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Liege & Lief by Fairport Convention
Liege & Lief by Fairport Convention
1969 | Rock
9.0 (1 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"My favourite song is 'Farewell, Farewell' which is this beautiful arrangement, awesome songwriting and then Sandy Denny's voice is just so haunting. But that album is masterfully arranged, masterfully recorded and I love the drum sounds. We were always trying to get the drum sounds to be more Fairport - it's so economical but really funky at the same time and they just have a lot of crazy meters that you don't even notice are shifting from 7/8 to 4/4 because it's carried by these strong folk song lyrics and melodies. But that was a big touchstone for us, especially some of the fiddle style parts. I think Richard Thompson is one of the coolest guitarists out there and there's a Richard & Linda Thompson album, I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, the title song of which is featured on this HBO show [Enlightened]. I thought. ""Is this a Liz Phair song from 1993, what is this?"" and then you discover it and think this song's fucking awesome. Her voice is definitely not as good as Sandy Denny's but it's probably more suited for that kind of 70s pop rock. But there's also this really great song on that album called 'The Calvary Cross', which could be a Lungfish song. He's just a dude who was way ahead of his time and more interesting than someone like Jimmy Page, who's been played to death and is such a rip-off artist!"

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Dirty Dancing  (1987)
Dirty Dancing (1987)
1987 | Drama, Music, Romance

"Finally, we’re going to go with a film that is so culturally relevant that as soon as I say it you’ll be able to quote at least one line from it. We’re going to go with Dirty Dancing. Because, come on, nobody puts Baby in a corner, right? Of course it’s been acted out, it’s been referenced in numerous films. It was in Crazy, Stupid, Love. This is the move that Ryan Gosling does to get the girls, right? And he and Emma Stone reenact this scene. So, you want to talk about a film that just had an amazing soundtrack, the performances were great, and it speaks to the confusion of teenagers growing up, but not in a, I feel like, a “loner” teenager way. There’s been a lot of teenage films where they feel like a loner. This is someone who liked her family, and she was a little irritated with her older sister as siblings tend to be, but she liked her dad and her mom, and when push came to shove at various points, she ran to her dad to help. There was something striking about how all of that worked together in a film that just made you feel good and want to dance and want to take someone to see, and then, how many years later, that film still holds up. And if you don’t believe me, go watch it. It still works."

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The Change 2: New York: The Queen of Coney Island
The Change 2: New York: The Queen of Coney Island
Guy Adams | 2017 | Science Fiction/Fantasy, Young Adult (YA)
6
6.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Very odd
The second book adds no real substance to what exactly happened in "The Change", I think I am just going to have to accept that "things changed".
In the first New York book, we meet Grace, who is trying to reunite with her brother, an inmate of Rikers before The Change. Trying to get safe passage up the Hudson river, she has to ask the Queen of Coney Island for a boat and permission. On the way to do so, she meets up with God (as you do), and enters the former Coney Island amusement park. It is populated with odd people and creatures, some of whom are real, some of whom are formerly real and brought back to life due to the change, others are physical embodiments of ideas and film characters.
Grace and God are given a seemingly simple task to achieve before being given safe passage, but it inevitably turns out to be a very difficult and dangerous one.
The book has a very different feel to the first, London-based one, with a very odd Alice in Wonderland feel to it, with crazy characters helping the one seemingly normal one to her goal.
The one thing that is consistent with the London book is the feeling of wanting more at the end. This time the character had a goal and (spoiler alert) she didn't achieve it by the end of the book.
  

“I was so touched by this book. I relate to Ronda in such an intense way, like I’ve almost never related to anybody my age – at least in the media. As a female producer who won’t work with co-producers, sometimes I feel like I don’t have any peers. When I first discovered Ronda, I was so moved that she was literally responsible for women entering the Ultimate Fighting Championship; that she walked into a man’s world and made it her own, even though everybody acted like she was crazy and didn’t think she could do it, or claimed that she only got there because of her looks. Everything, from being constantly exhausted because of eating issues, to the shame at being considered too masculine, to having no coach or mentor willing to train you, is something I have dealt with being a woman in a man’s industry. I also completely understand the commitment to being an entertainer whilst simultaneously perfecting your craft, and the kind of vitriol that this inspires from people on either end of the spectrum. Her dedication to being an autodidact, and the degree to which she has to train mentally to deal with the long hours and exhausting work, really struck me as both instructive and deeply relatable. This book changed my life, and made me feel so much less alone. I think all girls should read it.”

