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British 70s prog/folk-rockers Curved Air
03.26.2011
12:46 pm
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And speaking of Terry Riley’s Rainbow in Curved Air, it’s where nearly forgotten 70s British prog/folk/rock group, Curved Air got their name. Led by gorgeous (and sometimes scantily-clad) vocalist/songwriter Sonja Kristina (formerly in The Strawbs and the West End production of Hair), Curved Air was known for their innovative use of the violin and Moog synthesizer. The group had an ever-changing cast of characters including Eddie Jobson (Roxy Music, Frank Zappa), Stewart Copeland, latter of the Police and 801‘s Francis Monkman). Copeland was originally the band’s roadie and was married to Kristina from 1982 to 1991.

Sonja Kristina later became active in London’s “acid folk” scene and has reformed Curved Air for live performances from time to time. A 2011 reunion tour with key members of the group has been announced on the Curved Air website.

Here they are on a TV show from Belgium in 1972 singing “Melinda (More or Less)”:
 

 
More Curved Air performances after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.26.2011
12:46 pm
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Microworld: William Shatner’s psychedelic short film about microprocessors and transistors (1976)
03.26.2011
12:14 pm
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It’s like watching an episode of The Twilight Zone.


(via Nerdcore)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.26.2011
12:14 pm
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A Rainbow in Curved Air: Terry Riley
03.26.2011
11:26 am
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The music of minimalist composer Terry Riley has always had a special place on my turntable and in my CD player. His 1967 album, A Rainbow in Curved Air is the perfect thing to put on when guests are over—it creates a great mood but never overpowers conversation—and you can bliss out on it like a meditation mantra (the composer’s intent, obviously). You can hear parts of it behind the narration of the original BBC radio broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe and it’s on the radio station in Grand Theft Auto IV. Chances are that even if you don’t know it by name, you’ve heard it many times.
 

 
In the 1960s Riley used to play all night concerts, with audience members showing up with sleeping bags. He’d use tape loops to accompany himself, letting them run by themselves when he had to take bathroom breaks. His 1964 piece “In C,” where the same series of notes are played over and over and over again by (at least) 35 musicians, with a single anchor melody of a “C” note played at octaves as eighth notes (serving as the metronome or “pulse” and played preferably by “a beautiful girl,” as the music’s notation instructs) is considered the very first minimalist composition. At a recital of “In C” at the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, 124 musicians took part.
 

 
The repetitive synth section that leads off The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” was inspired by Riley’s signature sound and the title is a portmanteau of his name and that of Indian mystic Meher Baba. He also did a collaboration with John Cale—both of them heavily influenced by LaMonte Young—called Church of Anthrax, which is absolutely amazing and deserves a post of its own at a later date.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.26.2011
11:26 am
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Back to the future: Douglas Adams’s ‘Hyperland’
03.25.2011
07:29 pm
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In 1990, Douglas Adams wrote and presented a “fantasy documentary” called Hyperland for the BBC. In it Adams dreamt of a future where he would be able “to play a more active role in the information he chooses to digest.” Adams throws away his TV and is met by:

[a] software agent, Tom (played by Tom Baker), [who] guides Douglas around a multimedia information landscape, examining (then) cuttting-edge research by the SF Multimedia Lab and NASA Ames research center, and encountering hypermedia visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. Looking back now, it’s interesting to see how much he got right and how much he didn’t: these days, no one’s heard of the SF Multimedia Lab, and his super-high-tech portrayal of VR in 2005 could be outdone by a modern PC with a 3D card. However, these are just minor niggles when you consider how much more popular the technologies in question have become than anyone could have predicted - for while Douglas was creating Hyperland, a student at CERN in Switzerland was working on a little hypertext project he called the World Wide Web…

Hyperland is an excellent film - prescient, fascinating and greatly entertaining.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.25.2011
07:29 pm
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‘Punk In England’: 1980 documentary with The Clash, The Jam, The Pretenders and more
03.25.2011
06:28 pm
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Previously only available in battered VHS versions and shitty looking DVD transfers, Wolfgang Buld’s Punk In England (originally titled Punk and Its Aftershocks) has been remastered and made available for viewing thanks to the generous folks at See Of Sound.

