As an instrumentalist, Segovia did
for the guitar what Casals did for the cello, but he did it with an
instrument that had never before been taken seriously as a concert
instrument. Within his own lifetime, Segovia taught himself the
instrument, revolutionised the technique and elevated a folk instrument
to the highest levels of the international concert platform. As a
musician, he has come to be recognised as one of the most refined and
profound of his time.
In the film, Segovia reminisces about his early days in Grenada and
his happy discovery of the guitar. He plays ten pieces, all beautifully
filmed in the courtyards of the Alhambra:
Zabriskie Point (1970) by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, widely noted at the time for its setting in the late 1960s counterculture of the United States. Some of the film's scenes were shot on location at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley.
This was the second of three English-language films Antonioni had been contracted to direct for producer Carlo Ponti and to be distributed by MGM. The other two films were Blowup (1966) and The Passenger (1975).
Zabriskie Point was an overwhelming commercial failure and panned by most critics upon release. It has, however, achieved cult status and is noted for its cinematography, use of music and direction.
Aleister Crowley, self proclaimed "The Great Beast" and known by the sensationalist press as "The Wickedest Man in the World",
was perhaps the most controversial and notorious individuals in early 20th century England. This dramatically reconstructed film unearths the barely
believable and shocking facts surrounding a man who was voted in a BBC
poll to be one of the most influential Britons of all time. Was he
related to US President George Bush? How was he connected to the founder of Scientology, NASA, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jack the Ripper, Winston Churchill, Ian Fleming
and how did this Occultist, Spy, Poet, Writer and accomplished
Mountaineer come to know and influence so many other remarkable people?
In Search Of The Great Beast 666 - Aleister Crowley
Featuring the Voice of Joss Ackland and Music Score by Rick Wakeman As I posted this entry, my blog statistics come up as:
56666 pageviews - 881 posts, last published on Apr 22, 2013
Shelton Lea (1946-2005), born in Melbourne Australia, left school at the age of 12 and spent periods
in gaol as a young man, including eighteen months in Goulburn Gaol at
the age of 18. While there he wrote love poems for detainees, payment
being in tobacco. Part-performance poet (he declared he would read poems
wherever he could find an audience), part-critic of contemporary
Australian life and attitudes, he was 'by birth and nature urban', with
inner-city areas his natural habitat. His comfortable milieu is the city
pubs - 'great brewing palaces of beer' - and city life, with its
violence, crime, drugs, alcoholism, gutter and park derelicts ('in
defence of drunks', 'coming down - delirium tremens'). Shelton Lea also
wrote of love in his more tranquil verse ('having watched you', 'love
poem', 'i dream of the soft slide of light'). His complaint about the
sterility of modern Australian life and politics is evident in 'i'm here
today for a whinge' and 'occupied' - where he accuses, in
Jindyworobakish accents:
we are occupied by our own greed ... we are making of this place a desert, a land of rutted soil of ruined earth, leached of its true wealth, its dreamtime, rather than living in harmony, as once the koories did, treating this land as a kindred soul
Many
of Lea's poems are slanted towards performance, carrying within such
verses as 'The Dip's Dilemma' and 'Picnic Day at the Drouin Races',
echoes both of C.J. Dennis and an early Bruce Dawe. Commenting on the
modern proliferation of easygoing, slang-type verse (including much of
his own) Lea says that the times themselves prohibit traditional-type
verse, ('well-ordered thoughts well shaped and moulded into a perfectly
metrical form'). There are too many distractions in modern society -
television, the media and 'the accostation of cars and trucks/ the
imperterbable [sic] rumble of suburbs and/cities'. Lea published
several books of verse, Corners in Cans (1969), Chrysalis (1972), The Paradise Poems (1973), Chockablock with Dawn (1975), Palantine Madonna (1978), Poems from a Peach Melba Hat (1985), I am Nebuchadnezzar (1991) and a Poets on Record (1976, tape recording with text).
This BBC 4 documentary examines the question "Did Jesus Die?". It looks
at a bunch of ideas around this question until minute 25, where this
examination of ideas takes a very logical and grounded turn with
surprising conclusions that demonstrate that the three wise men were
Buddhist monks who found Jesus and came back for him around puberty.
