The magus of American cinema turns 85 today. I had the good fortune to see Kenneth recently at his MOCA opening and he’s looking rather hale and hearty for a man his age, I must say.
Anger’s musical collaboration with Brian Butler, Technicolor Skull, has recently produced a limited edition blood red vinyl album available only at the Technicolor Skull website (I have one, it’s a cool looking object).
Below, Anger’s short film made for the 2010 fall/winter collection of the house of Missoni:
Before the police dragged them off, the members of Pussy Riot, the Russian day-glo balaclava-clad punk rock protesters, sang their anthem “Revolt in Russia” (“Revolt in Russia – the charisma of protest / Revolt in Russia, Putin’s got scared!”) near the Kremlin. Their inspiration for a style of resistance never before seen in Russia, was the riot grrrl punk movement, including groups like Kathleen Hanna’s Bikini Kill, and flash mobs. The young women of the collective, average age 25, have revealed only the smallest details about their lives. None will divulge their day jobs. They only use first-names.
In the two weeks since their mid-January action, the all-female group has become a potent symbol of anger at the status quo in Russian society and their videos have gone viral all over the world. Like many young people in Russia, the members of the Pussy Riot collective are furious at Vladamir Putin’s plans to seek the presidency again and his return was the impetus behind the formation of the group (as well as their song “Putin Has Pissed Himself”). From The Guardian:
“We understood that to achieve change, including in the sphere of women’s rights, it’s not enough to go to Putin and ask for it,” said Garadzha. “This is a rotten, broken system.”
Her bandmate Tyurya said: “The culture of protest needs to develop. We have one form, but we need many different kinds.”
The band began writing songs with lyrics such as: “Egyptian air is good for the lungs / Do Tahrir on Red Square!” and performing on trams and in the metro. Videos of the flash gigs began spreading across the internet. When the protest leader Alexey Navalny was jailed for 15 days after his arrest during Russia’s first post-election protest on 5 December, three members of Pussy Riot took to the roof of the jail where he was being held, setting off red flares as they sang “Death to prison / Freedom to protest!”
The fear of arrest long ago left the band members, steeped in the tradition of illegal protest. “We have experience with it, we’ve been detained at protests before,” said Tyurya. “It’s not scary – you’re surrounded by good, normal people, those who protest against Putin.”
All eight women were detained during the Kremlin performance, questioned and released. Most got off with administrative fines rather than the 15-day jail sentences often doled out to those who stage illegal protests.
“The revolution should be done by women,” said Garazhda. “For now, they don’t beat or jail us as much.”
“There’s a deep tradition in Russia of gender and revolution – we’ve had amazing women revolutionaries.”
The band is getting ready for its next performance, something that usually takes a month to pull together. Its members don’t discuss plans on the telephone or give away details, out of fear that the security services will disrupt the project. Is what they do art or politics? “For us it’s one and the same.”
Despite projected temperatures of -20C, tens of thousands of protesters are expected to march on Bolotnaya Square, across from the Kremlin, on Saturday. The Russian presidential election will be held on March 4. Vladimir Putin, is, of course, expected to win handily.
Read more: Feminist punk band Pussy Riot take revolt to the Kremlin (The Guardian)
If you want to know what British TV was like in the 1970s, well, apart from watching the repeats on BBC4, this will give you a fair idea. Elton John and Michael Caine getting all “Knees-up Mother Brown” round the olde joanna on Michael Parkinson‘s show.
All this the same year The Sex Pistols released “Anarchy in the U.K.” on EMI, The Ramones singled “Blitzkreig Bop” and Patti Smith “Pissing in a River”. Cor blimey, guvnor.
In its 50 years of independence, Jamaica’s had an indelible influence on the global scene, mostly via its dizzyingly prolific music industry and sports stars. In terms of film, as iconic and authentic as movies like The Harder They Come, Rockers and Dancehall Queen are, they’re largely non-indigenous productions.
But recently, a new breed of grassroots digital DIY film- and video-makers have emerged who are depicting the zeitgeist on the island in ways that transcend the typical “yeah mon” stereotypes with which we’re too familiar.
One of these new breed is twenty-four-year-old Simon Thompson, who directs and edits video under the moniker Yosef Imagination. Along with videos for some of the island’s most well-known artists—including Capleton, Luciano, Fanton Mojah, Lutan Fyah—Thompson’s produced ads, short subjects and video series like the hilarious Konfu Dread, which has previously featuredhere. He’s currently at work on Zombie Flim, Jamaica’s first undead flick, which he’s uploading to his YouTube channel as he shoots and cuts.
