The Edge Of Dreaming, Amy Hardie’s investigation into the prophetic quality of dreams has just opened theatrically in Manhattan. It was broadcast on PBS last August. And you can stream it now from Netflix.

My dream life has been very active of late and I’m starting to pay more and more attention to the patterns of images and information in my dreams. I feel as though I’ve never taken my dreams seriously enough, which is odd, considering how much time I spend dreaming and how often the dreams do seem to be sending messages, teachings or warnings. So, Amy Hardie’s film is of great interest to me. Are dreams cognitive tendrils into the future? Should we give them more respect by simply paying more attention to them.

Do dreams, especially the portentous kind that you cannot easily shake off, predict the future? That question is investigated in “The Edge of Dreaming,” a deeply personal film by Amy Hardie, a Scottish science documentarian whose world was shaken after she experienced a series of related nightmares.

The first, in which her beloved horse keeled over and died, so alarmed Ms. Hardie that she ran out of her house in the Scottish Borders and found him dead of a heart attack. In the second, her oldest child’s father, who had died in 2004, appeared and told her sadly that her 48th year (the one that was coming up) would be her last. The third dream showed her how she would die.

Ms. Hardie, who is married to a psychotherapist, became obsessed with the possibility that the dreams were prophecies. She became even more frightened after she developed a mysterious breathing ailment that threatened to collapse her lungs.

“The Edge of Dreaming,” which carries her through her 49th birthday, does not have the trappings of a psychological horror film. Ms. Hardie, a self-described scaredy-cat since childhood, systematically searches for explanations, both medical and spiritual. She studies Jung; consults with Mark Solms, a neuroscientist; and ultimately revisits her dreams with a shaman. This shamanic journey is visualized in an extended montage sequence.

“The Edge of Dreaming” is not the confession of a true believer who has found the Answer but of an intelligent woman with an open mind and heart who embarked on a serious metaphysical quest.

If you have a Netflix account, stream here. This compelling interview with Hardie should pique your interest.
 

 
Here’s a compilation of video clips made in the 1960s for French television. Most of these videos were new to me when I discovered them and the quality is impressive.

The Spencer Davis Group, The Equals, Vince Taylor, Tom Jones, Jacques Dutronc, Johnny Hallyday, Francoise Hardy and Marianne Faithfull.

If you love this stuff and must have more, it’s available on import DVD here. It ain’t cheap and you’ve got to have an all-region DVD player, but man what a goldmine.

 
Proshot high quality video of the Bad Brains playing in Florida on March 20, 1987. Shorter clips from this show have appeared on the Internet but nowhere near this quality. This is the Bad Brains’ performance in full and it looks and sounds great.

The Chevrolet banner hanging from the stage declares that “This is the heartbeat of America.”  I agree. But the college kids on spring break that make up the audience seem clueless.

Setlist:

1. Intro
2. I
3. House of Suffering
4. Daytripper/ She’s a Rainbow
5. She is Calling you
6. The Youth are getting Restless
7. I against I
8. At the Movies

total runtime 24:49:21
 

 
Here’s an incredibly generous and, truth be told, unconventional (hello Kate Bush !) look at the so-called genre known by some as Shoegaze. I personally can’t stand the term (yes I’m being sarcastic in my use of the word in the masthead here on DM) despite the fact that my early-mid 90’s band Medicine is often lumped in with it. But Mr. Ning Nong here has not only shown the excellent/highly questionable taste to lead off with Medicine but to also include many other possibly controversial, yet tasty choices. It would be churlish to complain when being presented with 3 bleedin’ hours of the stuff though, right ?
 

A fresh, sun-drenched Typecast from Boston mainstay Ning Nong, diving into the world of classic guitar rock and indie some of us are still so afraid of. Go on, dip your toe in – nobody’s watching I promise.
If you like this, check the Ning Nong Radio show on WZBC 90.3 Boston every Tuesday evening (10-12) for more epic musical voyages.

