March 18, 2012
Sergio Leone [lee-oh-nee] (1929 – 1989) was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter most associated with the ‘Spaghetti Western’ genre. Leone’s film-making style includes juxtaposing extreme close-up shots with lengthy long shots. His movies include ‘The Last Days of Pompeii,’ ‘The Colossus of Rhodes,’ the Dollars Trilogy (‘A Fistful of Dollars,’ ‘For a Few Dollars More,’ and ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’), Once ‘Upon a Time in the West,’ ‘Duck, You Sucker!’, and ‘Once Upon a Time in America.’
Born in Rome, Leone was the son of the cinema pioneer Vincenzo Leone (known as director Roberto Roberti) and the silent film actress Edvige Valcarenghi (Bice Waleran). During his schooldays, Leone was a classmate of his later musical collaborator Ennio Morricone for a time. After watching his father work on film sets, Leone began his own career in the film industry at the age of 18 after dropping out of law studies at the university.
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March 17, 2012
Okayplayer is an online hip-hop and alternative music website and community. The group was co-founded by The Roots’ drummer Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson as a loose musical collective in 1987, and evolved into an online community in 1999. In 2004, Questlove launched Okayplayer Records as a spin-off of the community, in partnership with Decon. The community is made up of recording artists (who keep their official internet homes there) and message board users. Artists and staff, as well as those who post to the site’s message board, call themselves ‘okayplayers’ or ‘OKPs.’
Okayplayer has been identified as an online community that allows people to bypass traditional media. An example of such a collaboration fostered by the site is the Foreign Exchange project, with Little Brother’s vocalist Phonte Coleman and Dutch producer named Nicolay meeting on Okayplayer, and making an album together by sending tracks and verses back and forth over the Internet. The album, ‘Connected,’ was released before the pair had met in real life. Okayplayer organize regular tours and an annual ‘Roots Picnic’ all day event. Okayplayer artists include: The Roots, Mos Def, Lupe Fiasco, Common, Erykah Badu, India.Arie, and RJD2.
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March 16, 2012
‘The Fusilli Jerry‘ is the 107th episode of the sitcom ‘Seinfeld.’
This was the 21st episode of the sixth season. It aired in 1995. Working titles for this episode were ‘The Move’, ‘The Proctologist,’ and ‘The Assman.’
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March 16, 2012
‘Pass the Dutchie‘ was a song recorded by the British group Musical Youth from their 1982 album ‘The Youth of Today.’ It was a major hit, holding the number one position on the UK singles charts for three weeks in 1982 and selling 5 million copies worldwide. The song was a cover version of the song ‘Pass the Kouchie’ by The Mighty Diamonds, which deals with the recreational use of cannabis, ‘kouchie’ being slang for a cannabis pipe.
For the cover version, the song’s title was bowdlerized to ‘Pass the Dutchie,’ and all obvious drug references were removed from the lyrics; e. g., when the original croons ‘How does it feel when you got no herb?,’ the cover version refers to ‘food’ instead. ‘Dutchie’ is used as a slang term to refer to a food cooking pot such as a Dutch oven in Jamaica and the Caribbean. It has since become a drug reference in itself, denoting a blunt stuffed with marijuana and rolled in a wrapper from a Dutch Masters cigar.
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March 16, 2012
The Black List is a survey published every year on the second Friday of December since 2004. The survey includes the top screenplays that went unproduced.
The website claims that it is not necessarily ‘the best,’ but rather ‘the most liked,’ since it is voted on by studio and production company executives. Some of the screenplays are then selected off of the Blacklist to be put into production such as ‘The Social Network’ and ‘Cedar Rapids.’
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March 16, 2012
Zigaboo Modeliste (b. 1948) is an American drummer best known as a founding member of the funk group The Meters. Considered to be one of the most innovative, and highly acclaimed drummers ever to hail from New Orleans. Modeliste is a pioneer of second-line funk. He remains a strong influence for drummers and his syncopated style is the source of a great many hip-hop and drum and bass samplers.
He also cofounded The Wild Tchoupitoulas and has worked extensively with other musicians, notably Keith Richards, Robert Palmer, and Dr. John. Zigaboo released his first solo CD in 2000 – ‘Zigaboo.com.’ In 2011, he released his fourth solo album entitled ‘New Life.’ This record has elements of rock, funk and blues and features such artists as arranger Wardell Quezerque and Trumpeter Mic Gillet of Tower of Power fame. He resides in Oakland, California and continues to teach, release records, as well as manage his publishing Company Jomod Music and record label JZM records.
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March 14, 2012
The Upper Class Twit of the Year is a classic comedy sketch that was seen on the TV show ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus,’ and also in a modified format as the finale of the movie ‘And Now For Something Completely Different.’ It is notable for its savage satire on dim-witted members of the English upper class. The sketch features horse race style commentary by John Cleese about an obstacle-course race among five stereotypical, upper-class twits (imbeciles), to determine the 127th Annual Upper-Class Twit of the Year.