Thompson’s work is pretty impressive considering that he’s got no formal training and has been at it for a little under two years. He’s also shot virtually all his stuff on Canon T2i and Canon 5D digital still cameras rather than conventional camcorders.
Videographers like Thompson are composing a wide-ranging vision of a young, energetic and cosmopolitan Jamaica, mindful of its cultural history and struggles, yet infatuated with what’s next in music, technology and style. And yes, it’s a vision that’s imbued with the indefatigable sense of humor that typifies life on the island.
Thompson explains how his stuff differs from that of the island’s street-side genre directors:
I looked around in Jamaica and realized the quality and the topics of our film industry is pretty much the same from filmmaker to film maker. I wanted to show Jamaica in a different light. We’re not all gangsters we don’t all smoke weed and we don’t all push violence towards others who don’t have the same viewpoint we have. I want and will continue to push for change, push for a difference in Jamaica’s thinking, showing the youths that, hey, we can make quality films that don’t have to be about gangsters and politics.
I also try to include alot of humour in the projects from Yosef Imagination showing people a lighter and more free-spirited vibration of the Jamaican people and culture.
And what does the future hold?
I see Yosef Imagination as a Paramount Pictures or a Universal Pictures eventually…the sky is no limit to our imagination ....Yosef Imagination is limitless.
Here’s one of the most hectically paced YI pieces yet: a multi-artist jam on the Bipolar riddim…
After the jump…more music vids and Jamaica’s first zombie film!
Sir George Martin, Giles Martin and Dhani Harrison, listening to the multi-track master of “Here Comes The Sun,” reveal the audio channel with George Harrison’s “lost solo guitar.”
Kind of like X-raying a great painting and finding something significant underneath the surface. Sublime!
Apparently, the “small penis rule” is a sneaky defense strategy authors can use to save themselves from libel lawsuits. Here it is described in a New York Times article from 1998:
...For a fictional portrait to be actionable, it must be so accurate that a reader of the book would have no problem linking the two,” said Mr. Friedman. Thus, he continued, libel lawyers have what is known as “the small penis rule.” One way authors can protect themselves from libel suits is to say that a character has a small penis, Mr. Friedman said. “Now no male is going to come forward and say, ‘That character with a very small penis, that’s me!
The small penis rule was referenced in a 2006 dispute between Michael Crowley and Michael Crichton. Crowley alleged that after he wrote an unflattering review of Crichton’s novel State of Fear, Crichton libeled him by including a character named “Mick Crowley” in the novel Next. In the novel, Mick Crowley is a child rapist, described as being a Washington-based journalist and Yale graduate with a small penis.
I did not know about this. I guess you do learn something new everyday.
When it was originally transmitted in 2010 on BBC2, the extremely dark and terrifically twisted sitcom pilot Lizzie and Sarah went out at 11:45 on a Saturday night, almost as if the network wanted to leave it on the doorstep quietly in the middle of the night.
Once you’ve watched it, it’s understandable why BBC2 controllers might have felt this way and why a full series was never produced. Lizzie and Sarah is excruciatingly inappropriate, but my god is it one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life.
There is a particular type of bleaker than bleak comedic genius that runs through the work of co-creator Julia Davis (Nighty Night, Human Remains), a nightmarish and jaundiced appraisal of human relationships that is perhaps the darkest vision of ANYBODY working in comedy today. In collaboration with the equally brilliant Jessica Hynes (co-creator of Spaced) the pitch black brutality at the heart of Davis’s work has been egged on to an even more perverse place for their pathetic take on Thelma and Louise. They make a fantastic onscreen team and I can only imagine how much fun the writing sessions were.
Here’s how the Beeb described Lizzie and Sarah at the time:
Lizzie and Sarah are two fiftysomething suburban housewives, perpetually mistreated and ignored by unloving, selfish husbands. The highlight of their otherwise dull lives is their role in an amateur dramatic society, The Borking Players. In the aftermath of a tragic accident which causes the death of a popular local teenager, emotions run high, and following a dismal birthday lunch for Sarah, the two friends embark on a spur-of-the-moment shopping trip. As the day unfolds, they find a way to wreak their revenge
Although there is nothing untrue in the above synopsis, don’t think for a second that you know what this piece is about…
Lizzie and Sarah stretches the definition of what comedy can be further than anything since the debut of the League of Gentlemen or Davis’s career-defining 2004 role as monstrously selfish beautician Jill Tyrell in her Nighty Night series.
