Amazon's S3 in conjuction with Jungle Disk
Carbonite
Mozy
Monday, August 31, 2009
Save Karyn - Home
Save Karyn - Home
Missed this the first time 'round.
Hard to believe blogging was once so new that you could raise 20 grand just be asking for it.
Like Julie & Julia, the days of making it big with a blog are gone.
Maybe twitter...
Or better yet, think of something even newer...
Missed this the first time 'round.
Hard to believe blogging was once so new that you could raise 20 grand just be asking for it.
Like Julie & Julia, the days of making it big with a blog are gone.
Maybe twitter...
Or better yet, think of something even newer...
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Monday, August 24, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
actors
Corey Dudley - silent movies
Nacho Figuroa - played character actor roles, Italian bartender, etc.
Nacho Figuroa - played character actor roles, Italian bartender, etc.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
The Cakes - a set on Flickr - Gaetan Lee
The Cakes - a set on Flickr
Gaetan Lee
Cakes that have been made for a friends wedding.
Based on the folowing recipe from sainsbury magazine:
For the cake
125g unsalted butter
150g light muscavado sugar
2 medium size eggs
150g self raising flour
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
5ml spoon ground ginger
125g finely grated carrot
50ml milk
For the cream cheese filling
200g soft cream cheese
75g icing sugar
grated zest of 1 lemon
For decoration
250ml vegetable oil
1 carrot, peeled into thin strips with a potato peeler
zest of 1 lemon, cut into thin strips (julienne)
125g sugar
125g caster sugar
Preheat the oven to 190°C, 375°F, gas mark 5. Have ready two 18cm non-stick sandwich tins.
Cream the butter and muscavado sugar in a bowl until light in colour.
Gradually add the eggs, beating well after each addition.
Fold in the flour and spices.
Stir in the fruit, nuts, carrot and milk. Divide the mixture between the cake tins.
Bake on the middle oven shelf in the preheated oven for 30 minutes. Turn onto a wire rack to cool.
To make the filling; cream the cheese and sugar in a bowl by hand, taking care not overmix. Add the lemon.
Heat the oil in a saucepan to 175°C and fry the carrot strips until crispy, drain on absorbent kitchen paper and sprinkle with caster sugar.
Place the julienned lemon zest into a pan of water and bring to the boil. Strain the lemon and refresh under cold water. Repeat this process, then return the lemon to the pan and cover with 75ml of water and add 75g sugar and cook on a low heat for 5 minutes until the zest is soft, remove from the sticky syrup and roll in caster sugar.
Sandwich the sponges together with half of the cheese mix. Spread the remaining half on top and sprinkle the crispy carrot, sugared zest and toasted nuts over the cake.
Gaetan Lee
Cakes that have been made for a friends wedding.
Based on the folowing recipe from sainsbury magazine:
For the cake
125g unsalted butter
150g light muscavado sugar
2 medium size eggs
150g self raising flour
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
5ml spoon ground ginger
125g finely grated carrot
50ml milk
For the cream cheese filling
200g soft cream cheese
75g icing sugar
grated zest of 1 lemon
For decoration
250ml vegetable oil
1 carrot, peeled into thin strips with a potato peeler
zest of 1 lemon, cut into thin strips (julienne)
125g sugar
125g caster sugar
Preheat the oven to 190°C, 375°F, gas mark 5. Have ready two 18cm non-stick sandwich tins.
Cream the butter and muscavado sugar in a bowl until light in colour.
Gradually add the eggs, beating well after each addition.
Fold in the flour and spices.
Stir in the fruit, nuts, carrot and milk. Divide the mixture between the cake tins.
Bake on the middle oven shelf in the preheated oven for 30 minutes. Turn onto a wire rack to cool.
To make the filling; cream the cheese and sugar in a bowl by hand, taking care not overmix. Add the lemon.
Heat the oil in a saucepan to 175°C and fry the carrot strips until crispy, drain on absorbent kitchen paper and sprinkle with caster sugar.
Place the julienned lemon zest into a pan of water and bring to the boil. Strain the lemon and refresh under cold water. Repeat this process, then return the lemon to the pan and cover with 75ml of water and add 75g sugar and cook on a low heat for 5 minutes until the zest is soft, remove from the sticky syrup and roll in caster sugar.
Sandwich the sponges together with half of the cheese mix. Spread the remaining half on top and sprinkle the crispy carrot, sugared zest and toasted nuts over the cake.
Julie, Julia and me: Now it can be told - latimes.com
Julie, Julia and me: Now it can be told - latimes.com
latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-calcook12-2009aug12,0,7986229.story
latimes.com
THE CALIFORNIA COOK
Julie, Julia and me: Now it can be told
Nora Ephron's 'Julie & Julia' gets the tale just right.
By Russ Parsons
August 12, 2009
Quantcast
At a certain point in the wonderful new movie "Julie & Julia," there is a plot twist so shocking the audience gasps. Julia Child does something that seems so totally out of character that even on the way out, people were still shaking their heads. "How could she?" Well, that's one mystery I can solve. I was right there in the middle of it.
