Monday, February 29, 2016
School of Life Monday : Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy was a remarkable novelist in part because he believed in the novel as a tool for social reform, something that would enable us to become kinder, more thoughtful and more generous towards others.
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Recent Interview w/ Henry Rollins - BBC HARDtalk
We tend to pigeonhole creative types: writer, musician, actor - they get a label. Stephen Sackur talks to a guest who defies simple description - punk is perhaps the only word that captures the spirit of Henry Rollins. He first found success in the punk band Black Flag back in the early eighties. Since then he's variously made a name as a non-conforming writer, broadcaster, actor and intrepid traveller. How hard is it to swim against the cultural tide in the United States?
Interviewed Guest - Henry Lawrence Rollins
Presenter - Stephen Sackur
Saturday, February 27, 2016
Kate Schellenbach
(Beastie Boys original drummer) speaks on the Brouhaha Podcast
from the Brouhaha
Founding member of the Beastie Boys and drummer extraordinaire, Kate Schellenbach, talks about: early Beastie history, her apprehension of being a rap superstar, life as a television producer, the most difficult Luscious Jackson song to drum, and the whereabouts of Manny.
I made some cool photos with Luscious Jackson early on too...
Founding member of the Beastie Boys and drummer extraordinaire, Kate Schellenbach, talks about: early Beastie history, her apprehension of being a rap superstar, life as a television producer, the most difficult Luscious Jackson song to drum, and the whereabouts of Manny.
I made some cool photos with Luscious Jackson early on too...
Friday, February 26, 2016
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Documentary tonight in Brooklyn
POSITIVE FORCE: MORE THAN A WITNESS
I'll be part of a Q&A after the film
Although a lot of people believe I lived in DC, I never have, but I did go down over the years to visit friends and see great shows every once in a while... Positive Force was very inspiring when they came on the scene and I think this documentary is a good testament to that.
Here's a link to the event on FaceBook
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Radical thinker Angela Davis interviews Ice Cube, 1991
from Dangerous Minds:
Before the release of Ice Cube’s Death Certificate, renowned black radical Angela Y. Davis interviewed him for Transition Magazine. It’s probably the first and last time a magazine has used a Gramsci quotation to introduce its readers to Ice Cube.
Davis, a former student of Herbert Marcuse, had been targeted by Governor Ronald Reagan in 1969 and 1970, when she was an assistant professor in UCLA’s Philosophy Department. At the governor’s urging, she was fired (twice), and Reagan vowed that she would never teach at the University of California again. Because who was better qualified to evaluate the work of philosophy professors than like Ronald Reagan? (Today, Davis is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at UC Santa Cruz, and “Reagan” is a pair of syllables that stands for mental decay.) In ‘80, a decade after she was arrested because of her association with the Soledad Brothers, and again in ‘84, she was the vice-presidential candidate on the Communist Party USA ticket.
Ice Cube was coming from a different place. You couldn’t call his analysis Marxist, and “feminist” would have been a real stretch: he was reading The Final Call, not People’s World. This was during the period of Cube’s loudest advocacy for the Nation of Islam—before Friday, long before Are We There Yet?—when he was advocating black self-reliance (“We’ve got to start policing and patrolling our own neighborhoods,” he told Davis), endorsing an antisemitic NOI book called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, and arguing that the Hon. Elijah Muhammad was more important than Malcolm X. He and Davis had plenty to talk about.
Angela Davis and Ice Cube in Transition #58
Hip-hop historian Jeff Chang, who thinks this meeting likely took place in July of ‘91, writes in Can’t Stop Won’t Stopthat publicist Leyla Turkkan set up the interview, hoping it would position Ice Cube as “an inheritor of the Black radical tradition.” Chang continues:
The interview was a provocative idea—one that both Davis and Cube welcomed. But none of them had any idea how the conversation would turn when they got together in Cube’s Street Knowledge business offices.
