B&W footage of Bruce Lee’s complete screen test for the role of “Kato” in The Green Hornet TV series from 1965. Lee was a new father by just three days when this was shot and then only 24-years-old. You get a good sense of what he was like then. He was such a charismatic young guy.
In the demonstration part, it’s unreal how fast he moves! How many other guys auditioned after him, I wonder? None?
Below, a great kung fu action sequence from The Green Hornet. I love how the Green Hornet goads this guy into fighting the great Bruce Lee. Hilarious.
This looks splendid! Eames: The Architect and The Painter opens on November 18, 2011 at Laemmle Music Hall in Los Angeles. For more playdates go here. From the movie’s webiste:
The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America’s most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life—from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age—has been less widely understood. Narrated by James Franco, Eames: The Architect and the Painter is the first film dedicated to these creative geniuses and their work.
If you can’t tell from the title, I’m a B-52s fan. A pretty big one. They came into my life when I was 13-years-old and have never left. I’ve seen them live numerous times and they have never failed to bring the house down (in fact, I once nervously wondered if they were going to literally bring down the balcony at Radio City Music Hall due to all the frenzied frugging to “Rock Lobster.” A balcony I was seated under, I might add). The B-52s are so good live that I once stood in one of the worst torrential downpours I’ve ever been caught in, for hours, so that I could get in the front row for a tiny pre-Cosmic Thing warm-up gig at a PAPER magazine party in New York. I was drenched from head to toe, soaked to the bone, but it was still one of the best concert experiences I’ve ever had. I was about four feet way from the band as they played. Heavenly!
Over the weekend, I downloaded an absolutely superb live B-52s video from 1983, a show from Dortmund, Germany (it’s easy to find, the quality is perfect) and I’ve watched it over and over again. It’s not like I needed to be convinced or anything, but I was reminded watching it of what an absolutely genius band they are. They’re so original that they fall into a category of one. What they do is a uniquely American art form. They’re a national intergalactic treasure
I intended just to do one big mega mega-post about the B-52s, but instead I’m going to do four or five posts about them because there’s just way too much “good stuff” out there to not share it here. Tons of it. They often made multiple music videos for their songs, so it can be hard to choose the best ones. I don’t want to crash anyone’s browser with the B-52s bounty, so I’m breaking it off into chunks. Here’s a selection of material from their classic first album, released in 1979:
Cindy Wilson stirred my teenage hormones mightily in this godlike performance of “Dance This Mess Around” on a 1980 Saturday Night Live episode. How cute was she back then, right? Be still my heart!
A rousing “Planet Claire” from Dortmund, Germany, 1983:
Flickr user stripper_polaroids says he bought a box of over 400 photos of strippers trying out for a southern California club in the late-60s and early-70s. He bought the entire collection for $10.
Harold Camping, the 89-year-old coot preacher who achieved fame for repeatedly getting the date of “The Rapture” wrong says he finds his situation “embarrassing” and is getting out of the prophecy business. Probably a good idea at his age… and with his track record!
“We’re living in a day when one problem follows another, and when it comes trying to recognize the truth of prophecy we’re finding it very, very difficult,” Camping said in an audio file posted to his Family Radio website yesterday. Via the NY Daily News:
Camping has made several predictions about the end of the world over the years. He claimed the end was nigh in 1994, then again in May of this year. When that didn’t happen, he said it would be Oct. 21.
“Why didn’t Christ return on Oct. 21?” he asked. “It seems embarrassing for Family Radio, but God is in charge of everything.”
The minister noted that no matter what people may think is in the Bible, ultimately God has the final word and isn’t obligated to reveal his plans.
“There’s one thing that we must remember,” Camping said. “God is in charge of this whole business, and we are not. What God wants to tell us is his business, when he wants to tell us is his business.”
The failed prognosticator also said he was sorry for saying that anyone who didn’t believe in his incorrect predictions would not be saved.
“I should not have said that and I apologize,” Camping said.
The Oakland-based preacher added that just because he was wrong, people shouldn’t lose their faith.
“We should not for a moment feel that we’ve been abandoned by God,” he said.
David Greenfield has amassed a collection of records from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Japan which are all available for purchase online. I liked going through his collections from the 60s and 70s. It’s a great resource for loopy graphic design inspiration!
