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There are seemingly hundreds of awful documentaries about oil, so its refreshing to see a large budget 3 part, 3 hour long (1st part here), produced by people who are not nutcases, for the UK’s Channel 4.
Perhaps the trashy magazine aspect of the show about Japan where this clip was taken is the best format for the subject matter. In any case, expect to be deluged with stuff from it on SmashingTelly.
I love this clip about weird Japanese women’s fashion tribes, Gyaru, including the evolution of styles up to the exceptionally weird, reverse Geisha: Ganguro.
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One of the world’s most successful painters, Luc Tuyman, recently exhibited on a wall in a side street ( via Boingboing ). This is reminiscent of when one of the world’s premier violinists, Joshua Bell, played in the DC Metro.
Both Luc Tuyman and Joshua Bell are good sports. They both ventured outside of their natural habitat to display their feathers in ordinary situations to see if people noticed. I put this up as a contrast to the previous post about Gregor Schneider, since neither of these people are Fartists (Feeble artists).
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This film sounds like a shoddy conspiracy piece, but it is actually very pertinent (the first couple of minutes are in Dutch, the rest in English). I am posting it since it shows the origins of the situation covered in this excellent piece in yesterday’s New York Times.
The article asks why is it that in 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville could write “In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States” and yet now the country with a twentieth of the world’s population has a quarter of the world’s prisoners, incarcerated at ten times the rate of other Western countries with no actual difference in crime reduction beyond what has happened in Canada.
Some of the conclusions aren’t that surprising: a Protestant dominated, puritan influenced culture, combined with gung-ho libertarianism and an ongoing race paranoia, but one is startling - Democracy. Unlike most of the world, American judges are elected and often on a ticket of tough justice, which leads to the mob rule flavor of democracy, when combined with the previous factors.
Ibiza - A Short Film About Chilling
What makes this film important is the timing, sitting between the acid and the ecstasy. It was made in 1990, after Acid House, before the Ministry of Sound, and a decade before binge drinking would once more replace illegal narcotics as the opiate of the masses. In England, house music moved from fields in Essex and impromptu nights in old Warehouses to permanent, alcohol free, clubs under Victorian arches in places like Southwark in South London. These damp, dark, or damp and dark surroundings could not have been more different from the sunshine and stucco of a small island in the Mediterranean that was to become the unlikely holiday home for House. Ibiza decreed mighty, 24 hour, thomping nightclubs, measureless to man and became a cultural phenomenon for today’s social anthropologists to look back on. For some of the people in this film it was apparently their ‘first trip outside of England’.
36 mn 53 s 29 oct. 2006
imdb.com
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