To begin with, Davis only heard a few tracks from the still unfinished album [Death Certificate], including “My Summer Vacation,” “Us” and a track called “Lord Have Mercy,” which never made it to the album. She did not hear the song that would become most controversial—a rap entitled “Black Korea.” In another way, she was at a more fundamental disadvantage in the conversation.
Like Davis, Cube’s mother had grown up in the South. After moving to Watts, she had come of age as a participant in the 1965 riots. While Cube and his mother were close, they often argued about politics and his lyrics. Now it was like Cube was sitting down to talk with his mother. Davis was at a loss the way any parent is with her child at the moment he’s in the fullest agitation of his becoming.
Cube sat back behind his glass desk in a black leather chair, the walls covered with framed gold records and posters for Boyz N The Hood and his albums. Copies of URB, The Source and The Final Call were laid out in front of him. Davis asked Cube how he felt about the older generation.
“When I look at older people, I don’t think they feel that they can learn from the younger generation. I try and tell my mother things that she just doesn’t want to hear sometimes,” he answered.
Read the Transition article in full here. According to Chang, Priority Records released a 20-minute cut of Davis/Cube as a promotional video. The MC is surprisingly soft-spoken in the short clip of the interview that aired on Rap City, which you can see below at the (cough) 4:20 mark.
Bye, Felicia.
Monday, February 22, 2016
Johannes Vermeer - School of Life Monday
Johannes Vermeer is one of the world's greatest artists, in part because he's not great in the usual sense. He was content to paint very ordinary scenes and remind us of how special the everyday can be.
Sunday, February 21, 2016
for you Sunday: Atheism has ancient roots and is not ‘modern invention’, claims new text
from the GUARDIAN
Cambridge academic’s new book disputes that atheism is a ‘modern invention’ and sets out evidence that ‘disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills’
Cambridge academic’s new book disputes that atheism is a ‘modern invention’ and sets out evidence that ‘disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills’
Atheism is not a modern invention from the western Enlightenment, but actually dates back to the ancient world, according to a new book by a Cambridge academic – which challenges the assumption that humanity is naturally predisposed to believe in gods.
In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at Cambridge University, lays out a series of examples showing that atheism existed in polytheistic ancient Greece. It is, according to its author, partly “an attempt to excavate ancient atheism from underneath the rubble heaped on it by millennia of Christian opprobrium”.
Whitmarsh, a fellow of St John’s College, believes that the growing trend towards seeing religion as “hardwired” into humans is deeply worrying. “I am trying to destabilise this notion, which seems to be gaining hold all the time, that there is something fundamental to humanity about [religious] belief,” he told the Guardian.
His book disputes that atheism is “a modern invention, a product of the European Enlightenment” and a mode of thought that “would be inconceivable without the twin ideas of a secular state and of science as a rival to religious truth”.
It is a myth, he writes, which is “nurtured by both sides of the ‘new atheism’ debate. Adherents wish to present scepticism toward the supernatural as the result of science’s progressive eclipse of religion, and the religious wish to see it as a pathological symptom of a decadent western world consumed by capitalism.
“Both are guilty of modernist vanity. Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills. It is only through profound ignorance of the classical tradition that anyone ever believed that 18th-century Europeans were the first to battle the gods.”
“We tend to see atheism as an idea that has only recently emerged in secular western societies. The rhetoric used to describe it is hyper-modern. In fact, early societies were far more capable than many since of containing atheism within the spectrum of what they considered normal,” said Whitmarsh.
“Rather than making judgments based on scientific reason, these early atheists were making what seem to be universal objections about the paradoxical nature of religion – the fact that it asks you to accept things that aren’t intuitively there in your world. The fact that this was happening thousands of years ago suggests that forms of disbelief can exist in all cultures, and probably always have.”
In the fourth century BC, he points to Plato, as the philosopher imagines a believer chastising an atheist: “You and your friends are not the first to have held this view about the gods! There are always those who suffer from this illness, in greater or lesser numbers.”
