mardi 28 septembre 2010
At least i'm not a Liar ..... well...
In December 2004, i was living in a squat just behind the Cemetery of Montmartre in the 18th of Paris. I was working enough to have a flat, but i was paid at the time under the tabel. And flat's owners most of the time wants you to have a pay slip with at least THREE TIME the amount of the flat ( at LEAST ). Wich is more absurd than the price of their flat, anyway... So, i was squatting in this shity brand chinese clandestine factory. I had a little bit of cash , and i asked to this girl on myspace if she would let me stay at her's in NYC if i found a ticket to come . She said yes and, as a french cunt, i asked if one of my friend could come, and well ... she said : YES . 384 euros later we were for three weeks in NYC.
As French or generaly European we were educated since we were young to walk a lot, and what really shocked me in NYC was : You can ask for a direction to anybody and no one gonna tell you," yeah it's 10mn that way and after the third on the left it will be an other 25 mn that way ..." Nop , they say you take the line L and that's it . So we decided to get lost in NYC and to walk everywhere from Brooklyn where we were staying. And that's how I 've been introduce to the most incredible type of art in the street . "Homeless Humour". With only a board and a pen they can make your day . Even if it's freezin' cold , they still catch your attention with some clever signs .Or at least, sometimes ... it's honnest .
samedi 25 septembre 2010
If You ain't Got The DO RE MI ....
Where is the garden of eden ? That's the question that everybody is asking to himself .After the interpretation of the Garden is yours . The Okies probably thought it was California during the "Dust Bowl. I went to see again , during a hot summer morning , the adaptation of the John Steinbeck 'Novel , " The Grapes of Wrath " in a cinema in St Germain .
The Dust Bowl , or the Dirty Thirties was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936. Millions of acres of farmland became useless, and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes; many of these families (often known as "Okies", since so many came from Oklahoma) traveled to California and other states, where they found economic conditions little better than those they had left. Owning no land, many traveled from farm to farm picking fruit and other crops at starvation wages.
This song Explain it better :
Woody Guthrie at age 19, met and married his first wife, Mary Jennings, with whom he had three children. With the advent of the Dust Bowl era, Guthrie left Texas, leaving Mary behind, and joined the thousands of Okies who were migrating to California looking for work. Many of his songs are concerned with the conditions faced by these working class people.
Guthrie was born in Okemah in , a small town in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma, to Nora Belle Tanner and Charles Edward Guthrie. His parents named him after Woodrow Wilson, then Governor of New Jersey and the Democratic candidate soon to be elected President of the United States.
Charles Guthrie was an industrious businessman, owning at one time up to 30 plots of land in Okfuskee County. He was actively involved in Oklahoma politics and was a Democratic candidate for office in the county. When Charles was making stump speeches, he would often be accompanied by his son .
I have the strong feeling that in an other way we're living again this horrible situation . When you see more and more peoples , in the streets , in a doorway , in the metro , under a bridge , it's a sign . There is no more Middle - Class , and we kind of know who's behind it . The pictures of Dorothea Lange tells a lot about the pain and the suffering of a whole generation of Okies living from Camp to Camp .
The John Ford movie " The Grapes of Wrath " is for me the beatifull association of the Three Artists I 've mention before . I'm gonna finish with the line i quoted, Henry Fonda as Tom Joad is about to lose his "Grand-Pa" on the side of the Road , helpless to burry him with dignity . And here is what they say :
" The Gouverment care more about the dead rather than the LIVING ."
One of my Favourite song of Woody . Woody Guthrie - Littl' John Henry
Message of Hope
vendredi 24 septembre 2010
It's a Honky Tonk Parade .
Two differents experiences made me thought again about the great movie that " PAPER MOON " is.
My band Melody Syndrome just arrived from London and we were supposed to play one hour after at a new exhibition in le Marais in Paris . After a good hour playing and few drinks to relax from the long journey , i was paying attention to a specific picture . In the 50's and 60's , the cool cats , " blousons noirs" as we say in France , where hanging out in piece of waste land after the WWII or in Funfairs .
( Dig the 1960 movie of Marcel Carné call : " Terrain Vague " )
Paper Moon is a 1973 American motion picture comedy directed by Peter Bogdanovich and released by Paramount Pictures. The screenplay was adapted from the novel Addie Pray by Joe David Brown, and the film was shot in black-and-white. The film is set during the Great Depression in the U.S. state of Kansas and it starred the real life father and daughter pairing of Ryan and Tatum O'Neal, as on-screen father and daughter Moses and Addie.
