Fascination... The Life of Henry Miller

Yesterday I posted the Kerouac piece from the Steve Allen show, but during the same conversation I had about that segment, I mentioned a documentary I had seen several months ago that really fascinated me featuring Henry Miller. I've included the trailer and a brief synopsis of the film below. After the paragraph on the documentary, I included the bathroom monologues, as they were my favourite scenes of the picture. Whether one thinks he was a talented iconoclastic fiction writer or an indecent literary pornographer, you cannot deny his ability as a storyteller in his novels or in his oral narratives documented in "...Asleep & Awake".

See for yourself...



"Henry Miller Asleep & Awake" is a voyage of ideas about life, writing, sex, spirituality, nightmares, and New York that captures the warmth, vigor and high animal spirits of an American artist. Henry Miller guides us through his bathroom, covered with photos and drawings collected by the author. He points out the highlights of both this gallery and his life in this documentary by Tom Schiller.

To learn more or download, visit http://www2.indiepix.net/film/3121

Fascination.... Kerouac on The Steve Allen Show

So I was talking to someone recently about Jack Kerouac and was asked if I'd ever seen his appearance on the old Steve Allen Show. I said "no, but I'll goggle it". "Do that... it's amazing", I'm told. Well, through the wonder of the marvel that is the internet and myspace user rickagee, here it is... Kerouac on The Steve Allen Show from 1959.


via videosift.com

Phil, thanks for the recommendation! I'm glad to have seen this.

Frustration... S.O.S. : Need Blog Inspiration!

This is another attempt to get back into some routine of regularly blogging. I don't know why this is important to me -it just is. I think some of the things I had hoped for with this blog haven't really been achieved, so I'll forge on with this a bit more. Honestly, my greatest thrills with this blog would be to somehow correspond a bit more with anyone out there locally or globally with some similar interests. Teach me something new, make band recommendations to me, film recommendations, books, anything! I'd love to hear from anyone around the globe that stumbles onto this page... say "Hello", "Madainn mhath", "Haileo", "Bonjour", "Guten tag", "God dag", "Ciao", "Shalom", "Ola", "Marhaba", "Zdravstvuite", "Konnichi wa"! I would love to hear from you!

Hit me with questions, suggestions, anything, etc... I'll keep this going, update, and see where it goes!

Oh, a video before I go... Oasis "All Around the World"




Cheers everyone!

Frustration... Only Time for a Quick Post!

Lots to do this weekend, so my new initiative to post more could be in jeopardy, but I'm going to try to make little posts at least. I just want to try harder to always have something up on my page.

Tonight I offer up a video for an old favourite... "Something Changed" by Pulp



That's all I've got for tonight. To anyone that actually reads this page have a good weekend!

Be well.

Fascination... The Trailer for The Watchmen Movie

I've been on the fence for sometime now about whether The Watchmen series could be turned into a film that would do it any kind of justice.

This trailer for Zach Synder's upcoming film version is not a bad start!

This is going to be the only thing I'm going to be thinking about all night now. Hell, I've watched the trailer four times this evening!

Fascination & a lot of Anticipation... New Album from The Cure On Its Way!

Tonight I've been busy previewing all the available tracks that have surfaced so far from the upcoming Cure album, and I have to say I am very, very excited for this release! The Cure are the very first band I ever saw in concert when I was 13 years old, and 20 years later I am still very much a fan. I've had the pleasure of seeing them live on three different occasions on three different tours and they're still my favourite band to see live. They play forever during a show, and I've rarely not heard songs I wanted to hear -which considering how much material they have is just amazing!

With all the new bands out all the time, I sometimes forget the eternal artists that make up my music collection. The Cure are a solid section of the foundation of my own musical appreciation and sensibilities though, so there's no way my heart ever strays too far from them.

This is a video for one of the new singles with a title I completely resemble...

"Sleep When I'm Dead"



And in no particular order some videos of some of my favourite Cure songs live:

"A Strange Day" from Orange, France and the video of the same title, Orange, a video I obsessively watched over and over when I was a kid. The guitar solo after the second verse still makes me giddy!



"Charlotte Sometimes" - also from that 1984 show in Orange, France



"A Night Like This" Live 2005



"Catch" Live at the Santa Barbara Bowl May 29, 2008



"A Letter to Elise" from their MTV Unplugged performance!



"Pictures of You" from an encore during a 1990 show in Leipzig, Germany.

Appreciation... Sad Songs

Here's some classics I'd have to include on my life's soundtrack to accompany those not so good moments. Strangely though, I don't always find sad songs to be depressing. There's also something reaffirming in a lot of these tracks. Sadness is key to appreciating happiness, right? So I guess if you can see sadness as just part of the picture, you hold some sway over it. The problem is when sadness becomes the picture, all of the picture, the only picture you see... then you need to start looking for answers, you need to start looking for help.