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Bo Burnham recommended Fat Girls (2006) in Movies (curated)

 
Fat Girls (2006)
Fat Girls (2006)
2006 | Comedy
(0 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"I would probably say À ma soeur!, the Catherine Breillat film. If you could put that title instead of Fat Girl. I’m just kidding. I don’t really like saying my movie is related to that. I do think Catherine Breillat is brilliant and her movies have so much psychological weight to them. Those two sisters, they’re just, like, titanic, in terms of the conflict between them. The sexual scene with the boy is one of the most charged, terrifying, strange, impossible-to-describe scenes ever, that long take. The sort of depth of… Anaïs? The main girl? Just the depth of her look, how significant her neutral look and gaze is. Her stare is one of the best stares ever. And I stole the swimsuit from that movie and put it in my movie. I just completely stole the lime green one-piece and put it in my movie. I just love Catherine Breillat. I just think she’s incredibly smart. It’s very exciting, and it’s a sign of a really incredible director to show how much tension and tone can be wrought out of a scene of a younger sister staring out of her covers at her older sister from the bed across the room. It’s kind of incredible how powerful and charged that movie feels before it becomes insane at the end. To me, the brutality and shock of the ending, I was feeling throughout the entire movie. It’s just crazy when it shows up literally."

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Morgan Spurlock recommended Scanners (1981) in Movies (curated)

 
Scanners (1981)
Scanners (1981)
1981 | Horror, Sci-Fi

"My fifth film — it’s the movie that literally got me wanting to make movies to begin with — is the David Cronenberg film Scanners. When I was a kid, I was a little weird kid, and I loved horror films, I loved gore films. When Michael Ironside made that guy’s head explode in that movie, I was like, “Whatever this is, I want to do this!” I was ten, eleven years old, and my parents would take me to see these. Like, I saw The Exorcist in movie theaters; I saw The Evil Dead in a movie theater. I went to see all this crazy, freaky s*** that you would never take a little kid to see today. But I saw Jaws in a movie theater. Like, I wanted to see all these scary movies, and my parents were like, “Absolutely. Let’s go.” And so here I was, as a teenager, learning how to make my own blood, and my own scars and wounds. I wanted to be Rick Baker or Tom Savini. When I was a kid, that’s who I looked up to. When I saw An American Werewolf in London, it was phenomenal, to see all those makeup special effects they were doing. And then when I went to high school and learned you could actually go to college to study film and learn how to make movies, I was like, “I’m in. That’s exactly what I want to do.”"

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Journey in Satchidananda by Alice Coltrane
Journey in Satchidananda by Alice Coltrane
1971 | Rock
7.0 (1 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"I can't pronounce it either! It's a fantastic record. It's got such a gorgeous mellow vibe to it. It's kind of accessible to people who aren't familiar with jazz, but it also has kind of this free, loose thing. It's not free jazz, it's definitely modal. It's got Pharoah Sanders on it. It's lush and gorgeous and kind of takes you to a different place. Sometimes Alice Coltrane plays the harp, which sounds dreamy. It's one of my go-to's in the morning at work (in Sub Pop) I just kind of put it on to get me going. I probably drive some of my co-workers crazy playing it. You know, there's not a really obvious influence in our music that comes from jazz. I know I'm influenced by it, but I'm not sure how. I don't like all jazz, but certain things I love to death. That's the problem with this list: I can't stick Charles Mingus on it, or Andrew Hill, or Ornette Coleman, or Albert Ayler. One of the things I feel lucky about, my high school friends and I who formed Mr. Epp, we would go to our little record store in our suburban town and the guys there turned us onto The New York Dolls and Ornette Coleman and Ayler and The Velvet Underground, Brian Eno. I feel really lucky to have stumbled into that, at that time."

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