Wednesday, August 26, 2015
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Monday, August 17, 2015
LIGHT YEARS (aka Gandahar or Metal Men, 1988)
Back in the 1980’s a wonderful animated film came out by the name of Light Years. It didn’t get that much attention but is revered by many today animation experts and sci-fi geeks to this day. It combined the great minds of French animator, Rene Laloux and Isaac Asimov into a visually stunning peace of art that is more relevant today than it was 2o+ years ago.
The movie is wrapped around a riddle that the main character, Sylvain, must answer, “In a thousand years, Gandahar was destroyed, and and all its people massacred. A thousand years ago, Gandahar will be saved, and what can’t be avoided will be.”
The plot is very intense and deals with relevant topics such as war vs. pacifism, the dangers of unchecked scientific experiments and the theory of time travel in relevance to the human mind and soul. It’s stunningly beautiful in artistic expression and just as well written.
The original version was directed by René Laloux, and was based on Jean-Pierre Andrevon‘s novel Les Hommes-machines contre Gandahar (The Machine-Men versus Gandahar). An English version of the epic science fiction film was produced by Harvey Weinstein, and renowned science-fiction legend Isaac Asimov made the revision of the translation from French to English.
It boasts a very impressive cast of voice actors in the American version. Among the actors were, Glenn Close, Jennifer Grey, Terrence Mann, Penn and Teller, John Shea, Bridget Fonda, David Johansen, Earle Hyman, Earl Hammond and Christopher Plummer. Plummer plays the villain in the film with cunning excellence.
It has has beautifully drawn women with a slight tint of blue/purple skin color that are naked for most of the film. It’s a masterpeice that will live on for years. It is well known for it’s strange landscapes yet vaguely familiar creatures as well as menacing “men of metal”. The art is well done and if you like science fiction, you’re going to love this film.
Now if we could only get them to release it on DVD!
But until then, we have Youtube, please see below, the 8 part movie of LIGHT YEARS…
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Robert Anton Wilson & Operation Mindfuck / Ehkälogiikka [ robert anton wilson documentary "maybe logic" with finnish subs ]
http://disinfo.com/2013/08/robert-anton-wilson-operation-mindfuck/
It wasn’t always easy to tell where Operation Mindfuck ended and sincere paranoia began. “The Discordian revelations seem to have pressed a magick button,” Wilson later wrote. “New exposés of the Illuminati began to appear everywhere, in journals ranging from the extreme Right to the ultra-Left. Some of this was definitely not coming from us Discordians.” Not that it was always clear who “us Discordians” were either. Though some of the Berkeley Illuminati were acquainted with Thornley, they had independently invented the joke of posing as an ancient conspiracy. At one point, Wilson recalled, the Los Angeles Free Press printed “a taped interview with a black phone-caller who claimed to represent the ‘Black Mass,’ an Afro-Discordian conspiracy we had never heard of. He took credit, on behalf of the Black Mass and the Discordians, for all the bombings elsewhere attributed to the Weather Underground.”
In 1969, Wilson and another Playboy editor, Robert Shea, began to work on what would become the most influential element of Op eration Mindfuck. Inspired by the nutty letters the magazine often received, Shea and Wilson decided to write a novel “perched midway between satire and melodrama, and also delicately balancing between ‘proving’ the case for multiple conspiracies and undermining the ‘proof.’” The result was Illuminatus! It was basically finished in 1971 but it wouldn’t be published for another four years, with significant cuts and with the book sliced into three volumes.70 (A one-volume edition finally appeared in 1984.)
http://blog.kansanperinne.net/2011/09/ehkalogiikka-dokumentti-robert-anton.html
Robert Anton Wilson & Operation Mindfuck
Picture: Richard Adams (CC)
[Disinfo ed.’s note: The following is an excerpt from Jesse Walker’s new book,The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory. The excerpt is part of the chapter "Operation Mindfuck” and focuses on the role of the Discordian Pope, Robert Anton Wilson.]
[R[Robert Anton]ilson laid out the basic instructions for Operation Mindfuck in a memo sent to several friends (including [P[Paul]rassner). Participants were “to circulate all rumors contributed by other members,” and they were “to attribute all national calamities, assassinations or conspiracies to the other member-groups.” The one great risk, he cautioned, was that “the Establishment might be paranoid enough to believe some wild legend started by one of us and thereupon round up all of us for killing Abraham Lincoln.”
So they sent a letter on Bavarian Illuminati stationery to the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, just to confirm that “we’ve taken over the Rock Music business. But you’re still so naïve. We took over the business in the 1800s. Beethoven was our first convert.” Robert Welch of the John Birch Society got a letter informing him that Gary Allen was an Illuminati agent. When a New Orleans jury refused to convict one of the men Jim Garrison blamed for the JFK killing, Garrison’s booster Art Kunkin of the leftist Los Angeles Free Press received a missive from the “Order of the Phoenix Angel” revealing that the jurors were all members of the Illuminati. The telltale sign, the letter explained, was that none of them had a left nipple.
