Civilization, a video mural created for the new Standard hotel in New York City, depicts a journey from hell to heaven interpreted through modern film language using computer-enhanced found footage. This epic video mural contains over 300 individual channels of looped video blended into a multi-layered seamless tableau of interconnecting images that illustrate a contemporary, satirical take on the concepts of Heaven and Hell.
I’m a non-practicing Atheist type of Jew with a specific distaste for this particular holiday but even I cannot resist a Passover mix that includes Joy Division, The Velvet Underground and other non-trad delights. Don’t forget to smear lamb’s blood on your doorway and watch out for falling frogs and locusts ! I’ll find the Afikoman before you do !
Richard Tucker, “The Kiddush”
Darondo, “Let My People Go”
Socalled, “The Four Questions”
Moe Jaffe & Henry Tobias, “Passover Time on the Range”
G-d Is My Co-Pilot, “Dayenu”
Steven Bernstein, “Manishtana” (vs. The Wonder Kids)
Bas Sheva, “Caravan”
Joy Division, “Passover”
Rabbi Kahn, “Your Passover Seder” vs. Flying Lotus
Harold Stern, “Jewish Cowboy”
The Carter Family, “On My Way To Canaan’s Land”
Charles Mingus, “Freedom”
Nina Simone, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free”
Gershon Kingsley, “What Does It Take (The Ten Plagues)”
Socalled, “Dayenu”
Egyptian Lover, “Egypt, Egypt” vs. The Malavsky Family
Ray Barretto, “Exodus”
Benjamin Lapidus, “Las Cuatro Preguntas”
Ray Charles, “Where Can I Go?”
James Harman Band, “The Four Questions”
The Velvet Underground, “I’m Set Free”
Roosevelt Charles, “Let My People Go”
A brilliant (and terribly droll) commentary on consumer culture,
“Logograma” is an
Academy award-winning short film directed by the French animation
collective H5 (François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain).
First shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009, “Logorama” also
opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. I especially like the scene
where Ronald McDonald holds a gun to the head of the Bob’s Big Boy
mascot.
Anderson Cooper is launching a weeklong investigative series about Scientology tomorrow. Looks excellent.
Anderson Cooper is launching a weeklong series about Scientology Monday, covering many of the allegations against the controversial religion already reported by RadarOnline.com.
Anderson Cooper 360, the CNN anchor’s nightly news show, is looking at Scientology’s “history of violence,” especially allegations that leader – and Tom Cruise best friend – David Miscavige has personally physically abused his followers.
Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis, son of actress Anne Archer, is interviewed by Cooper and claims that while there has been violence committed against members in the elite Sea Organization, the guilty offenders are those very people now making allegations against Miscavige.
Scientology is increasingly coming under attack by top-ranking members who’ve left the organization. Interestingly, none of the top Hollywood stars who support Scientology, including Cruise, John Travolta, Jenna Elfman and Kirstie Alley, have commented.
Excellent clip of Christopher Hitchens on Real Time with Bill Maher taking a welding torch to the Catholic Church’s current policy on dealing with molester priests.
The Catholic Church is in serious trouble and may have nowhere to run, depending on who you ask.
“I warned them about all of this,” declared author Christopher Hitchens, appearing on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night. “Nothing good can come of a church that has as its’ slogan, ‘Leave no child’s behind.’ And then they went and chose as pope the man who was personally responsible, in his dioceses, and institutionally responsible for the cover-up. So now, there’s no escape.”
The child rape scandals that have savaged Catholic ranks for years starting in the United States, then flaring up in Ireland, Germany, Italy and other locations around the world, have finally come to implicate Pope Benedict XVI, according to recent reports.
At time of this writing, the most recent scandal flare-up involved a school for the deaf in Wisconsin, where up to 200 boys were molested by a man whom Hitchens said “was allowed to walk free and was buried with full honors as a priest.”
No, not Mike Watt’s band. The OTHER Minutemen. The racist, belligerent, uneducated psychopaths who decided to “protect our borders” from… uh… our entire service economy. I always considered these guys some of the biggest pricks in our country… who VOLUNTEERS their time to “beat up the damn Mexicans”?
I grew up by the border and regularly witnessed the reality of border crossing… large groups of desperate, hungry people walking through huge passages of 120º, inhuman conditions to try and get to the other side, in the (often vain) hope of getting some money from menial labor to send back to huge families in Mexico (labor that “real Americans” aren’t willing to do anyway). People cross in large groups for safety in numbers—many don’t make it back alive; they drop dead from dehydration or heat stroke, or literally get picked off by human predators who hunt these people to rape them or rob them of what little savings they are bringing with them. Often the only way to get across is by paying Coyotes, professional border-crossers who are adept at smuggling people across, but usually charge what amounts to somebody’s entire life savings to get across. And they often just run off with the money, or kill for it. It’s hellish. Oh, and what does that sound like, by the way? Like every story of how white America got started? The pilgrims, the pioneers, the Mormon Battalion? That’s what it sounds like to me. If the American dream still exists anywhere, it’s here, with people who are willing to sacrifice anything and brave any danger for the chance for a better life.
Now, imagine going through all that, and having some scuzzy fuck with a “Don’t Tread on Me” hat shoving a gun in your face and telling you you’re taking American jobs—cleary not his, though, because he has nothing better to do then sit in the middle of the desert looking for people to fuck with.