7/4

that's another story! But I think the current grp needs to be documented.

July 8, 2006 Court Rules Against Sanitizing Films By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 9:52 p.m. ET SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Sanitizing movies on DVD or VHS tape violates federal copyright laws, and several companies that scrub films must turn over their inventory to Hollywood studios, an appeals judge ruled. Editing movies to delete objectionable language, sex and violence is an ''illegitimate business'' that hurts Hollywood studios and directors who own the movie rights, said U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch in a decision released Thursday in Denver. ''Their (studios and directors) objective ... is to stop the infringement because of its irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies,'' the judge wrote. ''There is a public interest in providing such protection.'' Matsch ordered the companies named in the suit, including CleanFlicks, Play It Clean Video and CleanFilms, to stop ''producing, manufacturing, creating'' and renting edited movies. The businesses also must turn over their inventory to the movie studios within five days of the ruling. ''We're disappointed,'' CleanFlicks chief executive Ray Lines said. ''This is a typical case of David vs. Goliath, but in this case, Hollywood rewrote the ending. We're going to continue to fight.'' CleanFlicks produces and distributes sanitized copies of Hollywood films on DVD by burning edited versions of movies onto blank discs. The scrubbed films are sold over the Internet and to video stores. As many as 90 video stores nationwide -- about half of them in Utah -- purchase movies from CleanFlicks, Lines said. It's unclear how the ruling may effect those stores. The controversy began in 1998 when the owners of Sunrise Family Video began deleting scenes from ''Titanic'' that showed a naked Kate Winselt. The scrubbing caused an uproar in Hollywood, resulting in several lawsuits and countersuits. Directors can feel vindicated by the ruling, said Michael Apted, president of the Director's Guild of America. ''Audiences can now be assured that the films they buy or rent are the vision of the filmmakers who made them and not the arbitrary choices of a third-party editor,'' he said.

thnx!

The 2003 Carnegie Hall show from the JVC Jazz Festival is due out in 2006. I've now heard through the grapevine that contrary to what was reported in the Downbeat article, the live release will not be from Carnegie Hall but from a German performance. anything would be good. a box would be real nice.

Thanks DTMX! I've been bouncing around a bit this week quite a bit. FG on Toon at 11 pm edst @, I haven't seen Stewie B. Goode yet.

Don't know how I missed this...

perhaps this might interest the funny rat crowd.

Last night my string quartet as beautiful as a crescent of a new moon on a cloudless spring evening (2004) was premiered on Music from Other Minds, KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco. The show can be streamed from here for another week. Here's the original press release: The radio premiere of David Beardsley's (http://biink.com/db/index.htm) 30-minute 2004 string quartet "as beautiful as a crescent of a new moon on a cloudless spring evening" as performed by Christina Fong (http://christinafong.com) can be heard at 11pm PST Friday July 7th on KALW 91.7 FM's "Music from Other Minds" in San Francisco and also via the internet at http://rchrd.com/mfom. David's piece was submitted for a project initiated on the "Why Patterns?" discussion list. "For Feldman" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000F3T3PK) is second in a series featuring previously unreleased works by emerging composers. This 96kHz|24bit Audio DVD (plays in any DVD player) contains 4 world premiere recordings and the only available release of 3 works by Morton Feldman. One day after dinner, Morton was sitting at the kitchen table having a taste of water, thinking about a carpet or two, when electricity discontinued. Sun set and awareness gradually changed to wonder as he saw the beauty of the crescent of a new moon on a cloudless spring evening passing by the windows. Many years later, Morton awoke on his couch from an afternoon nap. Venus, the cat, leapt off the window where she was sleeping permitting sunlight to pass through a glass reclining on a table. "That is" he thought, "as beautiful as a crescent of a new moon on a cloudless spring evening". This piece is tuned to the system known as Just Intonation, rational intervals from the harmonic series.