The Discordians planted stories about the secret society in various leftist, libertarian, and hippie publications, introducing the Illuminati to the counterculture. “We accused everybody of being in the Illuminati,” Wilson recalled. “Nixon, Johnson, William Buckley, Jr., ourselves, Martian invaders, all the conspiracy buffs, everybody.” But they
did not regard this as a hoax or prank in the ordinary sense. We still considered it guerrilla ontology.My personal attitude was that if the New Left wanted to live in the particular tunnel-reality of the hard-core paranoid, they had an absolute right to that neurological choice. I saw Discordianism as the Cosmic Giggle Factor, introducing so many alternative paranoias that everybody could pick a favorite, if they were inclined that way. I also hoped that some less gullible souls, overwhelmed by this embarrassment of riches, might see through the whole paranoia game and decide to mutate to a wider, funnier, more hopeful reality-map.
They inserted that chart into The East Village Other. They placed odd ads in Innovator. They practically took over the Chicago paper rogerSPARK, which once had been a fairly staid New Left outlet affiliated with the 49th Ward Citizens for Independent Political Action. The Discordians filled it with anarchist politics and surrealist satire: Someone scanning the classifieds might see an ad declaring, “paranoids unite; you have nothing to fear but each other! Send for the informative booklet ‘How to Start Your Own Conspiracy’. Free from the Office of the District Attorney, New Orleans.” In the summer of 1969, the paper accused Chicago’s mayor of being an arm of the octopus, running the front-page headline DALEY LINKED WITH ILLUMINATI.
In the April 1969 edition of the Playboy Advisor column, right after an inquiry about blue balls, this missive appeared:
I recently heard an old man of right-wing views—a friend of my grandparents’—assert that the current wave of assassinations in America is the work of a secret society called the Illuminati. He said that the Illuminati have existed throughout history, own the international banking cartels, have all been 32nd-degree Masons and were known to Ian Fleming, who portrayed them as SPECTRE in his James Bond books—for which the Illuminati did away with Mr. Fleming. At first, this all seemed like a paranoid delusion to me. Then I read in The New Yorker that Allan Chapman, one of Jim Garrison’s investigators in the New Orleans probe of the John Kennedy assassination, believes that the Illuminati really exist. The next step in my galloping descent into credulity occurred when I mentioned this subject to a friend who is majoring in Middle Eastern affairs. He told me the Illuminati were actually of Arabic origin and that their founder was the legendary “old man of the mountains,” who used marijuana to work up a murderous frenzy and who fought against both the Crusaders and the orthodox Moslems, adding that their present ruler is the Aga Khan; but, he said, it is now merely a harmless religious order known as Ismailianism.I then began to wonder seriously about all this. I mentioned it to a friend from Berkeley. He immediately told me that there is a group on campus that calls itself the Illuminati and boasts that it secretly controls international finance and the mass media. Now (if Playboy isn’t part of the Illuminati conspiracy), can you tell me: Are the Illuminati part of the Masons? Is Aga Khan their leader? Do they really own all the banks and TV stations? And who have they killed lately?
The letter was signed “R.S., Kansas City, Missouri,” but it had actually been cooked up by Wilson and Thornley. Wilson’s reply, written in the light and neutral tone expected of the Playboy Advisor, cleared up most of the historical confusions contained in the letter (though it added the unsupported claim that Weishaupt’s Illuminati were “based loosely” on the Old Man of the Mountain’s order). The Berkeley Illuminati, Wilson added, were “a put-on by local anarchists.”
Wilson and Thornley met only once in that period, when Wilson spent the night at Thornley’s place in Tampa in 1968. They smoked some pot and started ruminating about their project. “What if there really is an Illuminati?” Wilson asked. “Maybe they’ll find out about us and be pissed.”
“I doubt if there is,” Thornley replied. “And if there by some chance is, they would probably be very happy to have wildass fools like us covering up for them by spreading bizarre theories.”
In 1969, Wilson and another Playboy editor, Robert Shea, began to work on what would become the most influential element of Op eration Mindfuck. Inspired by the nutty letters the magazine often received, Shea and Wilson decided to write a novel “perched midway between satire and melodrama, and also delicately balancing between ‘proving’ the case for multiple conspiracies and undermining the ‘proof.’” The result was Illuminatus! It was basically finished in 1971 but it wouldn’t be published for another four years, with significant cuts and with the book sliced into three volumes.70 (A one-volume edition finally appeared in 1984.)Excerpted from Jesse Walker’s new book, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, by kind permission of the publisher, Harper Books. © 2013 Jesse Walker.
http://blog.kansanperinne.net/2011/09/ehkalogiikka-dokumentti-robert-anton.html
Sunday, August 9, 2015
Thursday, August 6, 2015
The Truth According To Satan (1972)
The Truth According to Satan (1972)
A woman, Diana (Rita Calderoni, whose beautiful eyes still shine through in the fuzzy looking, low quality version I watched), seems to be at the core of a man’s, Roibert’s (Isarco Ravaioli), depressions. Sick of himself and going through what is no doubt an existential crises, he deeply contemplates and, in a melodramatic bout of playing Russian roulette with himself, fails at committing suicide, an insult which only seems to further his unease.
