Christian Poveda- La Vida Loca (2008)- DVD Rip (XviD)

I haven't had a chance to view this documentary yet, but with a backstory that this film carries, I thought posting it would be a good idea. It's a tragedy when someone has to die for a cause or when exposing truth, and it seems like El Salvador is one of those countries where shining a light on the underbelly of society will more than likely get you a bullet in the head. This is what tragically happened to documentarian Christian Poveda after finishing this film. The gangs which were the subject of this documentary chose to end his life, and at the same time ended his art. This is what's left.




From Deborah Bonello at the L.A. Times:

“La Vida Loca” reflects a depressing and hopeless reality. The documentary, by photojournalist and filmmaker Christian Poveda, follows some of the members of "la dieciocho," the so-called 18th Street gang in a poor San Salvador neighborhood.

“Little One” is a 19-year-old mother with an enormous "18," reflecting her membership in the 18th Street gang, tattooed on her face. The numbers stretch from above her eyebrows down onto her cheeks. “Moreno” is a 25-year-old male member of the same gang who works in a local bakery set up by a nonprofit group called Homies Unidos. The bakery eventually folds when its owner is arrested and sentenced to 16 years in jail on homicide charges.And "Wizard," another young mother and gang member, who lost her eye in a fight, is followed by Poveda during a long series of medical consultations and operations to fit her with a replacement glass eye. She’s shot and killed before the end of the film. Stories like that, punctuated with funerals attended by silent, heavily tattooed male gang members and wailing young wives, mothers and girlfriends, make up the sum of “La Vida Loca.”

The nature of their existence meant that Poveda had to spread his camera lens wide in the 16 months he spent shooting the film. “I knew right from the start that I couldn't film just one character,” he explains during an interview on a trip to Mexico last month when “La Vida Loca” was part of the Guadalajara International Film Festival. “Firstly, they get bored after a couple of months and don't want to be filmed anymore. Or two, they get put in jail, or they get killed.” That's a reality that Poveda feels a lot of Americans don’t know about and should.“Americans have to realize how much damage the U.S. has done to this region,” he says.




Poveda, who lives in San Salvador and has worked as a photojournalist covering the country before, during and after the 12-year-long civil war that began in 1980, is talking from experience. The current situation in El Salvador is one of the less-inspiring examples of the long-standing social and economic ties between the United States and Latin American countries, he argues. Gangs were formed by Salvadorans living on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s. When the peace accords that ended the civil war were signed in El Salvador in the early 1990s, huge numbers of gang members returned to the country, some of them by choice but most of them through deportation by U.S. authorities. Many were sent back after completing prison sentences. As Rocky Delgadillo, a Los Angeles city attorney, notes in his column for the L.A. Times, “this only exacerbated the problem, spreading gangs like a virus until they grew into transnational super-gangs'.”

Poverty and a lack of opportunities in post-war El Salvador made the country a ripe recruiting ground, but gangs did exist in El Salvador before that. Tracy Wilkinson noted in her 1994 report on the issue for the L.A. Times: “Gangs have existed in El Salvador since the late 1950s, but until recently they were more likely to be associated with schools and would fight each other over things like basketball games, perhaps over territory, but not over business interests or crime franchises. The student gangs were not inclined to attack outsiders, and their weapons usually were nothing more deadly than knives. The war between leftist guerrillas and U.S.-backed armies in the 1980s made these gangs more violent as it made society more violent.”

However, it was after the United States began implementing their deportation policy in the 1990s that the groups grew into the super-gangs that they are today, with cliques all the way through Central America and Mexico as well as, of course, a huge presence in the U.S. Speaking at the Mexico City premiere of “La Vida Loca” last month, Poveda said officials estimate there are 15,000 gang members in El Salvador; 14,000 in Guatemala; 35,000 in Honduras; and 5,000 in Mexico. The biggest population of gang members still resides in the U.S., with an estimated 70,000 living there, he said.




As far as Poveda is concerned, the vast majority of the gang members in El Salvador are “victims of society, of our society. " A desperate reaction to a desperate situation. Many would disagree. The brutally violent groups have been connected with organized crime and other illegal activities. Here in Mexico, they’re one of the parties blamed for the high levels of violent attacks and robberies against migrants traveling from Central America and heading north to the United States. But Poveda says that their big, bad image makes them an easy target and a convenient scapegoat for crimes difficult for governments to control. He also differentiates between gang members living in the United States and those living in El Salvador. “They live in completely different economic situations,” he says. “It’s not the same thing selling drugs in the central market of San Salvador as it is selling drugs on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles,” he says, referring to the kind of profits gang members make in the two places.

When asked if he can see a day when the gangs cease to exist, Poveda says that the destruction of the networks is not the point. “If you want to improve things, the first thing to know is that it’s not about making the gangs disappear. They need to be given another focus.”

...

Sadly Poveda died last year:

Suspected Salvadorean gang members killed French filmmaker Christian Poveda, whose 2008 film “La Vida Loca” crudely depicts the hopeless lives of members of the infamous Mara 18 street gang, local police said on Wednesday. Poveda, 53, was shot on a road 10 miles north of the capital of San Salvador, as he drove back from filming in La Campanera, a poor, overcrowded suburb and a Mara 18 stronghold. President Mauricio Funes said in a statement on Wednesday night that he was “shocked” by Poveda’s murder and ordered a thorough investigation.




