:

Chicken Dhansak

This Indian inspired dish rose up the popularity stakes because it embraced two separate dishes, a dal which for Freddie was always a moistening accompaniment and a ‘curry’ meat dish which often, on its own, tended to be dryer. Living in Earls Court, both Joe [Fanelli] and I had easy access to supermarkets where every spice known to mankind was stocked as a matter of regular principle. The area was such a melting pot of nationalities that for anyone not to have been able to buy fenugreek seeds would be for the property market in the area to plummet in value immediately!

25 gm channa, 25 gm moong, 25gm red and 50 gm toor lentils
125 ml oil
650 gm boneless chicken 2cm cubes
3 med onions
2 cloves garlic
410 gm tinned tomatoes
1 medium aubergine chopped
1 large potato chopped
115 gm spinach (frozen)
100 gm fresh coriander
50 gm fresh mint
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 brown cardamom
5cm cassia bark
½ teaspoon black mustard seeds
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground cumin
¼ teaspoon ground fenugreek seeds
½ teaspoon chilli powder
Salt.

Wash the lentils thoroughly, making sure you remove all the grit and residual husk. Soak together overnight.
The following day, cook the lentils in twice their volume of water for approx. 30 minutes. While the lentils are cooking, heat the oil in a heavy saucepan and fry the meat at a high temperature for 5 – 10 minutes until browned. Remove from the saucepan and keep in a warm place.
Fry the cumin seeds, cardamom, cassia bark and mustard seeds adding the onions, garlic and salt. When they have turned a golden brown, add the tomatoes and cook for about 5 more minutes.
Add the remaining chopped vegetables, mix and cook for 10 minutes.
Add the lentils and roughly mash everything together.
Add the meat and rest of the spices. Mix well and cook gently for a further 40 minutes.
Add the fresh coriander and mint and cook for at least 10 minutes.
Serve with plain boiled rice.

It is more than a decade since I met Peter for a documentary I was producing called When Freddie Mercury Met Kenny Everett. Peter had written an insightful and highly enjoyable book on his day-to-day life working for Freddie. I met Peter in Prague, at his city apartment, where we filmed the interview, before taking some walking shots on the Charles Bridge. Peter was charming, delightful company, and if you are interested, you can ask Phoebe questions about his life with Freddie here.
 

 
1987

‘Hello Derek.’
‘Hello. I’m writing in my diary about James Anderton. What a ghastly man.’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s saying we’re living in a cesspit of our making. I mean, how absurd. What a horrid little man. How the supposed Chief Constable of Manchester can say such vile things. It just makes me more determined, you know what I mean? I want to make a film about it.’

Film was personal and political for Jarman. While most most cinema during the 1980s was vacuous, empty, full of sound and fury, Jarman made films that were infused with his life, his thoughts, his passions, his politics—even the biopic Caravaggio mixed-in elements from his life to that of the Renaissance artist.

Jarman was a painter who made movies.

1980

In the Shadow of the Sun is an extraordinary collaboration between Derek Jarman and Throbbring Gristle. It is a more personal work for Jarman, which mixes elements from 3 of Jarman’s Super-8 movies: Journey to Avebury (1971), Tarot (aka The Magician) (1972) and Fire Island (1974), into a dream-like film, filled with magick and ritual, which Throbbing Gristle’s music matches perfectly.

In the Shadow of the Sun was premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 1980. It contains many of Jarman’s favorite leitmotifs—mirrors, fires, dance—which he returned to again in the more political, The Last of England. 
 

 
The quiet Beatle was born on this day in 1943. Harrison died on November 29, 2001 at the age of 58.

Below, George Harrison and heavy friends performing “Wah Wah” (a song about dealing with Paul McCartney’s ego) at the famous Concert for Bangladesh, 1972:
 

 
Thirty minutes with British philosopher, mathematician, Nobel winner and anti-nuclear activist Bertrand Russell, conducted by the BBC’s John Freeman in 1959. Russell was 86 years old when this was shot. The format of this program, Face to Face, is fascinating, almost like an interrogation, with lighting just as harsh. The camera zooms in on the subject and they rarely cut away.

