Mayer Hawthorne and the County Spread the Love

Mayer Hawthorne, the frontman for the soul revival group Mayer Hawthorne and the County has just released their debut album "A Strange Arrangement" on Peanut Butter Wolf's acclaimed label Stones Throw, which sees the likes of other notable artists on its roster such as Mad Villain, Breakestra, Guilty Simpson and so on... Prior to the likes of donning the Swooning Man's Cap as the Soulful Mr. Hawthorne, Andrew Cohen, the Ann Arbor Native cut his chops as a Rapper / DJ for the LA based Hip Hop Outfit Now On. (www.myspace.com/nowon) Haircut, as he is known in the world of rap and breakbeats, paved the way for Hawthorne to emerge, proving himself as a Master of the Hook, notable on many such as the track "The Willows" off of Now On's most recent album "Tomorrow Already," which you can download online.

I also had the pleasure of directing a music video for the Pittsburgh/Detroit Hip Hop Duo Past Due (www.myspace.com/wearepastdue) who enlisted Haircut's craftsmanship for the catchy track "All Mine," Produced by Mike Samm and VPK Solutions. You can check out the video here:



Last week I went to check out Mayer Hawthorne and the County at the Darkroom in Chicago to a sold out show for the group's international kick off "Lonely Hearts Club Tour." The notably talented local Chicago Act J.C. Brooks and the Uptown Sound warmed up the crowd with a mindblowing remake of "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" by Wilco in a way likened to Jimi Hendrix covering Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watch Tower." It didn't touch the original, but it made it into such a ridiculously awesome upbeat dance-jam that everyone in the building went nuts. Buff1 (also from Ann Arbor) got up to rock the mic right before Hawthorne and the County and rocked the set finishing with a hype delivery of his song "Beat the Speakers Up." You can check out the video here:



By the time Mayer Hawthorne took the stage, the Darkroom was packed, hot and sweaty. The county carried the crowd through a soulful 45 minute set and left everyone asking for more. I've heard a lot of people who questioned what the deal was with this Retro-Motown Soul Revival Act, and some people that just don't get it. Others have said that Hawthorne hasn't brought anything new to what is essentially a genre that ended well over 20 years ago. I beg to differ. While the formula may remain very similar to the territory it was born from, I would ask you to look at how masterfully it was done, give it a listen for yourself. My guess is that once "A Strange Arrangment" runs its course and gets the attention and radio play it deserves, Hawthorne's Sophomore Album will be more than a force to be reckoned with.

I just hope I'm lucky enough to get a call to do another video for this cat!

So long and Farewell. And I hope you Feel the Love!

Watchmen the Movie: Indicative of What?

So, I wasn't one of the first people to read Watchmen back in the late 80's or early 90's who ranted and raved about its particularities from the very beginning. In fact, I only read it earlier this year. But you can bet, I made SURE to read it before I even thought about going to a movie that Alan Moore (once again) wanted nothing to do with.

I don't want to make this a long winded critique that goes back and forth a thousand times but I will say this: Snyder has created beautiful images, just like he's done in the past and throughout his commercial career. Many of them are faithful to the graphic novel. The obvious problem one might say is that too many of these images ring hollow, but this isn't necessarily an issue of casting. In my opinion the film was actually exceptionally cast. ALL except for Ozymandias: Which was by far the greatest mis-match one could've mustered for the World's Smartest Man who also happens to be exceptionally strong. Adrien Viedt in this film comes across as the thin, wiry nerdy brat next door whose parents bought him all the cool expensive toys his whole life, and that's about it. And when he reveals his master plot, after the downfall, he stands in his disheveled Karnak looking defeated, which was never what Viedt would have done.

I have two qualms with the film that I feel very serious about. And I don't even need to mention the unfortunate exclusion of the Tales of the Black Freighter and the Frontiersman Newspaper Stand. The two most single disturbing features about Watchmen (to me) are this, and the first is somewhat unavoidable but contributes to my point about the second:

1) In the graphic novel, all of the violence and sex that takes place is largely at a distance or off screen throughout the entire story UNTIL the end, when there is a graphic display of carnage from the fallout, and you see pages of up close bodies spread in blood and debris. But before this, not even the exposition of Rorshach involved as much carnage as one might believe (especially if they had only seen the film). The scene where he butchers the child-molester saying "You put dogs down" - in the comic is actually very different. He handcuffs the man to the furnace, pours kerosene all over, and HANDS the man the butcher knife saying "I wouldnt try cutting through the chains. Not enough time." And tosses a match and walks out. Now TELL ME why the hell THAT wasn't the scene they included in the film. So much more class, and way more layered than the gratuitous head-butchering which never happened. This is my point, a Watchmen Blockbuster couldn't avoid cheapening itself and falling prey to the kinds of sex and violence that are expected to explicitly pop out at us in every scene. But this is what was so great about the comic, is it continually defied our expectations whereas in the film, we are paid off exactly in each instance we would expect. Cheapening every instinct.

