Combining live performance footage with studio sequences and fictionalized scenes, Hasta Que Se Ponga El Sol (rock until sundown) captures an exciting period in Argentina’s rock and roll history, a brief but liberating moment ablaze with creativity and youthful rebellion. Both an aesthetic and political statement, this vital document is social activism with a beat you can dance to.

Filmed in part on September of 1972 in Buenos Aires at the Olympia Theater, Hasta Que Se Ponga El Sol features legendary Argentinian prog rock, psychedelic, folk and blues bands raising their freak flags high at a time when the country was under the de facto military government of Lieutenant General Alejandro Lanusse. The mere fact that a Woodstock-like festival could occur in the country in 1972 is nothing short of miraculous. This all too fleeting escape from harsh reality was attended by thousands of kids who were craving a taste of rock and roll freedom and who were willing to take real chances to experience it. A decade later Lanusse, Peronism and The Dirty War would be consigned to the ash heap of history but rock and roll would remain in all its defiant glory.

Most of the bands featured in Hasta Que Se Ponga El Sol disbanded in the 70s but some re-united in the 1980s to perform for their fans in what might be described as a pop culture declaration of independence.

01. Color Humano - Larga Vida Al Sol
02. Color Humano - Coto De Caza(Cosas Rusticas)
03. Leon Gieco - Hombres De Hierro
04. Vox Dei - El Momento En Que Estas (Presente)
05. Vox Dei - Las Guerras
06. Vox Dei - Jeremias Pies de Plomo
07. Gabriela - Campesina Del Sol (with Edelmiro Molinari)
08. Billy Bond Y La Pesada Del Rock & Roll - Tontos
09. Claudio Gabis - Raga (with Isa Portugheis)
10. Orion’s Bethoveen - Nirmanakaya
11. Sui Generis - Cancion Para Mi Muerte
12. Litto Nebbia - El Bohemio (with Domingo Cura)
13. Litto Nebbia - Vamos Negro
14. Opiniones Del Publico (interviews with festival goers)
15. Pappo’s Blues - En Las Vias Del Ferrocarril
16. Pappo’s Blues - El Tren De Las 16
17. Pescado Rabioso - Ya Despiertate Nena
18. Pescado Rabioso - Corto
19. Pescado Rabioso - Post Crucifixion
20. Arco Iris - Hombre
 

 
Thanks to Alan Bay for his input.

 
I always preferred Len Deighton’s anonymous spy to Ian Fleming’s James Bond. There was something too glib and unexciting about Bond, like Superman you knew he could never be defeated, which made it all rather pointless. Whereas Deighton’s spy was fallible, awkward, funny and quite often messed things up.

When it came to the films, it was a more difficult choice. Sean Connery made Bond his own, and has never been equalled. But Michael Caine was equally successful with his interpretation of the Deighton’s insubordinate spy (now named) Harry Palmer in a trilogy of brilliant spy films. Of course, he later nearly blew it all by making two sub-standard Palmer films in the 1990s, the less said about which the better.

Here is Michael Caine with a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the second Palmer movie, Funeral in Berlin. The quality of this video is not brilliant, and yes, it does have an irritating text written over it, but there is enough fascinating things going on to make Man on the Wall very watchable.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

The true story behind ‘The Mackintosh Man’

 
Aside from the obvious— they were the first all-black punk band— two additional things must be said of the early Bad Brains: they were the most ferocious musical tornado ever unleashed; a frantic, thrashing monster of a group that had absolutely no competitors for the crown of being the most hardcore of all of the hardcore bands in Washington, D.C.

They were also the best, most skilled musicians of any of their compatriots. Sure, they played buzz-saw punk rock music that sounded like a Black Sabbath album spinning at 45rpm, but they actually came from a jazz fusion background (think Return to Forever and Mahavishnu Orchestra!) before the energy of the D.C. hardcore scene turned their attention to punk.

Lead vocalist H.R. was, simply put, one of the greatest frontmen of the punk era, up there with Johnny Rotten or Jello Biafra as a presence so incendiary, so crazed and so utterly unhinged that you wondered if he was possessed. Backed by Dr. Know (guitar), Darryl Jenifer (bass) and H.R.‘s younger brother, Earl Hudson, on drums, the Bad Brains would explode onto the stage like a nail bomb had gone off. If that prospect seemed worrisome, well, stand back!

It wasn’t long before the group found they weren’t able to play shows in their hometown, hence their famous number, “Banned in D.C.” which has been appropriated for the title of the new film about the group, Bad Brains: A Band In D.C. co-directed by Mandy Stein and Ben Logan. The film actually started as an offshoot of another project about CBGBs, but as Stein told us “What director wouldn’t want to tell this story?”

