YouTube Jukebox: Meeting of the Spirits

By David Ross. In Greek mythology, the distinction between heroes and gods is rather thin; and so too in the world of the guitar. The film Meeting of the Spirits, which features Larry Coryell, Paco De Lucia, and John McLaughlin in concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1979, makes the point. Olympian is the appropriate adjective.

Those who associate the acoustic guitar with Peter, Paul, and Mary – who’d love to do something like this – are in for a surprise: imagine a trio of F-22s engaged in precision maneuvers at multi-mach speed. Coryell and De Lucia are consummate musicians, but McLaughlin, who is all but nerve-connected to the guitar, his left-hand so fast and economical that it seems not even to move, is something else entirely. During the long title cut – a version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra standard – he seems to enter a trance and channel strange melodies from beyond the realm of logic and reason.

Let me adduce three songs of staggering technique and emotion: “Lotus Feet” (song of supreme spiritual beauty), “Meeting of the Spirits” (with uncanny solo by De Lucia), and “Meeting of the Spirits II” (with equally uncanny solo by McLaughlin). The latter clip is one of my YouTube favorites. I watch it repeatedly and obsessively as a kind of talisman against the slackness and mediocrity of daily life. Yes, there is some ‘fret buzz,’ but this is incidental. The Venus de Milo lacks arms. Who cares?

Meeting of the Spirits (DVD available here) was preamble to the McLaughlin-De Lucia-Al Di Meola collaboration captured for posterity on the classic 1980 concert album Friday Night in San Francisco. This concert is equally or perhaps even more dazzling in terms of technique, but less soulful and deeply felt.

Posted on June 20th, 2011 at 2:20pm.

Exposing a Cult of Personality: LFM Reviews Shadow of the Holy Book

By Joe Bendel. Imagine an Islamist police state ruled by Dianetics. That is basically the state of what passes for reality in Turkmenistan. They also have obscene oil and natural gas deposits. As a result, a lot of people who should know better have feigned interest in the Ruhnama, a book supposedly written by the largely illiterate president-for-life Saparmurat Niyazov that co-opted elements of Islam for the sake of his personality cult. Director Arto Halonen (the quiet one) and co-writer Kevin Frazier (the gabby one) try to ask some of Niyazov’s international enablers why they think the Ruhnama is so swell in their would-be muckraking documentary Shadow of the Holy Book, which screened last night as part of DocPoint’s tenth anniversary celebration tour of New York.

Appointed by Gorbachev as Turkmenistan’s Communist Party strongman, Niyazov was a hardliner who supported the 1991 coup attempt against his patron. Indeed, Niyazov’s dictatorship incorporated the worst elements of Communism, Fascism, Islamist extremism, and flat-out lunacy. Yet Halonen and Frazier largely ignore the ideological roots of Ruhnamania for inexplicable reasons (though perhaps that picture of Castro in their office is a clue).

When Shadow documents the institutionalized insanity of Niyazov’s Turkmenistan, it is jaw-droppingly scary. Subjects like algebra and physics were banned from schools, in favor of greater Ruhnama study. Architectural behemoths combining Fascist pomp, Islamic symbolism, and what can only be described as kitsch have been erected to glorify the crackpot tome. There is even a gargantuan book with pages that actually turn.

Continue reading Exposing a Cult of Personality: LFM Reviews Shadow of the Holy Book

Venture Capital & The Origins of Silicon Valley: LFM Reviews Something Ventured

By Patricia Ducey. In 1957, a group of eight California engineers, unhappy at their jobs at Shockley Semiconductors, decided to leave en masse for more compatible environs and wrote to a Wall Street banker for help in finding just the right employer. That banker, Arthur Rock, saw other possibilities and flew out West to convince them to start their own company. He would provide the capital, they would provide the scientific know-how. Later dubbed “The Traitorous Eight” by Shockley, they had to ask Rock what venture capital was and why they would want to start their own company, but they acceded. Rock and his investor and engineers then formed their entirely new company, Fairchild Semiconductors—and Silicon Valley was born.

The new documentary Something Ventured tells their story and numerous others; and it’s as sparkling, sweet—and potent—as a champagne cocktail.  Something Ventured is also an unapologetic paean to capitalism, dispensing a much needed corrective to the current cries of “Tax the Rich,” “At some point you’ve made enough money” or “Off with their heads!” All right, I made up that last one, but you get my point.

Producers Paul Holland (a partner himself at a venture firm) and Molly Davis chose Emmy-award winning filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine to helm the film. The able duo mix pop music, priceless old footage and facts and figures with interviews of the now octogenarian money men who funded the future. Holland, and many of the people in the film, aim to inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs—and, perhaps, to gently encourage our government and media to consider the upside of capitalism for once.