2) I promised not to rant, but this is simply the most irresponsible cop-out I have ever seen in an adaptation to screen. In the novel, Viedt is able to successfully use Doc Manhattan to accidentally transport a Giant Alien Creature into the Heart of New York city, thus creating an "Alien Other" to end the Cold War and Bridge the USSR and USA and rest of the world in solidarity to stand up against this "Unknown" and Unearthly Enemy. So, to have (and SPOILER BEWARE: if you haven't already seen the film and don't want to know what they changed) Doc Manhattan be blamed on the international scale for Nuclear Bombs going off all over the globe, with no Alien Other makes absolutely no sense. Remember: "The Superman exists, and he is American." So how would the world recognize peace with the United States when they have known forever that we've been flaunting a Super-Human Weapon who has NOW admittedly (via-viedt) destroyed the world. It makes no sense. But the parallels to our times are scarily pertinent. America claims to have the answers, but they come in the forms of destruction, and our greatest fantasy is that people will ultimately accept our solution to Humanity's problems, namely false pretext for "freedom and democracy" in the form of war.

What is so great about the REAL Watchmen, is it was a direct insidious opposition to this systemic idea of Fascism Walking. The film, merely bastardizes this, whilst keeping enough of it in tact to try to please the die-hards, and capture the miniscule attention span of those who never heard of Watchmen, by turning into the Popcorn / Cotton Candy for the Spectacle that it (and Alan Moore) stood against so defiantly.

Am I happy that Snyder took the bullet and made the film? No. No. No. ONLY in the sense that it provides a timely metaphor to our hollow state of affairs: All glitz - no glamour.


Watchmen from atfilmweb on Vimeo.

Kanye Stole my idea

Okay. So I know I am not the only person who has been playing around with Final Cut or any other video editing software, and gotten a strangely compressed quicktime export that made you go: OOooohhh Trippy! And I also recognize that I am probably not the only one who had thought about using this as an effect (my idea involves Sci-Fi Characters manipulating the digital bio-net) but I must say, I am very jealous and somewhat angry, and at the same time I Love This Video. I know I'm supposed to hate Kanye West, and I know that his new album is bla bla bla whatever, I don't care. EVEN THOUGH, he clearly stole this idea from me, I can't get enough of this video. I have nothing else to say about it. Just watch it yourself, if you havent already seen it.


KANYE WEST "Welcome To Heartbreak" Directed by Nabil from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.

Bad movies are still Awful

This was the worst movie I have ever seen in my entire life.

I have nothing else to say other than I'm actually thankful. Because when I saw this at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, it made me realize I can do great things.

If this film got made. Anything is possible.

Religion and Wrestling

So - I had the pleasure of watching two very different yet both incredibly interesting films in their own right today: The Wrestler and Religulous.

The latter is Bill Maher's journey to end the superstitions that drive the major religions in the world, in order to stop people from being okay with the Rapture, and perhaps bringing it into existence by their narrowly conceived "blind-faiths." Which I can appreciate. But I can't help but think that his approach is still fundamentally wrong. Maybe its because its fine to say that and understand it, but telling 5 billion people they're dead wrong (*even if they are) and they need to abandon their religions, is probably not going to do much either. I guess it's part of a larger problem I've been thinking about for a while. And while organized religion has been highly politicized, and manipulated for centuries, I can't help but acknowledge the fundamental truths of those religions is the same, and not bad: 1) Know who you are 2) Respect others 3) Appreciate the fact that the world is a mystery 4) Love.

If we are ever going to solve our problems and get beyond our differences, we need to start not by denying people's belief systems, but by appealing to their better sides. The sides that are accepting of others, the sides that don't just tolerate difference, but celebrate it.

In the Wrestler, Mickey Rourke gives a tour de force of a show as a washed-up Wrestler who has to work the independent circuit with cheap steroids and in the shadow of his broken past. It was a wonderful film that expands upon his struggle to exist in a world that has gone beyond him. "Guns and roses were awesome, and then Cobain came along and ruined it." The 80's ruled. At one point he sits in his trailer park and invites one of the neighbor kids to play an old nintendo version of an 8-bit Wrestling game. The kid gets bored and elaborates on Call of Duty 4, showing how much the world has changed. Rourke is out of place. The film also has a series of shots that follow Rourke's back as he walks through his routine, whether he is walking through the locker-room towards the Ring, or through the packing room of the grocery store to the meat-kiosk. He can't deny, even after he quits wrestling from a heart-attack, that he is a wrestler, it's what he loves. It's who he is. Albeit, wrestling is a silly sport, it's all a show, and yet so many people love it, follow it, and live in that strange circle of Make-up and Spandex.

