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A Smashing viewer suggested this great documentary about seminal electronic music composer, Tristram Cary.
Cary was involved in the design of a pre-Moog synth, created the distinctive Hammer House of Horror sound and composed music running the gamut of the UK film and TV industry from Ealing Comedies to Dr Who.
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A friend who was familiar with the post apocalyptic urban areas of the US, such as downtown Detroit, could not believe how bad Manchester looked, when he visited (for a NASA conference, of all things). He also could not believe it when I told him that some of the richest areas in Britain surrounded it, that it had some of the best examples of uniquely British architecture and that it did not have the kind of reputation for decay, these days, that Detroit does. Manchester is a complicated and important place.
What he did buy, was the fact that Manchester, like Detroit, is one of the world’s most important cities, musically and therefore artistically. A documentary about Factory Records, in memory of the late, great Tony Wilson is therefore a must see.
BBC Television
1 hr 29 min 27 sec Oct 13, 2007
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Child prodigies, as exemplified by Marc Yu, a seven-year-old concert pianist.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” the child psychologist asks. “A psychiatrist” says Marc, adding “only joking”.
I particularly like the scene where he looks bored and turns away from the psychologist, rocking back and forth on a stool in a very ordinary childlike manner, except that he is playing Mary Had a Little Lamb, backwards, behind his back, on the piano. A song he picked out when he was two.
46 min 57 sec Aug 26, 2007
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BBC
35 min 25 sec - Sep 1, 2007
Something odd happened in the early nineties in Britain. Jarvis Cocker summed it up as: ’suddenly it was cool to be poor’. Goodbye to wannabe Sloanes (or Preppies as their US counterparts were called) with their stand up collars, brogues, cords and jobs at stuffy banks; hello football, guitar bands and looking forward instead of back. At the time I was living in an abandoned warehouse, in London’s, now gentrified, Shoreditch, and it was a splendid time to be alive. Nobody summed up the mood of the mini renaissance better than Pulp.Hearing ‘Common People’ almost brings me to tears.
2 comments » (report dead embeds in comments) tags: music nostalgia
48 min 2 sec - Aug 29, 2007
4000holes.blogspot.com
A few years back, a portable jukebox that had once belonged to John Lennon, in the 60’s was discovered. On it were Lennon’s hand written labels for his favorite 40 songs. This documentary is about those songs. Perfect.
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