Lots of musicians have studios; Trent Reznor [] has an alchemist’s laboratory. On hiatus from touring, the Nine Inch Nails frontman has stuffed a converted garage with blinking electronic doodads, from modded synthesizers and sequencers to archaic drum machines. Reznor is using all this gear for his new band, How to Destroy Angels. Here’s how one song off the group’s forthcoming EP evolved from a seeming cacophony of beats and weird noise into a dense, polyrhythmic track.
At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims.
“Go home,” several shouted from the crowd.
“Get out,” others shouted.
In fact, the two men – Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called “The Way.” Both said they had come to protest the mosque.
“I’m a Christian,” Nassralla shouted to the crowd, his eyes bulging and beads of sweat rolling down his face.
But it was no use. The protesters had become so angry at what they thought were Muslims that New York City police officers had to rush in and pull Nassralla and El Masry to safety.
At some point, we simply have to recognize that these people are the real useful idiots. Build the Ground Zero Mosque.
Parisa remembers the precise moment she heard her first song by Shahin Najafi, an Iranian rapper living in exile in Germany, on her illegal satellite television in the small city of Karadj, west of Tehran.
“His words cut through me like a knife,” she said.
Parisa, a 24-year-old university student, stayed up long after midnight one night, when the Internet connection was faster, and spent six hours downloading Mr. Najafi’s songs.
Since the Iranian authorities have cracked down on the demonstrations that rocked the country after a disputed election a year ago, a flood of protest music has rushed in to comfort and inspire the opposition. If anything, as the street protests have been silenced, the music has grown louder and angrier.
The government has tried all manner of methods to mute what has become known as “resistance music.” It has blocked Web sites used to download songs and shut down social networking sites, which the opposition also used to organize protests and distribute videos of government and paramilitary violence.
In April, a shadowy pro-government group that calls itself “the cyber army” shut down Mr. Najafi’s Web site. The group, which hacked Iranian Twitter in December, left a message saying the site had been “conquered by anonymous soldiers of Imam Zaman,” a reference to the Shiite messiah.
In late December, the authorities detained Shahram Nazeri, a prominent Persian classical musician who had recorded the song “We Are Not Dirt or Dust,” a tart response to the words President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used to characterize the antigovernment protesters. The government briefly took his passport, detained and intimidated him; he has not released anything since.
But clamping down on music in the digital age is like squeezing a wet sponge. Protest songs are downloaded on the Internet, sold in the black market or shared via Bluetooth, a wireless technology that Iranians have adapted to share files on cellphones, bypassing the Internet altogether. Fans have also made dozens of homemade videos, setting montages of protest images to music and posting them online.
Parisa first heard Mr. Najafi’s song on Pars TV, an opposition satellite channel beamed out of Los Angeles. And, despite being blocked by the government since last summer, Mr. Najafi’s Web site can still be found by computer-savvy Iranians with the help of circumvention software.
“Music has become a tool for resisting the regime,” said Abbas Milani, the director of Iranian studies at Stanford University. “Music has never been as extensive and diverse as it is today.”
The music of dissent spreads virally, so there are no Billboard or Nielsen SoundScan charts to quantify its popularity. But the anecdotal evidence is persuasive.
An opposition Web site has posted about 100 protest songs recorded since the election. About two dozen of them honor Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year-old teacher shot at a protest in Tehran in June who became an icon of the opposition after her last moments were captured on a video that has since been widely circulated.
Street vendors in Tehran sell bootleg CDs and MP3s at traffic lights for $2 or $3. Protest music plays on stereos at parties and from cars on the streets, Tehran residents say. Music blasting from car speakers at a stoplight has become one of the more public ways still available to signal to others that the spirit of struggle still lives.
The music can just as easily turn up in quiet and unexpected places. Niki, 25, who, like others quoted in this article, withheld her family name for fear of retribution, said that at a bookstore in downtown Tehran she found the salesman, a man in his 60s, weeping while listening to a new song by Mohammad Reza Shajarian called “Brother, Drop Your Gun.” After more than 70 protesters were killed by government and paramilitary forces during the postelection demonstrations, according to the opposition, the song, based on an old poem, was a melancholic plea to the soldiers to end the violence.
“I had seen people at protests carrying banners with those words, ‘Brother, drop your gun,’ ” Niki said, “but this scene was much more emotional.”
The government’s success in repressing dissent may help explain the increasingly angry tone the music has taken and the popularity of artists like Mr. Najafi, who tap that anger.
