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‘The Dark Rift’: New music from Jim Jarmusch’s SQÜRL
05.31.2017
08:54 am
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Photo: Sara Driver

Before his landmark feature Stranger Than Paradise etched his name into the indie-cinema firmament, Jim Jarmusch was a student and a musician in NYC during that crucial late-‘70s period that incubated punk and No-Wave, and spent part of the early ‘80s playing in the Del-Byzanteens, and in Dark Day with fellow Ohio expat and DNA founder Robin Crutchfield. In recent years, Jarmusch has returned to active music making, releasing the albums Concerning the Entrance into Eternity, The Mystery of Heaven, and Apokatastasis in collaboration with minimalist composer and lute player Jozef van Wissem.

Jarmusch has also been playing rock guitar as a member of SQÜRL, with producer/composer Carter Logan on drums, and sound engineer Shane Stoneback creating loops and arrangements. Fittingly, their music is often cinematically spacious, with droning passages that most readily recall bands like Earth, Growing, and Boris. Originally named Bad Rabbit, the band was formed to contribute music to Jarmusch’s film The Limits of Control. Their 2009 EP of the same title was the band’s first release, and after changing the name to SQÜRL, they continued to release EPs almost exclusively—a good idea for this kind of music, really, the shorter format keeps excesses in check. Jarmusch had this to say on the matter four years ago in The Quietus:

We like EPs because the length of a 33rpm 12” LP is an arbitrary thing that was developed by commercial concerns. How much can fit on that piece of vinyl. In a way, that’s becoming as out of date as feature-length films, which were also arbitrarily designed for a certain number of screenings in a theater per day. So it was 90 minutes to 120 minutes, the average for a while. Those things are now gone in the digital age. They’re passé. I don’t think in the future people are going to care if a film is 10 minutes or four hours. It’s going to be what is it that they’re interested in. Feature-length films and LPs are still a nice form, but they were kind of arbitrary.

Having released EPs with the get-to-the-point titles EP #1, EP #2, and EP #3, SQÜRL released Only Lovers Left Alive in 2014, another collaboration with Van Wissem, and another Jarmusch film related release. Last year saw Live at Third Man Records, a full-length that included surprising covers of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and Elvis’ “Little Sister.” Today, they’re announcing the forthcoming release of yet another EP, featuring three new compositions, and two remixes—one each by Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe and Föllakzoid. The title is EP #260. When we asked “Huh?”, Jarmusch provided us with this:

Contradictions embraced: Although SQÜRL’s music is anti-mathematic, SQÜRL loves mathematics. We love the Fibonacci numbers. And magic numbers. Perfect numbers. Bell numbers. Catalan numbers. 260 is none of these. It isn’t a perfect number, and not factional of any number. It’s not even a regular number. 260, though, is the number of days in all Mesoamerican calendars. The Mayan calendar. The Tzolkin calendar. 260 is also the number of days of human gestation. (Orangutans also). 260 also has an elliptical connection to the dark rift; a series of molecular dust clouds located between our solar system and the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way. And although not a magic number, 260 is the magic constant of the magic square investigated by Benjamin Franklin, and part of the solution to a famous chess problem; the n-queens problem for n=8. 260 is also the country code for Zambia. And the US area code for Fort Wayne, Indiana.

It’s Dangerous Minds’ pleasure today to debut the first track to be released from EP #260, “The Dark Rift.”
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
A young Jim Jarmusch reports on Cleveland’s foremost post-punk heroes, Pere Ubu, 1977
The video Jim Jarmusch made for Big Audio Dynamite

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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05.31.2017
08:54 am
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Not just for vampires anymore: Putin, Obama and Angela Merkel cavort in evil new White Hills video
03.23.2016
05:06 pm
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Prolific New York-based psych rockers White Hills’ hypnotic, intense, riff-heavy music got them noticed by director Jim Jarmusch who decided to write his favorite band into his 2013 indie vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive. The critically acclaimed film starred Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston and featured White Hills—Dave W. on guitar and vocals and Ego Sensation on bass and vocals—as themselves playing their song “Under Skin Or By Name” in scene that takes place in a Detroit dive bar.
 

