covers and originals I LIKE

Leonard Cohen Hallelujah




Unfortunately I cannot embed the video. so click the link



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s2TfNlJ_nQ

Christopher Doyle Interview

There's this thread that stretches through some of my favorite films which lends each frame a dreamer's motion - the editing moves like water characters steadily waltz around rooms the view through the camera is a breezy haze of kaleidoscope motions

Christopher Doyle is a cinematographer who has worked on quite a handful of movies, personal favorites being Last Life in the Universe (Trailer) Paranoid Park, & In the Mood for Love (among other Wong Kar Wai films). If you've ever seen any of his films you'll recognize the guttural blow when he leaves images of amazing beauty just hanging on the screen.









I left Australia when I was 18 and I've been a foreigner for 36 years. I think that's very important to the way I work because as a foreigner you see things differently. But I started making Chinese-language films so I regard myself as a Chinese filmmaker. I just happen to be white. Or pink, actually.

I really think music and movement - dance, you know - and literature inform my visuals. I think film is also based in dance. The relationship between me, the camera and the actor is always a dance.

I went to France and tried to learn cinematography. Then I realized that I didn't care. So I came back to making films as I could. I think I started to know what I was doing in the middle of "Days of Being Wild" (in 1991). You can't learn how to make films. You gotta make mistakes and you have to appropriate the mistakes, and then you learn from those things. Then you have a voice.

I went to Taiwan to study Chinese and, as usual, I hung out in bars, and people in bars are usually musicians and artistic kinds of people. I had accumulated a little life experience so I could articulate things which were a little bit more complex than I could actually do and for some reason Edward Yang trusted me. And then we made this film ("That Day on the Beach," 1983) that won all these awards and I didn't know what I was doing. I fluked it.

My best film is always my next film. I couldn't make Chungking Express now, because of the way I live and drink I've forgotten how I did it. I don't believe in film school or film theory. Just try and get in there and make the bloody film, do good work and be with people you love.

For years most people didn't know I wasn't yellow. Du Ke Fung [his Chinese name] means `like the wind'. It's an extremely poetic name, as opposed to this piece of shit sitting before you. So this person called Du Ke Fung with no past or parents or ID card makes the films and at night he turns back into this drunkard called Chris Doyle.

Looks like we got it right on Hero and if you get it right the eye connects directly with the heart, doesn't matter what the language is. But Hollywood has fallen into making mechanistic, assembly-line movies. Now they have to steal ideas from Asia because that's where the originality is. I have a very strong identification with Asia, there's a different type of energy there, and I had a delayed adolescence in China so I feel I grew up there.

I was born Australian but I'm more Francis Bacon than Mel Gibson, who is the antithesis of me. Actually, I always wanted to be the Mick Jagger of cinema but I think I'm the Keith Richards, by force of habit, perhaps.

I didn't start making films until I was 34.But that wasted youth was probably the most valuable asset for what I'm doing now. You see the world, you end up in jail three or four times, you accumulate experience. And it gives you something to say. If you don't have anything to say then you shouldn't be making films. It's nothing to do with what lens you're using.

I think what we're doing here [Asia] is much more valid. We've got half the world's population here. The implications are as evident as they would be for the French New Wave.

The idea is becoming a blueprint. The visual aspect of film is expanding, we're evolving a new relationship with film-making over here [Asia]. I really think we've moved beyond all that auteur theory. People will have to come up with a different theory for what we're doing here.

The East is rising and the energy of the region is reflected in everything we do here, whether commercial, military or cinematic. I just happen to be part of that. We're in a golden age of cinematography. Most people are on-line at least four hours a day. They're seeing images all the time and their visual sophistication is jumping far beyond all the old farts in the Academy.

"I was born five months after my parents were married, so I understand why mistakes have informed my world."

"I feel that 2046 is unnecessary, in retrospect. I think probably Wong Kar-Wai realized that somewhere, and that's why it took so long. You do realize that you have basically said what you needed to say, so why say more? I feel that way. I think you have to move on."

"What I'm trying to do is make the camera-work lyrical rather than fragmentary. It's a dance between the camera and the actors."

