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Speech from 'The Great Dictator' (1940)
At the time the movie that this speech was given at the end of, some of the largest corporations in the U.S. were supplying Hitler with any and everything he wished to wage war with. Henry Ford had supplied trucks for the North African operations and had been supplying Hitler with $50,000 a year for quite awhile... Hitler had anti semitic books on tables outside of his office that he had anyone that visited him take a copy of to read. The Ethyl corporation supplied the octane booster of the same name for the use in aircraft and American Oil was shipping fuel by the tanker loads. Prescott Bush's father in law was a major financier of the Nazi cause and G.M. subsidiary Adam Opel built the engines for the first jet aircrafts that were used by the Luftwaffe against Allied forces and G.M. was repaid for damages by bombing of the subsidiary at the end of the war. Davis oil company was smuggling mercury out of Mexico off of both the Atlantic and Pacific coast to the Japanese and Germans to use in the primers in small arm bullet primers. That is some of what I recall off of the top of my head after a long tiring day but there is much much more incidents of allies supporting the Nazi cause not just at the beginning but throughout the war. The speech given by Charlie Chaplin at the end of "The Great Dictator" was used to justify Hoover to label him as a Communist and his campaign for a second front in European theater of war made him also a target of McCarthy at the wars end with Chaplin being denied reentry into the U.S. after a trip to Europe in 1952.
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s/t (Thrill Jockey, 1996)
Rome was Richard Smith – bass, melodica, Elliot Dicks – drums, drum brain, Adam Gruel – synth. Rome is focused on space and depth in the literal sense. Richard uses several manipulative machines on his bass-delay, pitch shifter, electo magnet to alter not only the tone but the time. Adam recycles Richard’s live bass through a condenser mic on a cheap Yamaha sampler- originally designed as a toy to mess with short phrases- and then feeds the line through various effects, including delay. The results are gorgeously amorphous soundscapes undergirded by the familiar muscle of dublike bass lines. This textural exploration is not without form; however this form is far removed from the verse chorus verse more commonly found in rock. They do however retain the visceral energy of rock with the pulse provided by the drums of Elliot Dicks.
HERE
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[don't worry playlist icon disappears after a minute or so]
80 minute documentary from 2003 which chronicles the life and work of Alan Moore, author of several acclaimed graphic novels, including From Hell, Watchmen and V for Vendetta. A portrait of the artist as contemporary shaman, someone with the power to transform consciousness by means of manipulating language, symbols and images. The film leads the audience through Moore’s world with the writer himself as guide, beginning with his childhood background, following the evolution of his career as he transformed the comics medium, through to his immersion in a magical worldview where science, spirituality and society are part of the same universe.
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"They'll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the black against the white - ANYTHING to keep us in our place."
The directorial debut of screenwriter Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver). Starring Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto. Both a critique of union practices and an examination of life in a working-class Rust Belt enclave, the film concerns a trio of Detroit auto workers: Zeke Brown (Pryor), Jerry Bartowski (Keitel), and Smokey James (Kotto). Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, the trio hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters. They commit the caper, but find a few scant bills in the union safe. More importantly, they also come away with a ledger, evidence of the union's illegal loan-lending operation and ties to organized crime syndicates. They attempt to blackmail the union with the information, but the union retaliates strongly and begins to turn the tables on the three friends. Meanwhile, a federal agent attempts to coerce Jerry into informing on the union's corruption which could make him enemies with his co-workers as well as the union bosses. wiki
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Half hour documentary from 1967 about the great Bluesman by Les Blank ...notes
"...A short film about the Texas blues singer Lightnin' (Sam) Hopkins. Built around what I gather was the return of Hopkins to his home town for a visit sometime in 1967, as much a celebration of a mode of life as it is a study of a kind of music. It is also fairly conventional film making (the conventions of documentary poetic realism), but in Hopkins and his friends it has a quality of life rather than a fabricated group image for a subject. Almost everybody in "Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins" seems to be a performer. But Hopkins himself controls the film's moods. Not so much in his exposition of the meaning of the blues as in what he makes of them when he sings and plays his guitar." New York Times, 1967
youtube link
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SPACE IS THE PLACE
featuring Sun Ra and his Arkestra
(1972, released 1974)
Stream VHS 63' version HERE
In 2003, the movie was re-released in its entire 82-minute format on DVD, after a heavily-edited 63-minute version on VHS. The original cuts were requested by Sun Ra, which director John Coney attributed to Sun Ra's prudishness.
The scenes indeed follow a racy "pimps and hos" narrative that is not entirely congruous with the rest of the film, and there was a notable backlash from fans of the original film.
The fact that the director inserted these scenes without the consent of Sun Ra does in fact leave room for scrutiny, considering the absence of Sun Ra in the scenes themselves. [wiki]
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INTERPLANETARY MELODIES
THE SECOND STOP IS JUPITER
ROCKET SHIP ROCK
Originally released in the 1950s by Alton Abraham's El Saturn Records in Chicago.