 
The first White Hills album, 2005’s No Game To Play was basically a solo project released by Dave W as a CD-R. Julian Cope reissued the album as They’ve Got Blood Like We’ve Got Blood on his Fuck Off and Di label and it’s no surprise that White Hills’ epic pounding—influenced by Hawkwind, the Stooges and the MC5—is something the Arch Drude felt he needed to get behind. Comedian Stewart Lee has also championed White Hills in a review of their self-released Glitter Glamour Atrocity in the pages of the Sunday London Times.

Keep reading after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.23.2016
05:06 pm
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A young Jim Jarmusch reports on Cleveland’s foremost post-punk heroes, Pere Ubu, 1977
05.27.2015
01:10 pm
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In the early 1970s, Akron native Jim Jarmusch, born in 1953, transferred from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University to Columbia University, receiving his diploma in 1975. He took full advantage of the opportunitis Columbia afforded him, editing The Columbia Review and moving to Paris for a stretch, which is where his lifelong love of film was born. After his return to NYC, Jarmusch enrolled in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and also hung out at CBGB’s a lot.

At some point he had the bright idea to return to the big midwestern metropolis from his home state of Ohio—that is, Cleveland—and report on some of the major rock doings going down in that city. In the 7th issue of N.Y. Rocker, which came out in the spring of 1977 (May-June), there appears a lengthy interview with Pere Ubu’s resident genius David Thomas with the byline “Jim Jarmusch.” As I read through it, it took an effort of will not to call to mind the wintry, winsome, and downtrodden feel of the Cleveland section of Jarmusch’s 1984 breakthrough (I would also say masterpiece) Stranger Than Paradise.

I’m currently a resident of Cleveland, having moved here from NYC (reverse trajectory to Jarmusch’s, hmmm) in 2013. I put on Pere Ubu’s 1978 12-inch Datapanik in the Year Zero, which I purchased in Cleveland last year, before writing this post. I’ve met people in the current incarnation of Pere Ubu and visited the Agora, where Ubu played in December 1976, but much more to the point, Jarmusch’s interview with Thomas resonates in a far more general way with me, now that I live here (and like it). On the second page of the interview is a blurry, wintry snapshot of Cleveland’s most prominent building, the Terminal Tower, with a raised drawbridge in the foreground, and you know, that picture now has a homey familiarity for me.

One portion of the interview was conducted at Tommy’s Restaurant on Coventry Road, and that restaurant is still there and thriving. The first part of the interview was conducted at the Pirate’s Cove in the Flats district of Cleveland, which is no more; Cobra Verde frontman and Cleveland Plain Dealer writer John Petkovic described it as a venue that “will go down in Cleveland rock lore as the host of shows by the Dead Boys, DEVO and Pere Ubu—back when the Flats was a rough-and-tumble working-class drinking spot.”

In the interview, Jarmusch and Thomas (winkingly identified as “Crocus Behemoth” throughout) discuss the finer points of Laverne and Shirley, the appeal of Nero Wolfe and Raymond Chandler, and the “repulsive” nature of poetry. At one point Thomas/“Behemoth” appears to set up Pere Ubu as a kind of Beach Boys for the industrial midwest:
 

A lot of our songs are about driving. Like “Street Waves” is like, you know, in California they got the surf, and in Cleveland, in the summer, if you work real hard at it, there’s a surf that comes down the streets. And if you work real hard, you can ride that surf. And in Cleveland, that’s real bizarre. You get out on West 25th and Detroit and ride the surf and its real good. Really good. That’s our big summertime thing—you get out there in a car with a radio in it, “a car that can get me around,” and you know, we dress in our swimming trunks and just surf down the streets…...

-snip-

We’re not innocent, like the Beach Boys are innocent, cuz nobody can be innocent anymore. But we know what innocence is, and we know we have to try to get back there, even if it is tinged with reality.

 
In the third and final part of the interview, Jarmusch and Thomas are cruising around the city in a 1966 Dodge Dart. They have the AM radio station CKLW on, which is cycling through some recent hits, to which Thomas reacts. When Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night” comes on, it spurs Thomas to a mini-manifesto of sorts:
 

This is one of my big faves, too. I like all kinds of shit. I think ABBA’s real superb. I like all kinds of crap. Like, I consider Pere Ubu to be a pop band. Like, we don’t really do long songs. Pop is an art—to do something really new with pop is an art.