Covers and the originals I LIKE

SAND

Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood



Einsturzende Neubauten

Hyungkoo Lee

I recently took a trip to Paris and stumbled upon a small gallery in the solarium of the luis vuitton store. Represented artists from all around the world were chosen for this exhibtion. One of them being a Korean artist, Hyungkoo Lee. Never heard of him before but I was amazed at what he showed there


It's a pretty self explanatory series of work

http://www.hyungkoolee.net/info/info.html

robot drummer

Also Sprach Zarathustra

When you put aside all the bad "Scary Movie" movies and even worse teen sex-comedies, this piece by Strauss is still badass. Check out this short clip of the movement we all know and take for granted. It's pretty ding-dang-dong moving.

Enjoy.

Martin Klimas

He breaks clay into pieces and takes photographs of the falling figurines when they hit the floor. so great!

Butoh Dance

I was kind of hoping that the person who shared this with me would post something about Butoh since I know very little about it except that it is one of the most indescribable things I've ever seen. Apparently Butoh performances are rare, and they just happen to be coming this weekend - the exact same weekend my family arrives....

So, you tell me, is it for dear old mom?

Butoh Performance 1

Butoh Performance 2

From Butoh Article (http://www.pripix.com/features/butoh.htm)

"We are between sanity and insanity, beauty and ugliness. Good and evil don't matter; emotion lurches from serenity to rage without warning. East and West, too, have merged: Leering Japanese ghosts waltz to Edith Piaf; a forest hag dressed for a Versailles ball strikes wild kabuki poses. Fear turns frolicksome at a soiree deep inside a nuclear-fallout shelter.

We are in the universe of butoh, the theatrical, ghoulish genre of dance that has, in its four decades of existence, become Japan's biggest contribution to the world of contemporary dance.

Butoh, a word comprising the Chinese characters for "dance" and "step," is a strikingly visual artform in which the butoh-ka (dancers) are often a mere loincloth away from total nudity, their whole bodies smeared in macabre white body paint. Exaggerated facial expressions are as important as movement in getting the point across: Does that off-kilter smile signify innocence, depravity -- or something beyond the bounds of language? Butoh has raised such imponderables since it arose from the rubble of postwar Japan, in the process pushing the envelope of dance."

Norma Lee's "Ole Red Santa Suit"

Merry Christmas!

top secret drum corps

Christopher Brach

and more found at any given name.

Walk On By

Hesitant to post anything here, for fear that the difference in the ages of the other contributing writers to myself will be evident in my taste of music, art, and love of my puppy snowglobe collection, I've stepped out of the retirement home of fear to post my first entry on Magical Metal Playground. There are 6 big years between myself and the other writers, I believe. What's 6 years, you ask? It's the difference between ironically liking Wham! and ironically liking Kyper. It's the difference between boasting a new pair of zcavaricci's and boasting a new pair of JNCO's. It's the difference between secretly watching your parents watch "Moonlighting" and secretly watching your parents watch "NYPD Blue". It's the difference between New Order and New Kids On the Block. (Embarrassingly, I actually loved NKOTB in the day.) I could go on and on. So, better for me to announce my age from the onset than find out later that you all have secret impersonations of me that include JELLO and dentures. 28. Case closed.

A brief history: I married a mediaphile in 2002. If you question whether or not marriage is for you, keep in mind that you are legally sanctioned the right to claim the more sophisticated interests of your spouse as your own after you say your vows. I claimed Terry's iTunes playlist as my own after he made an honest woman of me. I felt it safer to assert ownership of his Magnetic Fields albums over my (I can't believe I'm admitting this on my first post) Marcy Playground album from my vaulted pre-Terry years. But before you go thinking he was the chief benefactor in this relationship, let me inform you of the super-rad cookbook collection I brought to this holy union. Oh yeah. So, why am I, the scarlet-lettered "MP" (Marcy Playground, that is), writing here? It's because I believe there's something to be said for people who are inspired by music and art outside of a knowledge of music or art history or the realm of esoteric analysis found in smarmy music 'zines (ahem, Chunklet)... just normal people who get chills when they hear this:




And for the record, I love Chunklet, I delight in knowing obscurities of all kinds, I have an appreciation of art and music history, and I never really owned a Marcy Playground album. Ok, yes, I did. However, I'm coming to terms with that natural lean towards what we label in public "guilty pleasures". Why gulity? Just pleasure. Lisa Lisa, baby. You dig?

