MediaFromDanteToTheLostAndFound

A TIME-HONORED tradition: Stand outside a movie theater with a camera and microphone and poll the audience members for their reactions. What did you think of the film? A grandmotherly woman makes a face and waves her hand in disgust: Revolting! Idiotic! A middle-aged gentleman, stout and respectable, takes a more tolerant view: This is a movie about how young people live today, he says, a movie made by young people, and he is generally in favor of young people. But a sober-looking, well-dressed younger fellow demurs. “I don’t think it’s very serious,” he says dismissively. This little scene of impromptu amateur film criticism — or market research, if you prefer — occurs in Emmanuel Laurent’s new documentary, “Two in the Wave,” about the filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, whose friendship was a driving force and a central fact (as well as, eventually, a casualty) of the French New Wave. Those people outside that Parisian cinema in 1960 have just seen “Breathless,” Mr. God...

ANY journalist working in a war-torn or politically unstable region knows the risks and headaches of the job: threats to personal safety, difficulties of access, interference from authorities. For the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who has now made one film in occupied Iraq (the Oscar-nominated “My Country, My Country”) and another in the volatile Persian Gulf state of Yemen (“The Oath”), there is the added complication of being, she believes, on a United States government watch list. Flying home to New York in 2006 from a film festival in Sarajevo, Ms. Poitras was stopped while changing planes in Vienna and questioned by security agents there. Since then she has traveled to Yemen repeatedly to work on “The Oath” and, by her count, she has been stopped for questioning more than 20 times; whenever she arrives home from a trip abroad, customs and border-protection officials are waiting for her plane, she said. When going to the Berlin film festival in February to show “The Oath,” M...

Walter Sear, an audio engineer whose steadfast devotion to pre-digital recording technology led him to maintain a studio with vintage, analog equipment, a risk that paid off in recent years as musicians like Norah Jones, Wilco and Wynton Marsalis flocked there for its rich natural sound, died on April 29 in Manhattan. He was 80 and lived on the Upper West Side. The cause was complications of a subdural hematoma, or bleeding from the brain, after he injured himself in a fall, said his daughter Julia. At various times Mr. Sear was a professional tuba player; a designer, importer and dealer of specialty tubas; a composer of film soundtracks; and an electronic music enthusiast who advised Robert Moog on the design of his Moog synthesizer, the instrument that revolutionized popular music beginning in the 1960s. But to more recent generations of musicians, Mr. Sear was best known as the owner of Sear Sound, a studio on West 48th Street in Manhattan that, guided by Mr. Sear’s intransigent ear...

Why is this on a media blog? Imagine a country where your children are dying one after another. Would you have time for a story about a film, or a a piece of art, a piece of music? ep·i·dem·ic   /ˌɛpɪˈdɛmɪk/ Show Spelled[ep-i-dem-ik] Show IPA –adjective 1. Also, ep·i·dem·i·cal. (of a disease) affecting many persons at the same time, and spreading from person to person in a locality where the disease is not permanently prevalent.

So much so, in fact, that the discontinuities between that band's albums will always be more pronounced than their continuity. Any notion of music in a state of flux that this might imply has been indicative of Frith's work in the decades since that band split up. Now that he can be realistically considered as something of a musical polymath, Frith continues to push at the boundaries even while he maps out his own singular musical territory. All About Jazz: Even if an opinion is informed entirely by the subjective evidence of music on record, it's still apparent that Henry Cow was working a seam of that must, perhaps inevitably, be called progressive rock quite unlike anyone else. To what--if any--degree was that uniqueness the product of conscious decision making, or was the process not conscious at all? Fred Frith: It's never really that simple, is it? The balance between having a strong sense of direction while not really having a clue what you're doing has alway...

Bill Moyers Journal,” first broadcast in 1971, came to a close on Friday, with Mr. Moyers warning viewers that “plutocracy and democracy don’t mix,” as he compared past eras of populist insurgency to the present moment in America. “Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs,” he said from his desk in New York. Given those stakes, it might seem like an odd time for Mr. Moyers to sign off from PBS. The end of the “Journal” is a milestone both for public broadcasting and for Mr. Moyers, whose explorations of corporate power versus people power were unlike anything else on television. Those close to Mr. Moyers, 75, say he is not fully retiring but merely catching his breath after three tiring years of weekly deadline demands. His next step is unknown, even to him, they said. To his viewers Mr. Moyers and the “Journal” represented a rare place on television where experts, academics and public interest advocates coul...

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench - a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." - Hunter S. Thompson

Steven Van Zandt has claimed he told Bruce Springsteen that his 'Born to Run' album "sucked" -- and Springsteen then challenged him to improve it. The guitarist, who has been collaborating with Springsteen since the mid-'70s, told Uncut magazine's one-off publication 'Bruce Springsteen -- Ultimate Music Guide' that he criticised the legendary LP during its recording process, reports NME.com. But Springsteen promptly told him to make it better -- with Van Zandt more than happy to take a stab at it. He explained, "All I did on 'Born to Run' were the horns on '10th Avenue Freeze-Out.' I was just in the studio, hanging around. He said, 'What do you think?' and I said, 'I think it sucks.' And he said, 'Well, go f---ing fix it, then.'" Van Zandt continued, "So I went and fixed it. People came to the Bottom Line (New York venue) basically to laugh at us. And a funny thing happened -- we f---ing blew their...

Old bandmate David Crosby has spilled the beans on Neil Young's latest solo project -- and it seems the Canadian troubadour could be going stadium rock, at least if his choice of producer is any indication. According to Crosby, Young is recording with super-producer Daniel Lanois -- most known for his connection with U2 -- and is "having a great time talking music with him and just relating to him." As well as manning the mixing desk a half-dozen times for the Irish megastars, Lanois produced Bob Dylan's 'Time Out of Mind' and a couple of Peter Gabriel discs. Source: http://www.spinner.com/2010/04/30/neil-young-new-album-details/ The new Young effort will follow up 2009's 'Fork in the Road,' and may feature a Crosby cameo, if his ex-CSNY cohort gets his way. "I said to him, 'If you want a harmony, I'm volunteering,'" Crosby told Rolling Stone. "He said, 'You know, if I need one you'll be the first guy I call.'...