Filmed in 1980 as punk was fading, Punk In England captures the scene at a point of transition from a revolution to the pop mainstream. With dynamite performances by The Jam, Ian Dury, The Clash, The Specials, Madness, The Pretenders and many more. Enjoy.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.25.2011
06:28 pm
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Faces of Meth 2011
03.25.2011
06:25 pm
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(via Boing Boing )

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.25.2011
06:25 pm
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Devolved: Social Darwinism for the teen set
03.25.2011
06:04 pm
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Have a look at the trailer for Devolved, the new teen movie satire/homage from John Cregan and Severin Films, the company that unleashed (inflicted?) Birdemic on an unsuspecting world. With a razor-sharp script and a winning cast, Devolved is the intersection between American Pie, Gilligan’s Island and Social Darwinism….
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.25.2011
06:04 pm
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‘Monterey Pop’ film maker Richard Leacock R.I.P.
03.25.2011
05:07 pm
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Richard Leacock is best known for his work with D.A. Pennebaker on the documentary Monterey Pop (1968). But prior to that, Leacock had established himself within the film community as a major figure in the “direct cinema” movement, a style of film making that shot scenes as they actually happened without manipulating the content and without narration - an American version of cinema verite.

Born in London, Leacock got his start making films when he was in his teens. He moved to the United States, went to Harvard where he studied physics in order to better understand the technology of filmmaking, became a war photographer, and eventually got a serious start as a film maker working with legendary director Richard Flaherty on The Louisiana Story (1948).

Leacock later went on to work with Albert Maysles filming John F. Kennedy on the campaign trail and as Norman Mailer’s cinematographer on the ill-fated Maidstone. He collaborated with Godard in the early 70s on the unfinished One American Movie, which under Leacock’s direction was completed as One Parallel Movie. The film is a fascinating look at American 60s cultural icons including Eldridge Cleaver and The Jefferson Airplane.

While Leacock’s reputation was high among film makers, it was his partnership with D.A. Pennebaker on the production of Monterey Pop that took him to another level in terms of popular success. MP contains some of the greatest rock and roll scenes ever put on film with epic performances by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and The Who. Ironically, Leacock didn’t particularly care for rock music or rock musicians. He later said:

I didn’t appreciate that kind of bullshit.” As for Joplin: “She was always just full of drugs and alcohol. I remember her coming to look at the film afterwards at our place in New York. She was lying there stone drunk, sucking on a bottle of Southern Comfort.”

Mr. Leacock died at the age of 89 on March 23 at his home in France. His memoirs, The Feeling Of Being There, can be pre-ordered here.

One of Leacock’s personal favorites among his many films is also among the simplest: a lovely interview with film goddess Louise Brooks conducted in 1984.
 

 
The Jefferson Airplane shot by Leacock after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Marc Campbell
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03.25.2011
05:07 pm
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IN prosecutor resigns after advising Walker to stage fake attack on himself!

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Above, Carlos F. Lam, former Indiana Deputy Prosecutor, now and forevermore, just an unemployable idiot!
 
The gods of Republican schadenfreude have once again smiled on America’s working class. However the events in this story took place so quickly that there was scarcely enough time for it to make the news nationally, so here’s a post-mortem on the dead as a doornail legal career of one utterly silly fellow,  a former Indiana deputy persecutor prosecutor—and arch Republican buffoon—by the name of Carlos F. Lam.

Amidst the more than 50,000 emails sent to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker during the heat of the anti-union uprising, a two paragraph email from Lam, shall we say, stuck out like a sore thumb. In it, a PUBLIC OFFICIAL WHO ACTUALLY HAS A LAW DEGREE wrote:

“If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions’ cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the unions. Currently, the media is painting the union protest as a democratic uprising and failing to mention the role of the DNC (Democratic National Committee) and umbrella union organizations in the protests. Employing a false flag operation would assist in undercutting any support that the media may be creating in favor of the unions. God bless, Carlos F. Lam.”

