tagged w/ Culture
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Roger Ebert, who reviewed movies for the “Chicago Sun-Times” for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago at the age of 70.
On Tuesday, Ebert blogged that he had suffered a recurrence of cancer following a hip fracture suffered in December and would be taking “a leave of presence.” In the blog essay, marking his 46th anniversary of becoming the “Sun-Times” film critic, Ebert wrote “I am not going away. My intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers hand-picked and greatly admired by me.” “We were getting ready to go home today for hospice care, when he looked at us, smiled, and passed away,” said his wife, Chaz Ebert. “No struggle, no pain, just a quiet, dignified transition.”
Ebert had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland. He first had surgery to remove a malignant tumor on his thyroid in 2002, and three subsequent surgeries on his salivary gland, all the while refusing to cut back on his TV show or his lifelong pride and joy, his job at the “Sun-Times.” He lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity.
“My newspaper job,” he said in 2005, “is my identity.” But as always with Roger Ebert, that was being too modest. He was a renaissance man whose genius was based on film but by no means limited to it, a great soul who had extraordinary impact on his profession and the world around him.
“Kindness covers all of my political beliefs,” he wrote, at the end of his memoir, “Life Itself.” “No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”
This piece includes photographs and two videos.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/legendary-chicago-film-critic-roger-ebert-dies-at-age-70/Roger Ebert, who reviewed movies for the “Chicago Sun-Times” for 46 years... more
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Hanami is the Japanese tradition of making merry under cherry blossoms. It goes back a long time. One of the most spectacular hanami events occurred in 1598 at Daigo Temple in Kyoto. The most powerful man in Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, known by his title "Taiko" put on a lavish hanami at Daigoji.
Every 2nd Sunday in April, Daigoji commemorates this event with a small stately procession followed by traditional dances.
Photos:
http://therovingroninreport.blogspot.jp/2013/04/taiko-hanami-gyrorestu-kyoto-cherry.htmlHanami is the Japanese tradition of making merry under cherry blossoms. It goes back a... more
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Beware the Easter Bunny! On Easter day, Chicago’s courageous little poodle, Tuffy, was confronted by a truly terrifying gigantic Easter Bunny! After an epic struggle, brave little Tuffy managed to break free from the bunny’s huge predator paws. Tuffy then made his way to the Wiggly Field doggie park, where he celebrated his escape by joyfully frolicking with his best lady-friend, Miss Olive.
This piece includes color photographs and a music video.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2013/04/02/tuffys-easter-escapades-little-tuffy-confronts-terrifying-gigantic-bunny/Beware the Easter Bunny! On Easter day, Chicago’s courageous little poodle,... more
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“Croissant de Triomphe” is a wacky animated short film, the first in a new Disney series of 19 cartoon shorts, produced and directed by animator Paul Rudish. After scoring a 2013 Oscar with its animated film “Paperman,” Disney has debuted this wild short starring Mickey Mouse that follows our hero Mickey as he speeds through the City of Light, battling heavy traffic and many other obstacles, to deliver some badly needed croissants to Minnie’s cafe.
This piece includes colorful pictures and the comical animated short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/croissant-de-triomphe-mickeys-wacky-quest-for-minnies-croissants/“Croissant de Triomphe” is a wacky animated short film, the first in a new... more
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Graham Hancock
In his own words:
"Urgent call for help against an attempt to censor my work.
I have received notification today that my recent 18-minute TEDx video presentation, “The War on Consciousness” (YouTube) which has at time of writing received more than 132,000 views, is to be deleted from the TEDx website because what I say in that presentation allegedly “strays well beyond the realm of reasonable science”, and because I allegedly make “non-scientific and reckless” statements about psychotropic drugs. I am fighting these charges from TED’s Science Board which in my opinion are untrue and amount to nothing more than an ideologically driven attempt to censor my work. All the indications, however, are that my presentation will be deleted some time today...