“We may balk at his disease imagery,” writes Whitmarsh, “but Plato was surely right in his general point. There have been many throughout history and across all cultures who have resisted belief in the divine.”
These range from Carneades, head of the Platonic academy in the second century BC, who argued that “belief in gods is illogical”, to the Epicureans, who were often called atheoi in antiquity, and the atheistic writings of Xenophanes of Colophon.
Other examples are texts found regarding the healing god Asclepius from around 320 BC, including the case of a man who had lost the strength in his fingers, but who mocked the stories of the miracle cures found there, and refused to believe in them.
“When he slept in the sanctuary (a common type of ritual activity, known as incubation), Asclepius appeared to him in a dream. His fingers were cured, but the god chided him: ‘Because you disbelieved things that are not unbelievable, your name from now on shall be Disbeliever (Apistos).’ Aside from the story’s wonderful self-consciousness – a miracle inscription about someone who didn’t believe in miracle inscriptions – it also provides precious evidence for religious scepticism in practice, as espoused by a regular, everyday Greek,” writes Whitmarsh.
Whitmarsh argues that the diversity of ancient Greece’s polytheistic societies meant there was no such thing as religious orthodoxy, and no clergy laying out how people should live. This meant, he said, that while atheism could be viewed as mistaken, it was usually tolerated – although not in the case of Socrates, who was executed in Athens for “not recognising the gods of the city”.
While Whitmarsh is not setting out to take a stance on the truth or falsehood of atheism itself, he does state in his preface, his “strong conviction – that has hardened in the course of researching and writing this book – that cultural and religious pluralism, and free debate, are indispensable to the good life.
“Most cultures in human history have had a form of supernatural belief, of one sort or other. It would be hard to deny that that is the norm. But that’s not to say that every person in every culture has subscribed to that,” he writes.
Saturday, February 20, 2016
Friday, February 19, 2016
this cool music video reminds me of the days...
DOPE.
As a Skateboarder, it's kinda a thing, I can't stand roller skaters, but when girls do it correctly on 8 wheels, you can't front.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
Shepard Fairey goes out on a limb, once again, to support a major candidate for President of the United States of America
My good friend Shepard just announced on the internet several hours ago:
Bernie Sanders is the real deal and I feel it’s important for me to voice my support for his bid for President. I think he’s the candidate who will look out for the interest of average Americans and the candidate who to me embodies the principles of justice, equality, liberty, and access to the American Dream. I designed these t-shirts based off what I created for the chilipeppers fundraiser concert, and I’m happy these will help to fund Bernie’s campaign since he absolutely does not take money from corporations or Super PACs. Bernie needs help from people like you and me and I think he’ll look out for the needs of people like you and me. Pick up a t-shirt and help support Bernie Sanders! - Shepard
get it here in BLACK:
https://store.berniesanders.com/collections/apparel/products/shep-fairey-bernie-t-shirt-black
or here in WHITE:
https://store.berniesanders.com/collections/apparel/products/shep-fairey-bernie-t-shirt
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
The original MY RULES Photozine ... part of the story
I shared this on my instagram yesterday in three parts, here's the whole deal here:
In November of 1982 i published this "photozine" myself, they call it D.I.Y. now, but truth is thats the only choice we had then, and in the end we are all much better for it. We had to teach ourselves how to do things and make things happen on our own. None of the lazy ass slacker, type it in google to figure it out bull shit (not that that can't be put to good use, because of course it can, but its so damn easy, and any neuroscientist will tell you, easy shit doesn't stimulate the brain the way difficult things do... Jus sayin'). By actually talking to people not texting or speaking on message boards, by socializing FACE TO FACE motherfuckers, making phone calls and having conversations in REAL TIME WHEN SPOKEN TO not at your leisure when you feel like it or have the time to think of something witty to say, i think of it as LIVING IN REAL TIME, getting shit done, takin' care of business, workin' your hustle... No one had printers in their homes, NO ONE, you'd have to create pages on graph paper (thats an actual sheet of paper with lines preprinted on it), make "half-tones" of photographs and art, paste them on a page, titles would been hand glued or waxed onto a page one letter at a time, text would be taken from a typewriter or sent out to a typesetter who would let you pick one of a few fonts for a price, and if you wanted "different" fonts you'd pay a lot more and have to find a type house that did it even... Luckily for printing i was able to call on my bro's at Thrasher who i figured owed me a favor or two, bringing them some credibility coming from "SkateBoarder" after "Action Now" folded... Anyway, i got ad's from a few friends who had record companies to help pay for the printing, Thrasher got thier ad in trade for letting me use their facilities up in the San Fransisco ship yard where they operated from all the years i worked with them. SST didnt pay for theirs in cash, Black Flag's Van is what travelled with me and roadie Davo over 500 miles to bring the 10,000 zines back to my room at my moms house just south of Olympic blvd., stacked more than six feet high they filled up most of my room in boxes of 200 copies.