Technical Information:

Title: La Vida Loca
Year: 2008
Country: Mexico, El Salvador
Director: Christian Poveda

Source: DVD Retail
Video Codec: XviD
Container: .avi
Size: 850 MB
Length: 1:29:46
Programs used: unknown

Resolution: 640x368
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG 4 @ ~1324 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps

Audio: MP3 Spanish @ 128 kb/s
Subtitles: English





La Vida Loca Megaupload Link

Yasujirō Ozu- 晚春/Late Spring (1949)- BluRay Rip (720p-x264)

What would Antonioni have been without Monica Vitti? To answer that would be pure conjecture, but the bigger question, one that trancends the film idiom, would be: What would the young female in post-war Japanese society have been without Yasujirō Ozu and Setsuko Hara? It's hard to imagine the impact that Ozu and his muse had on a country that had been stripped of its dignity through war, then slowly westernized by the Marshall plan and Demming economics. Ozu and Hara held the country's hand through these troubling times, and to be able to peer fity years later through the masterful eyes of Ozu is the perfect blend of post-war history and art. To this day I melt when Setsuko Hara smiles, and I hope that I never quit melting when viewing their films. Here's the BluRay rip of Banshun/Late Spring. Tôkyô monogatari/Tokyo Story will soon follow.




From Michael Atkison:

Maybe it is something to do with the sensual seductiveness of cinema: as new-millennium Americans, we care nothing for Japanese poetry, little for Japanese painting and fiction, and certainly too much for Japanese cartoons, and yet Yasujiro Ozu, the least sensational filmmaker of all time, remains on our docket, calm as ever, seething with semispoken disappointments, visually blocking out Nippono bourgeois life maps with guileless wisdom. By all rights, an Asian artist of such sublime restraint should have been long forgotten in our ethnocentric, hyperventilating digital-viscera mind-set, but here he still is, evoking new scholarship, igniting theatrical retrospectives all over again, being lovingly and enthusiastically bronzed on DVD, one precious film at a time. An enormous amount of literature has been generated about Ozu’s work, but a few line items need to be reaffirmed: He is one of the very few cinema giants you could never accuse of pretension (Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel, and Robert Bresson are the others). He remains movies’ most disciplined creative voice—a matter of no small magnitude in a medium naturally prone to the infantilization of noise, speed, and bright colors. Each film is a raw lesson—new in our presence, if not terribly different than twenty others—intended to realign in our hearts what movies are good for.




It’s a cliché now to posit Ozu as the “most Japanese” of that nation’s great directors, but it still seems true. His focus on the society’s transitional struggles, quotidian living spaces, and enjoyable norms was not only unflagging (more than fifty films in a thirty-five-year career) but embodied in the very shape of his compositions and in the reasoning behind his cuts. But it’s not Japaneseness per se that draws us; why would it, after all? It is something more fundamental—a quintessential aspect of the medium, a breath-catching nexus of time elapsed and empathies shared. It just so happens that Ozu’s Zen-infused sensibility translates on film to something like the art form’s nascent formal beauty: patiently watching little happen, and the meditative moments around the nonhappening, until it becomes crashingly apparent that lives are at stake and the whole world is struggling to be reborn.Like many Ozu movies, Late Spring (1949) is a triumph of sympathetic, respectful clarity and a surgical strike at the heart, but it also stands alone as a turning point in his development as a sociopolitical artist. It is, first of all, the magisterial archetype for the shomin-geki—the “modern family drama”—a genre Ozu helped define and that remains his kingdom to reign. (To genre-ize Ozu at all seems odd, so intense is his formal signature. Even so, drama is the odd word out here; the textures of Japanese life and the rhythmic bolero of Ozu’s stories deliberately subsume the dramatic in favor of the internal.) But the family in that equation wasn’t exactly what it was before the war, and Late Spring is the first of his films made after those horrors to try to imagine what Japanese domesticity might look like in this new world. Comparatively (by an Ozu measure), Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) and A Hen in the Wind (1948)—his first two postwar works—are scabrous portrayals of a corrupt, demilitarized, firebombed landscape that swallows the vulnerable. It was as if Ozu needed to vent the war’s pus from his psyche. With Late Spring, he dresses the wound and moves toward his true aesthetic protocol; life during the reconstruction is viewed by way of the quiet tensions of generational conflict.




The low-intensity but painful warfare between domestic Japanese traditionalism and modern liberations and feminism—between the insecure old and the restless young—is Ozu’s range to patrol, and here it is realigned after wartime and complicated implicitly by signs of encroaching Americanization. (Was Ozu the first filmmaker to use the Coca-Cola logo as a symbol for rampaging Yankee capitalism? He certainly beat Jean-Luc Godard and Billy Wilder to the punch.) Indeed, postwar society (suggested further by discussions of treated anemias and glimpses of the Saturday Evening Post) let Ozu raise the stakes. What simmered as a timeless stew of generation-gap disconnect in the earlier films became, with Late Spring, a thunderously specific social dynamic. In the thirties, society was changing and Westernizing at a familiar pace, but in the postwar world, as Ozu suggests in his inimitably respectful way, the old-fashioned lifestyle was under siege by commercialism, permissiveness, antimasculinism, and independent wives and daughters. Suddenly, the struggle to guide youth with ancient values wasn’t just a manageable matter of course but a project doomed to failure by progress itself.




Still, Ozu’s scenario isn’t a generational throw-down. What he depicts in this, his inaugural seasonal film, the first ideogram in a dozen-year exploration of parent-child relationships, is an altogether subtler dilemma. Loving, grown, contemporary-minded daughter Noriko (Setsuko Hara) lives with her gentle, if slightly distractable, professor father (Chishu Ryu); an irritating aunt (Haruko Sugimura) suggests the young woman should marry, and soon. (The matter of the father’s caretaker-requiring “eccentricity” is mostly taken for granted, although his capabilities as a scholar seem under question when he confuses Franz Liszt with economist Freidrich List.) Believing he is doing the right thing, and in order to allow his daughter to detach from him and his daily needs, the father begins talking about taking a new, younger wife. Despite Noriko’s self-reliance—an Ozu earmark from the thirties that became an axiom in Late Spring—the acquiescent, ever-smiling heroine’s desires are never considered; she explicitly asks why her contented life cannot just go on as it has been.

