Drummer/composer Jean-Phi Goncalves, chanteuse Betty Bonifassi and engineer/producer Jean-Phi.
Downloaded the album and am now absorbing it, loving the sound and digging Bonifassi's booming voice, one that emits an exotic international-flavored English which imbues her phrasings with added nuance and depth.
Here's an apt decription from their official website at http://www.beastsound.net/ Though in Europe touring as of this post, they are based in Montreal/Toronto and will be back in North America soon.
Beast’s self-titled debut (Pheromone Recordings/Vega Musique) inhabits a place where Portishead meets Rage Against the Machine. Soul, rap, electro, rock and jazz (complete with a Charles Mingus bass sample on “Satan”) collide with a cinematic flair. “Trip rock,” Betty calls it, the phrase invoking the way haunting choirs and glitchy electronic bits run underneath saw-toothed bass and grinding guitars.
Musician and songwriter Simon Wilcox worked with Betty (whose first language is French) to polish her English lyrics, while maintaining the structure and strong imagery Betty had infused them with. Betty spits the resulting fiery stanzas with a delivery that melds the spirit of rap and slam poetry with bellowing soul. . .
World demographics pie. We're gonna be seven billion in a very short while . . . Europe, the USA and Latin American all put together ain't that much of the cake, as you can see. Add Africa and still you can see where it's really at . . .
Starring Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston and Tim Holt, John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) adapts to the big screen B. Traven's novel, Der Schatz der Sierra Madre (1927) / The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1935).
Set in Mexico during the mid-1920s in the rough wake of the Mexican Revolution, three Americans seek to break out of exile and poverty by striking gold in dangerous mountain country. The film begins in Tampico, with two of the dudes catching a job at a nearby oilfield, working on a derrick. Yes, even then oil was a coveted and exploited resource. After their oil work fails, off for gold in them thar hills. In the backdrop, Mexican bandits (holdovers from the Revolution?) and federales, town folk and rural Indians, campfires, guns, trains and burros.
As for the B. Travens the German novelist, even now no one seems quite sure of his "real" identity.
This was the first movie I ever saw on TV; must have been four years old, with my Mom and friends (maybe relatives) sitting around gabbing. I remember Bogart, the grit and wildness of the story; though in my memory, his character is stuck on the end of the bridge, dying. This is not quite how it plays out. There is a tunnel cave-in, but no bridge scene such as I remembered -- maybe it's another Bogart movie blending in the memory banks?
Fernando De Fuentes' ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! / Let's Go with Pancho Villa! (1936) is the All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) of the Mexican Revolution. Both are based on novels (Rafael Muñoz's ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa!, 1931, and Erich Maria Remarque's Im Westen nichts Neues, 1928/1929). Both are archetypal war stories, in a way that goes all the way back to The Iliad: Enthusiastic men -- in this case six guys -- volunteer for war, are developed enough to engender empathy, become disillusioned and, since by then it's far too late to escape their fates, decimated. Here, the men join up for the adventure and a vague sense of justice and are promised, along with their peers, land and liberty. But in the end, what land? What liberty?
A great film made when the Mexican Revolution, which looks on screen like a mix between the Wild West and the First World War, was still fresh. Troop trains, revolutionaries with big hats, bandoliers and horses, federales with rifles and machine gun nests, artillery, trenches and bugles -- it's all there. One scene has federales holed up in a fortified position, sweeping the approaches with a search light -- that scene sticks, as do many others. The entire cast is good, especially Antonio R. Frausto as Don Tiburcio Maya, the 40-something leader of Los Leones ("The Lions") de San Pablo.
If you like war or anti-war movies, early sound film or Latin American history, this one's for you. If you're looking for comedy, mellow or sophisticated special effects, not so much.
Incohate but palplable: is it just me or is there new life flickering in the Zeitgeist? Reminds me of the 1970s, certainly, with many people reeling economically but in heart and mind, very much alive and kicking. The recent re-release of Exile on Main St (1972) by The Rolling Stones adds to the old feeling: what goes around comes around! Culturally, that's a good thing: things have been pretty anemic since the day Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Iron seems to be coming back into the system. And politically, Barack Obama is more clever than Jimmy Carter. This socially creative period may persist longer than last time around -- if we're lucky. It's been a long time since I've felt this excited by new (or resurrected) stuff . . .
Here's a snippet from The Kinks 1979 song, "(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman," off the album Low Budget:
There was a gas strike, oil strike, lorry strike, bread strike Got to be a superman to survive Gas bills, rent bills, tax bills, phone bills I'm such a wreck but I'm staying alive . . .
Indeed. Keep fighting the good fight! And keep an eye on the crafty banks: I noticed a new ATM fee yesterday ($1.50). They'll try to weasle every nickle and dime they can out of their "valued customers," no matter what reforms have gone through.
An effective parable of human nature set during the First World War, Philippe de Broca's Le Roi de Cœur (1966) / King of Hearts (1967) takes a multilingual route to sanity. Characters are French, Scottish, English and German caught between lines in the last year of the war. Centers around the escaped inmates of an insane asylum and a Scottish soldier they crown King of Hearts.
I showed this one in my The Great War and the 1920s class, and the students seemed receptive even in the early 21st century. The story unfolds in a way that is not clichéd and still carries water. Makes me think of the Dadaist artists and writers escaping the war -- unlike many of their peers who were wasted as cannon fodder in protracted trench warfare. And to what end?
Great actors, including Alan Bates, Geneviève Bujold and Pierre Brasseur.
Walking around Goliad, Texas, near the 18th-century Presidio Nuestra Señora de Loreto de la Bahía, came across a Mexican cemetery, and this Mary shrine, at dusk. Eerie grounds, to be sure. This was formerly Mexican territory (Coahuila y Tejas), site of the Goliad massacre, 1836, and birthplace of General Ignacio Zaragoza -- the guy whose victory at the Battle of Puebla still inspires Cinco de Mayo celebrations.
Another vision of Mary: in Detroit, near a battleground of Pontiac's War against the encroaching British and Americans (1763). As a result of Pontiac's fairly successful "uprising," the British tried to adopt a policy toward the tribes more along the lines of the French who'd been there immediately before them. Here, Mary still abides, more than 300 years after her arrival in Detroit.