Since its original ignominious transmission, Lizzie and Sarah has steadily picked up a legion of fans via torrent trackers and friends foisting it upon unsuspecting friends, who are either appalled by what they see or become fans themselves. It’s rather impossible to feel lukewarm about Lizzie and Sarah. You’re either going to love it the way you first loved John Waters early films or else it’ll just depress the shit out of you and make you want to cry.
I see this Frank Zappa quote pop up on my Facebook feed from time to time and I think it needs to be parked right here on Dangerous Minds, too. Advice like this never gets old.
I’m Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes - The Man and His Work directed by one of the finest writers on the planet Michael Ventura was shot during the making of Cassavetes’ final personal film Love Streams in 1984. One of Cassavetes’ best and most underappreciated films (so what the fuck else is new?), Love Streams is inexplicably and appallingly unavailable on DVD in the USA.
I think Ventura’s extraordinary gifts as a writer provided him with the necessary insight on the creative process and a kindred spirit’s respect for Cassavetes’ incisive skill with the spoken word and empathy for the ways human beings try to find a language for the inexpressible that makes this documentary connect on a visceral level.
Cassavetes’ obsession to get at the “heart of the matter,” to find the essential truth that animates our being, to cut through the bullshit, is as spiritual a journey as any in the history of film. As a young man pounding my fists against the walls of my own masculinity, I found Cassavetes films liberating. Beneath the machismo and testosterone-fueled angst of his male protagonists, there exists a tenderness, vulnerability and uncertainty that belies the inherited social concepts of masculinity. Cassavetes’ men are tough guys clawing at their macho veneer like caged animals desperate to find that one exist point where they can burst free.
Cassavetes died on this day in 1989 and we present this very special documentary in honor of one of America’s pioneers of indy cinema and an artist of profound depth.
And there is no honoring Cassavetes, without giving equal honor to the phenomenal Gena Rowlands. Has there been a more dynamic collaboration between husband and wife in cinema? And that is not a rhetorical question. Let me know what you think.
Love Streams is available on import DVD. Michael Ventura’s book “Cassavetes Directs: John Cassavetes and the Making of Love Streams” can be purchased here.
I am still rather taken with the design for Public Image Limited’s 1986 Album. Yes, I know Generic Flipper did it first, but Lydon and co. did it better.
It is always good to have reader feedback on Dangerous Minds and recently Jenny Lens’ interesting comments on Anaïs Nin made me dust off my copies and revisit Nin’s books and diaries. This, of course, led me to check out what is available on You Tube, which uncovered these 4 clips, which appear to have been mainly taken from the documentary Anaïs Nin Observed (1974).
In the first clip, Anaïs explains how her diary started out as a letter to her father, and how it became an “inner journey”. This leads on to Nin reunited with Henry Miller where they discuss the importance of the artist as a liberator.
In the second clip Anaïs discusses art, the artist, and creative anger, concluding that she likes to “feel I have transcended my destiny.”
In the third, Anaïs discusses her favorite heroines, including Lou Andreas-Salomé, the Russian psycho-analyst and author, who was friends with Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Andreas-Salomé was one of the first to write psycho-analytically about female sexuality, long before she met Freud, and was his associate in the creation of psycho-analysis. Nin also talks about Caresse Crosby co-founder of the Black Sun Press, publisher of Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, amongst many others, patron to the Arts, and inventor of the modern bra. Anaïs then goes on to talk about volume 5 of her Diaries and her experiences of taking LSD, and how she turned into gold. The clip cuts out just as Nin discusses not passing judgement on her characters.
In the fourth, Nin and Henry Miller discuss “death in life”, dreams and the importance of recording them, and whether analysis will destroy the need for them.
More of Anaïs Nin (and Henry Miller), after the jump…
Usually their videos have millions of views on day one, but this one seems to have slipped out unnoticed, relatively speaking. There is also an OK Go color game at Sesame Street.com.
Directed by Al Jarnow, the animator responsible for the iconic “Cosmic Clock” short. This is his first new work for Sesame Street in over 25 years.