If Mohsen Namjoo, the folk troubadour whose poetic lyrics and tuneful melodies appeal to older listeners, is, as he has been called, the Persian Bob Dylan, Mr. Najafi may be the Rage Against the Islamic Revolutionary Machine, whose harsh lyrics and hip-hop beats have captivated Iranian youth.
His verses, according to e-mail messages he has received from former prisoners, have been scrawled on prison walls and hummed behind bars. His bitter ode to repression, “Our Doggy Life,” has become something of an anthem to a generation:
Shut your mouth; accept the condition; this is the tradition of the Prophet; accept it; man or woman, there is no difference, die; this is our doggy life.
As Mr. Najafi sees it, anger is an honest response to the beatings, killings and executions the government has meted out to dissidents.
“The anger in my music comes from deep within me,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Cologne, Germany. “I am a man who is always shouting sadly and angrily.”
A native of the Caspian city of Bandar Anzali, Mr. Najafi bought his first guitar when he was 18, and by 25 he had been thrown out of Iran for a song he wrote satirizing clerics. Although Iran’s ban on pop music, condemned by the revolution as un-Islamic, was softened in 2000, during the reform era of President Mohammad Khatami, only apolitical music was tolerated.
Mr. Najafi’s satirical “I Have a Beard” crossed the line, and a three-year prison sentence and 100 lashes await him if he returns. Like other Iranian artists in exile, his heart is bisected by borders: his life is in Germany, where he has artistic freedom, but his homeland will always be Iran.
Helplessly watching the events of last summer from about 2,500 miles away affected him deeply.
“I still belong to my country and feel their pain,” he said. “Distance has no meaning with Internet. We are a generation that was always suppressed and humiliated, which makes you sad and angry.”
The government-sponsored violence enraged other artists, too. In a song about last June’s election, Arash Sobhani, of the rock band Kiosk, calls the clerics who supervised the elections “dinosaurs” and says, “Compassion under the blow of batons; we all saw your justice.”
Even the Dylanesque Mr. Namjoo adopted more strident language in his last album, going so far as to ridicule the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the “supreme position of superiority.”
Although his lyrics are more metaphorical than Mr. Najafi’s, they, too, are angry.
“People are considered brave in Iran because whatever they do — from riding a motorcycle in the chaotic traffic of Tehran to staging protests against the government — is risky,” he said. “You have to constantly live with fear.”
Today, Mr. Namjoo lives in Palo Alto, Calif. But the fear, he said, never goes away.
Ken O'Keefe was on the Mavi Mamara, he describes some of the events as they unfolded for the people on board, from the taking of the ship to his and others experience imprisoned on land. From this experience he has issued a challenge to ANY Israeli apologists to debate him over the affair.
"Please explain how we, the defenders of the Mavi Mamara, are not the modern example of Gandhi’s essence? But first read the words of Gandhi himself. I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.... I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonour. – Gandhi And lastly I have one more challenge. I challenge any critic of merit, publicly, to debate me on a large stage over our actions that day. I would especially love to debate with any Israeli leader who accuses us of wrongdoing, it would be my tremendous pleasure to face off with you. All I saw in Israel was cowards with guns, so I am ripe to see you in a new context. I want to debate with you on the largest stage possible. Take that as an open challenge and let us see just how brave Israeli leaders are."
Welsh rock star Stuart Cable has been found dead at his Aberdare home this morning.
The body of the former Stereophonics drummer was discovered at about 5.30am.
His mother Mabel, who will be 80 this year, said: “Stuart has travelled all over the world with the band and I have worried myself silly.
“He is now settled down and then this has happens. It has not sunk in yet.”
Stuart's brother Paul said: "The family has no further comment to make at this stage. It is in the hands of the police."
South Wales Police confirmed the sudden death of a 40-year-old man. The cause of death has not yet been established but there are no suspicious circumstances at this stage.
Next of kin have been informed.
South Wales Valleys coroner Peter Maddox has also been informed.
BBC Radio Wales has cancelled 'Tom Jones Day' as a mark of respect to Stuart Cable and his family.
A spokesperson for the BBC said: "Sadly BBC Radio Wales presenter and former Steroephonics drummer, Stuart Cable was found dead this morning. The BBC has decided to pull the Tom Jones birthday party as a sign of respect. Our thoughts go out to all at BBC Wales."
Today’s FACT mix comes from the man behind Hyperdub, and one of modern dance music’s most celebrated producers and DJs, Kode9.