Here is some scenes of it and the main theme . Enjoy
say It is only a paper moon
sailing over a cardboard sea,
But it wouldn't be make believe
If you believed in me.
yes It is only a canvas sky
Hanging over a muslin tree,
But it wouldn't be make believe
If you believed in me.
Without your love,
It's a honky-tonk parade.
Without your love,
It's a melody played in a penny arcade.
It's a Barnum and Bailey world,
Just as phony as it can be,
But it wouldn't be make believe
If you believed in me.
Without your love,
It's a honky-tonk parade.
Without your love,
It's a melody played in a penny arcade.
It's a Barnum and Bailey world
Just as phony as it can be,
But it wouldn't be make believe
If you believed in me.
jeudi 23 septembre 2010
Lucien Ginsburg are you still dancing with a Gipsy Woman...
O.D.B was listening Woody Guthrie while he was on crack ?
Muddy Waters was making love while listening to Franz Listz?
I have no idea, but what is pretty sure is musicians have their own background, their own food taste, taste in women or man and music influences .
Lucien Ginsburg learned how to play the piano at age 9, even though he only really started to play in bars and café when he was thirty. His father attended Petrograd and Moscow's conservatories . If you were walking in Rue de Chine in the 20th of Paris in the mid 1930's, you probably could've heard some tunes that you would hear another 30 years late . Classical music has invaded Gainsbourg's mind forever. In the following songs, you can clearly see where he's drawn his inspiration. Listen carefully.
Listen carefully at 2:36 mn
Ladislav is a Real Mascot
Here is the story of one of the most talented stop-motion animators of the last century. Take your time and watch "The Mascot" from 1933 carefully. It's a brilliant short movie that gives a good overview of Starevitch's work....
Ladislav Starevich (August 8, 1882 - February 26, 1965), born Władysław Starewicz (Russian: Владисла́в Алекса́ндрович Старе́вич), was a Russian and French stop-motion animator who used insects and animals as his protagonists. (His name can also be spelled Starevitch, Starewich and Starewitch.)
Starewicz had interests in a number of different areas; by 1910 he was director of a museum of natural history in Kaunas. There he made four short live-action documentaries for the museum. For the fifth film, Starewicz wished to record the battle of two stag beetles, but was stymied by the fact that the nocturnal creatures inevitably went to sleep whenever the stage lighting was turned on. Inspired by a viewing of Les allumettes animées [Animated Matches] (1908) by Emile Cohl, Starewicz decided to re-create the fight through stop-motion animation: he removed the legs and mandibles from two beetle carcasses, then re-attached them with wax, creating articulated puppets. The result was the short film Lucanus Cervus (1910), apparently the first animated puppet film with a plot and the natal hour of Polish and Russian animation.
In 1911, Starewicz moved to Moscow and began work with the film company of Aleksandr Khanzhonkov. There he made two dozen films, most of them puppet animations using dead animals. Of these, The Beautiful Leukanida (premiere - 1912), a fairy tale for beetles, earned international acclaim (one British reviewer was tricked into thinking the stars were live trained insects), while The Grasshopper and the Ant (1911) got Starewicz decorated by the czar. But the best-known film of this period, perhaps of his entire career, was Mest' kinematograficheskogo operatora (Revenge of the Kinematograph Cameraman, aka The Cameraman's Revenge) (1912), a cynical work about infidelity and jealousy among the insects. Some of the films made for Khanzhonkov feature live-action/animation interaction. In some cases, the live action consisted of footage of Starewicz's daughter Irina. Particularly worthy of note is Starevich's 41-minute 1913 film The Night Before Christmas, an adaptation of the Nikolai Gogol story of the same name. The 1913 film Terrible Vengeance won the Gold Medal at an international festival in Milan in 1914, being just one of five films which won awards among 1005 contestants.
During World War I, Starewicz worked for several film companies, directing 60 live-action features, some of which were fairly successful. After the October Revolution of 1917, the film community largely sided with the White Army and moved from Moscow to Yalta on the Black Sea. After a brief stay, Starewicz and his family fled before the Red Army could capture the Crimea, stopping in Italy for a while before joining the Russian émigrés in Paris. There, they formed a company in the remains of Georges Méliès' old studio. At this time, Władysław Starewicz changed his name to Ladislas Starevich, easier to pronounce in French. He made one animated film for this studio, The Scarecrow, before the operation was wound up, with most of the Russians joining the Berlin or Hollywood studios.
