Taj Mahal 05/26/2010
 Future Utopias 05/18/2010
Cannes Excerpts: "Another Year" 05/18/2010
An obsession grows. Trust 05/04/2010
The great and difficult to find Hal Hartley film Trust is now available for streaming on Netflix! Highly recommended. Half Japanese 04/26/2010
12 years before directing the excellent The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Jeff Feuerzeig made Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King about the underground band. Here's the first ten minutes and a living room performance. El Sol 04/21/2010
Via Popular Science: More than three months after being hurled into orbit, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is snapping some breathtaking images of the Sun, the first of which NASA released this afternoon.  Cannes 2010 04/15/2010
 Some great looking films are screening at Cannes this year, highlighted by Mike Leigh's newest, Another Year. Also of note: Mathieu Amalric's Tournee. And the L.A. Times has this update on Terrence Malick's Tree of Life: Terrence Malick's much-ballyhooed and long-gestating "Tree of Life" was also not included in the lineup, negating the rumors, for now, that the Brad Pitt film would make a Cannes debut. It could still be added later -- "we're crossing our fingers," festival artistic director Thierry Fremaux said at the announcement -- but if it isn't, look for yet another round of rumors about Malick's exacting process. Billy's Deli 04/14/2010
 Here's a snapshot I took from my phone the other day of our nameless confidante of a waitress at Billy's Deli in Glendale. She had a thing for dirty jokes. Her best: "A guy calls into his boss, says 'I can't come into work today, I'm sick.' Boss says; 'You don't sound it to me.' Guy says; 'I'm over here fucking my sister, that sick enough for you?'" Related via NYT: Can the Jewish Deli be Reformed? Tadanori Yokoo 04/09/2010
Some beautiful Japanese psychedelia from artist Tadanori Yokoo, about whom Wikipedia says: In the late 1960s he became interested in mysticism and psychedelia, deepened by travels in India. Because his work was so attuned to 1960s pop culture, he has often been (unfairly) described as the "Japanese Andy Warhol" or likened to psychedelic poster artist Peter Max, but Yokoo's complex and multi-layered imagery is intensely autobiographical and entirely original.    Edward Larry Gordon 04/06/2010
via Soul Jazz: Laraaji’s distinctive use of the harp-like open-stringed zither and kalimba (African thumb piano) creates a hypnotic trance like musical landscape. ‘Celestial Vibrations’ was created before the concept of the ‘ambient’ artist existed and after the release of this album Laraaji soon came to the attention of another musical pioneer, Brian Eno.  |