Before i went to print i told everyone that this would be "The One and Only Issue". Flipside said they were printing around 4000 at the time, and Maximum Rock'N'Roll said they were printing between 2,500 and 3,500 at the time (they were by far the biggest Punk Fanzines at the time), Thrasher, which at that moment was the ONLY national skateboard magazine (but only B&W photos) told me they were doing 20,000... So i figured, being a one time thing, it'd be cool if i did 10,000, i had confidence the national & worldwide punk scene (there were pockets of punks all over the globe in major cities) would be into it. It wasn't until we were at the bindery, getting the zines all cut, trimmed, collated, & stapled together, that i found out the truth regarding Thrashers numbers by accident... The binder, whom Thrasher put me on to, asked me, "how many copies total you got here?" I said "half of what Thrasher does" he said "this looks like a lot more than that!" And then he told me they usually printed only around 6,000 copies a month, HAAAAA! I couldn't believe it, and here i am with 10,000, more than they ever did! Oh well... It cost me about .30¢ each to print, i wholesaled them for $1.00 to record distributors and magazine stands and record stores, the cover price was $2.00 the ads paid for about half the printing and the other $1500. was outa my own savings account, (no fucking kickstarter bullshit, its DIY!) i shipped them via UPS & USPO as well as drove many to distributors & record stores myself, and made all the calls to sell & collect myself. Every dot on every page i put there on purpose or by accident, myself or by Kevin Thatcher (Thrasher original Editor who gave me invaluable assistance in creating & cutting & pasting all my photos & ideas onto the page. My first solo homemade publication! Sold 8,000 copies in the first two years all over the country and mail orders came to me from over a dozen countries world wide, Yugoslavia and Chile being two of the farthest and most impressive to me, the currency sent in envelops from all over, much of it i would never trade in (some i still have & put in the collage in the MY RULES book endsheets)..
The last two thousand trickled out over the following 8 years or so, and nowadays some of my last few N.O.S. go for over $300 a pop, on eBay you can find them at different times for as little as $30 and as much as $399 just depends on the timing... Anyway, there's my presidents day off sermon, hope you liked it ✌🏾️
Monday, February 15, 2016
Fuckin with the cold...
(SORRY BACK ON TRACK WITH "SCHOOL OF LIFE" MODAYS NEXT WEEK)
Here in NYC it's been hovering around ZERO degrees Feranhceight for the last few days when the wind blows. It's cold.
this cool and calm clip reminded me it could be a lot colder ;-)
from The New York Times
This short film follows a diver on a search below the ice. By PAULINA SKIBIŃSKA
Here in NYC it's been hovering around ZERO degrees Feranhceight for the last few days when the wind blows. It's cold.