A Scanner Darkly -- The coolest thing about the movie version of Philip K. Dick's seven-years-from-now dystopia is that director Richard Linklater takes the title seriously. The painted-cell animation he used for his film Waking Life, has been improved to the point that this whole picture looks as if it's been run through a medical scanner and then colorized to bring it back to a semblance of real life. What this has to do with anything is anyone's guess, but it looks pretty amazing. The story -- about an undercover cop who's investigating a drug scourge called "D" (an amphetamine-style substance that seems to make "E" seem pretty tame) -- is less interesting than watching what the animation does to the faces and movements of Keanu Reeves (as the cop), Winona Ryder (as his junkie girlfriend), and Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr. (as his constantly feuding housemates). When the roomies are front and center -- Downey especially -- the story crackles. When the conspiracy stuff takes over, things slacken, so it's nice that the look of the film is so unusual. Cops, when they're undercover seven years from now, will apparently wear special suits made up of DNA fragments (or chips, or something) taken from thousands of people, so they're literally shape-shifters, a notion that the rotoscoping visual style Linklater's chosen is ideally suited to illustrate. And frankly, you've gotta love the director for finding a way to make Keanu Reeves seem, er, animated. - Bob Mondello, NPR

Have fun!

Brain Candy Richard Linklater's literate Dick adaptation is a brain-bending D-light by J. Hoberman, VVoice July 5th, 2006 3:34 PM The year's most animated performance: Downey Stoned babble and decomposing reality, A Scanner Darkly—Richard Linklater's animated version of the 1977 novel by Philip K. Dick—is the most literal of Dick adaptations and also, in a perverse way, the most literary. Dick, as tactfully pointed out by his Polish colleague Stanislaw Lem, was less a writer than a man cursed with prophetic sight who "does not so much play the part of a guide through his phantasmagoric worlds as he gives the impression of one lost in their labyrinth." What's extraordinary about Linklater's animation, computer-rotoscoped in the fashion of his 2001 Waking Life, is just how tangible the Dickian labyrinth becomes. Linklater renders coherent Dick's amorphous account of SoCal dopers addicted to the brain-destroying Substance D, the narcs who police them, and the shadowy corporation stage-managing the seedy drama. This straightforward version of Dick's anguished vision of drug-addled addiction makes Naked Lunch seem positively romantic. (Indeed, Linklater—or is it Dick?—even seems to be specifically mocking the "blue flower of romanticism.") The skin-crawling opener has D-generate Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane) frantically fending off a plague of nonexistent aphids erupting out of his scalp; like the book, the movie ends with Dick's dedication to his drug-casualty friends. Animation allows Linklater to efface the distinction between hallucination and "reality," as well as unmediated reality and video surveillance. Everything has the same somber palette and heavy outlines. Faces disintegrate into paint-by-numbers light patterns; interior planes shift and slide. The nominal hero, an undercover cop posing as one Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), is introduced addressing a businessmen's lunch from the safety of an identity-blurring "scramble suit." This shape-shifting outfit is made for animation and it's also the movie's ruling metaphor. Midspeech, the cop—who has, of course, been dabbling in the brain-fissuring D—snaps into his other personality. Dick's novel may be a morass of unplayable dialogue, but Linklater, who has been orchestrating spaced-out riffs since Slacker, has a connoisseur's appreciation for druggy logic and crackpot conspiracy. At least half the movie involves Arctor rapping with his pals, motor-mouthed Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) and hysterical Luckman (Woody Harrelson), as well as their dealer Donna (Winona Ryder), whose source he is trying to ascertain. Most scenes are set in Arctor's living room and the movie is characterized by superbly putrid crash pad mise-en-scéne—cigarette butts and dirty dishes on every surface, hand-scrawled signs ("Time to Thaw Walt Out," "Just Keep Keeping On") on the wall, an American flag stapled to the ceiling. As an exercise in brain-fried absurdism, A Scanner Darkly is far darker than Dazed and Confused. The psychedelic stooges are perpetually paranoid while Donna, Arctor's nominal girlfriend, is viscerally so. Recoiling from Arctor's touch, she unconvincingly explains: "I have to watch it because I do so much coke." The bizarrely conceited Barris, his mind in perpetual overdrive and ears ringing with "news from the guinea-pig grapevine," has the best theories—even as Downey, who, having grasped that he's playing a cartoon character, delivers the most animated performance. (Midway through 2006, this supporting turn is the performance to beat in what seems the year's American movie to beat.) It's Luckman, however, who has the key bit of jabber, droning on ad nauseam about a celebrated impostor who decided that, rather than impersonating all manner of individuals, it would be far less taxing to simply impersonate a celebrated impostor. This inevitably brings up the subject of cops disguised as dopers and leads Arctor, through a stoned non sequitur, to ponder his own fissured situation: "Shit, I'm spaced—posing as a narc, wow!" Dick's idea of a tragic modernist paradigm, Arctor is the character who suffers most acutely the loss of identity. (His name, realistically enough, sounds like "actor" on quaaludes.) Once the D kicks in, Arctor is both beset by false memories and pathetically unaware of his current situation. He lives his junkie life and then goes to work to watch himself living it (hence the title), dutifully informing on his vegetative friends—at least one of whom is reporting on him to him. Arctor briefs his superior, each wearing a protective scramble suit; he's only himself when submitting to the required psychological tests that, indicating cross-chatter between his brain's two hemispheres, suggest he has no "self" at all. After he no longer seems to realize that he is Arctor, nothing remains beyond a sad spiral through bogus rehab and meaningless group therapy. "Living and nonliving things are exchanging places," someone, possibly the bugged-out Freck, explains. Speaking of the group: People will complain that A Scanner Darkly is hard to follow. True, there's no use dropping bread crumbs in this maze. Just remember that everything in this grimly amusing world is its opposite—except, that is, when it's not.