Before I go any further, I have to warn you that this column is as full of spoilers as an unplugged refrigerator in August. If you haven't already seen the movie, you might want to wait to read this until after you have.
And you certainly should see it. "Julie & Julia" is superb on so many levels. It's a terrific story to begin with, how two women from completely different generations claim their identities through food.
Meryl Streep is astonishing. The way she captures Julia Child is something special. Streep inhabits her in a way that is eerie. Watch her move: Pay attention to the way she holds her elbows and cocks her head. That's Julia.
More important, while Streep certainly gets Julia's sometimes loopy enthusiasm, she also gets the deep seriousness that was obvious only to those who knew her fairly well. This is no Dan Aykroyd skit; this is Julia Child with gravitas, which is to say the real Julia Child. In fact, leaving the theater and looking at the poster, I had to remind myself that Julia Child did NOT have Meryl Streep's face.
Amy Adams is also appealing as Julie Powell, the blogger who set herself the task of cooking completely through Julia's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in a single year. And writing about it on her blog (which she later turned into a book). That likability is no small trick when playing a character whose main literary attribute was pretty much one endless whine.
All of that only makes the plot twist so much more shocking. When Julie is told late in the movie that Julia Child doesn't like the blog, she collapses in tears.
And we wonder too. How could Julia do such a thing?
The scoop
Ahem, I'm pretty much knee-deep in that episode. I was the first writer for a major newspaper to write about the "Julie/Julia" blog. (I know, never mind what the movie says: Check the publication dates and you'll see that my story ran almost a full month before the Christian Science Monitor's; and don't even get me started on my good friend former New York Times food writer Amanda Hesser nabbing an actual appearance in the film, skinny little witch.)
When Julia had moved to her retirement home in Montecito, I had taken advantage of her proximity to deepen what up to that time had been a cordial professional friendship. Whenever I traveled north, I would make a point to see her, bring her lunch, take her to dinner, even just stop for a drink and a chat. I was so lucky.
When I found "The Julie/Julia Project" online, I was fascinated by it. It seemed to me that finally here was a cooking blog that was succeeding on its own literary terms. Rather than mimicking mainstream media, Powell was taking what works best about blogs -- the intimate feeling of sharing someone's innermost thoughts in something approaching real time -- and using it to write about cooking.
"Julie/Julia" worked brilliantly, particularly when read in short bursts. Powell created a likable character (well, as I said, in short bursts), and the plot had a genuine sense of suspense -- remember, it was being posted as it happened, so you really didn't know whether she would finish or crash and burn. This was true both in the short term (could she succeed with a dish?) and the long (could she really keep her sanity through 524 recipes?).
Of course, I was also interested in what Julia might think about it. So I printed out the whole thing and took it up to her. She hadn't heard about it, but promised to have a look and get back to me.
I didn't hear from her for several days, so eventually I called her up. "So Julia," I asked, "what do you think?"
There was a silence as she gathered her thoughts. Then in that familiar reedy voice she nailed the answer: "Well," she said, "she just doesn't seem very serious, does she?
"I worked very hard on that book. I tested and retested those recipes for eight years so that everybody could cook them. And many, many people have. I don't understand how she could have problems with them. She just must not be much of a cook."
She asked me not to quote her, and after thinking it over, I didn't, choosing a valued friendship over a couple of juicy paragraphs in a story. I'm still not sure it was the right call, but there you have it.
So that solves part of the mystery of Julia's dis: professional pride.
This won't come as a surprise to anyone who knew her well. One of the marvelous things about Julia Child was that even with all of the honors she had earned, she still approached her work with the earnestness (and competitiveness) of a beginner.
At food conferences, you could always count on her being in the front row taking notes. And she fretted over her work as much as any first-time author. I remember being at her table at a book awards dinner when "Julia and Jacques," her terrific work with friend Jacques Pepin, was passed over for book of the year.
I know from hard experience that losing awards competitions is a gut-churning business. But I do take some comfort in the fact that it was obviously just as hard for Julia Child as it has been for me.
In character
Still, I think there was more to Julia's reaction to the blog than simple professional pride. Another possible objection could have been that even though Julia wore her icon status lightly, she protected it vigilantly. She never allowed her name to be used to promote a commercial product.
In the case of the Julie/Julia blog, the line between affectionate hommage and commercial piggybacking is hazy and probably depends on which side of it you find yourself.
But even more to the point is a deeper matter of character. While I don't think Julia was at all put off by Julie Powell's character's constant drinking and swearing, I do think her constant complaining was part of what Julia perceived as a lack of seriousness.
Nora Ephron captures this quite delicately in the movie, juxtaposing two key scenes. When Powell learns that Julia doesn't think much of her blog, she collapses in a sodden heap, wailing, "Julia hates me!"
Compare that with Julia's reaction when she gets the letter informing her that her prospective publisher has decided not to go ahead with her book, something she has spent almost a decade perfecting.
"Eight years of my life. It just turned out to be something to do, so I wouldn't have nothing to do," she says, obviously heartbroken. "Oh, well. Boo-hoo. Now what?"