this cool and calm clip reminded me it could be a lot colder ;-)
from The New York Times
This short film follows a diver on a search below the ice. By PAULINA SKIBIŃSKA
I grew up in Poland watching my father dive professionally. To me, the most fascinating part of the endeavor was the moment when a diver surfaces. When you dive, descending underwater, you become disoriented. Your adrenaline kicks in. You have the sense that you can go deeper and even deeper still. But before you can do that, you have to know how to stop, and how to keep the pressure safe — only then can you continue. When a diver descends in the water, where there’s only one way out, he is crossing a line, entering a world in which he is entirely reliant on his own resources. So when the diver finally emerges, the relief is almost palpable.Paulina Skibińska is a screenwriter and Ph.D. candidate in directing at the Lodz Film School in Poland
I spent two years focusing on these themes for this Op-Doc. I ultimately named it “Object,” in reference to the code word that professional divers use to refer to the dead. They don’t use the words “the body,” “the corpse,” “the drowned man” or woman or child, or “the floater” — just “the object.” I thought the term worked perfectly for the kind of film I was making: It is mysterious, just as you don’t know what the diver in my film is diving to find.
For the end, I chose a wide, aerial shot of fire officers securing an air hole with tape, which felt highly symbolic. While we were editing, we referred to the air hole as “the grave” — but in the film we wanted to portray the scene subtly, with no shocking images of death. Because this is not a film about the drowned. We wanted to make a film about someone strong, who intentionally inserts himself in opposition to a different world. Someone who steps out of everyday reality and into something that isn’t his natural environment.
I wanted the audience to be able to enter into the story and descend into the depths with the diver, to the point where the world above the water disappears. The result is a look into the mesmerizing world below the ice. I found it haunting.
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Sunday Skate Flick: PUBLIC DOMAIN
This Powell Peralta Bones Brigade video #4 was by far my favorite at the time, some classic stuff and revolutionary filming for the era thanks to Stecyk and Peralta:
Saturday, February 13, 2016
Friday, February 12, 2016
Thursday, February 11, 2016
"Martin Scorsese Directs"
from Dangerous Minds
Martin Scorsese started making movies when he was a kid. He suffered from asthma which meant he spent time a lot of isolated at home in bed. He couldn’t play like the other kids. Instead he watched them from his bedroom window running free, playing baseball and getting in fights. His bedroom window was his first viewfinder. He watched the world outside and imagined stories about the people he saw. His imagination was inspired by the movies at the local cinema—films starring Victor Mature, or those made by Powell and Pressburger.Scorsese was raised a Catholic. He was an altar boy and his parents thought one day he might become a priest. In church Scorsese saw the power and drama contained in the religious statues and paintings—the pieta with its crucified Christ draped across his mother’s lap. The martyred saints showing their wounds and pointing to unknowable heavens. Imagery was a visceral source of communication. At home in bed he created his own movies, spending hours painstakingly drawing storyboards, frame by frame, for the imaginary films he would one day direct.
In his teens he gave up on being a priest and went to the film school at NYU. He made the short films What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? (1963) and The Big Shave (1967). Scorsese’s greatest films are the ones informed with his own personal experience and knowledge of the world. Catholic guilt (Who’s That Knocking at My Door?); machismo posturing and violence (Mean Streets); violence, redemption and isolation (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull).
Much of this is well covered in Joel Sucher and Steven Fischler’ profile of Scorsese. Made for the PBS series, American Masters in 1990, this documentary follows the director during the making of Goodfellas. It contains superb interviews (most delightfully Scorsese’s parents), choice cuts from his films and contributions from actors (Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, Amy Robinson), producers and fellow directors—like Steven Spielberg who says the intense emotional turmoil of Scorsese’s work, “Sometimes you don’t know whether to scream or to laugh.”
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
My Boy Lance Mountain Still Killing It Like No One Else
Other than the logo's at the end I see no fault in this incredible Lance Mountain footage
Motherfucking LANCE!
Monday, February 8, 2016
"School of Life" Monday's Watch and Listen This Week:
HISTORY OF IDEAS - Art
By looking back at the history of art, we can get a clearer sense of what the purpose of art should be in our lives.