Calling up the lady of his sorrows, Diana, in the midst of a love affair with her female companion/slave, Yanita (Marie-Paule Bastin), Roibert informs her of his failed attempt at killing himself, threatening to try again. She hastily comes over to his place, looking nice and sexy, and Roibert eventually does stab and kill himself while leaning over her, smearing his blood over her. The neighbor, a strange jester of a man, Totoletto (Sergio Ammirata, chewing the scenery like none have ever done before), seems to have witnessed enough of the incident from the window to decide to have a fun time with the situation, turning the film into a deranged comedy from here on out.
Totoletto is a total clown, with a hefty amount of black humor that hits the spot at times. Unfortunately, his chicken sounds are a little too frequent and a little irritating. Though, it's still not enough to ruin the added dose of weird entertainment he brings to this already far-out, head trip of a, dare I say it, giallo.
The train of ideas that make up the story, of which Totoletto becomes in total control of, is frequently diverted by his highly eccentric diet of consuming two eggs every hour. His commitment to this diet is borderline insane, exclaiming it to be “a catastropheeee!!!!” to miss out on his egg break. To give you an idea of what kind of humor is taking place, when Diana attempts to turn the tables, threatening to frame Totoletto for the killing and kidnapping her, he freaks out, screams, and runs to the next room, worried about his eggs overcooking. I’m giggling just writing this; I love that guy!
As evidenced here and in some other works with Polselli, The Reincarnation of Isabel and Delirium, Calderoni has a talent for communicating a mental breakdown in front of the camera. The way she does it is excessive, which I like, and all the while the emotion seems genuine.
As evidenced here and in some other works with Polselli, The Reincarnation of Isabel and Delirium, Calderoni has a talent for communicating a mental breakdown in front of the camera. The way she does it is excessive, which I like, and all the while the emotion seems genuine.
In addition, I’m a bit drawn to a peculiar yet subtle recurring motif to the, obligatory to the sexploitation, tortures that Diana is put through, where a transition, going from discomfort to pleasure, is depicted in Calderoni’sexpressions. Segments including her mad boyfriend teasing her with the sharp tip of a blade over her body, or her being tied down while a dog eats raw meat off her body, or being sprayed over with a showerhead after being covered in blood, all end up with, somewhere in there, the actress going from a panic, or extreme distress, to what for sure appears to be approval and pleasure.
Giving a deep backstory to Diana and Roibert, dream-like flashbacks are used to suggest the emotions felt during their meeting for the first time and their time spent together. It's a love of very beautiful origins, giving a bittersweet reminder of the love’s gloomy end.
Battle stock footage is used to odd, disorienting effect, edited in to depict Roibert’s psych and the extent of the conflicting nature of his obsession with Diana, a woman who takes control of her relationships, including her female lover, Yanita, of whom she orders and whips like a slave. The two main male characters obsessively endeavor to turn this role of control around, taking pleasure in leading the game she usually takes charge of. In one instance, Totoletto has Yanita whip Diana instead, reversing the roles of master and slave. Diana seems to seduce Yanita back to her side with a soft kiss to the leg, much to Totoletto’s hilarious dismay.
After trying to make up its mind as to whether or not Diana’s plight is something supernatural, her going mad, or the result of someone keen on her torture, the movie finally wraps things up with a twist that isn’t really all that twisty. It even seems like Polselli thought it best to interrupt the climax a few times by cutting to a fabulous shot of dancing, naked hippies, with Yanita included, of which I always have a hard time resisting dancing to. I thought this might have been edited in from a different movie, like some kind of patchwork, but Totoletto’s interaction with these transcendental partiers at the end confirms that it is meant for this movie, and I’m glad for that.
Given all that I’ve discussed, I still can’t help saying that the only way to know what this movie is about is to see it. It starts out like a tame little suicide drama and eventually escalates into a party of the grandest, mind expanding, erratic surrealism. It’s what I was looking for with a Polsellifilm, yet it still ended up not being what I was expecting. And the scenes with the dancers are so damn brilliant! That’s what I want to see more of.
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Powell Peralta - Propaganda (1990)
The Propaganda video featured Tony Hawk, Steve Caballero, Lance Mountain, Mike McGill, Ray Barbee, Ray Underhill, Paulo Diaz, Frankie Hill, Steve Saiz, Chet Thomas, Lori Rigsby, Salman Agah, Lance Conklin, Colin McKay, Bucky Lasek, Frank Hirata, Eric Sanderson, Sean Mortimer, Mike Manzoori and more.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)