Among other topics, the famously free-thinking Russell explains why he’s not a Christian, writing his own obituary, his childhood, how the beauty of the planet was being destroyed during his lifetime and how smoking (literally) saved his life.

At the end Freeman asks the great humanist, historian and thinker:

“Suppose, Lord Russell, this film were to be looked at by our descendants, like a Dead Sea scroll in a thousand years’ time. What would you think is worth telling that generation about the life you’ve lived and the lessons you’ve learned from it?”

Lord Russell gives some very good advice:
 

 
Before he started writing, James Ellroy was busted for being drunk, drunk driving, petty theft and trespass. He was hassled as a suspicious pedestrian, had police shot-guns shoved in his face for squatting in a deserted house, and found himself locked up with pimps, killers, drug addicts and winos.

His diet was bennies and booze, and jail time was his “health retreat”:

I abstained from booze and dope and ate three square meals a day. I did push-ups and worked trusty details and got a little muscle tone going. I hung out with stupid white guys, stupid black guys and stupid Mexican guys—and swapped stupid stories with them. We had all committed daring crimes and fucked the world’s most glamorous women. An old black wino told me he fucked Marilyn Monroe. I said, “No shit—I fucked her too!”

Jail taught Ellroy a few truths—he was big, but not tough; he committed crimes, but was no criminal—but he knew he could ride it out.

I worked the trash-and-freight detail at the New County Jail and the library at Wayside Honor Rancho. My favorite jail was Biscailuz Center. They fed you big meals and let you read in the latrines after lights-out. Jail was no big fucking traumatic deal.

I knew how to ride short stretches. Jail cleaned out my system and gave me something to anticipate: my release and more booze and dope fantasies.

One day Ellroy woke-up tied to a hospital cot, his wrists bloodied by the restraints. He was 27, and near death—an abscess the size of a fist on his lung.

‘If it’s not working, then get the hell out.’ Ellroy once told me. ‘If your life isn’t working the way you want it, then do something to change it.’

We were in a car, driving down the curve of road from the Griffith Observatory. It was Fall 1994, and he was giving me advice he had learned on a hospital gurney some 20-years earlier. We had been filming an interview for a TV documentary. For a week Ellroy had given a guided tour of his life:  El Monte where his mother had been murdered, Hancock Park and the houses he had B&E’d, the panty sniffing, the pill-popping, the drinking, the parks where he jacked-off, the Sav-On where he stole Benzedrine inhalers to get buzzed, the empty apartments where he lived off booze and drugs, bad sex and fantasies.

Then it all stopped. He woke-up in hospital, and knew he was no longer invincible. And that’s when Ellroy started writing.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

James Ellroy: An early interview with the Demon Dog of American Literature

 
Here it is: The Chinese “model” opera that shares its name with the wonderful 2nd solo LP by DM patron saint Brian Eno, who lifted the title after finding it in a book of postcards (such as the one pictured above) in San Francisco. I’ve always been curious, so it’s another marvelous artifact of the YouTubes that it’s here for easy perusal. A description of what we’re seeing via the Wikipedia:

Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (Chinese: 智取威虎山; pinyin: zhì qǔ wēihǔ shān) is a Beijing opera, and one of the eight model plays allowed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The story is based on the novel Lin hai xue yuan (林海雪原), which in turn, is based on the real life story of an incident in 1946 during the Chinese Civil War, involving a communist reconnaissance team soldier Yang Zirong (杨子荣) who disguised himself as a bandit to infiltrate a local gang of bandits, eventually helping the main communist force to destroy the bandits. Unlike other characters depicted in the opera and novel, the protagonists’ name and the bandits’ names were real.
A film version directed by Xie Tieli was released in 1970 and currently Hong Kong film director Tsui Hark is making a new version of it. His movie is scheduled to be released at the end of 2012.

And naturally, the lovely Brian Eno song of the same name from said LP.

