My Brain Hurts

Thee Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band - 13 Blues For Thirteen Moons (2008)

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band have been making a big raw angry tender racket since the 2005 release of their last album, Horses In The Sky. With a focus on live performance and special projects over the past three years, the group proper has logged well over 100 shows in Europe and North America, in between sessions that yielded Thee Silver Mountain Reveries EP and Thee Silver Mountain Elegies Play War Radio tour (featuring four members of Mt. Zion and both members of labelmates Hangedup), as well as collaborations with Carla Bozulich, Vic Chesnutt and Patti Smith in the studio and in concert.

The music of the full band (two guitars, two violins, cello, contrebasse and drums) has grown louder, looser, full of spittle and tears. On 13 Blues For Thirteen Moons, riffs are the backbone more than ever. Anchored by new drummer Eric Craven (ex-Hangedup), the band works its slow build and burn with newfound patience, sinuousness and ferocity. Whether methodically framing walls of sound over the four-on-the-floor punk dirge of "1,000,000 Died To Make This Sound" or exploding in sheets of free noise and melody on "Black Waters Blowed", the band has never rocked harder and has never sounded more determined, desperate and driven. A stuttered blues riff is the foundation for the album's title track, making its appearance after a blisteringly minimalist intro. "Engine Broke Blues" features a gorgeous set of chords that build inexorably from multiple guitar, string and organ lines.

Fans of the group will be familiar with much of this material from the band's live shows over the past couple of years. The recording, undertaken at the newly renovated Hotel2Tango facility in Montreal and co-engineered by Howard Bilerman and Radwan Moumneh (who is also the band's live sound person), ups the ante considerably, with crackling guitar crescendos setting the pace for dive-bombing swirls of strings, while Efrim's voice rasps and wails words of worry, hope and fury throughout. The band's hallmark group vocal passages are positively spine-tingling.

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Em 2008 ,os anos 80 estão de volta

Não é só na música,no electroclash, nos mashups onde se cola a Madonna a algum às do tecno minimal alemão, ou na roupa mais ou menos reluzente.É também no cinema....que vão regressar alguns ícones como estes.......

rir é o melhor remédio

Whose line is it anyway. Um programa de humor baseado no improviso, procurem mais uns quantos clips no youtube e deliciem-se com os melhores momentos deste programa, e com alguns artistas convidados que trazem o seu talento para diversificar

Alemanha Vs Grécia

Blow Up de Michelangelo Antonioni

Um filme polémico e de ruptura à data em que foi realizado, e que hoje se mostra intemporal......aliás,demasiado actual até,pois encontra uma perfeita correspondência na sociedade hedonista dos nossos dias.Destaque também para a banda sonora com Herbie Hancock e os Yarbirds.Essencial.

Blow-Up, released in America in 1966, marked a departure. It was filmed in English and in color, and, it aspired to something like a plot: a photographer in swinging London (David Hemmings) uncovers evidence of a possible murder in the background of a series of pictures he's taken of a couple in a park. (De Palma's 1981 Blow Out is an obvious homage: A sound man records evidence of a murder on tape while recording ambient sounds.) Initially he's intrigued, since this event carries so much more gravity than the activities of his daily life, such as photographing models, driving around in a sports car, and off-handedly buying expensive antiques. But as the clues dry up, his interest does too. And having lost interest (after most of the prints are stolen), he simply throws the last print away.

Like everything else in Blow-Up, the photographer's choice of non-involvement carries the weight of Antonioni's moral judgment; the film is decked out in indifferent youth who make the same choice on a smaller scale in every instance. Antonioni's insistence is that Blow-Up is a chronicle of a day and age in which disinterest and immediate gratification win out over deeper values every time. (A similar theme was explored in the three films mentioned above.) Every generation has a cautionary tale like Blow-Up -- films are always warning us that society's fiber is worn thin by amoral young people -- but Blow-Up is special even in this company for its hypocrisy; Antonioni clucks his disapproval of casual sex, for instance, while leisurely treating his audience to an "orgy" at a party at which pot (scandal!) is smoked. Like his hero, Antonioni has an interest in the fashionable, too, so that, like the early '90s films of Gregg Araki (such as The Living End), the cutting-edge hip portrayed on the screen is now hilariously coy. There's even a gay couple with a little dog. When I last saw the film on a big screen in 1980, the aforementioned orgy had the college-age audience rolling in the aisles. So much for the message.

Thus it is that Antonioni, who very likely modeled his anti-hero partly on himself, peddles in Blow-Up the same thing he condemns. The film was a hit nonetheless, no doubt in large part for its simulated sex, and critics went mad for the rampant symbolism (drugged young people forcing a nun off a sidewalk, for instance) which Antonioni conveniently allowed them to read as they liked. Watching Blow-Up today (it's now available on DVD with a commentary track from an Antonioni scholar), you can enjoy the mod scenery, David Hemmings's lithe good looks, and Vanessa Redgrave's surprisingly engaging performance. But its message is just as tired and offensive as it was in '66.

este é que é o trailer!

Não, não, não... este é que é o trailer do imaginário infantil (nacional).


eu trauteava qualquer coisa do género:
Chanformers, nanana nana niais!
chanformers o nananana der, sem nanananan nais, os decepticuns!
chanformers, nananana ananiais!
chanformers, nanana nananais!
chanformers!
CHANFORMERS

ainda hoje tenho muito jeito para línguas! ")

O genérico de um dos imaginários infantis mais aditivos.A emoção que significava estes segundos.... impossível não trautear.

