On November 2nd Warp Records will release a new album called Small Craft On A Milk Sea by the legendary Brian Eno. After a recent cooperation with Underworld’s Karl Hyde he has appearantly decided to make a new electronic album. On his new website you can see the track listing and some of the artwork. One track has been released, which can be streamed below:
This track is full of energy and I think it’s very exciting and promising. This new teaming up of Eno and Warp could work out very well!
Kijk hier naar de livestream van de persconferentie van Bruin 1 (check das Rutte!). De complete akkoorden zijn hier te lezen. In het gedoogakkoord tussen CDA-VVD en PVV zijn alleen de punten immigratie, integratie, ouderenzorg en financiën opgenomen. Er komt nu ongetwijfeld een stroom aan analyses, hier de eerste opmerkelijke feiten uit het regeer/gedoogakkoord:
Uitzetting van strafrechtelijk veroordeelde vreemdelingen vindt eerder en vaker plaats.
Het kabinet komt met een voorstel tot verruiming van de mogelijkheid tot preventief fouilleren.
Het kabinet komt met voorstellen om in het volwassenenstrafrecht minimumstraffen in te voeren voor de gevallen waarin een persoon binnen tien jaar opnieuw wordt veroordeeld voor een misdrijf waarop wettelijk een maximumstraf van twaalf jaar of meer is gesteld. De rechter kan in individuele, zeer specifieke omstandigheden van het geval gemotiveerd afwijken van de minimumstraf.
Update: Wilders laat de term “straatterroristen” vallen, Verhagen en Rutte kijken niet eens op en stemmen stilzwijgend in.
Update 2: Er komt een boerkaverbod! Check dit stuk uit het akkoord, behoorlijk hardcore rechts als je het mij vraagt:
Het kabinet beëindigt het diversiteits/voorkeursbeleid op basis van geslacht en etnische herkomst. Selectie moet plaatsvinden op basis van kwaliteit. Er komt een meldcode voor cultureel bepaald huiselijk geweld en kindermishandeling. Het kabinet komt met een voorstel voor een algemeen verbod op gelaatsbedekkende kleding zoals boerka’s. In voorschriften wordt opgenomen dat de politie en leden van de rechterlijke macht geen hoofddoek dragen. Er wordt bezuinigd op de subsidies van de rijksoverheid op het gebied van integratie met uitzondering van de subsidie aan Vluchtelingenwerk. Het kabinet zal geen subsidie geven aan organisaties die activiteiten ondernemen die zich tegen de integratie richten.
Maximum snelheid op snelwegen gaat naar 130 kilometer per uur
De Tweede Kamer wordt teruggebracht van 150 naar 100 leden
De Eerste Kamer gaat van 75 naar 50 leden
Toegelaten immigranten krijgen een tijdelijk Nederlanderschap voor vijf jaar. Wanneer er een wet overtreden wordt waarvoor een straf van meer dan 12 jaar staat, moet de immigrant het land uit
Aanstelling van 3.000 extra agenten en 500 ‘dierenagenten’
“Qua milieubeleid is het kabinet-Rutte door en door vies”, zegt campagnedirecteur Greenpeace Jorijs Thijssen. “Rutte, Verhagen en Wilders zetten de deur nog verder open voor vervuilende kolen- en kerncentrales en verlagen milieudoelstellingen”.
Actievoerders van Greenpeace zijn donderdagmiddag rond vier uur begonnen met het beklimmen van de Ridderzaal om een spandoek op te hangen. De tekst op het doek is ‘Kabinet-Rutte: #viezerkanniet’.
Milieudefensie vindt dat Rutte I teruggrijpt naar de oude economie “waaruit de financiële crisis en de klimaatcrisis zijn voortgekomen”.
VVD, CDA en PVV gaan meer snelwegen aanleggen. “Dat trekt meer wegverkeer aan waardoor mensen in en rond de steden steeds vaker vast komen te staan”, zegt Milieudefensie. Ook vreest de organisatie dat de uitstoot van schadelijke stoffen groeit.
VNO-NCW, MKB-Nederland en LTO Nederland steunen het nieuwe kabinet. De ondernemersorganisaties geloven dat de nieuwe regering de overheidsfinanciën en economie gezond gaat maken en versterken. “Dat is de beste weg naar een goede toekomst van Nederland.”