July 7, 2006 MOVIE REVIEW 'A Scanner Darkly': Keanu Reeves, Undercover and Flying High on a Paranoid Head Trip By MANOHLA DARGIS Identities shift and melt like shadows in Richard Linklater's animated adaptation of "A Scanner Darkly," a look at a future that looks an awful lot like today. Based on a 1977 novel by the science fiction visionary Philip K. Dick, the semispeculative story involves a cop (call him Officer Fred) who, by assuming an undercover identity (call him Bob Arctor), is inching his way up toward a big drug bust, score by score. But there's a little problem: Fred is starting to forget he's Bob, or maybe vice versa. Given that Fred/Bob has been regularly dropping Substance D, as in Death, tab by tab, it's no wonder he's feeling a bit off; no wonder, too, given that this is the world Philip K. Dick made. Like the writer's other worlds, that of "A Scanner Darkly" is one in which drugs predominate and reality tends to be a big question mark, hovering like an electro-colored thought bubble above characters who are more everyday normal than super-this or -that. Ordinary guys who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances like Fred/Bob, who in Mr. Linklater's film has been given seductive voice and corporeal outline by Keanu Reeves, an actor whose penchant for otherworldly types and excellent adventures make him well suited for vision quests like this one. Mr. Dick wrote "A Scanner Darkly" after several years of firsthand experience with what he called the street scene in the early 1970's. By 1971 he was ingesting a whopping 1,000 hits of speed a week, along with plentiful daily doses of tranquilizers. "The happiness pills," he admitted around that time, "are turning out to be nightmare pills." He entered a rehabilitation center shortly thereafter and in 1972, in a letter to a drug treatment center in Southern California, even offered his services as a counselor, having had, as he wrote, "five friends kill themselves on or as a result of acid trips — and seen many fine brains burned out on narcotics." The novel "A Scanner Darkly," which drew on his memories of that time, followed. As in the book, the film finds Bob Arctor pursuing his drug-and-love connection, Donna (voiced by Winona Ryder), while Fred puts in time in front of a bank of video monitors, watching surveillance images of himself as Bob Arctor and his housemates, the prankster Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) and the joker Luckman (Woody Harrelson), vegetating amid their collective chaos and broken-down furniture. To protect his undercover identity, Fred often wears a "scramble suit," which turns him into a "vague blur" not unlike all the other vague blurs to whom he delivers antidrug speeches at the local Lions and Elks clubs. Not unlike the vague blur that Fred was once upon a married time, before he conked his head and, as Bob, started to turn on, tune in and drop out. On its most basic level, the novel serves as a cautionary tale about the perils of drug abuse and indeed closes with a poignant roll call of Philip K. Dick's friends who had been lost, "punished" — as he wrote — "entirely too much for what they did." That said, to reduce the novel to a "just say no" diatribe would be to greatly miss one of its and its author's sustaining points. Drugs are generally a bad idea in "A Scanner Darkly," in the book and film both, though in the novel it's the real world or what we perceive the real world to be that makes for the more obviously bad trip, not scary little pills. "So-called 'reality,' " as Mr. Dick once said, "is a mass delusion that we've all been required to believe for reasons totally