Contribuidores

Se ainda não repararam existe um novo contribuidor neste blog. Além de ser família, o tipo tem jeito para escrever (mais que eu) e por isso julgo que traz algum valor acrescentado ao blog...
Peço desculpa só o estar a apresentar depois de ele postar umas postas!

Bem-vindo Taos!

Homem vs Máquina

Ao longo dos tempos vários realizadores abordaram a questão da linha emocional que separa os homens das máquinas, humanizaram máquinas e robotizaram homens.

Interrogaram-se e interrogaram-nos se um dia o confronto homem vs máquina se poderá esbater na subjectividade das emoções. Será que um dia a máquina se irá sobrepor ao homem? Será que afinal andarão de braço dado?Stanley Kubrick colocou HAL 9000 a implorar ao humano que fosse misericordioso e lhe poupasse a "vida" (2001: A Space Odissey), George Lucas fez de R2-D2 um fiel parceiro dos humanos em (Star Wars) e Michael Bay (Transformers) com um estilo mais hollywoodesco mas não menos pertinente, fez de Bumblebee o melhor amigo de um adolescente em plena crise existencial e Optimus Prime protector da espécie humana. São apenas alguns exemplos de como o cinema - mesmo na área do sci-fi - está muito muito longe de ser,como muitos julgam,mero entretenimento.

Fotos.wired magazine

Fotos raras de coisas também pouco usuais de se verem....passe a redundância.
Aqui!

Battles.atlas

Battles,uma das revelações de 2007."Atlas" é combustão post-rock.

Cat Power.jukebox

Cat Power.jukebox (2008)

With ten interpretations of other people's songs, a re-interpretation of her own material ("Metal Heart") and only one new number (the Dylan-inspired "Song For Bobby"), Chan Marshall's second covers album could be perceived as treading water. If that's the case, she treads with grace and purpose – backed by a combination of alt America side players (Jim White, the Blues Explosion’s Judah Bauer) and soul legends such as Spooner Oldham and Teenie Hodges. It runs the risk of pastiche, but mining the same early-70s Memphis vibe as 2006's The Greatest, Jukebox is mostly a salutary lesson in how music used to be.

Raw, one-take recordings ensure that more familiar songs are the most intriguing. Under Marshall's law, Sinatra's ''New York, New York'' is reclaimed from decades of Rat Pack hell, while an abridged Hank Williams' classic "Rambin’ (Wo)man" becomes a midnight torch song. The shift from hillbilly death rattle to smooth soul-drenched ache is extraordinary.

Pitching herself between Marianne Faithful and Patti Smith, Marshall weaves between the instruments like a prizefighter. A diva wouldn’t occupy such shadows. However, her innate fragility resonates deeper than any lungbusting showboater. When Bauer hits one behind the beat, as on the Dylan-penned "I Believe In You", and the guitar riff cranks up and kicks in, it all sounds lazily perfect, like the Stones circa Sticky Fingers.

Not everything fares so well – closing covers of Billie, Janis and Joni are perhaps too obvious, too straight in interpretation – but a stripped down run at The Highwaymen's "Silver Stallion" shimmers with magic. At such moments, Chan Marshall momentarily clutches greatness. Overall, Jukebox makes for a smart and occasionally fantastic diversion, and worth the spare change from any right-thinking music lover's pocket.

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Hello World!

Fui convidado a mandar umas postas de pescada bem cheirosas para esta canastra a partir de hoje.Um bem haja ao Spectrum.

2008 Cancelado

Ao que parece, e 14 dias após o inicio do novo ano as noticias não são animadoras, 2008 vai ser um ano de cancelamentos.

Uma ameaça terrorista começou o ano a cancelar o Lisboa-Dakar, e há quem tema pelas edições futuras da prova.
A greve dos guionistas nos Estados Unidos, além de fazer prever o cancelamento da cerimonia de entrega de prémios Oscar, perturbou a HFPA (Hollywood Foreign Press Association) que pela voz do seu presidente apenas anunciou os vencedores dos Golden Globes descartando assim a cerimonia de entrega.
E se pensam que é só a nível de desporto e entretenimento pensem outra vez:
Aeroporto da Ota, é certo que foi substituído pelo projecto de Alcochete.
Urgências e SAPs por esse país fora (em março de 2007 eram 56 SAP a cancelar)

Parece que vai ser um bom ano...

Sai de Baixo

Vivam os Marretas

Grande Sandra Bullock ")

Ainda Natal

Emprestem os ouvidos por uns minutinhos que não se vão arrepender.
Preciosidade de António Severino

Rubrica da Antena 3 em PodCast: Laboratolarilolela

Obrigado a Nuno Markl, pelos comentários, e a todas as suas fontes.

Lisboa-Dakar 2008

Foi com pena que assisti ao cancelamento da mítica prova. Mas o que será o meu descontentamento perto da frustração e prejuízo de pilotos, equipas, organizadores, patrocinadores, operadores turísticos... tantos que investiram meses de preparação e milhares de euros.

Fico a aguardar um regresso em grande na edição de 2009, quem sabe não vou lá fazer uma "perninha"!

Para que serve uma tuna?