M. Ward plays "O'Brien" on Austin City Limits with Conor Oberst, 2005.

Suede plays "Pantomime Horse" in 1993. From Love & Poison.

Well how about that. I like a Blur song.
"The Universal" on Later...with Jools Holland.

Beck plays two from Sea Change on Austin City Limits, 2002.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play "God is in the House" on Later...with Jools Holland.

From Billboard:

Ryan Adams' latest album with his band the Cardinals, "Cardinology," is barely a month old, but the artist is already back in the studio tracking demos for more than a dozen new songs under the working album title "Dear Impossible."

Songs put to tape with engineer Noah Goldstein include "Firefly," "So Quiet, It's Loud," "Goodbye Sunshine," "Universe Size Arms," the title cut, "Please, Hold On," "Souls Full of Holes," "OK, I Surrender," "Wild & Hopeless," "Kaleidoscope Eyes," "Your Name Here," "Mirror-Gold," "The Lights" and "Lost in Space."

Adams apparently intends to incorporate contributions from the Cardinals at a later date. "Songs need seasons. So it's springtime for these," he wrote on his blog. "The guys, my BFF's in the Cards, all gave me way thumbs up on almost all of them so I figured why not get the working model down now."

The artist describes the material as similar to his 2004 album "Love Is Hell," and "like a more pop, melodic style." He's also drawn comparisons to Sonic Youth's "Sister" and the Smiths' "Hatful of Hollow." "But man, these tunes, they're tiny little things compared to those records," Adams says.

The Association on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967.

Frightened Rabbit play "I Feel Better" at the Mohawk in Austin, Texas. June 5, 2008.

Alex Chilton and Yo La Tengo play "Femme Fatale" at Maxwell's in Hoboken, 12/07/07.

Wire - "Mercy"

Giant Sand - "Astonished (In Memphis)"

Mark Kozelek's "Bedtime Lullaby" on Yo Gabba Gabba.

Video for "Sliver" by Nirvana.

Ride plays "Taste" in London at Brixton Academy, 1992.

Modest Mouse play "What People Are Made Of" in Atlanta on September 26, 2001.

Do Make Say Think - "Minmin"

Spoon - "Change My Life"

Don Caballero - "You Drink a lot of Coffee for a Teenager"

Sunny Day Real Estate - "The Ocean"

Destroyer - "Mercy (We Had the Right)"

Dan Bejar talked to Wavelength about higher education:


For the benefit of all those first-year students out there, and based on your educational experience, rank the following in order of priority: attending lectures, coffee, beer, books, boys/girls, rock'n'roll, sleep, staying up late philosophizing, studying your notes.


attending lectures
studying your notes
rock'n'roll
boys/girls
staying up late philosophizing
books
coffee
beer
sleep

I did these things in the opposite order of how they appear above, so I can say as the voice of experience that it was the wrong order.

Fred Neil - "Little Bit of Rain"

Video for "Harnessed in Slums" by Archers of Loaf.

The Jesus Lizard - "Monkey Trick"

The Stone Roses - "I Wanna Be Adored"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 10: Georges Méliès

Le Diable Noir (1905)


L'homme orchestre (1900)


Le Monstre (1903)

Supergrass plays "Caught by the Fuzz" on Later...with Jools Holland.

John Cale - "Amsterdam"

Bert Jansch - "Courting Blues"

Blonde Redhead - "In Particular"

Doug Martsch covers "This Night Has Opened My Eyes"

Video for Badly Drawn Boy's "Once Around the Block"

The Fall - "Two Steps Back"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 9

F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924)







From Senses of Cinema:

Der Letzte Mann tells the story of the emasculating downfall of a doorman at a fancy hotel, played by Emil Jannings. The film begins with an exhilarating sequence in the rain, introducing us to the fast-moving world of the hotel and the swirling business of a 1920s city. The rhythm of the scene is set by the constant spinning of a glass revolving door that separates the chaos of the outside elements from the glittering and efficient atmosphere of the hotel lobby. The doorman stumbles and strains under the weight of a particularly heavy piece of luggage and is forced to come inside, have a drink, and take a rest. When he returns to his post at the front of the hotel, we see the extreme pleasure he takes in his job. Jannings, whose massive presence and broad expressions are perfectly suited to the role, preens in his brass buttoned coat. He smartly salutes the guests as they enter the hotel and exults in escorting two attractive young ladies – one clinging to each arm – to a taxi. On his walk home he is a man of respect in the neighborhood, condescendingly patting children on the head and nodding at his friends and neighbors. On the following day, it becomes clear that his difficulty with luggage has not gone unnoticed. There is a new porter in front of the hotel and the stunned doorman staggers to the manager's office. He is informed that he will replace the lavatory attendant, the oldest staff member at the hotel, who is being sent to a pensioner's home. The doorman pleads to remain in his old job as the manager impassively puffs on a cigar. Finally the manager tires of these entreaties and he forcibly strips the doorman of his magnificent coat and forces him to go to his new post. Utterly bereft, the doorman clings to his old identity, stealing his old coat so that he can walk home and still maintain his former status.



Drunk dreaming

Video for "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" by The Smiths.