After being trained in a Buddhist Monastery he spread the Buddhist
philosophy, survived the crucifixion, and escaped to Kashmir,
Afghanistan where he died an old man at the age of 80.
This documentary examines the missing years from the life of Jesus. The unknown years of Jesus refers to the period between Jesus childhood and the beginning of his ministry as recorded in the New Testament. The term "silent years" is sometimes used as well. The phrase "lost years of Jesus" is also encountered in esoteric
literature, but is not commonly used in scholarly literature since it
is assumed that Jesus was probably working as a carpenter in Galilee
from the age of twelve till thirty, so the years were not "lost years".
In the late medieval period Arthurian legends appeared that the young Jesus was in Britain. In the 19th and 20th centuries theories began to emerge that between the ages of 12 and 30 Jesus had visited India, or had studied with the Essenes in the Judea desert. Modern scholarship has generally rejected these theories and holds that nothing is known about this time period in the life of Jesus.
The phrase "lost years" is also found in relation to theories arising from the "swoon hypothesis", the suggestion that Jesus survived his crucifixion.
This, and the related view that he avoided crucifixion altogether, has
given rise to several speculations about what happened to him in the
supposed remaining years of his life, but these are generally not
accepted by mainstream scholars.
"A religious text written in stone"
The Khajuraho Group of Monuments in Khajuraho, a town in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, located in Chhatarpur District, about 620 kilometres (385 mi) southeast of New Delhi, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in India. Khajuraho has the largest group of medieval Hindu and Jain temples, famous for their erotic sculptures.
The name Khajuraho, ancient "Kharjuravāhaka", is derived from the Sanskrit words kharjura = date palm and vāhaka = "one who carries". Locals living in the Khajuraho village always knew about and kept up the temples as best as they could. They were pointed out to the English in the late 19th century when the jungles had taken a toll on the monuments.In the 19th century, British engineer T.S. Burt arrived in the area, followed by General Alexander Cunningham. Cunningham put Khajuraho on the world map when he explored the site on behalf of the Archaeological Survey of India and described what he found in glowing terms. The Khajuraho Group of Monuments has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is considered to be one of the "seven wonders" of India.
This witty and original film is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others
don't. Beginning at New York's Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space is so popular and how other urban oases, both in New York and elsewhere, measure up. Based on direct observation of what people actually do, the film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it.
Running time: 58 min, Year released: 1988
Ichi the Killer(殺し屋１Koroshiya Ichi) is a 2001 Japanese film directed by Takashi Miike, written by Sakichi Sato, and based on Hideo Yamamoto's manga series
of the same name. The film is notorious amongst moviegoers due to its
extremely graphic violence. The film has received widespread controversy
and is banned outright in several countries due to its high impact
violence and graphic depictions of cruelty. In 2009, The Norwegian Media Authority reacted to the film and later classified the film as Rejected and banned the film due to "high impact violence and cruelty" and the film is still banned in Norway, but still available for home video purchase. The film has been banned outright in Malaysia
since the film's distribution date in 2001 due to "very high impact
violence and offensive depictions of cruelty" The film is banned uncut
in Germany, and classified as "adults only" in a "heavily cut version".
The film was released in the United States in a cut version rated NC-17.
The soundtrack was written and produced by Japanese band Boredoms, credited as "Karera Musication", under the direction of ex-guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto and percussionist/band leader Yoshimi P-We. Click on the image above for the full film.
This 25 minute long film is about the mid-1970s British rubber fetish scene. It features a short clip of Sex Pistols Manager and clothing entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren. The film is made by John Samson. John Samson (1946 - 2004) was an extraordinary British filmmaker. Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, as a teenager Samson moved to Paisley just outside of Glasgow where he remained for the formative years of his life. Resistant to the constraints of formal education, at 16 Samson left school and took on an apprenticeship in the Clyde shipyards learning precision tool making in an engineering firm. Samson quickly became involved as a spokesperson in the first Glasgow apprentices' strike, helping organise visits by Glasgow apprentices to other shipyards in England in order to demonstrate solidarity across the British Isles.
