==pla|\|ing lakes==
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
but of course. . .
R.I.P. Ingmar Bergman & Tom Snyder
9:28 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
nice piece on david lynch in The Age, the Australian daily [pop candy]Lynch is the opposite of another exceptional American filmmaker, Robert Altman. Whereas Altman starts with multiple, incoherent strands and pulls them together, Lynch starts with a conventional story and allows it to implode. Inland Empire is his most experimental film yet - we are never sure what is real, fictional or dreamed, nor in what order events happen. He has become the William Burroughs of cinema, taking apart plots and characters, and randomly glueing them back together.
8:54 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Friday, July 27, 2007
new mp3/cd-r label worth a look: TIBProd. [EARlabs]
10:55 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Thursday, July 26, 2007
the passing of an english institution, in the best way
R.I.P. George Melly [bliss blog]George Melly, who has died aged 80, was one of the most genial and genuinely popular figures in the world of British entertainment. Dressed like a 30s gangster or a 40s Harlem hipster, a huge hat on his large head, his ample figure and rubbery face, with its mischievous hint of Mr Toad, were warmly welcomed wherever he went. He was a "personality" who actually had personality, a jazz singer who was also a cultural commentator, a devotee of the Surrealists who wrote the story-lines of a cartoon-strip. Presenter-performer, autobiographer, libertarian and in his own word "tart", he was "Good-Time George".i remember seeing articles on him in the british press in the 70s when i discovered what a world of music -- and artistic personalities -- was out there.
not my style of music but my kind of guy.
7:51 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
my kind of shrink [gibson]
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Wednesday, July 25, 2007
2 from pop candy, can you tell i'm clearing out my feed archive?
some ecards & obtusity's analysis of bowie via his videos
2:33 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
brain men david byrne & daniel levitin tell you why music uh works [pop candy]
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Trailer for No End in Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq
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Sunday, July 22, 2007
nice
Hell on Bangs [pop candy]Like many rock writers Lester took extreme stances, but unlike the other most flamboyantly contrary of them, he didn't paint himself into a minuscule corner of supported music, and he didn't go sour with cynicism and resentment (or maybe he did a little toward the end—1982 for Lester—when punk seemed to end up genuinely, fatally, hopeless). Lester was large and he was interested in doing what was right—which sometimes entailed willfully offending those whose values he opposed—not merely being right in his taste and musical standards. He wanted to learn. What's appealing about him is the same thing that he valued in the music he wrote about: the life in it—engagement with and responsiveness to the world.
6:09 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
nicely sour piece on wolcott's blog about why romantic comedies died with hitler's invasion of polandMy problem with Denby's essay, apart from the yawning obviousness of some of the complaints he lodges [about] our cinematic fall from grace, is his definition of the essential message of the genre.And i want to read The Runaway Bride now.
"Romantic comedy is entertainment in the service of the biological imperative. The world must be peopled. Even if the lovers are past child-rearing age or, as in recent years, don't want children, the biological imperative survives, as any evolutionary psychologist will tell you, in the flourishes of courtship behavior."
I haven't run into any evolutionary psychologists lately but the go-forth-and-multiply edict from The Taming of the Shrew that Denby puts in patriarchal italics doesn't seem to me to explain in the tiniest bit the appeal or urgency of classic romantic comedies, where if anything the biological imperative seemed to have been suspended, put on hold, magically arrested.
1:49 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Friday, July 20, 2007
"schoolbus. . . or lightbulb?"
Having just downloaded a bittorrent file of Laurie Anderson's 1986 concert movie Home of the Brave, I insist someone tell me why this classic isn't on DVD?
except for a reference to floppy discs, it hasn't aged a bit.
ok, having scoped her site i see there will soon be a dvd box set of HOTB + her videos, and that Big Science was re-released on Wednesday last.
now if only someone could talk her into performing United States in front of a camera. . .
9:17 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Walmart & Fedex replace FEMA in flooded Texas [beyond the beyond]
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Saturday, July 14, 2007
one of the coolest ladies on the planet
also from asphodel, ann magnuson's new album Pretty Songs and Ugly Stories
one of the lower east side crew from the post-punk era, hope she gains an audience worthy of her talent now.
her blog & myspace page & homepage.
11:14 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
german (natch) ensemble zeitkratzer will release their live acoustic score of lou reed's notorious Metal Machine Music in September [thanks, jeph!]“The idea [to play Metal Machine Music live] was born a few years ago in a discussion with ULRICH KRIEGER, the saxophone player of ZEITKRATZER,” says REINHOLD FRIEDL, the group’s director. “We thought Metal Machine Music was a very important piece, comparable with the contemporary music pieces of that time. It’s constructed in a very orchestral way, so we thought this music asks for a live instrumentation. Ulrich and Luca Venitucci created a score and I think it really worked. We had already worked with noise musicians like MERZBOW or ZBIGNIEW KARKOWSKI and we’ve worked with electronics, manipulating and reworking our instrumental techniques with ‘electronic’ sounds. Ulrich’s and Luca’s transcription of Metal Machine Music is a 34 page score, which is a real masterwork of instrumentation. It includes orchestration techniques that you hear in DEBUSSY compositions, like mixtures of sounds.” zeitkratzer was clearly ready for the challenges of performing Metal Machine Music live, and drew packed houses to their presentation of the work. It reinforced their assertion that “rock ’n’ roll as serious contemporary music has been ignored for too long, in too arrogant a way.”