Using a silent video (from 8 mm film footage) uploaded to Vimeo by Ruby Max Fury, Clash fans synched audio from bootleg recordings to the film to re-create a sense of what it was like on the night of September 21, 1979 when the The Clash invaded New York City. The second night of a two night stand at The Palladium, this was the show where Paul Simonon made rock history when he smashed his guitar to the stage and Pennie Smith took the iconic photo that graced the cover of London Calling.
In February of ‘79, I was in the audience for The Clash’s NYC debut. Standing in the swaying balcony and watching the The Clash pummel and strafe the audience with rock so hard you could feel it in your guts, I knew instantaneously I was witnessing a band for the ages. If there had been any doubt that punk bands could play their instruments, The Clash crushed that myth beneath a barrage of tight visceral beats and lacerating guitars. It was epic. And it was very very good.
Writer Tom Carson described The Clash live sound beautifully:
The musicians’ confidence was evident at every turn. Lead guitarist Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon leaped around as if no stage could hold them; Nicky Headon’s drums cracked through the music with the authority of machine-gun fire. The group’s perfect ensemble timing - the two guitars locking horns above the percussion; the way Jones’ ethereal, incantatory backup vocals filled the gaps in Joe Strummer’s harsh leads - went beyond mere technical mastery; it was audible symbols of the band’s communal instinct.
[The title is not a joke, but you’ll have to bear with me…]
You’d think that as the parent of a child with a rare genetic disorder, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum would have deep empathy for a fellow parent of a child with a rare genetic disorder—or if he was a true Christian as he claims to be, even support universal healthcare for everyone’s children—but… NOPE!
Tuesday, speaking to a crowd of more than 400 people in Woodland Park, Colorado, Santorum told this woman that free market capitalism should set prices for drugs, whether she could afford it for her kid or not. Via Crooks and Liars:
“People have no problem paying $900 for an iPad,” the candidate explained. “But paying $900 for a drug they have a problem with — it keeps you alive. Why? Because you’ve been conditioned to think health care is something you can get without having to pay for it.”
The mother replied that she could not afford her son’s medication, Abilify, which can cost as much as $1 million a year without health insurance.
“Look, I want your son and everybody to have the opportunity to stay alive on much-needed drugs,” Santorum insisted. “But the bottom line is, we have to give companies the incentive to make those drugs. And if they don’t have the incentive to make those drugs, your son won’t be alive and lots of other people in this country won’t be alive.”
“He’s alive today because drug companies provide care,” the candidate continued. “And if they didn’t think they could make money providing that drug, that drug wouldn’t be here. I sympathize with these compassionate cases. … I want your son to stay alive on much-needed drugs. Fact is, we need companies to have incentives to make drugs. If they don’t have incentives, they won’t make those drugs. We either believe in markets or we don’t.”
How’s about when it comes to healthcare, we don’t believe that free markets are the way to go? It’s as if the thought that there might be ANY other way of doing it never even entered this asshole’s mind or like he was prevented from grokking it by some sort of alien brain structure Republicans have that rejects common sense.
It’s painful to watch, but at the heart of this exchange is something that I think more and more American women—including, yes, even some Christian, conservative women—are going to realize as this election cycle goes on: Republican policies are bad for America’s children.
They don’t want universal healthcare. They’ve got health insurance for their families, so fuck yours.
They don’t want to pay for public schools. Their kids go to private schools, so fuck yours.
How much more obvious can they get before even the most brain-damaged Fox News viewer finally picks up on the fact that this country is going to Hell in a handbasket if the GOP is allowed to gut spending on healthcare, education, infrastructure and social services any more than the cowardly Democrats have already allowed them to. It’s getting obvious that America is becoming a meaner, shittier place to live and raise a family. The Republicans don’t care about the environment, woman’s health matters, the unemployed… What won’t they attack?
Despite what this pious hypocrite seem to believe, where does it say in the Bible that Rick Santorum’s kids should have the best medical care money can buy, but your kids..? Uh, sorry Charlie, that’s just the way the fucking free market works.
There are winners and losers in life and in Capitalism, so buck up, America! It’s God’s will that your kid died, even if you don’t believe in God!
If you ask me, one of the greatest untapped political forces that this country could ever see would be a movement comprised of mothers who know in their hearts that this country is engaging in a race straight to the bottom when men like Rick Santorum have the loudest voices in our society. An informed mother’s movement that knows exactly who (they do have names, addresses and Social Security numbers, of course) were responsible for flushing the future of America’s children down the toilet, would be a deadly Leviathan to the Republican Party and scare the shit out of the goddamned Democrats, too.