 
A list of the books W. H. Auden borrowed from the New York Society Library during January and February 1962, and for various dates in 1963, reveals the poet’s passion for mysteries and pulp thrillers (including Gladys Mitchell’s The Man Who Grew Tomatoes, John Blackburn’s Bound to Kill, Alex Fraser’s Constables Don’t Count, John Rhode’s The Fatal Pool), as well as literature (amongst which are G. K. Chesterton’s Wit and Wisdom, Delacroix’s Journals, and Schiller’s Essays). All of which he appears to have read at a ferocious rate.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous MInds

 
Via Poets Org
 
More of Auden’s Library Books, after the jump…
 

 
It says there’s only 24 hours left that you can still watch the HD webcast of last night’s Nick Cave concert in Los Angeles but it’s probably closer to 12 hours at this point.

I was at the show at the Henry Fonda Theatre last night and WOW. I’ve seen Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds going back thirty years—fifteen times—and this was one of the best shows, ever, for sure.

The LA gig was notable for several reasons. They played their boss new album, Push the Sky Away all the way through. The pensive tension and release of the album’s running order, I thought translated exceptionally well to a concert hall set list. “Jubilee Street,” one of Cave’s best songs, well, since his last album, was a particular swaggering highlight.

The return of the great Barry Adamson to the Bad Seeds. Very cool. I actually did not know this was the case until he walked onstage. I’ve been listening to two of his albums a lot lately and I was quite happy about this.

The string section that accompanied the group and the children’s choir from Flea’s Silverlake Conservatory of Music giving the show a sort of “Nick Cave meets The Langley School Music Project” kinda feel. It worked brilliantly. Cave would turn to them—I’d say they numbered about 20—and ask “You ready kids?” and trust me they were. They sang their little hearts out. Who would have expected something so cute from a Nick Cave concert, but there you have it. (“The Ship Song” with the kids last night was a lovely, lovely moment).

A particularly amazing “From Her to Eternity,” throbbing like a motherfucker, where every instrument, including those in the string section, were basically played as percussion.

Cave was in great voice and he looked amazing, cutting a damned slim figure for a guy his age in a sharp black three-piece suit. The Bad Seeds are probably the greatest rock ensemble of this generation, honestly what more needs to be said of these gentlemen? Watch the video, it speaks for itself.

After a certain point, Cave thanked the children and they left the stage. Cue an absolutely monstrous second act that raised the fucking roof. It was almost as if Cave and the band felt they had to wait until the coast was clear before they pulled out all the stops. It’s probably a good thing they did, because the intensity of the latter part of the gig would have probably scared the shit out of their young collaborators.

The set ended with an encore of “Stagger Lee” that was so intense people were leaving the theater with stunned looks on their faces, like they’d just been brutalized. I felt positively giddy.

In any case, time’s a-runnin’ out on this one. The Bad Seeds will be touring America throughout March and April. Every single show is already sold out. You lucky people!
 

 
Thank you very, very kindly Iain Forsyth (who directed this webcast, btw)

 
Making a movie is a very mathematical operation, Federico Fellini explains in this interview from 1972. It is like firing a missile into space—everything has to be prepared.

This control over film-making is neatly contrasted with the often random nature of documentary-making, when moments later a telephone rings and the interview is stopped. Fittingly, the sequence is kept in, as if it had been scripted.

There is also a great interplay between Fellini and interviewer Philip Jenkinson, where the director responds to the questions about his films—Roma, Amacord, Satyricon, his techniques, and his life, but rarely giving a definitive answer. There is a drama going on here between the two, of nuance and mood, with Fellini cleverly avoiding his being tied to one thought, one explanation, one answer. That is for the critics, he says.

Ultimately, Fellini defines movie-making, or artistic creation, as a form of autobiography.

Everything is autobiographical. How is it possible to live outside of yourself? Anything we do is also a testifying of yourself. If a creator makes something that pretends to be very objective, it is the autobiography of a man who is very objective…

He ends in a similar form:

...How is it possible to do something outside of your myth, of your world, of your character, of your history, of yourself?

It brings the interview almost full-circle, but Fellini’s answers throughout only leave the viewer wanting to know more. This is a classic and rare TV interview and demands to be seen.
 

 
With thanks to NellyM