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The REAL Hunger Games
05.09.2012
07:54 pm
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Above, Hunger Games poster for the Roger Corman version

The REAL hunger games have begun in the Capitol: This week the House is voting on $36 billion in cuts to nutrition assistance, or SNAP, which would kick 2 million people off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps), reduce benefits for 44 million more, and drop 280,000 low-income kids from school lunch.

Visit Half in Ten to learn more—and how you can stop the Capitol from winning.

An Austerity Backlash: From Sen. Bernie Sanders’s website, May 7, 2012

France handed the presidency on Sunday to François Hollande, who declared that “austerity can no longer be inevitable.”  In Greece, Germany and Italy, parliamentary and local elections Sunday were seen as setbacks for austerity measures. Sen. Bernie Sanders saw a lesson for the United States in the European elections.

“In the United States and around the world, the middle class is in steep decline while the wealthy and large corporations are doing phenomenally well. The message sent by voters in France and other European countries, which I believe will be echoed here in the United States, is that the wealthy and large corporations are going to have to experience some austerity also and that that burden cannot solely fall on working families. 

In the United States, where corporate profits are soaring and the gap between the rich and everybody else is growing wider, we must end corporate tax loopholes and start making the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes. At the same time, we must protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Austerity, yes, but for millionaires and billionaires, not the working families of this country.”

 

 
Via Think Progress

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.09.2012
07:54 pm
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Brian Eno lecture on music and art (full talk)
05.08.2012
01:41 pm
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Brian Eno speaks about the evolution of music and the visual arts and how they converged historically in the 20th century.

Taped in Russia on November 2011.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.08.2012
01:41 pm
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Reggae Britannia: Cult classic ‘Babylon’ deals pure wickedness
05.08.2012
12:50 pm
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Babylon is a totally engrossing 1980 British film that is set against the UK reggae and “sound system” culture of South London’s then predominantly West Indian neighborhood, Brixton.

From the DVD:

Sound system ‘toaster’ Blue and his Ital Lion crew are looking forward to a sound clash competition with rival outfit Jah Shaka. But as the event approaches, Blue’s personal life begins to unravel. Fired from his job, he beings to suspect his girlfriend is cheating on him and then one night he is brutally beaten by plain-clothes policemen. Finally, when their lock-up garage is broken into and their sound system destroyed, he cannot take any more. Increasingly angered and alienated by what he perceives to be society’s rejection of his race and his culture, Blue is compelled to respond by fighting fire with fire.

Babylon stars Brinsley Forde, the lead singer of Aswad as “Blue.” Martin Stellman (Quadrophenia) co-wrote the screenplay with director Franco Rosso. The soundtrack was scored by Slits producer Dennis Bovell and featured music by Aswad (their killer “Warrior Charge” number), Yabby U, I Roy, Michael Prophet and others. Babylon was shot by Oscar winning cinematographer Chris Menges (The Mission; The Killing Fields).

Babylon is a real treat and considered a classic today. The soundclash scene with Jah Shaka near the film’s end is just a flat-out great piece of film-making. Babylon was difficult to see until it was released on DVD in 2008, but it’s made a strong comeback since then, with prestigious screenings and a BBC broadcast as part of the “Reggae Britannia” season.

Certainly it’s a unique film, the only one of its kind to examine the harsh life of Jamaican immigrants in London during that time. Babylon represents the first time in UK cinema where British reggae culture and Rastafarianism were explored in a non-documentary. Director Rosso was raised in South London himself and knew exactly where to find visually arresting backdrops of urban decay in Brixton and Deptford.

I lived in Brixton in 1983-84 myself—where I saw Aswad play live many, many times and walked past a couple of outdoor Jah Shaka parties that I probably would not have been all that welcome at (his PA system was so loud it felt like the music was thicker than the air, like some kind of dub humidity)—so I was always curious to see this film.  It did not disappoint. Babylon perfectly evokes the growing racial tensions—and intense feelings of doom—of inner city London life during the late 70s/early 80s that ultimately culminated in the fiery Brixton riots. Highly recommended.

Mel Smith, seen in the still-frame below, has a small role as Blue’s racist employer.
 

 
Via Exile on Moan Street

Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.08.2012
12:50 pm
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All you need is war: The Beatles vs Hitler in the most fucked-up movie ever made
05.07.2012
10:44 pm
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If you thought the movie version of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was bad, here’s something that will really curl the toes of your Beatle boots.

All This And World War ll mashes up archival WW2 film footage with gung-ho Hollywood war epics and then tosses in a weird mix of rock stars covering Beatle tunes for its soundtrack. It’s a hit or miss affair that manages to achieve a soul-deflating awfulness while occasionally allowing little wormike glimmerings of brilliance to ooze through the sprocket holes. Had it not been produced by 20th Century Fox, it might be mistaken for a long lost underground film directed by dadaist acidheads with a lot of rock and roll musicians for friends.