Newly leaked on YouTube: David Tennant, Catherine Tate and John Barrowman in this charming tribute to the outgoing Doctor Who production team of Russell T. Davies and Julie Gardner, when they, and Timelord Tennant, departed from the series a few years back. This was shown at the wrap party after their final episode.
The song is a riff on “Let’s Do It,” the signature number of beloved British comedienne, Victoria Wood. The “Russell & Julie” lyrics were written by Jennie Fava.
Delivering a Howard Zinn lecture is a bittersweet experience for me. I regret that he’s not here to take part in and invigorate a movement that would have been the dream of his life. Indeed, he laid a lot of the groundwork for it.
If the bonds and associations being established in these remarkable events can be sustained through a long, hard period ahead, victories don’t come quickly, the Occupy protests could mark a significant moment in American history.
I’ve never seen anything quite like the Occupy movement in scale and character, here and worldwide. The Occupy outposts are trying to create cooperative communities that just might be the basis for the kinds of lasting organizations necessary to overcome the barriers ahead and the backlash that’s already coming.
That the Occupy movement is unprecedented seems appropriate because this is an unprecedented era, not just at this moment but since the 1970s.
The 1970s marked a turning point for the United States. Since the country began, it had been a developing society, not always in very pretty ways, but with general progress toward industrialization and wealth.
Even in dark times, the expectation was that the progress would continue. I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. By the mid-1930s, even though the situation was objectively much harsher than today, the spirit was quite different.
A militant labor movement was organizing, the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) and others, and workers were staging sit-down strikes, just one step from taking over the factories and running them themselves.
Under popular pressure, New Deal legislation was passed. The prevailing sense was that we would get out of the hard times.
Now there’s a sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. This is quite new in our history. During the 1930s, working people could anticipate that the jobs would come back. Today, if you’re a worker in manufacturing, with unemployment practically at Depression levels, you know that those jobs may be gone forever if current policies persist.
That change in the American outlook has evolved since the 1970s. In a reversal, several centuries of industrialization turned to de-industrialization. Of course manufacturing continued, but overseas, very profitable, though harmful to the workforce.
The economy shifted to financialization. Financial institutions expanded enormously. A vicious cycle between finance and politics accelerated. Increasingly, wealth concentrated in the financial sector. Politicians, faced with the rising cost of campaigns, were driven ever deeper into the pockets of wealthy backers.
And the politicians rewarded them with policies favorable to Wall Street: deregulation, tax changes, relaxation of rules of corporate governance, which intensified the vicious cycle. Collapse was inevitable. In 2008, the government once again came to the rescue of Wall Street firms presumably too big to fail, with leaders too big to jail.
Today, for the one-tenth of 1 percent of the population who benefited most from these decades of greed and deceit, everything is fine.
In 2005, Citigroup, which, by the way, has repeatedly been saved by government bailouts, saw the wealthy as a growth opportunity. The bank released a brochure for investors that urged them to put their money into something called the Plutonomy Index, which identified stocks in companies that cater to the luxury market.
“The world is dividing into two blocs, the plutonomy and the rest,” Citigroup summarized. “The U.S., U.K. and Canada are the key plutonomies, economies powered by the wealthy.”
As for the non-rich, they’re sometimes called the precariat, people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. The “periphery” however, has become a substantial proportion of the population in the U.S. and elsewhere.
So we have the plutonomy and the precariat: the 1 percent and the 99 percent, as Occupy sees it, not literal numbers, but the right picture.
The historic reversal in people’s confidence about the future is a reflection of tendencies that could become irreversible. The Occupy protests are the first major popular reaction that could change the dynamic.
Continue reading Chomsky’s analysis of the international arena at In These Times
A “lost” film produced from “top to bottom” by George Harrison, has been rediscovered and released on DVD by the British Film Institute. Little Malcolm was made in 1973, and starred John Hurt, David Warner, John McEnery, Raymond Platt and Rosalind Ayres. Based on the play Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs by David Halliwell, it was Harrison’s first film as producer, and one that was thought long lost, as director by Stuart Cooper explained in an interview with the Guardian:
“George never said this to me,” says Cooper, “but I definitely got the feeling that Little Malcolm may have been the first and last time George ever went to a play. But he was a big, big fan of it and also a big fan of [its star] Johnny Hurt, so he was in our corner already. Also, at the time, the other Beatles all had a film gig, John had done Imagine, Paul, I guess, directed Magical Mystery Tour, and Ringo was in Candy and The Magic Christian. So the only one without a film gig was George. He financed Malcolm through a company called Suba Films, which existed solely to receive profits from the animated Yellow Submarine. It was financed entirely by Yellow Submarine! It wasn’t a big budget, somewhere around a million, million and a half pounds – not expensive. He financed it top to bottom. He stepped up, wrote the cheque, and we made the movie.”
