Viv Albertine of punk legends The Slits made this agreeably loopy short for the BFI in 1991. Three blonde extra-terrestrial investigators have just 48 hours to find love on Earth whilst trying to avoid the deadly "loneliness virus". They are aided on their quest by a number of talking heads, including filmmaker/musician Don Letts, feminist Shere Hite, journalist Ros Coward and members of the public.
Fancy seeing you here Fifi!!!
If Love
Wednesday 29 February 2012
Wholly Communion (Peter Whitehead 1965)
Wholly Communion is a short documentary film made in 1965 by British film-maker Peter Whitehead. It was filmed at the Royal Albert Hall, London, and documents a poetry event held on 11 June 1965 called the International Poetry Incarnation. It features poetry readings by Beat poets from the UK and U.S., including Allen Ginsberg, Michael Horovitz and Adrian Mitchell. The event was hosted by everyone's favourite sixties Scottish sometime-situationist beat junkie, Alexander Trocchi. Peter Whitehead's first independently produced film, won the Gold Medal at the prestigious Mannheim Documentary Film Festival 1966, and was shown at Film Festivals round the world. It was England's first cinema-verite documentary film - filmed with a silent Eclair camera - 'one of the audience' - at the legendary, spontaneous International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall, London, 11th June 1965 - 7000 people unexpectedly filled the hall to listen to Beat poets from America - making the event into the first major "Happening".
Holes Of Happiness
Holes Of Happiness is a short documentary looking at the reactions of the public to some pothole gardens that have been popping up around East London. http://www.thepotholegardener.com
Via
Via
New Multitudes: How The Idea Took Root
Jay Farrar, Anders Parker, Jim James and Nora Guthrie discuss how the idea took root to write new music set to Woody Guthrie's lyrics.
Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (William Burroughs narration)
Originally filmed in 1922, this version was updated in the mid 1960's to include english narration by William S Burroughs. The writer and director Benjamin Christensen discloses a historical view of the witches through the seven parts of this silent movie. First, there is a slide-show alternating inter-titles with drawings and paintings to illustrate the behavior of pagan cultures in the Middle Ages regarding their vision of demons and witches. Then there is a dramatization of the situation of the witches in the Middle Ages, with the witchcraft and the witch-hunts. Finally Benjamin Christensen compares the behavior of hysteria of the modern women of 1921 with the behavior of the witches in the Middle Ages, concluding that they are very similar.
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(Thanx Chuck!)
Death Take Your Fiddle (J Spaceman)
I think I'll drink myself into a coma
And I'll take every way out I can find
But morphine, codeine, whisky, they won't alter
The way I feel the way now death is not around
So death take your fiddle
And play a song for me
Play a song we used to sing
The one that brought you close to me
Play a song and I will sing along
I think I'd like to take myself to heaven
Cause I ain't been there many times before
And Jesus Christ, if I don't know if I like it
Sadness struck a thousand times or more
So death take your fiddle
And play a song for me
Play a song we used to sing
The one that brought you close to me
Play a song and I will sing along
Think I'll drink myself into a coma
And I'll take every pill that I can find
But morphine, codeine, whisky, they won't alter
The way I feel now death is not around
The way I feel now death is not around
The way I feel now death is not around
And I'll take every way out I can find
But morphine, codeine, whisky, they won't alter
The way I feel the way now death is not around
So death take your fiddle
And play a song for me
Play a song we used to sing
The one that brought you close to me
Play a song and I will sing along
I think I'd like to take myself to heaven
Cause I ain't been there many times before
And Jesus Christ, if I don't know if I like it
Sadness struck a thousand times or more
So death take your fiddle
And play a song for me
Play a song we used to sing
The one that brought you close to me
Play a song and I will sing along
Think I'll drink myself into a coma
And I'll take every pill that I can find
But morphine, codeine, whisky, they won't alter
The way I feel now death is not around
The way I feel now death is not around
The way I feel now death is not around
‘Faces of Addiction’ in the Bronx
Every weekend, Chris Arnade leaves Brooklyn Heights and heads to Hunts Point in the Bronx, searching for subjects of his ongoing Faces of Addiction photo essay. ”I post people’s stories as they tell them to me,” he writes. “I am not a journalist. I don’t try to verify, just listen.” They talk. These New Yorkers are living in shelters, abandoned buildings, crack houses, and vacant lots are suffering through addiction and recovery, together. Many of them are victims of abusive households, former runaways who grew up on the street, forced into the most dangerous sort of sex work, assaulted, raped and stabbed. They are blunt about their lives; they are grateful for what they do have. The essay is both heartbreaking and hopeful. There’s a tentative intimacy to them, a reserved dignity. Flip through some of these portraits and see the full set to read their stories.