Debuting on Tempa in 2002 with ‘Fat Larry’s Skank’, Kode9 has spent the last decade exploring an aesthetic that’s taken him from suffocating dread-filled dubstep to toxic house music. Along the way, he’s released a superb album (Memories of the Future, with frequent collaborator Spaceape) and become just as famous for his record label as his own productions: since Hyperdub’s inception in 2004, it’s released albums by Burial, Ikonika and King Midas Sound, and singles by Zomby, Terror Danjah, Cooly G, Mala and more.
This month, 9 will release the latest in K7’s DJ-Kicks series of mix CDs, a journey from elasticated house and dancehall, through soul, funk and hip-hop, to overbearing dubstep and grime. Kode is one of the world’s best DJs – his extended sets at Plastic People last year are spoken of with pure reverence, and this year he’s let out specialist mixes in 2step and “sino-grime”. Here he contributes a mix of “mostly ’94-’96 jungle”, bound by an icy, misty quality. Lemon D, DJ SS, Undercover Agent and more feature.
Next week, Hyperdub, Plat du Jour and FACT will be presenting an off-Sonar party at Club Mondo, Thursday 17 June. Already on the bill are Darkstar, Cooly G, Ikonika, Guido, Mweslee and Kode9 himself, plus Plat du Jour residents. There’s also a ton of special guests – to find out who, you’ll have to attend. For more tickets, click here.
Tracklist:
1. Soundman & Don Lloyde with Elizabeth Troy – Greater Love
2. Lemon D – Manhatten Melody
3. Dope Style – You Must Think First
4. Nut Nut – Special Dedication
5. Undercover Agent – Oh Gosh
6. DJ SS – MA2 remix
7. 12-10 Series Mk 1 – All that Jazz
8. L Double featuring Bassman – Da Base too Dark
9. Urban Jungle – Back in the Daze
10. Sacred – Kall the Kops
11. Fusion Forum – Vintage Keys
12. Maldini – Def Roll
13. Bad Influence feat. DJ Rush Puppie – Time & Time
This week, Elliott Abrams, the former Bush official and noted neoconservative, wrote an essay in the Weekly Standard attacking the Obama administration for not more forcefully defending Israel during the flotilla crisis. Abrams said the White House had joined an anti-Israeli “lynch mob.” Over the course of the article, he used the metaphor six times.
It’s remarkable when you think about it. To Americans with even the slightest degree of racial awareness, “lynch mob” conjures something quite particular: African American men hanging from trees in the post-civil war South. To deploy the metaphor to describe a United Nations resolution that obliquely criticizes Israel is audacious. To deploy it to describe the support for that resolution by America’s first African-American president is downright astonishing. It’s a bit like calling Joe Lieberman’s opposition health-care reform a “pogrom.”
As an Obama official once told me about the Netanyahu team, with amazement, “these guys are actually waiting for President Palin.”
Why does Abrams’ metaphor matter? Because it shows how out of touch the Israeli government’s American defenders are with, well, America. There’s an irony here. The Netanyahu government is filled with Americans. The prime minister himself attended high school in the Philadelphia suburbs. Ron Dermer, one of his closest advisors, was born in Miami Beach. His ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, hails from New Jersey. In addition, prominent Americans like Abrams regularly appear in the U.S. media to echo the Netanyahu line. But paradoxically, this familiarity breeds overconfidence and ignorance. When Netanyahu travels to Washington, he speaks before Jewish audiences that mostly dislike Barack Obama’s Israel policy, even though according to a recent American Jewish Committee survey, American Jews overall support it by a margin of close to two to one. When he’s not speaking to right-wing Jews, he’s speaking to right-wing Christians. And when he’s not speaking to right-wing Christians, he’s speaking to former Bush administration officials who expect to soon be back in their old jobs. As an Obama official once told me about the Netanyahu team, with amazement, “these guys are actually waiting for President Palin.”
What Netanyahu and his acolytes seem not to understand is this: Although there are lots of Americans who will support Israeli policy no matter what, their side is not likely to wield power anytime soon. The two most important emerging forces in American politics are Hispanics, America’s largest minority group, and millennials, the most diverse generation in American history, and one larger than the baby boomers. Both are growing inexorably as a share of the electorate. Both have tipped decisively towards the Democrats, not just in 2008, but in every election since 2004. And neither is likely to be uncritically pro-Israel. According to a 2006 survey by the Pew Research Center, only one-third of Hispanics, compared to almost half of non-Hispanic whites, say they sympathize more with Israel than the Palestinians. Given the disproportionate percentage of Hispanics and African-Americans in the millennial generation, it’s a good bet that younger voters tilt this way too. If the Netanyahu government and its allies have a strategy for talking to these Americans—as opposed to the ones who attend the AIPAC Policy Conference or Christians United for Israel rallies—it has been well-hidden. Comparing the Obama administration to a lynch mob isn’t a very good way to begin.
