second floor

sasha frere-jones:

A friend just sent me a link to the video for Santogold’s “L.E.S. Artistes,” with the question, “WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?” (I saw Santogold open for Björk last September, and still feel very positively about “Creator.”) These are my guesses as to what this video is about:

1. The traumatic switch from black-and-white to color in the movies, a long shift in preference that did not tip heavily in favor of color until the 1960s. It was hard to choose. They are both nice.

2. Artists being forced out of their lofts on the Lower East Side (even though there are more lofts in Williamsburg and SoHo).

3. A directorial decision to make the performers wear gray and act out clichés of movie violence while substituting brightly colored foodstuffs for traditional red squibs and gore.

4. Santi White’s frustration at not being able to ride a horse.

photo by flickr user sabandija in da house used under a creative commons license

hollywood insider:

How much neurosis can one movie channel? We’re about find out. Larry David, the mind behind Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, is set to be the lead in Woody Allen’s next, as-yet-untitled feature, which is scheduled to shoot in New York City in the spring. Plot details are being kept under wraps, but David will act alongside Evan Rachel Wood (Across the Universe). The movie marks Allen’s return home after he made three films in London and one, the upcoming Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in Spain.

the upcoming vicky cristina barcelona is also making news:

SCARLETT Johansson (below) has a steamy lesbian sex scene with Penelope Cruz in Woody Allen’s upcoming “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” A source tells us: “It is also extremely erotic. People will be blown away and even shocked. Penelope and Scarlett go at it in a red-tinted photography dark room, and it will leave the audience gasping.” The women later have a threesome with Javier Bardem (below), who plays Cruz’s husband. The film also stars Patricia Clarkson, Rebecca Hall, Kevin Dunn and Chris Messina.

…that i’ve seen…

better late than never… (full disclosure: in the realm of “notable” movies, i haven’t seen the diving bell and the butterfly, the savages, margot at the wedding, atonement, or before the devil knows you’re dead)

honorable mentions go to 3:10 to yuma, into the wild, and persepolis

my picks for best actor and actress go to daniel day-lewis in there will be blood and marion cotillard in la vie en rose

10. the assassination of jesse james (written by ron hansen and directed by andrew dominik)

9. cassandra’s dream (written and directed by woody allen…technically 2008 but i’ll let it slide)

8. eastern promises (written by steven knight and directed by david cronenberg)

7. control (written by matt greenhalgh and deborah curtis; directed by anton corbijn)

6. la vie en rose (written by isabelle sobelman and olivier dahan; directed by olivier dahan)

5. rescue dawn (written and directed by werner herzog)

4. michael clayton (written and directed by tony gilroy)

3. the darjeeling limited (written by wes anderson, roman coppola, and jason schwartzman; directed by wes anderson)

2. no country for old men (written and directed by the coen brothers)

1. there will be blood (written and directed by paul thomas anderson)

video released 4 years later (from stones throw’s new dvd):

& the classic “all caps”:

wired:

In the early 1980s, while Groening was making a name for himself as a cartoonist chronicling the punk rock and bohemian subcultures of LA, Cohen was making a name for himself on the New Jersey high school math-team circuit. He went on to study physics at Harvard and get a master’s in computer science from UC Berkeley. But he was also the president of The Harvard Lampoon, and he left academia to write comedy.

After he started working on The Simpsons in 1993, he became fascinated by the “freeze framers” — obsessive fans who videotaped episodes so they could pause them and look for gags that lasted only a split second. So he gave them little Easter eggs. In a 1995 episode in which Homer Simpson enters an alternate universe and becomes a 3-D model, Cohen inserted an equation into the background of one scene. It seemed to offer a counterexample to Fermat’s last theorem. Then he lurked on the alt.tv.simpsons newsgroup to gauge the geek response. (Confusion at first, then astonishment when they tested it, then despair when they discovered that it was accurate only to eight decimal places. D’oh!)

…

After the show (Futurama) got a green light, Cohen assembled the geekiest writing staff television had ever seen: one MA in math, one MA in computer science, one MA in philosophy, one PhD in chemistry, one PhD in applied math, and some normals to balance things out. “I went from Home Improvement, where people earnestly pitched jokes about farting and table saws, to a place where there were discussions about nanophysics and string theory and quantum mechanics,” writer Eric Horsted says. “I could only follow the conversation for a few minutes before my brain would start sweating and I’d have to reach for a copy of People.”

“This issue looks forward, not back, and it’s packed with interviews with the artists, leaders and thinkers who can best divine what our future holds. It arrives, appropriately, during the run-up to next year’s presidential election, which looms as a moment of truth for our nation. “People are nauseous about being perceived as the enemy,” Bono says of America’s standing in the world. “Whoever fixes that problem gets elected.” But it’s not just politics – as a society, we face choices that will likely determine the fate of our civilization, matters of war and peace, resource depletion and explosive population growth. And, of course, global warming: “It’s a mistake to think of the climate crisis as one in a list of issues that will define our future,” Al Gore tells us. “It is the issue.”

We don’t claim to have the answers to these challenges, but we do know where to look for leadership and inspiration. The values of tolerance, inclusiveness, common sense and personal liberty (not to mention fun) that took shape in the 1960s have animated this magazine ever since.”

chock full of wit and wisdom from some of the world’s most interesting minds…

you can find the entire issue digitally right here, but the interface rolling stone set up is really horrible, so i’ve made the text from some of the interviews into pdfs:

BILL CLINTON

BILL GATES

AL GORE

SAM HARRIS

PAUL KRUGMAN

BILL MAHER

JON STEWART

CORNEL WEST

KANYE WEST

here’s some quotes that i’ve culled:

(more…)

political wire:

Not surprisingly, a new Norman Lear Center/Zogby poll reveals that America’s entertainment tastes are as polarized as our political views.

A few of the findings:

• Liberals were much more likely than conservatives to listen to commentary and entertainment with which they disagreed philosophically.
• Fox News wins the prize for the most politically divisive TV channel (70% of conservatives watch it daily and only 3% of liberals).
• Over 82% of conservatives say they never watch MTV.
• Cerebral material like documentaries and arts and educational programming all appeal more to liberals… Conservative viewers are more likely to watch action-adventure, sports, and business programming.
• Conservatives are the least likely group to listen to jazz and reggae… Liberals, on the other hand, are more likely than other respondents to enjoy almost every music genre.

three vignettes from one of my favorite movies, coffee and cigarettes, written and directed by jim jarmusch.

COUSINS with alfred molina and steve coogan (9:13):

DELIRIUM with GZA, RZA, and bill murray (7:42):

(more…)

update: youtube video taken down - here’s a new link.

“The music video to Good Morning by Kanye West & Takashi Murakami ONLY at the Geffen Contemporary - Museum of Contemporary Art in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles CA.

Sorry so shaky in the beginning of the video. I didn’t want security to catch me videotaping the video. Plus the autofocus on my camera gets pretty weird sometimes…”