 
Read the original article after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.27.2015
01:10 pm
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The video Jim Jarmusch made for Big Audio Dynamite


 
1986’s No. 10, Upping St. was kind of an amazing album for Big Audio Dynamite. That was the band Clash Guitarist Mick Jones formed upon his ouster from that seminal punk band, and he used the freedom that came with being HMFIC to explore a mix of club and hip-hop influences with the rock and reggae influences he’d already been known for. And yet, Upping was co-written and produced by his evidently no-longer-estranged former bandmate Joe Strummer! Jones would never re-join the Clash (who, as a result, would suck mightily until they packed it in), and so that B.A.D. LP would be the only Strummer/Jones reunion that ever took place. Jones revealed last year that he and Strummer were working together again in the 21st Century, but that renewed collaboration was cut short by Strummer’s 2002 death.

Three videos were made from that album, “C’mon Every Beatbox,” “V. Thirteen,” and “Sightsee M.C!” That last was noteworthy for having been directed by the pioneering independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. The director had already become a celebrated figure for Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law, but the only music video he’d made before was for Talking Heads’ “The Lady Don’t Mind.” In spite of Jarmusch’s high status among indie musicians as well as film afficionados, and his frequent casting of musicians (including Joe Strummer) as actors in his features, ”Sightsee M.C!” remains one of only seven music videos he’s directed in his long career. In a 1992 issue of Film Comment, he had this to say on the matter:

I don’t generally like music videos because they provide you images to go with the songs rather than you providing your own. You lose the beauty of music by not bringing your own mental images or recollections or associations. Music videos obliterate that. That said, one of the better videos I’ve seen is not a music video at all: it’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” where Dylan just stands there with the cards - it’s one single shot. They lifted that out of Don’t Look Back and showed it on MTV. I saw a good video the Butthole Surfers did, directed by the actor from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Alex Winter; very weird, not your MTV fare. Julia Haywood’s Talking Heads video “Burning Down the House” was interesting - projecting fire onto the house itself, and images onto the road and re-photographing them. Zbigniew Rybczinski has done amazing things. But mostly I like videos that don’t get too complicated.

 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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08.11.2014
05:15 pm
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‘Who do you think you are, God?’: Bible talk with Jim Jarmusch and Neil Young
08.29.2013
01:20 pm
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God figures prominently in the video below from Jim Jamusch’s 1997 documentary, Year of the Horse.  The film impressionistically chronicles the storied, decades-long partnership between Neil Young and Crazy Horse as they tour the world in 1996. 

I dug up the clip after reading a Rolling Stone interview from last April with Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, long-term guitar player for Crazy Horse, brought on board after the tragic death of Danny Whitten, the band’s integral and original guitar player and songwriter.  Sampedro first played with the band in 1973, but wouldn’t see material released with Crazy Horse until Zuma in 1975.  He says in the interview that his gut tells him that their current tour will be their last.

“Our shows are physical,” says Poncho. “It takes a lot of energy to play that much. It just seems at some point something is going to break. I already had an operation on my thumb. Neil’s wrist bugs him, and he has to tape it when he plays. You can’t fool time. You can’t count on this happening again in five years.”

The quote turned out to be prophetic. Sampedro broke his hand in an accident earlier this month forcing Crazy Horse to cancel the last seven dates of the European leg of their tour.  Then, just last week, they announced that they had to bail on an upcoming four-date tour in the U.S. and Canada as well. 

It struck me as possible that Neil Young and Crazy Horse might be close to having done their last show (they have a few dates scheduled in September and through the end of the year according to Young’s website), and it made me think about how glad I was that I got to see them in October. Despite the fact that the youngest member in the band (Poncho) was in his early 60’s, they were still great, classically hunching in a tight circle onstage, once again summoning that indescribable thing, those beautifully heavy, organic landscapes that you either get or you don’t and that Crazy Horse uniquely conjures.

