Number 9

Beatles remastered release 090909

Severe cuts

Why are they smiling?

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders will begin working today to line up votes for the budget agreement they reached Monday evening to close a $26.3-billion deficit and allow the state to begin paying all of its bills again...
The plan has not been formally released. But... it does not include any broad-based tax increases, relying instead on deep cuts in government services, borrowing and accounting maneuvers to wipe out the deficit....

Tens of thousands of seniors and children would lose access to healthcare, local governments would sacrifice several billion dollars in state assistance this year and thousands of convicted criminals could serve less time in state prison. Welfare checks would go to fewer residents, state workers would be forced to continue to take unpaid days off and new drilling for oil would be permitted off the Santa Barbara coast.

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So again, why exactly are they smiling?

Hippy Summer tunes

A 60's Psychedelic mix

Lemon Fog - Summer
Plastic Cloud - Dainty General Rides
Rhubarb Rhubarb - Rainmaker
Renegades - I Was There
The Chocolate Watch Band - I'm Not Like Everybody Else
The Visions - Small Town Commotion
Tyrannies - She's a Queen

Dust

Dust - Hard Attack [1972]

Pull Away So Many Times
Walk in the Soft Rain
Thusly Spoken
Ivory

Just a few tracks from their second album.

Lost Island of VHS...

Antoine et Antoinette - Jacques Becker - 1947

Jacques Becker's light but highly enjoyable French film from the 1940's 'Antoine and Antoinette' is about an attractive working class couple living in Paris who get their hands on a winning lottery ticket that is sure to end all of their woes. Only the ticket gets lost in a busy train station. Antoine scrambles to find the ticket at the same time Antoinette finds herself the object of affection from a lecherous businessman who employees her. The film is sort of a remake of Rene Clair's 'Le Million'. Less artful perhaps but maybe a bit more empathetic and down-to-earth.
I suspect this could be part of the Janus Collection and may show up on Criterion some day. As it is now you can only see it on a cheap VHS copy that is tough to find.

Spiegelman does Peanuts

This is from the 2/19/00 issue of The New Yorker.

Lost Island of VHS...

The Nasty Girl - Michael Verhoeven - 1990

One of my favorite German films from the 1990's was 'The Nasty Girl' by Michael Verehoven. A young woman writes an essay that wins her the respect and love of her small home town. So for her next assignment she decides to write an essay about the town's Nazi past and before she knows it she is an outcast facing the wrath of the town along with death threats to her family. The film's story is good enough but the style and distinct energy of the directing and editing make for a really delightful cinematic experience not to mention one that deals with a subject that still riles some Germans.
This one deserves to be on DVD. Miramax has the rights.

Jukka Tolonen is a Finish guitar legend.

Here are a few tracks from his 1971 album Tolonen!. It's more jazz oriented than rock - just so you know.

Elements: Earth, Fire, Water, Air
Ramblin
Mountains
Wanderland

What is this recent New Yorker cartoon all about?
Answer below.

John
Marsha
John
Marsha
John
Marsha
John
Marsha...

The piece was written by Stan Freberg in 1951.

There was also a long running TV sitcom in the Philippines called John en Marsha back in the 1980's.

Egg breaking revival

Tear Gas - 1971 hard blues rock


Yeah Yeah Yeahs - 2009 rock album

No downloads here - just a comparison of images.

Culpeper's Orchard

Culpeper's Orchard was a Danish psych / rock band [with folk influence] from the 1970's. Their sound has hints of Led Zeppelin, Cream and Genesis. Check it out.

Here are choice cuts [from YouTube] of the first album Culpeper's Orchard - 1971.

Mountain Music Part 1
Hey You People
Teaparty for an Orchard
Ode to Resistance
Your Song & Mine
Gideon's Trap
Blue Day's Morning
Mountain Music Part 2

Magazine cover

This week's New Yorker cover was done on an iPhone.

Ramases

Ramases - Space Hymns.
Ramases was an early 1970's band that produced [I think] only this one album in 1971.
And it's a good one. Sort of a psychedelic, freak folk rock album done by Martin Raphael - who made a living as a heating salesman in Sheffield, England. He and his wife, Selket, put this album together and in a short time it obtained a cult following.

Here are a few tracks to listen to available on YouTube.

Life Child
And The Whole World
Quasar One
You're The Only One
Earth People
Balloon
Jesus Come Back

Some 09 Movies

Here is what I have seen recently. In order of preference.

Revanche - A terrific thriller from Austria about a criminal bent on killing the cop who killed his girlfriend. Has a gradual pace and builds beautifully and then shifts focus very subtly and effectively.

