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?"

SILENT SUMMER, Part 2

Pandora's Box (1929) by G.W. Pabst. From All Movie:

G.W. Pabst's most famous film featured his first, star-making collaboration with American actress Louise Brooks in a complex exploration of sexual psychology and Weimar Germany's social decadence. Working from Frank Wedekind's play in Pabst's trademark realist style, Pabst and Brooks transformed the character of Lulu from an evil temptress into a hedonistic innocent at ease with her sexuality. Pursued by men and women alike, Lulu is prey as much to social repression as to her own insatiable desires, as she winds up blamed for the troubles that others have brought on themselves through their own sexual hypocrisy.



From Senses of Cinema:

The film wasn't received in Germany with much sympathy, which puzzled Brooks. In her memoir, Lulu in Hollywood, published near the end of her life in 1985, she pondered:


'Berlin had rejected its reality when we made Pandora's Box and sex was the business of the town. At the Eden Hotel, where I lived in Berlin, the café bar was lined with the higher-priced trollops. The economy girls walked the streets outside. On the corner stood the girls in boots, advertising flagellation. Actors' agents pimped for the ladies in luxury apartments in the Bavarian Quarter. Race-track touts at the Hoppegarten arranged orgies for groups of sportsmen. The nightclub Eldorado displayed an enticing line of homosexuals dressed as women. At the Maly, there was a choice of feminine or collar-and-tie lesbians. Collective lust roared unashamed at the theater. In the revue Chocolate Kiddies, when Josephine Baker appeared naked except for a girdle of bananas, it was precisely as Lulu's stage entrance was described by Wedekind: “They rage there as in a menagerie when the meat appears at the cage.'

Excerpt from Fellini: A Life, PART 3

On La Dolce Vita:

“The ‘orgy,’ as filmed, is more symbolic than real. Nadia, during her striptease, is never entirely uncovered, and whatever sexual acts might be transpiring are left largely to the viewers’ imaginations. However, Fellini, ever the stickler for verismilitude, decided he needed some expert advice.

‘Believing that Pasolini [who had been brought in to help with the dialogue for Cabiria] was familiar with orgies,’ he told Giovanni Grazzini, ‘I invited him to dinner, but Pier Paolo told me he didn’t like middle-class orgies and knew nothing about them. He was sorry, he said, but he had never participated in any, and didn’t know anyone who had. So I started the sequence with no idea in my head, got the actors arranged, and suggested we invent some debauchery. I had a beautiful Dutch assistant who kept her eyes on me in anticipation of seeing me produce who knew what crazy scenes of turpitude. After two hours I heard her saying to another disappointed assistant, ‘He wants to play the pig, but doesn’t know how.’”
--From Fellini: A Life by Hollis Alpert

Video and commentary for "The Ship Song" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

Cocteau Twins - "Cico Bluff"