 
1. Medicine – One More (Creation)
2. Serena-Maneesh – Honeyjinx (4AD)
3. Slowdive – Morningrise (Creation)
4. Arab Strap – Last Orders (Chemikal Underground)
5. Yo La Tengo – Saturday (Matador)
6. Unrest – Imperial (Teen Beat)
7. Moose – Suzanne (Hut)
8. Altar Eagle – Spy Movie (Type)
9. His Name Is Alive – Lip (4AD)
10. Swirlies – Bell (Taang!)
11. Dinosaur Jr – In A Jar (sst)
12. Swervedriver – Duel (Creation)
13. The Verve – Drive You Home (Hut)
14. Blur – Resigned (Food)
15. Pale Saints – Kinky Love (4AD)
16. The House Of Love – Love In A Car (Creation)
17. Ride – Like A Daydream (Creation)
18. The Boo Radleys – Almost Nearly There (Creation)
19. Teenage Fanclub – Alcoholiday (Creation)
20. The Jesus & Mary Chain – Something I Can’t Have (Blanco Y Negro)
21. Interpol – Not Even Jail (Matador)
22. Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci – Where Does Yer Go Now? (Mantra)
23. Mogwai – Year 2000 Non-Compliant Cardia (Chemikal Underground)
24. Sunset – Man’s Heart Complaint (Autobus)
25. Flying Saucer Attack – In The Light Of Time (Domino)
26. Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career (4AD)
27. My Bloody Valentine – Sometimes (Creation)
28. Swallow – Peekaboo (4AD)
29. Kate Bush – Cloudbusting (emi)
30. Tindersticks – Drunk Tank (This Way Up)
31. Bark Psychosis – All Different Things (Cheree)
32. David Sylvian – Let The Happiness In (Virgin)
33. Cocteau Twins – Ella Megalast Burls Forever (4AD)
 

 
With thanks to Danny Gromfin !

 
In 1975, a year before NASA’s Viking 1 spacecraft orbited Mars, Orson Welles presented Who’s Out There?, a NASA produced documentary examining the “likely existence of non-Earthly life in the universe.”

Thirty-six years on, this is a fascinating piece of archive, and rather timely with the news that NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory is due to be launched in November in a bid to make the first precision landing on Mars in August 2012.

Starting with H G Wells novel, and his own infamous radio production of The War of the Worlds, Welles, together with Carl Sagan, George Wald, Richard Berendzen and Philip Morrison, explore what was then “the new view of extraterrestrial life now emerging from the results of probes to the planets,” and conclude that “other intelligent civilizations exist in the universe.”

Carl Sagan:  The most optimistic estimates, in the view of many, about the number of civilizations that there might be in the galaxy is of the order of a million, which means that only one in a few hundred thousand stars has such civilizations.
 
George Wald:  That would mean a billion such places just in our own galaxy that might contain life.
 
Philip Morrison:  As I believe there’s a society of these groups, not just one, there’re probably very many.  There’s only one, we have no hope of finding them; there’re probably thousands, maybe as many as a million.  They probably already have had long history of this same experience, of finding new ones and bringing them into the network.
 
Carl Sagan:  And I would imagine, an advanced civilization wanted to talk to us, they would say “Oh, look, those guys must be extremely backwards, go into some ancient museum and pull out one of those – what are they called – radio telescopes and beam it at them.”

In summation, Welles says:

In 1976 we’re going to be able to explore Mars for perhaps not so humble microorganisms.  Before and after that, we’ll be searching the planets and the galaxies for clues to fill in the new patterns we’re discovering, the evolution of evolutions that has produced us and the possible millions of other civilizations….
 
...The difference between the spacecrafts of NASA and the lurid flying saucery of that old radio War of the Worlds is the difference between science and science fiction and, yes, between war and peace.  It’s our own world which has turned out to be the interplanetary visitor; we’re the ones who are moving out there, not with death rays but with cameras, not to conquer but simply to learn. We are in fact behaving ourselves far better out there than we ever have back here at home on our own planet.

 
Bonus - Orson Welles directs The Mercury Theater’s radio production of The War of the Worlds
 

 
Michael McClure, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at City Lights Books, 1966
 

Poet, playwright and novelist, Michael McClure discusses his “poetic processes and experiences with peyote” in this extract taken from the USA Poetry series by Richard O. Moore (1966).

A key figure in The Beats, a mentor to Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, McClure has just released his latest book of new and selected poetry Of Indigo and Saffron, details for which can be found here.
 

 
Via City Lights
 

 
In his 1986 New York Times best-seller The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, an examination of various bizarre neurological disorders, Oliver Sacks provided an account of oppositely impaired patients – aphasiacs, who can’t understand spoken words but do take in information from extra-verbal cues, and tonal agnosiacs, who understand the actual words but miss their emotional content – watching a speech by President Reagan.

“It was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice,” wrote Sacks, which caused the word-deaf aphasiacs to laugh hysterically at the Great Communicator, while one agnosiac, relying entirely on the actual words, sat in stony silence, concluding that “he is not cogent ... his word-use is improper” and suspecting that “he has something to conceal.”

