On Tuesday the second season of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia premiered on VICE. This show is one of the best series going and I’ve been anxiously awaiting this season since first hearing that new installments were imminent. The “Hamilton” of the title is Hamilton Morris — he’s the son of renowned documentary director Errol Morris and a kind of professional stoner. This show captures Hamilton’s world travels as he makes his way to drug dens, shaman circles, scientific laboratories, and hippie hideaways around the globe in search of the highest highs that plants, compounds and pharmaceuticals have to offer. In the first episode of this new season Hamilton heads to the Sonoran desert in Arizona to search for a psychedelic frog that literally oozes DMT. Along the way he also plays detective as he searches for Albert Most, the author of the mysterious pamphlet Bufo Alvarius: the Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert…

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While I’ve posted numerous times about the 50th anniversary of The Velvet Underground and Nico this year, but I’ve been missing the chance to celebrate other faves. Now that I’m done with all those October horror posts I’m getting back on track with my notable music anniversaries.

American Stars and Bars isn’t considered to be one of Neil Young’s best records, but I’ve always loved the album which turned 40 this year. Critics complain that it’s uneven, but that’s one of the things I like best about it. One side of the record is straight country but the other side is rock. I guess it’s normal for folks to get confused by such an offering, but I like country Neil and rock Neil so of course I dig this double scoop. Plus, how can anybody not love an album that includes a classic like “Like a Hurricane?”

Here’s a cool Neil doc examining his career starting from the mid-1970s through the turn of the millennium. ‘Stars and Bars is the first record spotlighted here…

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I just watched a preview screener for the new Mansfield 66/67 documentary about the doomed bombshell and camp pioneer Jayne Mansfield. If you’re in Nashville look for my full review in The Contributor next week. The film will open at the Belcourt Theatre on Saturday, October 21. The movie’s opening emphasizes the 666 embedded in the title as this biopic is focused on the last two years of Mansfield’s life when her stardom had begun to fade and she befriend’s Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan in San Francisco. Were they friends? Were they lovers? Was Mansfield a serious Satanist and a high priestess in the church or were her and LaVey both cagey showbiz veterans who knew a good act when they saw one?

The movie features bits and pieces from an interview with LaVey that aired on the Joe Pyne television show in 1967. Here’s the complete interview…

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Two years before Hunter S. Thompson took his own life in 2005 his Woody Creek, Colorado neighbor Wayne Ewing edited together years of video and film footage into a days-in-the-life-style documentary that captured HST drunk, drunk on stage, drugged, in trouble with the cops, visiting his home state of Kentucky, and trying to get Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas made into a film. Here’s Swampland with the word…

Breakfast With Hunter contains classic footage from Thompson’s Woody Creek, Colorado, ranch he calls Owl Farm. Guest appearances include Johnny Depp, Benecio Del Toro, Harry Dean Stanton, Terry Gilliam, Laila Nabulsi, John Cusack, and the late Warren Zevon.
Scenes with English artist Ralph Steadman whose paintings accompany many of Thompson’s writings prove interesting. Another scene details Thompson ambushing Rolling Stone mogul Jann Wenner with a fire extinguisher in his posh New York City office. Other footage features HST day in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky (also Depp’s hometown), as well as a stage appearance at Depp’s Viper Room.

The film chronicles the 25th Anniversary of Thompson’s classic book, Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, including early stages for production, filming, and the premiere of the 1998 movie. A confrontation in Thompson’s kitchen erupts with a British writer over the Fear & Loathing script, which personifies Thompson’s spirit.

Here’s Breakfast with Hunter…

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Getting back to posting about this year’s observance of the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, I’m interested in another take on the season that announced the rise of the hippie. While the phrase Summer of Love conjures images of willowy hippy girls and long haired hippie dudes frolicking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, at the same time there was another kind of revolution happening on the other side of the world. While America’s West Coast was getting blazed on peace and love, London was in a full swing cultural upheaval of their own as a generation of young people rejected post-war austerity for their own take on American sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Here’s the word from the Daily Beast…

There came a moment when London first shook off the coils of hidebound British society, the sobriety of convention, the obedience of norms that had made it a funless place in its post-war years. As no other city has ever done, London suddenly owned a whole decade and became synonymous with the culture of that decade—the 1960s.

So much of what makes London what it is now is came from that time. There was a cultural and social insurrection that transformed every idea of what was permissible in society and in the arts.

Here’s a BBC doc about London’s version of that most psychedelic season…

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I celebrated a birthday this week and didn’t get back to the blog until this afternoon. It’s starting to feel like summer in Nashville. It’s muggy and warmer, but not exactly hot yet. We sometimes spend weeks in the high 90′s or low 100′s between July and September, but I’m hoping for a milder season this go round. We warmed up early this year and I’m hoping we’ve already let off enough steam to ensure a cooler summer. I know I’m not really describing how the weather actually works, but since it doesn’t really matter what I think, I figure why not be a bit fanciful and kind of superstitious about it all if only for style points?