Eels - "Jeannie's Diary"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 8

A taste of F.W. Murnau's Phantom (1922)

Mirah - "Sweepstakes Prize"



Mirah talked to The Morning News in October of 2004:

Since you often sing of consummate love, chivalric struggle, and wayfaring loneliness, I fancy you as a fan of medieval lit. Or maybe just a sucker for a fairy tale? I guess what I’m asking is, what do you like to read?

Well, when I appeared on the Nickelodeon game show Double Dare in 1987 and Marc Summers asked me what kinds of books I liked to read I answered “fantasy books.” My favorite books when I was little were The Hobbit, Watership Down, A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia—those sorts. I never considered myself a follower of science fiction, but I was always a fan of mythical beasts, strange lands, general pageantry, weird happenings, and fancy outfits. Hence my 12-year-old term “fantasy books” (now that sounds kind of dirty). I liked books that traveled and that taught me something and I liked to relax into my active imagination and to foster what would later blossom into full-blown adult hopeless romanticism syndrome. Books that I’ve loved as an adult tend to be more educational and less fictional.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever read any medieval literature. Maybe I should. I think my tendency towards high-drama imagery in my lyrics comes more from other music that I listen to or being in amazing-looking places or caught in thunderstorms than from what book I might be reading.

Air's video for "Playground Love"

Merle Haggard - "Sing A Sad Song"

Ween - "Stay Forever"

Ween - "It's Gonna Be (Alright)"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 7: товарищи, объединитесь! Edition

Sergei Eisenstein's Strike (1924)





Vsevold Pudovkin's Mother (1926)

Yo La Tengo - "Everyday"


Ira Kaplan talked to Inkblot Magazine about And then nothing turned itself inside-out:


Inkblot: Is the album autobiographical?

Ira: No. The songs represent moods more than actual incidents. We didn't know that there was a theme to the record until we read it on the advance CD.

Excerpt from Fellini: A Life, PART 5

"When I make a picture, I am healthy, happy, don’t need anything except sex. I live in a dimension in which I am absolved, taken by life. When crisis begins when a pictures finishes, when I am again with my real problems—God, wife, women, taxes—until a new light comes to announce a new game and it takes me again."
--From Fellini: A Life by Hollis Alpert

The Beatles - "Thank You Girl"

At the Drive-In plays "Invalid Litter Dept." at Shibuya On Air East in Tokyo. January 18, 2001.

Excerpt from Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, PART 2

On his first visit to the US, Ray met a number of American directors and writers. In New York he had long chats with Elia Kazan, Paddy Chayevsky and Sidney Lumet, and in Hollywood talked to Stanley Kubrick, George Stevens and Billy Wilder who was then shooting Some Like It Hot. “You won a prize at Cannes?” were his first words to Ray. “Well, I guess you’re an artist. But I’m not. I’m just a commercial man, and I like it that way.” Ray visited all the major studios, becoming “absolutely terrified by the plethora of equipment and personnel,” despite the forewarning impression he had received from Renoir in 1949. Two aspects of his trip particularly lodged in his mind: there were no “poets” among those he met, and virtually no one had more than “the vaguest notions about India.” An MGM executive he lunched with in the studio’s basement cafeteria had proudly confided to him his casting for a film about the Buddha – Robert Taylor! As Ray remarked in a letter to the Sri Lankan director Lester James Peries in December 1958, after he got back home to Calcutta: “One realizes what the Indian film-maker is up against – a colossal ignorance and only a moderate inquisitiveness. It is a miracle that Pather Panchali is doing so well at the Box Office. The notions about Japan are equally nebulous, and this airing of ideas about Kabuki etc. is just sheer pretence. The East is still as far away from the West as it has ever been…”
--From Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye by Andrew Robinson

Jawbreaker plays "Accident Prone" at Foufounes Electriques in Montreal. 1995.

The Raspberries play "Go All the Way" and "I Wanna Be with You"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 6

Anna Karina watches Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) in Jean-Luc Godard's My Life to Live (1962).

Dirty Three - "I Offered It up to the Stars & The Night Sky"

The New Pornographers - "The Body Says No"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 5

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910) Directed by Otis Turner

The United States of America - "Hard Coming Love"

Lambchop - "Grumpus"




Kurt Wagner talked to Comes With a Smile in the Spring of 2001:

So have any of your songs ever been directly inspired by a movie?

Not really, although going to the movies and films do sort of inspire me in general... They make me feel like doing things. I don’t know why that is, but they provoke some kind of thought process that makes me sort of, y’know, want to go and write things. It’s not anything direct, so like, I don’t want to suddenly write something about The Third Man or something like that. It’s just like I find even reading …this is odd, but I was thinking about this yesterday …I was reading the ‘New York Times’ book review, and I was thinking ‘Well isn’t this great; here are all these synopses about all these different ideas that people have’, and in sort of a general way, it’s like flipping through 30 people’s minds about ideas they’ve had, and I think it’s like really a neat way to get a general idea about approaches and ways of looking at the world.

Death Cab for Cutie - "Company Calls"

Superdrag - "Some Kind of Tragedy"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 4

The Peach Girl (1931) Directed by Wancang Bu.