obscure." Mr. Dick searched long and hard for those reasons, as both his frenetic work output (more than 40 novels, zillions of stories) and recreational drug use suggest. In 1980, two years before he died at 53 from a series of strokes, he described himself as an " 'acosmic panenthiest,' which means that I don't believe that the universe exists. I believe that the only thing that exists is God and he is more than the universe. The universe is an extension of God into space and time." Whether he was having some fun with his interviewers matters little; he had found a reasonable way to puzzle over those ballooning question marks that didn't require him to stay awake for days at a time with eyes and brain bugged and bugging. As he did in an earlier film, "Waking Life," Mr. Linklater uses the animation technique called rotoscoping to translate Mr. Dick's worldview, mostly to fine expressive effect. With this technique, a version of which was used by early giants like Max Fleischer and even in the old Disney factory, animators directly trace over live-action images of performers. (What was once achieved through ink and paint is now accomplished through software.) The results tend to look fluid, almost as if the bodies were floating above the background visuals — an effect that appears to have been pushed in "A Scanner Darkly," where the bodies can appear almost liquid, as if the characters had been recently poured and had yet to harden into final shape. Rotoscoping makes certain sense for a film about cognitive dissonance and alternative realities, though both the vocal and gestural performances by Mr. Reeves, Mr. Harrelson and, in particular, the wonderful Mr. Downey make me wish that we were watching them in live action. "A Scanner Darkly" has a kind of hypnotic visual appeal, and there's something very appropriate in how a chair in Bob Arctor's kitchen appears to hover above the floor, replicating the kind of time-space visual dislocations that can be produced through the consumption of hallucinogens. Even so, considering that the animation is not transcendently beautiful and that Mr. Downey has been pretty much out of commission lately, in part because of his own drug troubles, it would have been nice to see real shadows crossing his face. "A Scanner Darkly" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has drug use, adult language and animated bare breasts. A Scanner Darkly Opens today in Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Austin, Tex. Directed by Richard Linklater; written by Mr. Linklater, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick; director of photography, Shane F. Kelly; edited by Sandra Adair; music by Graham Reynolds; production designer, Bruce Curtis; produced by Anne Walker-McBay, Tommy Pallotta, Palmer West, Jonah Smith and Erwin Stoff; released by Warner Independent Pictures. Running time: 100 minutes. WITH: Keanu Reeves (Bob Arctor), Robert Downey Jr. (Jim Barris), Woody Harrelson (Ernie Luckman), Winona Ryder (Donna Hawthorne) and Rory Cochrane (Charles Freck).

JUST LIKE OLD TIMES. CAPS KEY STUCK.

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday!

ironic.

Same here. I've never had a missing cat, but I have lost cats and I miss them.

He not only wrote the liners, he compiled the album. I thought so. I need to get the box.

I hope you find kitty.

well yeah...red heads!

Same here. I think my next listening spree will be checking out my international collection. Back when I was internet broadcasting 49/48 radio I bought a ton of CDs that need to be listened to more than a few times.

Are those power tools or sex toys?

At least you don't look like Tiny Tim.