De voorzitter van de Turkse Arbeidersvereniging, Mustafa Ayranci, heeft geen woorden voor het regeerakkoord. “Ik heb echt angst dat groepen tegen elkaar worden uitgespeeld. De spanningen zullen toenemen in onze samenleving. Dit zijn we niet gewend. In ons land was plek voor iedereen. Dat is nu voorbij.”
Author: lsdimension Published: September 30th, 2010
It’s pretty common on other sites and blogs and we were lagging behind, but as of now we’re completely up to date “social media-wise”! Under every post you can now find Facebook “like” , Twitter, Reddit and e-mail buttons. So if you feel you need to share one of our posts with the interwebs just use one of the buttons.
Please share your thoughts on this new feature in the comments!
But a single American al Qaeda terrorist in a foreign country actively waging war against us seems to me to be a pretty isolated example. And Obama always said he would fight a war against al Qaeda more ruthlessly than Bush. As he has. I agree that invoking state secrets so comprehensively as to prevent any scrutiny of this is a step way too far. But I do believe we are at war; and that killing those who wish to kill us before they can do so is not the equivalent of “assassination”. My concern has always been with the power to detain without due process and torture, not the regrettable necessity of killing the enemy in a hot and dangerous war.
This refers to the case of Anwar Aulaqi, a Yemeni-American terrorist suspect who is an official killing target for the U.S. government. By all accounts, he is a prominent member of Al Qaeda, suspected of involvement in the Fort Hood shooting and the Detroit underpants assault. So I don’t really care about him. But he’s also formally still a suspect, and an American citizen at that. Obama, in targeting this guy for assassination, has in terms of ignoring the rule of law pretty much gone beyond whatever Bush and Cheney did. That, I think, makes Obama an incredibly disappointing and untrustworthy politician.
My response to Sullivan:
I’m absolutely dumbfounded with your comment in this post:
(…)
And that’s coming from you?
First of, this guy holds an American passport. That makes him a U.S. citizen, with every right and protection that is attached to that. Secondly, you should know that “isolated examples” don’t remain isolated examples. These sort of “exceptions” have a tendency to spread and become normality after a while, just like happened with the Bush counterterrorism measures (and with the torture regime, spreading to Iraq, and with the Patriot Act, and so forth). Thirdly, since when are the life and rights of one individual somehow less worth than those of other individuals?
I know that this guy is probably a terrorist and what not. But this is a matter of principle, and an extremely important one at that. If you don’t care about the unchecked, unbounded killing by a government of one of its own citizens, merely because he is declared a terrorist, nobody can take your stance on “due process” and torture seriously either.
Had to vent that.
For more about this, read Glenn Greenwald (who, I see just now, also passionately attacks Andrew Sullivan on this).
Check out today’s announcement in the depressing “real world” that Lucas will begin rolling out 3-D versions of all six “Star Wars” features, beginning in 2012. He will start, of course, with “The Phantom Menace,” the canonically correct “first” (i.e., fourth) film, which was more than craptastic enough in 2-D. As someone in my Twitter feed observed minutes after the announcement, that debate in the Galactic Senate, or whatever it’s called, is going to be so, so riveting now! And I don’t know about you, but I’m hoping for some as-yet-unseen Jar-Jar Binks reggae-dance outtakes.
This presumably puts the re-rerelease (unless it’s the re-re-rerelease) of the original 1977 “Star Wars” — sorry, “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” — in summer 2015, when Lucas will be 71 and many of his original fans will be taking their grandkids to the movie. But hell, 71′s not that old these days, and George looks to be in good health. Do we think he’s done fiddling after 2017? Nah. We just don’t.
It may not even become a hit. How many times can you revive a classic? Lucas won’t stop until the very last dollar has been squeezed out of his 33 year old franchise. This news gives Trey Parker and Matt Stone material for a complete season.
Of course they are tasty and all, so not a complete surprise, but still! Seriously we see more places selling poffertjes here than we did living in the Netherlands. There are even companies that specialize in selling poffertjes cooking machines and pans. Odd. Now if we could only get some lekker stommpot delivered here. (I will pass on the Hollandse Nieuwe and let Maarten and Adriejan fight it).
