Sigur Rós and Film

Famous for their vivid and evocative music Sigur Rós have invited a dozen directors to each interpret a track from their latest album Valtari adding their personal visual interpretation to the Icelandic groups' soundscape. The results have been unpredictable but equally brilliant and although independently directed, several common themes have emerged from the series entitled Mystery Film Experiment.

While the differences between each video are markedly clear, it is the thematic similarities that startle when the videos are viewed sequentially. Leitmotifs such as the rubbing of the natural world with the modern human environment and dream-like sequences echo throughout and work to lend this collection of beautifully filmed short films an unforgetable pathos and emotional continuity.

After releasing one video per week online the series will reach it's zenith when Sigur Rós premier the screening of the series on the weekend 9-11th December across all 7(!) continents. Curiously several international cities with artistic inclinations have been left off the list thus far (Berlin, London, Melbourne, Paris).

The latest release comes from Swedish director Christian Larson and features two dancers in an abandoned space, the hues and quality of the light are suggestive of a north-european location. Moving painfully and beautifully, the fragility of the human form is laid bare; the physicality of their movement is emphasised by the raw, animal stare shared late in the sequence that encapsulates and yet fiercely denies the co-dependance of individuals upon others. This blending together the modern world with nature both in the crumbling, deserted building and within themselves is a thought provoking aesthetic joy to behold.

Director Christian Larson writes: 'I've always been inspired by dance, so i wanted to tell a short story with dialogue through movement, without anyone saying anything. Sidi Llarbi Cherkaoui's extraordinary choreography created this unique communication between the dancers James O'Hara & Nicola Leahey. Larbi's way of working with flexibility played as an interesting contrast to the harsh environment in which matthias montero's pure and ethereal style of cinematography allowed an intimate portrait of the couple'.

Watch the video below and enjoy the other videos in the series- noteworthy appearances by prominent actors, Shia LeBeouf (Transformers) and Aidan Gillen (The Wire) are worth watching, especially with Shia's upcoming appearance in Lars von Trier's The Nymphomaniac. 

MOST VIDEOS ARE NSFW, be warned.

Riots vs Russel Brand

Russel Brand is not a man many would turn to for a respectable opinion but here is an article that demonstrates his evident intellect- be patient it is rather self-absorbed for the first few paragraphs but one feels that with so many critics Brand has to cover his ass before offering any thought

Check out the article here

The Laughing Heart

Levi's have made the classically aspirational advert once again, I want to be as free and crisp as the lines (visual/literary) and lives portrayed in the commercial- I can achieve this by buying into the Levi's brand and capture their spirit of youth, 'going forth' and lust.

sublime

Fall in love with Lana Del Rey



Drake- Marvin's Room



"Talk to me please, don’t have much to believe in
I need you right now, are you down to listen to me?
Too many drinks have been given to me
I got some women that's living off me
Paid for their flights and hotels I’m ashamed
Bet that you know them, I won’t say no names
After a while girl they all seem the same
I’ve had sex four times this week I’ll explain
Having a hard time adjusting to fame"

KANYE

does it again http://kanyewest.com/

Watch this

Chris Bryan Films Phantom Reel from Chris Bryan on Vimeo.

that is a big curb

Sneaking suspicion

Saw these a while back and loved the design now MF DOOM has customised his own... I don't really know the deal but they look pretty sweet.

Tha Raptcha

Can't believe there hasn't been more stuff on the 'blogosphere' on this.

Quite frankly I can't wait for it all to be over right now.




(photo: jr doty)

The Tree of Life

Looks good
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2011/may/16/cannes-2011-reel-review-tree-life-video?INTCMP=SRCH


(photo by Joseph Gasior)

The Weeknd

Must be over a month now since the release but these gems have just come to my attention- sex sells.

High For This .

FLEET FOXES

Not content with blowing my mind with their leaked album here's them live. Not that you'd know

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gj2nv

skip first 3 minutes, Zane Lowe is a poor interviewer/they have no rapport/he is clearly insincere

Bolivia enshrines natural world's rights with equal status for Mother Earth

Law of Mother Earth expected to prompt radical new conservation and social measures in South American nation

John Vidal in Guardian. click here for article

Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as "blessings" and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.

The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.

Controversially, it will also enshrine the right of nature "to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities".

"It makes world history. Earth is the mother of all", said Vice-President Alvaro García Linera. "It establishes a new relationship between man and nature, the harmony of which must be preserved as a guarantee of its regeneration."

