I have a secret I need to get off my chest - I love dance films. They’re just so extraordinarily bad yet good at the same time. For all the terrible acting and clunky dialog, you can just zone out and focus on some incredible acrobatic moves or the pretty costumes. Hell, some of them even have decent soundtracks that sound great on a big booming Dolby cinema system (Timbaland’s minimal opus “Bounce” as used in Step Up 2 is one particular example).
So this is where The FP comes in. I know very little about this film other than the fact that the trailer looks amazing - like a cross between Step Up, Mortal Kombat and Zoolander. In true grind house style, I would go so far as to say the trailer is so good that the film itself feels a bit irrelevant Still, I would definitely watch this if it came up on late night cable TV.
What I can work out, gleamed with a little help from IMDB, is that the film was directed by Brandon and Jason Trost (brothers I presume) and is the second incarnation of the film after a 2007 short, also directed by the brothers. Its about rival gangs doing battle with a Dance Dance Revolution-style video game for control of their local trailer park (Frazier Park, the “FP” of the title). It was definitely made on the cheap and I don’t think it’s supposed to be taken very seriously:
The FP - Trailer from Trost Bros. on Vimeo.
Thanks to Geoff Crowther!
Here’s a shocking example of an anti-drug poster campaign from the United Nations’ Offices on Drugs and Crime targeting the use of opium in Kabul, Afghanistan.
I guess this is one way to ease the pain for a teething baby?
(via reddit)
Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips is such a fucking idiot that I have, on more than one occasion, wondered if he was some sort of long-fuse “Yes Men” prank designed to embarrass and disgust current or would-be Teabaggers from having anything to do with the dying-off political movement. Just Google his name, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of examples of completely unintelligent, ill-informed, ignorant and just plain stupid things he’s said. Judson is a small-town jackass who puffs his chest out and says dumb shit like only land owners should be allowed to vote. What does he add to the conversation besides a hefty dollop of DUMB?
Here’s just the most recent example of what a complete buffoon this man is. Via Raw Story:
At a Wisconsin rally on Saturday, Judson Phillips, CEO of “Tea Party Nation”, one of the many tea party splinter groups, claimed that “the left” has “killed a billion people in the last century”.
According to Politico, Phillips and other speakers heated up the rhetoric around Tuesday’s historic recall elections, with one speaker referring to Democrats as terrorists who struck at a Republican “Ground Zero”. Vince Shmuki, leader of another tea party group, the Ozaukee Patriots said, “This is ground zero. You remember what the term ground zero means? We have been attacked.”
Earlier this week, Judson Phillips compared protesters who opposed Governor Scott Walker to Nazi storm troopers. On Saturday, he said, “I detest and despise everything the Left stands for. How anybody can endorse and embrace an ideology that has killed a billion people in the last century is beyond me.”
See what I mean? If Judson did not exist, it would be in the interests of the Democrats to “invent” him. If they weren’t so lame, the Democrats, I’d have added “and maybe they have” but this is Democrats we’re talking about.
Phillips made this statement at a sparsely-attended rally to support Republican State Senator Alberta Darling, who is in the fight of her political life trying to hold onto her seat against Democratic Representative Sandy Pasch. When they were making the speakers list for the rally, you have to wonder what the selection process criteria was that they decided to INVITE (and probably pay the travel and hotel costs) for a complete idiot like Judson Phillips. How is inviting a fool to say crazy shit that is then ridiculed all over the media and blogsphere in any way helpful to their cause?
Unless it IS helpful to their cause, of course, which is just too frightening to contemplate.
Below, Phillips makes a complete and utter fool of himself on Hardball with Chris Matthews when he decided to flap his lips about the Gabrielle Giffords murder attempt just after the shooting in Tucson. How dumb would you have to be to follow this goofball?
Nice stop-motion recreation of classic Sesame Street segment, the “Pinball Number Count.” I really wished they had retained the original, ultra funky theme song sung by The Pointer Sisters, though.
(via BuzzFeed)
While most of my rock and roll friends were hanging out at the nocturnal punk rock Meccas of CBGB and Max’s in 1977/78, suburbanites were braving the harsh city streets and wallowing in nostalgia on Broadway. For a couple of years Beatlemania was a hit on Times Square for an audience that preferred the warm and fuzzy past to the bleak reality of New York at a moment when the city was frayed at the edges and the center was barely holding.
The four musicians who comprised the cast of Beatlemania came from nowhere, basked in the glory of reflected stardom for a few years, and ended up being marginal footnotes in the history of rock and roll. But, it must have been a blast while it lasted.
I wonder how the dead ringer for Paul, Mitch Weissman, dealt with his life after Beatlemania. The rest of the faux Beatles, none of whom looked like the originals, probably adjusted to lives of relative anonymity. But Mitch, what about Mitch? There’s a website that has some photos of Mitch today here. He seems to have morphed into the Paul of our nightmares.