I guess that's my problem with Bill Maher. He is unwilling to accept that religion isn't just a dogmatic scheme for peons to be herded through existence. He can't seem to see that there is still good there. It may need to be saved from a collision course with an awful reality of Religious Wars, but the answer is within its own make-up. It's fabric holds the cure to this potentially terrible path it could continue to find itelf on.

Maybe Religion is like Wrestling. Sometime its okay to put on the costume and step into the hyper-real sensation of the arena. If it connects you to people, and it allows you to live a life you Love, and others love also, how can it be purely wrong?

Even if you don't like Wrestling. And I don't.

Go see the Wrestler. It's a great film. And even though Bill Maher get's annoying really quick, Religulous is still worth a watch. He brings up valid points, he just doesn't have a very good way to solve the problems he highlights. Empathy is what's missing from our lives. Maher could benefit from it. Rourke did, certainly in terms of his career, and definitely in the film as Randy the Ram.

It's the force that can truly solve problems, and allow us to be who we truly are.

Alex Jones Tv:2009 Police State

My favorite part is where Alex Jones talks about the Police Drinking Fluoride Water, Pumping their kids with Mercury, and swat teaming bar-oweners saying: "YOU CAN'T SELL WHISKEY TO A GOD!"

With Us or Against Us

George Bush once repeated a not-so-subtle mantra during the midst of his 8 years of terror, debt, destruction, and the dissolution of America as we know it, in a manner that at the time by many was deemed justified. In order to fight Terror as he put it, we must throw out the old rule book, and we need everyone on our side. The mantra was simply this:

EITHER YOU ARE WITH US, OR YOU ARE WITH THE TERRORISTS.

Aside, from sounding like something the Borg might've said in an episode of Star Trek, it is a fatuous and bellicose statement with no moral intrinsic value. In fact, it is the exact opposite.

When we accept this didactic nightmare we engage in a narcoleptic vision of the world which sees our own understanding of reality slipping further away from any sense of constructive or positive relevance. I began to think about this again as I work on trying to finish a documentary about the life of a poet from British India, Muhammad Iqbal, who understood this concept 100 years ago.

It's nothing new of course. But today, the mantra has a powerful twist. Bigger Weapons, Larger Consequences, More Insidious and Endless Enemies. The War on Terror, if we accept it, is a self-fulfilling prophecy brought forth by the Spectacle itself, trying to usher us into an era of pure thoughtlessness, fear, and ignorance.

What we have actually done by accepting this is far removed from those ideals we hollowly assume we are upholding (freedom, democracy, truth, prosperity, liberty, etc...)

When we accept this, we are actually initiating a war against ourselves. And the longer we pursue violence as a means to an end, the longer we pursue cultural domination as a by-product of global corporate control, the longer we accept even a single innocent casualty as just cause for our larger Religion of Hegemonic lust, the quicker we demonize ourselves, and the easier it becomes to bury ourselves completely: consumed by the narrative of our own fears.

There is no clash of civilizations. There is only a clash within ourselves.

The major problem of the 21st century isn't terrorism, it's pursuing a false-global democracy that is synonymous with Terror as a State of Mind. War as a Way of Life.

The danger of our times is that we have forgotten who we are.

The Secret of the Self is simple: We have to remember.

This realization starts within, and has to find a way to work itself into the world before it's too late. Or one day we might wake up and realize we created our own personal Hell on Earth, where no one trusts anyone, and no one believes anyone, and there is no more diversity, there is no more difference, there is no more unity, there is nothing.

It's not as dramatic here as it is in real life.

Go out and do your part. But don't despair. We have to win this battle by loving life. We have to win this battle by actively being engaged, to defend those things we love most.

We have to be Creative, Non-Violent, 21st Century, Mystic Revolutionary Combatants.

We have to Know who We Are.

Good night or Good morning. Whichever it is. . .

Monday - January 5, 2009 (close to 10pm)

I am not sure what drove me to jump back into the blogosphere. But here I am. I guess I will start slowly and give no reasons.

The role of the mind is to externalize itself, and the role of the world is to be internalized by the mind.

As far as I can tell thats as close a reason as I can find to describe this sudden desire.

I send my prayers to Gaza. Will it ever end?

Wishing you are well at the start of what will undoubtedly be a Wonderful and Horrible Year.

Good night.