But can it? What would be the best path for her to follow? Far from a Manichaean take on the oppressive power of lingering social norms, Late Spring is a hushed battlefield where no one is right or wrong. We watch the infliction roll out inexorably, wishing there were a cheesy, American-style resolution somewhere on the horizon in which all of the well-meaning characters could be happy. But that’s not Ozu. Ozu is the natural energy of Noriko’s generous grin, dispensed selflessly in all social situations, until she realizes where her life is helplessly headed—and the blood-cooling shock of seeing that resilient smile finally drop.




Justly praised for his temperate, rigorous form, Ozu is actually something of a calculating whammy master, and Late Spring saves its crushing blows for the very last shots and the simple peeling of an apple. But Ozu’s methodology in Late Spring, which became an almost ritualized discipline in his subsequent films, expresses so much more than mere character and narrative: the famous still-life cutaways (themselves a codex of Zen commentaries and signifiers) and tatami-mat-high point of view; the compressed depth of the family’s rooms (Noriko and company pass in and out of sight through doorways we cannot see, suggesting haunting layers of quotidian complexity); the fastidious commemoration of the uniquely careful Japanese living spaces (that no culture has thought as much about the composition and physical meaning of their own homes is not a point lost on Ozu); the vivid manner in which the architectural precision expresses the controlled tone of relationships. There’s an acute sense of home here, happily inhabited, that is unaccented and yet fuels Noriko’s tragedy. (Contrast it to the ill-fitting urban rooms suffered by the elderly couple visiting their ruinous children in Tokyo Story, from 1953, or the inverse discomfiture of the visiting actor in the home of his former lover in 1959’s Floating Weeds. Ozu’s palette may seem uniform from film to film, but it often yields very different atmospheres.) Late Spring can be seen as Ozu’s first absolutely crucial work, a step toward understanding the ripple effects of the postwar age among ordinary citizens—or, if that’s not possible, then at least capturing them in compassionate amber.




Technical Information:

Title: 晚春/Banshun/Late Spring
Year: 1949
Country: Japan
Director: Yasujiro Ozu

Source: BluRay Retail
Video Codec: 720p-x264
Container: .mkv
Size: 4.36 GB
Length: 1:47:58
Programs used: Unknown

Resolution: 960X720
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG4 H264 @ ~8600 kb/s
Frame Rate: 23.97 fps

Audio: Dolby AC3 pass-thru Japanese @ 448 kb/s
Subtitles: English


Thanks to team titans for the original rip and upload!



(Our prefered x264 player is Media Player Classic.)

Late Spring Megaupload Links

Nina Simone- Live at Ronnie Scott's (1985)- DVD5 (NTSC Format)

It's strange. The funnest part of setting up posts is choosing the artist we're going to highlight and, after the post is published, scrolling down the page, realizing that Kurdt Cobain has ended up hanging out with Brooksie, Orson Welles, SY, Keith Jarrett, and the Kuchar Brothers. As much of a royal pain-in-the-ass this site is, adding Nina Simone to this hodge-podge of masters makes it all worth it. I love me some Nina Simone. Enjoy.




From Arthur Lazere at culturevulture.net:

On her very first LP, on the Bethlehem label in 1957, there was, in the singing and piano playing of Nina Simone (1933-2003) an authority, an artistic confidence unusual in a novice performer of 24. She had been trained for a classical piano career, including studies at the Julliard School. But she learned early on that there were discriminatory obstacles to a black artist on the classical circuit and she shifted gears into jazz. (She named John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Oscar Peterson as her idols.) And, as she stated with more than a little bitterness on more than one occasion, she performed folk and pop music as well, because jazz alone wouldn't pay the bills.

That first Bethlehem album included her interpretation of Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy." It was a hit and nobody has sung it better since, not even Nina Simone. She sings it on a newly released concert DVD, Nina Simone Live at Ronnie Scott's, which was taped in 1985 at the popular London club. The delivery clearly suffered after a quarter of century of constant audience demand for the song; she seems just to be going through the motions.




Indeed, this resuscitated material will be of more interest to Simone fans as a curious, somewhat off-guard look at the personality of the singer, rather than as prime examples of a fine artist at her best. She wears a strapless gown, but the lights and the room were hot--she interrupts her songs more than once to mop her dripping face with a towel. The sound quality is variable as well and the cutting between songs and interview segments often seems designed to cover problems in the tapes.

Still, there are moments here when Simone creates the magic that made her the star she was. "If You Knew," her own composition, is a gentle, yearning love song, enhanced by her virtuoso piano playing. (She's given brilliant support throughout by timpanist Paul Robinson.) For "Fodder in her Wings," she starts playing on a harpsichord and then switches to one hand on the harpsichord and one on the piano as she delivers this poetic lament, also her own song. It builds to a throbbing intensity and she is clearly pleased with her performance at the conclusion of the song.

Simone wrote "Mississippi Goddam" when the civil rights movement was in high gear and the anger it expressed came from deep inside. It was mesmerizing when she sang it in the 60's. At Ronnie Scott's, she flies through it as if obligated, no longer connecting with the roots of her own song. After her early success, Simone was an angry woman; on the positive side, that anger energized some of her songs, but she was also well known for turning her anger on club and concert audiences.