The 30+ years of the Bad Brains’ existence has been fraught with interpersonal conflict— one epic argument was caught on video by the directors— but it’s that tension that makes the band so great that also, perhaps, prevented them from being as big as they might have otherwise been. Band in DC features some fierce archival footage, more recent live performances and interviews with Henry Rollins, The Beastie Boys, Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye, British black punk DJ and filmmaker Don Letts and The Cars’ Ric Ocasek, who produced the band in the studio.

In the clip below, co-director Mandy Stein and Bad Brains singer H.R. discuss the film and the energy of the early Washington, D.C. punk scene.

 
Jimmy Page has revealed via his Facebook page, that he will release his music for Lucifer Rising next week.

In a “special announcement” Page said:

On March 20th, the Spring Equinox 2012, the title music for Lucifer Rising and Other Sound Tracks will have its premiere and release.

The title music, along with other musical pieces recorded at my home studio in the early Seventies, have been revisited, remixed and released for the first time.

This is a musical diary of avant-garde compositions and experiments, one of which was to appear on the film Lucifer Rising.

The collection has been exhumed and is now ready for public release. This will be available exclusively on the website.

There will be a standard release on heavyweight vinyl.

In addition there will be a special run of 418 numbered copies. The first 93 copies will be signed and numbered.

There are liner notes and commentary to each track. The tracks are:

Side One

1) Lucifer Rising - Main Track

Side Two

1) Incubus
2) Damask
3) Unharmonics
4) Damask - Ambient
5) Lucifer Rising - Percussive Return

Jimmy Page, March 2012

As you all know, Page was originally asked to write the music for the film by Kenneth Anger, but various difficulties saw their collaboration fall apart. Anger later claimed he could turn the guitarist into a toad or a statue of gold.

While Page’s soundtrack has been available as a bootleg for some years, this is its first official release, which you can purchase via Jimmy Page’s website

This is what the bootleg version sounds like:
 

 
And what Kenneth Anger said after being asked just one more question about Jimmy Page.
 

 
This was the kind of crap David Cronenberg had to endure from the audience at a test screening of his film Videodrome. Thankfully, Mr Cronenberg and his producers were made of stronger stuff, so they could shrug of such comments as:

“I fail to understand what would be accomplished by releasing such a movie on the public. What sort of person could enjoy it.”

Or:

“I consider myself to be an open minded individual - but I would not accept that such a thing would be captivating to the public.”

Oh really?

See a few more audience comments here.
 

 

 
With thanks to Tara McGinley, via Nerdcore and Criterion
 
More bellyachin’, after the jump…
 

 
Strange to think, had he lived, Jack Kerouac would have been 90 this week. It begs the question, what would he have been like? Rabid raving Republican? Drunk demented Democrat? A pairing of the both? A religious nut? Would he have continued writing? Become an éminence grise? Would he still have mattered? Would we have cared?

Ninety. And to think he’s been dead for almost half that time, during which he has gone in-and-out of fashion. And yet, his appeal has somehow always stayed, though arguably that appeal has sometimes been more for what he represented than for his books or writing.

Even so, Kerouac at his best captured a hope, a joyous sense of what life could be - the potential of a moment, of the living of a life, rather than the having of a life-style.

I saw Whatever Happened to Kerouac? on the day it was released, in olde fleapit cinema, southside of Edinburgh. There were around a dozen people in the audience, gathered together in the flickering dark like a secret religious group come to give devotion, as we reverentially watched what is still the best documentary made on the “King of the Beats”. But this film is no hagiography, it captures what was both good and bad about Kerouac, and most of what you need to know, answering some of the questions other bio-pics and documentaries have avoided. The essence of the film is best summed up by William Burroughs when asked, “Whatever happened to Kerouac?” responds, Jack incited:

‘’....a worldwide unprecedented cultural revolution….”

The list of contributors is a who’s who of the Beat Generation: William Burroughs, Carolyn Cassady, Neal Cassady, Ann Charters, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Diane DiPrima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, Joyce Johnson, Michael McClure, Edie Kerouac Parker, and Gary Snyder. Directed by Richard Lerner and Lewis MacAdam, this is a must for fans of Kerouac and the Beats.
 

 
Ben Gazzara performs Charles Bukowski’s poem “Style,” from Marco Ferreri’s film Tales of Ordinary Madness.

Style is the answer to everything
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous
thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable
to doing a dangerous thing without it
To do a dangerous thing with style, is what
I call art
Bullfighting can be an art
Boxing can be an art
Loving can be an art
Opening a can of sardines can be an art
Not many have style
Not many can keep style
I have seen dogs with more style than men
Although not many dogs have style
Cats have it with abundance
When Hemingway put his brains
to the wall with a shotgun, that was style
For sometimes people give you style
Joan of Arc had style
John the Baptist
Christ
Socrates
Caesar
García Lorca
I have met men in jail with style
I have met more men in jail with style
than men out of jail
Style is a difference, a way of doing,
a way of being done
Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,
or you, walking out of the bathroom naked without seeing me

A memorable definition, and a fine delivery from Gazzara, which you can compare against Bukowski’s reading below.
 