“Here then,” wrote Sacks, “was the paradox of the President’s speech.  We normals – aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled ... And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived.”

Excerpted from the “Reagan Centennial Edition” of my 1989 book The Clothes Have No Emperor, available here as an enhanced eBook.

 
And this, my friends, is exactly why I hate fireworks.

(via HYST)

Photo by Michael Sheridan

Let it be no secret hyenas terrify the shit out of me. Ever since I saw these photos, the idea of hanging out with hyenas is my worst freakin’ nightmare. Ethiopia’s Hyena Man must have big balls… some seriously big balls. From world photographer Michael Sheridan:

Harar is a mainly Muslim town in Eastern Ethiopia. Hyenas are common in the area. Every night, they come to the outskirts of town where they are fed by the Hyena Man. The ritual is carried out whether or not there are any onlookers.

 
(via Arbroath)

 
Teen heartthrob Justin Bieber may just be a kid, and yet in a recent Rolling Stone interview, he demonstrated a level of political sophistication (not to mention common sense) that these brain-dead Tea bagger-types lack when he told journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis that he had no plans to ever become an American citizen:

“You guys are evil,” he says with a laugh. “Canada’s the best country in the world. We go to the doctor and we don’t need to worry about paying him, but here, your whole life, you’re broke because of medical bills. My bodyguard’s baby was premature, and now he has to pay for it. In Canada, if your baby’s premature, he stays in the hospital as long as he needs to, and then you go home.”

Seems like a good system to me.

However, instead of one of JB’s hits, let’s listen to BJ Snowden’s paean to our northern neighbor, “In Canada”:
 

 
Here’s an odd video short titled “Butterflies” directed by Sandro Miller, design/VFX by Gentleman Scholar and starring John Malkovich. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of information on “Butterflies” except for the folks who created it listed on its Vimeo page.

(via KFMW)

 
Plan B was an independent British music magazine that ran from 2004 to 2009. It was founded by Editor-in-Chief Everett True, one-time editor of both the Melody Maker and Vox magazine, as an antithesis of the mainstream press like the New Musical Express. Duly, it covered a diverse range of left-leaning music, had in-depth features from great writers, excellent illustrations, and was printed on heavy grade paper. Even though it only lasted for 46 issues Plan B felt like the last great hurrah of the British printing press, when people cared about the content they were placing in your hands. The entire back catalog of the magazine is now available via torrent from the Plan B website, and is highly recommended for anyone who likes quality, opinionated music writing. Everett True now runs the website Collapse Board, which is also highly recommended, not just for its criticisms of current music media practices (and the free press), but for highly subjective pieces like “Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend and the pernicious influence of Pitchfork”.
 

 

 
Serge Gainsbourg sings “Requiem Pour Un Con” from 1968 French film Le Pacha starring Jean Gabin.

What a sweet groove.

 
Can it be? Why, yes it can… announcing the LIVE debut of YouTube weirdo, Tonetta!

Yes, this Friday at Show Cave here in Los Angeles, the pervy, thong-wearing purveyor of his own special flavor of nasty ass R&B will be exhibiting his art and video work and doing a special live performance in celebration of his new album 777 Vol. II. So what if he looks like he’s got someone chained up in his basement, Tonetta knows how to party.

Show Cave, 3501 Eagle Rock Blvd , Los Angeles, CA.

Below, Tonetta wants to be your “drain” if you know what I mean and I think you do:
 

 
Thank you, Jason Louv!

 
A taste of things to come - two of David Lynch’s early films.

The Grandmother (1970):

The plot of the Grandmother centers around a boy who, looking for an escape from his abusive parents, grows a grandmother to comfort him. “There’s something about a grandmother…It came from this particular character’s need - a need that that prototype can provide. Grandmothers get playful. And they relax a little, and they have unconditional love. And that’s what this kid, you know, conjured up.”

The film has little dialog and combines animation with film, in its exploration of the “myths of birth, sexuality and death.”
 
The Alphabet (1968):

[David] Lynch’s wife, Peggy, told him of a dream her niece had during which she was reciting the alphabet in her sleep, then woke up and starting bouncing around repeating it. Lynch took this idea and ran with it. First he painted the walls of his upstairs bedroom black. Lynch painted Peggy’s face white to give her an un-real contrast to the black room, and had her bounce around the room in different positions as he filmed. This footage was edited together with an animated sequence where the letters of the alphabet slowly appear and a capital A gives birth to several smaller a’s which form a human figure.

 
The rest of ‘The Grandmother’ plus Lynch’s ‘The Alphabet’, after the jump…