By the 80's, her concerns seem to be more personal than political. She sings a sad and moving "For a While" (Bob Gaudio/Jake Holmes), a declaration of love after the love affair is over. (Jake Holmes has been quoted about this song: "For five minutes the sun is shining and everything is beautiful. Then all of a sudden you realize that the person you cared about is gone, and it all comes back...one of those little holes in grief when it becomes even more painful.")

And, of course, Simone wraps with "My Baby Just Cares for Me," a song that was on the original Bethlehem disk. As a result of a television commercial, it became a smash hit for her thirty years later in 1987 and reinvigorated her career.

"I was born a child prodigy," she says, matter-of-factly in part of the interview, "My music is a gift from God." It was a gift variously molded by her race, her anger, and her personal life. Like Josephine Baker, Dexter Gordon, and James Baldwin, Nina Simone was an expatriate who sought in Europe a cultural environment free of the racial discrimination prevalent in American society. She died at her home in France on April 21, 2003.




Technical Information:

Title: Nina Simone: Live at Ronnie Scott's
Artist: Nina Simone
Date: November 17, 1985
Location: Ronnie Scott's, London, UK

Source: DVD5 Retail
Pro-shot: Yes
DVD Format: NTSC
DVD Size: DVD5
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 2.97 GB
Length: 0:56:35
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG 2 @ ~6800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97

Audio 1: Dolby Digital Surround 2.0 English @ 192 kb/s
Audio 2: Dolby Digital Surround 5.1 English @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: None

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD extras: None on source




Personnel:

Nina Simone: vocals, piano
Paul Robinson: drums


Setlist:

01. God God God
02. If You Knew, Mr. Smith
03. Fodder in her Wings
04. Be My Husband
05. I Love You, Porgy
06. The Other Woman
07. Mississippi Goddam/Moon Over Alabama medly
08. For A While
09. See-Line-Woman
10. I Just Sing to Know I'm Alive
11. My Baby Just Cares for Me





(Use JDownloader to automate downloading):

Live at Ronnie Scott's Megaupload Links

Nirvana- Pachyderm Studio Sessions (1993)- CD Rip (FLAC)

As of late, anything and everything by Nirvana has been pulled from the site, and a bevy of interns for Nirvana-related musical consortiums are combing over this post at this very moment while preparing to type out cease and desists to Megaupload. So...

Dear Mr. or Ms. Nirvana musical consortium intern:
This is a bootleg, so please leave it alone. Chosen Rejects is also a bootleg, so leave that alone as well. There are plenty of mp3 sites that you can go after that have a stronger Google presense than our lowly, struggling lossless ghetto of a blog, so focus on them for awhile and kindly crawl out of our asses. Comprende? If not, I have a mesmerised flesh-eating squirrel that will do my bidding, and he won't be after spare change.

Dear Lord, the ass-kissing you have to do when running a blog. Here's some Albini Nirvana...but grab it quickly.




From Eric Dennis at Spectrum Culture:

In February of 1993, Nirvana and Steve Albini finished recording the follow-up to the band's (insert hyperbolic adjectives here) 1991 release Nevermind. Already starting to distance themselves from that record - and in particular, its mostly sanitized and commercial-friendly sound that made it palatable to a broad audience - the trio consistently maintained that their next studio album would be far less accessible and polished than its predecessor. In the months leading up to the recording sessions Kurt Cobain's opinion of that album increasingly soured, at least in print, where the vocalist frequently voiced his displeasure at its smooth production and inoffensive sheen. Enlisting Albini - someone who appeared to never gave a damn about whether an album would be met with commercial acceptance - seemed to confirm the band's intention to craft something less FM-ready than Nevermind.

Though the exact order of events for what happened after the tapes were submitted to the suits at Geffen remains unclear, one thing is certain: whether due to label pressures, the band's dissatisfaction or a combination of the two, the Albini mix was rejected and hot shot producer Scott Litt was called in to give the songs an overhaul. "All Apologies" and "Heart-Shaped Box" were remixed, the bass and drums were given more separation throughout the album and Cobain's vocals were increased by a few decibels. Judging by most contemporary reviews these modifications were for the better; the revamped record that would be released as In Utero received almost universal critical praise as a radical departure from the style of Nevermind.




In retrospect, this shift wasn't nearly as dramatic as most critics claimed and it's debatable whether these changes really improved the album. Though Albini has as recently as 2007 stated that any version that passes as the Albini mix is generations removed from his recording, what is claimed as the Albini mix reveals significant differences from the revised In Utero. Although the face lift that was applied to the record appears slight and superficial at first glance, the effect it had on the record's overall composition is impossible to miss. The original mix didn't feature The Albini Sound at its most confrontational, but his version is still far more punishing, aggressive and industrial than the official release and emphasizes the influence that noise rock had on the band. This is most noticeable on harder-edged songs like "Serve the Servants," "Scentless Apprentice," "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle" and "Milk It." Albini puts the vocals and instrumentation about even in the mix, making these songs far more abrasive than their officially-released counterparts, which still today sometimes sound too refined and safe.

Any chances of Cobain's lyrics not being the focus of attention were lost when the songs were reworked. Though Albini didn't bury the vocals as severely as he had on other albums, they sometimes threatened to be swallowed up by the songs' arrangements, creating a far more primal sound that often felt like Cobain was howling from the depths of his own private hell. In contrast, the Geffen-approved release increased the vocals' prominence just enough to kill off at least a fraction of the conflicted emotions he conveyed. Indeed, this seemingly innocuous decibel boost makes the singer's various mumbles, screams and wails on "Very Ape," "Pennyroyal Tea," "All Apologies" and the perfect-for-radio "Heart-Shaped Box" sound less desperate and urgent. Any potential walls Albini's mix might have allowed Cobain to construct as he railed against being typecast as some sort of disaffected slacker voice of a generation crumbled once the vocals were thrown front and center. Though these lyrics probably would have been dissected and overanalyzed regardless, at least Albini made the listener work to understand what had Cobain so pissed off and distraught.