According to the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism:

Carlos F. Lam submitted his resignation shortly before the Center published a story quoting his Feb. 19 email, which praised Walker for standing up to unions but went on to say that the chaos in Wisconsin presented “a good opportunity for what’s called a ‘false flag’ operation.”

At 5 a.m. Thursday, expecting the story to come out that day, Lam called his boss, Johnson County, Ind., Prosecutor Brad Cooper, and told him he had been up all night thinking about it. “He wanted to come clean, I guess, and said he is the one who sent that email,” Cooper said.

He came into the office and gave his resignation verbally, Cooper told the Daily Journal in Franklin, Ind. The resignation was announced after the Center’s initial story was published.

Email headers with detailed IP addresses suggested that the message was sent from Indianapolis.

Lam, an Indianapolis resident, at first told the Center he never wrote it.

Reached Tuesday by phone at the number listed on the email, Lam confirmed his email address matched the Hotmail address appearing on the Walker email, but said he had never written to Walker. “I am flabbergasted and would never advocate for something like this, and would like everyone to be sure that that’s just not me,” he said, after being read the email.

Except that it was him. And he SIGNED IT WITH HIS OWN NAME and even added his telephone number! And it came from his IP address! Of course it’s not him, why, a um, a UNION THUG must have sent it!!!!

Shit, these Republicans crack me the fuck up! How can someone able to pass the bar exam not realize this is a PREPOSTEROUSLY stupid thing to do???

From Mother Jones:

Lam wasn’t alone in proposing to undermine unions with sleazy tactics during the Wisconsin protests. The day after Lam sent his email, radio talk show host Mark Williams [former Tea Party Express leader] wrote a blog post urging his followers to cause trouble at a Sacramento solidarity event by wearing Service Employees International Union T-shirts and say outrageous things to embarrass the union. “If I do get the ‘in’ I am going to do my darnedest to get podium access and take the mic to do that rant from there,” Williams wrote. “With any luck and if I can manage the moments to build up to it, I can probably get a cheer out of the crowd for something extreme.” This, of course, was the same Mark Williams who infamously wrote a blog post in the voice of black slave who said that slavery was “a great gig.”

You expect such buffoonery from Williams. But from a deputy attorney general and a county prosecutor? All in all, it’s been a rough month or so for prosecutors in the great state of Indiana.

That last sentence, should you have already forgotten, refers also to disgraced Indiana state Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Cox, who wrote on his Twitter account that riot police should “use live ammunition” in the Wisconsin capital against union members and protesters. When Mother Jones reported on this matter on Feb. 23, Cox was fired from his job.As he should have been.

With all their new-found free time, Cox and Lam will have lots of time to consider the fact that career-wise, they’re both KAPUT in the legal profession. Who would hire lawyers THIS STUPID? An idiotic, loose cannon attorney is the last thing any respectable law firm requires. These stunts will follow them around on Google like shit on their shoes for the rest of their lives and I sure hope they’ve both got some INSANE debt from law school. Imagine what it must be like googling yourself and reading articles like this one calling you an abject moron and there are tens of thousands of them! And if either one of them is married, good luck holding onto your wife!

Indiana prosecutor Carlos F. Lam resigns after recommending Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker stage fake attack against himself (Post Crescent)

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.25.2011
02:27 pm
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Happy Religion Photoshop
03.25.2011
12:57 pm
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Indonesian artist Agan Harahap, who was responsible for the viral images of superheros photoshopped into iconic historical images, has a new project: “Happy Religion.” Harahap photoshops his own face onto Christ’s from well-known classic paintings like Caravaggio’s “The Supper at Emmaus” and “The Entombment of Christ.”

Is it true that Jesus’ face was bearded and long haired, or black and frizzy hair, or maybe even bald, clean-shaven and slanted eyes. For me, it would be much more elegant if I learn to believe in my religion personally and learn to live in harmony with others rather than question the ‘little things’ that could be fatal for the content of my faith and relationship with audiences.

And when each individual can look at religion as a ‘humanist and liquid’ form, I believe the tensions and friction that cause wars and discrimination because of religion will not happen again in future lives.

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View more of Agan Harahap’s “Happy Religion.”

(via Nerdcore )

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.25.2011
12:57 pm
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