The law, which is part of a complete restructuring of the Bolivian legal system following a change of constitution in 2009, has been heavily influenced by a resurgent indigenous Andean spiritual world view which places the environment and the earth deity known as the Pachamama at the centre of all life. Humans are considered equal to all other entities.

But the abstract new laws are not expected to stop industry in its tracks. While it is not clear yet what actual protection the new rights will give in court to bugs, insects and ecosystems, the government is expected to establish a ministry of mother earth and to appoint an ombudsman. It is also committed to giving communities new legal powers to monitor and control polluting industries.

Bolivia has long suffered from serious environmental problems from the mining of tin, silver, gold and other raw materials. "Existing laws are not strong enough," said Undarico Pinto, leader of the 3.5m-strong Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, the biggest social movement, who helped draft the law. "It will make industry more transparent. It will allow people to regulate industry at national, regional and local levels."

Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said Bolivia's traditional indigenous respect for the Pachamama was vital to prevent climate change. "Our grandparents taught us that we belong to a big family of plants and animals. We believe that everything in the planet forms part of a big family. We indigenous people can contribute to solving the energy, climate, food and financial crises with our values," he said.

Little opposition is expected to the law being passed because President Evo Morales's ruling party, the Movement Towards Socialism, enjoys a comfortable majority in both houses of parliament.

However, the government must tread a fine line between increased regulation of companies and giving way to the powerful social movements who have pressed for the law. Bolivia earns $500m (£305m) a year from mining companies which provides nearly one third of the country's foreign currency.

In the indigenous philosophy, the Pachamama is a living being.

The draft of the new law states: "She is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and cares for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos. She is comprised of all ecosystems and living beings, and their self-organisation."

Ecuador, which also has powerful indigenous groups, has changed its constitution to give nature "the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution". However, the abstract rights have not led to new laws or stopped oil companies from destroying some of the most biologically rich areas of the Amazon.

Coping with climate change

Bolivia is struggling to cope with rising temperatures, melting glaciers and more extreme weather events including more frequent floods, droughts, frosts and mudslides.

Research by glaciologist Edson Ramirez of San Andres University in the capital city, La Paz, suggests temperatures have been rising steadily for 60 years and started to accelerate in 1979. They are now on course to rise a further 3.5-4C over the next 100 years. This would turn much of Bolivia into a desert.

Most glaciers below 5,000m are expected to disappear completely within 20 years, leaving Bolivia with a much smaller ice cap. Scientists say this will lead to a crisis in farming and water shortages in cities such as La Paz and El Alto.

Evo Morales, Latin America's first indigenous president, has become an outspoken critic in the UN of industrialised countries which are not prepared to hold temperatures to a 1C rise.

Natural disasters? (from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/02/natural-disasters-floods-earthquakes-landslides)

Floods, earthquakes, landslides: 2011 is a year of disasters. Bill McKibben asks: are we to blame?

At least since Noah, and likely long before, we've stared in horror at catastrophe and tried to suss out deeper meaning – it was but weeks ago that the Tokyo governor, Shintaro Ishihara, declared that the earthquake/tsunami/ reactor tripleheader was "divine punishment" for excess consumerism. This line of reasoning usually fails to persuade these days (why are Las Vegas and Dubai unscathed by anything except the housing meltdown?) but it's persistent. We need some explanation for why our stable world is suddenly cracked in half or under water. Still, over time we've become less superstitious, since science can explain these cataclysms. Angry gods or plate tectonics? We're definitely moving towards natural explanation of crises.

Which is odd, because the physical world is moving in the other direction.

The Holocene – the 10,000 years through which we have just come – was by all accounts a period of calm and stability on Earth. Temperatures and sea levels were relatively stable. Hence it was an excellent time to build a civilisation, especially the modern kind that comes with lots of stuff: roads, buildings, container ports, nuclear reactors. Yes, we had disasters throughout those millennia, some of them (Krakatoa, say) simply enormous. Hurricanes blew, earthquakes rocked. But they were, by definition, rare, taking us by surprise – freaks, outliers, traumas that persisted in our collective history precisely because they were so unusual.

