A slow build takes place in just three short songs performed at the NPR Music offices in January 2012 – from a guitar instrumental to the final primal cry of “Jezebel”. Calvi plays three songs from her self-titled debut in this powerful performance at the NPR Music offices: “River To The Sea”, “Surrender” and “Jezebel”.
Author Archives: cherry bomb
bill callahan – tiny desk concert
Recorded live at the NPR Music offices in July 2009, this triptych is really worth a listen – the man formerly known as SMOG writes exquisitely. The three songs performed are “Jim Cain”, “Rococo Zephyr” and “Too Many Birds”. More information HERE.
palaces of jacob zuma
playa 4 lyf
ukulele orchestra of great britain – pretty girls
“am i pretty or ugly?”
The following videos are posted by very young teenage girls looking for validation from strangers online in the face of negative comments about their appearance… There are MANY, MANY videos like this on Youtube – it’s become a strange sort of meme.
The exact motives for making these movies are mixed, but if you read the comments under the videos, you’ll see how mean people can be under the cloak of anonymity – meaner, probably, than the unkindness at school that the girls are hoping to drown out with the “objective” opinions of strangers online, for this is what all the videos have in common.
I don’t think I will ever understand how hurting someone else, even if it is because you yourself are hurting, could help you feel better at all… which I guess is what always made me an easy target for bullies myself. I don’t retaliate because it doesn’t make sense to me to do so. That’s lethal bully-bait when coupled with the conviction to stand up for oneself, to speak back. I hit people teasing me a few times when I was a kid, mainly to get them out of my face. It made me feel sick to do that, and it didn’t help. Mostly I would just try to shout them down.
My mom’s mantra, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me,” roared uselessly.
It took me years and years to figure out how futile and dangerous it is to try to shout, to speak, to whisper back, to appeal to sense and truth, to reason with cruelty. It doesn’t work, because cruelty isn’t rational. It is senseless. Cruelty is fed by any and every reaction. These girls won’t realise until the damage is already done and they have lost their voices completely. It hurts to watch them exposing themselves to so much pain.
“I feel like I could just go away and never come back. I feel like I’ve been standing all these years and keep getting torn down… Deep down inside, all girls know that other people’s opinions don’t matter, but we still go to other people for help because we don’t believe what people say.”
~ Faye (13). More on her story HERE.
helge janssen on the psychology of bullies
“Bullying represents a negative form of seeking attention. The bully is an excessively damaged person asking for help in a devastating way. While compassion is a fantastic quality, our society does not have the tools to deal effectively with this scourge. As a victim of bullying throughout my educational career (including, though less frequent, at college) I had absolutely no support from anybody. People thought bullying was ‘funny’. The bully has no control of his bullying and is not going to stop because he is shown ‘compassion’.
“The bully seeks power from the very person most likely to let him have it! It is a very weird psychology. However society does not have any mechanism (certainly not in schools, although there are pockets of greater awareness) to check this hurtful and harmful behaviour because the bully will find a way outside of school environment.
“Usually, the only thing the bully will listen to is if he is challenged directly. Sadly this challenge may come at a time when the VICTIM has lost rationale and has become desperate. Domestic violence is another form of bullying. Once a victim is forced into silent suffering the results become tragic.
“Being bullied taught me how to become INVISIBLE and it took about 10 years of my life AS AN ADULT to work my way out of this ‘death’. This was my only defence. In hind sight this has given me an invaluable tool: I am now an eternal REBEL.”
~ Helge Janssen
Written in response to THIS OPINION PIECE on bullying, published today on the Daily Maverick website.
john stevens on the dynamic which underlies bullying
“Bullying is about rejection and belonging. It stems from the need for a place in the world and the feeling that one has been denied that need. When young people feel properly welcomed in the world, when they feel their gifts being led out, they do not feel the need to claim their place through violence or meanness. When a person bullies, or shoots his bully, it shows us that we did not provide that young person the opportunity to grow his or her gifts.