Year of the Horse came to mind as I thought about the Crazy Horse live experience. In this more-than-a-rockumentary, rust belt auteur, Jarmusch (Permanent Vacation, Strangers in Paradise, Night on Earth, Broken Flowers, etc.), inter-mingles sometimes confrontational band interviews and grainy concert footage with ethereal, black-and-white, fluttering, ghostly imagery shot from moving vehicles, from inside empty concert venues, and from deep within dancing audiences rendered in slow motion. Vintage out-takes, culled mainly from tours in 1976 and 1986, mark ten year intervals from the time of the contemporary footage, infusing the film with a sort of timelessness, glimpses rather than a solid narrative and the sense the Crazy Horse has been on some kind of a mission, however insane and disjointed, since day one. It’s a chronicle of a band haunted by a turbulent past, littered with lost members and what Young calls a “trail of destruction.”

The film flows nicely from Jarmusch’s previous film, 1995’s Dead Man, a genre-bending western and Native American death journey featuring a stark, reverb-infused instrumental soundtrack crafted by none other than Young himself.

One of the virtues of Year of the Horse is that for all the leave-it-all-on-the-stage swagger of the live performances, there’s often just as much intensity between the band members when they’re not on stage. Then again, during several moments of levity, the film shows how hilariously dopey the band can be at times. These parts leave you laughing and sometimes marveling. 

In one segment from 1976, Young sets fire to a bunch of cloth flowers inside a Glasgow hotel room, tries to extinguish them with a pile of napkins and “a little orange juice,” and then, when the hotel manager arrives, sheepishly blames the whole incident on how dangerous it is that the establishment keeps flammable flowers on the table right near where the ashtray sits. 

In 1986 footage from Rotterdam, Young, known for literally kicking his players in the ass on stage for screwing up, goes ballistic on bass player Billy Talbot for fucking up during a performance after rehearsing all day. It’s seriously not nice.

Later, intimate black-and-white footage finds the band back in England in 1976 in a small, back-stage, painted brick room, moments after a performance with the crowd yelling for more in the background.  Crazy Horse seems wiped out, but they ultimately settle on “Home Grown” for the encore.

While some of the concert footage meanders a bit a times, there are also some great performances here. There’s a blistering, careening, angry take on “Fuckin’ Up” from 1990’s Ragged Glory, wherein the band chugs along with the ferocity and attitude of a bunch of guys half their age. There’s an ultra-heavy, incendiary version of “Tonight’s the Night” that captures all the stop-on-a-dime dynamics of that tune, with the band deconstructing itself into shaky vocal harmonies then ripping into guitar-bending feedback crescendos while Young works out jerky, side-stabbing solos. The film wraps up with footage of the band literally beating the hell out of “Like a Hurricane,” while Jarmusch infuses footage of the same song performed twenty years earlier, demonstrating the unwavering, stubborn energy that can almost transcendentally exude from this epic, multi-decade vision of analog exploration.

Young really liked the film. In a 1997 interview, he said:

I love that movie ... You can really feel the personal view of a filmmaker and, above all, the movie is about the band. It’s more than a simple story; it’s an impression, a succession of feelings. I had the idea of doing this movie - I like this kind of stuff and I like to have a camera with me, but Jim made it possible.

Sampedro, on the other hand, is a little more lukewarm about it.  When asked to speak on Year of the Horsein the April Rolling Stone interview mentioned above he answered:

Am I a fan of the movie? In a way, yes, and in a way, no. I think if people really think that’s Crazy Horse . . . it’s a pretty soft version of us. You don’t really see what goes on. But then again, some stuff is so personal you don’t want people to see it all. It would be like one of those weird reality shows. There’s a lot more turmoil than what you see there, and intensity as well.

 
In interviews, Sampedro harangues Jarmusch on two separate occasions in the film for being an “artsy-fartsy” director who could never even begin to ask a few questions and hope to capture the decades-long saga that is Crazy Horse.  In the interest of full disclosure, or maybe just because he’s having fun with it, Jarmusch lets the camera roll and includes footage of the visibly annoyed Sampedro.

Is this the best documentation ever put to film of Neil Young and Crazy Horse? Maybe not, but what does it matter? What it comes down to is that Year of the Horse is just another moment in time for a band on a messy, cantankerous and often incredible journey. It’s just another historical artifact demonstrating that when Crazy Horse is firing on all cylinders, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better rock-and-roll outfit on the entire planet.

