I mean this right here. Free mp3 download of Billy Bragg's new song, about the late peace activist Rachel Corrie, killed age 23 by an Israeli bulldozer.
Find out more about Rachel here.
I know people like her. That is the only reason I am posting this.
This is one for those among us who seem to feel that sweat shops don't exploit people enough.
I can't find the Guardian article referred to, but this link claims that a Chinese cosmetics firm uses skin from executed prisoners in makeup for export to Europe.
If I need to explain what's mind-bogglingly wrong about this to you, you're barely human.
Mmmmm tasty. Big thanks to Stomp Visual for releasing a bunch of Blue Underground dvds in New Zealand. BU are basically the Criterion Collection of trash cinema, offering uncut and highly-polished transfers of all kinds of sleaze, often with very well put together featurettes.
Mannaja: A Man Called Blade is a very late (1977) spaghetti western directed by giallo maestro Sergio Martino. Maurizio Merli stars as the title character, who along with the usual supernaturally-brilliant skills with a revolver is a dab hand at throwing hatchets.
God bless the spaghetti western. What other genre could start with a guy hunting someone down, cutting his hand off, dragging him through the desert, barging into a town where he knows no-one, insulting every stranger he sees, offering his prisoner as stakes in a poker game, cheating, shooting half the people in the room, stealing thousands of dollars, then calmly sauntering away -- and having that guy as the hero?
Mannaja also offers a great fist fight in a street of mud, lots of death, some preachy Marxist ideals, eyeball torture, enough double-crossing for a dozen other movies, and a soundtrack largely consisting of what sounds like a bad Nick Cave impersonator narrating the story (and giving away plot points before they happen).
Sheer genius. And yet it doesn't even compare to the next feature!
Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot! is a psychedelic western from 1967 that's weirder and more violent than any other western I've seen. The closest comparison I can think of is Clint Eastwood's brilliant horror western High Plains Drifter. Django Kill opens with its hero seemingly rising from the dead, where he is greeted by two awe-struck Native Americans who give him a swag of gold bullets ("God is better than lead, goes deeper") in exchange for knowledge about what lies beyond the veil of death.
The movie that follows is never normal. A standard-seeming revenge plot is derailed almost as soon as it starts. A man shot with those gold bullets has his guts ripped out by greedy townfolks while he's still alive. There's shooting, scalping, and plenty more atrocities. One or two bits are dumb, but mostly it's very well done. The writer/director was a documentary filmmaker who claims to have been inspired to make this movie by his own wartime experiences.
Coming soon... More Martino, and giallo!
PS - still planning that sex post. Isn't this a woman's trick usually, to promise some kind of sex just to keep the boys listening to what she's got to say in the meantime? ;-)
I've been meaning to make a post like this for a while.
Like many people, I have websites that I turn to for reviews on shit what I like. These are a few of my absolute favourites.
Steve Clark's I Hate Movies is a movie review column on a livejournal. This guy watches a phenomenal amount of movies and then writes funny, often hostile reviews. He seems to especially love weird-ass shit and anything harsh, from Ingmar Bergman to Takashi Miike, from Werner Herzog to Troma. Even better, he knows what he hates and why he hates it. I often disagree but am always entertained.
Byron Crawford, the mindset of a champion is the best hip-hop site on the web, no homo. Bol is savage, homophobic, racist, sexist, and very very funny. He claims his inflammatory comments are all a put-on but I'm not so sure. In any case he really knows his music (every album I've bought on his recommendation has been fappo) and has managed to genuinely piss off a number of real hip-hop stars, most prominently Kanye West who he has a real hate hard-on for (no homo).
Russell Brown's Hard News is my NZ political blog of choice. Russell knows his shit, knows how to write, and is just the right sort of leftie geek. Yeah so he's also a professional journalist everywhere from The Listener to National Radio.
John Fallon's Arrow In the Head is my one-stop shop for horror movies. He breaks movies down with useful categories like Gore, Directing, Soundtrack, and the ever-important T&A. He's funny, rude and knowledgeable -- and he turned me on to Dante Tomaselli. He's got some pretty good reviews.
Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond is my international blog of choice. He links to all sorts of nice stuff. Sterling is one of my current all-round gurus; he's come a long way from the '80s cyberpunk stuff. Shame his blog is so UGLY, but I guess I can blame Wired for that, computer geeks have no sense of style.