...I don’t intend to allow this bizarre transgression of my freedom of speech on the part of an institution – TED – for which I once had the highest respect, to pass without a fight..." (paraphrased)
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Wanna be enlightened? Watch Graham Hancock videos on YouTube.Graham Hancock
In his own words:
"Urgent call for help against an attempt... more
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And then, suddenly, just when the colors and outlines settle at last to their various duties — smiling, frivolous duties — some knob is touched and a torrent of sounds comes to life:And then, suddenly, just when the colors and outlines settle at last to their various... more
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Capitalism means that there is much more research into male baldness than there is into diseases such as malaria, which mostly affect poor people, said Bill Gates, speaking at the Royal Academy of Engineering's Global Grand Challenges Summit.
"Our priorities are tilted by marketplace imperatives," he said. "The malaria vaccine in humanist terms is the biggest need. But it gets virtually no funding. But if you are working on male baldness or other things you get an order of magnitude more research funding because of the voice in the marketplace than something like malaria."
As a result, governments and philanthropic organisations have to step in to offset this "flaw in the pure capitalistic approach". The Gates Foundation focuses on finding under invested areas of basic science and focusing an innovation agenda on the needs of the poor, specifically looking at education and health.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-03/14/bill-gates-capitalismCapitalism means that there is much more research into male baldness than there is... more
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http://lewrockwell.com/reed/reed252.html
The United States is the most hated country in the world, followed closely by Israel, and then by nobody. Why? Why not Ecuador? China? Russia? East Timor? The hostility puzzles many Americans, who genuinely believe their country to be a force for good, a pillar of democracy, a defender of human rights.
To the rest of the world, none of this is even close.
If you have lived abroad, as so very few Americans have, the explanation for the hatred is obvious: Meddling. Relentless, prideful, uncomprehending meddling, frequently military, often with horrendous death tolls. Americans, adroitly managed by a controlled press, historically illiterate, incurious, decreasingly educated, either have never heard of the American behavior that angers others, or believe it to have been inspired by virtuous motives. Nobody else thinks so. Add to unfamiliarity with the wider world the constantly inculcated assertion that America is the greatest, most wonderful nation ever to exist, a light to the world, a shining city on a hill, and you get a dangerously delusional state. Especially now. In the past, American economic and military supremacy were such that the US didn’t have to care what others thought. The times, they are a-changing.
It might be wise to compare briefly the view through American and foreign eyes. Consider Iraq. To most of the world, the war on Iraq was brutal, unprovoked, and murderous. More than a few, looking at the ruins of Fallujah, thought of Guernica – of which few in the States have ever heard.
Many Americans do not believe that we destroyed Iraq for oil, empire, and the Israel lobby, as was in fact the case. No. We wanted to topple an evil dictator and dispense the precious gift of democracy. It was a question of goodness. Many apparently still believe that Iraq had something to do with the attacks on New York. Again, controlled press, poor schooling, little curiosity.
Similarly, Americans tend to see the war on Afghanistan as having to do with ending Terror or sprouting democracy – not as the Great Game (“Hanh?”) redux, or the quest for the TAPI pipeline (“Say whuh?”) or Caspian hydrocarbons. (“Caspian? You mean the Friendly Ghost?”) To most of the world, Afghanistan is just another sorry spectacle of American fighter-bombers killing peasants, of gutted children and drone attacks on half-identified targets. This, the merciless use of overwhelming firepower against lightly armed campesinos, is what the world sees, over and over. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan. It isn’t pretty.
more at link...
Great editorial!
9/11 was an inside job
America is a tool for the New World Order
The US will fall worse than Rome if people don't wake uphttp://lewrockwell.com/reed/reed252.html
The United States is the most hated... more
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“The Man at the Counter” is an award-winning, magically heartwarming short film about life, love and sugar packets, directed by Brian McAllister at Note to Self Films. The film tells the story of a young boy who spends his summer working in a small town coffee shop. The boy notices an old man who comes into the store each day and orders a tall coffee, repeatedly pocketing a number of sugar packets on his way out. As this pattern continues, the boy grows more and more frustrated in trying to solve the mystery of the stolen sugar packets. Finally, the boy confronts the old man, but the answer isn’t at all what he had expected. Eventually, the mystery of the stolen sweeteners leads the boy to discover a new outlook on life, forcing him to cope with some of life’s most basic questions.
This piece includes color photographs and the award-winning short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/sugarman-the-man-at-the-counter/“The Man at the Counter” is an award-winning, magically heartwarming short... more
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BEIRUT — The number of Syrians who have fled their war-ravaged country and are seeking assistance has now topped the 1 million mark, the U.N. refugee agency said Wednesday, warning that Syria is heading toward a "full-scale disaster."