Not unlike 1991’s film version of Weld which was released on VHS and never reissued, Year of the Horse seems to be out of print for purchase (there are a few pricey copies listed as “new” left on Amazon) and is often not even mentioned in band bios. It’s a shame. Not only is the film something for fans of Jim Jarmusch to consider, but, if Crazy Horse really is almost done touring, Year of the Horse is a part of the band’s legacy worthy of a look.  There might not be much new live footage to ponder.

There is live album called Year of the Horse, but none of the performances from the film appear on it.

The clip below focuses on Jarmusch and Young pretending to take seriously a bunch of completely over-the-top bible verses.  There’s a goofy and childlike camaraderie between the two who, frankly, seem a little “light-headed.” 

While you’re waiting for the God talk, enjoy a psyched 1970’s super-fan extolling the virtues of “the Neil Young universe” and a spacey, Jesus freak guy enlightening Young on how “San Francisco was the rebirth of the planet.” 

 

 
Incidentally, Roger Ebert HATED Year of the Horse, giving it a single star and calling it the worst movie he saw in 1997.  He describes the music in the film as (among other things)  “shapeless, graceless and built from rhythm, not melody.” 

Decide for yourself by watching the film in its entirety in the two clips (with Spanish subtitles) below or better still, it’s streaming on Netflix.
 

[FILM] Year of the Horse (Jim Jarmusch, Neil Young, See more) from santa sancha on Vimeo.

 
‘Year of the Horse,’ part II, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Jason Schafer
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08.29.2013
01:20 pm
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How to join the Sons of Lee Marvin in five easy steps
08.27.2013
09:24 am
Topics:
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Lee Marvin
 
Back in the 1980s Tom Waits, Jim Jarmusch, John Lurie, and maybe one or two others started a facetious little organization called the Sons of Lee Marvin in honor of one of their favorite actors. As it is a secret society, details are scarce—Nick Cave is in the club, and the director John Boorman has been given an honorary membership. It is rumored that Thurston Moore, Iggy Pop, Josh Brolin, and Neil Young are also in the group.

If you would like to join the Sons of Lee Marvin, here’s all you have to do:

1. Be born with a penis.
2. Have “a facial structure such that you could be related to, or be a son of, Lee Marvin.”
3. Develop an intense fondness for Lee Marvin, especially how his characters are “outsiders and very violent” and “have a very strong code.”
4. Achieve significant notoriety as an adorable bohemian/downtown musician or filmmaker.
5. Become close buddies with Jim Jarmusch.
 
Sons of Lee Marvin
(T-shirt available at Threadless.)

The following anecdote appears in the May/June 1992 issue of Film Comment:
 

Just the idea of Marvin’s characters being outsiders and very violent appeals to me. Some seem to have a very strong code—even if it’s a psychotic one—that he follows rigidly.

A secret organization exists called The Sons of Lee Marvin—it includes myself, Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Richard Boes…. Six months ago, Tom Waits was in a bar somewhere like Sonoma County in Northern California, and the bartender said:

“You’re Tom Waits, right? A guy over there wants to talk to you.”

Tom went over to this dark corner booth and the guy sitting there said, “Sit down, I want to talk to you.”
“What do you want to talk to me about? I don’t know you.”
“What is this bullshit about the Sons of Lee Marvin?”
“Well, it’s a secret organization and I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“I don’t like it.”
“What’s it to you?”
“I’m Lee Marvin’s son,” and he really was.

He thought it was insulting, but it’s not, it’s completely out of respect for Lee Marvin.

 
The fan page jim-jarmusch.net has a pretty good summary of the known information about the Sons of Lee Marvin.

If you haven’t seen it, Point Blank—directed by honorary SOLM John Boorman—is a great movie. Here’s a pretty spiffy clip:
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Lee Marvin and Angela Dickinson perform ‘Clapping Music’
Jim Jarmusch, Neil Young, RZA: The music of Dead Man and Ghost Dog

Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.27.2013
09:24 am
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Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, Martin Scorsese and Tim Robbins discuss Samuel Fuller


 
Ah, Samuel Fuller. The great director, on some levels, exists in his very own category, creatively hitting up in the Kubrick/Kurosawa/Bergman leagues and yet hardly most people outside of serious film geeks have ever heard of him.