We're now moving into a new geological epoch, one scientists are calling the Anthropocene – a world remade by man, most obvious in his emissions of carbon dioxide. That CO₂ traps heat near the planet that would otherwise have radiated back to space – there is, simply, more energy in our atmosphere than there used to be. And that energy expresses itself in many ways: ice melts, water heats, clouds gather. 2010 was the warmest year on record, and according to insurers – the people we task with totting up disasters – it demonstrated the unprecedented mayhem this new heat causes. Global warming was "the only plausible explanation", the giant reinsurer Munich Re explained in December, of 2010's catastrophes, the drought, heatwave and fires across Russia, and the mega-floods in Pakistan, Australia, Brazil and elsewhere were at least plausibly connected to the general heating. They were, that is to say, not precisely "natural disasters", but something more complex; the human thumb was on the scale.

We still have plenty of purely natural disasters – though scientists can posit reasons climate change might make the world more seismically active, tectonic and volcanic forces seem beyond our reach; the great wave that broke over Sendai really did come out of the blue. But even in Japan, of course, the disaster was not entirely "natural". The subsequent fallout was… fallout, the invisible plume streaming from one of our highest-tech marvels, a complex reduced in minutes into something almost elemental, a kind of utility-owned volcano.

In a sense Ishihara was correct when he decried "selfish greed". It is consumerism that has flooded the atmosphere with CO₂: the constant getting and spending, where $1 spent liberates roughly 1lb of carbon. We are remaking the world, and quickly; we are stumbling into a new way of thinking about disaster, where neither God nor nature, but man is to blame.

That changes the valence of catastrophe. Since warm air holds more water vapour than cold, the atmosphere is nearly 5% moister than it was just a few decades ago. That loads the dice for great floods of the kind suddenly so common. I lived through one in my small mountain town in Vermont two summers ago: the biggest thunderstorm in our history dropped buckets of rain in a matter of hours. Our town is almost entirely intact forest; it should have been able to hold whatever nature threw at it. But that rain fell on a different planet from the one the forest had grown up on; every road washed out, and the governor had to visit by helicopter. But at least we had the solace (or self-lacerating realisation) that we'd helped cause this deep change. Americans burn more carbon per capita than just about anyone; what do you say to a Pakistani farmer watching the swollen Indus wash away his life's work? And since global warming seems to take first aim at the poorest places that have done the least to cause it, this is a question we may be asking ourselves a good deal in the decades to come.

Not every natural disaster is unnatural now, and we may be able to fool ourselves a little longer. But these days it's the climate deniers who act like the pious of yore, unable to accept the truth. I was surprised, and impressed, to read a poll of Americans taken recently. By healthy majorities, this most religious of western citizenries said natural disasters were more likely to be a sign of climate change than of God's displeasure.

Which is good news, because for the first time in human history we can prevent a great deal of unnecessary cataclysm in the years ahead. Not all of it – there will always be earthquakes and hurricanes. But every bit of carbon we keep out of the atmosphere is that much less extra energy we add to the system. It's that much less disaster waiting to happen.

FULLSCREEN

Fleet Foxes - Grown Ocean from Fleet Foxes on Vimeo.

FFORWM

Spent all day preparing to lead the 'experimental drama' group (who take the name of the title) that I've been a part of since October... I tried to integrate elements of the challenging sixties improvisational theatre movement that had been brushed over in a politics lecture and thoroughly enjoyed the research process (mainly because it's so interesting).

The group traditionally use the teachings of Alberto Boal, who developed a dramatic technique called 'theatre of the oppressed'. He was Brazillian and worked with peasants and other groups of people who lacked representation in society or were 'oppressed'. Generally sessions revolve around games which help everyone to feel closer, breaking down the boundaries society has instilled in us and our confidence in our ourselves and as a group builds up. So he would build up the confidence of the oppressed and gradually get them to enact scenarios where they might have one of them pretending to be a landowner and they would 'practice' asking for a payrise or a less expensive rent, just to get used to the idea... there are other purposes, methods and intentions but that's it sketched out.

I often go to Fforwm feeling down or tired and get really energised by it, it's a really important creative outlet for me. I'm just off to have a wank over how great and totally unpretentious I sound noww....

Liberia

Old news but finally got around to watching it and shocking doesn't get close

http://www.vbs.tv/en-gb/watch/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-vice-guide-to-liberia

What's the time Mr Wolf?

Insanely 80's vibe but I need the feel good factor right now

Family Reunion

Great night, now to somehow keep myself composed enough to get through 6 hours with the family on 2 hours sleep and with pill-y eyes. Need to look normal but my little snake eyes are darting around.

This is doing the job The Weeknd - Wicked Games by The_Weeknd