I’m a man, so forgive me for saying so, but I do feel strongly that right now is an appropriate historical moment and opportunity to redefine and expand upon the definition of what “Feminism” means for a new century’s evolutionary needs. I’m not saying that motherhood per se would be the necessary requirement, but I am suggesting that it might be the right time for a “new” kind of woman’s movement, not exactly Lysistrata but something along those lines.
Imagine, if you will, how a female politician would have answered that woman’s question in Colorado on Tuesday. This country would be a lot better off if more smart, progressive women would start running for state, local and national elections, because idiots like Rick Santorum are never going to change anything for the better, as he ably demonstrated in the way he answered this question. He should be ashamed to admit to such thoughts in public and yet this bozo thinks he should be elected President saying them aloud with a microphone in front of his face! It’s astonishing how misguided this chump is.
(BTW, note that Sartre’s cigarette was airbrushed out in the above image, one of the posters for France’s National Library event celebrating his life and work in 2005. Ridiculous historical revisionism to do that to one of history’s most-committed chain-smokers, obviously, but necessary to circumvent prosecution under France’s strict anti-tobacco laws.)
“If what you got is common sense, hell, I don’t want none!”
If you enjoy radio shows where supposedly straight men discuss buttsecks, then “Peter LaBarbera’s Americans For Truth About Homosexuality Radio Hour” program is the show for you! On a recent installment, LaBarbera welcomed fellow anti-gay activist, North Carolina Pastor Patrick Wooden.
“[...] responded to critics over his comments that he has an “anal obsession.” Wooden has claimed that gay men have to “wear a diaper or a butt plug just to be able to contain their bowels” when they are older as a result of shoving cellphones, baseball bats and animals in their anus. Wooden told LaBarbera that anal obsession is “the very basis of homosexuality” and he simply wants to tell gay men to “get it together, let the Lord deliver you and let God give you a woman, a wife, where you can enjoy the pleasures of a wife” and stop “participating in these perversive, sexual acts”
From the interview:
Wooden: Now it is amazing that you and I are called men who have the obsession with the anus, right? Anal obsession, is that what she said? Is that not the very basis of homosexuality? We’re not homosexuals. What we’re saying is, we’re saying to men, ‘hey, let’s get it together, let the Lord deliver you and let God give you a woman, a wife, where you can enjoy the pleasures of a wife.’ Now you’re talking about a case of the pot calling the kettle black, we have no anal-obsession, but we are armed with the truth about the damage that people are doing to their rectums and anuses as a result of participating in these perversive, sexual acts.
After going off on a tangent about Tyler Perry, Flip WIlson and Ru Paul, Wooden is asked about Oprah Winfrey:
LaBarbera: Now let’s go to a black liberal, Oprah, I wanted to get you to comment. I saw one of her final episodes before she went off the air, now she’s on her own network, she ended it and she had this appeal on homosexuality. When I looked in her eyes, I saw somebody who had become a hardened supporter of so-called same-sex so-called marriage, she has evolved, she has rejected her Christian upbringing, whatever Christian upbringing she had Patrick, she was a hardcore supporter of homosexuality and I wonder how that happened. Do you think that’s just a factor of swimming in that Hollywood environment?
Wooden: I think it is; I think it is a factor of swimming. I think and this is just my opinion I’ve never talked to Oprah in my life, I think it is part of the price that she had to pay in order to build her empire. I would say to her if I had the chance, hey Oprah what has a man or a woman profited if they gain the world and lose their souls, if they gain the world and lose themselves?
As the Firesign Theatree once said, “A stiff idiot is the worst kind!” I’d imagine that if Pastor Wooden actually had a chance to voice his anal obsessions to Oprah, she’d probably just react the way most normal people would, by telling him to go fuck himself. and mind his own business.
Bad Rave Flyers is “a blog dedicated to showcasing the worst and most lazy in graphic design for club and rave flyers.” Says the anonymous author:
I spend a lot of time looking at event listings on messageboards. I’ve always been fascinated by how bad most rave & club flyers are, especially ones for events with mostly local DJs. As a testament to this, I’ve decided to compile my favorites into one place.
Indeed, some of these flyers are terrible. But before we go laughing ourselves into a false sense of superiority, it has to be stated that EVERYONE who has been involved in djing or club promoting has at some point created their own bad rave flyer. I still have mine lurking at the back of a closet somewhere. It may not be as bad as these, but consider it a rite of passage every club industry professional must go through.