Once upon a time, all this might not have mattered. In the old days when the Jewish State faced off against leaders like Yasir Arafat and Saddam Hussein, Israel’s foes could be trusted to make it look good by comparison. Today, by contrast, Israel’s most influential critic in the Middle East is Turkey, a democracy and a member of NATO. The Palestinians in the West Bank are led by Salam Fayyad, a proponent of nonviolence, a source of anti-corruption and a devotee of the Texas Longhorns. For too long, Israeli leaders had it easy: unsympathetic enemies in the Middle East and uncritical friends in the United States. The result was hubris, a belief that Israel could do whatever it wanted, and still win the political debate in the United States. That is no longer the case. In Congress, Israel can still do no wrong. But the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue doesn’t hold that view, and he will likely be there for quite some time. Israel’s leaders need to come to grips with how much American politics have changed in the last several years. Obama is the new normal. When they figure that out, perhaps they can tell their friends in the GOP.
MegaUpload is one of the most prominent file-hosting services on the Internet. It is owned by an unbelievably colorful individual who is probably better known for his multiple convictions for computer fraud, embezzlement and insider trading. He owns several luxury cars, for which he is currently under investigation, and has just acquired New Zealand’s most expensive house – a snip at just over $20m.
The file-sharing and anti-piracy world is full of interesting characters, most of whom remain hidden in the shadows. Some individuals are just too large to be contained though, and are either involuntarily thrust into the media spotlight by force or become deliberately high-profile by design.
While many people will be familiar with Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid and Fredrik due to them being featured in countless articles, the pair tend to shy away from too much direct publicity. The same cannot be said of Peter Sunde who rarely misses an opportunity to be in the spotlight, and to great effect it must be said.
The believed owner of MegaUpload, however, makes Peter Sunde look like a shrinking violet.
Kim ‘Kimble’ Schmitz is a quite unbelievable character. Born in 1974 in Germany, he grew to become a computer hacker, successful businessman and convicted criminal. In 1998 Schmitz received two years’ probation for hacking into corporate networks and abusing telephone services but the draw of big money was just around the corner.
In 2001 Schmitz pulled off a huge stock market bluff which netted him a small fortune. After buying shares worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the almost bankrupt LetsBuyIt.com, he announced that he would invest 50 million euros in the company, but in reality he didn’t have the money. His declaration led to the biggest single-day rise on the German stock market which allowed Schmitz to sell his shares and pocket $1.5 million profit. He was arrested for insider-trading in 2002, sentenced to a term of 20 months and given a 100,000 euro fine.
Also in 2001, one of Schmitz’s companies loaned another one 280,000 euros and conveniently both went bust shortly after. Schmitz later pleaded guilty to embezzlement and received another two years probation.
A master of the PR stunt, Schmitz has previously faked his own suicide and also offered a $10 million reward for the capture of Osama Bin Laden. He also claimed to own a fleet of jets but apparently the planes he was photographed with belonged to other people.
A self-confessed car-nut, Schmitz entered the Gumball 3000 rally many times and actually came first in 2001, but his appearances in this event brought even more controversy. According to YouTube videos here and here, Schmitz drove at 240 km/h on a public road in Belgium, ignored stop signs and drove in cycle lanes where one of his friends hit a pedestrian. In another clip he’s seen admitting to bribing the police and deliberately nudging a rival’s Porsche with his Mercedes.
But claims that he also did the private jet ‘trick’ mentioned above when photographed with, allegedly, other peoples’ cars, may have been a little off the mark.
According to a recent report from New Zealand, Schmitz is currently under investigation for using multiple names to register three luxury cars including a Rolls-Royce Phantom convertible. The cars are adorned with personal plates – GOD, WANTED and GUILTY.
The vehicles are registered to an address in Coatesville, New Zealand, which turns out to be a very special venue indeed – Schmitz’s newly-acquired mansion and the country’s most expensive house, a snip at just over $20 million USD.
The mega-money has clearly continued to roll in, with the addition of porn site Megarotic and the site most readers will be familiar with, MegaUpload. Although Schmitz’s connection to these projects has been denied in the past, he was the person who registered the site’s domain name in 2005 and there are many other links which are difficult to simply brush off.