Arguably, Fuller has been largely ignored historically because, even in the 50s and early 60s he was cranking up the intensity to levels that simply could not be tolerated by most cinema-goers or even movie critics. Confronted with Fuller’s incendiary vision, American society collectively slapped their hands over their ears and repeated, No, this can’t be the way things are. But they were that way, and Fuller presented it in such a way that you couldn’t deny it. Forget about mom, apple pie and the postwar American dream, Samuel Fuller’s films metaphorically lifted Marilyn Monroe’s skirt to reveal a maniacally grinning demon underneath.

For instance, here’s white supremacist Trent from Shock Corridor, and remember this came out in 1962:
 

 
See what I mean? If you’ve never experienced that scene before, right now you’re probably saying, “Holy Shit…”

Sam Fuller was a classic cigar-chomping old school man’s man who’d been a crime reporter in the 1930s and then shipped off to World War II. He fought on the beaches of North Africa, Sicily and Normandy before helping to liberate the concentration camp at Falkenau, where shot some of his earliest film footage.

By the time he made his first movie in 1949 at the age of 37, Fuller was already loaded for bear with levels of life experience most of us would never even wish for. His films combined newspaper sensationalism sprinkled with bits and pieces from his own life. Although not nihilistic, Fuller didn’t have heroes or villains in the classic sense but populated his films with real characters with good and bad all mixed together. You know, like in real life.

Like any artist or writer or, well THINKER worth a damn, you can’t easily pigeonhole his world view. In Sam Fuller, The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera, a documentary about Fuller’s life, Jim Jarmusch describes the iconoclastic director as an “anti-totalitarian anarchist,” though Fuller took heat from both the right and left for Pickup on South Street (which was accused of “Red baiting” and anti-Americanism at the same time!). In the film you can also see Fuller describe both the fascists and mid-20th century communist regimes as “Enemies of humanity.”

Like Luis Buñuel,  Fuller got kicked to the curb for a number or years for just going too damn far, with the controversial White Dog—which never did see a US release—about a dog trained to hate black people [A neighbor of mine in Brooklyn had a doberman that hated black people, so this isn’t as far-fetched as you might think], whereupon he moved to France, where he was, of course, hailed as a genius, and finished out the rest of his creative career.

Here’s the entire film about Fuller, shot during his lifetime so that there are plenty of classic quotes from the man. Just as amusing are the shots of Quentin Tarantino and Tim Robbins rooting around in Fuller’s pre-France work-space, uncovering all sorts of Fuller’s old treasures, even as they imitate him and invoke his spirit at a distance:
 

Posted by Em
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05.28.2013
11:40 am
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Divine Trash: Award-winning documentary on John Waters

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The thing I love most about John Waters is that he always appears unfazed by anything. He’s cool, self-contained and shrugs off all condescension. He’s the kind of role model that should be used in schools to get youngsters (and adults) to like themselves, and be confident in who they are and how they want to live.

Steven Yaeger’s documentary on Waters, Divine Trash, is one of those films that ends up on everyone’s wish list at some point or another, it’s an ‘O, I’d love to see that’ kind-of-a-film, and is as good as you hope. This is especially true if you’re a fan of Mr Waters, and want to see behind the scenes and find out all about his early days as a film-maker, in particular the making of Pink Flamingoes. Director Yaeger more than deserved his Film-Makers’ Trophy for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival for Divine Trash in 1998, as he gets the best out of Waters and knows how to tell a damned good tale. With contributions from Divine, Hal Hartley, Steve Buscemi, Jim Jarmusch, Waters and of course those fabulous Dreamlanders.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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02.24.2012
07:07 pm
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Director cameos in their own and others’ films

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Alfred Hitchcock made a habit of appearing in his own films, it became such a distraction that the great director ensured his trade-mark profile appeared soon after the opening titles, so audiences could concentrate on the intricacies of the plot rather than play Where’s Alfie?.

