Category Archives: Recommendations

Sweet Billy Pilgrim – Blakefield Gold

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Here’s the new video by Sweet Billy Pilgrim, to support their single “Blakefield Gold” from the “Crown and Treaty” album. The video was shot by the band whilst gigging in Scotland and I chopped the footage together on Final Cut Pro when they got back. 

If you head over to their website at http://www.sweetbillypilgrim.com you can join the mailing list and get a FREE download of the song in return.

Sweet Billy Pilgrim are doing an acoustic residency at The Alexandra, Fortis Green, London N10 from next Thursday 6th September for five weeks. 

Piefinger “Good To Be”

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So, several months after upgrading to a Nikon D7000, I’ve finally made something with actual moving pictures. This is a video for “Good To Be”, the first single from Piefinger‘s new album “A Countryman’s Favour” which will be out on 1st November, 2011. It was shot in full HD, so crank up the YouTube settings on the embed as high as your system will allow:

This is intended to be the first of two promos for “Good To Be”, the second will feature people listening to the song on headphones. That’s still a work-in-progress at this time…

For those with a technical bent, the video was shot on a Nikon D7000 using some very old lenses; a 135mm dating from the late sixties (It’s the one my dad used to take baby pictures of me!), an 85mm from 1974 and a 105mm also from the early seventies. The whole thing was shot in my living room, in available light (because I’ve never had to light my own shoots before and the learning curve was a little too steep for the time allowed) and then edited and colour-graded on Final Cut Pro X, which worked like an absolute dream.

I went for a very simple idea because it was my first solo effort but I think the end result is pretty effective.

Hopefully there’ll be more where this came from over the coming months.

Sidney Lumet R.I.P.

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We shall never see his like again. Sidney Lumet, the great American director, died yesterday morning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/movies/sidney-lumet-director-of-american-classics-dies-at-86.html?_r=1

“Serpico”, “Dog Day Afternoon” and especially “Network” were all major movie landmarks for me growing up.

Lumet’s book “Making Movies” is also one of the finest practical handbooks on the craft ever published.

 

Live from the DMZ

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For anyone who’s been following Brian Wood‘s incredible DMZ series, the countdown to final issue 72 has begun. As the series winds up, Live from the DMZ presents behind-the-scenes info on all 12 volumes and full-length interviews with the creators. Go see.

If the last paragraph meant nothing at all to you, DMZ concerns itself with a second American Civil War wherein Manhattan Island has become a no-go zone caught between the two sides. Like the re-boot of Battlestar Galactica, DMZ is as much a political allegory as it is a compelling story in its own right and is easily the best graphic novel series of the last few years.

Say You Want A Revolution…

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Saturday 26th March 2011. So-called “anarchists” ran amok in London, off the back of the march against public sector cuts. They occupied Fortnum and Mason, broke the windows at The Ritz and trashed a Porsche showroom. Bless. If only it was still 1986, the Establishment would have been shitting itself. I’m looking forward to next week’s poll tax riot.

You want to fuck with people’s heads? Hit The Guardian, a Buddhist temple and a branch of Planet Organic; force the Establishment to defend its enemies and turn the whole thing on its head.

Talking of fucking with people’s heads, allow me to commend “The Invisibles” to your kind attention… Very occasionally you read something that profoundly alters your view of the world. In September 1994, DC Vertigo published the first issue of Grant Morrison‘s “The Invisibles”. I was hooked from issue 1 and devoured every one of the subsequent 58 issues as soon as they were published. The Invisibles is a hand grenade tossed into Western culture, an epic story that ties together every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard and re-examines them through a prism of occult theory, Chaos magic, quantum physics, time travel and meta-fiction.

“The Invisibles” has a story and a pretty good, if convoluted and contradictory, one but that is almost beside the point. Grant Morrison isn’t telling you a story so much as he is giving you an experience; a work-out for your brain, an irreversible expansion of your world-view. The seven volumes of “The Invisibles” are a seven-step process towards enlightenment. I shit you not.

“The Invisibles” is a spell, a chaotic sigil designed to hack the software in your brain and make it process the world in an infinitely more interesting and rewarding way. “The Matrix” would never have been made without “The Invisibles” and you wouldn’t believe how heavily the movie cribs from the comic book. The idea that the “real world” can be hacked and bent to your will is central to both stories but “The Invisibles”, and the tangential research it inspires, shows you how.

Every frame of every page contains something challenging, something to make you stop and think, something that will have you firing up Google and expanding your mind. Referencing everything from arcane and contemporary magic to quantum theory, time travel, religion, politics, sex, the nature of death, parallel universe theory, UFOs, martial arts, Eastern philosophy, history, literature, movies, linguistics (terribly important, linguistics – a 26 character alphabet may seriously limit our ability to perceive all the facets of the universe), the nature of consensus reality, the nature of rebellion… The list goes on and on.

Everything you know is wrong. You are living a lie, a lie you don’t even understand.

“The Invisibles” is life without a perception filter, reality without consensus.

Open your eyes.

Nice and smooth.