MegaUpload has become more and more successful in recent times and its growing popularity make it a popular choice with those looking for an alternative to RapidShare. Much of MegaUpload’s system appears to be running from host LeaseWeb in The Netherlands and Carpathia Hosting in the US. In both locations they have many hundreds of IP addresses and servers.
While RapidShare’s huge growth has seen the company become the target for recent legal action, according to information received by TorrentFreak it appears that an apparent expansion of MegaUpload hasn’t gone unnoticed either. French anti-piracy group ALPA has been cranking up the pressure on LeaseWeb in what is being described as a “pre-litigation period”.
If the future of MegaUpload and Kim Schmitz is anywhere as colorful as the past, there will be yet more amazing stories to come.
To anyone who has noticed that there has been a lot of lazy Youtoob videos and the like here at 'Exile' these past couple of days...unfortunately I have been battling the flu and bad toothache but hopefully it will be over soon...
wikileaksAllegations in Wired that we have been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.3 minutes ago via bit.ly
Jean Seberg in Jean‑Luc Godard's masterpiece, Breathless. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
Two trailers bookend my half-a-century of writing professionally about the cinema and bracket the career of the man who is arguably the most influential moviemaker of my lifetime. Fifty years ago this month I dropped into an Oslo cinema while waiting for a midnight train and saw an unforgettable trailer for a French picture. It cut abruptly between a handsome, broken-nosed actor I'd never come across before, giant posters of Humphrey Bogart, and the familiar features of Jean Seberg, whom I knew to be an idol of French cinéastes as the protegee of Otto Preminger. Shot in high contrast monochrome, rapidly edited, interspersed with puzzling statements in white-on-black and black-on-white lettering, it was like no other trailer I'd seen, and I was captivated. Not until my return to London did I discover that the broken-nosed actor was Jean-Paul Belmondo and the film was the debut feature of the Cahiers du Cinéma critic Jean-Luc Godard. It had opened in Paris six weeks before to considerable acclaim and had been made with the help of two fellow critics-turned-directors, François Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, whose first films I'd seen. When A Bout de souffle (aka Breathless) opened in London a year later, it did live up to my expectations.
Eighty years old this November, Godard has just compiled another trailer for his latest (according to him, his last) picture, Film Socialisme. As provocative and original as ever, the two-minute trailer can be viewed online. It is in fact the whole film, speeded up for an audience too impatient to concentrate for two hours. The movie, premiered at Cannes last month, has subtitles that are deliberately unintelligible to anyone who doesn't understand the various languages in which it's made. In an interview with that other onetime revolutionary firebrand of the 1960s, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Godard said simply: "Don't translate, learn languages." For nearly 40 years I've been convinced that whenever a Godard movie is shown at Cannes, everybody in the world interested in seeing it is present at the Palais du Festival, elbowing other critics aside as they struggle to get into the early-morning press show. Nowadays, I only see a new film by the aloof, hectoring, didactic Godard when wild horses turn up at my front gate to drag me to a London press screening.
How, then, to explain what Godard meant to us back in the 60s? Why did I put on the dustjacket of my first book a photograph of myself scowling in a leather jacket and dark glasses, a cigarette in the corner of my mouth, because I thought it made me look like Godard? Why was I thrilled when Truffaut, as the director in his La Nuit américaine, eagerly tears open a parcel of books on the cinema, one of which is a symposium on Godard containing my 1965 essay on Une Femme mariée? Why did we sit around discussing the ideas and innovations of Godard the way young filmgoers today talk about box-office grosses, special effects and continuity errors?
Since the mid-50s we'd been looking for the new in the arts, society and politics, and our latest hopes were being invested in our cinema's working-class realism, which came out of fiction and the theatre, and in the nouveau roman and nouvelle vague from across the Channel. The latter term was coined in L'Express in 1957 by Françoise Giroud to describe the whole postwar generation and was applied to the cinema the following year by Pierre Billard in Cinéma 58. Talk of the new wave dominated Cannes in 1959, when films as different from each other as Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour and Truffaut's Les Quatre cents coups were perceived as characteristic examples of the new movement. Of the three, only Truffaut was a critic, and along with Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma. Their polemical writings were devoted to overthrowing the cinematic old guard they called "Le cinéma du papa" (Dad's cinema) and promoting the politique des auteurs. They saw directors (or at least a select group of them) as auteurs, a term soon introduced into worldwide usage. These omniscient figures, whose ranks they sought to join, were seen as imposing their personalities, at times almost mystically, on every film they made, wielding what the moviemaker and theorist Alexandre Astruc called "le camera stylo" or cinematic pen.