Prior to his suicide Cobain remarked how he'd like to move in an entirely different musical direction, even suggesting an acoustic record along the lines of Automatic For the People wasn't out of the question. For observant fans it wasn't the first time they'd heard this, but it would be among the last. Though the official release remains Nirvana's most consistent effort, it's hard not to conclude that the band fell just short of a true masterpiece when the Albini mix was overhauled. It may take careful attention to fully appreciate the differences between these two pieces - and such an examination is clearly a sign of geeky fanboy behavior- but ultimately the Albini version comes across as more challenging, satisfying and worthy of the band's legacy. Although it's overly simplistic to assume the band conceded to these revisions to ensure mainstream attention and radio play - it's hard to imagine "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter" and "Tourette's" expanding Nirvana's fan base - it is nevertheless undeniable that the Geffen version, while not exactly duplicating the slickness of Nevermind, didn't exactly disavow that record's accessibility either. As it stands today, In Utero sounds more like a partial deconstruction of the Nevermind sound that a complete break from it. That full deconstruction - Albini's mix - was essentially gutted in favor of something that, while representing the group's most adventurous studio release, smoothed over the band's sound just enough to make it less disagreeable to the mainstream audience that Nevermind initially reeled in.




Technical Information:

Artist: Nirvana
Album: Pachyderm Studio In Utero Sessions- Steve Albini Mix
Date: February 12-26, 1993
Location: Pachyderm Studios, Cannon Falls, MN.

Audio Codec(s): FLAC
Encoding: lossless
Type: split tracks + MD5
Avg. bitrate: 883 kb/s
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Bits per sample: 16
Channels: 2
File size: 325 MB
Length: 0:53:57


Tracklisting:

01. Serve The Servants (3:38)
02. Scentless Apprentice (3:49)
03. Heart-Shaped Box (4:44)
04. Rape Me (2:51)
05. Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle (4:11)
06. Dumb (2:31)
07. Very Ape (1:56)
08. Milk It (3:56)
09. Pennyroyal Tea (3:37)
10. Radio Friendly Unit Shifter (4:51)
11. Tourette's (1:35)
12. All Apologies (4:00)
13. Marigold (2:35)
14. Sappy (3:25)
15. I Hate Myself And Want To Die (2.45)
16. Moist Vagina (3:32)


Thanks to JWB for the original remaster and upload!





Pachyderm Studio Sessions Megaupload Link

Sonic Youth- Corporate Ghost: The Videos (1990-2002)- DVD9 (NTSC Format)

Corporate Ghost is loaded to the gills, and if you want to know what's in it, you'll have to trudge through the extensive readmore that we've provided. What I will say about this collection of Sonic Youth material is that it's got treasures and kool commentaries that you won't be able to find anywhere else but on this DVD. A very well thought out visual history of the band that's an extremely tough find on the interweb.




From Sonic Youth:

Sonic Youth's first official DVD release! A compilation of their Geffen-era videos from 1990-2002, released on the same day as "Sonic Nurse". The title is taken from a track recorded for a late 80's Peel Session. The cover features X-rays of two guitars, Lee's 12-string Deimel and the ever popular Eterna. After the obligatory corporate logos, Corporate Ghost begins with a flurry of SY's Geffen-era LP covers, cleverly computer processed, set to the driving "Kool Thing" intro riff, and eventually exploding into the menu, which consists of clips from various videos containing many, many very small pixels, each ALSO containing rapid fire images from all of the videos on the set. It's a pretty cool effect, and "Kool Thing" plays until the middle section before it fades and loops. There are three menu options, "PLAY" (which plays all of the 'main' videos continuously), "VIDEOS" (access to menus where you can select the different commentaries for the individual songs), and "BONUS" (the bonus features, of course, which you'll find information on below).




Videos Included:

Dirty Boots
Tunic (Song for Karen)
Mary-Christ
Kool Thing
My Friend Goo
Disappearer
Mildred Pierce
Cinderella's Big Score
Scooter & Jinx
Titanium Expose
100%
Sugar Kane
Youth Against Fascism
Bull in the Heather
Superstar
Little Trouble Girl
The Diamond Sea
Sunday
Hoarfrost
Nevermind (What Was It Anyway)
The Empty Page
Disconnection Notice

Note: All videos include commentary


The first 11 are the "GOO" album in its entirety, as previously available on the Goo VHS compilation (but w/ a notable increase in picture and sound quality!). The rest of the videos were pretty much unavailable in any accessible fashion, including three from "Dirty", one from "Experimental Jet Set...", one from the "If I Were a Carpenter" tribute LP, two from "Washing Machine", two from "A Thousand Leaves", one from "NYC Ghosts & Flowers", and two from "Murray Street". Up until "Sunday", most of these videos (aside from the "non-single" Goo tunes) aired on tv at some point, perhaps even with some regularity, but "Hoarfrost" "Nevermind" "Empty Page" and "Disconnection Notice" are pretty much unique to this collection. Extensive DVD credits run silently after "Disconnection Notice".




