The War on Drugs (The Prison Industrial Complex)

April 24th, 2008 · comment or link to (permalink)

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.

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Ibiza - A Short Film About Chilling

April 11th, 2008 · comment or link to (permalink)

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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Born Rich

March 23rd, 2008 · 3 comments or link to (permalink)

A refreshingly candid and fascinating view into what its like to be born rich, most specifically, to be born rich in America.
1 hr 7 min 49 sec Oct 25, 2006
“Born Rich”

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Pruitt-Igoe section from Koyaanisqatsi

March 2nd, 2008 · 3 comments or link to (permalink)

St. Louis’ Pruitt Igoe represented the failure of modernist town planning and architectural determinism from Robert Moses to Corbusier, respectively. Shoveling up the uncomfortable mess of slums into machines for living in, threw out the soul with the sewage. The mess came back, as modernist slum replacements deteriorated, but the soul often didn’t. They also act as a reminder of how America was not really a democracy, within living memory; Pruitt was designed for Black people, Igoe for White people.

When I first came to New york in the 80s I asked the cab driver to take me to see a similar Corbusier style project in the Bronx. The first cab driver refused to even drive there, and when I went, the scenes of burning rubble in the streets and sheer squalor, were unlike anything I had ever seen in a developed country.

Koyaanisqatsi is hit or miss in parts, but the Philip Glass score has become a classic, and nowhere was the film more powerful that the scenes of the Pruitt Igoe projects prior to and during their demolition in 1972, only 20 years after their completion. Even before its use in Koyaanisqatsi, the film of the controlled destruction became the worlds most iconic footage of demolition. Architect and Critic, Charles Jencks said their destruction marked the end of modernism. Years later, this film with its powerful score, takes on an entirely different meaning, marking the end of something else, since the architect, of the Pruitt Igoe, Yamasaki - also designed New York’s World Trade Center.

Pruitt-Igoe section from Koyaanisqatsi trailer

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Day to Day Communications at CERN in 1974

February 14th, 2008 · 2 comments or link to (permalink)

Day to Day communications at CERN in 1974, what a wonderfully prescient title for a short film about a place that would permanently change global, day to day communications, a decade and a half later, when the Web was invented there.

I love this film. it perfectly represents a time and place. The opening sequence with Cat Stevens and time bleached, aerial footage of Geneva makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

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