Sunday, February 7, 2016
Saturday, February 6, 2016
ZZ Top fan recreates the ‘Tres Hombres’ gatefold meal and then eats it.
from Dangerous Minds
It’s "arguably" the greatest LP gatefold image of all time: the drool-inducing food porn Mexican spread from the inner fold of ZZ Top’s 1973 Tres Hombresalbum. Only Coven’s Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reap Souls
comes close to matching it’s exemplary use of the medium, but as far as gatefold images go, it’s hard to top THE TOP.
In what is destined to be the the greatest short film of 2016, Austin chef Thomas Micklethwait lovingly re-creates this enviable meal and proceeds to eat the shit out of it.
As someone who has often dreamt of being at that fabled table, all I can say is kudos to the chef for allowing me to live vicariously through him and yet not have to experience the following day’s Afterburner
tribute.
Fans of ZZ Top or grande burritos, take note:
Friday, February 5, 2016
New Pussy Riot video
Explained in the New York Times
from The New York Times
Pussy Riot Video Mocks Russian Prosecutor Accused of Corruption
MOSCOW — Wearing police uniforms and fishnet stockings, they whip hooded prisoners and waterboard them in their prison cells. The well-made-up women gleefully throw wads of cash into the air and flirt viciously with their viewers.
The Russian punk protest group Pussy Riot sashayed back into the public eye on Wednesday with the release of a music video savaging the country’s prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika, who locked up three members of the group in 2012.
It is a black satire of the Russian criminal justice system, in which the women, playing prison guards, rap lustily about money and torture a man with hot clothes irons.
“I run the war on corruption here, or to be precise, I run the corruption,” the group’s leader, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, sings alluding to accusations of high-level wrongdoing in Mr. Chaika’s office.
Those accusations were brought by Aleksei A. Navalny, the anticorruption activist, late last year. Mr. Navalny suggested that Mr. Chaika’s son jointly owned a luxury hotel in Greece and villas in Switzerland with Olga Lopatina, the wife of a deputy prosecutor general.
Ms. Lopatina’s previous husband had ties to a notorious organized crime group in southern Russia, the Tsapok gang. Ms. Lopatina has denied the ties and sued Mr. Navalny.
Mr. Chaika denied wrongdoing. The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said he would not comment on allegations concerning the grown son of a federal official.
Ms. Tolokonnikova was one of three members of the protest group who were convicted in 2012 for performing a protest concert in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Ms. Tolokonnikova and her bandmate Maria Alyokhina served a year and nine months in prison before they were released under an amnesty law before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Another member of the group, Yekaterina Samutsevich, had been released on parole.
In the video, Ms. Tolokonnikova plays, with a sly smile, Mr. Chaika, her old nemesis.
“I love Russia, I am a patriot, but I could live in Switzerland,” she sings.
The young women sway to the tinny rhythm, gorge on a lavish feast in a palatial setting and pout at the camera. One wears a bird mask, a reference to Mr. Chaika, whose name means “sea gull.” Ms. Tolokonnikova alternates between flapping her hands like wings and forming pistols with her fingers.
A framed portrait of President Vladimir V. Putin, the type that hangs in official offices here, looks down on Ms. Tolokonnikova as she eats a gold-painted loaf of bread. And there are subtle hints at life inside the zone, the Russian penal colony system, such as a checkerboard drawn on a table with spilled sugar. The game pieces are also lumps of sugar.
“Be humble, learn to obey, don’t worry about material stuff,” Ms. Tolokonnikova rhymes sarcastically.
“And son, if you do worry about material things in life, then be loyal to Putin forever, son,” Ms. Tolokonnikova raps softly. “You want to get away with murder, be loyal to your boss.”
Thursday, February 4, 2016
The rise and fall of a Fox News fraud
from BoingBoing:
Fox News invited bullshitting fraudster Wayne Simmons to appear on its "news" programs over 100 times posing as a CIA operative. Based on his hawkish proclamations, the Pentagon hired Simmons as a shill analyst to propagandize for them. Now that Simmons has been exposed, arrested, and charged with with multiple counts of fraud, he will never appear on Fox News again, but the lies he told on the network will forever be regarded as gospel truth by fear-addicted Fox TV viewers.