From SilentFilm.org:

Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of Blood, or The Peach Girl as it is more commonly translated, is a rarely screened classic from the Lianhua Film Company, one of the most successful studios in 1930s Shanghai...Naturalistic lighting and delicate camerawork are skillfully employed to tell a uniquely Chinese story in which class and gender ultimately determine destiny. The lovers are played by two stars of the early Shanghai studio system: Jin Yan, considered the Valentino of his time, and Ruan Lingyu, often referred to as the Asian Garbo. Appearing in 29 films in just seven years, Ruan Lingyu received critical acclaim for her moving portrayals of prostitutes and underclass women, and developed such widespread popularity that she came to symbolize "the suffering of China." The fame and adulation she received proved to be her downfall - in 1935 she took her life at the age of 25.

Grandaddy plays "The Crystal Lake" in Japan in 2000.

Video for Morrissey's "Glamorous Glue"

Smog - "Dress Sexy at my Funeral"

Excerpt from Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, PART 1

On his time in London in 1950, and what influenced Pather Panchali:

Of the roughly one hundred films that Satyajit saw while he was in London, including La Regle du Jeu which he rates one of the best films ever made, the revelation was unquestionably Bicycle Thieves. It 'gored' him. 'I came out of the theatre my mind firmly made up. I would become a film-maker,' he said in his 1982 lecture, though characteristically, he did not let on about this even to Clare. 'The prospect of giving up a safe job didn’t daunt me any more. I would make my film exactly as De Sica had made his: working with non-professional actors, using modest resources, and shooting on actual locations. The village which Bibhutibhusan had so lovingly described would be a living backgrop to the film, just as the outskirts of Rome were for De Sica’s film.'
--From Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye by Andrew Robinson

Excerpt from Fellini: A Life, PART 4

On the international reception of 8 1/2:

Leaving the critical hubbub behind, Fellini, with Giulietta, went to Moscow, where 8 ½ was Italy’s official entry in the eastern bloc film festival. Giulietta was perhaps even better known to the Russians than Fellini, and when they stood on the stage together in the huge hall that held more than 8,000 people, they were greeted with thunderous applause. The end of the film, too, brought an ovation.

The festival jury had fifteen members, the majority from socialist countries. Italy’s representative was Fellini’s former colleague, Sergio Amidei. Since 8 ½ was clearly the hands down favorite among the entries, it was the prime candidate for the grand prize. Nevertheless, eight of the fifteen jury votes went against it, word apparently having been received from on high that it would be against official policy to vote for it. This caused a ruckus among the remaining jury members, the rebellion being led by Stanley Kramer, the American representative.

Finally, the Czech member of the jury came to Fellini and asked him if he would receive the prize as a brilliant director, but one whose film, unfortunately, did not contribute to peace and friendship among nations. "I might accept," Fellini told him, "if I wanted a funny story to tell for the rest of my life…accepting a prize and a scolding at the same time."

Eventually a compromise was reached. He was given the prize for a film that bore “witness to an artist in search of the truth," while the Russian public was informed by the press that the film’s ideas were "pessimistic and remote from the people.”
--From Fellini: A Life by Hollis Alpert

Gang of Four - "I Found that Essence Rare"

Built to Spill plays "Nowhere Nothin' Fuckup" at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland on September 20, 2007.

Sparklehorse - "Some Sweet Day"

Sparklehorse - "Ghost in the Sky"

Red House Painters - "Smokey"

Yo La Tengo - "Little Eyes"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 3

Spotlight on Benjamin Christensen, the Satanly scholar director of Häxan, and homoerotic master painter star of Carl Theodor Dreyer's Michael. From AllMovie:

A former opera singer, Danish director Benjamin Christensen acted in and directed stage shows before entering films as an actor in 1906. Making an impressive debut as a director/star six years later with the erotic suspense thriller Det Hemmelighedsfulde X (1912), Christensen won accolades for his inventive use of light and darkness in an otherwise overly melodramatic story of a navy officer falsely accused of spying. The director astounded audiences by filming the turning on of an electric light in a key scene in this film. Motion pictures were still filmed in natural sunlight and Christensen was forced to use trick photography to reach his objective. Such inventiveness brought the filmmaker a world-wide reputation and Christensen's days in Danish films were numbered. In Sweden, Christensen directed the episodic Häxan (aka Witchcraft Through the Ages), where his obsession with bizarre lighting effects perhaps reached its zenith. A progression of dramatic vignettes illustrating the power of witchcraft in the Middle Ages, the film featured Christensen as Satan and retains its impact even on a modern audience. Häxan paved the way for Christensen to sign a contract with the leading German film concern UFA, for whom he directed three films.
More importantly, perhaps, the director also played the leading role in his countryman Carl Dreyer's evocative Mikaël (1924), an erotic drama about an Auguste Rodin-like painter seduced by his pupil (Walter Slezak). Christensen finally heeded the call of Hollywood in 1925, but his stay there proved anticlimactic.




Häxan (1922)

The Fall - "Leave the Capitol"

Explosions in the Sky - "Have You Passed Through This Night?"