In 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. Carr’s thesis states that Google, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and the structure of the Internet in general engenders “foggy thinking”, and “attention deficit disorder like syndromes in the mind”, a poverty of deep critical engagement with ideas and texts, and a general feeling of exhausted cognitive function. Carr famously quipped what the use of of the Internet had done to his reading habits: “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words, now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”
[Read More]
1977 was the year the Sex Pistols released their first and only studio album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols”, and the same year The Clash released their self-titled debut (just a year after The Ramones had released their own self-titled debut). 1977 was also the year Elvis Presley died, when disco was at its peak, and hip hop was brewing out of the percussive riddim vat of soul, funk, disco, and dub breaks. Meanwhile, across the Pacific in South Korea, three Seoul-based brothers, still heavily under the influence of late 60s psych rock, released their first album as Sanullim (산울림, translated as “Mountain Echo”). Sanullim 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]
He rhymes as weird as I feel
- Mos Def, on MF DOOM
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?
Hints to an answer can be found in Mos Def’s awed (stoned?) appraisal of MF DOOM. In [this video], Mos big-ups the “abstract … that kind of wild energy” in Doom’s lyricism: “that kind of raw shit.” Like Mos, I admire the psychedelic-painterly abandon with which DOOM approaches his craft (“Please read the signs: no feedin the baboons / Seein as how they got ya back bleeding from the stab wounds…”), though I am also partial to the mouthfeel of his near-gibberish wordplay (“Good googly moogly, see that loogie? / Yeah, but keep it on the D.L. Hughley…”). These flashes of violence and garble interspersed into rhyme make me double-take the way I do when I’m conversing with a stranger on the street and only five minutes in realize she’s schizophrenic. Lately, I’ve been double-taking a lot, as hiphop continues what appears to be an accelerating embrace of the freakish.
[Read More]
If 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. Since 2007, the World Cinema Foundation has been involved in the restoration of a select handful of films for special screening at the Cannes International Film Festival. The 2008 edition of the series saw the restoration of Kim Ki-young‘s The Housemaid (하녀/Hanyeo, 1960), a landmark in Korean cinema. The Korean Film Archive, which was largely responsible for initiating and completing the restoration of The Housemaid, has gone ahead and restored 4 other films by Kim Ki-young in a special DVD boxset, the Kim Ki-Young Collection.
Kim’s comeback as a major auteur of world cinema began in earnest in 1996 when the Tokyo International Film Festival screened 5 of his films for the first time in many years. Retrospectives at the Busan International Film Festival in 1997 and at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1998 followed suit. When Berlin invited Kim to attend the retrospective, the director was already utilizing his newfound fame to prepare for a new film which would serve as the culmination of a career criminally under-appreciated for decades. Sadly that film never materialized, since Kim and his wife Kim Yu-bong (his long-standing supporter and producer of almost all of his films) died in a fire at their home before they could ever board the plane to Berlin. Fortunately for the world, Kim’s legacy lives on in the efforts of joint ventures like the World Cinema Foundation and the Korean Film Archive.
[Read More]
“Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears”
– Heraclitus
The 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. The film sits somewhere between the fragmented meta-cinema of Almodovar and the dread inducing shadow pulses of early Polanski, with a structure premised on a Beethoven sonata . Campanella, working from a taut politically motivated novel penned by Eduardo Sacheri, along with the support of three highly nuanced performances from his lead actors Soledad Villamil (Irene), Ricardo Darin (Benjamin) and Guillermo Francella (Sandoval), has crafted a finely tuned and wholly engrossing layered work of film-art.
[Read More]
While attending the 11th Annual Jeonju International Film Festival (which concluded this past Friday, on May 7th), I came into late contact with the cinema of Portuguese director Pedro Costa. Costa’s name has been bandied about by diligent, discerning cineastes since the beginning of the decade as the arrival of a visionary filmmaker whose cinema demands the strictest attention to its atomic motions and a similar participation in its latent unfolding. The recent 4-disc box set release by Criterion of Costa’s three major works, Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and Colossal Youth (2006), was enough to solidify Costa’s growing status as a master filmmaker in the international scene. Costa’s work has been often described as “severe and…uncompromisingly difficult,” and though I expected the worst, I came away from his films overwhelmed with a heightened sense of the mythos that lies at the heart of the actual and the real — the transcendent reality which is already contained in the concrete. The cinema of Pedro Costa is indeed “colossal,” and though its progression has been a labor of glacial speed, its achievements are as far reaching as the giant steps of those who’ve practiced the unacknowledged art of vigilant forbearance.
