Legendary Malaysian actor and musician P. Ramlee plays the totally groovy “Bunyi Gitar”. The fez , the shades, teenagers twisting like rock and roll angels, this video has it all. Thankyou DJGiantRobot.

P.Ramlee’s big break came on 1 June 1948 when he was spotted by Tamil film director B. S. Rajhans. The director was impressed by Ramlee, and in 1949 he was cast in the film Nasib (Fate). Seven years later, Ramlee directed his first film Penarik Becha (The Trishaw Man). In 1957, Ramlee would act in the first of his Bujang Lapok (Dowdy Bachelors) comedic films that he acted along S. Shamsuddin along with Aziz Sattar, which are still popular among the modern Malay film watchers.On 29 May 1973 P.Ramlee died at the age of 44 due to heart problems and was buried in Jalan Ampang Muslim Cemetery, Kuala Lumpur. In 1986, in honour of his contributions to the Malaysian entertainment industry, the P. Ramlee Memorial was set up in Setapak, Kuala Lumpur. In 1982, Jalan Parry in the KL city centre has been renamed Jalan P. Ramlee in his honor. He was posthumously awarded with the Malaysian honorific title Tan Sri in the early 1990s.

P. Ramlee superstar!
 

 
Dinner With Henry is exactly what the title suggests. Over a plate of food and glass of wine, the 87 year old Buddha of Brooklyn enthusiastically riffs on his hero Blaise Cendrars, D.H. Lawrence, Rimbaud and the surrealists. Shot by Richard Young and John Chesko in 1979, this “lost’ documentary has recently surfaced and it’s a wonderful peek into the life of one literature’s great provocateurs.

Henry Miller, along with Charles Bukowski, Rimbaud and Richard Brautigan, inspired me to buy a typewriter and attempt the life of a writer. Oh, what I would have done to have had a glass of wine with the great man.

Brenda Venus, the last great love Miller’s life, wrote about the filming of this dinner in her 1986 book Dear, Dear Brenda: The Love Letters of Henry Miller;

Two filmmakers had requested to film Henry speaking freely about wine. When they arrived at Henry’s home, he was in “an ill temper” explains Venus, who guessed that he’d had a bad sleep. When dinner time arrived, Henry was asked to “speak frankly and spontaneously.”  At first, his comments seemed negatively focused on the meal. It’s unclear who prepared the meal, but Henry does not spare anyone’s feelings by calling it “pitiful” and refusing to eat certain things, or complaining about the order of courses. With some coaxing from Brenda, Henry is finally set on track to various personal commentaries. Although he does offer some comparison between French and American wines, he doesn’t offering any real opinion of the wines set before him, which had been the whole point of the film. “I kept encouraging Henry to say something about the various wines he was sipping,” write Venus, “but he pointedly ignored me while regaling the camera with his powers as a raconteur”

 
Henry Miller reads from Black Spring  and is interviewed on French TV after the jump…

 
Jack Kerouac reads from Visions of Cody on The Steve Allen Plymouth Show in 1959. This clip is taken from the documentary film, Whatever Happened to Keroauc? It’s often mislabeled as being a reading from On The Road, but it’s not (to add further to the confusion, there is a close up of On The Road’s cover as Steve Allen is speaking).
 

 
In a promotional campaign for the new Resident Evil film, grotesque looking arms were strategically placed throughout the streets and buildings of Madrid to spook the living shit out of unsuspecting pedestrians. Funny and effective.

Music by System Of A Down.

 
I can’t believe how little this glaring fact plays in the general awareness of our little adventure in Iraq. As Glenn Greenwald rightfully points out: “It should be noted that on this chart the number of Iraqi deaths is the most conservative count”.
 
What is the real death toll in Iraq? (The Guardian)
 
Via Balloon Juice and Glenn Greenwald’s Twitter feed

 
Austrian filmmaker Virgil Widrich and his crew truly turned it out in 2003 with Fast Film, an amazingly obsessed confluence of film history, paper-craft and pre-digital animation.

Born from the scraps of Widrich’s equally well-crafted short, Copy Shop, Fast Film imbues its surrealistic qualities with familiarity, humor, anxiety, dread and hints of sexuality.
 

 
After the jump: How this incredible film was made…
 

 
Unreality/via Matt Staggs

 
He doesnt appear all that chastened, tho…

(via Sticky’s Soup)

 

 
According to the ad, this is what the apartment looks like after the repairs and renovations! There’s no security deposit either, folks! 
 
More photos after the jump…

(via TDW)