After World War I
Wishing to remain independent, Starevich moved to Fontenay-sous-Bois and started on a series of puppet films that would last for the rest of his life. In these films he was assisted first by his wife France Starevich and later by his daughter Irina (who had changed her name to Irène). The first of these films was Les Grenouilles qui demandent un roi (The Frogs That Demand a King, aka Frogland [US]) (1922), probably the closest Starevich ever came to political commentary in his French films. Following Aesop's fable of the frogs who demand a king from the god Jupiter and are disappointed by the results, the film shows a clear preference not for the pre-monarchial or decadent democracy (which would likely be the slant of an American or French film), but for King Log's form of libertarian government.During the years at Fontenay-sous-Bois, the Stareviches made two dozen films. Among the most notable are La Voix du rossignol (The Voice of the Nightingale) (1923), a hand-tinted film (some sources say Prizmacolor) starring the young "Nina Starr" (Janina Starevich) and the naturalistic nightingale who convinces her to free him, and Fétiche Mascotte (Duffy the Mascot, aka The Mascot, aka Puppet Love, aka The Devil's Ball) (1934), a long and strange story about a loving dog puppet who practically goes through Hell to get an orange to a girl dying of scurvy, selected by Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time[1]. La Voix du rossignol was awarded the Hugo Riesenfeld Medal for being the "most novel short subject motion picture in the USA during the year 1925".
Often mentioned as being among his best work, The Tale of the Fox (French: Le Roman de Renard, German: Reinicke Fuchs) was also his first animated feature. Although most of the production took place in Paris from 1929–1931, it was finally released in Berlin in 1937 and in France in 1941. It was the third animated feature film to have sound, after Quirino Cristiani's Peludópolis (1931) and The New Gulliver (1935) from the Soviet Union.
Starevich introduced sound and color into his puppet films as soon as they became available. He kept every puppet he made, so stars in one film tended to turn up as supporting characters in later works (the frogs from Grenouilles qui demandent un roi are the oldest of these).
Ladislas Starevich died on 26 February 1965, while working on Comme chien et chat (Like Dog and Cat). It was left unfinished out of respect. He was one of the few European animators to be known by name in America before the 1960s, largely on account of La Voix du rossignol and Fétiche Mascotte (The Tale of the Fox was not widely distributed in the US). His Russian films were known for their dark humor, probably an inevitable consequence of the choice of dead beetles and grasshoppers as subjects. Once he switched to using more ordinary puppets for his French films, his work became more lyrical. However, the fact that he was working independently had the negative effect that the films are sometimes considered too long, too lyrical, and too uncommercial. The films are united, however, by their wild imagination.
Films directed in Russia 1911-1918, (with their original titles in Russian):
- MIEST KINOMATOGRAFICHESKOVO OPERATORA (1911) - The Cameraman’s Revenge
- ROZHDYESTVO OBITATELEI LYESA (1911) - The Insects' Christmas
- STREKOZA I MURAVEI (1911) - The Ant and the Grasshopper
- AVIACIONNAYA NEDELYA NASEKOMYKH (1912) - Insects' Aviation Week
- STRASHNAIA MYEST (1912) - The Terrible Vengeance
- NOCH' PERED ROZHDESTVOM (1912) - The Night before Christmas
- VESELYE SCENKI IZ ZHIZNI ZHIVOTNYKH (1912) - Amusing Scenes from the Life of Insects
- PUTESHESTVIE NA LUNU (1912) - A Journey to the Moon
- RUSLAN I LUDMILLA. (1913) - Ruslan and Ludmilla
- SNEGUROCHKA. (1914) - The Snow Maiden
- PASYNOK MARSA (1914) - Mars’s Stepson
- KAYSER-GOGIEL-MOGIEL (1914) - Gogel-Mogel General