The announcement came as government troops and rebels fought street battles in Syria's strategic northern city of Raqqa. The Syrian military dispatched reinforcements in an attempt to push out opposition gunmen who now control most of the city, activists said.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, said in Geneva that the 1 million figure is based on reports from his agency's field offices in countries neighboring Syria that have provided safe haven for refugees escaping the civil war.
"With a million people in flight, millions more displaced internally, and thousands of people continuing to cross the border every day, Syria is spiraling toward full-scale disaster," Guterres said. Syria's population is about 22 million.
end of excerpt.
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A humanitarian disaster of immense proportions and yet, silence. Why? Because once again the politics takes precedence over the human. Based on all media sources and the actions of Syria's government, Assad is an unfit and cruel leader who wields absolute power and we have seen that as exhibited by the accounts of those living there. Unfortunately, the "rebels" taking up arms are no better. Composed of entities seeking only the same power (and face it, probably backed by the CIA and other covert organizations) the people continue to suffer. And the announcement by new SOS John Kerry that the US is giving support to these "rebels" does nothing to end this suffering.>
This is a scenario being played out all over the Arab world and the similarities leave one who can connect the dots wondering just what and who is at the crux of it. Ghadhafi in Libya is gone, but now we see instability and war in Mali as arms from Libya made their way conveniently into these other countries which brought in the very elements now needing "cleansing" by the same Western powers that always seem to be in the forefront as well as the same alliance (Iran, China, Russia) on the other side. There is much money to be made in arms dealing and in fomenting wars just like this and banks (that state they are "too big to fail") that deal in it for governments and contractors make huge money from it as well. It is literally the buying and selling of humanity for profit.
For those who are not aware there is also a geopolitical race going on for resources due to new technologies (drone warfare as an example,) climate change (particularly drought in this region of the world affecting agriculture, prices and water,) terrorism and competition between developed powers and those emerging like China. This is making a battlefield out of the world as they compete using any means necessary to thwart the progress of the other. And make no mistake about it, climate change is also playing a part in this geopolitical battle. In Syria as in the entire Fertile Crescent drought and water shortages have been causing people in the thousands to be displaced as food and water become scarcer and deserts expand. This leads to the people rising up to demand action and in places in the Arab world that see strong footholds over power, this then leads to civil war and what we now see culminating in Syria with alliances aligning to take advantage of the circumstances to achieve their own geopolitical agenda at the expense of the people caught in the middle.
Syria is endemic of the failure of humanity to care for its people.
As far as the political end to this Assad is not a leader that the people of Syria deserve. Nor do I see these "rebels" as being much better. Perhaps and I know this is idealistic, but perhaps if just once we looked at these humanitarian disasters from a humanitarian point of view rather than a political one we just might be able to find a way to heal people instead of making the rift wider. We must beware of all sides in this because it would seem none of them are truly looking out for the human solution to this. I fear many more will die as people continue to be used as pawns on this geopolitical chessboard with the US a cautious yet frontline player. As an American I find it disgusting to see that these crises continue to kill so many innocents all due to the fact that greed, ideology and religious intolerance have overcome common decency.
http://rt.com/news/syria-ancient-artifacts-plunder-482/
Historic Syrian Antiques Plundered Amid Civil War
This is truly sad. Such a rich culture being destroyed.
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/empire/2013/01/201313092236800691.html
Timeline: The Syrian Revolt
Six decades of this with the US and Russia taking turns at destabilization. Where does it end?
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EDIT:
1 MILLION refugees (really more when you consider those not registered) living in conditions that MSF calls, "inadequate for human existence" and total silence. I know I am seen as a pariah here by some for speaking my mind but this is ridiculous. Should I have added more hate and gore to it? Climate denier trolls (the same one putting idiotic tags in my posts) and other disruptors get more responses here than legitimate posters who give a damn it would seem. Or is it that the moderators control the content here and it isn't "politically partisan" enough? Or are those who post thirty or more entries a day that monopolize this site keeping information like this off? Or does it go deeper: Do people not like seeing themselves in the mirror? Because this is truly a reflection of the human race and it is not a pretty picture. Perhaps that is too much for some to take.BEIRUT — The number of Syrians who have fled their war-ravaged country and are... more
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One woman's enterprise helps DR Congo's rape survivors find healing and an independent income through farming.