Here’s a documentary about rock music in England when I was still a baby — it features profiles of The Faces, Marc Bolan, Linda Lewis, Matthews Southern Comfort, and Fairport Convention. Here’s London Rock…

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Earlier today I saw a tweet about the 50th anniversary of The Doors first gig at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles. Of course I immediately thought “Oh, perfect — I can blog about that.” Turns out it’s the 51st anniversary of The Doors debut at the club, and while it’s not an auspicious remembrance, I’m always up for The Doors.

Here’s a 1997 documentary exploring The Doors, their music, and the story behind Oliver Stone’s eponymous film about the band. Here’s The Road of Excess…

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Wednesday afternoon I headed to the fest to check out the Animating Reality short cartoon docs block. During the introduction before the program it was explained that so many documentary entries came in as animated films that the fest decided they deserved their very own section. Lately documentaries use animation a lot. It’s a trend, but it’s mostly a bad one that sees directors employing cartoon techniques as a replacement for footage that doesn’t exist or even for a dirth of imagination or creativity. The job of a filmmaker is to tell a visual story, and, for me, animation in docs nearly always seems like cop out that allows a documentary director to create anything they might dream up versus doing the hard work of finding the magic in the real life milieu in front of their lenses. I love animation, and I like when it’s used creatively in narrative films, but docs have a different set of rules and limits, and I hate the animation trend where most documentaries are concerned.

That said, making a fully animated documentary is a very different matter. Bringing together real life interviews and audio by creating images to accompany them is a sort of hybrid filmmaking that I find as fascinating as every other genre/medium bending format always is to me. The best mainstream example of this kind of real life animating might be the Blank on Blank series. I love it when artists refuse to play by rules or work within categories, and there was something subversive running through this whole program on Wednesday.

All the films were animated interviews with one or more folks telling a story, sharing experiences or voicing opinions. The animation styles were as varied as the subjects so it’s a bit of an apples and oranges situation, but I did have my favorites:

A very short film from Germany had one of the most unique visual styles of the bunch. Steve Bache, Mahyar Goudarzi, and Louise Peter’s “Eye for an Eye” featured thoughtful, minimal line drawings of an interview with a death row inmate that they discovered on YouTube. The fact that this was a student film only adds to its impressive impact.

Documentaries should be judged as films in and of themselves and not given points just because they focus on important or popular subjects. That said, both “Broken – The Woman’s Prison at Hoheneck” and “Nowhere Line: Voices from Manus Island” illuminate harrowing stories of human rights abuses with journeyman cartooning. “Broken” focuses on an East German work prison for female political dissidents, and “Nowhere Line” tells of the tortuous journey of an Iranian refugee who was imprisoned when he sought asylum in Australia.

I’m not surprised that my favorite of the bunch was an animation about animators: “The Sparrow’s Flight” is a love letter between filmmakers and creative partners director, Tom Schroeder and his former collaborator, Dave Herr who died of a brain tumor in 2009. The movie is an animated documentary about the pair’s friendship, and their creative, exuberant animations and experiments which were primarily inspired by the Brothers Quay. The movie looks great and this biodoc about an otherwise unknown filmmaker might be exactly the thing that will inspire the next generation of visionary animators.

Here’s the trailer for “The Sparrow’s Flight…”

“The Sparrow’s Flight” trailer from Tom Schroeder on Vimeo.

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I came across an interesting article earlier today. With the rise of Trump I thought the religious right and the Ayn Rand extremists in the Republican party had been ousted. Unfortunately, the fake Christians seem as empowered as ever, and according to this piece, Ayn Rand has never held more sway over D.C….Here’s the word from The Guardian…

Rand, who died in 1982 and was alternately ridiculed and revered throughout her lifetime, is having a moment. Long the poster girl of a particularly hardcore brand of free-market fundamentalism – the advocate of a philosophy she called “the virtue of selfishness” – Rand has always had acolytes in the conservative political classes. The Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, is so committed a Randian, he was famous for giving every new member of his staff a copy of Rand’s gargantuan novel, Atlas Shrugged (along with Freidrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom). The story, oft-repeated, that his colleague in the US Senate, Rand Paul, owes his first name to his father Ron’s adulation of Ayn (it rhymes with “mine”) turns out to be apocryphal, but Paul describes himself as a fan all the same.

No one’s illuminated the cult of Rand at the heart of American politics and technology better than filmmaker Adam Curtis. Here’s the director’s visionary three-part BBC documentary “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace…”

Lately I post a From The Archives selection to my social media on Fridays, but this Friday is St. Patrick’s Day and I wanted to share this great doc about Irish rock music. I originally discovered the BBC gem The Irish Rock Story: A Tale of Two Cities at the Nashville Public Library. It’s a cool capturing of Irish music’s evolution from Van Morrison’s pop star breakthrough in the 1960′s to U2′s ascendancy to biggest band in the world status by the dawning of the 21st century. But before Van became The Man, Ireland produced a deep history of poetry and music that were as much a part of “Gloria” as American rhythm and blues. And between Van and Bono artists like Thin Lizzy, The Undertones, Rory Gallagher, the Boomtown Rats and Sinead O’Connor fired the flame of Irish rock. All the while the cultural differences and political tensions between the cities of Dublin and Belfast acted like the poles of a battery, creating a charged tension that produced some of the best music in the world.

Here’s the flick. Happy St. Patrick’s Day…

Stay Awake!

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