When it was released to theaters in 1976, ATAWW2 lasted a couple of weeks (critics hated it, audiences stayed away) before being pulled by Fox and buried forever. It has never appeared on VHS or DVD. Rumor had it that Fox had destroyed every existing print and negative of the movie (not true). Even bootleggers found it close to impossible to unearth a copy.

Thanks to YouTube, it is now possible to see this extravagantly misguided experiment as it lands on your monitor screen with a sickening thud. An experiment that proves that if you put enough monkeys in an editing room and give them enough time and film footage they will create something that approximates a movie even if it’s no more than the cinematic equivalent of throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks.

I’m sure we can all argue which juxtapositions of song to images work, which ones are silly in the extreme or just plain irredeemably bad ... or all of the above. Helen Reddy singing “Fool On The Hill” as clips of Hitler unspool on the screen gets my vote for the movie’s maddest moment. Or is it Rod Stewart singing “Get Back” to footage of masses of goosestepping Nazis? Or The Bee Gees singing “Golden Slumbers” as bombs drop on London and buildings explode in a maelstrom of smoke and fire. I don’t know. The film offers so many choices that my bad taste meter never left the red zone. And that alone is enough for me to recommend this anal wart of a movie.

For a completely different take on ATAWW2, check out Phil Hall’s rather wonderful review at Film Threat.

So here it is: the rarely seen All This And World War ll.

Soundtrack songs:

“Magical Mystery Tour”—Ambrosia
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—Elton John (includes an uncredited John Lennon on lead guitar and backing vocals)
“Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight”—The Bee Gees
“I Am The Walrus”—Leo Sayer
“She’s Leaving Home”—Bryan Ferry
“Lovely Rita”—Roy Wood
“When I’m Sixty-Four”—Keith Moon
“Get Back”—Rod Stewart
“Let It Be”—Leo Sayer
“Yesterday”—David Essex
“With a Little Help from My Friends/Nowhere Man”—Jeff Lynne
“Because”—Lynsey De Paul
“She Came In Through The Bathroom Window”—The Bee Gees
“Michelle”—Richard Cocciante
“We Can Work It Out”—The Four Seasons
“The Fool On The Hill”—Helen Reddy
“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”—Frankie Laine
“Hey Jude”—The Brothers Johnson
“Polythene Pam”—Roy Wood
“Sun King”—The Bee Gees
“Getting Better”—Status Quo
“The Long and Winding Road”—Leo Sayer
“Help!”—Henry Gross
“Strawberry Fields Forever”—Peter Gabriel
“A Day in the Life”—Frankie Valli
“Come Together”—Tina Turner
“You Never Give Me Your Money”—Will Malone & Lou Reizner
“The End”—The London Symphony Orchestra

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.07.2012
10:44 pm
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Natty dread in the echo chamber: Documentary on dub music
05.07.2012
03:12 pm
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I and I can leap tall buildings.
 
The documentary Dub Echoes explores Jamaican dub and its influence on electronic music and hip hop via interviews with some of the music’s leading practitioners.

Directed by Bruno Natal and featuring reggae legends and dub pioneers King Jammy, Sly and Robbie, U-Roy and Lee “Scratch” Perry, as well as beat experimentalists like Bill Laswell, DJ Spooky, Mad Professor and Basement Jaxx, Dub Echoes gets deep into the groove and takes you inside the echo chamber.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.07.2012
03:12 pm
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Suffering in Style: ‘The Mark of Cain’
05.07.2012
02:25 pm
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Now over a decade old, Alix Lambert’s The Mark of Cain remains far and away the best prison documentary that I’ve ever seen. Examining Russian inmates and their tattooing traditions, it is a brutal, yet very beautiful, film that brings to mind Dostoevsky’s assertion in The House of the Dead that many of the individuals encountered in the course of his own Siberian stint were among his nation’s most gifted and intelligent. Somehow, in spite of the starvation, overcrowding and violence, an almost perverse atmosphere of high culture pervades this documentary – Tarkovsky’s shadow, for example, is as inescapable as Dostoevsky’s, due not least to the chilling phrase inmates use to refer to prison: The Zone.