Read about El Saturn Research and the Astro-Black Mythology here
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Freestyle Frenzy, Liberty Grooves 12" vinyl promo's
quote from Rekordz On Wheelz:
"Freestyle Frenzy were a series of limited edition freestyle compilations highlighting some stellar live on air segments from my radio show on KCR. I believe it is the first of its kind, and predates a slew of future releases that captured unofficial recordings. To give you a little insight into how novel this record was, when Ghostface was in record store in Virginia, someone played for him a 12" that was a bootleg of the Meth/Ghost freestyle off of Freestyle Frenzy. When he got back to NYC, he went straight to Loud Records and was ready to flip. It was a little unpleasant because I was on Loud's payroll as a frelance A&R man. While I believe he was enjoying the drama, and making it seem worse than it was, Steve Rifkind was acting like the sky was about to fall, full of panic, certain that Saholin was about t wreck Loud's offices and cause me bodily harm. It turns out I saw Ghost later that month, and he really had very little idea what I was talking about when I tried to explain what the record was. To this day I don't know what really happened, but it was a bit controversial for a minute because no one could tell if it was a good thing for the artists or if it was a bootleg. Keep in mind this before the digital revolution." Stretch Armstrong
Vol.1 (1994)
Large Professor & O.C. - Freestyle (Nov 93)
Nas & Six Nine - Freestyle (Oct 93)
Das EFX - Freestyle (Nov 93)
Big L - Freestyle (Oct 93)
UMC'S - Freestyle (Oct 93)
Souls of Mischief & Kurious - Freestyle (Nov 92)
Q-Tip & Mad Skillz - Freestyle (Apr 94)
Method Man & Ghostface Killah - Freestyle (Apr 94)
Akinyele - Freestyle (Nov 93)
Black Moon & Smif-N-Wessun - Freestyle (Jun 93)
Prince Poetry - Freestyle (Jun 92)
Vol.2 (1995)
MC Serch & O.C. - Freestyle (Aug 94)
Mobb Deep - Freestyle (July 94)
Brand Nubian - Freestyle (Oct 94)
Organized Konfusion - Freestyle (May 93)
Lord Finesse - Freestyle (Sep 94)
Mad Skillz - Freestyle (Oct 94)
Scientifik - Freestyle (Sep 94)
Craig G - Freestyle (July 94)
Common Sense - Freestyle (Oct 94)
Around '93/'94 I used to buy my hip-hop vinyl from Trax Records (or was it Bass Generator?) back in Newcastle... hardcore/techno upstairs and hip-hop in the a cupboard sized basement. It was the only place for 100 miles to buy decent stuff, i'd call in everyday if possible, 2 days of the week at most i might have been armed with 10 quid (if i was lucky). It was on the ball for the time, they got stuff a week or two after vinyl was released in the States, along with alot of bootleg white labels too. Anyway that's where i bought Freestyle Frenzy Vol.1 on clear vinyl. I sold it a few years back for a meagre 10 pounds when i was broke... i think i only bought a meals worth of ready to cook food from Marks & Spencer and enough left to chip in for a bottle of stinkin' High Commissioner whiskey? Hope you still have it Jesse!
[I posted the version from Stretch's Konstant Kontact a while back but the link is dead. Lot's of tracks from Zoo York Mixtape, these vinyl versions have most of them too, although shame it doesn't feature the first appearance on the show from a young Busta Rhymes which i can't find anywhere.]
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Lobos Fiser: Valerie and Her Week of Wonders soundtrack (1970)
Jaromil Jireš' Valerie a týden divů (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Czechoslovakia, 1970) is one of those haunting, dream-like films that once seen is difficult to forget. The sexual awakening of adolescent Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) provides the major theme, ornately rendered as a symbol-soaked gothic fairytale. Elements drawn from the horror genre operate in conjunction with the type of gentle soft-core art imagery that can be found in other European sexual initiation films of the 1970s, such as Emmanuelle (1974), Bilitis (1977) and The Story of O (Histoire d'O, 1975).
This heady generic mixture is well-suited to the film's focus on the ambiguous status of various thresholds and the mysteriousness of awakening sensuality, conflicting desires and duplicity. One of the seductive attractions of Valerie a týden divů is its magical trance-inducing quality. The carefully-crafted sets, the hypnotic harpsichord, flute and choir-based music, and the predominance of thematically significant white in the colour co-ordinated palette all add to the film's particular audio-visual ambience of artifice. In addition to the use of elliptical editing, the crystalline quality of the photography is simply stunning, capturing in some scenes the beauty of early summer light sparkling on water and illuminating the pastoral landscape, which is set against dark, decaying, cobweb-strewn crypts... more
watch
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Rabid Dogs (1974)
I'm off to Rome for 2 months so it's possible there may be even less posts than of late and if there is some, then it will most definitely be music but until then i'll leave you with this classic Italian B-movie to chew on.
Audi 5000
(oh and thanks Michele)
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The Firm (Alan Clarke, 1988)
Originally made for TV, directed by Alan Clarke and written by Al Ashton. The film is based on the activities of the Inter City Firm, football firm of West Ham United during the 1970's and 1980's although in the film the firm's name is changed slightly to become the Inter City Crew (ICC).
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