Between 1958 and 1963 an astonishing 170 French filmmakers directed their first features, happily marching under the new wave banner, which was as vague as it was in vogue. But few were truly radical and innovative. The chief exception was Godard, the 30-year-old Franco-Swiss intellectual, as passionate about Hegel as he was about Hitchcock, an artist bent on transforming the nature of cinema and with it the world. "Godard is not merely an iconoclast," that prophet of modernism Susan Sontag declared in 1968, "he is a deliberate 'destroyer' of cinema."
Breathless was the real thing. It was what we'd been waiting for, and it has taken its place alongside 20th-century works that have become familiar landmarks yet not lost their ability to shock and surprise: Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses, Dali and Buñuel's Un Chien andalou, Picasso's Guernica, Welles's Citizen Kane, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Burroughs's Naked Lunch. They are what Ezra Pound was talking about when he said that "great literature is news that remains news".
Claude Chabrol, who served as supervising producer on Breathless, famously warned that great subjects rarely make great films. And Godard, the master of the gnomic epigram and perceptive paradox, once said: "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl." This was the basis of the brief scenario that Truffaut, a fellow admirer of film noir and série noire pulp fiction, provided for Breathless. Its antihero, the swaggering, misogynistic petty criminal Michel (Belmondo), steals a car in the south of France and kills a policeman on the road to Paris, where he takes up with an old girlfriend, the well-heeled American, Patricia (Seberg). They talk of life and literature (in particular Faulkner's The Wild Palms) in a seedy hotel, make love and visit the movies while he tries to get money owed him by criminal associates. The police close in, Patricia betrays him. Hardboiled B-feature stuff. But the style is everything, a calculated destruction and remaking of traditional film grammar, and Godard formulated his much-quoted idea that "a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order".
The film is dedicated to Monogram Pictures, the celebrated B-movie studio on Hollywood's Poverty Row, the camera is handheld, the editing is abrupt and inconsistent, Raoul Coutard's masterly monochrome photography is harsh, hard-edged, reliant on natural light. The much-admired director of existential gangster pictures, Jean-Pierre Melville, makes an appearance as himself, the first of such cameos in a Godard picture. The work of other directors is evoked or alluded to, among them Budd Boetticher (Westbound), Samuel Fuller (Forty Guns), Otto Preminger (Whirlpool), Robert Aldrich (Ten Seconds to Hell), and Bogart is a looming presence. We are constantly distanced in the manner of Brecht's alienation effect, told that what we are watching is a film, but also that movies, like our lives, are halls of mirrors.
Godard's methods of work on Breathless were purposefully chaotic. He admitted that he deliberately created confusion to achieve "a greater possibility of invention". Shooting in the busy streets of Paris, he avoided crowd control, and at one point a policeman leapt from a passing bus to assist an apparently dying Belmondo.
Over the next eight years Godard made a dozen feature films and contributed to several portmanteau pictures that defined and refined his art, and they've influenced several generations of cineastes from Nagisa Oshima through Wim Wenders to Quentin Tarantino. Yet the playfulness, the apparent sheer love of the movies, eventually gave way to a deep ambivalence, as his doubts about Hollywood changed to loathing and his sceptical attitude towards the States became unabashed anti-Americanism. "Do you love the cinema?" he was asked around the time of Breathless. He replied: "I have contempt for it. It is nothing. It does not exist. Thus I love it. I love it yet at the same time I have contempt for it."
Most of his 1960s films are masterpieces or near-masterpieces. Several ran into trouble with the censors. Some didn't get released in Britain until years after they were made. Godard managed to attract major stars both then and later. He was constantly at the centre of controversy, debate and even scandal, ever ready with a quote for the press or a quotable line in a film. He mocked the film business in Le Mépris, subverted the musical in Une Femme est une femme, questioned the very basis of marriage in Une Femme mariée, showed present-day Paris as a horrific, depersonalised city of the future in his bleak sci-fi film Alphaville. But none of the later films had an impact comparable with Breathless, and as the decade progressed, his characters turned from nihilistic outsiders to slogan-mouthing revolutionaries. His farewell to anything resembling the mainstream came in 1967 with Weekend, which ended with the title "Fin du cinéma". He then worked within a leftwing collective on low-budget pictures, most of them on video, before moving with his collaborator and third wife, Anne-Marie Miéville, to Switzerland, which has been his base ever since.