11:04 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Danah Boyd and online netorkingThrough her observations, Boyd has become one of the chief thinkers of the MySpace age. Her work tells us about the people who inhabit this new world, what they do there, and why. Boyd says online social networks have become a vital space for young people to express themselves and build their personal identities. While adults worry about the culture and dangers their children are exposed to on the internet, she says that what parents think children do online and what they are actually doing is very different. She defends a technology that has repercussions far beyond teenagers and could change the way all of us order our world, interact with each other, get information and do business.
“[Talking to people online] was so empowering for me as a kid, as a teen,” Boyd said recently when I visited her small white-stuccoed home near Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Boyd is 28 and has blonde spiky hair, brown eyes, rings on her toes, and today was wearing an orange T-Shirt that asked, Got Attitude? She speaks in a lively high-pitched voice that grows even more excitable when she talks about her all-consuming passion: social networks. She had just moved to LA to take up a one-year post at the University of Southern California, where she will study technology’s impact on society. “I am what I am because of what I have done online,” she said as she sat cross-legged amid the clutter of her move, cradling her beloved Apple Mac laptop. “I want teens today to have the same power.”
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R.I.P. Jim Mitchell [Stop Smiling]
a sad story indeed.
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USPS: hard copies going to be harder to get, one way or another [hacking netflix]"We're already seeing signs that we're at the point now where people are seriously measuring the effectiveness of mail against alternative mechanisms, such as e-mailing or retailing or telemarketing to your known customer base, shifting to direct response TV or any of the other channels that previously one would have looked at and said, 'God, these are expensive venues.' Now, all of a sudden, they're looking at them and they're saying, 'Well, the cost of those venues are coming down but the cost of mail is going up.'"
That means there are a lot of unknowns about what the system will look like in the future, said [Gene Del Polito, president of the American Association for Postal Commerce, which represents advertising mailers].
"Sooner or later we're probably going to have to make a decision as a nation as to whether or not the core services that are provided for free are going to be done the way that they are today, or whether they're going to be offered in a more restricted capacity and in a more cost efficient capacity," he said.
For example, he suggested the possibility of requiring centralized delivery and allowing the consumer pay something extra to get actual delivery service to the door.
"Now, when you do that, that means you must also give the consumer the opportunity to say what I want to get and what I don't want to get, and that could change the nature of the postal system," Del Polito said.
12:40 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
Friday, July 13, 2007
from what i can glean from the netflix page for factory Girl, it's a beautiful mistake which will be worth watching at least for guy pearce's take on warhol, and should light a fire under someone to do a film which does justice to the sublimely repelling atmosphere of the factory
it's out on disc on tuesday.
also from davis dvd -- friedkin's bug out in september (i have a hunch this was promoted as something it wasn't and may be his best since to live and die in l.a.); and there will be a director's cut of fincher's zodiac out next year on 2 discs (vanilla disc out week after next).
11:06 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Prince is killing the music industry
just like you. . .
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Wednesday, July 11, 2007
R.I.P. Charles Lane
What a career!
He's everywhere, but you couldn't picture him I'll bet.
10:55 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Another source for compulsive book buyers like me: BookMooch [God is not an asshole]
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Monday, July 09, 2007
Nice buttons [neurastenia]
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If you've been to a health market in the last 30 years (or more), you've probably seen a display of Dr Bronner's Magic Soap products, with the exhausting screed on the labels; now, see the film
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Huldufolk 102 [magpie]
8:21 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Kent Jones of Cinemascope on the foreign language debuts of Hou Hsiao Hsien & Wong Kar-WaiWorking in a foreign language and a foreign city, Hou either can not or will not do what he does so effortlessly in, say, the central section of Three Times — which is to convey the emotions and values of the story he’s telling on the most subtly expressive terms imaginable, through the means of his extraordinary camera eye, his apparently unerring sense of tone and movement within the frame, his remarkable ability to lay pace and structure in perfect harmonic balance with the narrative. In other words, he avails himself of two dramatic devices —the balloon and the au pair — of which he would have no need were he working on home ground. It seems to me that this is a forgivable shortcoming, and it represents the kind of adjustment made by many emigrሆilmmakers in Hollywood during the ‘30s and ‘40s, who had to find alternate means of conveying certain ideas, themes and emotions without the benefit of cultural shorthand. [link]
9:15 PM - [Link] - Comments ()
Monday, July 02, 2007
R.I.P. Edward Yang
One of the trio of Taiwanese direntors (with Hou Hsiao Hsien & Tsai Ming-Liang) who impressed cinephiles so much over the last 25 years.
Only seen Yi Yi so far (not easy to see the rest).
Way before his time.
7:05 AM - [Link] - Comments ()
and s-integrator
@me
Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.
--Chris Marker