Early on we meet Semyon Dyachenko, an otherwise reasonable seeming fellow (and mean tap dancer) imprisoned for decapitating three gypsies who had robbed his mother’s grave.“I have my own laws,” he mumbles through an epic moustache, “if you don’t encroach on what is holy I’ll leave you among the living” (Lambert’s entire cast, by the way, are apparently incapable of uttering a sentence devoid of lyricism). Semyon gestures to a Janus-faced creation tattooed beneath his ribs – half woman, half snarling beast: “It’s called, ‘People are Animals to Each Other,’” he says, unwittingly (?) invoking Man is Wolf to Man, the classic memoir of Soviet brutality by the (now I come to think of it) eerily named Janusz Bardach…

Perhaps the film’s most memorable individual is the young inmate named Aleksandr Borisov, a sublime tattooist who executes his work with a wind-up contraption made out of a razorblade, a ballpoint pen, and a sharpened guitar string (the makeshift ink is derived from a mixture of soot and urine). “This machine, you could say, is my ticket to some kind of life here,” muses dour Aleksandr, before shrugging off his talent in characteristic style: “Leonardo Da Vinci had a special gift… but he didn’t see it, right? A person is a person. I don’t see anything special about me.”

Even the more popular prison tattoos have interesting meanings– the jagged stars on knees symbolise the refusal to kneel down before authority; sailing ships commemorate a roaming life – and the tattooed sentiments tend again to be outright poetic (‘Let all I have lived be as if it were a dream’; ‘A slave to fate but no lackey to the law’). The stunning churches that stretch across torsos and backs, meanwhile, with each cupola standing for a conviction, must be the most laughably Russian phenomenon of all time. As another typically erudite inmate puts it (throwing in a Martin Esslin reference for good measure): “The Zone is a kind of model of the state, only all the relations between people are exaggerated. It resembles the theatre of the absurd.”
 

Posted by Thomas McGrath
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05.07.2012
02:25 pm
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Mindblowingly beautiful film on anatomical art
05.07.2012
01:25 pm
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In addition to being an illustrator for Disney, painter Frank Armitage is also known for his stunning medical art. In this 1970 educational film on anatomy, Armitage guides us through the human body in beautifully rendered paintings.

When I first watched this, I was reminded of the murals of Diego Rivera. I later discovered that Rivera was a big influence on Armitage. He also won an Academy Award for his set designs for the movie The Fantastic Voyage and that movie’s visual sensibility is clearly apparent in this amazing short film, which Armitage also narrates.
 

 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.07.2012
01:25 pm
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A Day In The Life: MCA is Nathanial Hornblower
05.06.2012
09:01 am
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It’s still sinking in here that MCA-aka Adam Yauch- has died, and that, in effect, the Beastie Boys are no more. What a fucking bummer.

It’s an inescapable fact that the Beastie Boys are one of the bands that define my generation. If you were a child at any point from the mid 80s up until the late 90s you cannot have escaped their influence. And I’m not just talking about their music; their aesthetic reached everywhere, from film and music videos to magazine publishing and clothes lines.

I feel like my generation (and I use that term loosely) don’t have a singular iconic figure they can point too, like a Prince or a Bowie. You know, that one person that unites an entire age group through sheer talent and poise. Well, the Beasties may not have had the incredible album-a-year productivity rate of Prince or Bowie at their prime (in fact they were legendarily slow at making music,) but their extra-musicular activites more than made up for that, and meant that when their albums did drop it was a major event.

More than just the music on its own, more than the Grande Royale magazine and record label, more than fantastic the art work or the trend-setting X-Large clothing range, it was the Beastie Boys incredible videos that set them apart, and brought their diverse fan base together. They really knew how to work in different media while retaining their core identity, making them some of the first and most successful rap music entrepreneurs, and this placed them right at the centre of the 90s golden age of both hip-hop and music videos. And there steering the helm of most of those awesome Beastie Boys promo clips was Yauch himself, often in the guise of Swiss director Nathanial Hornblower.
 

Nathanial Hornblower cartoon by Evil Design
 

My God, looking back now it’s startling to think of how these videos have influenced my life and my addiction to (and perception of) pop culture.

I caught the raunchy video for ‘She’s On It” on TV when I was about 8 years old and the image of Mike D sliding an ice cube down a bikini-clad model’s back has been seared into my brain ever since. I didn’t quite understand what was going on in that shot at the time (hey, I was too young and too sheltered) but there was naked flesh and it was naughty and exciting. I still remember that tingly feeling of not wanting my parents to walk in and see me watching the video. Even though that’s a feeling that returned often in my teenage years, I guess I can say that seeing “She’s On It” was one of my first childhood sexual experiences. 

When I was 13 the promo for Check Your Head‘s opening track “Jimmy James” was a staple on late night European cable music channels, the kind I would creep downstairs and watch on low volume while my parents were asleep. It was hard to keep the volume on this one down, and the visuals themselves were a hypnotic template for everything I thought rocked in the world at the time - New York subways, vintage go-go strippers, dope looking rappers filmed in fish-eye lenses, burning 8mm film, Jimi fucking Hendrix. At this point the Beastie Boys were a bit of an unknown quantity in the UK press, as their reputation stemmed largely from the License To Ill “frat” period (Paul’s Boutique was still being seen as a costly, if interesting, flop.) Still, “Jimmy James” (and “So Watcha Want”) was THE SHIT, and helped spread the word of mouth amongst listeners and the journos alike about how great Check Your Head was. 

