Category Archives: American culture

World cinema classics #17

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwUuEN2NTts]

Bamboozled (2000) by Spike Lee

It has been a while since we featured an American film. Although almost all of Spike Lee’s films are better than 97% of American cinema, I chose Bamboozled, a 2000 satirical film about a modern televised minstrel show featuring black actors donning blackface makeup and the violent fall-out from the show’s success. A hilarious film.

Did you know that whiteface is also a comic trope?

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Happy birthday Pharoah and World Dance Music classic #8

Pharoah turns 67 today.

Thembi (1971) – Pharoah Sanders
(with on the cover I believe, Lonnie Liston Smith)

Pharoah Sanders (born October 13, 1940) is an American jazz saxophonist. Ornette Coleman once described him as “probably the best tenor player in the world.” Most of Sanders’ best-selling work was made in the late 1960s and early 1970s for Impulse Records, including the 30-minute wave-on-wave of free jazz “The Creator has a Master Plan” from the album Karma. Sanders’s works influenced a new generation when his music was a major influence on the British acid jazz scene from the late 1980s and 1990s. Most recently his work was compiled on You’ve Got to Have Freedom, which features my favorite and the most danceable and accessible track of Sanders: the 1980 You’ve Got to Have Freedom, which is number 8 in my World Dance Music Classic series.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdTgH1u7cmM]

World Dance Music Classic #8

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“I am a writer of tales of the uncanny”

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jQtkGJMtH0]

Fake H. P. Lovecraft 1933 WPA Newsreel Interview via William Gibson

Today, William Gibson reported on the above footage. In a second post, Gibson admits having been fooled. As he writes in a second post:  “I guess I so wanted to believe that that was Lovecraft that I managed to ignore the actor’s complete lack of HPLoid bone-structure. (Lovecraft was one distinctively-jawed New Englander.)

Faking elder footage on YouTube, though, has great potential as a form.”

World dance music classics #7

Today, on the occasion of Grandmaster Flash‘s 49th birthday:

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6e9G-ump3Y]

The Message (1982) – Grandmaster Flash

“The Message” is an old school hip hop song by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released in 1982. The song’s lyrics were some of the first in the genre of rap to talk about the struggles and the frustrations of living in the ghetto. The song’s chorus of “Don’t push me ‘cuz I’m close to the edge” has become one of the most well known choruses in rap music history.

See previous entries in this series.

World cinema classics #16

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdFjxhDOKNQ]

sex, lies, and videotape (1989) Steven Soderbergh

sex, lies, and videotape (the title is always given in lower case letters) is the film that brought director Steven Soderbergh to prominence. It tells the story of an impotent “voyeur” who films women discussing their sexuality, and his impact on the relationship of a troubled married couple.

This clip features the unforgettable quote: “being happy is not that great … I mean … the last time I was really happy … I got so fat … I must have put on 25 pounds”

In 2006, sex, lies, and videotape was added to the United States National Film Registry as being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

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