Julia Child was part of the generation that had seen Depression and war. She had known bad times, and she believed that the only way to meet them was head-on. You picked yourself up, dusted yourself off and got on your way.
The first time we visited her at the assisted living center in Montecito, my wife commented on her apartment, and Julia replied matter-of-factly, "Yes, it's a nice little pad. But it's the kind of place they take you out feet first."
I don't think she could begin to know what to think about the blogging generation, where a beef stew can result in 800 words of anguish.
Come to think of it -- just pipe-dreaming here -- wouldn't it be great if in addition to absorbing Julia's love of food and zest for life, a few moviegoers picked up on a little of that character as well?
russ.parsons@latimes.com
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-calcook12-2009aug12,0,7986229.story
latimes.com
THE CALIFORNIA COOK
Julie, Julia and me: Now it can be told
Nora Ephron's 'Julie & Julia' gets the tale just right.
By Russ Parsons
August 12, 2009
Quantcast
At a certain point in the wonderful new movie "Julie & Julia," there is a plot twist so shocking the audience gasps. Julia Child does something that seems so totally out of character that even on the way out, people were still shaking their heads. "How could she?" Well, that's one mystery I can solve. I was right there in the middle of it.
Before I go any further, I have to warn you that this column is as full of spoilers as an unplugged refrigerator in August. If you haven't already seen the movie, you might want to wait to read this until after you have.
And you certainly should see it. "Julie & Julia" is superb on so many levels. It's a terrific story to begin with, how two women from completely different generations claim their identities through food.
Meryl Streep is astonishing. The way she captures Julia Child is something special. Streep inhabits her in a way that is eerie. Watch her move: Pay attention to the way she holds her elbows and cocks her head. That's Julia.
More important, while Streep certainly gets Julia's sometimes loopy enthusiasm, she also gets the deep seriousness that was obvious only to those who knew her fairly well. This is no Dan Aykroyd skit; this is Julia Child with gravitas, which is to say the real Julia Child. In fact, leaving the theater and looking at the poster, I had to remind myself that Julia Child did NOT have Meryl Streep's face.
Amy Adams is also appealing as Julie Powell, the blogger who set herself the task of cooking completely through Julia's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in a single year. And writing about it on her blog (which she later turned into a book). That likability is no small trick when playing a character whose main literary attribute was pretty much one endless whine.
All of that only makes the plot twist so much more shocking. When Julie is told late in the movie that Julia Child doesn't like the blog, she collapses in tears.
And we wonder too. How could Julia do such a thing?
The scoop
Ahem, I'm pretty much knee-deep in that episode. I was the first writer for a major newspaper to write about the "Julie/Julia" blog. (I know, never mind what the movie says: Check the publication dates and you'll see that my story ran almost a full month before the Christian Science Monitor's; and don't even get me started on my good friend former New York Times food writer Amanda Hesser nabbing an actual appearance in the film, skinny little witch.)
When Julia had moved to her retirement home in Montecito, I had taken advantage of her proximity to deepen what up to that time had been a cordial professional friendship. Whenever I traveled north, I would make a point to see her, bring her lunch, take her to dinner, even just stop for a drink and a chat. I was so lucky.
When I found "The Julie/Julia Project" online, I was fascinated by it. It seemed to me that finally here was a cooking blog that was succeeding on its own literary terms. Rather than mimicking mainstream media, Powell was taking what works best about blogs -- the intimate feeling of sharing someone's innermost thoughts in something approaching real time -- and using it to write about cooking.
"Julie/Julia" worked brilliantly, particularly when read in short bursts. Powell created a likable character (well, as I said, in short bursts), and the plot had a genuine sense of suspense -- remember, it was being posted as it happened, so you really didn't know whether she would finish or crash and burn. This was true both in the short term (could she succeed with a dish?) and the long (could she really keep her sanity through 524 recipes?).
Of course, I was also interested in what Julia might think about it. So I printed out the whole thing and took it up to her. She hadn't heard about it, but promised to have a look and get back to me.
I didn't hear from her for several days, so eventually I called her up. "So Julia," I asked, "what do you think?"
There was a silence as she gathered her thoughts. Then in that familiar reedy voice she nailed the answer: "Well," she said, "she just doesn't seem very serious, does she?
"I worked very hard on that book. I tested and retested those recipes for eight years so that everybody could cook them. And many, many people have. I don't understand how she could have problems with them. She just must not be much of a cook."
She asked me not to quote her, and after thinking it over, I didn't, choosing a valued friendship over a couple of juicy paragraphs in a story. I'm still not sure it was the right call, but there you have it.
So that solves part of the mystery of Julia's dis: professional pride.
This won't come as a surprise to anyone who knew her well. One of the marvelous things about Julia Child was that even with all of the honors she had earned, she still approached her work with the earnestness (and competitiveness) of a beginner.
At food conferences, you could always count on her being in the front row taking notes. And she fretted over her work as much as any first-time author. I remember being at her table at a book awards dinner when "Julia and Jacques," her terrific work with friend Jacques Pepin, was passed over for book of the year.