Yet if Godard was ever a mainstream director, then he started to paddle rapidly towards the river's parallel tributaries as early as 1963. That was when he made Le Mépris, a million-dollar production financed by American producer Joseph Levine and the Italian tycoon Carlo Ponti. They wanted a combination of art-house chic and upmarket sexploitation that would show off the naked charms of Brigitte Bardot. She was cast as the wife of a French screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) working on an Italian version of The Odyssey directed by Fritz Lang and produced by a snarling Hollywood mogul played by Jack Palance. The producers didn't like the fractured masterpiece they were given, edited their own versions, and were denounced as "King Kong Levine" and "Mussolini Ponti". Godard slapped Ponti's 69-year-old Paris representative in public and got a 500 franc fine.
This was the first of a string of confrontations and demolitions that included helping to close down the Cannes film festival in May 1968 as an act of solidarity with demonstrating students and striking workers. Six months later he punched Iain Quarrier, the British co-producer of his One Plus One (AKA Sympathy for the Devil), in the face and stomach on the stage of the National Film Theatre. Richard Roud, author of the first book in English on Godard and director of the London film festival, had brought Quarrier and Godard together for a public discussion on the film's re-editing, and the assault was preceded by Godard advising the spectators to demand their money back.
The worst conflict, however, was the split between Godard and his oldest friend and collaborator, François Truffaut, the man whose first act on gaining a certain industrial muscle by winning a prize at Cannes with Les Quatre cents coups was to help his colleague get his feet on the feature film ladder. There was jealousy and principle on Godard's side, a mixture of guilt and exasperation on Truffaut's. They traded public insults during the 1970s and their irreconcilable differences were never repaired. When Truffaut died in 1984, Godard praised his criticism but refused to make any favourable comments on his films. Truffaut had come to terms with the film industry, Godard would never consider such a compromise. Not until the publication in 1988 of Truffaut's collected letters, which contained a 1973 exchange between the two, did most of us understand the depth of the breach between them. Godard's letter pointed out what he considered the dishonesty of La Nuit américaine, calling Truffaut a liar for not mentioning his affair with its star Jacqueline Bisset. He then demanded as his right that Truffaut should invest 10m francs in his new low-budget movie, Un simple film.
Truffaut's scathing reply, which occupies six full pages of the book, lists a succession of slights, insults and betrayals, calls Godard a shit several times, and begins with the statement: "Jean-Luc. Just so you won't be obliged to read this unpleasant letter right to the end, I'm starting with the essential point: I will not co-produce your film." It has to be added, however, that Godard wrote an affectionate introduction for the Truffaut book, a characteristic mixture of eloquence and obscurity, in which he said, looking back on their youth: "The cinema had taught us how to live; but life, like Glenn Ford in The Big Heat, was to take its revenge."
This is an excellent example of the Republican Party's continued use of what is known as the Southern Strategy. The continued use of race during political campaigns is used to instill fear, create division and tap the hate in the electorate. What's so sad here is that Senator Knotts justifies his hate because the US is at war in the Middle East, yet the candidate he smeared is Indian.
With a bead of sweat rolling down the side of his face outside a Columbia bar, Republican S.C. Sen. Jake Knotts called Lexington Rep. Nikki Haley, an Indian-American Republican woman running for governor, a “raghead” several times while explaining how he believed she was hiding her true religion from voters.
“She’s a f#!king raghead,” Knotts said.
He later clarified his statement. He did not mean to use the F-word.
Knotts says he believed Haley has been set up by a network of Sikhs and was programmed to run for governor of South Carolina by outside influences in foreign countries. He claims she is hiding her religion and he wants the voters to know about it.
“We got a raghead in Washington; we don’t need one in South Carolina,” Knotts said more than once. “She’s a raghead that’s ashamed of her religion trying to hide it behind being Methodist for political reasons.”
President Obama’s father is from Africa. His mother is a white woman from Kansas.
On her website, Haley says, “Being a Christian is not about words, but about living for Christ every day.”
Knotts, a former boxer and cop from West Columbia, said he wasn’t worried about being called a racist for the remarks he made. He says he was elected to the Senate to represent his constituents which he says he does well. He says many of his supporters are black.
“This is Jakie Knotts trying to let the people know,” he said about his motivations for leveling the inflammatory charges against a minority Republican frontrunner for governor just days before the June 8 primary elections. He says he’s called her a raghead before.
Knotts is backing Republican Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer for governor.