Early 1994 saw the release of “Sabotage”. Sure, the clip was directed by Spike Jonze, but Yauch’s fingerprints were all over it. I don’t think I need to write much about this video, only to say that it really was a cultural milestone for people my age. Almost single handedly it ushered in a new era. Out went heroin-chic and woe-is-me grunge, and in came a new sense of fun (with a healthy dose of irony.)  Here was an appreciation of pop-culture’s bargain bin that tied in nicely with Tarantino, some new looks that were equal parts vintage and street, and most importantly of all an incredibly broad musical palate where anything went.

Beyond the stone cold classic video, “Sabotage” pushed boundaries musically. Yeah, so it may be a straight forward punk song, but how many ‘rap groups’ had ever done something like that? In fact, me and my friends didn’t really perceive the Beasties as strictly a ‘rap group’ per se, even though (obviously) they rapped. They were more than that. Presumably because they were white and played actual instruments on occasion, they weren’t talked about in the same hallowed tones as Cypress Hill or Public Enemy. But they were very much a gateway to those bands, and the more commercial hip-hop that followed, and their blessing of the above mentioned acts with tours and remixes made it feel ok for middle-class white kids to define themselves as “rap fans.”

Last year’s video for “Make Some Noise” brought the band back in to the limelight, not least for the starry cast list: what other modern act would be able to convince Seth Rogen, Danny McBride and Elijah Wood to play them in a clip AND THEN rope in Ted Danson, Kirstin Dunst and Will Ferrell for additional cameos? But the real fan treat was the clip for “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win”, which featured G.I.Joe-style puppet versions of the band doing battle underwater, on ice, and even at a music festival. 

Adam Yauch was a visionary, and should be remembered for his film work just as much as his music. In fact, he brought music and film together better than anyone else up to that point, and for that has to be counted as a huge influence and inspiration on the artistic endeavours of myself and my peers. I probably wouldn’t do what I do now if it weren’t for him.

And he did it while wearing a ginger wig and lederhosen. Here’s a strange (and strangely touching) short film of Yauch David Cross [? - what’s going on here?] as Hornblower, shooting the shit on a NY Street and engaging in a game of chess with a labrador:
 

 
Adam Yauch, aka MCA, aka Nathanial Hornblower (August 5, 1964 – May 4, 2012.)

Rest In Peace. 

After the jump, videos for the above mentioned Beastie Boys songs, and a 1992 interview with the band featuring Yauch (yes, definitely Yauch this time) in full Hornblower attire…

READ ON
Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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05.06.2012
09:01 am
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May the 4th be with you: Watch a fine documentary on ‘Star Wars’
05.04.2012
07:12 pm
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May 4th is Star Wars Day. I’m not sure what people do on Star Wars Day, but I’m keeping an eye out for random light saber attacks and stashing a bottle of air freshener in my pocket just in case.

I’ve always been more interested in the Star Wars phenomenon than the films themselves. The passions and obsessions that the movies generate among their fans is truly mindboggling to me. But I understand the need within the human psyche to dream and fantasize and the power of movie myth to give our world some order and a sense of good and evil, while all the while letting us escape from our own gravity.

From ‘Star Wars’ to ‘Jedi’: The Making of a Saga
is a nicely done documentary written and produced by film critic Richard Schickel in 1983. A fascinating behind-the-scenes look at George Lucas’s alternative realities.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.04.2012
07:12 pm
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Device allows you to store your life in Darth Maul’s head
05.04.2012
06:42 pm
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Dangerous Minds’ friend and fan Clint Weilor from Music Video Distributors sent us this timely press release.

This geekily cool Darth Maul flash drive went on sale today (May 4) in a limited edition of 504 copies (get it? 5/4).

I’m no fan of the George Lucas space operas, but if you are and want one these, visit Mimoco here. They’re only 20 bucks for the 8 gig version.

Available in 8GB to 64GB capacities, Hooded Darth Maul MIMOBOT® lets you channel your emotions, (even the dark ones), as you store and transport all your digital music, pics, documents, and more.  And with exclusive preloaded digital extras that include Star Wars-themed icons, avatars, screensavers, wallpapers, and the mimoByte™ sound software that plays authentic Star Wars audio clips when MIMOBOT is inserted or ejected from your computer, your limited edition Hooded Darth Maul MIMOBOT will make this May the 4th the best Star Wars Day ever!”

As far as these things go, this is kind of badass.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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05.04.2012
06:42 pm
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