I know from hard experience that losing awards competitions is a gut-churning business. But I do take some comfort in the fact that it was obviously just as hard for Julia Child as it has been for me.
In character
Still, I think there was more to Julia's reaction to the blog than simple professional pride. Another possible objection could have been that even though Julia wore her icon status lightly, she protected it vigilantly. She never allowed her name to be used to promote a commercial product.
In the case of the Julie/Julia blog, the line between affectionate hommage and commercial piggybacking is hazy and probably depends on which side of it you find yourself.
But even more to the point is a deeper matter of character. While I don't think Julia was at all put off by Julie Powell's character's constant drinking and swearing, I do think her constant complaining was part of what Julia perceived as a lack of seriousness.
Nora Ephron captures this quite delicately in the movie, juxtaposing two key scenes. When Powell learns that Julia doesn't think much of her blog, she collapses in a sodden heap, wailing, "Julia hates me!"
Compare that with Julia's reaction when she gets the letter informing her that her prospective publisher has decided not to go ahead with her book, something she has spent almost a decade perfecting.
"Eight years of my life. It just turned out to be something to do, so I wouldn't have nothing to do," she says, obviously heartbroken. "Oh, well. Boo-hoo. Now what?"
Julia Child was part of the generation that had seen Depression and war. She had known bad times, and she believed that the only way to meet them was head-on. You picked yourself up, dusted yourself off and got on your way.
The first time we visited her at the assisted living center in Montecito, my wife commented on her apartment, and Julia replied matter-of-factly, "Yes, it's a nice little pad. But it's the kind of place they take you out feet first."
I don't think she could begin to know what to think about the blogging generation, where a beef stew can result in 800 words of anguish.
Come to think of it -- just pipe-dreaming here -- wouldn't it be great if in addition to absorbing Julia's love of food and zest for life, a few moviegoers picked up on a little of that character as well?
russ.parsons@latimes.com
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
Friday, August 14, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
Sunday, August 09, 2009
The weirdo element | Film | The Guardian
The weirdo element | Film | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/mar/02/5/print
guardian.co.uk home
* Culture
* Film
The weirdo element
At first, their only audiences were freaks, geeks and hippies - but these films would change pop culture for ever. John Patterson salutes the midnight movie
* John Patterson
*
o John Patterson
o The Guardian, Friday 2 March 2007
o larger | smaller
o Article history
Pink Flamingos
Monstrous... Pink Flamingos
I first learned the intertwined meanings of the terms "midnight movie" and "cult movie" when I was living in Washington, DC, in 1981. A nice-if-rather-square friend of mine asked if I fancied checking out a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at an arts cinema in the posh Georgetown neighbourhood.
1. Midnight Movies: From The Margins To The Mainstream
2. Release: 2005
3. Countries: Rest of the world, USA
4. Cert (UK): NC
5. Runtime: 88 mins
6. Directors: Stuart Samuels
7. More on this film
I said yes, but in truth I wasn't all that amped up at the prospect. The stage musical had been running in London for years by then, and the show's soundtrack was familiar to me, seeping into my subconsciousness along with all the English punk that had so upended my teenage mind in the previous few years. For anyone weaned on gender-teasing glam rock and in-your-face punk, all these trannies, camp sci-fi spoofs and retro rock'n'roll singalongs - this adult panto - seemed very tame by comparison.
Come the night, a good third of the audience turned up in ratty-looking homemade versions of the movie's costumes and took their places on the stage beneath the screen. Audience participation was the order of the night, and I was aware even then, even through a miasma of beer and weed, that the rituals being enacted before my eyes were also happening, at precisely the same moment, in about 200 cinemas all across America.
A wedding kicks off the movie, and suddenly the air in the cinema was filled with hundreds of handfuls of rice, which remained in my hair for days afterwards. Every time anyone on the screen addressed the character Brad, the entire auditorium screamed, in unison, "ASSHOLE!" During the songs, the motley posse of cross-dressers and Franken-tributes yowled along in delirious ecstasy, some elbowing others out of the way to nab more limelight.
There was constant interaction between audience and screen, with returning fans (some of them back for the 100th time) interpolating lines they had sat up all week figuring out. One that lingers in my mind came when Tim Curry's Frank-N-Furter turns to take his captive guests to another of his castle's chambers. A perfectly timed voice rang out from the cheap seats, "Hey, Frank-N-Furter, what's yer favourite high-protein health drink?" At which Curry turned to the camera, beckoned us with a scarlet talon and boomed, "COME!"
It was a lot of fun, even for those of us who kept our seats. A good half of the audience was composed of suburbanites who came to jeer at the weirdoes and sissy boys on stage, but by the end pretty much everyone had got into the spirit of things, screaming along to "Let's Do the Time Warp" at the tops of their lungs.
