Before there were iPods, or even CDs, and around the time cassettes let break dancers move the party to a cardboard dance floor on the sidewalk, there were boomboxes. It's been 20 years since the devices disappeared from the streets. It's high time to press rewind on this aspect of America's musical history. Back in the day, you could take your music with you and play it loud, even if people didn't want to hear it. 150 decibels of power-packed bass blasted out on street corners from New York City to Topeka. Starting in the mid-'70s, boomboxes were available everywhere, and they weren't too expensive. Young inner-city kids lugged them around, and kids in the suburbs kept them in their cars. They weren't just portable tape players with the speakers built in. You could record off the radio, and most had double cassette decks, so if you were walking down the street and you heard something you liked, you could go up to the kid and ask to dub a copy. They were called boomboxes, or ghetto blasters. But to most of the young kids in New York City, they were just a box. And the manufacturers noticed, says Fred Brathwaite, better known as Fab 5 Freddy. "People that were big fans of music at the time were into higher-fidelity, better-quality sound — bass, midrange and treble," Freddy says. "So [the manufacturers] listened to what the consumer, what the young hip kid on the streets of New York, wanted. We wanted bass."
e quando já não se consegue assistir a nada que não faça referência à crise, eis o maior festival de música. south by southwest, texas. esta é a altura do ano em que toneladas de jornalistas de música, autores do melhores e piores blogs, fricalhada roqueira, pessoal das roulotes de apoio alimentar, ou o que for, desaparece durante 5 dias para austin. caras radiantes, filas intermináveis para o concerto que afinal não era o que se pensava. é engraçado ver nas notícias que dois artistas portugueses vão aparecer no festival. por acaso até vão 5 deles. tipo jogos olímpicos. mas quem é que os vai ver com vontade? muito antes disto andaram por lá por exemplo os les baton rouge. ainda não havia o canal de notícias da sic. esta semana vão desfilar por aqui alguns dos mais interessantes enviados.
A BBC fez recentemente um documentário sobre a Factory Records, que o ano passado fez 30 anos, onde faz referência a bandas como os Joy Division e os Happy Mondays. Tem entrevistas com os membros dos Joy Division, New Order, Section 25, Happy Mondays e muito outros. A Factory Records foi fundada por Tony Wilson em Manchester e as primeiras bandas a passar por o famoso rótulo foram os Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire e The Durutti Column.
"Uma noite num bar, um velho amigo de Ari Folman conversa com ele sobre um pesadelo recorrente no qual é perseguido por 26 cães enraivecidos. Todas as noites, o mesmo número de monstros. Os dois homens chegam à conclusão que há uma ligação com o exército israelita, durante a sua primeira missão na primeira guerra do Líbano no início dos anos 80. Ari fica surpreendido pelo facto de já não se lembrar de nada desse período da sua vida. Intrigado por este enigma, decide entrevistar velhos amigos e camaradas por todo o mundo. Ele precisa de descobrir a verdade sobre essa altura e sobre ele próprio. Enquanto Ari se envolve cada vez mais no mistério, a sua memória começa lentamente a despertar imagens surreais..."
Tiago Pereira e B Fachada apresentama Tradição Oral ContemporâneaNum impulso construtivo de análise do processo de tradicionalização, um documentarista do tradicional, Tiago Pereira, convida uma princesa da Pop, B Fachada, à auto-reflexão em torno das noções deautoria e criação. É este o ponto de partida.
Os dois viajam a um centro da Tradição Oral por excelência com o propósito de cruzar o processo estético urbano do músico com a criação comunitária rural; a troca de repertório e de metodologias com as vozes do campo é bem sucedida e acaba por transcender o projecto inicial. Simultaneamente, uma exploraçãovisual do imaginário citadino do B Fachada constrói o paralelo entre a criaçãocolectiva pelo indivíduo da Tradição rural com a criação individual pelo colectivo da Pop urbana.
A sobreposição da lírica comunitária com a lírica individual, da variação comunitária com a inovação individual levanta questões de interesse generalizado— Como é possível que romances comunitários cantados ha quinhentos anos possam tão explicitamente relacionar-se com canções de autor de há 5 semanas nos métodos e nos propósitos?
Como pode a autoria artesanal urbana ser tão semelhante à variação rural da Tradição Oral?
B Fachada, Tradição Oral Contemporânea, de Tiago Pereira. Salvemos o Giacometti da triste desculturalização rural e mostremos-lhe ofrenético comunitário da urbe.