The obstacles include: Kicking The Beggar (the Twits must approach a beggar with a tray and kick him until he falls over); Reversing Into The Old Lady (the Twits must get into their sports cars and reverse them into a cardboard cut-out of an old lady, then speed off; into Waking The Neighbor (the Twits must drive their cars forward and then try to wake up a neighbor (who is attempting to get some sleep) by slamming their doors, tooting their horns, etc. Finally, the Twits approach a table with five revolvers on it. The winner is the first Twit to shoot himself. The three coffins of the winning Twits are placed on the medal rostrum and medals are draped around them. Cleese ends his commentary by remarking that ‘there’ll certainly be some car door slamming in the streets of Kensington tonight.’
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March 14, 2012
And Now for Something Completely Different is a film spin-off from the television comedy series ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ featuring favorite sketches from the first two seasons. The title was used as a catchphrase in the television show. The film, released in 1971, consists of 90 minutes of the best sketches seen in the first two series of the television show. The sketches were remade on film without an audience, and were intended for an American audience which had not yet seen the series. The announcer (John Cleese) uses the phrase ‘and now for something completely different’ several times during the film, in situations such as being roasted on a spit and lying on top of the desk in a small, pink bikini.
This was the Pythons’ first feature film, of sketches re-shot on an extremely low budget (and often slightly edited) for cinema release. Some famous sketches included are: the ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch, ‘The Lumberjack Song,’ ‘Upperclass Twits,’ ‘Hell’s Grannies,’ and the ‘Nudge Nudge’ sketch. Financed by Playboy’s UK executive Victor Lownes, it was intended as a way of breaking Monty Python in America, and although it was ultimately unsuccessful in this, the film did good business in the UK. The group did not consider the film a success, but it enjoys a cult following today.
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March 12, 2012
In literature, the competent man is a stock character who can do anything perfectly, or at least exhibits a very wide range of abilities and knowledge, making him a form of polymath. While not the first to use such a character type, the heroes (and heroines) of Robert A. Heinlein’s fiction are generally competent men/women (with Jubal Harshaw being a prime example), and one of Heinlein’s characters Lazarus Long gives a good summary of requirements: ‘A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.’
The competent man, more often than not, is written without explaining how he achieved his wide range of skills and abilities, especially as true expertise typically suggests practical experience instead of learning through books or formalized education alone. While not implausible with older or unusually long lived characters, when such characters are young it is often not adequately explained as to how they acquired so many skills at an early age. It would be easy for a reader to form the impression that the competent man is just basically a superior sort of human being. Many non-superpowered comic book characters are written as hyper-competent characters due to the perception that they would simply be considered underpowered otherwise.
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March 11, 2012
Pre-Millennium Tension is the third album from Tricky, released in 1996. Following the unexpected success of ‘Maxinquaye,’ Tricky made a much darker, more paranoid sonic landscape for this release, resulting in a more abrasive, and far less accessible album. It features longtime collaborator Martina Topley-Bird, and former Mama’s Boy’s guitarist Pat McManus. The album was recorded at Grove Studios in Jamaica, possibly explaining the heavy Rastafarian influence. Parts were also recorded at Platinum Islands Studio, New York.
Tricky said in an interview with ‘Raygun’ that he wanted to make an ‘out-an-out punk record’ and that ‘I thought it was going be heavier. I thought it was just going to be an out-an-out punk record. But you end up straying. What I wanted to do was a total fast album. Some of the tracks are fast and hard, but they didn’t come out like that.’ He also said that he hated being stuck with the trip-hop tag: ‘That’s why I did ‘Nearly God’, and that’s why I did ‘Pre-Millennium Tension.’ You can’t see them as trip-hop albums. So I just keep running away from it. But the farther you run, it’s still there. They’ll find you.’
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March 11, 2012
Modulations is a multi-media exploration into the history of electronic music, consisting of a documentary film, its soundtrack album, and a book. The project was directed by Iara Lee, the maker of the documentary film ‘Synthetic Pleasures’ (which explored the implications of virtual reality, biotechnology, plastic surgery, and mood-altering drugs). People interviewed in the film include Robert Moog, DJ Funk, and Frankie Knuckles.
The book was edited by Peter Shapiro and features: Rob Young on the pioneers of electronic music, Simon Reynolds on krautrock, Peter Shapiro on disco & post-punk, Kodwo Eshun on house, David Toop on hip hop, Mike Rubin on techno, Chris Sharp on jungle, Tony Marcus on ambient, Kurt Reighley on downtempo, and Michael Berk on the technology of electronic music. Also interviewed is industrial music founder Genesis P-Orridge.
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March 8, 2012
Dimensions of Dialogue (Czech: ‘Možnosti dialogu’) is a 1982 Czechoslovak animated short film directed by Jan Švankmajer. It is 14 minute long and created with stop motion. The animation is divided into three sections:
‘Exhaustive discussion’ shows Arcimboldo-like heads gradually reducing each other to bland copies; ‘Passionate discourse’ shows a clay man and woman who dissolve into one another sexually, then quarrel and reduce themselves to a frenzied, boiling pulp; and ‘Factual conversation’ consists of two elderly clay heads who extrude various objects on their tongues (toothbrush and toothpaste; shoe and shoelaces, etc.) and intertwine them in various combinations.
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