Earthquake Weather
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I’m a huge Fishing with John/John Lurie fan, and have posted about Fishing with John here previously, but this reblog was too good to pass up - talk about comprehensive!
Fishing with John is a 1991 television series conceived, directed by and starring actor and musician John Lurie, which earned a cult following. The guests featured are film director Jim Jarmusch, actor Matt Dillon, musician Tom Waits, actor Willem Dafoe and actor-director Dennis Hopper.
John Lurie played a mean sax before pursuing acting, starring in some of Jim Jarmusch’s best films—Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law, among others. But it was the 1990s television show he conceived and directed which really catapulted him into a cult obsession: the strange, wonderful, and hilarious Fishing With John. The concept of the show was simple: each episode, Lurie would take one of his pals to a certain locale around the world and fish. Just real men doing real things. Those pals also just happened to be Jim Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Willem Dafoe, Dennis Hopper, and Matt Dillon. From Maine, Jamacia, and Thailand, Lurie would travel with his guest of honor and set out to brave the elements, search new territory, and, of course, catch some fish. The result was a fantastic exploration of finding the comedy in the mundane—the pleasure of watching two men sit on a boat in the heat or freezing to death on a frozen lake heightened to the surreal, with a narrated voiceover that could double you over. Tom Waits gets cranky, Jim Jarmusch is bored, Willem Dafoe dies, Dennis Hopper is…well, Dennis Hopper, and naturally a bit of disaster ensues. —Gone Fishing: An Interview With the Legendary John Lurie By Hillary Weston
All the episodes are available on YouTube, lets have some fishing fun!
- Jim Jarmusch: Fishing for shark off the coast of Montauk, New York State. Out here, the shark is at the top of the food chain.
- Tom Waits: Lurie and Waits fish for red snapper in Jamaica. Tom periodically becomes grumpy. A game of cards on dry land makes Tom feel much better. Waits catches a fish and puts it in his pants.
- Matt Dillon: Dillon and Lurie fish in San José, Costa Rica. Supernatural events ensue.
- Willem Dafoe: Ice fishing in northern Maine. Dafoe and Lurie run out of crackers and, the narrator tells us, starve to death.
- Dennis Hopper: The narrator happily reports that Lurie is still alive. Lurie and Hopper search for the mythical and elusive giant squid in Thailand, which also is apparently hunting them.
- Dennis Hopper: Part two in Thailand. The squid hypnotizes the protagonists with its “volley ball” sized eye. Deeper and deeper into Thailand, few are chosen.
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‘A Man Vanishes’, Dir: Shohei Imamura
Shohei Imamura’s hybrid documentary/fiction film from 1967, plays at IFC center tongight as part of the great Stranger Than Fiction Series.
Also, awesomely, it’s available on youtube here(don’t forget to turn on the subtitles, duh.)
Here’s an excerpt from Manohla Dargis’s review in the NYT:
If “A Man Vanishes” — a movie about a disappearance and the transformation of reality into an ever more mercurial mystery, a vertiginous drama and the very stuff of cinema — played at the Cannes Film Festival this year, it would have been hailed as a thrilling discovery. That surely will be the response of filmgoers lucky enough to see this 1967 masterwork from the Japanese director Shohei Imamura (1926-2006), which begins a weeklong run on Thursday in Manhattan at the Anthology Film Archives before moving elsewhere. Seemingly banal in its conceit, wildly startling in its execution, it tracks a film crew that, like a detective squad, investigates what became of an ordinary man.
The reason Tadashi Oshima vanished is the enigma that sets the film in motion, though it eventually becomes evident that Imamura was also chasing other questions. There’s a no-nonsense, cut-to-the-chase quality to the opening scenes, which lay out the stakes and terrain. Shot in black and white, it begins with a man who, after a stroll through a Kafka-esque maze of filing cabinets, reads from a missing-persons report. Oshima — a salesman, 32, with a medium build, square face and caterpillar brows — was reported missing in April 1965, having disappeared, “motive and cause unknown.” The movie then jumps to a crowded street scene, and a male voice, presumably that of Imamura, asks, “Where can anyone missing be in such a small country?”
It’s a question that Imamura and his crew pursue in an inquiry that turns into an increasingly complex look at a man, his culture and his country. The first revelation or crack in the case, as it were, comes from co-workers and relatives who explain that Oshima embezzled money from his company. Instead of firing him, his boss says, the company docked his pay. The film then takes a surprising turn when one of the apparent interviewers in the scene, a woman, Yoshie Hayakawa, explains that, having just dated Oshima briefly, she may have known only his good side. What, she asks the boss, is his opinion of Oshima? The answer (“timid and gentle”) isn’t critical, but the revelation that she is the missing man’s fiancée is a jolt because it goes against the grain of documentary objectivity.
When a second interviewer asks Hayakawa, “How do you feel?,” you may think he should ask you the same question. Because this is a documentary — isn’t it?
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Malombo Jazz Makers - “Sibathathu”
Great tune of the Strut compilation of South African Jazz, “Next Stop…Soweto”
Jazz has a deep heritage in South Africa, dating from the early 20th Century. The country’s jazz scene flourished during the ‘50s, despite the increasing restrictions of apartheid, with musicians like the Jazz Epistles and Chris McGregor influenced by Charlie Parker & Duke Ellington before adding local marabi and kwela to their be bop. During the ‘60s, the Sharpville Massacre, radio restrictions and police clampdowns made the life of a black musician often untenable. Major names like Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba left to live abroad.
Next Stop Soweto Vol. 3 is the story of the music that survived in South Africa during this mid-‘60s to mid-‘80s era. The album features many of the recognised South African jazz greats like saxophonist Dudu Pukwana and drummer Early Mabuza, the potent soul jazz grooves of The Heshoo Beshoo Group and The Drive and some of the many artists creating unique fusions like Philip Tabane’s Malombo mixing African drums and hand percussion with guitar, vocal and flute. This is important music, a defiant statement in the face of unimaginable cultural repression.
The album features an unreleased track, Dollar Brand’s ‘Next Stop Soweto’ from the archives of the South African Broadcasting Corporation. As with previous volumes, the package features rare photos from the ‘60s and ‘70s with sleeve notes by South Africa’s finest author on music and culture, Gwen Ansell. The compilers of the series are Duncan Brooker and Francis Gooding.
VIA: Strut
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