Sunday

MY TOP 10

BY GEORGE P PELECANOS
1.CURTIS MAYFIELD
Freddie's Dead Buddah
2. THE ISLEY BROTHERS
That Lady (Part 1) T-Neck
3. AL GREEN
Let's Stay Together London
4. SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE
If You Want Me To Stay Epic
5. ELTON JOHN
Bennie & The Jets DJM
6. THE CHI-LITES
Have You Seen Her MCA
7. WILLIAM DeVAUGHN
Be Thankful For What You Got Chelsea
8. GIL SCOTT-HERON
The Bottle (Part 1) Arista
9. JAMES BROWN
The Payback (Part 1) Polydor
10. PARLIAMENT
Chocolate City Casablanca 

THE 100 SINGLES YOU MUST OWN

In 2003 Mojo magazine published The 100 Singles You Must Own, selected by a team of the world's most respected music experts, including Nick Hornby, Jon Savage, Nick Tosches, Colin Escott, Dave Godin, Lenny Kaye, George P. Pelecanos and many more.
The brief they gave their stellar panel was simple: if you had a wheezing old Rock-Ola record machine in your backroom--and, hey, some of them actually have-- what are the 10 tunes you'd insist were in there? These sonic delights had to satisfy some tough criteria. First, they had to have been originally available on 7-inch vinyl; they had, where possible, to have a spanking B-side for optimum jukebox longevity; and they had to be available today on CD, just so music lovers who'd consingned their styli to the attic could still sample their majesty.
The incoming votes were number-crunched by a crack team of mathematicians, and the results appear here at Indierider, like all great beauty contests in reverse order. It's a countdown to sonic nirvana... with a surprise Top 10. I hope you enjoy it.
100. THE DELFONICS: Didn't I ( Blow Your Mind This Time)/Loving Him
Despite its delicacy, this slow, luxurious ballad--masterminded by Philly soul maestro, Thom Bell--possesses the solid groove of a mandatory jukebox disc. Led by William Hart's seraphic falsetto and accompanied by Bell's symphonic arrangements, The Delfonics pioneered a romantic soft-soul sound that paved the way for later Philly acts like The Stylistics and Blue Magic. In contrast to the breath taking sonic beauty of Didn't I, the record's B-side, Loving Him, is edgier and finds the harmony vocal trio in a rare uptempo setting.
Availability: The Delfonics ARISTA CD
99. JERRY LEE LEWIS: Whole Lotta Shaking' Goin' On/It'll Be Me
Memphis Tennessee, 1957: a twice married, once jailed, 21-year-old Bible college dropout is determined to become the king of rock'n'roll. His first single, Crazy Arms, does moderatly well. Then, with Whole Lotta Shakin', he delivers every parent's worst nightmare. Kicking his piano bench and shaking his hips in an uncontrollable frenzy, Jerry Lee is taking his audience straight to Hell. Drop a quarter in the jukebox and you can still hear the insolence four decades later. Elvis might've ended up the King, but no one outhumped the Killer.
Availability: The Essential Sun Collection SNAPPER CD

CULT RECORD: MASSIVE ATTACK:" BLUE LINES"(1991)

Even if the U.K. hadn't just endured three long hard years of acid house and techno tyranny, the 1991 arrival of Massive Attack's Blue Lines, with its measured bass lines, keyboard swells and lover's-rock reggae dreaminess, would have come as a sweet relief. As it was, the group--a shadowy consortium of DJs, rappers, remixers and multi-media dabblers around whom various players and singers orbited--received the sort of genuflection and forelock-tugging that Brits used to reserve for royalty. Natives of Bristol, a sleepy boho hamlet in the southwest of England, Massive (the suffix was jettisoned for the duration of the Gulf War) blended a troika of formative influences: the throbbing dub reggae played in mobile sound systems, the needs-must ingenuity of early hip hop, and the sense of foreboding prevalent in the best noir soundtracks. Blue Lines provided a platform for the tremulous vocals of reggae vet Horace Andy, and it redeemed years of asthmatic excuses for British rap with the stoned stream-of-conciousness mumbling of Tricky. But the record's great and enduring acclaim can be attributed to one singer and one song. Shara Nelson had perfomed with an earlier incarnation of Massive Attack back in 1986, when they were trading under the moniker the Wild Bunch and she applied uplift to a swampy, shuffling 12-inch retread of Bacharah/David's "The Look of Love." Returning to the fold, her pipes brought paranoia to Blue Lines' opening, "Safe From Harm", and abandon to "Daydreaming." She was also featured on "Unfinished Sympathy," the song that realized all Massive's ambitions. With rattling percussion and gathering stormclouds of strings, the hit merited every fevered adjective hurled in its direction.

CULT MOVIE: GET CARTER(1971)

Cool, unrelenting and vicious, Jack Carter returns to Newcastle to find those responsible for killing his brother and falls into a world of corruption, seedy pornography and murder. Although Ted Lewis' original work was set in an unnamed steel town, Newcastle-upon-Tyne provides a suitably gritty backdrop for the action( every southerner knows it's grim up north). Thirty years on, the coolness with wich Jack dishes out violence remains far more disturbing than any slasher film, and anticipates the measured violence of the following year's The Godfather. Playwright John Osborne is surprisingly effective as the crime boss. Caine didn't get to know him well: "He seemed to be someone who didn't like many other people, so I kept out of his way in case I was one of them." Sly Stallone's American remake has all the narrative coherence of Thomas And The Magic Railroad.

Saturday

CULT RECORD: STEREOLAB:" SWITCHED ON STEREOLAB"(1992)

Most original rock music is created through combining preexisting styles, but Stereolab takes its influences to extremes that border on disseration research. Core band members Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier, who both used to play in the politically charged pop group McCarthy, have a fondness for drawing lines between obscure points of 1950's and 1960's pop culture. The English band's music, most of it made on churning Farfisa organs and percolating Moog synthesizers, allows the bubblegum rock of bands like the Archies and Ohio Express, the electronic ramblings of '70s Krautrockers like Faust and Can, and the novelty pop of 1950's musicians like Martin Denny and Perrey & Kingsley to gather but not necessarily mingle. Stereolab began pushing the envelope of alternative taste at just the right time, when the trend towards seeking out lounge music was beginning and the need of guitar rock that didn't smack of flannel was at its peak. Switched On collects the band's first singles, released on its own Duophonic label. Throughout the album, Sadier sings mostly English lyrics in a soft French accent as Gane strums quick, light guitar rhythms and twists knobs on synthesizers. The result is a great pop album that sounds like it's about to brew coffe, with each pop song boiling over with bubbling electronics.