In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, every hour in the day some 48 women are raped. That is around 1,100 rapes a day, leaving many thousands of women and children with broken lives and little hope for their futures.
Desange: 'I wanted to kill myself'
Rachel: 'I feel a lot of emptiness inside me'
Masika: 'It's not the end of the world'
But one woman, herself a rape survivor, is helping to change some of these lives for the better. Masika has set up a place where rape survivors can get support, counselling and, uniquely, start to make a living.
With bits and pieces of money she raises, Masika rents a field where the women sow, tend and harvest crops, giving them an income as well as a sense of purpose and direction after their traumas.
The women, and also their children born of rape, are often hated, abandoned and abused further, but with remarkable compassion Masika takes in yet more abused women and children.
Despite these impossible circumstances, this Field of Hope helps the women find dignity, purpose, economic independence and some power to rebuild their lives.
"We women have something precious that everybody seems to be after," says Masika.
"Here in Congo they go into villages and loot. And after looting, they never leave without raping. That's why I say we've become weapons of war in Congo."
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What is happening in the Democratic Republic Of Congo is nothing short of hell on Earth. This woman is a heroine. I was numb after watching this video. Facing a world most of us cannot even comprehend these women find hope in planting seeds and faith in each other. These are the stories of truth and humanity and the evils of this world we need to see. If you don't feel outraged by this you aren't alive.
This is just one story of thousands showing the reality of survival in the DRC and as hopeful as this is we also need to reflect on the US role in foreign policy and aid that precipitates these horrors.
More at the linkOne woman's enterprise helps DR Congo's rape survivors find healing and an... more
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“Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” directed and mostly shot by Steven Sebring, is an elegantly impressionistic portrait of the punk godhead, Patti Smith, which was created over a heroic period of 11-years. The film has barely begun before Patti has offered forth a life’s worth of headline news, a strategy that allows Mr. Sebring and Ms. Smith, who is as much a collaborator as a subject, to fill the next 100 or so minutes with fragmented beauty and song.
For the most part, the film is a song of life, alternately joyous and elegiac, warm and vibrantly present, a mosaic of moods and moments from one woman’s richly lived time on earth. Against the odds and other punk rockers’ self-destructive tendencies, Ms. Smith didn’t die young or succumb to the usual rock clichés.
This piece includes photographs, a music video and the documentary film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/dream-of-life-an-elegantly-impressionistic-portrait-of-patti-smith/“Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” directed and mostly shot by Steven Sebring,... more
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If bands could get to No. 1 on the charts for ingenuity rather than record sales, then the amusingly irreverent unsigned trio, The Get Out Clause, would win hands down. The English indie band exploited a legal loophole to make an innovative video for their single “Paper” on the cheap.
“We wanted to produce something that looked good and that wasn’t too expensive to do,” says guitarist Tony Churnside, 29, who met the other band members at The University of Salford in Manchester. Desperate to make a video for their new single Paper, but with no budget to hire a crew, the Manchester guys decided to let the state do the filming instead. The band used footage from some of the the many CCTV surveillance cameras stationed around their home city of Manchester to create their own music video. The Get Out Clause played in front of CCTV cameras at 80 locations (out of the 13 million CCTV “security” cameras currently deployed throughout England), including at Deansgate, on a bus, on a zebra crossing and in the Castlefield Amphitheater. They then approached the companies who owned the cameras and used England’s Freedom of Information Act to obtain the footage.
The images were then pieced together and used as the video for one of the band’s songs, “Paper.” James Thomson of the band said, “You can’t help but go somewhere and not see one of these CCTV cameras, so we just thought we’d regurgitate what was available to us.” Tony Churnside, the band’s guitarist, said: “Legally, you are supposed to be able to get this footage back as it is information that is held about you. The vast majority of these places didn’t respond, so there was only a few we managed to get footage from in the end.” In all, the band had played in front of 80 CCTV cameras, and managed to get a quarter of the tapes back. The video ended up showing the band playing in 20 different locations throughout Manchester.
