After watching the video to David Bowie and Mick Jagger’s “Dancing in the Street” for probably the hundredth time in its quarter century of existence, all I can ask myself is how can two people as eternally cool as these two come up with something so embarrassing? Is their Martha and the Vandellas cover a a sign of the times, and in this case a relic of the coked-out decadent excess of the 80’s? Am I being elitist for singling out a light-hearted guilty pleasure charity single? Hopefully not, because what has continued to evade me all these years is sorting out what exactly are they going for in this video.
Close-up yellow Reebok’s stomping faster. Uncomfortable Jagger struts. Bowie in a terrible leopard print jumpsuit. Bowie and Jagger, Instead of two rock gods having a laugh, what unfolds is more like my dad and a mate, on a night on the red. The simultaneous butt-wiggle at the end confirms the hilarity. Nevertheless, their real legacy still exists.
Trees shrouded in ghostly cocoons line the edges of a submerged farm field in the Pakistani village of Sindh, where 2010′s massive floods drove millions of spiders into the trees to spin their webs.
Beginning last July, unprecedented monsoons dropped nearly ten years’ worth of rainfall on Pakistan in one week, swelling the country’s rivers. The water was slow to recede, creating vast pools of stagnant water across the countryside.
“It was a very slow-motion kind of disaster,” said Russell Watkins, a multimedia editor with the U.K.’s Department for International Development (DFID), the organization tasked with managing Britain’s overseas aid programs.
According to Watkins, who photographed the trees during a trip to Pakistan last December, people in Sindh said they’d never seen this phenomenon before the flooding.
John Lennon, is the most influential musician of the last century. He led the one of the most iconic bands of all time into the history books and then followed it up as a symbol for peace as war divided the country. Yet the years John spent after the Beatles with Yoko has always been entangled with controversy and never truly been examined in depth, until now. Working from a vault of rare studio outtakes and reams full of never before seen personal film, LENNONYC is a rare and personal glimpse into the life of Lennon as both a musician in his post-Beatles phase of his career and a loving dude.
Michael Epstein has crafted a pitch perfect portrait of Lennon as an artist finding redemption not from the spotlight he craved so dearly as a young aspiring musician, but rather from the gratifying humanistic side of being a father. When Lennon came to NYC '71, he was looking for freedom. The world was changing at a rapid rate while division spread throughout the USA. Lennon’s vocal opinion against the Vietnam made him an easy target for the Nixon administration, who proceeded to bully the former Beatle out of the country via the FBI and INS by tapping his phone calls and documenting his every move.
One of the amazing elements that gives LENNONYC such life is the candid and insightful interview Yoko delivers, in part because of her close relationship with the filmmaker. Her remarks on the time period contrasted by actually hearing and seeing Lennon through photographs or studio outtakes is remarkable. There are some truly amazing moments of Lennon’s life captured and explained in detail ranging from stories about performing with Elton John @ MSG, running off to California with May Pang and hanging out with the likes of Andy Warhol and other sceney kids of NYC.
Never before have we seen this intimate or human a portrait of Lennon while in the twilight of adulthood embracing fatherhood properly for the first time. It’s also equally tragic in that it’s a somber reminder of how quickly we lost one of the last generations most important figures in not just music but history. Still, the movie weighs heavily on the optimism that Lennon finally discovered in himself after Sean was born. More importantly, it’s another testament to how amazing Lennon the musician was and will always be.
As the mouthpiece and figurehead of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, the teenage hip-hop outfit that's courted controversy and well-nigh governed the blogosphere for the better part of two years, Tyler the Creator is facing down an especially large degree of expectation surrounding his first major-label release.
His self-released and entirely self-produced 2009 album, Bastard, made waves for its shock value, but also boasted some genuinely inspired moments that went some way toward vindicating his crew's cult following. His new album, Goblin, is a much larger platform for Tyler's polemical rants, and it will likely be the mainstream's first taste of the OFWGKTA sound.
Salad: 1 small bulb of fennel (sliced ultra-thin), 2 oranges (peel, seeded and segmented), 1 ripe avocado (peeled, toned and sliced), small handful of fresh blueberries, 1 TBSP walnuts, broken up with your fingers.
Dressing: Juice ½ an orange, 1 small clove of garlic (v.finely chop), a small handful of fresh coriander (fine
chop), ½ tablespoon of olive oil, 2-3 drops of balsamic, 2 teaspoons of tamari.
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