“Instead of recognising this, our emotional reaction is often to try to reclaim control, to clamp down. It is a reaction that feeds and deepens the roots of alienation in young people – roots that grab in the belly and grow through the heart until they bloom red in schools. In the United States, where I am from, we have experienced school violence at heretofore unknown levels. We have often responded in all the wrong ways and have managed to turn many of our schools into places that more closely resemble prisons than places in which the inherent gifts of each individual person are ushered into the world.”
Read the rest of this opinion piece HERE.
amanda todd (15)
“I’m struggling to stay in this world, because everything just touches me so deeply. I’m not doing this for attention. I’m doing this to be an inspiration and to show that I can be strong. I did things to myself to make pain go away, because I’d rather hurt myself then someone else. Haters are haters but please don’t hate, although I’m sure I’ll get them. I hope I can show you guys that everyone has a story, and everyones future will be bright one day, you just gotta pull through. I’m still here aren’t I ?”
~ Amanda Todd (on making the above video, posted in September 2012)
RIP Amanda Todd: November 27, 1996 – October 10, 2012
Video posted four hours before her suicide.
alice (jan svankmajer, 1988)
In Alice, a little girl follows a white rabbit into a world where nothing is quite what it seems. Where Czech surrealist Švankmajer’s Alice differs from other adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is that it explores the book’s darker side as well, thereby remaining faithful to the tone of uneasy confusion that pervades the original story. A live-action Alice (Kristyna Kohoutova) inhabits a Wonderland that teems with threatening stop-motion characters. Švankmajer’s visual canniness and piercing psychological insight permeate the film with a menacing dream-logic. Curiouser and curiouser.
alice in wonderland (w. w. young, 1915)
W. W. Young’s 1915 film of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Starring Viola Savoy as Alice. Produced by The American Film Manufacturing Company (Flying A Studios) and released on 19 January 1915.
alice in wonderland (hepworth/stow, 1903)
Directed by two of the founders of British cinema, Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, its original running time of twelve minutes made the first cinematic adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s literary classic the longest running British film to date.The one remaining print has been restored by the BFI, and here it is, courtesy of Youtube.
Alice in Wonderland was clearly made for cinema goers who had already read the book, hence describing this version of Alice in Wonderland as a literary adaptation in the modern understanding of the term may be misleading (without prior knowledge of the books, deciphering the events of the film would be quite difficult). Given the film’s length, it would be better to describe it as a series of vignettes from the book. It is perhaps this aspect of the film’s organisation that gives it a peculiar and slightly disjointed feel.
It is memorable for its use of special effects, clearly inspired by the likes of Georges Méliès and the Lumière Brothers.
Despite the BFI’s best efforts, the original reel of Alice in Wonderland was damaged to such an extent that the deterioration is quite clearly visible on the restored print. This however, only heightens the dreamlike atmosphere of the film. Combined with the fact that the film is not a ‘conventional narrative’, Alice in Wonderland can be seen as a forerunner for the works of surrealist filmmakers such as René Clair, Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau.
Read more about the film HERE.
nadine shah – are you with me?
“Shah is a singer-songwriter of Norwegian and Pakistani parentage from a small coastal village in the north-east of England, but she could just as easily be the result of a steamy union in the capital some time in the early-90s between Polly Harvey and Nick Cave. That’s the lineage to which her dark tales of lust and loss, revenge and regret belong, although she also cites as influences everyone from Philip Larkin and Frida Kahlo to Interpol and Arthur Russell (something in the tremulousness of her voice bears the latter out) as well as the religious Sufi songs that her father would play during car rides and the ghazals he sang in Urdu around the house… There is romance in her backstory, even if it’s not of the troubled variety. Shah grew up on a rocky cliff overlooking the North Sea. Her mum was a sea captain’s daughter, and her dad was the exotic stranger who stole her heart. Her debut album will be called Love From Dum And Mad, its title capturing the intriguing split in Shah’s character between loving family girl and avenging banshee.”