This piece includes photographs, a documentary short and the music video, “Paper.”
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/from-cctv-to-mtv-paper-on-the-cheap/If bands could get to No. 1 on the charts for ingenuity rather than record sales, then... more
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The Hindu gathering known as Kumbh Mela is on a scale difficult to fathom: The world's largest religious festival is millions of feet shuffling, millions of mantras chanted, countless sales of firewood to ward off the night cold. Millions of incense sticks will be burned and bells rung in devotional rituals called aartis.
Jet-setting swamis, naked holy men and foreigners fascinated by Eastern mysticism joined tens of millions of pilgrims for a dip in river waters believed to be holy.
Tragedy struck Sunday on the biggest day of the 55-day-long festival, when a stampede killed 37 people at a train station ferrying pilgrims home from the Kumbh Mela.
In a single day — this past Sunday — an estimated 30 million people celebrated on the river banks of the city of Allahabad. It's as if the combined populations of Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota showed up at the same place, at the same time. These pilgrims have converged on the Sangam — the confluence of three rivers, the Ganga or Ganges, the Yamuna and the so-called mythical Saraswati.
American-born Sadvhi Bhagawati Saraswati is a sanyasi, or a nun in the Hindu tradition. She is a disciple of Swami Chidanand Saraswati and the managing editor of the Encyclopedia of Hinduism, which was released last year.
"Once every 12 years, when the stars, the planets, the moon and everything is in proper alignment, it is considered the most auspicious and divine and sacred time to have a bath in the confluence of these sacred water," she explains, referring to the three holy rivers of India.
In Hindu mythology, Saraswati says, the kumbh of Kumbh Mela is a pot that contained sacred nectar.
"Drops of the sacred nectar of immortality actually fell upon this land and into these rivers, and so people who have come have come to bathe in the nectar of immorality. But nobody thinks that what it means is that cells of their body won't die. Of course they will. Everybody knows that," she says. "So we go home from here with an awareness of our divine and eternal nature. And that's what the nectar of immortality is."
snip
It is expected that by the final dipping day on March 10, more than 100 million people will have experienced the Kumbh Mela.
end of excerpt.
http://kumbhmelaallahabad.gov.in/english/index.html
Official Website of Kumbh Mela 2013
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/AkGF6U/www.npr.org/2013/02/12/171735743/in-the-waters-of-indias-holy-rivers-seeking-a-glimpse-of-immortality
Seeking a Glimpse Of Immortality In The Waters Of India's Holy Rivers
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This is truly a mystical and incredible event to behold.
Water Is Life.The Hindu gathering known as Kumbh Mela is on a scale difficult to fathom: The... more
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“Paperman” is a sweet tale of love at first sight, which won the 2013 Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. The groundbreaking 6-minute animated short is a gorgeous black and white classical-looking animation that nostalgically revives the timeless Disney-style of character animation and design. “Paperman” is the beta test of a potentially momentous shift in animation technology, using a novel new process to create 2D aesthetics in 3D.
Told entirely in pantomime, “Paperman” is a romantic comedy that tells the story of an ordinary young man who works at an ordinary job, traveling into and out of the city on one of the daily commuter trains. One windy day, he accidentally encounters a pretty young lady, who then boards her own train and vanishes out of his life almost as soon as she entered. Saddened by this brush with what-might-have-been, the man later sits despondently at his desk looking at the huge stack of forms the boss has just dropped into his in-box. But when he happens to glance out the window, he discovers to his great surprise that his dream-girl is at that very moment sitting near an open window in the building directly across the street. What happens next is wonderful, sweet, charming and magical in the best sense of the word.
This piece includes illustrations and the award-winning animated short film, “Paperman.”
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/paperman-wins-2013-oscar-for-best-animated-short-film/“Paperman” is a sweet tale of love at first sight, which won the 2013... more
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“Searching for Sugar Man” found an Oscar on Sunday night. The film, which traces the strange, almost unbelievable tale of Detroit folk musician Sixto Rodriguez from obscurity to international success, largely without his knowing, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film at Sunday’s 85th Academy Awards. Rodriguez, 70, was not at the ceremony, “because he didn’t want to take any of the credit himself,” producer Simon Chinn explained from the Oscar stage while accepting the award. “And that just about says everything about that man and his story that you want to know.”
