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“When Loveless was released, few touted it as a revolutionary record,” notoriously reclusive singer/guitarist Kevin Shields said in 2004. Yet Loveless remains revolutionary. It’s arguably the most original record of the ’90s, and perhaps even the ’00s.
Few if any albums released since 1991 — an epochal music year, in which everyone from Nirvana and Pearl Jam to Metallica and Red Hot Chili Peppers released career-making full-lengths — have managed to sound so singularly different from everything else in or out of the mainstream.
That’s because Shields’ infamously detail-oriented production fully paid off on Loveless, which was released 20 years ago Friday.
Julien Bazinet via io9
I still love Predator. Wikipedia claims it is a «perennial cable favourite», and it’s true: I can’t stop myself from watching it whenever it’s on, at whatever point I catch it. The ridiculous machismo, the 80s kitsch of the special effects, the panicked second-act spiral as Arnie’s crack squad gets picked off, the alien’s dreadlocks and crab-platter features – I love it all. I know it’s bad for me: no movie with this many future Republican gubernatorial candidates (Arnie, Ventura, as well as Sonny Landham, who was beaten to Kentucky) in it can be healthy. Not to mention a hand-operated Gatling gun. And it’s not even the best red-blooded 80s action classic (that would probably be James Cameron’s Aliens), or the best vintage-era Arnie flick (The Terminator).
1. Alien (1979)
What: The crew of the Nostromo is woken from their space slumber to investigate a signal from strange planet. Turns out the signal is coming from an alien spacecraft with a collection of pods inside it. One pod opens and the contents wraps itself around a crew members head, it’s all downhill from there.
Why: The tagline, «In space no one can hear you scream,» pretty much sets up why we’ve decided that Alien is the scariest film of all time. The total and complete helplessness of the crew, who are doomed because of their company’s selfish action paired with the aggressive monsters with acid blood and terrifying eyeless faces, makes for some serious horror. There’s no negotiating with this monster — the alien simply wants you dead, the end. No one is safe, no one is spared, and everyone meets a grizzly end (that is of course besides our hero and her cat). The audience gets bludgeoned by KY covered faces and forced into the dark alien hallways of a world no one was familiar with, back in 1979. It changed the way we viewed aliens and forever changed the way people looked at female protagonists.
Scariest Scene: The first time we met the chestburster.
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Magnum at the Movies by Whitney Johnson – New Yorker
Photographers have been snapping images on film sets since the dawn of cinema. Often they are hired set photographers, whose work, explains the Italian film critic Alberto Barbera, is “limited mostly to documenting the work of a film, following the director’s work and often concerned only with satisfying the directives of the studio’s publicity departments, which need certain shots for promoting the film even before they finish making it.” But other photographers have taken the set itself as their subject, capturing not only the illusory world created by film but also the atmosphere of a production: a horse carried across a Texas ranch; the upturned face of Marilyn powdered through a car window.
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Machu Picchu, the Lost City of the Incas
Πάντα είχα μια τρέλλα μ’αυτο το μέρος και ήθελα να το επισκεφτώ. Μερικές φωτογραφίες απο το αφιέρωμα του fotopedia:
via io9
And let the weirdness begin:
It’s an unfortunate coincidence that some of the world’s most beautiful places happen to be the most dangerous. No one is suggesting that anyone spend spring break in the Green Zone, but with the Abu Sayyaf in Southeast Asia, Somali pirates roaming Africa’s coastlines, and drug unrest in South America, the world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place. If you have no interest in spending your precious vacation time scratching notches in the wall of a hut, we have a few tips on how to minimize your risk — and what to do if you’re actually captured.
We’ve always been escaping, in one way or another. In Tuan’s picture our entire civilisation is a kind of escape. Migration across continents was an escape from our natural origins. Building homes and railways and cities were acts of escape, too – escape from the hardships environment, travel, or social existence. In the modern world our acts of escape might be quite different. Holidays in the countryside are often an escape from the city and back to «nature», while holidays in the city might be escape from the isolation and boredom of rural life. Escapism can be found in almost anything that removes us from the situation we find ourselves in: a visit to a gallery, a walk in a forest, a boozy night in a club. We have built endless structures to escape: environmentally, geographically, socially, and intellectually. (via Warren Ellis)
«The barricades were up in Paris: everyone was talking about ‘instant revolution’: and when Cohn-Bendit held a question and answer session, I made myself immediately unpopular by asking: ‘What’s your strategy? What is the next step the students will take?’ Cohn-Bendit said impatiently ‘the whole point of our revolution is that we do not follow plans. It is a spontaneous permanent revolution. We improvise it. It is like jazz.’ Everyone applauded and reproved my carping.»
But there was a ghost that haunted the party in the room that night – Clive Goodwin’s young and beautiful wife who had died tragically less than two years before. She was a revolutionary painter and collagist called Pauline Boty.
Pauline Boty and Clive Goodwin had been at the centre of the student movement as it grew in Britain. But the reason Pauline was like a ghost at the party was not just her death, but because she had come from a tradition of revolt that was beginning to disappear from the movement.
Because Pauline had loved America. She wasn’t frightened of it, she loved the powerful images at the heart of American culture, and the deep emotions the music and films evoked in her.
Καλημέρα σας και καλή κυριακίλα.
they said