CULT MOVIE: THE CORPSE GRINDERS (1972)

"Turn bones and flesh into screaming, savage blood death!" yelped the publicity blurb for this outrageous horror comedy from legendary exploitation movie mogul Ted V Mikels. The plot rotates around the crippled owners of a failing cat-food company who, to spice up their product, employ a couple of grave-robbing maniacs to supply them with dead bodies which they then grind up and sell to cat-lovers. After a few cans the felines develop a craving for human flesh and start attacking their owners. This leads to a factory visit by veterinarian Dr Howard Glass (Kenney) and his nurse assistant Angie Robinson (Kelly), whose covert investigation uncovers the entire ghastly scheme. The star of this movie is the prop of the title: a painted cardboard box which, every time a body is pushed through it, has hamburger meat dropping out of the other end into a bucket.
Director: Ted V Mikels Cast: Sean Kenney, Monika Kelly

Friday

GOD SPEAKS

God has a reputation, largely deserved, for being a bit deep. But when he speaks in the movies, as you can see below, this isn't always the case.
Jesus: What is your name my friend?
James: James. Little James. They call me Little because I'm the youngest. What's yours?
Jesus: Jesus.
James: Ah, that's a good name. Thank you.
The Greatest Story Ever Told(1965)
Jesus: My name is Jesus. I come from Nazareth.
Guard: Nazareth? I've not been there for many years. Yet your face is familiar.
Jesus: You once came to our house and spoke to my mother.
Guard: The house of the carpenter-oh yes.
King of Kings(1961)
Jesus: Did I ever tell you I used to read feet?
Jeffrey: You used to .... what?
Jesus: Some people read palms or tea leaves. Iread feet.
Godspell(1973)
Jesus: Tomorrow is my birthday, yet all is not right.
Stan: Your birthday is on Christmas? That sucks, dude!
The Spirit of Christmas(1995) 

TOP TEN: GORDON GANO (VIOLENT FEMMES)

1. HEARTBREAKERS:" Live at Max's Kansas City"
2. TELEVISION:" Marquee Moon"
3.VELVET UNDERGROUND (all)
4. RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS:" Blank Generation"
5. SEX PISTOLS:" Never Mind the Bollocks","Here's the Sex Pistols"
6. LOU REED:" Berlin"
7. RAMONES:" Ramones"
8. IGGY POP:" Lust for Life"
9. CAPTAIN BEEFHEART:" Mirror Man"
10. PATTI SMITH:" Horses"

VIDEO: BEACH HOUSE:"SILVER SOUL"

R.I.P. JD SALINGER



Jerome David "J. D." Salinger (January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American author, best known for his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, as well as his reclusive nature. His last original published work was in 1965; he gave his last interview in 1980.
In 1974, in a rare interview given to The New York Times, he said: "I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure." In her memoir, his daughter Margaret Salinger noted that he did keep writing, and last year The Guardian reported that it was rumored he had "produced hundreds of short stories, and perhaps scores of novels over the past however-many decades." He had allegedly set up a detailed filing system for his unpublished manuscripts: "A red mark meant, if I die before I finish my work, publish this 'as is,' blue meant publish but edit first, and so on." Salinger died of natural causes on January 27, 2010, at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire.

CULT RECORD: PATTI SMITH:"HORSES"(1975)

Black-clad demon spawn of Lautreamont and the Quin-Tones, chanter, ranter, allien succubus, prophet of sex and power and ecstasy, Patti Smith was a sublimely weird rock'n'roll creation, someone who claimed she'd learned how to walk by watching Dylan in Don't Look Back. On Horses, Smith tried to take the spoken voice into the realm of feedback and spillage where the Stooges had taken the electric guitar. But her poetic approach to rock didn't sound effete because her poetic rhythms were so steeped in the meter of doo-wop and R&B. When she first started perfoming with fellow writer Lenny Caye on guitar, she was as likely to cover "Down the Aisle of Love" or "The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game" as to tell the story of Scheherazade. Reciting her poetry in her South Jersey accent over piano, she sounds like Burroughs than like the Shangri-Las in "I Can Never Go Home Anymore" or "Past, Present, and Future". Her independent debut single "Piss Factory"/"Hey Joe" proved that the animating rock rhythms of her voice were intricate enough to get on the good foot. By the time Smith recorded Horses in 1975 with John Cale, her group had transcended its technical limitations to sound like a tough punk band, and if the rhythms of her voice are what make the music go, Jay Daugherty's drums keep up. Smith begins Van Morrison's "Gloria" with the famous proclamation, " Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine/ my sins my own, they belong to me", and whips the music into a whirling frenzy. "Kimberly" is a moving tale of sisterly bonding, set to the shuffle from Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs' "Stay", while "Land" blasts through a tale of knives, cars, and rebirth that would be stunning even without the salutary invocations to the watusi and the memorable chant, "Go Rimbaud!". Horses isn't very loud or guitar-heavy, but it surges with a wit and intensity unmatced elsewhere in punk, and although countless listeners, male and female, have responded to Horses, no musicians anywhere have caught up with its sound.

CULT MOVIE: DANCER IN THE DARK (2000)

Odd, if compelling, story of a young Czech-born mother (Bjork) working in a US factory during the 1960s. She is trying to save money to cure her son from an inherited eye condition, which is causing her own blindness, and escapes from the tedium and stress of her life by pretending she is in a musical. Fans of Bjork's yowling vocal style are most likely to enjoy the numbers, but even those unfamiliar with her music will be entranced by the way von Trier weaves the sounds of the machinery she works with, as well as the local railway engines, into the score. Despite the bleak premise there are some hilarious moments, especially when the local group casts Selma as Maria in The Sound of Music. Despite some reports of on-set tensions and a mixed reception, the film won a Palme D'Or and a best actress award for bjork at Cannes.
Director: Lars von Trier Cast: Bjork, Catherine Deneuve

Thursday

CULT RECORD: VIOLENT FEMMES:" VIOLENT FEMMES"(1983)


Hard to believe these days that theViolent Femmes were once part of an august group of post-punk bands. Beyond marginal now, and fairly silly  from its second album on, the trio possess a debut that rests comfortably in an edgy pantheon with works as auspicious as Entertainment!, Los Angeles, and Unknown Pleasures. That record--put out after the Femmes were discovered haranguing passerby on a Milwaukee sreet corner by the Pretenders' James Honeyman-Scott--was definetly the quietest of this noisy list. But out of its rustling acousticism and stark arrangements came a perverse cri de coreur from one Gordon Gano; strained believer, concience-striken carnalist, and bereaved lover. The sexual and other dysfunctions described in songs like "Blister in the Sun" (compulsive masturbation?) and "Prove My Love" (compulsive cunnilingus?) remain unknown, as does the precise nature of the sickness he repeatedly referred to.  But it was a dreadful thing, the sound of a boy-man (Jonathan Richman, maybe, only with perversions) would down in a vortex of adolescent, sometimes infantile urges and the accompanying familial humiliations. Gano's ability to craft Velvety ballads ("Good Feeling"), nervous, popinfused nuggets ("Prove My Love"), and moments of nasty emotional apocalypse (the climax to "Add It Up")--along with the manic rumbling of Brian Ritchie's bass, Victor DeLorenzo's makeshift drumkitting and certain inspired overdubs, like the febrile vibes and springy guitar on "Gone Daddy Gone"--make the record an early document in the coalescing of a new wave of generational angst in the 1980s. Indeed; never hitting the Top 40, the album nevertheless has been passed down through mini-generation after mini-generation throughout the '80s and eventually went platinum.