Alex Gibney is one of the most important documentarists at work today. Two of his recent films - Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, about high-level corporate corruption in America, and Taxi to the Dark Side, an account of US military interrogation and torture in Afghanistan and Iraq - are essential viewing for anyone seeking an understanding of our times. His films are sober, carefully crafted and thoroughly researched, politically committed but not propagandistic, and deeply felt without focusing the camera on his own bleeding heart. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson Release: 2008 Country: USA Cert (UK): 15 Runtime: 120 mins Directors: Alex Gibney Cast: Johnny Depp More on this film He is thus considerably different from the subject of his latest film, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S. Thompson, one of the creators and most extreme exponent of the "New Journalism" of the 1960s, and the man who gave us that overworked phrase "fear and loathing". Thompson, who had an obsession with guns, owning 22 of them (all kept fully loaded), committed suicide with a gunshot to his head in 2005 at the age of 67. The film is an impressionistic portrait of Thompson as eccentric libertarian, admired outsider, rebel, scabrous social critic. A romantic utopian, he was searching for the American Dream and lamenting its death. As an ambitious writer, he was chasing after that chimera "the Great American novel", but inevitably finding it eluded him. Early on, Gibney takes us to the study in the Colorado farmhouse where Thompson lived for the last 40 years of his life, the camera scanning photographs of Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, the heroes he sought to emulate. Thompson was one of three brothers raised in a lower-middle-class family in Louisville, Kentucky, and was in constant trouble at school and then in the US Air Force. The film, however, passes rapidly over the youth and early career, eager to get to the wild, rebellious 1960s, which he observed, participated in, helped shape the image of, and of which he was ultimately a victim through his reckless addiction to every possible kind of drug. There is an extended section on his first book, Hell's Angels (1966), an excellent piece of reportage on California's motorcycle gangs, written after spending a year with them, and ending when he was given a terrible beating after they'd demanded a share of any money he made out of them. Gibney shows Thompson going to the self-destructive edge in writing this book and then plunging over that edge into Gonzo journalism. Hell's Angels was participatory journalism that put the writer into the story and drew on the techniques of fiction. Gonzo happily stirred actual fiction into the brew (some of it extremely mischievous, as when he wrote of politician Ed Muskie as a drug addict) and added touches of the surreal. Thompson was introduced to the term 'Gonzo' by his friend, the Boston journalist Bill Cardoso; it's apparently an Irish-American term for the last man standing after an all-night drinking session. From 1970, British cartoonist Ralph Steadman illustrated many of Thompson's books and articles, and his bold graphic style, an expressionistic combination of George Grosz and Thomas Rowlandson, became an essential element in the Gonzo package. Steadman speaks with a warm, wry candour about their collaboration. Having started out as a sport journalist, Thompson became immersed in politics. He ran unsuccessfully for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado, on an independent hippy ticket. More importantly, he covered all the presidential elections from 1968 onwards. "The Kennedys - they were his guys," one witness observes, but he became a friend of George McGovern, Gary Hart and Jimmy Carter, all of whom speak well of him, as does a less likely friend, the right-wing ideologue Pat Buchanan, who must have loathed everything Thompson stood for, yet arranged for him to ride in the back of Nixon's limousine during the 1968 election. During this period, we see Thompson developing a public persona through his signature dark glasses, cigarette holder, floppy hat and outrageous behaviour and being taken over by it. By 1976, when travelling with Jimmy Carter, it was Thompson's autograph people sought, not the presidential candidate's. The peak of Thompson's madness was reached in 1974 when he accepted a Rolling Stone assignment to cover the Foreman-Ali 'Rumble in the Jungle' in Kinshasa. Instead of attending the fight (as more responsible New Journalists such as Tom Wolfe, George Plimpton and Norman Mailer did), he took a load of drugs and floated in his hotel pool wearing a Nixon mask and clutching a bottle of whisky. Gibney's elaborately textured film draws on much home movie footage, new interviews, old TV appearances and clips from the feature films inspired by Thompson's antics (he's played by Bill Murray in Where the Buffalo Roam and Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). It's often hilarious and captures the spirit of the time, both in its early hopes and its inevitable disillusionment. Yet it's a sad movie and somehow inadequate in its lack of true pity or understanding. Thompson's first wife, Sondi, mother of his son Juan, put up with him for 20 years, until his excesses and egotism forced her to leave, and it is she alone who says: "I think his story was tragic." And it is she who demurs from a general agreement that his suicide, like that of Hemingway, was somehow a courageous act. In this documentary, we watch a man go insane and destroy himself, his final act of madness being the funeral he organised in which his ashes were sent into the skies with red, white and blue fireworks from a self-aggrandising tower he'd designed with the help of Steadman. · This article was amended on December 28 2008. In the article above we said: "Pat Buchanan, who must have loathed everything [Hunter S] Thompson stood for...arranged for him to ride in the back of Nixon's limousine during the 1972 election." We meant the 1968 election, when Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey. This has been corrected.