Bauer this week fired one of his lead consultants, Columbia lobbyist Larry Marchant, for what he called “inappropriate conduct.” Marchant told the media shortly after that he’d had sex with Haley at a conference in Utah while they were both married. The claim comes after blogger Will Folks said he’d also had a relationship with Haley in early 2007.
Knotts showed up unexpectedly at the Flying Saucer bar in Columbia’s Vista for a live taping of the online political talk show Pub Politics, which is co-hosted by Senate Republican Caucus political director Wesley Donehue and his Democratic counterpart, Phil Bailey. Democratic S.C. Rep Boyd Brown of Fairfield County was a guest.
Knotts initially made the racial slur on the show.
Neither Donehue, Bailey nor Brown challenged Knotts on his remark during or after the broadcast.
“I was floored,” Donehue said after the cameras were off.
“Senator Knotts took it a step too far,” Bailey said afterward. “I don’t agree with it … [but] it’s not my job to question Jakie Knotts.”
After the broadcast, Knotts stood in a corner on the deck of the bar and defended his remarks.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve said it,” Knotts said. “I’m not on a crusade to downgrade her, but if someone asks me I’ll tell ‘em. And look here, someone wants to vote for her knowing the truth, vote for her.”
Knotts said that South Carolina is a religious community.
“We need a good Christian to be our governor,” he said. “She’s hiding her religion. She ought to be proud of it. I’m proud of my god.”
Knotts says he believes Haley’s father has been sending letters to India saying that Haley is the first Sikh running for high office in America. He says her father walks around Lexington wearing a turban.
“We’re at war over there,” Knotts said.
Asked to clarify, he said he did not mean the United States was at war with India, but was at war with “foreign countries.”
By around 7:30 p.m., comments about the slur had made their way around political circles through social media networking sites.
Donehue and Bailey both spoke with CNN and The State newspaper by 8 p.m., and a story was posted on CNN.
Asked if he was going to edit the video of Pub Politics, Donehue glanced at Knotts who immediately said he didn’t want the video edited.
Knotts later apologized for his comments, which showed up in the morning papers.
“My ‘raghead’ comments about Obama and Haley were intended in jest,” Knotts said in a statement. “Bear in mind that this is a freewheeling, anything-goes Internet radio show that is broadcast from a pub. It’s like local political version of Saturday Night Live."
Corey Hutchins @'Free Times'
Ahead of the release of the innovative new audio/visual The Chemical Brothers album ‘Further’, check out this interactive video showcasing clips from the visuals which accompany every track.
Select each video by clicking the appropriate box and be taken to your chosen clip. To return to the menu screen at any time click the menu button in the top left hand corner of the screen.
‘Further’ is released June 14, including as an iTunes Pass in the US and iTunes LP in the UK.
In an audio communication between the Israeli Navy and the seventh flotilla ship, the navy operator informs the flotilla that the ship is heading towards an area that is under a naval blockade. The Israeli navy requests that the ship dock at the Port of Ashdod, where they can unload their cargo and the IDF will deliver the goods through the land crossings after a security check. The seventh flotilla ship responds that they have received the message but do not respond to the request.
The ship was contacted 4 times and refused to respond to request. As of 12:45 5 June 2010 the crew of the ship permitted the IDF soldiers to board the ship. They boarded by land, no helicopters were used. No reports of violence.
Interesting that they don't call the ship the 'Rachel Corrie'!
] has an alchemist’s laboratory. On hiatus from touring, the Nine Inch Nails frontman has stuffed a converted garage with blinking electronic doodads, from modded synthesizers and sequencers to archaic drum machines. Reznor is using all this gear for his new band, How to Destroy Angels. Here’s how one song off the group’s forthcoming EP evolved from a seeming cacophony of beats and weird noise into a dense, polyrhythmic track.
The file-sharing and anti-piracy world is full of interesting characters, most of whom remain hidden in the shadows. Some individuals are just too large to be contained though, and are either involuntarily thrust into the media spotlight by force or become deliberately high-profile by design.
![A BOUT DE SOUFFLE aka BREATHLESS [FRANCE 1959]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vcDrIMqmjoeLetrYoSZ95ZJHshkBmEvZK3EzwW-yrzeDbk5UjbU7GFkZaVTSLKw6YbVPgoEA9hkGUqL2tD0SJrOZJQWtka2j13_HqygZOiJ51YPz1yRrxw-PE1rlxFHpIw_K-3pLBLHccTwxCCjEcSSA8rti4_w42sbU2FEPhU3OmL08rYUuH1v4lCn4yIkkAwf95y8_dYVThjwA=s0-d)