CULT MOVIE: HAXAN(1922)


Eighty years on, Christensen's use of real life, animation and dramatic sequences for his disturbing documentary about witchcraft through the ages has lost none of its ability to shock. His silent scenes of demonically possesed nuns and friars--and the tortures which they were forced to suffer to extract sorcery confessions--are  made more upsetting by the fear-filled expressions of the actors. Elsewhere, his re-enactment of a witces' sabbat and the horrors surrounding it, gives you the uneasy feeling that the Danish director could have been present at such events in real life.
Director: Benjamin Christensen Cast: Maren Pedersen, Oscar Stribolt

Wednesday

CULT RECORD: LIZ PHAIR: "EXILE IN GUYVILLE"(1993)


Liz Phair first surfaced as a member of indie-rock's great indoors, turning her home recordings into a couple of 1991 cassetes under the name Girly Sound. These tapes were strange contraptions, the sound of a mysterious artiste echoing the spidery guitars of New Zealand folk-rock while declaring "I'll fuck you and your girlfriend too", from a protective cloud of tape hiss. The muffled strumming resembled Tall Dwarfs or the Cannanes, except that Phair sang like Peppermint Patty on a bad caffeine jag. Phair went public with Exile in Guyville (a song-by-song response to Pussy Galore's Exile on Main Street), inventing herself as a diva dentata: half sensitive folksinger, half persona pirate. Exile in Guyville would have been memorable for its melodies alone, but it revitalized its old-fashioned songcraft with a jolt of personality crisis. In the New York Dolls tradition, Phair's specialty was gernder trouble, turning Mick Jagger into Salome in "Dance of the Seven Veils" and turning Clint Eastwood into a porn queen in her sleeve photos. Phair plots an Aviance night in the madrigal "Flower" (with the "you and your girlfriend" line unfortunately amended to "you and your minions"), enjoys cunnilingus in "Glory", and plays guitar hero in "Stange Loop". "Fuck and Run" borrows fragile chords from the Only Ones to wish for a loyal boyfriend; the very next song, "Girls! Girls! Girls!", borrows lyrics from Jim Croce in order to tell a loyal boyfriend that she doesn't care wherher he comes, stays, lays, or prays. Phair's jagged guitar hooks provide the momentum, but her mind games liberate the guitar hooks from the enervating air of singer-songwriter simpiness. A true code-fucker, Phair makes her mess and leaves it for the audience to clean up.

CULT MOVIE: LENINGRAND COWBOYS GO AMERICA(1989)


Hopelessly crazed and hilarious film about a Finnish rock band that travel to America in search of fame and fortune and aiming to reach Mexico. Resplendent in huge quiffs and clown-like winklepickers, they are possibly the most pathetic rock band ever to tour the States, lurching from one mishap to another, whether it's the village idiot who has followed them from Finland hoping to join the band, their failed revolt against their overbearing Russian manager who refuses them any money to buy food, or having the engine stolen out of their Cadillac (sold to them by Jim Jarmusch). The Leningrand Cowboys discover an America that is a stream of run-down gasworks, seedy strip malls and devoid of any charm whatsoever.
Director: Aki Kaurismaki Cast: Matti Pellonpaa, Kari Vaananen

Tuesday

CULT RECORD: GUN CLUB: "FIRE OF LOVE"(1981)


The Gun Club leader Jeffrey Lee Pierce ought to be easy to dismiss as a selfstyled bad boy trying to blackwash over his blonde pout with an authenticating devotion to the blues. Yet his intensity, his guitar work, and his persistence within a rarefied cult all indicate heartfelt commitment, no matter how varied the recorded results. Emerging from the L.A. scene that included X and the Blasters, the Gun Club loaded blues and rockabilly into its punk assault, turning them into some sinister misspawn of Creedence Clearwater Revival. While New York emigres the Cramps whipped the same ingredients into grand slapstick, the early Gun Club maintained a solemn, threatening edge through its death-haunted repertoire. On the debut Fire of Love, Pierce asserts himself with recitative hectoring--he hasn't yet developed the overripe tremolo of his later vocals. Latching onto the tradition of Robert Johnson, who's covered in a hyperventilated rework of "Preaching the Blues", Pierce plunges into themes of sex, death, and salvation; whether fucking under the Christmas tree, buying his own graveyard, or praising a girl who's like heroin ("she cannot miss a vein"), he sounds determined to live up to his "Jack on Fire" line: "Everyday is judgement day". Traces of crypto-racism (references to pursued and dead "niggers") give Fire of Love, with its pumped-up beats and graceful slide guitars, an uncomfortable aftertaste--no doubt what Pierce intended. Part of the intentional--one hopes--irony of these usages is his willful punk plunder of a musical heritage not his own.

CULT MOVIE: THE SEVEN SAMURAI(1954)


A rare example of a story where the remake and the original are equally good, if for different reasons. Kurosawa's brilliant tale of a good-hearted samurai who recruits six others to help defend a small town under constant attack from bandits, was trannsplanted to America where it became John Sturges's The Magnificent Seven. The US version is a hugely entertaining, about a bunch of men who come together to protect the weak and helpless. (Let's just pretend that Return Of The Magnificent Seven never existed.) The Japanese original is less sure of its massage and more interested in its characters. It's an absorbing and violent drama where the samurai fight to regain their honour, and the deal between them and the townspeople is complicated by class distinction. Kurosawa also explores filmmaking as an art, with vivid imagery, making it an emotional and visual masterpiece.
Director: Akira Kurosawa Cast: Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune

Monday

LOS CAMPESINOS-VIDEO:"ROMANCE IS BORING"



Los Campesinos! are an indie-pop band which formed in Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom in 2006. The band consists of Gareth Campesinos! (vocals, glockenspiel, keyboards), Kim Campesinos! (vocals, keyboards), Tom Campesinos! (guitar, vocals, keyboards), Neil Campesinos! (guitar), Ellen Campesinos! (bass, vocals), Harriet Campesinos! (violin, keyboards, vocals) and Ollie Campesinos! (drums). Aleksandra Campesinos! (vocals, keyboards, glockenspiel) left the band in 2009 to focus on her study. She was replaced by Gareth’s sister Kim in September 2009.

CULT RECORD: WIRE: "PINK FLAG"(1977)


The Velvet Underground of the seventies,Wire has sometimes been called: for those "What Goes On" fans who finally worship punk most for the dynamic capacities of its outwardly ugly, secretly beautiful sound, English punk produced no finer document than the band's debut, Pink Flag. Art schoolers to the bone, the quartet turned punk rage into one of the fine arts--even garage purists would have a hard time denying these melodies and AC/DC-caliber power chords, played at a Ramones tempo with an Eno/Roxy Music coating over the guitars. Singer Colin Newman is able to be achingly tuneful and still convey Johnny Rotten contempt. Crazed but clean, DIY with nothing out of place, Wire was an aesthete's dream of the incendiary. Much of the charm of Pink Flag comes from the enormous scope it manages to achieve within punk's procrustean bed of guitar rushes and half-tunes. Newman, bassist Graham Lewis, guitarist Bruce Gilbert, and drummer Robert Gotobed effortessly shift between one-chord ravers ("12XU" the legend; "Field Day for the Sundays" a precedent-setting 28 seconds, including a false end!), dandy dalliances ("Lowdown", "Feeling Called Love"), set pieces about war and violence ("Reuters", "Pink Flag"), and overwlming power pop like "Ex Lion Tamer" and "Mannequin". Only about five of the twenty-one cuts are less than essential to an album that races by into immortality.