Little Malcolm is the story of Malcolm Scrawdyke (Hurt), a delusional Hitlerite revolutionary, who plots his revenge after his expulsion form college, by forming the Party of Dynamic Erection, with fellow slackers, Wick (McEnery), Irwin (Platt) and Nipple (Warner). Malcolm’s battle is against an unseen enemy, and the film is a mix of Young Adolf meets Baader-Meinhof via Billy Liar.
Halliwell wrote Little Malcolm in 1965, it was his first and most successful play. Directed by Mike Leigh, the role of Malcolm was originally played by Halliwell, who explained his thoughts behind the drama at the time:
“The Nazis made a big impression on people of my age, they almost destroyed Europe. But as well as being pretty threatening they were also seen as a laughing stock even during the war.”
The play’s director, Mike Leigh had a different view of Halliwell and the production, as he wrote for Halliwell’s obituary in 2006:
David Halliwell was a loner. He lived alone and, typically, it seems he died alone. Indeed, his eponymous loner, Little Malcolm Scrawdyke, was in many ways a self-portrait, although David always denied this. Having met at Rada and become close friends, he and I founded Dramagraph with Philip Martin in 1965, and I directed and designed our original production of Little Malcolm at Unity Theatre. David played Scrawdyke. He was impossible to direct, resisted cuts, and the production was famously overlong and unwieldy. But it was and remains a magnificent piece of writing, and it is truly tragic that this quite brilliant and original dramatist procrastinated for the remaining 40 years of his life.
...pioneered the idea of lunchtime theatre and multi-viewpoint drama and left his mark on several close collaborators, including Mike Leigh.
Unfortunately, through his determination to do things his way, Halliwell never fully developed his ideas, and as Billington noted, “Halliwell suffered the fate of the pioneer whose ideas are refined and improved by later practitioners”.
Originally Little Malcolm ran for 6 hours, but after subbing by Leigh, it transferred to London’s West End, where John Hurt took over the title role - it was a career defining performance - one of many in Hurt’s case - and after a short run, moved to Dublin and New York. The play won Halliwell a Most Promising Newcomer Award, and also attracted Harrison’s interest, enough for the Beatle to bank roll the movie. But once made, the film was caught up in The Beatles’ acrimonious split, as Cooper explained:
“In the end, we got hung up by the Beatles’ breakup, when all of the Apple and Beatles assets went into the official receiver’s hands. So Little Malcolm just basically sat there for a couple of years. Whatever heat and buzz we generated was all lost. It didn’t diminish the movie but it stopped the momentum. George had to fight to get it back.
“Berlin was the first airing we managed, but it won best direction and the response was incredible. We got great reviews from Alexander Walker and Margaret Hinxman, but by then it really didn’t have any legs. It was a film that got lost, and I had to put it on a shelf and say to myself, well, there might be a day for that one day – and here we are now, after so many years.”
In 1974, Little Malcolm won the Silver Bear at Berlin Film festival. It was Cooper’s first, he won a second in 1975 with Overlord before directing Hurt, Warner and Donald Sutherland in the film version of Derek Marlowe‘s The Disappearance in 1977.
Endlessly creative artist collage/mosaic artist Jason Mecier’s new exhibit “Licorice Flix, Edible Movie Mosaics” also features portraits of Harry Potter, Willy Wonka, ET, Elizabeth Berkley in Show Girls and Freddy Krueger rendered in Red Vines®. As usual, they’re pretty amazing.
Appropriately, there is a portrait of Charlie Chaplin included. It’s a little-known fact that the shoe the Little Tramp boils and eats in The Gold Rush was made of licorice by the American Licorice Company, the same company who make Red Vines® (and who are sponsoring the art show).
The show is opening at the IAm8Bit Gallery at 2147 W. Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles, with a reception for the artist on November 4 from 7-10 PM.
