Blog Archives
DIG! Turns 10
10 years ago, DIG! won the Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and this year we recognize its ten year birthday. The film, directed by Ondi Timoner, draws on seven years of footage, following both The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols. Comparing and contrasting the development of the bands’ [...]
Happy Birthday, Brother Theodore
Today we celebrate the 1906 birthday of Brother Theodore, a German American monologist known for his rambling rants and self-described “stand-up tragedy.” Born Theodore Gottlieb, he was an artist described as “Boris Karloff, surrealist Salvador Dalí, Nijinsky and Red Skelton . . . simultaneously”. Here’s an overview from the Wiki… Gottlieb was born into a [...]
James Dean ’76
I don’t have cable. Not only does this mean I nearly never watch sports at home, it also means I’m often tuned into the strange wonders that can be found channel surfing over-the-air digital television. My girlfriend calls it a new “Wild West Golden Age of Television for Weirdos Everywhere.” She’s on to something. Tonight, [...]
Gallery-Going with W.S.B.
Another post celebrating the William S. Burroughs centenary, this video is a fascinating document of the man himself visiting a gallery show of his own paintings on paper at Galerie Waschsalon in Frankfurt, Germany. Here, we see Burroughs accompanied by Udo Breger and Burrough’s man Friday, James Grauerholz. Breger is a writer and publisher who [...]
Prisoners of Gravity
Taking a break from our spooky October posts here at the end of the month — we’ll let today’s merrymaking bring its own hard-earned scares — here’s a great little show from Canadian television that I stumbled upon the other day. Prisoners of Gravity was an interview show disguised as a pirate broadcast, covering all [...]
Caligula at 35
This year we celebrate the 35th anniversary of Bob Guccione’s X-rated epic, Caligula. You can watch the whole film on YouTube, but I couldn’t find a version in English or with suitable subtitles. Instead, I offer this documentary about the subject of the film. While this version lacks the T&A content that made the movie [...]
Isaac’s Apple
Sir Isaac Newton invented calculus, figured out the composition of light, and also gave us the laws of gravity and motion which just happened to govern the entire universe at the time of their revelations. Sir Isaac Newton is considered to be the father of modern science. He was also a sorcerer. This documentary follows [...]
Party at Worthy Farm
Today marks the anniversary of the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, first held on this day in 1970 on Michael Eavis’s family farm in Pilton, Somerset. Along with the utopian idealism of the time came an invention of the “free” music festival, a social movement based on collaboration and responsibility for one’s own expectations. [...]
Wasted Surplus
Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers (2003) is an award-winning Swedish documentary by director Erik Gandini. Gandini’s film uses creative editing and music cues to illustrate the fundamental problems present in capitalism’s diabolical quest for ever-expanding markets in the face of ever-dwindling resources. It also questions industrialization’s promise of the liberation from labor given the ubiquitous [...]