Aliens have landed on earth, infiltrated British and American nuclear missile sites and sabotaged weapons, according to US Air Force officers.
Six retired officers and one former non-commissioned officer claim to have gathered witness testimonies from more than 120 military personnel revealing the infiltration of nuclear sites by aliens as recently as 2003.
Captain Robert Salas, a former Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Launch officer, said he was on duty during one missile disruption incident at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in 1967.
“An object came over and hovered directly over the site,” he said.
“The missiles shut down – 10 Minuteman missiles. And the same thing happened at another site a week later. There’s a strong interest in our missiles by these objects, wherever they come from.
“I personally think they’re not from planet Earth.”
He said he was ordered to never discuss it: “The US Air Force is lying about the national security implications of unidentified aerial objects at nuclear bases and we can prove it.”
Colonel Charles Halt said he watched Unidentified Flying Objects directing beams of light into RAF Bentwaters airbase near Ipswich and heard on the radio that they landed in the nuclear weapons storage area.
Col Halt said: “I believe that the security services of both the United States and the United Kingdom have attempted – both then and now – to subvert the significance of what occurred at RAF Bentwaters by the use of well-practised methods of disinformation.”
The group of officers said they would distribute declassified government documents on Monday that would prove there had been alien interference at nuclear weapons sites stretching back to 1948.
In some cases, nuclear missiles supposedly malfunctioned while a disc-shaped object hovered nearby.
After 92 years. Well, great. Now we don’t have to worry about the Treaty of Versailles and the burden of the Great War’s reparation payments inciting the German population against its neighbours anymore.
Am nächsten Sonntag ist es so weit: Deutschland tilgt die letzten Schulden aus Reparationszahlungen für den 1. Weltkrieg (1914– 1918). 69,9 Millionen Euro beenden dieses Kapitel nach 92 Jahren. Zumindest finanziell.
Die rund 70 Millionen Euro stehen als Punkt 2.1.1.6 im Bundeshaushalt 2010: „Bereinigte Auslandsschulden (Londoner Schuldenabkommen)“.
(…)
Nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg musste Deutschland Entschädigungen für Zerstörungen und Kriegskosten leisten. Verpflichtungen aus dem Versailler Vertrag von 1919. Doch während des Zweiten Weltkriegs stoppte das Deutsche Reich die Zahlungen.
Nach 1945 übernahm die Bundesrepublik einen großen Teil der Schulden, beglich sie bis 1983. Rund 125 Millionen Euro für Zinsen auf Auslandsanleihen sollten – laut Londoner Schuldenabkommen von 1953 – erst gezahlt werden, wenn Deutschland wiedervereinigt sei.
Diese Zahlungen begannen 1996. Am 3. Oktober 2010 ist nun die letzte Rate fällig – und der Erste Weltkrieg auch finanziell beendet.
As an outsider from Canada observing Dutch politics I am pleasantly baffled by the relative orderliness and decorum that appear to characterize Dutch politics. Adriejan has already noted here the relative invisibility of Job Cohen during recent rounds of negotiations even as things seem to be hurtling towards the finish line. Perhaps the enthusiastic suggestion that Cohen initiate his own coalition agreement might have pushed things too far; you don’t want to upset Her Majesty after all.
From a North American (or even in Australia, my current home away from home) Cohen’s patience and near silence while the right-wing negotiations proceed is jarring. Instead one would expect Cohen to take every opportunity to rail against Wilders’ potential involvement in governing as well as against the other potential coalition partners for allowing Wilders to even get near such an opportunity. Cohen could easily have added pressure to the already splintering CDA. And his incentive seems to be clear enough: if the current right-wing talks had failed to deliver a coalition agreement, the next iteration of negotiations would likely have included Cohen’s PvdA front and centre.
Harper also had some comments on minority governments and coalitions, given that Cameron is the head of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.
“Losers don’t get to form coalitions,” Harper said, in a shot apparently aimed at Canadian opposition parties…
“And of course this coalition in Britain, I would note, doesn’t contain a party dedicated to the break up of the country. And these were, as you know, the two problems in Canada, the proposition by my opposition was to form a coalition with the purpose of excluding the party that won the election and for the purpose of including a party dedicated to the break up of the country,” Harper said.
The British situation has some “instructive lessons for Canada,” he added.