CULT MOVIE: HARD BOILED(1992)



American producers certainly made the action film into the monster that it is today, but in the 1990s Hong Kong enjoyed its own cinematic resurgence with directors, led by John Woo (see also Johnny To and Yonfan), adding a harder edge to the action. Although Woo claims violence makes him sick ("I get pretty upset. And I'd bring that to screen. Let's beat him harder, let's hit him with more bullets"), you wouldn't guess it from looking at his movies. The Hard Boiled plot is standard action fare, very similar to Beverly Hills Cop; dedicated cop (Yun-Fat) seeks out the killers of his partner with the aid of an undercover agent. The action, however, is slick and choreographed, featuring what have become Woo trademarks (the Mexican stand-off between adversaries, two-handed gun action, slow motion and freeze-frame shots) and the comedy is blacker than the usual wisecracks. One of the best action films of the '90s, but stick to the original Cantonese version.
Director: John Woo Cast: Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung Chiu Wai, Philip Chan, Teresa Mo

Sunday

CULT RECORD:BREEDERS:"LAST SPLASH"1993


The Breeders began as a side project for Kim Deal of the Pixies, Tanya Donelly of throwing Muses, and Josephine Whiggs of the great British trance-rockers The Perfect Disaster. Lat Splash balances pleasure and conflict with staggeringly high payoffs on both sides, a pop album that couldn't have sounded listener-friendly even a year earlier. Throughout, bizzare noise-guitar detours erupt into perfectly hummable songs about summer, diving, and carnivals, as well as the "glitter on the water" of sexual sparks. "Canonball" piles Doors and Clash riffs, arch sound effects, the word "bong" and some Wizard of Oz chants into an indelible punk groove. "Hag" is a declaration of pride, "Invisible Man" feeds Cocteau-ish harmonics through the industrial grinder, and "Divine Hammer" even addreses the taboo indie-rock topic of enjoing orgasms over giddy New Zealand guitars. It's a utopian record, evoking a place where straight, jocky Midwestern sisters can unite with Euro death-chicks to bond and plunder.

CULT MOVIE:SCARFACE(1932)



Al Capone liked this disguised story of his life so much he is supposed to have had his own copy.Muni starred as Tony Camonte, former bagman to an old-style gang leader, who sets out to rule the (mob) world. Despite the film's credits stating, "This picture is an indictment of gang rule in America and of the callous indifference of the goverment", censors wouldn't endorse it. Reshoots showing Tony arrested, convicted and hanged failed to persuade them, so Hawks eventually stuck to the original. The film also marks the arrival of George Raft as a cointossing henchman. Raft would play a slew of gangster roles, aided by his personal association with real-life mobsters like Bugsy Siegel, and rumours that he himself was a "made" man. Although the 1983 Al Pacino/De Palma remake lacks originality, Pacino is suitably menacing as coke-fuelled, self-made boss Tony Montana--don't worry, it was icing sugar they were bathing their nostrils in. The scene where Montana, surrounded, his arm in a sling, waves his gun at his enemies and certain death is one of the most glamorous, romantic images of the doomed gangster on celluloid.
Director: Howard Hawks, Richard Rosson Cast: Paul Muni, Ann Dvorak, George Raft

Saturday

CULT RECORD:DEVO:"Q:ARE WE NOT MEN?A:WE ARE DEVO!"


Devo, as it would never let you forget for a second, was a concept band. As early formulators of now long-familiar ironic attitudes about the end of progress, the inevitability of electronic instrumentation, and the explosion of genericism, Mark Mothersbaugh, Gerald V. Casale, and crew were ahead of their time when their Warner Bros. debut appeared out of Akron, Ohio, during the early new wave year 1978. But unlike, say, the B-52's, they didn't bother to seem very likeable; that went beyond the concept. Clever, funny, dance-minded, occasionally even provocative with their sociological hunches masquerading shrewdly as ideas, Devo was always running for class president of New Wave University. Despite a few close elections, some big hits, and several major video awards, year after year the group lost. Still, those all-out attempts did show others how to campaign. Working with producer Brian Eno on the debut, the band placed hummable ditties like "Mongoloid" and its cool, dismissive version of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" alongside studyhall overtures, anthems, and streched-out riffs. The album triumphs, even today, because of its absorbing sound, a curious blend of some recognizable rock flash and lots of new plastic. This is the rock ensemble as articulate shrink-wrap.

CULT MOVIE:THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW(1975)


A newly engaged couple break down on a lonely road and find themselves at the mercy of local weirdo, Dr Frank-N-Futer. The cult musical to end all cult musicals is still packing them in at late-night showings, complete with a costumed audience and alternative script to be shouted at the screen at the right moment. Curry has never been better as the louche transvestite, and knowing the kind of dramatic, worthy projects that Sarandon has chosen since, it's a hoot seeing her running around in her underwear. Great songs, great cameos, Koo Stark in an uncredited role as a bridesmaid and a truly bizarre final number.
Director: Jim Sharman Cast: Tim Carry, Susan Sarandon

Friday

CULT RECORD:PRETENDERS:"THE PRETENDERS"(1979)


More than Debbie Harry (too cold), Kate Bush (too weird), or even Patti Smith (too early and far off the charts), the Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde owns the heart of alternative, as the punk-rock mother of us all. Partly, it's her story: self-defined scabby nobody escapes the classic-rock Midwest for mod England just before the scene explodes, buys a red leather jacket, and forms a band. Then she reconquers America on her own terms--with songs about sexual adventure and everyday survival, chronicling a girl's fight to make herself special when no one else thinks she can be. Who Hynde was and what she sang about was inseparable from the way the Pretenders sounded. They sounded common, from Martin Chambers' hit-you-on-the-head drumming to Pete Fardon's hardworking basslines to James Honeyman-Scott's flashy-bloke guitar. And most common of all was Hynde's, a strong, supple alto with vibrato that sounds like tears falling, used in the service of empathy. On Pretenders, she speaks from the rough-and-tumble heart of a yong woman vying with an urban milieu full of brutal motorbike boys who fuck and don't call back; but in classic songs like "Brass in Pocket" and "Mystery Achievement", Hynde plays neither victim nor supergirl, instead claiming the voice of a hardheaded but softhearted survivor. In the way that The Catcher in the Rye gave generations of undergrads a way to make sense of their own alienation, or Fear of Flying taught secretaries and schoolteachers how they might articulate desire, Pretenders pinpointed the thrills and frustration felt by the women musicians, record store clerks, band manrgers, scenesters, and fans living in the shadow of a male-dominated rock'n'roll--but also daring the rebel moves it seemed to make possible.