[Read More]
Said a speaker at a recent conference I attended: “Every nation has within it its own Global South.” Retorted my friend, “that misses the meaning of the word global.” Au contraire, friend of mine! Alter-globalization, with its many polycentric manifestations (Global Civil Society; the World Social Forum; the Third World; la Red; TSMo‘s; the Diaspora; the Developing World; the Majority World; the South) has been able to realize within and across national borders “un mundo donde caben muchos mundos” (if you’ll permit me the zapatismo). And alongside this political blossoming has sprung an international artists’ movement of analogous tone, variety, and timbre. I’ll nick a nomer for the length of this post, and refer to that musical-aesthetic movement as “World Town“.
[Read More]
But certainly for the present age, which refers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence,. . . illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. – Feurbach (via Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle)
I don’t know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower. — Banksy
Yes, Banksy has once again invoked the gawking hearts of the Internet–all sorts of media sources — and maybe even real people. The mischievous and still publicly anonymous vandal, known for his slyly playful and politically-minded graffiti (like painting on the West Bank barrier), learned an important lesson from his many years of painting on private property: art gathers as much meaning from its context as its content. It might not seem like much of a radical thought, but by taking environmental context seriously Banksy has been able to make art more of an event than a cultural artifact. Some of Banksy’s most memorable performance stunts find him placing things in unlikely places: his own work among the masters or inside a Paris Hilton album, a painted elephant in the middle of his debut gallery opening or a Guantanamo Bay prisoner doll near a Disneyland ride. Banksy’s new project, the supposed documentary on street art Exit Through the Gift Shop, plays all these tricks and more.
[Read More]
Listening to Ariel Pink is like being placed inside a jukebox time machine filled with simulated pop songs from the past. His music exists somewhere between the waking and dreaming state – the equivalent of a drifting delirium while perched at a razor’s edge of lucidity. They are the half remembered songs from your adolescence, it could be Hall and Oates “I Can’t Go For That” or Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon”, or any song that might have seemed hapless and sentimental in all the wrong ways at the time; but which now you look back upon with a fond sympathy. There is a translucent nostalgia that seeps in through his music, a product of the emotions that could only have been borne out of the meridian of your life. [Read More]
I picked up a CD of Moment of Truth, the fifth full-length effort of NY duo Gang Starr, back in 1998. I was still a young hiphop fiend excited to sink my teeth into whatever beats and rhymes came my way. But even my immersion in Los Angeles during the apex of the G-Funk era and a swelling underground scene championing freestyle ciphers and heady rhymes hardly prepared me for Gang Starr. While it seemed as if both poles of Los Angeles hiphop were hinged on exaggeration, an aggressive hyperrealism on one side countered by boundless formal play on the other extreme, Gang Starr brought the mind’s eye to the street level. The name says it all; the people and the cosmos linked together.
In Moment’s self-titled song, Guru raps: Styles, smooth but rugged — you can’t push or shove it/ You dig it and you dug it cause like money you love it/ The king of monotone, with my own throne/ Righteously violent prone my words bring winds like cyclones. It was subliminal grime. Royal thinking and commercial desire merged together. Even the instrumental production propped up that balance. Guru’s partner and producer, DJ Premier, flipped horn samples from dusty jazz and funk crates (Donald Byrd to James Brown) over coarse boom bap percussion while Guru matched the tension holding those chest-rattling beats with both effortless delivery and strong minded lyricism. He was always in deep concentration, hiphop’s most memorable incarnation of the street philosopher.
Guru, known from birth as Keith Elam and in his later years as Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal, died Monday. He had been suffering from multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood, and was in a coma since a heart attack in mid-February. He was 47 years old.
[Read More]
|
Featured Articles
How Does The Net Affect our Brains? Nicholas Carr and A Glimpse into the Debate
By Oscar Paul Medina
In 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 Psych
By Jose-Luis Moctezuma
Sanullim 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 Films
By Jose-Luis Moctezuma
If 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 Campanella
By Oscar Paul Medina
The 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]
|
Popular Articles