Harper made the most of the opportunity to misrepresent not just the Westminster system and responsible government, but also a nearly formed coalition set on ending his grasp on power shortly after the last Canadian election. Without getting into all the gory details (see link below for more info), the key point is this: Harper in facing down a potential coalition consisting of the centrist Liberals and social democrat New Democratic Party that relied on the separatist Bloc Quebecois in much the same manner that Rutte and Verhagen will rely on the Islamaphobe Wilders, launched into all sorts of invective to (effectively) turn public opinion against the coalition effort.
A fiery Harper, in turn, accused Dion of “playing the biggest political game in Canadian history,” saying the [then] Liberal leader would recklessly attempt to govern the country amid a global economic crisis under threat of veto by “socialists and separatists.”
The over the top rhetoric hit its peak when Harper’s Conservative Party sent out Member of Parliament Daryl Kramp to the mic to address the proposed coalition’s effort to unseat the government and gain an opportunity from the Governor General to govern in its place:
“This is over the top now. This is a coup d’état. It makes us look like a banana republic. The only difference here is there’s no blood, thank goodness.”
To those paying attention, like prominent Canadian pundit Paul Wells, Harper has already made clear that nearly two years later he intends to continue to campaign on much the same lines:
On Sept. 14 in a wedding hall in Edwards, Ont., Harper said, “Friends, next time the choice will be either a Parliament where we Conservatives have the majority of seats, or one where the Liberals, NDP and Bloc Québécois have the majority of seats.”
Pay no attention to the opposition’s current silence on the matter, he said. “Regardless of what they tell you during an election, they will form a coalition the day after that election is over. Last time they waited—and they found out that that meant they couldn’t get away with it without having another election.” He said the opposition could never campaign on an explicit promise to form a coalition. “They would have been slaughtered.”
I’ve noticed this line of argument repeatedly from Harper over nearly two years, and written about it often on my blog.
His speech last Tuesday at the Canadian Club of Ottawa was expected to be about the Canadian economy. Instead, it turned into a highly partisan rant about an “Ignatieff-NDP-Bloc Québécois Coalition” that will take over and bankrupt the country unless the Conservatives are elected to a majority.
(…)
Flaherty used the word ‘economy’ eight times in the speech. He referred to the coalition 14 times.
(…)
The speech, less than 24 hours after Parliament reopened for the fall sitting, ended any premise of civility and co-operation between the government and opposition and automatically had the election-speculation meters running.
While I would have been much more happy had the negotiations for the forthcoming right-wing Dutch government fall apart, and I have no particular sympathy for CDA, I do have a great appreciation for Cohen’s willingness and ability to reinforce the perception of Netherlands’s more consensual politics by not taking up the opportunity to vilify his opponents for the sake of grabbing power. And to be clear, this is not a call for the end of politics (what would I do with that half of my waking hours?!?!). But, there is much to be said for a more mature brand of politics than that currently practiced by governments and opposition alike in Canada, the United States or Australia.
Now hopefully the Netherlands’ seemingly inevitable new right-wing government will self-implode before they cause too much damage…
Of course challenges to my argument are most welccome!
Ondanks dat moet worden bezuinigd, gaat het aanstaande kabinet Rutte jaarlijks honderden miljoenen euro’s extra besteden aan de aanleg van wegen.
Dat staat in het conceptregeerakkoord dat de Kamerleden van VVD, CDA en PVV woensdag te zien krijgen, schrijft De Telegraaf.
(…)
Het huidige budget voor het onderhoud en de aanleg van wegen is drie miljard euro per jaar. Volgens de krant moet dat budget de komende jaren uitkomen op een jaarbedrag dat vijfhonderd miljoen euro hoger ligt. Met deze investeringen wil het nieuwe kabinet de files aanpakken. Of ook in het openbaar vervoer wordt geïnvesteerd, is niet bekend.
Ik zal het aanstaande kabinet natuurlijk met het grootst mogelijke wantrouwen bejegenen, en hoop dat het zo snel mogelijk uit elkaar valt (of er niet eens komt).
Maar hierover moet ik toch zeggen: dikke kudos richting het rechtse kabinet, en een fuck you naar Ab Klink. Het rookverbod in kleine cafés afgeschaft. Hurray!