I'm no fan of Francis Fukuyama, but this piece is very interesting.
Fukuyama argues, among other things, that next US president1 Hillary Clinton's comments on the Dubai Ports World takeover of six US ports are not only hypocritical, they are indicative that a Democrat administration would be no more world-friendly than the current Republican administration.
This has been obvious to a lot of us for a long time. It's nice to see someone often labelled a neoconservative offering this opinion.
This post doesn't feel complete without fuckwords.
1 - Well, do you have any doubts?
I cannot tell you how happy I am to see a major Hollywood movie being marketed with the ad line that's at the top of this poster.
There's an even cooler version around Wellington where the image is just the blood-red V in a circle, looking like an inverted Anarchy symbol. Awesome.
I can't wait to see the movie. Alan Moore knows the score.
Just to follow the recent trend on this increasingly lame-ass blog, here's a link to a new article by J.G. Ballard, on Modernism.
We love J.G. Ballard. We think everyone should read his books. He is the prophet of our age. Watching the movie versions of Empire Of The Sun and Crash isn't enough.
We love using the royal "we" because it makes us feel like someone is agreeing with us.
We watched the 1967 movie If You Live... Shoot (aka Django Kill) and enjoyed it. Any movie which opens with the hero rising from the grave and being given gold bullets by two friendly American Indians who want to know the secrets of death is ok in our book. Especially if it's a psychedelic western. Italians made much better westerns than Americans, they were weirder and more stylish. This is one of the best I've seen.
Our next post will be about SEX!
In his audio commentary for Casablanca, Roger Ebert says he has never heard of a negative review of that movie.
Ha ha, I don't need to justify my words or my actions!!
In the tradition of recent posts with no content by me, I present the greatest quotes of Margaret Thatcher.
"As God once said, and I think rightly..."
"Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul"
"No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions - he had money, too"
"I want my money back"
"A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure"
"If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman"
"No woman in my time will be prime minister or chancellor or foreign secretary - not the top jobs. Anyway, I wouldn't want to be prime minister; you have to give yourself 100 percent"
"I owe nothing to Women's Lib"
"The battle for women's rights has been largely won"
"Of course, people tell me that I shouldn't gloat. Well I am gloating"
"A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us"
"You don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive"
"When you've spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment, it's exciting to have a real crisis on your hands"
"I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end"
Every day I wake up is a miracle, thank you
Seperate religious and the spiritual, thank you
See I don't be asking in the air
Every action is a prayer
The bear won't attack me
I'll be attacking the bear, see
Back in the day I used to work in a book store
My job was to find whatever book you looked for
I remember one day this lady came for a bible
We was out so I started showing her other titles
Trying to share information about her religion
Everything that I showed her was written by Christians
Still, she got the hell out of the place
Might have read something about me shaking her faith
Now, knowledge is power, we spread information
How strong is your faith? What it take to be shaken?
Yo, I think she missed what Jesus was saying
You can't keep your eyes closed to a revelation
You could be speaking in tongues
Or be speaking to sons or daughters
My reflection of course within the water is
Beautiful, attractive, my musical contraption
Classified as unusual practice
But that's what it take to be a man
Free the land
Crash down on Babylon like the sea to the sand
Peace to the fam
We want you all to stay strong
And live long
Like a De La song, c'mon
Can't keep quiet
This time gon' be more than a riot
-- Talib Kweli, "Shuffering And Smiling"
(Fela Kuti tribute, from Red Hot & Riot)
Apologies if I got some of that wrong. I couldn't find a transcription online.
This ties in with another righteous Kweli lyric about religion:
It don't matter if you Muslim, Hebrew, or you a Christian
Information is the newest religion, it's a true way of living
Ain't no voodoo or stupid superstition
Gonna stop me with going through with my mission
Come on man
-- Talib Kweli, "We Got the Beat"
and:
Browsing through my old posts, I found this in my review of Kweli's mixtape Right About Now:
"There's a soppy tribute to Lauren Hill that I could have done without"
Three months later I claimed it was the best song of the year. Heh.
Billy sent me this link aaaaages ago, and it never fails to thrill me.