Let's Get Lost is a 1988 American documentary film about the turbulent life and career of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker written and directed by Bruce Weber. A group of Baker fans, ranging from ex-associates to ex-wives and children, talk about the man. WeberΓ??s film traces the manΓ??s career from the 1950s, when he was in his prime, playing with jazz greats like Charlie Parker and Gerry Mulligan, to the 1980s, when he had become a skid row junkie unable to get a decent gig. By juxtaposing these two decades, Weber presents a sharp contrast between the younger, handsome Baker Γ?? the statuesque idol who resembled a mix of James Dean and Jack Kerouac Γ?? to what he became, Γ??a seamy looking drugstore cowboy-cum-derelict,Γ?? as J. Hoberman put it in his Village Voice review.[1] LetΓ??s Get Lost begins near the end of BakerΓ??s life, on the beaches of Santa Monica, and ends at the Cannes Film Festival. Weber uses these moments in the present as bookends to the historic footage contained in the bulk of the film. The documentation ranges from vintage photographs by William Claxton in 1953 to appearances on The Steve Allen Show and kitschy, low budget Italian films Baker did for quick money.
BBC FOUR focuses on one of England’s truly unique and underrated bands - The Fall - in this special documentary. One of the most enigmatic, idiosyncratic and chaotic garage bands of the last 30 years, The Fall are led by the belligerent and poetic Mark E Smith. The band grew out of the fringe of the Manchester punk scene and to date have released in excess of three dozen albums, toured relentlessly, inspired two successful stage plays, recorded 24 Peel Sessions and performed with contemporary ballet dancer Michael Clarke, along with various spoken word events. All this has happened under the guidance of Smith with various line-ups currently totalling over 40 different members. They have never conformed to fashion or musical trends and when asked why they were his favourite band, John Peel replied: “They are always different, they are always the same.” This is the first time that Mark E Smith has agreed to the story being told on television and he, along with many of the major players, takes us through this unique English rock ‘n’ roll story. Their rollercoaster story is told alongside footage of their most recent and sadly now last Peel Session recorded in August at the legendary BBC Maida Vale studios. There is also film of John playing out the session at Peel Acres a week later. Contributors include past and present band members including Marc Riley, Una Baines, Steve Hanley, Ben Pritchard and Eleni Smith plus thoughts from key fans and critics including Paul Morley, Tony Wilson, Stewart Lee, promoter Alan Wise, original Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon and Franz Ferdinand.
cá está o torrent: http://www.greylodge.org/gpc/?p=346
I noticed my own heart beating, breath passing through my nostrils, My feet walking, eyes seeing. —Allen Ginsberg, “On the Cremation of Chögyam Thungpa Vidyadhara”
I was lost, and the cost, and the cost didn’t matter to me. I was lost, and the cost was to be outside society. —Patti Smith, “Rock and Roll Nigger”
“I was born in Chicago, mainline of America, in the center of a blizzard after World War II.” Biographical fact, yes, but so elliptical and so visceral in its phrasing, Patti Smith’s birth here links culture, history, and weather—like she’s some fantastic force come to earth to surprise us all. This notion is reinforced throughout Patti Smith: Dream of Life, a film and art installation and photography book 11 years in the making. Now playing at New York’s Film Forum, Steven Sebring’s documentary opens with the artist’s self-narration—her siblings’ arrivals, the family’s move to the City of Brotherly Love—over images of running, red-lit horses (of course), followed by footage from a train window, apartment buildings and train tracks and traffic. “Life is an adventure of our own design,” she says, “intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.”
Dream of Life follows her adventure, specifically after her career started again. She had already lived in New York, worked and lived with Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Shepard, and recorded seminal punk rock albums in 1974 and ‘75,) when she met Fred Sonic Smith. In 1979, they moved to Detroit, his “beloved Detroit,” where they began raising their two children, Jackson and Jesse. It was only when Fred and then her brother Todd died suddenly, that Smith even considered returning to a public life. To support her family and encouraged by Allen Ginsberg ("Let go of the spirit of the departed and continue your life’s celebration), in 1995 she brought her children back east and began performing on stage again. “Shaking off the performance dust,” she says, “and saying hello to the road.”
As Smith narrates this decision, the movie shows her emerging from a car pulling an Airstreamer, hardly your average camper. Like much of the footage assembled for the film—and again, she and Sebring collaborated on the project for a decade—this image is at once oddly ceremonial, appositely punk, and utterly self-knowing. The film is suffused with Smith’s sense of irony, outrage, and loss, and it is shaped according to her changing sense of self, her dedication to her kids, her constant political commitments. Smith frames her story as an junction of experiences: “Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line,” Smith observes. “You have your own interior world and it’s not neat, therefore the importance and beauty of music, sound, noise, when you go outside and walk on the street.”