Badly Drawn Boy - "Promises" This one killed to listen to there for a time for obvious reasons.



Lloyd Cole - "No Blue Skies" A classic... thrown this one on a number of mix tapes over the years.



David Gray - "This Year's Love" I think this song is particularly sad to me because it makes me dwell on love, the lack of love,or the hope for love in association with time. It leaves me with this sense of how easily we attach hope to a mere calendar change, "this year is going to be different... find love, find happiness, etc.", and how we hope for time in the sense of things that will carry on in our lives. It's tremendously hard to live one's life without the sense of something being constant, some positive that is eternal.



The Verve - "The Drugs Don't Work" From that title it's easy to think of this song in the sense of recreational drugs not doing the trick just when one needs them, but I see it in the sense of medication, vital medication not working for someone who's life depends on it.



Damien Rice - "Blower's Daughter" I went with a video here that didn't include clips from the movie, Closer, because that a film I would just as soon put out of my mind these days.



Damien Rice - "Cannonball" If ever you're in need of an an artist who excels in writing songs of pain and such severe sorrow, Damien Rice is your guy.



Travis - "Humpty Dumpty Love Song" This song just really cuts to the core of me. Who hasn't felt that broken and beyond repair in life at some point in their lives?



Trash Can Sinatras - "Got Carried Away" This song has been like a theme song to me at times in my life. My heart's been guilty of such action on too many occasions.



The Divine Comedy - "Commuter Love" ...not exactly a video, but I love this song, so this will have to do. I know too well about daydreams of a proper stranger, love unrequited and forever undisclosed.



The Smiths - "Asleep" A sad classic... years of junior high nights were spent crying into my pillow to this one, or was that last Saturday night? No, seriously... The Smiths still strike a number of chords in me today, but like so many of their fans, I really needed them when I was younger. All the same though, I am also very thankful for them now. I'm closing this post with this track.

Frustration... Oh, Life!

I try to keep this blog impersonal, but good grief am I cursed!

A statement I shall now back up with an example:

I bought my Saturn off a friend who I make payments to every month. He used to do the maintenance on both the Saturn I used to drive and the Saturn my ex-wife still drives. A Saturn she still takes to my friend for oil changes and general maintenance. She had one such appointment scheduled today at 5PM, which is about the same time I had also planned to meet my friend to drop off my second to last payment (woohoo!). Knowing how I fair better when I don't see the ex, my buddy kindly volunteered to stop by my work on his lunch break this afternoon to get the cheque and thus spare me an chance of seeing her. Crisis averted!

But... as fate would have it, Saturn moved its service center to a new location down the Carlisle Pike in May, and apparently my ex did not know this. So where does she go when she's in dire need of directions? She comes to see me at work. All that effort this morning on my friend's part to spare me an encounter... worthless.

Such is my life... the encounter didn't harm me. I just had to laugh a bit about my own twisted luck and best laid plans and such. It's oddly appropriate in a way though that I saw her now because this past weekend marked the one year anniversary of her leaving me and filing for divorce. I know for me it's been a rough year. I didn't meet someone right away the way she did, and unlike her, I am still living on my own. I wouldn't wish to deny her a moment of what she has now with her new guy, but I'm just anxious sometimes to find my own place again with someone. I think though for now I just need to be more comfortable with being alone, and I'll be fine.

Well, for old time sake... I don't wish to do this again, but these were some of my songs for all that which has come and gone. A really sad one that I barely play anymore because it summed us up too well, and the second song is probably more reflective of my own realisations I made as the end drew near.

Death Cab for Cutie - "Brothers on a Hotel Bed" (a live studio version)



Belle & Sebastian - "Waking Up To Us" (Live on Later With Jools Holland, from November 30, 2001)




And that's all I've got for tonight. At least I'm posting... as I said I've avoided getting into personal stuff with this blog, but maybe I'll reconsider that a bit. Who knows?

Appreciation... The Good Things

I had the misfortune of having most expensive bad date of my entire life this past weekend, but fortunately I got to see an amazingly talented and very fun bunch of guys play. The guys are Ryan Cox, John Morales, and Steven Christopher, their band is called The Good Things and they're from Detroit, MI. Never thought I'd find anything with them on YouTube, but hey I guess every thing's on YouTube, so here they are! I gotta say when they did this track at the show the drum solo was the coolest damn thing I've experienced at a show in a long time!



This band was just so great! I do wish the venue had been a place where you could've gotten up and really danced, but I'm just glad to have seen them. The $3.00 I spent on their EP was easily the best money spent that night.