Is it actually possible to try to start a conversation with an attractive stranger on the street without it coming across as harrassment?
It's an urge I get from time to time, but I usually chicken out because I'm afraid of coming across like a randy construction worker.
It probably doesn't help that I've deliberately grown redneck-look facial hair.
Lots of people, apparently.
I love movies, I really do. But I can't quite fathom why otherwise intelligent people devote valuable brain power to obsessing about what awards the most mediocre talents in Hollywood will secretly conspire to give to this week's fads of the year.
I don't know anyone who claims to believe that the oscars are any kind of guideline to good movies. Just the opposite in fact. Here's my personal take on each Best Picture winner of the decade to date:
2000: Gladiator - mindless trash.
2001: A Beautiful Mind - boring crap wasting good actors on a piss-poor director.
2002: Chicago - mediocre musical starring people who cannot sing or dance well.
2003: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - not even a complete movie, seemingly endless, dreadfully scripted mediocrity.
2004: Million Dollar Baby - pretty good actually.
2005: Crash - oops, didn't see it.
In fact if you go back through all best picture oscar winners, the last time an enduring classic won the award was in 1975 (the year of my birth), it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and it wasn't a patch on the book! More often it will got to quickly-forgotten mediocrity like Rain Man or The English Patient.
And still we care. I care enough to write this post.
I think the problem is that instead of Zeus and Osiris and even Jehovah, these days we have Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts and Reese Witherspoon. A tawdry and disposable bunch of gods for a tawdry and disposable age. We care deeply about them all, worship them with women's magazines and gossip columns, and ditch them faster and cheaper than Judas ditched Jesus. No wonder Tom Cruise went crazy.
I flame people who threaten me with legal action!
People who say "We have a legal obligation to receive BLAH within 24 hours of BLEH! Do what I tell you or Big Scary Union will get medieval on your ass!"
Annoyed I am, yes. So rather than get caught with my pants down (oo er) I ring the relevant legislative body and say "What is my legal obligation with regards to providing BLAH?"
They tell me "You have no legal obligation to provide BLAH at all. If Big Scary Union tries to bite yo ass, send them to us."
Ha. Ha. Ha. Take that, flammable ones!
Does anyone else get the feeling that they're being watched? I don't. Call it anti-paranoia. "Big Brother doesn't give a good gosh-darn about me!"
Do you ever say something perfectly innocuous to a friend of the opposite gender, and then worry for hours that they've taken it the wrong way? I don't -- I worry for weeks, even after I've forgotten what I said and who I said it to. A vague sense of unease that a sexual harrassment case is going to creep up on me and I won't have a defence because I won't even know if I did anything inappropriate or not. Call it Benson-Pope Syndrome.
When good looking members of your preferred genital configuration-attraction flirtateously smile at you on the street, do you assume that they're actually smiling at the person behind you? I don't. I get wood.
Non-New Zealand readers (and probably most non-Wellington readers) who have never heard of his guy should take note.
I always give respect to The Brother. F**k you if you don't.
Oh, and on March 2 Bush will be taken to visit Gandhi's memorial in Rajghat. He's by no means the only war criminal who has been invited by the Indian government to lay flowers at Rajghat ... But when George Bush places flowers on that famous slab of highly polished stone, millions of Indians will wince. It will be as though he has poured a pint of blood on the memory of Gandhi.
We really would prefer that he didn't.
-- Arundhati Roy
Abandoned! Martin, where are yeh?
How the fappo could I forget to name the best song released in 2005?
Ms. Hill by Talib Kweli. It's on his most recent mixtape, Right About Now. It's a platonic love song urging Lauren Hill to get back on the mic.
It's beautiful and heartfelt, two things I almost never hear in any recent music, much less in a hip-hop track.
I'd provide a link to download it but I can't find one. I'd post some lyrics but the delivery is a huge part of it. If you can locate me in space/time, I can play it for you.
When you imagine the future, what taste do you think of?
Is it metallic, the taste of spoons? Is it pure and clean, the taste of filtered water? Perhaps the opposite - do you imagine a clotted taste of dirty water with floaties?
Do you imagine the taste of coca cola? Of vaginal mucous? Of staplers? Of golf balls?
Questions like this haunt me.