Born Rich
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”
Spacefest Preview
Spacefest 2009 will be held in San Diego Feb 19-22 next year in San Diego. This trailer is a great taster. It is also a way to plug the place where I found it, my favorite new weblog: Bad Astronomy, which is bad ass, indeed.
SmashingTelly sells out
After much agonizing about it, I’ve decided (as some people might have noticed) that I will post clips on SmashingTelly. The reason I though a site about full length programs would work is that the practice of leaving low resolution full length documentaries would encourage people to buy DVDs (I have bought many of the things featured here), so it was a mutually beneficial practice.
That may become a de facto custom in future, but for now many links go dead too quickly. I will continue to post links to full format stuff that I find and have been up long enough that it looks like they are not being requested to get taken down, but will also link to clips. I will try to make the choices of clips be as interesting rather than gimmicky.
Fonz Jumps the Shark on HAPPY DAYS vs Drinking Your Milkshake
March 8th, 2008 Comments Off on Fonz Jumps the Shark on HAPPY DAYS vs Drinking Your Milkshake | # link to | posted by david
The reason I’m posting this infamous 1977 clip from Happy Days which gives us the expression to ‘jump the shark’, (meaning to pass ones prime and descended into gimmick) is that I realized that I had never actually watched it.
But that’s not the only reason. The recent ‘I’ll end up drinking your milkshake’ line from There Will be Blood (which originally came from the 1920s) looks set to also become a permanent part of contemporary English vernacular.
What these expressions both have in common is that they are not descriptive of what they have come to mean, without knowing the reference, and yet they are and will be used without knowing that reference. This points to the conclusion, that expressions such as these stick precisely because they are unusual enough for people to take notice, and different enough that there is no existing competition from similar expressions.
Fonz Jumps the Shark on HAPPY DAYS
Comments Off on Fonz Jumps the Shark on HAPPY DAYS vs Drinking Your Milkshake clips, memes
Shane MacGowan: The Great Hunger
bbc
59 min 54 sec Mar 1, 2008 myspace.com
I’ll just repeat what I said about MacGowan in the Nick Cave post:
“The Pogues front man, although Irish, is a once preppy schoolboy from one of the most exclusive private schools in England, who created a fake persona of an Irish drunk, in the name of authenticity – to the point where it actually became real. MacGowan is, no doubt, both a genuinely troubled genius and self-indulgent, racist, self-parody of an Irishman.”
And that’s about someone I really like.
Pruitt-Igoe section from Koyaanisqatsi
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.
Biography of Nick Cave
On the one hand, I have always liked Nick Cave, as one of the more cerebral pop stars, on the other I can’t help thinking that he fits the mould of self inflicted misery that is ultimately a pose.
In broad strokes, but not in the details, Nick Cave shares something with Shane MacGowan. The Pogues front man, although Irish, is a once preppy schoolboy from one of the most exclusive private schools in England, who created a fake persona of an Irish drunk, in the name of authenticity – to the point where it actually became real. MacGowan is, no doubt, both a genuinely troubled genius and self-indulgent, racist, self-parody of an Irishman. Cave’s heroin raddled persona, epitomized by his cameo as the bohemian Berlin singer in Wings of Desire is similarly caught between gritty realism and pretentious poncery. I’m not sure which is real, but the music is nonetheless decent, proving, ironically, that neither image nor integrity is everything.
47 min 32 sec Feb 19, 2008
Spring Cleanup
I’ve been through and cleared out almost all of the dead embeds, and will introduce some flagging system in future. In the interim, if you see embeds that won’t play, please tell me in the comments.
DG
42 Hour Film of Buckminster Fuller
This has to be the most extreme example of what Smashing Telly set out to promote, the antithesis of ‘moronic 30 second dog on skateboard’ clips, this is 42 hours of gloriously intelligent video.
With people not much older than Fuller, like George Orwell, having not a single audio or video recording of themselves in existence, Buckminster Fuller fans can consider themselves lucky that such a film legacy exists.
In 1975 Buckminster Fuller recorded these sessions entitled ‘Everything I know’, in Philadelphia. This is the first film in the series, the entire set is available at the Wiki below.
1 hr 19 min 59 sec
conversationswithbuckypbwiki.com