“It’s easy to ignore others,” Chris Arnade says of life in New York City. “By not looking, by not talking to them, we often fall into constructing our own narrative that affirms our limited world view. What I am hoping to do, by allowing my subjects to share their dreams and burdens with the viewer and by photographing them with respect, is to show that everyone, regardless of their station in life, is as valid as anyone else.”
After Arnade captures their portraits and stories, he returns to visit with a large print for each. At his upcoming Portraits and Pigeons show at the Urban Folk Art Gallery in Brooklyn, he will be selling prints, with all proceeds going to Hunts Point Alliance for Children. You can keep up to date with the project by following him on Twitter at @Chris_Arnade.
Cynthia, single mother of eleven, working the streets since thirteen. Read her story.
"I am blessed. I am still here. Many others have gone. I am blessed. We are all blessed.” Read his story.
Jackie. ”You live on the streets as a girl, you get raped. It just is.” Read her story.
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“It’s easy to ignore others,” Chris Arnade says of life in New York City. “By not looking, by not talking to them, we often fall into constructing our own narrative that affirms our limited world view. What I am hoping to do, by allowing my subjects to share their dreams and burdens with the viewer and by photographing them with respect, is to show that everyone, regardless of their station in life, is as valid as anyone else.”
After Arnade captures their portraits and stories, he returns to visit with a large print for each. At his upcoming Portraits and Pigeons show at the Urban Folk Art Gallery in Brooklyn, he will be selling prints, with all proceeds going to Hunts Point Alliance for Children. You can keep up to date with the project by following him on Twitter at @Chris_Arnade.
MORE
West Coast Punk Flyers
Just some of the LA/Calif punk flyers posted by my friend Scott from his collection on his Facebook page.
*phew*
Well that's the last injection!
At the moment my viral load is zero - tho they do check again in six months time as (very rarely) it can return.
One more week of pills and then hopefully both me and my life can return to 'normal' (or as normal as it ever gets anyway!)
For everyone who has put up with my mood swings/tantrums/depression/feeling like shit etc for these past six months both in real life and here online - all I can say is 'sorry' but thank gawd it is over!
From now on...
Upper class people are more likely to behave selfishly, studies suggest
Privileged people behaved consistently worse than others in a range of situations, with a greater tendency to lie, cheat, take things meant for others, cut up other road users, not stop for pedestrians on crossings, and endorse unethical behaviour, researchers found.
Psychologists at the University of California in Berkeley drew their unflattering conclusions after covertly observing people's behaviour in the open and in a series of follow-up studies in the laboratory.
Describing their work in the US journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, social psychologist Paul Piff and his colleagues at the Institute of Personality and Social Research claim that self-interest may be a "more fundamental motive among society's elite" that leads to more wrongdoing. They say selfishness may be "a shared cultural norm".
The scientists also found a strong link between social status and greed, a connection they suspect might exacerbate the economic gulf between the rich and poor.
The work builds on previous research that suggests the upper classes are less cognizant of others, worse at reading other people's emotions and less altruistic than individuals in lower social classes.
"If you occupy these higher echelons, you start to see yourself as more entitled, and develop a heightened self-focus," Piff told the Guardian. "Your social environment is likely more buffered against the impact of your actions, and you might not perceive the risks of your behaviour because you are better resourced, you have the money for lawyers and so on."
In the first of the studies, researchers concealed themselves close to a crossroads in the Bay Area of San Francisco and spied on drivers who were expected to stop and wait their turn before driving on. Whenever a car arrived at the junction, the scientists ranked the driver's class on a scale of one to five according to the model, age and appearance of the car.
On average, 12.4% of the observed drivers failed to wait their turn and cut in front of other road users. Those in the less classy cars cut people up less than 10% of the time, but drivers in the most prestigious cars did so around one third of the time.
The researchers next recorded whether drivers stopped for a person who tried to walk across the junction using a pedestrian crossing. Drivers of the cheapest and oldest cars were most likely to slow down and give way, followed by those in average quality cars. But those in the most prestigious cars drove on regardless of the pedestrian around 45% of the time.
On the back of these observations, the scientists set up five laboratory studies to investigate differences in ethical behaviour among people in upper and lower classes. They found that the higher a person's class, the more likely they were to tell lies in negotiations and cheat for money, and even pilfer sweets meant for children in a neighbouring lab.
In one study, 105 volunteers were asked to read eight stories that implicated a character in taking something that wasn't theirs, and comment on whether they would do the same. Their endorsement of wrongdoing rose with socioeconomic class, as ranked by income, education and occupation.
Another study had volunteers play a computer game that simulated five rolls of a dice. The participants were asked to write down their total score, and told that a high score might earn them a cash prize. Even though the game was rigged to give everyone a score of 12, more upper class than lower class people reported higher scores.
