Monthly Archives: March 2015

RIP Albert Maysles (1926 – 2015)

Albert Maysles was an American documentary filmmaker best-known for the documentaries Gimme Shelter (1970) Grey Gardens (1975).

He is best known for the direct cinema/cinéma vérité – documentaries he made with his brother.

You can watch Gimme Shelter[1] and Grey Gardens[2] in their totalities on YouTube. And Salesman[3] too (practically).

If your new to the Maysles, I’d start with Grey Gardens, the story of an eccentric mother and daugther.

“All About Money” is WMC#951

As I’ve mentioned before, I have been working on a musical top 1000 since 2007. It’s almost finished, another 50 or so tracks to go. Let’s call it my musical fingerprint.

It has come to my attention that a certain Dan Snaith, who works under the name Caribou, has been doing the same thing.

He recently published his top 1000.

There is about two to three percent overlap with my list.

Not on my list was “All About Money” (above), a queer but wonderful composition by an eighties studio project called ‘Spontaneous Overthrow’.

“All About Money” is also on the compilation Personal Space (Electronic Soul 1974 – 1984).

Keywords are cosmic, druggy, weird.

Drawing the contours of the ‘American fantastique’

The Eye of the Beholder” (1960) is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. Its theme is aesthetic relativism.

It is a prime example of the American fantastique, the fantastique being a sensibility which is a sibling of horror, fantasy and SF, and child of speculative fiction.

You can watch the full episode (only about twenty minutes) here[1].

I previously mentioned this episode here[2].

10/10