CULT MOVIE:BRAZIL(1985)


A bleak yet humorous take on the future. Sam (Pryce) feels suppresed in a world of technology and bureaucracy, and dreams of flying off with his dream girl Jill (Greist) whom he has never met. Gilliam's experience directing this film was almost as nightmarish as the stoty of Sam. He fought with Universal Studios' chairman Sid Sheinberg (as documented in the book The Battle Of Brazil) with Sheinberg insisting on an upbeat ending, first shown in the US TV version. Gilliam was also unhappy with Kim Greist's perfomance as Jill (he'd wanted Ellen Barkin for the role after seeing screen tests by her, Greist, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kelly McGillis and even Madonna). So he cut several of her scenes which Sheinberg added to his studio version, referred to as "Love Conquers All".
Ditrctor: Terry Gilliam Cast: Jonathan Pryse, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Kin Greist, Bob Hoskins

Thursday

PRIVATE SCHOOLING


So you wannabe a private eye?Get ready to be vulnerable on three counts.
1.PHYSICAL You get your nose slit like Jake Gittes in Chinatown, drugged like Marlowe in Murder My Sweet, beaten up twice like Marlowe in The Big Sleep or six times like Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly. Them's the perks.
2.EMOTIONAL Is there something phallic about a private dick with a gun? Why do four women flirt with Bogart in the first 15 minutes of The Big Sleep? Some of us  go entire lifetimes without that much flirting. But then you have to fall for the heroin who probably isn't a heroine (Brigid in The Maltese Falcon) or if she is, like Evelyn Cross, she's probably deeply mad albeit with good reason. You may end up with the dame as the credits roll but we all know it's not permanent. The girl is normally trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Prison.
3.MORTAL You can resist anything except temptation and that might come in the form of that strumpet Carmen or because you've deluded yourself that Terry Lennox is your mate so you'll cover for him until the only way to clear up the mess is to go to Mexico and shoot him. Remember, the cops are mostly crooked or stupid, the judges are drunk or bribed and the DA is keener on winning votes than winning convictions, so if there's to be any kind of justice in this world, you'll just have to dispense it yourself.

CULT RECORD:TELEVISION:"MARQUEE MOON"(1977)


Television made self-consciously mythic rock that conjures up steely skyscrapers the way Led Zeppelin conjures up moss-covered stone castles. Despite its garage-band sound, Television never played many anthemic punk riffs. Instead, it specialized in soaring drones over which Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd played staccato radar blips on guitar. Television evidently loved the Velvet Underground's "European Son" for the same reason Kraftwerk did: the robotic, jagged overdrive of the stark rhythms. Although many punks accused the group of being hippies, today Television songs sound more like synth-pop songs that happen to be played on guitars. Whether Verlaine was impersonating a gum-chewing detective in "Prove It" or a decadent artist in "See No Evil", he always sounded like a dewy-eyed kid who'd just read his first Baudelaire poem twenty minutes ago, staring up at the city lights with a sense of wonder that was too too-too to put a finger on. And as Patti Smith pointed out, he had the most beautiful neck in rock'n'roll. Marquee Moon is the CBGB era's most grandiose guitar album, with chiming Byrdsy folk-rock building into screeches nicked from Ayler and Reed. Verlain may have adopted his strangled voice to sound jaded and urbane, but it communicates boyish delight in mockingly superficial symboliste tropes such as "the flat curving of the room" and "I want a nice little boat made out of ocean". The saga of "Little Johnny Jewel" continues in amazing songs such as "Elevation", "See No Evil", and "Venus", where Little Boy Blue falls asleep in the haystack and wakes up in the urban grime, rubbing his eyes and declaring, "Broadway looks so medieval!". "Marquee Moon" allows serpentine guitar riffs to entwine like tendrils around the desolate groove for ten of punk's most intensely emotional minutes.

CULT MOVIE:VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED(1960)


More than four decades after it was made in Letcmore Heath in England, this adaptation of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos remains astonishingly creepy. One day, everyone in an English village falls asleep during the middle of the afternoon; months later all the women capable of having children give birth to sinister blond tots with penetrating eyes and the ability to communicate telepathically. Brunette children were given blond wigs to get a striking contrast for black-and-white cinematographer Geoffry Faithfull, and the young actors give skin-crawling perfomances as the little monsters with unblinking stares. Shun the 1963 sequel Children Of The Damned and John Carpenter's 1995 remake with Kirstie Alley.
Director: Wolf Rilla Cast: George Sanders, Barbara Shelley

Wednesday

TITLE BOUT


Films where you feel more effort has gone into the title than anything else.
  • CAN HIERONYMUS MERKIN EVER FORGET MERCY HUMPEE AND FIND TRUE HAPPINESS?(1969)
What kind of fool am I?Anthony Newley asked. Does this answer the question?
  • I KILLED MY LESBIAN WIFE, HUNG HER ON A MEAT HOOK AND NOW HAVE A THREE-PICTURE DEAL AT DISNEY(1995)
To which the only appropriate response seems to be:"Bully for you".
  • FEUDIN', FIGHTIN'N'FUSSIN'(1968)
Not to be confused with Feudin', Fussin' And A-Fightin'(1949)
  • TEENAGE PSYCHO MEETS BLOODY MARY(1964)
Aka "The Incredibly Srange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies"
  • HOW BRIDGET SERVED THE SALAD UNDRESSED(1898)
Silent comedy of manners in which serving girl Bridget is told to serve the salad undressed and, you guessed it, takes her clothes off.
  • HOW MUCH WOOD WOULD A WOODCHUCK CHUCK(1976)
Werner Herzog's documentary about the world championship for cattle auctioneers. It's better than it sounds.
  • WHAT ARE THOSE STRANGE DROPS OF BLOOD DOING ON JENNIFER'S BODY?(1972)
Actually this Italian serial chiller isn't bad.

CULT RECORD:TIM BUCKLEY:"STARSAILOR"(1971)


Dead from a heroin and morphine overdose in 1975, Tim Buckley's 28 years were nonotheless packed with some extraordinary accomplishments. His influence on alternative music is rarely felt directly. Buckley was such a distinctive artist and singer that no one, save his biological son Jeff, could ever really sound like him. Yet underground experimentalists from Sun City Girls to Red House Painters are clearly in debt to Buckley for his fearless egoism and sense of musical daring. Starsailor released in 1971, gets so far inside Buckley's head it's no wonder that his last three sex drenched, white boy, funk/soul studio albums represent a collapse; he was wiped out. Buckley blithely ignores all laws of structure and pace; he trusts only his own intuition. "Song To The Siren" is the album's breathtaking bit of beauty; This Mortal Coil's 1985 cover version sparkled renewed interest in Buckley. But it's the title track that serves as Buckley's apotheosis, a wordless barrage of whoops, cries, cackles, croons, shouts, melismas, and moans that commingle into one of the most powerful demonstrations of emotional bloodletting ever recorded.