– Paul Lester, The Guardian
The Aching Bones EP was released on 19 November 2012 by Label Fandango. More from Nadine Shah HERE.
the general malaise
“To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.”
~ Emile Cioran
in my facebook feed right now
music for its own sake
“Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music, we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.”
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
~ Alan Watts
lhasa – anywhere on this road
From The Living Road (2003).
to go on
“To go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.”
~ Samuel Beckett, from The Unnamable
the unnamable (1999)
A film by Jenny Triggs, based on the novel of the same name by Samuel Beckett. This film animates body parts, chess pieces and mechnical motifs as life’s conveyor belt threatens to grind to a halt, but never does.
Contact jenny.triggs@blueyonder.co.uk for further information.
“unbound” tonight at greatmore studios’ 2012 showcase
Fleurmach highly recommends that you check out Greatmore Studios‘ Showcase 2012, particularly tonight’s live improvisational performance, entitled ‘Unbound’. Don’t miss this once-off collaboration, involving sound by musicians Alex Bozas, Garth Erasmus and Niklas Zimmer, dance by Jacki Job and photography of the performance projected live by Noncedo Gxekwa.
When? Wednesday 28 November (TONIGHT!). Doors open 18h00. Live performance commences 18h30.
Where? 47-49 Greatmore St, Woodstock, Cape Town. Map HERE.
The live performance will accompany an extensive exhibition by resident artists, visiting artists and guests, which promises to be really worthwhile. More info HERE.
Greatmore Studios is an artist-run initiative based in Cape Town. It revolves around a pool of permanent artists, an international visiting-artists-in-residency programme and a range of workshops and other activities. This initiative forms part of the Triangle Arts Trust, a United Kingdom-based organisation that facilitates an international network of artist-led workshops and residencies. This association affords artists access to information and opportunities to exchange ideas and skills with other artists around the world.
david whyte on faith and belief
and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly,
so Biblically,
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love
– David Whyte
depeche mode – waiting for the night to fall
From Violator (Mute/Stumm 64, 1990)
“And when I squinted, the world seemed rose-tinted
And angels appeared to descend
To my surprise, with half-closed eyes
Things looked even better than when they were open…”
lil louis – blackout (1989)
shakespears sister – black sky (the black dub)
From Shakespears Sister (sic) “Goodbye Cruel World” 12″
Label: London Records – lonx 309, London Records – 869 199-1
Format: Vinyl, 12″, Limited Edition, 45 RPM
Country: UK
Released: 1991
pre-eclipse moon into gemini, 29 november 2012
Instagram by Stella*
Follow her HERE.
i’m glad i never…
“I’m sure glad I never… Ain’t you glad I never… Be glad I never owned a gun.”
Lee Hazlewood cover by Lambchop. Original HERE.
jiddu krishnamurti on universal suffering and responsibility
the breeders – wicked little town
Beautiful cover version from Wig In A Box – Songs From And Inspired By Hedwig And The Angry Inch (2003).
gr†llgr†ll – if u cAn dR3Am – pRinc3ss3s
more HERE.
baloji with konono n°1 – karibu ya bintou (english subtitles)
From the album Kinshasa Succursale (Crammed Discs, 2011)
Video shot in the streets of Kinshasa.
Electric thumb piano (likembé) played by Konono N°1, the legendary Congolese band whose junkyard sonics and trademark “Congotronics” sound has had a major influence on the electronic and indie rock scenes.
Directors: Spike and Jones
DOP: Nicolas Karakatsanis
Producer: Annemie Decorte (Dr. Film)
Styling: Ann Lauwerys
Mask: Katrien Matthys
More info:
http://www.baloji.com
http://www.crammed.be
“we don’t mean to offend you by calling you racist”
‘Young gentros in Urban Outfitters “Navajo” tees saying “F**k the system” and “I don’t see color”: You are the problem.’
Two slam poets with Brave New Voices deliver this indictment of hipster cultural appropriation and its collateral damage. Read more HERE.
fleurmach 