“Searching for Sugar Man” is a 2012 Swedish/British documentary directed by Malik Bendjelloul, which follows the efforts of two Cape Town fans, Stephen ‘Sugar’ Segerman and Craig Bartholomew Strydom, to find out whether the rumored death of Rodriguez was true, and, if not, to discover what had become of him. Previously, the film won the Special Jury Prize and the Audience Award for Best International Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, the Audience Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival, the Audience Award at the Durban International Film Festival and the Audience Award at the Melbourne Film Festival. Malik Bendjelloul won the 2013 Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary for “Searching for Sugar Man.”
The film tells the magical story of a gifted singer-songwriter from Detroit, who was an enigmatic mystery. His face half-hidden by long flowing hair and dark glasses, he sang in smoke-filled folk music bars, often with his back turned to the audience. His name was Sixto Rodriguez. In the late 1960′s, Rodriguez was so good that with neither fame nor a large fan base, he signed a two-album contract with Sussex and A&R Records. The first album, Cold Fact, got a rare four-star review from Billboard Magazine. However, neither it nor his second album, Coming From Reality, sold well, the contract was dropped and the story seemed to end there.
Nothing else was heard from Sixto Rodriguez. But several years later, his albums traveled half-way around the world, to Cape Town, South Africa, where bootleg copies passed from hand to hand and his songs became the storied anthems of the anti-apartheid movement. When an indie record store owner named Stephen Segerman released them commercially, they took off, the first selling 500,000 copies, which in that nation was comparable to the Beatles or Elvis Presley.
This piece includes photographs, two documentary short films and a music video.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/searching-for-sugar-man-story-of-musician-sixto-rodriguez-wins-oscar-for-best-documentary/“Searching for Sugar Man” found an Oscar on Sunday night. The film, which... more
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“The Jockstrap Raiders” is a delightfully wacky animated short film by animator Mark Nelson, which won the 2012 Student Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. In a slightly altered version of World War I, Germany is building a bridge across the English Channel to invade Britain.
Britain’s sole hope is The Jockstrap Raiders, a former amateur rugby club for freaks and geeks, all of whom had previously been excluded from the war due to various bizarre abnormalities. The team switches balls for bombs and goes into battle aerodynamically shaved and wearing only jockstraps, becoming the heroic flying squadron that foils the invading Kaiser and his army.
This piece includes colorful illustrations and the very humorous, acclaimed animated short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/the-jockstrap-raiders-heroic-british-misfits-defeat-invading-german-armies/“The Jockstrap Raiders” is a delightfully wacky animated short film by... more
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“Henry” is an emotionally touching short film by Quebec actor Yan England, which is a 2013 Oscar Nominee for Best Live-Action Short Film. The film is about an 84-year-old concert pianist suffering from Alzheimer’s, whose life is thrown into turmoil when his wife mysteriously disappears. The aging musician is tossed between feelings of hope and suffering as he searches in vain for his lost love, while reminiscing about their past together.
“Henry,” which England financed out of his own pocket, is an ambitious attempt to portray the world of worsening dementia from the inside. Gérard Poirier plays the pianist, Henry, and Louise Laprade portrays his wife, Maria. The 29-year-old England says the film was inspired by the experiences of his own grandfather, who developed Alzheimer’s disease and died three years ago at age 96.
This piece includes color photographs and acclaimed the short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/henry-the-inevitable-verdict-of-life/“Henry” is an emotionally touching short film by Quebec actor Yan England,... more
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“We’ve All Been There” is an acclaimed, inspiring short film directed by Australian filmmaker Nicholas Clifford, which just won top honors at Tropfest Australia 2013, the world’s biggest short-film festival. In the film, a struggling young waitress has to come up with $800 immediately or lose her house, while a flat tire leaves an older woman stranded in the middle of a desert. At the same time, an unemployed man desperately needs a job. All these stories are brought together as what goes around comes around and they impact each other in a way the three people could never have imagined.
This piece includes color photographs and the award-winning short film.
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/weve-all-been-there-the-unexpected-kindness-of-others/“We’ve All Been There” is an acclaimed, inspiring short film... more
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