If you choose "BONUS", "Sugar Kane" leads a path to your bonus feature options:

"Drunken Butterfly" - the fan-made winning video for the 1992 MTV "120 Minutes" contest. This is an insanely well-choreographed sock-puppet rendition of the Dirty rocker complete w/ mini-screwdrivers in the guitars! Sonic Youth also do an audio commentary for this video.

"Swimsuit Issue" - the runner-up to the MTV video contest, featuring a pack of men removing their shirts and smoking. Lots. Note: this wasn't actually the runner-up, SY wanted to include a video for "Nic Fit" that featured a TV bearing the MTV logo being demolished! No commentary.

"Disappearer (Director's Cut)" - rough footage of Todd Haynes' original edit of the video, which was later re-edited by Tamra Davis. It's mostly the same footage, in a different order. No commentary.

"Ono Soul" - clip from Thurston's solo LP "Psychic Hearts", featuring Thurston w/ Steve & Tim Foljahn. No commentary.

"Spike's Eye" - an 11-minute segment showing various Spike Jonze photographs of the band, with Spike's commentary overtop. Most of the photos are from the video shoots for "100%" and "Bull in the Heather".




"Sonic Spiel" - a 19-minute montage of interview footage with the folks who provide commentaries, recalling some favorite sonic moments. Around 11 and a half minutes in, the recollections become interspersed with live footage of "She Is Not Alone" from the March 17th, 2002 "All Tomorrow's Parties" festival in Los Angeles. This continues in the background under the interviews.

"My Sonic Room" - a fascinating 8-minute mini-film submitted to Sonic Youth by young Patty Orsini, that pretty much can't be described! This video was filmed in the "Goo" era, and following the release of the "Corporate Ghost" DVD, Patty sent the band a sequel that offered an update on her life and some background on the original video. The band posted "My Sonic Room 2" on their news page for viewing or download.

"Personal Playlist" - offers the option of programming your own playlist order using the 23 main videos on the collection.

Though commonly advertised as containing two easter eggs, only one is to be found, Thurston's "Rock the Vote" PSA from 1992. This is accessed by going to the "Personal Playlist" menu (before the screen w/ the actual list of songs), highlighting "BONUS", and pressing the right arrow four times. It can also be directly accessed by choosing title 57. Though featured in the credits, the "Clap Interview" easter egg was not included on the DVD. Early European pressings, I believe, even had issues w/ the "Rock the Vote" PSA not being included, and instructions were placed in the credits of the next pressing? Can somebody please clarify this?

All in all, Sonic Youth went above and beyond in delivering a comprehensive compilation of their Geffen era videography, complete with fascinating, insightful audio commentaries on almost every video (a task previously accomplished by Lance Bangs on Pavement's "Slow Century" DVD), and some rarely seen extra features.




Technical Information:

Title: Corporate Ghost- The Videos: 1990-2002
Artist: Sonic Youth
Year: 2004

Source: DVD9- Retail
Pro-shot: Yes
DVD Format: NTSC
DVD Size: DVD9
Container: .ISO + MDS
Size: 7.66 GB
Length: 1:43:29
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: mpeg-2 @ 6800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio 1: Dolby AC3, 2 Channels, 16-bit, 48000 Hz @ 192 kb/s
Audio 2: LPCM, 2 Channels, 24-bit, 48000 Hz
Audio 3: Commentary- Dolby AC3 English @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: No

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD extras: Commentary and hidden bonus features





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Corporate Ghost Megaupload Links

Orson Welles- Mercury Theatre of the Air (1938)- mp3

Orson Welles started the Mercury Theatre company with John Houseman at the ripe old age of 21 and by the time he was 23, they had graduated from the stage to the airwaves with Mercury Theatre of the Air. Their weekly radio show, which produced the notorious War of the Worlds broadcast, was a smash hit and ran without a sponsor for only a few months before it was picked up by Campbell's Soup, had its name changed to the Campbell Playhouse and moved itself to Hollywood to accomodate Welles' growing film career. Here are the 17 surviving episodes of the original 22 broadcast by the Mercury Theatre of the Air and I'll be posting the Campbell's Playhouse episodes soon!




From The Digital Deli:

Mercury Theatre of The Air (1938) was the most innovative and historically significant production of the series. Indeed, though overshadowed in Radio History by the extraordinary result of its notorious The War of The Worlds program, all of the remaining productions were equally radical or innovative for their time. Julius Caesar was presented in much the same format as their radical Stage production, set in contemporary fascist Italy. Welles' Sherlock Holmes characterization was heralded as one of the finest interpretations of the morphine-addicted detective genius as had ever been heard over Radio. And all three of the Charles Dickens productions--A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers--were very well received. But indeed it was Howard Koch's brilliant adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of The Worlds that created a stir out of all proportion to any other Radio broadcast during the Golden Age of Radio.

Mercury Theatre of The Air had intended from the outset to mount H.G. Wells' The War of The Worlds on October 30, 1938 as a Halloween presentation. They'd already opened their season with Dracula in any case, and Howard Koch and John Houseman had written a hyper-realistic adaptation of Wells' brilliant science-fiction novel. The production was by no means a secret. Nor, by extension was The War of The Worlds a secret. First published in 1898, H.G. Wells' most famous book had already been published throughout the world in a commensurate number of languages fully forty years before Mercury Theatre adapted it for Radio.




The program opened with Welles' narration describing a series of fictional events which ensued during the evening of October 30, 1938 ("the 39th year of the twentieth century"). In Welles' deep baritone, melodramatically filled with import and foreboding, Welles' matter of factly introduced the series of very realistic radio script elements that followed: radio engineers cutting back and forth during the broadcast from the 'music of Ramon Raquelo' to an astronomer at the Princeton Observatory in New Jersey, then to 'reporters in the field' observing first-hand the slow unscrewing of the hatch of an extra-terrestrial meteorite that had landed near Grover's Mill, New Jersey. From that point forward, the script cut back and forth from accounts of the astronomer tracking uncommon activity on the surface of Mars, accounts from the farmers and reporters at Grover's Mill, and the news studios, authorities and observers of the phenomena that ensued.