But the filmmakers include the downside of the high risk atmosphere of startups, too. The investors note that about half of the original founders of startups are replaced within 18 months of a new corporate structure. Sandy Lerner, a founder of Cisco, recalls painfully how she was fired from the company she loved by the new owner/managers (and how many times has Steve Jobs been fired?), while Tom Perkins and Pitch Johnson recall a few of the inventions that turned out to be duds and companies (termed “the living dead”) that never took off.

If at times the film feels like a storytelling session with the boys at the coffee shop, that’s because it started out that way. Linda Yates, Holland’s wife, introduced him to the semi-retired investors, and he enjoyed their stories so much he decided to share them. These are men of good humor, optimism and ambition and clearly relish their role as facilitators to the innovators they met along the way. They insist that the entrepreneurs of Apple and Genentech, Cisco and numerous others of their startups, are the real heroes. Their own passion is to create and grow businesses where no business existed before, and they still are spreading the good news today – in their typically larger-than-life fashion. (Pitch Johnson, for one, jumped in his private plane one day in 1970 and flew to Cuba to convince Fidel Castro of the superior benefits of capitalism. No word yet on Castro’s response.) Continue reading Venture Capital & The Origins of Silicon Valley: LFM Reviews Something Ventured

Is The UN a Villain in Transformers: Dark of the Moon? + ‘Patriotic’ Navy SEAL Movie Coming, Written by ‘300’ Scribe

By Jason Apuzzo. Take a look at a new trailer above that aired during the NBA Finals for Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and tell me if you’re not left with the impression that this film will feature the UN collaborating with an alien invasion of planet Earth. If that’s the case … thank you, Michael Bay! You get better with each film.

In other news, Relativity Media has apparently just picked up distribution rights to Act of Valor, described as a “very patriotic” action thriller about the Navy SEALs, starring a cast of unknowns … along with actual, active-duty SEALs. The film was written by 300 screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, and may also be getting an IMAX release. You can read more about the project here, and there are already some production photos available.

This is good news. I’m liking this new SEAL-movie trend because it indicates that Hollywood is finally becoming responsive to actual, present-day events. If only this had been the case ten years ago …

Posted on June 13th, 2011 at 10:24am.

On Super 8

By Jason Apuzzo. I just wanted LFM readers to know that due to some exciting new developments in my non-Libertas career, I won’t presently have time to review Super 8. I will try to catch up with the film at some point down the line, and will otherwise attempt to be back up and running normally next week.

In the meantime, feel free to comment below to register your own reactions to the film.

Posted on June 11th, 2011 12:20pm.

YouTube Jukebox: Miriam Makeba

By David Ross. My daughter and I heard the Tokens’ “Wimoweh” somewhere or other; this led to Ladysmith Black Mambazo; this in turn led to Miriam Makeba, and ever since we’ve been listening to Makeba day in and out, with no weariness – indeed with ever deepening respect – on the adult side. My daughter wanted to be an ‘African singer’ last Halloween, but we talked her down from this ledge of potential racist scandal, and she wound up going as a ‘Chinese princess.’

Let me offer a simple conviction: during the 1960s Miriam Makeba was one of the very greatest vernacular artists in the world, in a category with the likes of James Brown, Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Charles Mingus, and Thelonius Monk. She might be reasonably compared to Aretha Franklin or Sarah Vaughan, but on the whole she was their superior, combining the former’s soaring voice with the latter’s genius for phrasing, and endowing everything she did with a palpable personal charm. As a politically resonant Third World artist combining native and American idioms, the obvious – and fair – comparison is to Bob Marley.

Here (see above) is a tremendous clip associated with Makeba’s appearance in Stockholm in 1966. The concert is available as a DVD import titled Miriam Makeba Live at Bern’s Salonger (I purchased mine from Amazon.co.uk), but the film does not include this sequence. I gather that Makeba appeared on TV in support of the concert proper. The clip features two tremendous songs and some comments on the arch-nastiness of the racial politics of South Africa, with Makeba herself utterly fetching in her duality of girlishness and loftiness. This second clip, a bossa nova delight from the live appearance at Bern’s Salonger, highlights Makeba’s remarkable versatility. This third clip drives home her capacity for massive, earth-shaking grooves.

Enjoy this material while you can. YouTube has lately been stripped of Makeba material.

The core of Makeba’s sixties output is available on three CD sets that repackage seven of her albums. These sets are a must for anyone with a serious interest in twentieth-century music, as indispensible as Live at the Apollo and Kind of Blue.

Posted on June 11th, 2011 at 9:23am.