CULT MOVIE:MEAN STREETS(1973)


"You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets." Charlie (Keitel) and Johnny (De Niro) are two young hoods establishing themselves in the New York mafia. Charlie, quiet, thoughtful and guilt-ridden, runs errands for his uncle, while Johnny is the embodiment of gangster glory. It's less polished than his later works, but many of Scorsese's trademarks are evident, notably the use of music, in the memorable, much copied, scene of Charlie strutting through his friend's bar to the sound of Mick Jagger blaring Jumpin' Jack Flash. Although not autobiographical, Mean Streets stems from a childhood where, in Scorsese's neighbourhood, you enteredthe mob or the priesthood. Thankfully for us, Scorsese entered neither. Be thankful also that Scorsese, who wrote 27 drafts of the script before anyone bought it, didn't accept Roger Corman's offer to finance it if as a Shaft me-too with an all-black cast
Director: Martin Scorsese Cast: Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro

Tuesday

CULT RECORD:UNDERTONES:"THE UNDERTONES"(1979)


While U.K. bands raged about guns in the streets, Northern Ireland was nurturing a bunch of acts who wanted nothing more than to play pop songs about girls. Belfast, a city whose youth grew up under the gun, produced a whole string of pop-punk bands in the late '70s, most of them under the auspices of Terri Hooley's Good Vibrations label. Among their number were Protex, Rudi, the Xydreamysts, and the Moondogs, who even had their own after-school series on British TV. Head and shoulders above the pack was the Undertones. Guitarist John O'Neill's written-in-stone hooks and Feargal Sharkey's quavering choirboy delivery made a masterpiece of their debut single "Teenage Kicks". Veteran British DJ John Peel proclaimed it his favorite song of all time, elevating it onto the pop charts. The exuberant material the band pumped out for its Peel radio sessions (later gathered on record) proved "Teenage Kicks" was no one-off. Bursting with brief songs, buzzsaw guitars and big choruses ( think Ramones plus Irish conviction), The Undertones enshrined teenage cliches with the same fervor that U.K. hardcore combos used to foam about anarchy. Perfectly capturing a worldview that extends from hanging out in the schoolyard to hanging out in the city streets, the album is pretty much dud-free. And no collision between pop and punk ever produced more ecstatic results than "Get Over You".

CULT MOVIE:A BOUT DE SOUFLE(1960)


This hugely influential film about a car thief (Belmondo) on the run with his American girlfriend (Seberg) was at the vanguard of the French New Wave, a movement spearheaded by Francois Truffaut (who conceived the story, even though Goddard wrote the script) and the critics of the Cahiers du Cinema. Much looser than earlier formulaic, studio-led films, and the subject matter more daring for its day. What is interesting is Belmondo's character's admiration for Humphrey Bogart, down to his imitation of Bogart's nervous lip-wiping, emphasising the idea that the film is a new take on classic Hollywood genres. It was remade as Breathless in 1983, with Richard Gere and Valerie Kaprisky, but with the frisson of anti-establishment naughtiness gone. It deservedly sunk without trace.
Director:Jean-Luc Godard Cast:Jean-Paul Belmondo,Jean Seberg

Monday

STARS WHO PLAYED OTHER STARS


THE GOOD
  • Bette Davies as Joan Crawford
Her relationship with Joan Crawford was dubbed Hollywood's "divine feud" so imagine Bette's delight when she realized she could play the role of an Oscar-winning actress who refuses to admit that her career was over as if she was Joanie! The character's name changed but this was a better Crawford impersonation than Faye Dunaway's in Mommie Dearest.
  • Rudolph Nureyev as Valentino
When you're playing the greatest screen lover ever, you need charisma above all and Nureyev, at his first real film role, has it in spades even if his technique sometimes lets him down.

THE BAD
  • James Brolin as Clarke Gable
Jimmy must have a certain something because he has wed diva of divas, Barbra Streisand. But whatever "it" is, is not apparent in this 1976 biopic where he plays the King of Hollywood. But it was a stretch for an actor best known as a guest on Markus Welby MD. Not that the script helped. As he inspects the wreckage of the plain in which his wife Carole Lombard had died, what does the King of Hollywood say? "I told her she should have taken the train". That's pathos. Or bathos
  • Guy Pearce as Errol Flynn
When Pearce was still mainly known as wimpy teacher on Neighbours, he appeared in the biopic Flynn. If Errol had been alive when this was made it wouldn't have been called a biopic, it would have been called libellous.
THE UGLY
  • Misty Rowe as Marilyn Monroe
Hollywood has been saying goodbye to Marilyn for 47 years now but never quite as nastily as in this sexploitation account of her rise. Six rapes later (and memorable dialogue like "I am somebody, I really am somebody") she has passed her first screen test. Rowe allegedly has a daughter called Dreama Jane but that may be just something her enemies have put around to discredit her.

TOP TEN:JOSEPHINE WIGGS(BREEDERS)


1.SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES:"The Scream"
2.CURE:"Seventeen Seconds"
3.GANG OF FOUR:"Entertainment!"
4.SLITS:"Cut"
5.B-52's:"The B-52's"
6.PUBLIC IMAGE LTD.:"Metal Box"
7.PIXIES:"Doolittle"
8.BREEDERS:"Pod"
9.LUSCIOUS JACKSON:"Natural Ingredients"
10.BEASTIE BOYS:"Check Your Head"

CULT RECORD:HOLE:"LIVE THROUGH THIS"(1994)


Courtney Love is a liar and a thief--and those are just two of her outstanding virtues. She's a liar in the way all women lie, or rather, she's made it her project to uncover the endless ways femininity requires women to ignore their own insticts, conform to artificial standards, and subsume themselves within definitions that strangle as they fit. She's a thief, because she's cobbled together a persona from these deadly definitions, leaving enough gaps in the fabric to show that the ladylike is never so neat as it appears. Those seams break, in women's rage, self-destructiveness and loss of control, and in the brutality of men and the abusive family. A first listen to Hole's songs indicates that Love's obsessions lie within this seamy underbelly of the domestic circle. But do as she asks, and live through them for a while, and you'll discover that there's no bottom here, that the layers of deceit and perversion hide only more layers. The feminine spirit that Love embodies is one whose very core betrays itself. Love mostly screams her way through Pretty On The Inside, and although it's a versatile scream, it only hints at the depths of musicality reached on Live Through This. Obviously. Love and hubby Kurt Cobain influenced each other musically, and like Nirvana's best, this album blends the hardest edges of punk with a sweet, singalong tunefulness. But while Cobain used punk to fight against his innate accessibility, Love pursues pop impulses to overcome her limitations as a singer. Live Through This rocks in the sickiest way possible. Indie bands with more innovative surfaces don't compare to this wholly accesible, yet very inticate, mix of words and music. Love projects herself into scenarios that could be her own, but resonate as classic tales of women's oppression: bulimia in "Plump", rape in "Asking For It", childhood abuse in "Softer, Softest", frustrated mother love in "I Think That I Would Die". Sure the line, "They really want you, but i do too", in "Doll Parts" is about her and Kurt, but all the other lines, about artifice and its costs, trancend such a narrow view.