Wish the actual "date" part of my evening had gone better, but that tale of utter loserdom I'll reserve for myself. Thanks to a few Stellas and The Good Things, I'm going to try and remember that I at least had a good time. If you know this band's playing anytime, anywhere in your area, check out their show! These guys even played the second song of their set a second time because some folks that showed up late missed out. How many bands would ever do that?

Distraction... Video Alphabet "R"

I've done this blog a serious disservice not keeping up with regular posts lately, but I'm going to try harder here in this month of July. June was off to a fine start, but I really stumbled there towards the end of the month.

But enough about that... onto the good stuff!

R is for R.E.M. - "I Believe"



Wow! I am so happy to have found this on YouTube! Seriously, R.E.M.'s Tourfilm is one of my all time favourite concert recordings, but I haven't seen it since watching it years ago on a friend's VHS tape. It's been on DVD for a few years now, so I think this is a disc I need to finally buy.

One more from Tourfilm... my favourite R.E.M. song, and like "I Believe" this song is also from the album Life's Rich Pageant, "Fall On Me".



R is for Radio 4 - "Dance to the Underground"



NYC had quite a scene of bands crop up there around 2000 or so, and Radio 4 is still going strong. I could spent several posts just covering bands from NYC... in fact, that might not be a bad idea for after I hit "Z".

R is for Radiohead - "Idioteque"



Radiohead is a band I was absolutely loved years ago, but my attention wane after Kid A. Lately though I find I'm thinking about them more and more, and I had an overwhelming desire to hear this track for some reason a few days ago hence the inclusion of the video here. My favourite Radiohead album though is The Bends, so I'm including another video from that phenomenal album.

"Fake Plastic Trees"



R is for Ride - "Twisterella"



I had such a hard time picking a Ride song because there's so many great tracks to choose from, but as I see this as being such a summer song, I had to go with it! What a great pop song!

R is for Rogue Wave - "Eyes"



My last choice tonight... I've got to work tomorrow morning or I'd say more!


Again, I am really going to try hard to post more this week. I've been wasting a lot of my time lately and just generally feeling down, but I'm trying to bounce back. So it will be onto "S"... lots of great bands there!

Appreciation... The World of Linnen

Fellow comic book fanatic, 80s synth-pop music lover, rookie co-worker, and all around nice guy, Brian Linnen, maintains a swell page and has a 30 day blog challenge on to post everyday and keep it interesting.

Visit his page from the links on my site!

Distraction & Frustration... No "Q" Bands in My Collection?!?

I've got nothing, so I give you this...

Question Mark???



Onto "R" and finishing this alphabet business soon! Sorry for the lag in posts, I've been incredibly social lately, which is hell for blogging.

Stay tuned!

Fascination & Jubilation... A Complete Version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis has been found!

Metropolis, the most important silent film in German history, can from this day on be considered to have been recovered! It was announced today that film archivists at the Museo del Cine Pablo C. Ducros Hicken in Buenos Aires have just recently discovered the complete 16mm negatives of Fritz Lang's 1927 film! The most complete restored version audiences have been able to see of this film has been the 2001 restoration which Kino Video released on DVD. This effort still did not contain nearly 25% of the film, despite the addition of scenes that were found and restored in Europe from the film version from Film museum Munich, the additional materials of the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv (Federal Archive / Filmarchive), Berlin, and partners of the Deutscher Kinematheksverbund (Association of German Film Archives).

ZEITmagazin gives this story of how the film managed to survive.

"Adolfo Z. Wilson, a man from Buenos Aires and head of the Terra film distribution company, arranged for a copy of the long version of “Metropolis” to be sent to Argentina in 1928 to show it in cinemas there. Shortly afterwards a film critic called Manuel Peña Rodríguez came into possession of the reels and added them to his private collection. In the 1960s Peña Rodríguez sold the film reels to Argentina’s National Art Fund – clearly nobody had yet realised the value of the reels. A copy of these reels passed into the collection of the Museo del Cine (Cinema Museum) in Buenos Aires in 1992, the curatorship of which was taken over by Paula Félix-Didier in January this year. Her ex-husband, director of the film department of the Museum of Latin American Art, first entertained the decisive suspicion: He had heard from the manager of a cinema club, who years before had been surprised by how long a screening of this film had taken. Together, Paula Félix-Didier and her ex-husband took a look at the film in her archive – and discovered the missing scenes."



This is truly great news! I will certainly be anxiously awaiting a re-release now from Kino, who were already in the planning stages of a Blu-Ray edition sometime in 2009. I can only imagine that release will be slated now to carry the restoration version of this new complete negative, and finally allow modern audiences to see this film only as German audiences were able to enjoy it over 80 years ago!