Jimi Hendrix Live at Woodstock (Full Video)

.

The first time I saw this film was in 1993. I was living in Surry Hills in Sydney, Australia. I came home at something like 4am after a night of carousing and turned on the TV as I was not sleepy and there he was. I watched the entire hour totally spellbound. Now you can too.

Didge on the Sea of Galilee

A magical night on the sea of Galilee, when this amazing didge player "yoram Sivan" combined his show with these 2 Amazon fire girls

Patti Smith and Jonathan Lethem in Conversation

Dont miss this conversation with two New York icons. Patti Smith burst on to the New York punk scene with her 1975 seminal album Horses. A bright flame in music for more than three-decades, she has influenced the likes of REM, The Smiths, and Garbage. She is an acclaimed visual artist and poet, and recipient of a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture. Recently she released a memoir, Just Kids, about her friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Jonathan Lethems National Book Critics Circle award-winning novel Motherless Brooklyn, about a detective with Tourette syndrome, had The New York Times crown him as something of a hipster celebrity. Hes also the author of The Fortress of Solitude and, most recently, Chronic City. Together they talk about Just Kids and some of their shared passions along the way the visual arts, literature (of course) and their love for the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.

Andrei Tarkovsky - Mirror

A couple of scenes from Tarkovsky's "Mirror"

Election Night Special

For England this morning.

The Beginings of Portable Audio

The first portable radio features in the 1961 series "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis". The vacant beatnik Maynard G Crabbs seems to be a world of his own as the sound surrounds him.

Vilayat Khan and Kishan Maharaj -Raag Bhairavi

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN... MR LEONARD COHEN

Informal portrait of Leonard Cohen. The film begins with Cohen delivering a comic monologue about his visit to a friend in a Montreal mental hospital. Later he is seen reading poetry to rapt audience and also alone, or relaxing with family and friends, walking the streets of the city, eating in a popular night spot, sleeping in his three-dollar-a-night hotel room, even taking a bath. His poetry readings are principally from “A Spice-box of Earth” and “Flowers for Hitler”. A press conference with Cohen and his friend Irving Layton forms a part of the film.
Filmed and recorded at various locations in 1964, released in 1965 by the National Film Board of Canada. Directed by Donal Brittain and Dan Owen, produced by John Kemeny. Black & white, 44 min.

Steven "Jesse" Bernstein

Morning in the Sub-Basement of Hell

"Holding the instruments of pain I conduct the orchestra of the sun"


The Man Upstairs

Steven "Jesse" Bernstein (December 4, 1950 -- October 22, 1991) was an American underground writer and performance artist who is most famous for his recordings with Sub Pop Records and close relationship with William S. Burroughs. Bernstein's substance abuse issues and mental illness contributed to his provocative local celebrity, though they ultimately culminated in his suicide.

Steven Jesse Bernstein was born in Los Angeles, California. He moved to Seattle, Washington in 1974 where he adopted the moniker Jesse, and began performing and self-publishing chapbooks of his poetry (the first chapbook was Choking On Sixth, 1978). Bernstein would become something of an icon to many in Seattle's underground music scene. Notable fans included Kurt Cobain and Oliver Stone. Bernstein's mental illness was not as alarming as it might have been off the stage, as his drug-reinforced manic episodes were harnessed and channelled into engrossing, often perverse, entertainment. According to one Seattle newspaper, he opened for music acts such as Nirvana, Big Black, Soundgarden, U-Men, and the Crows:
"He read poems from a stage with a live rodent in his mouth, its tail twitching as baseline punctuation. He tried to cut his heart out in order to hold it in his hands and calm it down. He once urinated on a heckler and tended to throw things: beer bottles, manuscripts, drumsticks, his wallet, a sandwich."

The concept for the Bernstein album Prison was for Jesse to do a raw, live performance at Monroe, Washington State Penitentiary Special Offenders unit in 1991. Jesse went with his manager Barbara Buckland, Bruce Pavitt from Sub Pop Records, Grant Alden, then with Seattle's Rocket Magazine, now known as the co-founder of No Depression Magazine, photographer Arthur S. Aubry, and various tech people. None of the session except for the photos taken by Aubry was usable, however, and SubPop later contracted Steve Fisk to finish the project. The album was intended to be produced along the same lines as Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison, but Fisk later decided to score the recordings with jazz and ambient music. The album was only partially completed when Bernstein committed suicide by stabbing himself in the throat three times with a knife. He was 40 years old when he died -- about a month and a half before his 41st birthday.

Prison was released on April 1, 1992. In 1994, one of these recordings, "Me and Her Outside (No No Man)",was used in the film Natural Born Killers.

I am Secretly an Important Man, a collection of poetry, short stories, and spoken performances, was released in March of 1996 by Zero Hour Publishing.

Stephen Fry Speaks Out Against the Catholic Church