It was the very documentary style of the broadcast that was the most compelling. The 'first-hand' accounts were wonderfully similar to the kind of man-in-the-street fare that had already become the rage in Radio (e.g., Vox Pop, et al). Howard Koch's genius in orchestrating the various initially unrelated events slowly and subtlely--and wonderfully realistically--into a tapestry of a growing extra-terrestrial threat was one of Radio's most brilliant dramatic strokes.




 Unfortunately, the thousands of listeners that tuned in after Orson Welles' very explicit disclaimer found themselves caught up in what can only be described as a mass suspension of disbelief. For those listeners, hearing only the brilliantly realistic radio snippets coming over their radio sets, the scenario was developing into a situation so realistic that by twenty-three minutes into the hour-long broadcast phones were ringing off the hook in radio stations, police precincts, and fire departments up and down the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. Within hours, as the broadcast aired throughout the country, the same phenomena occured throughout radio-listening America. What with announcements of road blocks in eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, declarations of martial law, and even an address by 'F.D.R.' himself, the entire nation soon became caught up in the mass hysteria to one degree or another.

The aftermath was predictable for a mid-term election year. Officials great and small were calling for Orson Welles' head on a plate. Within twelve hours of the broadcast, the FCC was demanding a review of the Columbia Chain's (CBS's) broadcast license. Within eighteen hours of the broadcast H.G. Wells himself had been contacted for comment, expressing outrage that Mercury Theatre had changed the location of his story from London, England to New Jersey, New York and Eastern Pennsylvania. But more importantly to Mercury Theatre--and Orson Welles himself--within forty-eight hours, the entire Western World was abuzz about the twenty-three year old upstart and his Mercury Players.




Technical Information:

Artist: The Mercury Theatre
Director: Orson Welles
Year: 1938

Audio Codec(s): mp3
Encoding: lossy
Bitrate: 64 kb/s
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Bits per sample: CBR
Channels: 1
File size: 460 MB
Length: 16:50:41




Tracklisting:

01. Dracula (53:56)
02. Treasure Island (1:04:56)
03. A Tale of Two Cities (57:22)
04. The 39 Steps (1:03:11)
05. Three Short Stories: I'm a Fool, The Open Window, and My Little Boy (58:23)
06. Abraham Lincoln (1:00:09)
07. The Affairs of Anatole (1:00:04)
08. The Count of Monte Cristo (59:34)
09. The Man Who Was Thursday (57:47)
10. The Immortal Sherlock Holmes (56:34)
11. Hell on Ice (1:00:07)
12. Seventeen (1:00:21)
13. Around the World in 80 Days (57:59)
14. The War of the Worlds (59:36)
15. Heart of Darkness/Life with Father (58:29)
16. A Passenger to Bali (1:00:36)
17. The Pickwick Papers (1:01:40)


Thanks to www.mercurytheatre.info for making these available!





Mercury Theatre of the Air Megaupload Link

Movie of the Week

This Week,

INCEPTION (2010)

Starring- Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

I don't want to ruin anything about this movie for you, so in the interest of being kind I will preface this review with-

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!

Now, with that said, I feel that this new film from director and writer Christopher Nolan is the best movie of 2010, thus far. Inception is very similar to other films in many ways, but also different, and that is why it is uniquely entertaining. It is kind of like Minority Report, Shutter Island, Vertigo and Memento had a sophisticated, complex and thought provoking baby. Nolan loves to explore the human mind in his films and that is the primary setting for Inception. In fact, most of the action takes place inside dreams. This is because DiCaprio's character, and his team are experts in stealing thoughts from the minds of unsuspecting victims. According to the film, unlocking hidden thoughts via the subconscious is easy, but implanting ideas in the mind is next to impossible.

This practice of creating thoughts in someone's mind is called inception, and if not for his desperate nature, Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) would not even consider it. To do the job, he creates a team to help him implant the idea, starting with his right hand man played by Gordon-Levitt, and a young architect played by Ellen Page. While his team works to figure out the technical aspects of inception, Cobb struggles with personal demons in his own subconscious that could threaten the entire operation.

Nolan does a nice job of making this film a thinking person's suspense thriller. Rather than having the suspense driven by emotion, the viewer is actually thinking more about what might come next rather than feeling it, and that is different from other films in this genre. Inception is helped along with a first rate cast that has in its minor roles the likes of Michael Caine, Pete Posthlewaite and Cillian Murphy- not too shabby. I don't want to give much more away because the less you know going into this movie, the better. I will say, however, that the action is as strong as what you might find in a James Bond or Jason Bourne adventure, the dialogue is realistic and the story is inventive and compelling. Even though I thought it was a bit long, Inception brings the audience to an exciting climax that will have you talking well after the credits roll.

Things to watch for-

The totem
Tom Beringer's triumphant return
Some great zero gravity fighting
James Bond meets planet Hoth

"What's the most resilient parasite? An Idea."

Georg Wilhelm Pabst- Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)- DVD5 (PAL Format)

Brooksie. The camera has never loved anyone in the same way that it loved Louise Brooks, and it more than likely never will. Sure, there's Setsuko Hara with her girl-next-door appeal, and Antonioni's muse, Monica Vitti. And one can't forget Catherine Deneuve. Damn. Now I've lost my train of thought. Ohhhhhh... Louise Brooks. My point: There's only one Brooksie.