CULT MOVIE:REPO MAN(1984)


Cox's most original film is a fantastic conflation of every budget sci-fi theme: a dystopian lawless future, a goverment conspiracy, aliens and atomic power. Otto (Estevez in his first and best starring role) is a disaffected youth who meets a car repossesion man (Stanton in the funniest perfomance of his career) and is persuaded to join the agency. In mortal danger as a repo man, he is soon caught up in the hysteria surrounding a mysterious 1964 Chevy and its glowing deadly cargo. Cox adds to this already unusual brew the finer details that define any cult movie. Many characters are named after kinds of beer, all the cars have Christmas tree air fresheners (very sinister if you've seen Se7en) and all the cars turn the opposite way from the one they're indicating.
Director:Alex Cox Cast: Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez

Sunday

CULT RECORD:RAMONES:"RAMONES"(1976)


The Ramones built their music around a crass glue-sniffing fantasy: What if you took only the giddiest peaks of your favorite songs--the second verse, which is the same as the first, in Herman's Hermits' "I'm Henry VIII, I Am," or the roller coaster screams in the '60s AM nugget "Palisades Park"--and played them over and over? And what if you left everything else for Traffic fans to bother with? The result would be Ramones, the founding punk rock record. The Ramones' dessert-only approach resembled that of the hip-hop DJs who started making noise in New York around the same time, especially in that their first priority was rhythm. Joey's stuttered vocals, Dee Dee's bass and Johnny's guitar fuzz were all submerged into the fastest beats ever manufactured, and before you appreciated their songs for their wit, arrogance, or melodies, you had to absorb Tommy Ramone's drumming into your own bodily rhythms. Ramones burns with the rage of fuckups who find comfort in recognizing and renaming each other, refusing to play the victim, insisting on a "Palisades Park" of their own. It kicks off with "Blitzkrieg Bop", beats on the Beatles with a baseball bat, rants against the world, sniffs some glue, demands your spare change, asks you to dance, and finally swandives into the garbage can with "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World". The sinus-clearing album of all time.

CULT MOVIE:ERASERHEAD(1977)


Lynch's first major film tells the strange tale of Henry (Nance) and Mary X's (Stewart) bizzare relationship when, during a family dinner, they are informed that they are now the proud parents of a helpless, mewling, phallic-necked premature baby creature. Essentially about the horror of procreation, Eraserhead is full of subliminally sexual nightmare images of tiny bleeding chickens, exploding womb sacs and Henry's slowly plummeting severed head. Eraserhaed has echoes of Bunuel and Dali's Un Chien Andalou, as though Lynch had allowed that film's dark dreams to mutate and fester anew through Henry, the hysterical Mary, the bandaged, fly-blown baby, and the putty-faced Radiator Lady who exists in Henry's imagination. Jack Fisk as the Man In The Planet is surrounded by the same aura that made Bunuel's moon-gazing eye-slasher so memorable.
Director: David Lynch Cast: Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Laurel Near, Allen Joseph

Saturday

THE DIRECTORS CUT


A book 10 times the size of The Bible could be entirely devoted to a discussion of which directors were all-time greats, but space and your valuable reading time means that we are only able to offer a brief taste of a few of the directors whose films are included in our review section.
WOODY ALLEN
A New Yorker to the bone, Allen developed his very personal brand of talky, neurotic humour as a stand-up comic. Zany hits like Bananas gave way to more introspective and some would say less entertaining films, but more recent offerings like Mighty Aphrodite are a joy.
ROBERT ALTMAN
It's hard to imagine this maverick director helming episodes of Bonanza, but after making his first feature, The Delinquents,that's what he did. Luckily, he escaped and broke into the top rank with M*A*S*H* in 1970, pioneering one of the most recognisable techniques which was to record sound in a way that allowed actors to speak over each other's lines in a far more naturalistic style than had been heard before. Altman's best films, like Nashville, McCabe And Mrs Miller and Short Cuts, feature large casts and wandering narratives, and he likes to use shallow focus to pick his protagonists out of seemingly endless crowds.
LINDSAY ANDERSON
Iconoclastic British director with a passion for socially concious filmmaking and a distaste for Hollywood--except for John Ford, about whom he wrote a succesful biography. This Sporting Life, a tense study of a couple's affair in 1960s Yorkshire, embodies his concerns with human desires repressed by convention. His loose trilogy If..., O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital, all set around the character of Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) became increasingly farcical, but Anderson's disgust with all things bourgeois shines throughout.
JOEL AND ETHAN COEN
Although Ethan is credited as producer and Joel as director, the Coen brothers work very closely on all aspects of making their films. They draw deeply on classic Hollywood cinena, but make the genres their own with stylish scripts and inspired perfomances. Their first three films all refer heavily to established genres-- Blood Simple to film noir, Raising Arizona to madcap comedy,Miller's Crossing to gangster films, but each one is far more than just an homage to filmmakers of the past.
FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
Like so many top directors, Coppola made low-budget schlock for Roger Corman, but quickly progressed to sumptuous epics with a trademark attention to detail, as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. Coppola has won five Oscars, but some of his films (such as One From The Heart and The Cotton Club) have been spectacular box-office flops.
DAVID CRONENBERG
He started out as a purely horror director with films like They Came From Within, before moving on to more mainstream subjects, often with a horrific edge. Exploding heads (Scanners), TV sets with human entrails (Videodrome) and a sexual fetish for car accidents (Crash) may sound like gimmicks but Cronenberg's movies always trancend the horror.
FEDERICO FELLINI
His best movies were canvases on which he painted sprawling casts of grotesques engaged in stories of love, creativity and satire. His distinctive imagination led to the adjective "Felliniesque" being used to describe any eccentric and colourful film moments.
STANLEY KUBRICK
It's rare that a single filmmaker is responsible for such diverse masterpieces as Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Kubrick's cinematic genius was never limited to a single genre. Controversial stories like Lolita and A Clockwork Orange were given a stunning visual gloss without compromising the impact of their subject matter, and although his output was never prolific, it is consistently interesting and provocative.
SPIKE LEE
Lee's technical brilliance is matched by his often in-your-face approach to telling things the way he sees them. Whether an early comedy like She's Gotta Have It or one of his more serious later films like Malcolm X, Lee's films are characterised by sharp observation, great perfomances, and a penchant for tackling the uncomfortable issue of racism in all its forms.
DAVID LYNCH
Just when everyone thought brilliant but weird films like Eraserhead, Wild At Heart and Lost Highway were the only kind of film Lynch was interested in making, along came The Straight Story, one of the most touching and direct films of recent years.
OLIVER STONE
If there's a conspiracy theory out there, Stone will have made a film about it, whether it's JFK, Salvador or his Vietnam trilogy: Platoon, Born On The Fourth Of July and Heaven And Earth. His style is to wake up the audience with fast cutting, huge changes of pace and vibrant perfomances extracted from, if rumours are to be believed, terrified actors. No matter what he does to get the films made, he pulls no punches in getting his stories across.
ORSON WELLES
Despite making only a handful of films on his own terms, Welles looms large over filmmaking history as the director who still claims the title of best feature debut. Citizen Cane, made when Welles was only 26, revealed an extraordinary cinematic gift and directors all over the world have adopted Welles' use of eye-popping camera angles, deep focus, sound devices and montage. The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch Of Evil are also visionary films.