Il Divo - An impressive, impressionistic Italian film about a former Prime Minister who may have had connections to the mafia and the murders of his rivals. This is not a traditional biopic and it's all the better for it. Very well assembled. I'm not sure if the director or the editor or the cinematographer gets the bigger applause so I'll salute all three.

Lemon Tree - A [rich] Israeli couple move next door to [poor] Palestinian woman who happens to have a lemon orchard they think will be a hideout for terrorists who want to kill them. So they arrange to clear cut the orchard. This is a well made and engaging film that gets into the personal emotions of the Israeli Palestinian conflict even if is a bit predictable and, at times, heavy-handed.

Adventureland - Young man gets job before going to college in a theme park where he does drugs, falls in love and has a great summer. Despite the fact that many jokes fall flat this is a good film because of the believability of the characters, their situations and the 80's East Coast milieu. It captures youth and falling in love about as well as any youth film out there.

Séraphine - French film about [real life] sightly crazy painter Séraphine de Senlis. Great first hour that carries on a bit long into the second hour as we watch the woman make bad decisions and descend into madness - a place where, unfortunately, most dramas about painters go.


Departures - Japanese film about a cellist who becomes an undertaker preparing bodies for their 'departure'. Sensitive film with some good early scenes about rituals but it gets too sentimental midway through. I like the rock metaphor but it only adds some interest to the story. Also what's up with most of the recently departed being women?

The Limits of Control - Laconic hit man (Isaach De Bankolé) - who lives on paper and espresso - goes to Spain to kill some bigwig [Bill Murray] in this flatter than a pancake drama. I'm a fan of Jarmusch's existential, dead pan style but I had no connection with this film at all.

70's classic

I've always wanted to hear this album. Some guy is streaming** it on a website called Vinyl Archives.
Buckingham Nicks

**[Note this only plays the full album on a Windows Media player. If you only have iTunes it will only play the first song, which it downloads].

Also available here to listen to no matter what you have.

Cannes 2009

The 2009 Cannes competition lineup:

“Abrazos Rotos” (Broken Embraces), directed by Pedro Almodovar
“Antichrist,” directed by Lars Von Trier
“Bright Star,” directed by Jane Campion
“Enter The Void,” directed by Gasper Noe
Faces directed by Tsai Ming-liang
“Fish Tank,” directed by Andrea Arnold
“Kinatay,” directed by directed by Brillante Mendoza
“Les Herbes folles,” directed by Alain Resnais
“In The Beginning,” directed by Xavier Giannoli
“Inglorious Basterds,” directed by Quentin Tarantino
“Looking For Eric,” directed by Ken Loach
“Map of the Sounds of Tokyo,” directed by Isabel Coixet
“A Prophet,” directed by Jacques Audiard
“Spring Fever,” directed by Lou Ye
“Taking Woodstock,” directed by Ang Lee
“The Time That Remains,” directed by Elia Suleiman
“Thirst,” directed by directed by Park Chan Wook
“Vengeance,” directed by Johnny To
“Vincere,” directed by Marco Bellocchio
“The White Ribbon,” directed by Michael Haneke

When possible I've tried to include the trailer.

Infinite monkey comics

Godard


Deneuve


Create your own three panel cartoon.

Ballardry

"J.G. Ballard began as a hardcore SF writer. His very early short stories, on familiar themes such as overpopulation, societal decay and so on, are as good as anything in the genre.... There followed four novels of glazed apocalypse": [Martin Amis]

Where the world was destroyed by:

The Wind from Nowhere (1961) Wind
The Drowned World (1962) Water
The Drought (1964) Heat
The Crystal World (1966) Mineralisation

Evolution of Dancing Gangsters

Walk Cheerfully (1930) silent Ozu film.
The Band Wagon (1953) Vincent Minelli musical.
Band of Outsiders (1964) Jean-Luc Godard movie
Pulp Fiction (1994) - Quentin Tarantino flic.

Old prof...

Stanton Englehart has passed away. He was a great artist but an even better human being. He was very compassionate, humorous, generous, vibrant and a pleasure to be around.
He taught art classes at Fort Lewis College in CO.
One of the classes he taught was on Aesthetics. I took the class back in 1990. It was a cool class because the students would talk aesthetics and art most of the day. Then Stanton would play music and we would write in our journals or read the books he had assigned. At the end of the year he would let the students grade themselves. He felt we ultimately would be humble enough to not give ourselves an A+ and he was right: He had to talk some of us out of giving ourselves a B.
He painted a lot of landscapes and was particularly partial to the Southwestern United States [close to where he lived his entire life]. He would visit Lake Powell often, with his wife, and he would come back and paint these big colorful paintings that would take up half the wall. A book on his paintings can be found here.

The books he assigned for his class were:

The Memory of Old Jack
The Universe is a Green Dragon
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

He had an influence on my life. He'll be missed by many.