Afterwards, in the street outside, I found the oddballs and cross-dressers an eclectic and likable bunch, the first cool, switched-on and subversive people I ever met in this country. If you had one iota of weirdness in your DNA, these midnight shows of hitherto unheard-of movies, such as Pink Flamingos, Eraserhead, Night of the Living Dead, Freaks, Harold and Maude, Plan Nine From Outer Space and The Honeymoon Killers were like a second home.
That circuit, whose magnificent and sleazy heyday lasted from about 1970 until the mid-80s, was one of the many oddball places in which was incubated much of the mainstream popular culture we know now. The title of a documentary on the phenomenon tells it all: Midnight Movies: From the Margins to the Mainstream. It's based on the still-definitive 1983 survey, Midnight Movies, by two of America's best male film critics, Jonathan Rosenbaum and J Hoberman, who also appear as commentators, and it examines the crucial role of six cult classics in changing American cinema forever.
The success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show was the beginning of the mainstreaming - perhaps the beginning of the end - of this defiantly marginal subculture, which had diffuse roots in the communal movie-going practices of the New York avant garde and campus-based 60s counterculture, and which was doomed, along with the drive-in and grindhouse movie cultures, by the advent of the VCR and cable television. Until their demise, they offered us oddballs a place to enact quasi-primitive nocturnal rites of extreme fandom and audience participation that, all these years later, linger in my mind as the happiest movie-going experiences of my life.
The New York underground of the early 60s blazed the trail that midnight movies would later follow. Movies such as Flaming Creatures by Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger's mid-period biker-centric films and Andy Warhol shorts were guaranteed to offend the censors and the NYPD vice squad, and they surely did. Meanwhile, at campus freak-outs and rock clubs across the country, psychedelic light shows were intermingled with Marx Brothers movies, Laurel and Hardy and WC Fields shorts - anything that looked incongruous when set against the swirling paisley- and buckskin-clad hippy masses. Sixties Hollywood was a joke to these people, who instead delved deeply in the vaults to rediscover and reclaim forgotten crap such as Ed Wood's movies, Reefer Madness and wonderfully psychotic oddities including Nightmare Alley and Freaks. They constituted the first outlines of a parallel alternative canon of memorable movies now thoroughly integrated into our broader understanding of film culture.
The first genuine midnight movie hit was Alejandro Jodorovsky's malevolently mystical Mexican western El Topo, which appeared out of nowhere at the Elgin Theater in Manhattan and sold out every show for nine months, mainly on the basis of heavy return traffic. John Lennon, then a local resident, loved it and persuaded his manager, Allen Klein, to acquire the distribution rights (which later doomed the movie to three decades of utter unavailability, only lately resolved). Until then, the movie had subsisted on word-of-mouth and a single weekly ad in the Village Voice, though Pauline Kael had slammed the movie in a review entitled, accurately, "El Poto". Meanwhile, other movies and directors were moving in.
John Waters spent the winter of 1971-72 making his fabulously nauseating Pink Flamingos. Waters had spent the 60s in thrall to the avant-garde New York scene, and had created a parallel movie environment for outcasts in his hometown of Baltimore, with premieres of his movies held in church halls and local dives. It was Pink Flamingos' sheer visual extremity and taboo-smashing glee - the shit-eating, the Singing Asshole, the castrations and deviant faux-sex - that pulled in the crowds once the movie moved to the Elgin in early 1973. In his wonderful autobiography, Shock Value, Waters recalled his favourite review, from Variety, under the headline: "Dregs of Human Perversity Draws Weirdo Element. Monstrous." Yeah - that was us, all right.
What connected these unlikely hits was their unimpeachable distance from the infrastructure that nourished conventional Hollywood cinema. Waters made his films with little more than pocket-change, recovered garbage and a demented sense of lapsed-Catholic iconoclasm. George Romero made Night of the Living Dead for $6,000 (it had made $12m by 1983). The last great midnight movie, David Lynch's Eraserhead, released in 1977, had been lovingly crafted over years in a lonely attic on the Philadelphia campus of the American Film Institute. Without the midnight circuit, none of these movies, all of them now American classics, would ever have been seen.
I'm so proud to have witnessed the late glory of the midnight movie. Some of my most lasting movie experiences were had in these mouldy fleapits: Night of the Living Dead and Eraserhead on a double-bill in some squalid Baltimore dump reeking of pot; Pink Flamingos at midnight on July 4 1981, again in Baltimore; and a heaped helping of sex, weirdness and ultraviolence at regular midnight shows throughout DC.
Signs of the mainstreaming to come were all about us even then, though. The very books that alerted me to this trove of strange films - Danny Peary's Cult Movies, Michael and Harry Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards, Shock Value - were a sure indication that the phenomenon was slowly dying. And it happened quickly. At some point in 1980 I saw Romero's Dawn of the Dead at a conventionally freaky midnight screening; a year later, I saw it again at the snooty and prestigious Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in DC. In that journey to a peerlessly clean and giant arthouse were concealed the plaintive dying pangs of a lovely and inspiring moviegoing tradition.
