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Herman Eberitzsch Jr. III in the early 70s The medium of recorded music has reached a pivotal age in its maturation. The origins of recording technology reach back well over a century (the earliest phonograph recordings date to the late 1800s), and the most longstanding traditions of American music– blues, folk, rock– now penetrate the [Read More] There has been a perceivable spike in African music reissues over the last few years with scores of titles hitting the market from funk, jazz, soul, along with genres as rare as afro-psych being found amongst the swarm. Some grumbling about this has emerged from many corners of the globe as the issue of over-saturation [Read More] Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, a devotedly aestheticist adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel, opened to surprisingly mixed reviews (thankfully more positive than negative), the worse of which seemed to agree on three points: 1) the film is a visual tour-de-force; 2) the film/plot may come across as “clunky,” “silly,” “flawed,” “lugubrious,” and “intellectually undernourished”; and 3) Shutter Island is nowhere near Scorsese’s best work, hardly a “masterpiece.” Much of the fussiness with Shutter Island arises from a perception that Scorsese’s considerable erudition and verve are wasted upon a film whose story seems to have no overt purpose or greater resonance beyond its mere sensationalism. [Read More] Folk troubadour and enfant terrible, Eduardo Mateo was a paradoxical figure in the Uruguayan rock scene of the 1970′s. At a time when Uruguay was undergoing deep political strife due to the uprooting of a democratic government by a dictator- he chose to make folk music that was utterly personal, fragile, brimming with mysticism. Folk music in the 60′s and how it dialogued with politics has fostered the perception within the public that folk should be political – or at least have political trappings- in the obvious outward sense of the term. Eduardo Mateo shatters such limiting [Read More] Better known for his novels, Roberto Bolaño shirked from the nomen of NOVELIST. . . until a hungry first child forced him to think about making some money–ergo the novels. But it seems that even then he liked to think of his business as POETRY (himself, a detective of poetry)–with or without much white space on the page. [Read More] Today’s zeitgeist: Public. It new (sort of). It is an ongoing discourse amongst artists, curators, theorists and cultural producers (leading to symposiums, salons, conferences and publications); as well as an evolving artistic practice which has given form to collective groups like Fallen Fruit, Machine Projects, Islands of LA (just in LA), who explicitly or not align themselves as producers of Public work; and it is the focus of several sexy graduate programs (just in the Southern California region: USC Masters in Public Art Studies, Otis Public Practice, UCSD Public Culture [Read More] Another Dispatch from Miami: Manno [Read More] The role of the music producer is analogous to that of the film director; he oversees the many elements that enter into a composition and attempts to conjure from the players involved whatever is necessary to render an artistic work of compelling depth and penetrative vision. [Read More] The best story in Nam Le’s eponymous collection The Boat is a harrowing “40 pages of entirely unpostmodern realism about boat people suffering as they try to escape the new Communist state.” The experience of boat people is not exclusively Vietnamese. There are the boat people of Cuba, of Northern Africa; of Eastern Europe; of Indonesia [Read More] Touted as the most controversial film since The Birth of a Nation, The Cry of Jazz–a 1959 film essay on the spiritual status of blacks in America read through the structure of jazz music–was framed as a response to the consequences of racial division and oppression made clear in D.W. Griffith’s Klan-centered portrayal of post-bellum [Read More] |
 How Does The Net Affect our Brains? Nicholas Carr and A Glimpse into the DebateIn 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an influential essay in the Atlantic titled “ Is Google Making us Stupid” ? Since that essay’s publication the use of the Internet and its effect on our brains has become a highly divisive topic which has produced a large spat of journalistic and academic articles in its wake. [Read More]  Sanullim: Mountain Echo PsychSanullim is something of an anomaly in rock history. At a time when vintage rock was dying and new cultural tropes were diversifying the palette of pop music, Sanullim appeared on the margin in a country whose pop music landscape, heavily censored by the authoritarian bureaus of Park Chung-Hee, mainly consisted of traditional trot ballads and dance-pop music. Sanullim’s heavy bass lines, thunderous drums, chromatic fuzz guitar-work, and psych-image lyrics were a revival shock in a system which had gone dormant since the early 60s scene singlehandedly engendered by Korean rock godfather Shin Jung-Hyeon. [Read More]  We are Freak (Rap)By Adri Wong The abstraction of hiphop – sonically & visually – is a progression other commentators have discussed in relation to instrumental/beats artists like Flying Lotus and the unparalleled Dilla. But what of the lyrical persona in the abstract world? Which is to say, in this constantly expanding kaleidoscope universe, what happens to the MC? [Read More]  ‘The Housemaid’ – A Comparison of Two Korean FilmsIf Martin Scorsese had stopped making films after the 90s, he’d still prove an invaluable part of cinema history on the basis of his current film preservation efforts. Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, which works to “help developing countries preserve their cinematic treasures,” has gone a long way in preserving and promoting little seen, almost lost films from a wide range of countries. [Read More]  Film Review: The Secret in their Eyes (El Secreto de sus Ojos) dir. by Juan Jose CampanellaThe Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last year was bestowed onto an Argentine mystery romance; a film that intermixes the pathos of unspoken love and the torture chamber of memory, and parallels these alongside the shadowy contours of law and corrupt politics. As the film frames all these disparate elements within a novelist’s remembrance of a rape and murder investigation that he was involved in as a young attorney in the court halls of Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, it continuously draws analogies to the mercenary political machinations of a dictatorial Argentina. This brilliantly scripted and acted film was written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a director who has now catapulted himself onto the international film scene with this minor masterpiece. [Read More]    |
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