MARLON VS MERYL


If you're looking to become one of the few distinguished luminaries residing in Hollywood, or at least stand a greater chance of filling that display cabinet you bought to house 13-inch gold-plated naked men, you need to do one of two things. You can either specialize in playing disabled characters, (Hoffman as autistic, Pacino as a blind colonel) or you could pull a Streep and tour the accents of the world. Not even Marlon Brando can beat Meryl when it comes to getting his tongue around those vowels, and he doesn't always get it quite right.
MARLON
English--Mutiny On The Bounty, Raoni, Queimada!(aka Burn)
French/Nebraskan--Desiree
German--Morituri, The Young Lions
Italian-American--The Godfather, The Freshman
Mexican--Viva Zapata
Shakespearean/Nebraskan--Julius Caesar
Spanish--Christopher Columbus:The Discovery
MERYL
Australian--Cry In The Dark
English--French Lieutenant's Woman, Plenty
Irish--Dancing In Lughnasa
Italian--Bridges Of Madison County
Polish--Sophie's Choice
South African--Out Of Africa
South American--The House Of Spirits
 

CULT RECORD:NIRVANA :"NEVERMIND"(1991)


Kurt Cobain had a way of making his I's resonate like We's. Those famous lyrics from "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "With the lights out, it's less dangerous/Here we are now, entertain us/ I feel stupid and contagious," don't welcome an audience at all, but the form of loathing they offered easily became a model for millions to imitate. Cobain was an intensely personal writer, but his personal was also public--that's why his suicide left so many feeling a defencive embarrassment bordering on disgrace. And it's why his intense fanship for the indie rock he'd grown up on (Black Flag, Melvins, Butthole Surfers, Meat Puppets, Raincoats, and tons of others) made him the first great alternative rock figure: R.E.M. may have convinced the indie scene to believe in itself, but Nirvana convinced the rest of the world (corporate and fan) to believe in indie. Unfortunately, the contradictions it was Cobain's great talent to magnify finally became a whirlpool. On Nevermind, every time Krist Novoselic's bass, Grohl's drums, and Cobain's guitar crunch into each other the effect is a chime, noise as beauty, instead of a thud. Purists who complained are indie-rock granola heads-- Vig's bold production, which assumes a social dominance alternative hadn't yet achieved, may be the album's most revolutionary quality. As for "Smells Like Teen Spirit," what can you say about a mega-hit that generated eight-figure profits and also managed the complexity of the greatest art? "A denial," Cobain rasps, but that's only half of it. Nirvana could translate underground affinities into mass music because Cobain's fragmented personality bridged the gap--inhabiting the psychopaths of "Lithium" and "Polly" but just as deeply linked to their female targets, singing with the battlefield command of a rocker and the reverse of a proud subculturalist, viscerally judgmental without a shred of elitism. It's scary now to hear the first three songs mention guns; "In Bloom" was more autobiographical than we realized.

CULT MOVIE:THE BIG SLEEP(1946)


What movie,apart from Casablanca, has been as mythologized as this version of The Big Sleep? Ironically, the film based on the work of two fine writers (Raymond Chandler wrote the novel and William Faulkner helped write the script) started life as a sequel to To Have And Have Not. Warners didn't really care what the film was about as long as it starred Bacall and Bogart. (Indeed, after the first version was completed, the studio would insert extra scenes with its stars before it was released in 1946.) The plot was changed dramatically because Chandler's original plot didn't hang together (one of the bigger loose ends being who killed the Sternwood family's chauffeur) and because the censors wanted somebody punished: if not the decadent Sternwood family then the gangsters. Hawks didn't mind, the censors' ending was more violent than his and less complicated than the one Chandler suggested. Chandler's hero didn't like women much, not  a point  of view the usually broad-minded Hawks had much time for, so he made the women in the film as available as he could, without having them actually walking the street. Out of these conflicting priorities and commercial considerations emerged a masterpiece. But for the depressed alcoholic Faulkner, it was the film which finally persuaded him to give up screenwriting.
Director: Howard Hawks Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall

Friday

CULT RECORD:PAVEMENT:"SLANTED AND ENCHANTED(1992)


Pavement is the bookish Nirvana, equally the child of postpunk and indie rock, only far more erudite and restrained,indebted to soundscape aesthetes like Swell Maps, Eno, and the Krautrock contingent, not the sloppier Melvins or Beat Happening. In 1989, buddies "S.M." (Steve Malkmus) and "Spiral Stairs" (Scott Kannberg) began recording in a Stockton, California, studio, with its owner, '60s refugee Gary Young on drums. The magical results were slowly parceled out, husbanding fanzine acclaim, on three exquisitely collaged (visually and sonically) vinyl EPS, the first self-released and the other two, including the ten-inch Perfect Sound Forever, on Chicago's second generation "micro label" Drag City. Slanted and Enchanted was reviewed in Spin as an advance cassette months before it came out; the hunger was that intense. And Pavement delivered, with fully formed compositions that gave up static for silk. What's unexpected about this album is its grandeur, how these largely slow tunes, intoxicated on unexplained conjunctions ("Lies and betrayals/ Fruit-covered nails/Electricity and lust"), conjure an undiscovered country from scraps of reference, pun, and metaphor. On "In the Mouth a Desert," Malkmus asks "Can you treat it like an oil well, when it's underground, out of sight?". Of course you can, and Slanted and Enchanted is the best artistic illustration of the principle.

CULT MOVIE:MILLER'S CROSSING(1990)


The Coen brothers' terrific tribute to film noir features one of the trademark complex plots about a scheming young political advisor caught in the shifting loyalties between two crime bosses when a war erupts over a bookie who has been cheating one of them. Its plot was inspired by the 1942 film The Glass Key, based on a Dashiell Hamett story and starring Alan Ladd, Veronica Lane and Brian Donlevy (an even earlier version featured George Raft and Claire Dodd). The Coens' version is much harsher with Gabriel Byrne as the utterly callous manipulator, running rings around the other characters, even though he doesn't really gain anything from it himself. There are flashes of the blackest humour like the scene where a gang is being ripped to shreds by machine gun fire to the strains of Danny Boy. The stalwart Coen supporting cast of Steve Buscemi and Jon Turturro add their own offbeat dimension to the film.
Director: Joel Coen Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden

Thursday

BEACH HOUSE


Beach House is an indie rock/dream pop group which formed in 2005 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. The group consists of Victoria Legrand (vocals, organ) and Alex Scally (guitar, keyboards). Legrand is the niece of french composer Michel Legrand. The group has released three albums: 2006’s “Beach House”, 2008’s “Devotion” and “Teen Dream” out January 26 on Sub Pop.

5 GREAT GRAFFITIS






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