· Midnight Movies shows at the ICA, London SW1, from March 23. John Patterson writes about the "grindhouse" movie circuit in The Guide tomorrow
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/mar/02/5/print
guardian.co.uk home
* Culture
* Film
The weirdo element
At first, their only audiences were freaks, geeks and hippies - but these films would change pop culture for ever. John Patterson salutes the midnight movie
* John Patterson
*
o John Patterson
o The Guardian, Friday 2 March 2007
o larger | smaller
o Article history
Pink Flamingos
Monstrous... Pink Flamingos
I first learned the intertwined meanings of the terms "midnight movie" and "cult movie" when I was living in Washington, DC, in 1981. A nice-if-rather-square friend of mine asked if I fancied checking out a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at an arts cinema in the posh Georgetown neighbourhood.
1. Midnight Movies: From The Margins To The Mainstream
2. Release: 2005
3. Countries: Rest of the world, USA
4. Cert (UK): NC
5. Runtime: 88 mins
6. Directors: Stuart Samuels
7. More on this film
I said yes, but in truth I wasn't all that amped up at the prospect. The stage musical had been running in London for years by then, and the show's soundtrack was familiar to me, seeping into my subconsciousness along with all the English punk that had so upended my teenage mind in the previous few years. For anyone weaned on gender-teasing glam rock and in-your-face punk, all these trannies, camp sci-fi spoofs and retro rock'n'roll singalongs - this adult panto - seemed very tame by comparison.
Come the night, a good third of the audience turned up in ratty-looking homemade versions of the movie's costumes and took their places on the stage beneath the screen. Audience participation was the order of the night, and I was aware even then, even through a miasma of beer and weed, that the rituals being enacted before my eyes were also happening, at precisely the same moment, in about 200 cinemas all across America.
A wedding kicks off the movie, and suddenly the air in the cinema was filled with hundreds of handfuls of rice, which remained in my hair for days afterwards. Every time anyone on the screen addressed the character Brad, the entire auditorium screamed, in unison, "ASSHOLE!" During the songs, the motley posse of cross-dressers and Franken-tributes yowled along in delirious ecstasy, some elbowing others out of the way to nab more limelight.
There was constant interaction between audience and screen, with returning fans (some of them back for the 100th time) interpolating lines they had sat up all week figuring out. One that lingers in my mind came when Tim Curry's Frank-N-Furter turns to take his captive guests to another of his castle's chambers. A perfectly timed voice rang out from the cheap seats, "Hey, Frank-N-Furter, what's yer favourite high-protein health drink?" At which Curry turned to the camera, beckoned us with a scarlet talon and boomed, "COME!"
It was a lot of fun, even for those of us who kept our seats. A good half of the audience was composed of suburbanites who came to jeer at the weirdoes and sissy boys on stage, but by the end pretty much everyone had got into the spirit of things, screaming along to "Let's Do the Time Warp" at the tops of their lungs.
Afterwards, in the street outside, I found the oddballs and cross-dressers an eclectic and likable bunch, the first cool, switched-on and subversive people I ever met in this country. If you had one iota of weirdness in your DNA, these midnight shows of hitherto unheard-of movies, such as Pink Flamingos, Eraserhead, Night of the Living Dead, Freaks, Harold and Maude, Plan Nine From Outer Space and The Honeymoon Killers were like a second home.
That circuit, whose magnificent and sleazy heyday lasted from about 1970 until the mid-80s, was one of the many oddball places in which was incubated much of the mainstream popular culture we know now. The title of a documentary on the phenomenon tells it all: Midnight Movies: From the Margins to the Mainstream. It's based on the still-definitive 1983 survey, Midnight Movies, by two of America's best male film critics, Jonathan Rosenbaum and J Hoberman, who also appear as commentators, and it examines the crucial role of six cult classics in changing American cinema forever.
The success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show was the beginning of the mainstreaming - perhaps the beginning of the end - of this defiantly marginal subculture, which had diffuse roots in the communal movie-going practices of the New York avant garde and campus-based 60s counterculture, and which was doomed, along with the drive-in and grindhouse movie cultures, by the advent of the VCR and cable television. Until their demise, they offered us oddballs a place to enact quasi-primitive nocturnal rites of extreme fandom and audience participation that, all these years later, linger in my mind as the happiest movie-going experiences of my life.
The New York underground of the early 60s blazed the trail that midnight movies would later follow. Movies such as Flaming Creatures by Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger's mid-period biker-centric films and Andy Warhol shorts were guaranteed to offend the censors and the NYPD vice squad, and they surely did. Meanwhile, at campus freak-outs and rock clubs across the country, psychedelic light shows were intermingled with Marx Brothers movies, Laurel and Hardy and WC Fields shorts - anything that looked incongruous when set against the swirling paisley- and buckskin-clad hippy masses. Sixties Hollywood was a joke to these people, who instead delved deeply in the vaults to rediscover and reclaim forgotten crap such as Ed Wood's movies, Reefer Madness and wonderfully psychotic oddities including Nightmare Alley and Freaks. They constituted the first outlines of a parallel alternative canon of memorable movies now thoroughly integrated into our broader understanding of film culture.