Update 8/9: Mick Stadium, the fellow who uploaded these videos to Youtube, reveals the source of the Beatlemania clips:
A friend recently gave me stack of VHS tapes found @ a Flea Market, all labeled as “Beatlemania” related. Turns out they belonged to Mitch Weissman (Paul in the Original Cast) who had taped all of their ‘70s TV appearances as they aired. I’ve uploaded the best of the lot for your enjoyment. P.S. Weissman lives in LA and is getting his tapes back (which he says were auctioned in a storage unit selloff.)
More after the jump…
Sad to hear that prolific German experimental music pioneer, Conrad Schnitzler, one-time student of Joseph Beuys, early member of Tangerine Dream and founder of Kluster, has died.
Via Ric Leichtung at Altered Zones:
On August 4th, Conrad Schnitzler passed away from stomach cancer. Member of Kluster and Tangerine Dream, Schnitzler played in an invaluable role in the shaping of kraut and electronic music. Having studied under Stockhausen, Conrad composed more than 90 albums of solo material, and completed his final work, “00/830,” just four days before his death. In preparation for his departure, Schnitzler sent strands of his hair to be buried around the world and created the Global Living Project. In his words:
Since some time, I globalize me.
Why just living in one country,
why just sleeping in one country,
why just being buried only in one country,
now that we think and live globally.I would like to be at beautiful places in the world,
without to move me from my place here.
I send my DNA (my hair) to different places in the world.
This means I’m all over the world.
I’m everywhere, even when I’ll be dead.
Nobody must come to my grave in Berlin.
My friends can visit me in the whole world now.So if friends want to give me a place…., welcome.
I’ll send a DNA sample to bury me.
I am in the whole world at home now. I love this feeling.
Friends, family, and fans can pay their respects to Conrad at 9 different sites, including the Green Lagoon in Spain, Norway’s Lysefjord, and Mt. Fuji.
Below, Schnitzler’s “Magic Party”:
“Collection A #5 Take off”
Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin, currently traveling in Japan, met up with Yoko Ono and conducted a great interview with the artist/humanitarian, who had just been awarded the 8th Hiroshima Art Prize. The Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art is displaying “The Road of Hope: Yoko Ono 2011,” until October 16, 2011.
Xeni Jardin: A few days ago, you were in Hiroshima accepting an award for your your legacy of art in the service of peace. You were a young girl here in Japan when the event happened. What was that day like?
Yoko Ono: Yes, I think I was 12. It was a shock of course, but at the time, initially we didn’t know what happened. I heard about it from somebody in the village. It’s a very, very different kind of bomb, they said, we have to immediately stop the war. It didn’t make sense to me at all, in any way. We didn’t understand.
Xeni Jardin: At what point did the magnitude or the nature of what had happened become more clear to you?
Yoko Ono: Well, every day, from then on. They were reporting in newspapers and magazines what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it was just—it was something that you just could not understand. It was just so bad.
Xeni Jardin: Trying to grasp the full scope of what had happened must have been something that unfolded over many years for you, your family, and for all of your fellow countrymen and women.
Yoko Ono: Well you see, it was because of Pearl Harbor, and so the rest of the world was very, very cold to us when the bombs dropped. Like, “Oh, they deserved it.” That kind of thinking.
And of course in those days, the idea of what an enemy is, and what is fair to do to enemies were very different. For America to have bombed civilians was something that most people accepted. But women and children, old and young, they all suffered. If it had happened not to Japan but in a Western country, maybe the West would have felt differently about it. But that’s how it was. And the Japanese people, especially the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they had to endure the whole thing without any kindness or compassion from the world. Despite the meanness directed at them, even after the bombing, they stood up and survived, and they created a normal situation out of the ashes of that horror, which I believe is amazing.
The whole of Japan helped them. I learned when I was in Hiroshima, for instance, that many trees were sent from other towns throughout Japan, to be planted there to renew the bare ground. People throughout the country tried to help, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to stand up on their own, as well, of course.
And in a very strange way, even though they were victims and martyrs of a terrible thing, now they are not victims. They are the people who created a strong, strong recovery. They show to the world that this is what we can do, instead of all the myths that were created about those places — the myth that you could never enter those places after what happened, and that you couldn’t return into those cities. Just walking in there is dangerous.
But now, they’re two beautiful cities again. And the world sees that.
Read more of Xeni Jardin’s interview with Yoko Ono at Boing Boing.
Below, a fucking fierce Beatles/Yoko jam session in an outtake from Let It Be:
Scary Perry.
Rick Perry’s “prayer” eerily recalls George W. Bush’s spiritual insincerity and inarticulateness. The guy can barely read his notes and he comes off as a man who hasn’t had much real experience with prayer. Not exactly heartfelt.
After watching Perry’s speech at today’s religious rally in Houston, Joshua Green of The Atlantic echoed my thoughts when he posed the question “is the country ready for somebody who looks and sounds like George W. Bush on steroids.”
Thanks to John Aziz for the “prayerprompter.”
Charlie toots at least a half gram but still has an appetite. It must’ve been that low-grade prison blow.
Charlie, you’re not supposed to put the spoon in your ear.
Via Biblioklept
