John Prine Returns with a Gem

John Prine’s The Tree of Forgiveness is his first collection of fresh material since 2005’s Grammy-winning Fair and Square. That means fans have endured a 13-year wait, but it was worth every minute, because the new album is a gem.

It’s hard to put your finger on just how Prine works his magic. Though he certainly knows how to turn a phrase, there are few fancy metaphors in his lyrics; his folksy vocals, which seem effortless, have more power than you might expect from such an understated, gravelly voiced singer; his melodies and instrumentation are simple and straightforward; and Nashville producer Dave Cobb keeps studio embellishments to a minimum, appearing to focus largely on just letting Prine be Prine.

Perhaps part of the secret behind the artist’s appeal is contained in his recent answer to Rolling Stone’s Patrick Doyle, who asked Prine…

“Astral Weeks is the second studio album by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison. It was recorded at Century Sound Studios in New York City during three sessions in September and October 1968, although most participants and biographers agree that the eight songs were culled from the first and last early evening sessions. Except for John Payne, Morrison and the assembled jazz musicians had not played together before and the recordings commenced without rehearsals or lead sheets handed out. The cover art, music and lyrics of the album portray the symbolism equating earthly love and heaven that would often feature in Morrison’s work. When Astral Weeks was released by Warner Bros. Records in November 1968, it did not receive promotion from the label and was not an immediate success with consumers or critics. Blending folk, blues, jazz, and classical music, the album’s songs signaled a…

Mosaic at the memorial at My Lai

“Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the My Lai massacre. On the morning of March 16, 1968, American forces entered the village and gathered up all living things: elderly men and women, infants in mothers’ arms, pigs, chickens, and water buffalo. Then, the Americans proceeded to kill them all, slowly, carefully, methodically. It took four hours (this was no sudden outburst of passion), until all 504 people and all the animals were massacred. Fifty-six of the people killed were under seven years old; some of the infants were bayoneted to death. Women were raped before being shot. After the killing orgy, two of the American soldiers (one a religious Mormon) sat down to lunch nearby. Unfortunately, their meal was interrupted by the moans of a few villagers shot and left for dead, but not yet fully dead. The two soldiers, disturbed by…

“When it comes to the influence of the arts on everyday life, it can seem like our reality derives far more from Jeff Koons’ ‘augmented banality‘ than from the Fluxus movement’s playful experiments with chance operations, conceptual rigor, and improvisatory performance. But perhaps in a Jeff Koons world, these are precisely the qualities we need. Mainly based in New York, and ‘taking shape around 1959,’ notes the University of Iowa’s Fluxus: A Field Guide, ‘the international cohort of artists known as Fluxus experimented with—or better yet between—poetry, theater, music, and the visual arts.’ Big names like John Cage and Yoko Ono might give the uninitiated a sense of what the 60s art movement was all about. An ‘interdisciplinary aesthetic,’ writes Ubuweb, that ‘brings together influences as diverse as Zen, science, and daily life and puts them to poetic use.’ Of course, there’s more to it…

“The Helix was an American biweekly newspaper founded in 1967 after a series of organizational meetings held at the Free University of Seattle involving a large and eclectic group including Paul Dorpat, Tom Robbins, Lorenzo Milam and others from KRAB-FM, John Ullman of the Seattle Folklore Society, Unitarian minister Paul Sawyer, and many others. A member of both the Underground Press Syndicate and the Liberation News Service, it published a total of 125 issues (sometimes as a weekly, sometimes as a biweekly) before folding on June 11, 1970. The first issue was produced by Paul Dorpat with $200 in borrowed capital, out of a rented storefront on Roosevelt Way NE. After being turned down by the first printers they approached, they found a printer in Ken Monson, communications director of the International Association of Machinists local, who had recently acquired a printing press. 1500 copies were…

The Berlinale, or Berlin International Film Festival, is one of the great Film Festivals. It has a vast and varied programme. Alongside the offerings of world cinema, mainstream productions, documentaries and experimental fare are well designed retrospective programmes. This year, in a treat for cinephiles, the Festival offered a focus on the era of Weimar Cinema, German film production from 1918 to 1933.

“In the heyday of German film-making, a variety of styles developed such as Expressionism and New Objectivity, inspired in part by American methods, a division of labour developed which led to greater professionalism and specialisation in many film production jobs.”

‘Expressionism’ is fairly well-known as a film movement, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari  (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920) is the famous example. The ‘New Objectivity’ was an artistic movement which in some ways was a reaction against Expressionism. The films espoused a more naturalistic style…

The Trip (1967)

“Hippie exploitation films are 1960s exploitation films about the hippiecounterculture with stereotypical situations associated with the movement such as marijuana and LSD use, sex and wild psychedelic parties. From almost the beginning, Hollywood also got in on the action and produced a number of extremely lurid hippie exploitation films masquerading as cautionary public service announcements, but which were in fact aimed directly at feeding a morbid public appetite while pretending to take a moral stance. Often depicting drug-crazed hippies living and freaking out in ‘Manson family’ style communes, such films as The Hallucination Generation (1967) and Riot on Sunset Strip (1967) depicted ‘hippie’ youths running wild in an orgy of group sex, drugs, crime and even murder. Other examples include The Love-ins, Psych-Out, The Trip, and Wild in the Streets. One of the strangest of these films is the horror film