The first genuine midnight movie hit was Alejandro Jodorovsky's malevolently mystical Mexican western El Topo, which appeared out of nowhere at the Elgin Theater in Manhattan and sold out every show for nine months, mainly on the basis of heavy return traffic. John Lennon, then a local resident, loved it and persuaded his manager, Allen Klein, to acquire the distribution rights (which later doomed the movie to three decades of utter unavailability, only lately resolved). Until then, the movie had subsisted on word-of-mouth and a single weekly ad in the Village Voice, though Pauline Kael had slammed the movie in a review entitled, accurately, "El Poto". Meanwhile, other movies and directors were moving in.
John Waters spent the winter of 1971-72 making his fabulously nauseating Pink Flamingos. Waters had spent the 60s in thrall to the avant-garde New York scene, and had created a parallel movie environment for outcasts in his hometown of Baltimore, with premieres of his movies held in church halls and local dives. It was Pink Flamingos' sheer visual extremity and taboo-smashing glee - the shit-eating, the Singing Asshole, the castrations and deviant faux-sex - that pulled in the crowds once the movie moved to the Elgin in early 1973. In his wonderful autobiography, Shock Value, Waters recalled his favourite review, from Variety, under the headline: "Dregs of Human Perversity Draws Weirdo Element. Monstrous." Yeah - that was us, all right.
What connected these unlikely hits was their unimpeachable distance from the infrastructure that nourished conventional Hollywood cinema. Waters made his films with little more than pocket-change, recovered garbage and a demented sense of lapsed-Catholic iconoclasm. George Romero made Night of the Living Dead for $6,000 (it had made $12m by 1983). The last great midnight movie, David Lynch's Eraserhead, released in 1977, had been lovingly crafted over years in a lonely attic on the Philadelphia campus of the American Film Institute. Without the midnight circuit, none of these movies, all of them now American classics, would ever have been seen.
I'm so proud to have witnessed the late glory of the midnight movie. Some of my most lasting movie experiences were had in these mouldy fleapits: Night of the Living Dead and Eraserhead on a double-bill in some squalid Baltimore dump reeking of pot; Pink Flamingos at midnight on July 4 1981, again in Baltimore; and a heaped helping of sex, weirdness and ultraviolence at regular midnight shows throughout DC.
Signs of the mainstreaming to come were all about us even then, though. The very books that alerted me to this trove of strange films - Danny Peary's Cult Movies, Michael and Harry Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards, Shock Value - were a sure indication that the phenomenon was slowly dying. And it happened quickly. At some point in 1980 I saw Romero's Dawn of the Dead at a conventionally freaky midnight screening; a year later, I saw it again at the snooty and prestigious Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in DC. In that journey to a peerlessly clean and giant arthouse were concealed the plaintive dying pangs of a lovely and inspiring moviegoing tradition.
· Midnight Movies shows at the ICA, London SW1, from March 23. John Patterson writes about the "grindhouse" movie circuit in The Guide tomorrow
* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
Saturday, August 08, 2009
Friday, August 07, 2009
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Monday, August 03, 2009
CitiGroup to extend acceptance of California IOUs - MarketWatch
CitiGroup to extend acceptance of California IOUs - MarketWatch
"Numerous local credit unions, along with some community banks, in California are accepting IOUs indefinitely. Bank of the West is also accepting them, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times."
"Numerous local credit unions, along with some community banks, in California are accepting IOUs indefinitely. Bank of the West is also accepting them, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times."
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Saturday, August 01, 2009
Facebook | P.L.A.Y. In The Jungle II - The Greatest Pool Party of YOUR LIFE
Facebook | P.L.A.Y. In The Jungle II - The Greatest Pool Party of YOUR LIFE
===>P.L.A.Y. IS SOLD OUT. There will NOT be tickets available at the door, if you do not have tickets you must purchase a table or a cabana. Contact Craig or Brad for details on the different options. Prices levels are $2500, $5000, and $10,000
================================
We are very excited to invite you to the WILDEST pool party of the year... Come P.L.A.Y. In The Jungle II!
Last year’s inaugural PLAY In The Jungle event helped PLAY donate THOUSANDS of toys to underprivileged children in the Los Angeles area... and this year we are going to help even more kids!
Those of you who came last year *think* you know what to expect...
-An outrageous 20 million dollar estate featuring the most elaborate residential pool in the country... featuring a full grotto, swim up bars and blackjack tables... plus a 100 ft water slide!
-A full ZOO featuring giraffes, monkeys, snakes, panthers... along with a GRIZZLY BEAR and 3000lb RHINOCEROUS. Get your picture taken riding through the party atop a glorious camel or elephant!
-Delicious food and premium open bars... bring only enough cash to tip the bartenders and hopefully donate a little extra to the kids!
-Casino gaming with amazing prizes donated by P.L.A.Y. sponsors
-A 3 on 3 basketball tournament and volleyball tournament
-Henna tattoos and tarot card readings
-Hot air balloon rides above the party! Departing straight from the back yard of the estate!