If I were to put a bumper sticker on my car (which I've actually yet to do), it would say, "Life is short- listen to more Burt Bacharach." Or somethin.

meatus murder

here

A Certain Ratio

Still I think, really too underrated...

A Certain Ratio - Tribeca Video

Spacemen 3 DJ Tones

Check it. This song is maybe the catchiest Spacemen 3 song you ever heard. It's an unreleased track from this ep of unreleased songs/versions of songs I paid way too much for. Anyways, the mixes on this album kinda rule.

Spacemen 3 - "These Blues" (Unrealeased)

HERE.

Longmont Potion Castle

By far the strangest/funniest...
http://longmontpotioncastle.com/media/popuphtml/video/video_clip_4_popup.html

ZXCV Theater, vol. 4

The Boss Covers Suicide

I remember when Josh and I used to talk about how we'd hear the vocal similarities between Bruce Springsteen's 'Nebraska' and Suicide's Alan Vega. Everyone also knows that Suicide (most notably Frankie Teardrop and Dream, Baby Dream) were direct influences on Springsteen's vocals for Nebraska.

Check out this stripped down live cover of "Dream, Baby Dream." It's actually pretty awesome.



p.s. - Check out how rad the picture of the E-Street Band is... Killer.

Achwgha Ney Wodeï - "Petit Paul"

My 10

Another year, another year-end list. Here are my ten favorite albums of 2008. I was going to write a quick blurb for each one, but this post is already too long due to the picture and the list format. Trash it or add yours now! (Sorry for such a crude photo...)

Growing - All the Way
The Alps - III
Es - Sateenkaarisuudelma
Languis - Fractured
Mountains - Mountains
Oneida - Preteen Weaponry
Fennesz - The Black Sea
David Bryne & Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
Lindstrom - Where You Go I Go Too
James Blackshaw - Litany of Echoes

Honorable Mentions:

Cloudland Canyon - Lie in Light
The Fun Years - Baby It's Cold Outside
Bardo Pond - Batholith
Lawrence English - Kiri No Oto
Grouper - Dragging A Dead Deer Up a Hill
Windy & Carl - Songs for the Broken Hearted
Christopher Bissonnette - In Between Words

timothy carey

rendezvous

Drunk History vol. 2 - Featuring Jack Black

Thanks Sayde!

A COUNTRY DOCTOR

The only animation I've seen  of Koji Yamamura was Mt. Head and I got hot pants for it! hacha! He recently became the first grand prix winner in all major international animation film festivals with his latest animation based off of Franz Kafka's short story  Ein Landarzt aka  A Country Doctor. 

ZXCV Theater, vol. 3

More fun than watching paint dry...

Harry Smith

By chance I stumbled across the Anthology of American Folk Music through the leading purveyors of music preservation, Barnes & Noble. These field recordings double as fascinating anthropological studies of early American history - there's something so unobtrusive about this music...Kind of strange considering our modern techniques for recording, things will never sound like this again.

"The Anthology has had enormous historical influence. [Harry] Smith's methodology of sequencing tracks, along with his inventive liner notes, called attention to the set, imbuing it with a talismanic aura. This reintroduction of near-forgotten popular styles of rural American music from the selected years to new listeners had impact on American ethnomusicology, and was both directly and indirectly responsible for the aforementioned folk music revival.

The music on the compilation provided direct inspiration to much of the emergent folk music revival movement. The Anthology made widely available music which previously had been largely the preserve of marginal social economic groups. Many people who first heard this music through the Anthology came from very different cultural and economic backgrounds from its original creators and listeners. Many previously obscure songs became standards at hootenannies and folk clubs due to their inclusion on the Anthology. Some of the musicians represented on the Anthology saw their musical careers revived, and made additional recordings and live appearances.

This document is generally thought to have been enormously influential on the folk & blues revival of the '50s and '60s, and brought the works of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Dick Justice and many others to the attention of musicians such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. The "Harry Smith Anthology," as some call it, was the bible of folk music during the late 1950s and early 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. As stated in the liner notes to the 1997 reissue, the late musician Dave van Ronk had earlier commented that "we all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated.""

Knowing that Harry Smith compiled this collection and was the savior of folk music, take a look at this video he made in the 40's and tell me how people can exist on such diametrically opposing planes of the universe.



Some things I just can not comprehend...