Gonjasufi is a yoga teacher and a rapper. That combination of words should be enough to strike terror into the bowels of just about anybody. However, in this case, it actually pans out. This guy is scary-good with an intensity that is more Manson than Deepak.
You can hear his whole album, via Warp Records, streamed for free here.
And you can buy it here when it comes out tomorrow: (Gonjasufi: A Sufi & A Killer)
GOOD magazine’s latest post in their series on transportation covers the Mars 500, a Russian training exercise to prepare astronauts for hitting Mars. (European and Chinese astronauts are also included. Apparently America has dropped the ball on this one, along with the rest of our approach to the space program, until we pick it up again.)
Ever since the dawn of the space age, we’ve been preparing for a red-planet mission. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s, Europeans and Russians locked themselves into tiny capsules for hundreds of days at a time to simulate a Martian mission. Locations were selected for remoteness and desolation, whether that meant the Atacama desert in Chile or the iciest reaches of Canada.
Yet those extremes pale against Mars 500, a test that will begin in the middle of this year in Moscow, inside a warehouse on the campus of the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems. There, a crew of seven men will lock themselves inside a series of rooms no bigger than a tiny house for 520 days—the approximate amount of time a return trip to Mars would take, with a 30-day layover on the planet. If they last, each crew member will get a bounty, possibly upwards of $100,000. What are we hoping to learn from this exercise? And, really, why would anyone want to do that?
Think of Mars 500 as something like the original Real World, minus the sexual tension and booze, with a few details changed:
“This is the true story of seven strangers (three Europeans, three Russian cosmonauts in training, and one Chinese)...
…picked to live in a house (that looks like the lovechild of a Quonset hut and the International Space Station)...
According to now-declassified MI5 files, Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the modern scouting movement, was nice and friendly with the Hitler Youth, and held meetings with von Ribbentrop about forming closer ties.
I knew there was a reason I dropped out of the scouts when I was 10, calling them a “bunch of fascists.” (Literally.) I mean, who names an organization for prepubescent youth “Webelos” (pronounced “We-Blow”)? Freaks.
Scouting founder Lord Robert Baden-Powell was invited to meet Adolf Hitler after friendly talks with the Hitler Youth about forming closer ties, secret British files released Monday showed.
Britain’s Baden-Powell, who started the Scouts in 1907, held talks with German ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop and Hitler Youth chief of staff Hartmann Lauterbacher on November 19, 1937.
Lauterbacher, then 28, was in Britain to foster closer relations with the Boy Scout movement and Ribbentrop invited Baden-Powell to tea with the Hitler Youth leader, newly declassified MI5 Security Service files revealed.
I refer you to the comments thread of this week’s Dangerous Minds interview with Charles Johnson, of Little Green Footballs. This afternoon Charles linked to the interview from his popular blog and within a matter of minutes people were posting about the interview both there and here. Some pro, some con (I get compared to Sean Hannity for instance!), but some just nasty and fairly pointless, such as one item (since deleted by us and not at the request of Charles, either) which managed to slip in both a homophobic epithet and a not-so-veiled death threat!
Charming.
As Charles replied “Welcome to my world! These are exactly the people I was talking about in the interview.” I sent him the IP address and in a matter of minutes he tracked the guy down and found several instances of his email address posted online elsewhere.
Views were initially slow on this episode, but are trending upwards quickly. I’ll leave this up for another day before posting part 2.
Sad news today—Mark Linkous, who usually recorded under the name Sparklehorse, has committed suicide at the age of 47.
Sparklehorse’s albums “Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot,” “Good Morning Spider,” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” were college favorites with my pod of indie friends. Linkous mined territory somewhere in between Radiohead and the Eels, coming up with a kind of glitchy Appalachian misery that was way too dark to ever properly take off. Nonetheless, the man was considered a giant by those who knew.
Mark Linkous, a singer-songwriter whose music, released under the name Sparklehorse, was renowned in the indie-rock and alt-country worlds for its dark, allusive themes and fragile beauty, committed suicide on Saturday in Knoxville, Tenn. He was 47.
He shot himself in the heart in an alley outside a friend’s home, said his manager, Shelby Meade. Lt. Greg Hoskins of the Knoxville Police Department confirmed that the police responded to a call at 1:20 p.m., and that Mr. Linkous was pronounced dead at the scene. According to his family, Mr. Linkous owned the gun that he used.
On four Sparklehorse albums released between 1995 and 2006, and in numerous collaborations, Mr. Linkous developed a style that sent sunny, Beatles-esque melodies through a filter of crackling, damaged folk-rock, and his songs were filled with entropic imagery. “Everything that’s made is made to decay,” he sang on Sparkehorse’s debut album, “Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot” (Capitol) in a whispery tenor that had echoes of coal-country folk.
Wonderful music video directed by Pierre et Gilles for Marc Almond’s A Lover Spurned single. They also shot the cover (above). Playing opposite Marc in the video is the glamourous Marie France, transsexual style icon and pop singer.
Scenes from the Animal Collective / Danny Perez takeover of the Guggenheim a couple of days ago. Looks and sounds like a good time !
Photos via Pitchfork.
This is an episode of Post Mortem, a series that examined the “pathologies” of certain seemingly doomed artists who were touched equally by genius and madness. Other subjects included Beethoven, Virginia Woolf, Francis Bacon, and Nijinsky. This episode, about Montgomery Clift features interviewees like Kenneth Anger, Clift biographer Patricia Bosworth. Kevin McCarthy, and Barney Hoskyns.
The company who made this, Blackwatch Media, also produced the excellent Carry On Darkly documentary about the troubled personalities behind the iconic British Carry On film series of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Carry on Darkly is well worth looking for on the torrent trackers. I enjoyed it immensely.
Thank you Paul Gallagher!
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the cinema… there’s Birdemic: Shock and Terror, which I maliciously tricked Jason Louv into seeing last night. But what I didn’t know—why would anyone know this?—is that James Nguyen, “The Master of the Romantic Thriller”™ who, uh, created Birdemic, actually directed an earlier movie in 2003 called Julie & Jack.
I haven’t seen it—and seriously doubt that I ever will—but apparently, Julie is actually dead and her brain and personality are stored in a computer. This is what Jack is all upset about. Apparently. (Note that actress Tippi Hedren is in both of Nguyen’s movies).