-Cirque Du Soleil style performances from Zen Arts (www.ZenArtsLA.com)
-Top DJs spinning the hottest summer mixes
... but in reality... this year's party will have much, MUCH more!
Mark my words...
You have NEVER been to a party like *this* before!
***Scroll down to see some photos from last year's unforgettable event***
Visit this link for passes:
http://www.playforkids.org/donation_2_prev.php
Admission to the event can be obtained by making a $30 advance donation to P.L.A.Y. (includes premium open bar and food)
A $60 advance donation gets you admission as well as an Express Shuttle Pass to "skip the line" and get to the excitement even faster.
A limited amount of Drive-on Passes are available for $150... roll your limousine or vehicle straight up to the door of the estate and walk right in.
Information on sponsorship, tables and cabanas can be found here:
http://www.playforkids.org/sponsors.htm
+++All guests are asked to bring a new, unwrapped toy+++
It is very likely you will NEVER have a chance to experience a party like this again, so make your donations NOW to reserve your spot (admission limited to 2000 guests and we WILL sell out *before* the event.)
Let's have some fun... and let's help some kids!
Let's P.L.A.Y. In The Jungle... July 19th, 2009. 1-7pm.
Make your donation for tickets here:
http://www.playforkids.org/donation_2_prev.php
Craig & Brad
===>P.L.A.Y. IS SOLD OUT. There will NOT be tickets available at the door, if you do not have tickets you must purchase a table or a cabana. Contact Craig or Brad for details on the different options. Prices levels are $2500, $5000, and $10,000
================================
We are very excited to invite you to the WILDEST pool party of the year... Come P.L.A.Y. In The Jungle II!
Last year’s inaugural PLAY In The Jungle event helped PLAY donate THOUSANDS of toys to underprivileged children in the Los Angeles area... and this year we are going to help even more kids!
Those of you who came last year *think* you know what to expect...
-An outrageous 20 million dollar estate featuring the most elaborate residential pool in the country... featuring a full grotto, swim up bars and blackjack tables... plus a 100 ft water slide!
-A full ZOO featuring giraffes, monkeys, snakes, panthers... along with a GRIZZLY BEAR and 3000lb RHINOCEROUS. Get your picture taken riding through the party atop a glorious camel or elephant!
-Delicious food and premium open bars... bring only enough cash to tip the bartenders and hopefully donate a little extra to the kids!
-Casino gaming with amazing prizes donated by P.L.A.Y. sponsors
-A 3 on 3 basketball tournament and volleyball tournament
-Henna tattoos and tarot card readings
-Hot air balloon rides above the party! Departing straight from the back yard of the estate!
-Cirque Du Soleil style performances from Zen Arts (www.ZenArtsLA.com)
-Top DJs spinning the hottest summer mixes
... but in reality... this year's party will have much, MUCH more!
Mark my words...
You have NEVER been to a party like *this* before!
***Scroll down to see some photos from last year's unforgettable event***
Visit this link for passes:
http://www.playforkids.org/donation_2_prev.php
Admission to the event can be obtained by making a $30 advance donation to P.L.A.Y. (includes premium open bar and food)
A $60 advance donation gets you admission as well as an Express Shuttle Pass to "skip the line" and get to the excitement even faster.
A limited amount of Drive-on Passes are available for $150... roll your limousine or vehicle straight up to the door of the estate and walk right in.
Information on sponsorship, tables and cabanas can be found here:
http://www.playforkids.org/sponsors.htm
+++All guests are asked to bring a new, unwrapped toy+++
It is very likely you will NEVER have a chance to experience a party like this again, so make your donations NOW to reserve your spot (admission limited to 2000 guests and we WILL sell out *before* the event.)
Let's have some fun... and let's help some kids!
Let's P.L.A.Y. In The Jungle... July 19th, 2009. 1-7pm.
Make your donation for tickets here:
http://www.playforkids.org/donation_2_prev.php
Craig & Brad
Raaaaaaaandy - Part 1 (Funny People) from Funny People and Aziz Ansari - Video
Raaaaaaaandy - Part 1 (Funny People) from Funny People and Aziz Ansari - Video
Kinda gross and totally offensive.
But trying to get it. Maybe the next generation has seen so much porn on the internet that it is a public activity... like tying your shoelaces. To laugh at themselves, they laugh at porn references.
The next generation always finds a way to be disagreeable to the previous generation.
I had punk rock. These kids have porn.
Maybe the next generation will put it together and have porn rock.
Kinda gross and totally offensive.
But trying to get it. Maybe the next generation has seen so much porn on the internet that it is a public activity... like tying your shoelaces. To laugh at themselves, they laugh at porn references.
The next generation always finds a way to be disagreeable to the previous generation.
I had punk rock. These kids have porn.
Maybe the next generation will put it together and have porn rock.
Quotes
"A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet "for sale", who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence - briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing - cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his "normal" contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity,his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves. "
— Erich Fromm
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
— Plato
"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
— Joseph Campbell
"She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down."
— Zadie Smith
— Erich Fromm
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
— Plato
"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
— Joseph Campbell
"She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down."
— Zadie Smith
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