De eerste maatregel uit het regeer- en gedoogakkoord dat het CDA, de VVD en de PVV hebben gesloten, is al uitgelekt. Het nog te vormen kabinet-Rutte I gaat het rookverbod voor kleine cafés afschaffen.
Het rookverbod, ingevoerd door CDA-minister Klink, bestaat sinds ruim twee jaar en leidde tot veel ophef. Veel cafés hielden zich niet aan het verbod en zetten toch asbakken in hun zaak neer.
Enkele cafés spanden, met succes, rechtszaken aan om onder het verbod uit te komen. In februari echter stelde de Hoge Raad dat de gerechtshoven in Leeuwarden en Den Bosch de wet niet goed hebben geïnterpreteerd en dat er wel degelijk ruimte is voor een rookverbod voor kleine cafés. Sindsdien was het roken daar weer taboe.
There is one thing it is not: living a healthy lifestyle. Research confirms that smoking, drinking, and all those other terrible things do have an effect upon average people, but not upon supercentenarians. In fact, a substantial percentage of these people enjoys the goods life has to offer. An interesting story.
Helen is 108 years old. She hates salads, vegetables, getting up early and just about everything that has to do with a healthy lifestyle. She loves rare hamburgers, chocolate, cocktails and nightlife in New York: all the exotic restaurants, Broadway shows, movie theaters — where she recently saw “Iron Man 2″ — and the Metropolitan Opera. That’s where she attended her first opera, “Samson et Delila,” in 1918. It was a present from her father for her 17th birthday.
She also likes to smoke, of course: “I’ve been smoking for more than 80 years, all day long, every day. That’s a whole lot of cigarettes,” admits Helen, who has always been called “Happy” since she was a child. Then she giggles as she falls back into her soft armchair. This 108-year-old woman is so small and delicate that she almost seems to disappear into the plush furniture. She is wearing pleated pants, a pink cardigan with ruffles, a matching shawl and a number of pearl necklaces. Her short light-brown curls are perfectly blow-dried and she is wearing rouge and lipstick. Her skin is soft and nearly spotless, and her brown eyes sparkle merrily behind her glasses.
Since she had a stroke five years ago, her pronunciation has been slightly slurred. But her mind is alert, her curiosity as strong as ever, and her memory is often better than that of her 37-year-old Filipino caretaker. Happy is currently nursing a cold and should take it easy — so she is receiving guests in her apartment on Park Avenue, and not at the Indian place around the corner or at one of her other favorite restaurants. “But on Saturday,” says Happy, as she sits up again and beams, “on Saturday, we’ll meet with my brother Irving for lunch. Okay?”
(…)
Demographers have calculated that the life expectancy of people in the developed world has risen for the past 170 years by an average of three months per year. In Germany, it is currently 82 years for women and 77 years for men — and there’s no end in sight to this trend. How can we prevent this increasingly elderly population from being plagued by the typical afflictions of old age, including protracted illnesses and medical conditions such as arteriosclerosis, diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s? Do the lives of individuals who have lived over a century provide recipes to combat the impending infirmities of a rapidly aging society?
There are some 50,000 people over the age of 100 in the United States, and just under 6,000 in Germany. One in seven million even live to the age of 110 and longer — and there is even a special word for these living ancients: supercentenarians. Research teams worldwide are searching for centenarians and supercentenarians to comb through their genes, medical records and life stories for explanations.
(…)
The results are sobering: “There is no pattern,” says Barzilai, 54. “The usual recommendations for a healthy life — not smoking, not drinking, plenty of exercise, a well-balanced diet, keeping your weight down — they apply to us average people,” says the researcher, “but not to them. Centenarians are in a class of their own.” He pulls spreadsheets out of a drawer, adjusts his glasses and reads out loud: “At the age of 70, a total of 37 percent of our subjects were, according to their own statements, overweight, and 8 percent were obese; 37 percent were smokers, on average for 31 years; 44 percent said that they only moderately exercised; 20 percent never exercised.”
But Barzilai is quick to point out that people shouldn’t start questioning the importance of a healthy lifestyle: “Today’s changes in lifestyle do in fact contribute to whether someone dies at the age of 85 or already at age 75.” But in order to reach the age of 100, says the researcher, you need a special genetic make-up. “These people age differently. Slower. They end up dying of the same diseases that we do — but 30 years later and usually quicker, without languishing for long periods.”