From Rolling Stone:
Simmons claimed to have spent 27 years with the CIA, but Paul Nathanson, the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case, said in a court filing that Simmons "never had any association whatsoever with the CIA." (The CIA declined to comment – as a rule, it never confirms or denies agents – but said it is "working closely with the Justice Department on this matter.") Instead, prosecutors say Simmons spent those 27 years doing just about everything else: He ran a limousine service, a gambling operation and an AIDS-testing clinic; worked for a hot-tub business, a carpeting company and a nightclub; and briefly played defensive back for the New Orleans Saints. Along the way, he accrued criminal convictions, including multiple DUIs, plus charges for weapons possession and assault, and an arrest for attacking a cabdriver in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2007. "Fuck you, you can't do shit to me – do you know who I am?" Simmons told a cop, according to a police report, before insisting that he was CIA, and that the cabbie, who was Pakistani, had a bomb. A police dog found no explosives, and a CIA representative told the cops to take whatever actions they deemed necessary.
Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Jay Adams would have been 55 Today
Today would have been Jay's 55th birthday.
He was the Original, there is no other like him and there never will be.
Jay Adams was radical, he was an inspiration to many and that is why we celebrate him.
Although he was not perfect by any means, i personally feel its a disservice to all to dwell on the negative, because that did not inspire anyone. We want to remember the best that this man or boy was. in hopes to inspire the best in ourselves. It's happy birthday Jay, not unhappy birthday.
Lotsa love to brother Jay Boy and his memory.
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
The Devil's Toy: The evils of skateboarding exposed!
from Dangerous Minds:
The first movie ever made in Canada about skateboarding is called “The Devil’s Toy,” and it’s a frothy 15-minute effort from 1966 depicting a couple dozen freewheeling youngsters gliding over the streets and parks of Montreal.The weirdest thing about the “The Devil’s Toy” is that the people who commissioned the production may have been under the impression that this was to be a terrifying social guidance movie à la Troy McClure’s “Firecrackers: The Silent Menace,” but apparently the people who actually made the movie weren’t seeing it that way.
Three elements—the title; a portentous, nay grandiloquent dedication “to all victims of intolerance”; and a suitably over-the-top voiceover (one imagines someone like Gary Owens at the mic)—point to the movie’s ostensible purpose of alarming teenagers into selling their planks tout de suite—but for anyone with eyes to see, the movie clearly depicts youths having some harmless fun, plus precisely zero malign consequences are depicted as a result of the use of skateboards—not even a single scraped knee.
The director of “The Devil’s Toy” is Claude Jutra, an important figure in the history of Quebec film, responsible for 1971’s Mon oncle Antoine, among others. Based on “The Devil’s Toy” alone, there is no doubt that Jutra was a filmmaker of some talent. The proceedings are heavily influenced by the nouvelle vague, even as the effervescent score, featuring vocals by none other than Geneviève Bujold, can easily be imagined emanating from a Scopitone in some Gallic bistro.Marc Campbell, my colleague here at DM, posted this gem back in 2012. He thinks “The Devil’s Toy” was intended to be a straight-up “mockumentary.” He might be right. That’s it’s so on the edge is what makes it even better.
By the way, can anyone clear this up? All sources seem to agree that the movie dates from 1966—it certainly feels like 1966—but “MCMLXIX” (1969) is plainly visible in the end credits, so I don’t know what’s up with that.
As stated, the scarifying elements of the movie seem well-nigh parodic. But as shocking social guidance films go, this one’s a pure delight.
h/t: Jeff AlbersPreviously on Dangerous Minds:
Black and white pictures of famous people on skateboards
Monday, February 1, 2016
"School of Life" Monday's Watch and Listen This Week:
The Wisdom of Space
A series of images provided by NASA (and music by J.S.Bach) help to restore perspective and a sense of peace to our frazzled lives.
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