- TROIKA (1914) - Troika
- FLEURS FANEES 1914 - Faded Flowers
- LE CHANT DU BAGNARD (1915) - The Convict's Song
- PORTRET (1915) - (may be produced by the Skobeliew committee) - The Portrait
- LILIYA BEL'GII (1915) - The Lily of Belgium
- ETO TYEBYE PRINADLEZHIT (1915) - It’s Fine for You
- EROS I PSYCHE (1915) - Eros and Psyche
- DVYE VSTRYECHI (1916) - Two Meetings
- LE FAUNE EN LAISSE (1916) - The Chained Faun
- O CHOM SHUMIELO MORIE (1916) - The Murmuring Sea
- TAMAN (1916) - Taman
- NA VARSHAVSKOM TRAKTE (1916) - On The Warsaw Highway
- PAN TWARDOWSKI (1917) - Mister Twardowski
- SASHKA-NAEZDNIK (1917) - Sashka the Horseman
- K NARODNOI VLASTI (1917) - Towards People’s Power
- KALIOSTRO (1918) - Cagliostro
- YOLA (1918) - Iola
- WIJ (1918) - Vij
- SOROTCHINSKAIA YARMAKA (1918) - The Sorotchninsk Fair
- MAISKAYA NOCH (1918) - May Night
- STELLA MARIS (1918) - Starfish
Films directed in France, 1920–1965, (with their original titles in French):
- DANS LES GRIFFES DE L'ARAIGNEE (1920) - In the Claws of the Spider
- LE MARIAGE DE BABYLAS (1921) - Babylas’s Marriage
- L'EPOUVANTAIL (1921) - The Scarecrow
- LES GRENOUILLES QUI DEMANDENT UN ROI (1922) - Frogland
- LA VOIX DU ROSSIGNOL (1923) - The Voice of the Nightingale
- AMOUR NOIR ET BLANC (1923) - Love in Black and White
- LA PETITE CHANTEUSE DES RUES (1924) - The Little Street Singer
- LES YEUX DU DRAGON (1925) - The Eyes of the Dragon
- LE RAT DE VILLE ET LE RAT DES CHAMPS - (1926) The Town Rat and the Country Rat
- LA CIGALE ET LA FOURMI (1927) - The Ant and the Grasshopper
- LA REINE DES PAPILLONS (1927) - The Queen of the Butterflies
- L'HORLOGE MAGIQUE (1928) - The Magic Clock
- LA PETITE PARADE (1928) - The Little Parade
- LE LION ET LE MOUCHERON (1932) - The Lion and the Fly
- LE LION DEVENU VIEUX (1932) - The Old Lion
- FETICHE MASCOTTE (1933) - The Mascot
- FETICHE PRESTIDIGITATEUR (1934) - The Ringmaster
- FETICHE SE MARIE (1935) - The Mascot’s Marriage
- FETICHE EN VOYAGE DE NOCES (1936) - The Navigator
- FETICHE CHEZ LES SIRENES (1937) - The Mascot and the Mermaids
- LE ROMAN DE RENARD. (1930–1939) - The Tale of the Fox
- ZANZABELLE A PARIS (1947) - Zanzabelle in Paris
- FLEUR DE FOUGERE (1949) - Fern Flowers
- GAZOUILLY PETIT OISEAU. (1953) - Little Bird Gazouilly
- GUEULE DE BOIS (1954) - Hangover
- UN DIMANCHE DE GAZOUILLY (1955) - Gazouilly’s Sunday Picnic
- NEZ AU VENT (1956) - Nose to the Wind
- CARROUSEL BOREAL (1958) - Winter Carousel
- COMME CHIEN ET CHAT (1965) - Like Dog and Cat
Ain't No Tellin'
Mississippi John Hurt
Mississippi John Hurt (July 3, 1893 or March 8, 1892— November 2, 1966) was an influential country blues singer and guitarist. He sang in a loud whisper, to a melodious finger-picked guitar accompaniment.In 1963, however, a folk musicologist, Tom Hoskins, inspired by the recordings, was able to locate Hurt near Avalon, Mississippi. Seeing that Hurt's guitar playing skills were still intact, Hoskins encouraged him to move to Washington, D.C., and begin performing on a wider stage. His performance at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival saw his star rise amongst the new folk revival audience. Before his death he played extensively in colleges, concert halls, coffee houses and also on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, as well as recording three further albums for Vanguard Records. Much of his repertoire was recorded for the Library of Congress, also. The numbers his devotees particularly liked were the ragtime songs "Salty Dog" and "Candy Man", and the blues ballads "Spike Driver Blues" (a variant of "John Henry") and "Frankie".
Hurt's influence spanned several music genres including blues, country, bluegrass, folk and contemporary rock and roll. A soft-spoken man, his nature was reflected in the work, which remained a mellow mix of country, blues and old time music to the end.
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