Yes, you read that correctly. Allen Ginsberg’s Howlhas been made into a movie.
Along with On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Howl stands as one of the greatest works of the 1950s Beat Generation. It features the same sort of stream of consciousness writing and themes (drugs, sexuality, jazz, alcohol) and beautiful hallucinatory imagery as On the Road does. There’s one particular reading by Ginsberg of Howl that is especially noteworthy, namely that in the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955. Here, a lot of Beat poets and writers were gathered, and the evening has been memorialized by Kerouac in On the Road.
Here’s the famous opening fragment (entire poem here):
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
The beatniks are frequently seen as the proto-hippies, setting the stage for the 1960s countercultural revolution with their scene and publications in the decade before. While any such historical causation suffers from being too simple, it is kinda true that Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (the original hippies) later on thrived in the bohemian atmosphere in the San Francisco area created by the beat poets, and in their liberating, drug-fueled self-expression followed in their footsteps. Also, Allen Ginsberg (too old to be a baby boomer, like the hippies were) continued to hang out with Kesey and the Pranksters, and exerted a great influence on them (Kerouac rejected the hippies, however). This cross pollution is most evident in the character of Neal Cassady, who was a model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road, had a (sexual) relationship with Ginsberg, and was the one who drove the original Prankster bus from California to New York.
Anyway – pardon the digression, I love this stuff and it was great for me to visit the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco a few years ago, where all of this pretty much started – now Howl has been made into a movie. Definitively looking forward to it!
Howl may be the unlikeliest movie ever to come out of Sundance with national distribution: a translation of a poem—the substance, spirit, and cultural heft of a poem—into film.
The poem is Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”—written in 1955, published in ’57—and it’s probably hard for anyone born long after those years to grasp just what a cataclysmic impact that poem made (or perhaps any poem could make) not just on the literary world but on the broader society and culture.
Even many of those who have never read the whole poem know its white-heat opening lines: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/ dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix. …”
It was an anguished protest, literally a howl, against the era’s soul-crushing conformism and a hymn to the holiness of everything about the human body and mind, splashed in verse that breaks free from standard meter but speaks instead in the long lines and jangling rhythm of natural breath and conversation, a style inspired by the expressive poets who went ignored in the ivory towers of high modernism—Whitman, Blake, Rimbaud*—fused with the urban syncopation of the bebop jazz that Ginsberg and his pal, Jack Kerouac, went to hear in the clubs of Harlem while they were students at Columbia in the mid-1940s.
Howl the movie doesn’t capture this entire milieu. Probably no 90-minute movie, shot in 14 days on a shoestring budget, could. But, as far as the film reaches, it’s an evocative, at times compelling portrait of an era and of the radical changes that some of the era’s spokesmen—Ginsberg included—foresaw, and to some degree galvanized.
Ginsberg gave his first reading of “Howl” at the Six Gallery in the North Beach district of San Francisco the night of Oct. 7, 1955, with what he later described as “a strange, ecstatic intensity”—his friend and literary soul mate, Jack Kerouac, who was passing around the jugs of wine, would refer to the event as that “mad night”—and the film re-creates it with a properly hushed thrill. James Franco, as Ginsberg, is stunningly spot-on. Not only does he look quite a bit like the young Ginsberg (before he went bald and grew the shaman’s beard), but he has his clipped mannerisms down perfectly and, more remarkable still, he reads poetry like a poet (something few actors do at all successfully), so much so that I wish the filmmakers would have just shown Franco reading during those scenes and not cut away now and then to a cartoon dramatization of the poem; the animation is too literal and distracts from Ginsberg’s language. (For more on the re-enactment of the reading, click here. For more on the animation, click here.) In real life, the reading caused a sensation—the image of the San Francisco Renaissance, a.k.a. the Beat movement, was pretty much created on the spot, and this part of the film lets you see why.
Free Pussy Riot
Peaches, the twenty-first century torchbearer of feminist punk, just released a video and track in support of Pussy Riot, the Russian female anarc...
EHRM handhaaft SGP-uitspraak Hoge Raad
Dat ging nog best snel: het Europese Hof voor de Rechten van de Mens (EHRM) heeft zich uitgesproken over de vrouwen uitsluitende praktijk van de S...
After 92 years