 
Bonus - Bukowski reads “Style”

 
Thanks Tara McGinley!
 

 
The great French film director Jean-Luc Godard once famously quipped “All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl,” but it’s unlikely that he had anything like Bobcat Goldthwait’s outrageous new satire, God Bless America in mind when he said that.

The most vicious, hilarious and timely takedown of American culture since Network, God Bless America follows the downward trajectory of the dismal life of Frank (Joel Murray), an unemployed sad-sack everyman who is given the sort of medical diagnosis that no one wants to hear. Alone, dejected, depressed and suicidal, Frank opts to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger, but is distracted by a monstrously selfish Beverly Hills teenager on a TV reality show. In a flash, Frank decides that if he’s going to go, he’s going to take this pampered brat with him.

Frank’s execution of Chloe is witnessed by one of her classmates, Roxy, played by Tara Lynne Barr in perhaps the single most gleefully nihilistic performances a teenage girl has ever given in all of cinematic history. Roxy’s Tarantino-esque rant about why Alice Cooper is the greatest, most influential rockstar of all time— I mean, she does prove it here beyond all argument— is one of the film’s comic highlights.

Egged on by his curiously homicidal teen accomplice, Frank decides to mow down more rude, selfish people before his disease takes him. Like a Bonnie and Clyde for the YouTube era, Frank and Roxy embark on a wave of carnage and mayhem, eliminating a blowhard TV pundit based on Glenn Beck, religious extremists and in the film’s over-the-top climax, most of the studio audience at an American Idol-type program.

As Frank so earnestly puts it: “I only want to kill people who deserve to die.”

Below, Bobcat Goldthwait talks about his outrageous new comedy God Bless America:

 
Nick Drake died in 1974 at the age of 26. But his brief life had a lasting and profound impact. It took a television commercial to rescue his music from cultdom and introduce it to an international audience.

In A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, a haunting tribute to Drake and his music, his sister Gabrielle takes us through the Drake family history as director Jeroen Berkven’s camera meditates on the almost mystical landscapes of the English village of Tanworht-in-Arden where Drake was born and lived.

I was introduced to Nick Drake’s music while he was still alive. A poet friend of mine who suffered from depression (as did Drake) turned me on to “Five Leaves Left” and I was immediately enchanted. My friend was obsessed with Nick’s music and found solace in its sweet sadness and a kind of kinship that tempered his loneliness. When Nick died it was a huge loss for all of us who were just beginning to discover and appreciate his work. I had felt this same sense of loss before when Tim Buckley died and would feel it again when Tim’s son Jeff drowned in the Mississippi River. Musical geniuses who died much too young.

Safe in the womb
Of an everlasting night
You find the darkness can
Give the brightest light
Safe in your place deep in the earth
That’s when they’ll know what you’re really worth
Forgotten while you’re here”

Lyrics from “Fruit Tree.”
 
Other than a few childhood home movies, no film footage of Nick Drake exists. So director Berkven had to create a sense of Drake through other means. That he succeeds is quite remarkable. He is enormously helped by Nick’s mother Molly. Her own music uncannily evokes her son’s and creates a deeply emotional dimension to A Skin Too Few.

Here’s A Skin Too Few in its entirety. Pour yourself a glass of wine or a cup of tea and enjoy this 48 minute tone poem. The quality is good enough that you can watch it in full screen.

 
There are plenty of reasons why so many children are homeless in Ukraine. Some have been abandoned by their families. Others are victims of abuse. Whatever the reasons, each child is different, and has a unique story to tell.

There are no official statistics for the total number of children and young people living or working on the streets of Ukraine, yet various children’s charities and homeless organizations suggest the number is somewhere between 50,000 and 300,000.

Over the past 8 years, Scottish photographer David Gillanders has photographed the lives of these street children - documenting their stories of grim day-to-day existence on the streets of Odessa.

David found the children living underground, seeking warmth from central heating pipes. They were ravaged by malnutrition and addicted to drugs - nasal decongestants, which they crushed down and then injected.

“When I first started to take pictures of children living like that, I knew that I wasn’t going to change the world. But I did think something would happen - that it would improve. It didn’t.”

A photograph of one street child, Yana, won UNICEF Photograph of the Year. It captured the 13-year-old only 5 days before she froze to death on the streets.

Most of the children David has documented are now dead and his photographs are the only evidence of their tragic, short lives.

Based around his photographs,  David has made a powerful and moving short film, The Neglected for Channel 4 television. Produced by Nicola Black of Blackwatch Media, the film reveals the lives of a lost generation of children who live in desolation underneath the streets of Odessa.

UNICEF on Ukraine street children. Hope and Homes for Children in Ukraine

The Neglected will be broadcast on Channel 4, Thursday 22nd March 12 midnight.

Above photograph copyright to David Gillanders.