These worlds exist across space and time. When she revisits Detroit, photos show Smith immersed in her young family (pregnant, leaning into Fred, entranced by a sleeping infant), Sebring’s camera takes you through the old house, revealing dishes in a sink, children’s handprints on otherwise empty walls, a home abandoned now but dense with memories. As Smith makes her way down a stairwell or gazes out windows, the soundtrack offers “The Jackson Song”: “When day is done and little dreamers spin, / First take my hand, now let it go.”
Loss is a persistent theme in the film, considered in various dimensions. She visits Blake’s and Gregory Corso’s graves (“‘Remember you are mortal,’ said Gregory, ‘but poetry is not’"), compares photos of Baghdad’s Golden Dome Mosque, before and after the U.S. invasion ("What are we doing in Iraq?"), and describes her own “alteration” since her brother’s death: “My heart went from feeling like a cold black ember to a warm really joyful flame,” she says, “All his finest qualities somehow entered me as a human being.”
As the camera follows Smith and her band on the road (including shows in Tokyo, London, Paris, and Atlanta), it also returns again and again to the city that seduced her. Remembering her early days in New York, she touches on people (William Burroughs, “our guardian angel") and places (CBGB), the film illustrating briefly as she skips from one recollection to another. “New York,” a decades-younger Smith recites, “is the thing that formed me, New York is the thing that deformed me, New York is the thing that perverted me, New York is the thing that converted me… It’s my little prayer for New York.” The city is here less a place than a point of perpetual departure. And the film, despite Smith’s own date-pocked narration, is hardly chronological, but rather, a lyrical construction of moments—black and white or color, crisp or grainy, posed or apparently improvised—pieces and connections rather than conclusions.
This shifting portrait assumes viewers’ assumptions and filters, doesn’t impose a reading. Rather, it slinks and shimmies, stops and starts, provokes and seduces. Just so, Smith comes in and out of frame, each actual place a repository and occasion. When she enters her “corner,” a room in the Chelsea Hotel to which the film returns more than once, the image focuses on black boots first, then tips up to show the camera hanging from her neck. Pans of the room show accumulating memories: photos (Ralph Nader, for whom she campaigned in 2000), wooden clogs, books (Walt Whitman, Mickey Spillane, William Blake, Rimbaud), and her instruments. She found in rock and roll, she says, a means to express herself, “albeit somewhat awkwardly.”
Modest and even shy offstage, Smith is famously explosive on it. The film’s concert footage is occasionally overlaid with alternate soundtracks (Smith reading poems), but always makes clears her uncanny charisma. “My mission,” Smith says, “is to communicate, to wake people up, to give them my energy and to suck theirs.” Just so, her recent performances include calls to action against the current U.S. administration. In Philadelphia, she reads from the Declaration of Independence ("a long train of abuses") in order to “indict George W. Bush for befouling our country’s name.” On the DC Mall, she sings “Radio Baghdad,” from her 2004 CD Trampin’ ("Suffer not the paralysis of your neighbor, / Suffer not, but extend your hand"), as the film shows an anti-war collage.
Smith’s journeys are by turns intimate and indistinct, comic (a bit with Flea on a beach, comparing stories of pissing into bottles) and spiritual (she walks with Jesse through Central Park as she remembers the song “She Walked Home,” which she wrote but never recorded because, she says, “Somehow Fred made it his own"). As much as this collaborative film reveals of Smith, it never tries to define her or even make her its only focus. Instead, it takes her at her word: “We all have a voice. We have a responsibility to exercise it, to use it.”
by Cynthia Fuchs PopMatters Film and TV Editor
Patti Smith: Dream of Life Director: Steven Sebring Cast: Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, Oliver Ray, Tony Shanahan, Jay Dee Daughterty, Jackson Smith, Jesse Smith, Tom Verlaine, Sam Shepard, Phillip Glass, Benjamin Smoke, Michael Stipe, Flea
é... temos sempre aqui o torrent a cair no desktop: http://www.mininova.org/tor/1339304
Beautiful Losers Beautiful Losers is a feature documentary film celebrating the independent and D.I.Y. spirit that unified a loose-knit group of American artists who emerged from the underground youth subcultures of skateboarding, graffiti, punk rock and hip-hop. This documentary tells the story of how a group of outsiders with little or no formal training and almost no conception or interest of the inner workings of the art world ended up having an incredible impact on the worlds of art, fashion, music, film and pop culture.
e lá continua o doc lisboa sempre de pé. sem parar em semáforos e sem hesitar em bifurcações. os documentários portugueses continuam sem aparecer. sabe.se lá porquê.