In a crucial last experiment, the scientists primed volunteers into seeing greed as good. They asked them to write down three ways in which it was beneficial, before answering questions on their likelihood of performing unethical acts. This time, the lower and higher classes scored the same, because those on the lower social rungs behaved worse after being primed.
"Upper and lower class individuals do not necessarily differ in terms of their capacity for unethical behaviour, but rather in terms of their default tendencies toward it," the authors write.
Ian Sample @'The Guardian'
Tuesday 28 February 2012
Chappaqua
Directed by Conrad Rooks in 1966 (starring William S. Burroughs, Ravi Shankar, Allen Ginsberg, The Fugs).
Music by Ornette Coleman. Conrad Rooks' hallucinogenic gem also boasts one of the most hypnotic film scores of all time by Ravi Shankar.
Rooks knows his story, and although he tends to wander at times, he's always keeps the action moving on course. Russel Harwick's (Rooks) attempts to "escape" the rehab center are hilarious. This film probably captures the essence of the sixties counter-culture like few films ever have. Although you might be tempted not to see this trip all the way through, you will only be cheating yourself out of one of the greatest movie endings of all time.
Jello Biafra: Caught in the crossfire - Should musicians boycott Israel?
San Francisco, CA - So now I have been to Israel. I have also been to Palestine. I got a taste of the place, but not in the way I'd originally hoped.
In many ways I really wish my band, Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine, had played in Tel Aviv. But I also share most of the boycott's supporters' feelings about Israel's government, the occupation and ongoing human rights violations.
I hope people take the time to understand how deeply this has torn at the fabric of our band. The promoter in Tel Aviv lost thousands, and I am eating thousands more in lost and re-booked airfares that I have no idea how I am going to pay, or how I will pay my bills for the rest of the year. Real human beings got hurt here.
This whole controversy has been one of the most intense situations of my life - and I thrive on intense situations. But the rest of the band was not used to this. How fair was it to drag them there in the first place? This is not like fighting Tipper Gore and the Los Angeles Police Department, greedy ex-Dead Kennedys members or more-radical-than-thou thugs who think it's OK to put someone in the hospital for being a "sellout". I gradually felt like I had gotten in over my head sticking my nose into one of the longest and nastiest conflicts on earth.
So with the rollercoaster still in my stomach and my head, I flew solo to Israel instead. The mission: to check things out myself and hopefully at least get closer to some kind of conclusion on whether artists boycotting Israel, especially me, was really the best way to help the Palestinian people.
The first people who wrote asking us to boycott went out of their way to be diplomatic and communicate how they felt. Then the gloves came off, and so did some of the masks. Our Facebook page went from eye-opening and educational to a childish, bickering orgy between a handful of people. Racial slurs began to appear on this and other boycott sites. Many writings seemed to have no idea who I was or what punk is. One called me a "fanatic Zionist with a clear touch of cultural racism".
I also got an invitation from a self-proclaimed fan to "come meet the Israeli right" and see the settlements through their eyes, complete with a wine-tasting party.
Many people I met on my trip to Israel feel that the boycott has damaged the Israeli opposition more than it has anyone else and "helped silence the peace camp in Israel". A veteran journalist I met later told me, "the best way to contribute to peace is to try and work to understand both sides" and that he felt that boycotts strengthen extremists by keeping people apart.
Others felt the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement "is not all bad", and can raise awareness across the pond of what the US is letting Israel's government get away with. One wrote to me later, saying that: "I don't disagree with BDS myself … and I definitely feel that BDS is a legitimate way to do so [raise awareness]. But if the price paid for this is worldwide ignorance, then I think I believe the price is too high. If musicians were to boycott Israel or Palestine, they would miss out on the opportunity to educate themselves - and then hopefully preach that opinion when and where they see fit..."
Continue reading
(Thanx Chuck!)
♪♫ Lucky Dube - I'm Still Here in the House of Exile
Live in Uganda from 2003
House of Exile was originally released in 1991.
Monday 27 February 2012
The Existence of Time
Third test for the upcoming Monolake Surround tour.
Track: The Existence of Time (edit)
Sound: Robert Henke (monolake.de)
3D animation: Tarik Barri (tarikbarri.nl)
Editing: Robert Henke / Tarik Barri
Track: The Existence of Time (edit)
Sound: Robert Henke (monolake.de)
3D animation: Tarik Barri (tarikbarri.nl)
Editing: Robert Henke / Tarik Barri
Spiritualized - Hey Jane
I bought [Iggy and the Stooges’] “Raw Power” when I was 14, that was the first record I bought. I didn’t know anything about it, I had no friends that were listening to it. They used to sell records in the chemists’, Boots chemists. I saw the sleeve to “Raw Power,” I saw the silver pants, and I went home holding that. If you’re going to start anywhere in music — I got lucky- Jason Pierce
To hear the new album played live last year at The Royal Albert Hall go to spz2011-10-11 in this list...
Saturday 25 February 2012
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