Here's the beguiling Louise Brooks in her first German film with director G.W. Pabst. Their second undertaking would be a little film called Pandora's Box, which I'm holding my breath for in BluRay. In some ways, Diary of a Lost Girl is the better of the two films, but you can be the judge of that. Pandora's Box to follow.




From silentera.com:

With Louise Brooks enshrined as an irrefutable icon of the silent era of films, any home video release of one of her films is news, especially when the film features her last great role and when the film is presented in a fine new edition such as the one at hand. The disc features approximately seven minutes of footage previously unavailable on home video.

This video transfer was prepared from a restoration print prepared by L’Immagine Ritrovata and distributed by Transit Films/Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung, current controller of many of the German films from the late silent era. The print features a clarity of detail, with broad grayscale ranges featuring detailed highlights and open shadows, that hasn’t been seen before in America in post-release prints of this film. The restoration print still has the usual amount of persistent speckling, dust and moderate print damage in the form of scuffing, lengthy scratches, emulsion chipping and decomposition, splices, timing marks, and sprocket damage in the image area of some sections of the print. The video transfer itself departs from the example of other recent Kino releases in that the digital resolution of the transfer and video bit rate is high enough (with video compression low enough) to replicate the original print’s film grain but without introducing many perceptible digital artifacts. The video bit rate does not fall lower than 5 Mb per second and occasionally hovers up around 8 to 9 Mb per second, rendering a reasonably faithful video representation of the source print.




The musical accompaniment has been composed and performed by Joseph Turrin. The well-composed and pleasing music is a fine example of silent film accompaniment, but it has also been performed on a digital piano and synthesizers which leaves us wishing for true strings and woodwinds in this otherwise good recording.

The video transfer was prepared from a good 16mm reduction print that suffers from contrasty grayscale ranges that result in blasted-out highlights and plugged-up shadows, also from a little print decomposition and a couple of splices. The print’s soundtrack has a high-level of background noise due, we think, to the passable but substandard duplication of the reduction print. While we haven’t seen other home video releases of this title, we suspect that this may be the best-looking edition available.

We are impressed with the image quality of this new home video edition of Louise Brooks’ last great film and recommend it enthusiastically to Brooks fans and silent film collectors alike.




Technical Information:

Title: Diary of a Lost Girl
Year: 1929
Country: Germany
Director: Georg Wilhelm Pabst

Source: DVD5 Eureka Retail DVD
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .ISO+MDS
Size: 3.81 GB
Length: 1:47:07
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~4800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps

Audio: Music Only- Dolby ac3, 48000 Hz @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None




A note to North American downloaders:
All Phillips branded DVD players play European PAL DVD's without a hitch, and it seems like a fair amount of the DVD's  we post around here are in PAL, even though we're on your side of the pond. Just a head-up.


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Diary of a Lost Girl Megaupload Links

Keith Jarrett Quartet- The Survivors' Suite (1976)- CD Rip (APE/FLAC)

It's all about transitions...

The Survivors' Suite takes the listener on a journey that begins with the calmest of Asian influences, then 3/4 of the way through the trip, one finds themselves stuck in an Albert Aylers Trio-like session that can only be likened to a very dissonant cat being strangled, that devolves into the coolest of cool jazz, parking the listener calmly at its last stop, the conclusion, which so happens to be the name of the last track. What an album. I have an odd feeling you might like it.




From Stacia Proefrock at All Music Guide:

One of the best recordings for Keith Jarrett's mid-'70s American quartet (whose style differed sharply from its European doppelganger), Survivor's Suite opens with Jarrett's aching, breathy sigh on the bass recorder, evoking the sound of a horn somewhere across a great expanse of fog. Percussion soon punctuates the melodic line to give the opening a more spiritual, ritualistic feel, which is only the first of many mutations that this album will go through. Divided into two parts, entitled "Beginning" and "Conclusion," this suite effortlessly flows between its movements which range from fiery free jazz to open, meditative atmospheric pieces showing heavy input from indigenous musics to instrumental solos that owe a stylistic debt to the music of the previous decade. Jarrett has strong solos in both the first and second track, but his performances rise to the surface frequently to add warmth to the suite. The greatest contribution that he makes on this album, however, is as a composer, as its complex components seem to nestle together seamlessly again and again, even if the solos occasionally rapidly expand and contract with kinetic energy. As strong a hand as Jarrett has in this album, however, he definitely owes a debt to his supporting players, especially the passionate Dewey Redman and skilled Paul Motian, but Charlie Haden plays an important role in the execution of the suite as well, even if only to provide a skeleton to hang the more fluid elements on. Like other albums of its time, this was beginning to show the brightness, lightness, and soft edges of contemporary jazz, but the solidness of Haden's bass helps keep it rooted and earthbound.




Technical Information:

Artist: Keith Jarrett Quartet
Album: The Survivors' Suite
Year: 1976

Audio Codec(s): APE/FLAC8
Encoding: lossless
Rip: APE + .cue/FLAC8 split tracks
Avg. bitrate: 733 kb/s
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Bits per sample: 16
Channels: 2
File size: 262 MB
Length: 0:48:39




Personnel:

Keith Jarrett: piano, celeste, cello, drums, recorder, bass recorder, soprano saxophone, osidrum
Dewey Redman: percussion, tenor saxophone
Charlie Haden: bass, double bass
Paul Motian: drums, percussion


Tracklisting:

01. Beginning (27:21)
02. Conclusion (21:18)





Survivors' Suite Megaupload Links:

APE + .cue
FLAC8 (split tracks)