Around this time Samson began to engage with the Anarchist movement, joining the Committee of 100 and participating in a number of Nuclear Disarmament protests including Holy Loch in 1961 where he was arrested with 350 others for demonstrating against the presence of a US nuclear submarine. In 1963, upon meeting his wife Linda who was studying painting at Glasgow School of Art at the time, Samson gave up his apprenticeship and fell in with a bohemian circle that included artists, writers and musicians. He taught himself guitar, took up stills photography and by the early 70s began to make films.
These experiences - Samson's working class roots, his passionate interest in radical politics and bohemia - fuelled what would turn out to be a life-long fascination with individuals and groups operating at the margins of society. If it is possible to pick up such a thing as a singular thematic or narrative running throughout Samson's films, then it is exactly this: his subjects are outsiders, people with unusual lives and obsessions, liminal figures who fail to square neatly with the normative models for identity and behaviour propagated by contemporary culture.
Evident from his very first film Charlie (1973), a 10 minute short film on the merit of which he was awarded a scholarship to the National Film School, Samson was an extremely compassionate filmmaker who never sought to exploit his unusual subjects. Instead he would immerse himself in their strange worlds; his keen eye teasing out motivations while never lacking a dry yet gentle good humour which helped him, above all, to make sense of each and every extraordinary existence he encountered.
Here the subject of fetishism in clothing - rubber, latex, leather - is explored. The film features Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols at the time at SEX, the boutique he ran with Vivien Westwood on the Kings Road. Central to the film is a magnificent studio set constructed mainly by Samson himself in the shape of the fetishist magazine Atomage with actual turning pages all populated by these amazing characters, dressed in thigh length leather boots and chains. The film was banned at the time by London Weekend Television, and has become one of those rare films more quoted than seen. Again, using revealing interviews on the motivation behind the protagonists' choices, Dressing for Pleasure won Outstanding Film Award at the London Film Festival that year. Recently it has toured the world as part of the Vivienne Westwood exhibition and has been an inspiration for many other films including Julian Temple's The Filth and the Fury (2000).
Dressing for Pleasure is an intimate, candid film about people with a rubber fetish. An interview with John Sutcliffe, the legendary clothing designer who also founded AtomAge, ‘a magazine for vinyl wearers’, is woven through the film, while blown-up pages from the magazine are used as a backdrop to the carefully composed scenes of participants parading their costumes. An interview with a shop assistant at Sex, the King’s Road boutique owned by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, one of the few places that openly sold latex and rubber wear, links fetish wear to the equally scandalous punk scene. There’s nothing deliberately sensational in Dressing for Pleasure, and what emerges is not a film about people into S&M, but a portrait of an alternative lifestyle that embraces pleasure without shame.
With his documentary My Name Is Albert Ayler, Swedish filmmaker Kasper Collin pays unbridled homage to the titular musician, one of the most innovative and electric but least-known figures in contemporary jazz. Ayler's obscurity is at least as attributable to his short lifespan as it is to his musical iconoclasm -- he died under bizarre and inexplicable circumstances in late 1970; on November 5 of that year, Manhattan police found his 34-year-old body floating in the city's East River, possibly (though not definitively) a victim of suicide. Collin approaches Ayler's life as a straightforward narrative, segueing smoothly from touchstone to touchstone. The picture thus covers the musician's upbringing in Cleveland, OH; his performances on the saxophone and oboe in a military band; his critical, shaping experiences in touring R&B groups across the U.S.; and finally, his decision to spin that R&B music off into an unprecedented form of experimental jazz on the landscapes of New York City and Stockholm, Sweden. Collin's narrative ends, of course, with speculation on Ayler's death. Collin devotes much screen time to an exploration of Ayler's friendship with the legendary John Coltrane, and to the sad reality that during the 1960s, truly groundbreaking jazz by African-American artists could only flourish in über-progressive Europe. Throughout the picture, the documentarian works in extremely rare archival footage of Ayler, and roots much of his narrative in interviews with such key figures as Ayler's Sunday school teacher father (in his nineties at the time of this production); Ayler's brother Donald, also a musician, and one with a history of severe mental disturbance; and a number of Ayler's nonfamilial musical collaborators including Sunny Murray and Gary Peacock. (Ayler's romantic partner and sometime musical collaborator, Mary Parks, declined to appear onscreen, though Collin works in extracts from a telephone interview with her.) It goes without saying that My Name Is Albert Ayler represents the only documentary portrait to date of the wondrous musician. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