Over the years, other directors have adopted the Hitchcockian cameo (M Night Shyamalan being the most irritating), or turned it into a memorable scene - Martin Scorsese’s creepy cameo as a cuckolded husband in Taxi Driver is a small film all of its own. There have also been the directors who give cameos to the film-makers who influenced or inspired their careers - Jean-Luc Goddard’s homage to the genius Sam Fuller in Pierre le Fou, where the legendary director of The Steel Helmet, Underworld USA, The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor expounds on cinema:

“Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word . . . emotion.”

Here is just a small selection of some notable cameos by directors in their own and in other director’s films.
 

Legendary director Sam Fuller appears in this party scene from Jean-Luc Goddard’s ‘Pierrot le Fou’ (1965)
 
More directors in front of the camera, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.14.2011
05:39 pm
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Shackleton vs Jim Jarmusch: “Dead Man”
03.03.2011
10:12 am
Topics:
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One of the UK’s premiere dubstep producers Shackleton this week releases a new EP called Deadman on London’s reggae and dub imprint Honest Jon’s. Dead Man is also the name of a fantastic 1995 film by Jim Jarmusch starring Johnny Depp as a man called William Blake, wandering through a black and white recreation of the old West while nursing a fatal gunshot wound.

I don’t know if the Shackleton release (sleeve pictured above) is an hommage to the film, but the enterprising folks at The 29th Nov films have made a video for the track itself using footage from the Jarmusch film. It’s great. Rivaling Neil Young’s original minimalist guitar score for haunting atmosphere, Shackleton’s signature sound of Eastern hand percussion hits, disembodied voices and washes of dub noise prove a perfect accompaniment to the gorgeous monochrome footage of Johnny Depp slowly dying:
 

 
Shackleton’s Deadman is available to buy on vinyl and download from Juno.

Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man is available to buy from Amazon.

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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03.03.2011
10:12 am
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Jim Jarmusch, Neil Young, RZA: The music of Dead Man and Ghost Dog
08.27.2010
07:04 pm
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While I agree with most of what Jarmusch has to say in the above quote, I question whether or not originality is non-existent. You may be inspired by or steal from other sources, but ultimately what you create - from whatever you got from wherever you got it - is your own original creation no matter that it’s composed of received elements. If nothing else, the energy originates from you and therefore is original. If originality is dead then aren’t we all? If originality is dead then what drives art? Has the shock of the new turned into a recycled thud?

Here’s a fascinating look into the process Jarmusch went through making the soundtracks for Dead Man with Neil Young and Ghost Dog with RZA. All three artists seem to enjoy working in the moment, improvising and spontaneity, and I find the results quite original.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.27.2010
07:04 pm
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Rudy Wurlitzer: Two-Lane Blacktop And Beyond

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In reference to Rudy Wurlitzer‘s ‘69 debut, Nog, none other than Thomas Pynchon said: “The novel of bullshit is dead.””  A not bad start for Wurlitzer, the sole member of the piano-making clan who never saw a dime (or not many) from his family name.

Tracing the often-psychedelic wanderlust of its title character who was either insane or drug-addicted (or both), Nog brought Wurlitzer a certain degree of fame as a novelist, but he’s perhaps best known, and celebrated, for his screenwriting.  His collaboration with Sam Peckinpah yielded the Bob Dylan-scored Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.  Two years before that, though, he and Monte Hellman pulled off one of my all-time cinematic favorites, Two-Lane Blacktop.

Starring James Taylor and Dennis Wilson (both looking shockingly boyish) as eternally drifting drivers, Two-Lane featured sparse dialogue and even sparser performances.  Visually, though, it’s pure poetry, and, to me, a still-vital piece of American existentialism—especially in its final moment.  The trailer for Two-Lane follows below.

And just up at Chuck Palahniuk‘s website, an excellent, yet typically elusive, interview with Wurlitzer where he discusses everything from Dylan to Pynchon.  Regarding his new-ish novel, The Drop Edge of Yonder, Wurlitzer also addresses, politely, “l’affaire de Jim Jarmusch.”  Apparently, the director “pillaged” from Wurlitzer the raw material he’d later shape into Dead Man.  You can read the interview here.

 
See also in Arthur Magazine: ON THE DRIFT: Rudy Wurlitzer and the Road to Nowhere

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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09.03.2009
03:30 pm
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