BrokeWorld

December 22, 2024

Tracy Letts recommended ‘Tomorrow I’ll Get Uo and Scald Myself With Tea’ on The Big Picture podcast. It’s a comic time travel flick with some surprisingly great special effects and costume/scenic design. Nazi punks FUCK OFF!

Steven Hager plays this tune as the intro to his recent YT videos now and it worked on me. I had to track down ‘Sticky Icky’ by the Seeds of Doubt.

I get annoyed with best-of-the-year lists because they’re filled with movies that haven’t come out yet, haven’t come to streaming yet, or haven’t come to my city yet. Yes you media people have access to movies us pleebs can only dream about. So here are my 10 favorite movies of 2023:

10: Bottoms

9: No Hard Feelings

8: Janet Planet

7: Poor Things

6: Beau Is Afraid

5: The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar (as stand-in for all the WA Netflix shorts)

4: Godzilla Minus One

3: May December

2: Priscilla

1: The Boy and the Heron

And the mixes I’ve enjoyed since last time:

November 13, 2024

Unstreamable and out-of-print, it’s The Turning Point which features some great dancing and Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft spanking each other’s asses on the windswept plains outside Lincoln Center.

**FUCK DONALD TRUMP FUCK MAGA** The democrats have, since Clinton, turned themselves into the party of the status quo. Guess what, people hate the status quo. There’s a fuckton of misery out there and the democrats have proven over and over again that they’re not going to do a thing about it. It’s so bad that the country just elected an elderly psychotic racist rather than watch these mealy-mouthed neoliberals pretend they can’t raise the minimum wage or stop sending weapons to a genocidal ethnostate. Jesus Christ.

The Enchanted Dragonfly has convinced me of the importance of painting the floor…

Been playing this masterpiece of an LP from Luiz Bonfá and Norma Suely from 1960 on repeat:

and some mixes I’ve enjoyed since last time:

September 12, 2024

A Letter to Three Wives is a magic trick of a movie. The story sets up a question: which of the husbands is it? and you watch knowing that at some point the movie will have to answer the question and it will just be: it was THIS one. And that will be unsatisfying. But by the time it tells you which husband it is, you care about something else entirely, and you weren’t even aware that it pulled a switch on you. It’s a narrative sleight of hand. The story resolves in a surprising/satisfying way. Love it.

Why is this tune so good?

Looking for good scripts to read and I gotta say, I like Michael Clayton by Tony Gilroy. Lotta greatcraft and artistry in there. It goes down smooth and you really feel like you’re watching a movie while you read it.

More good jazz… (especially tracks 15 to the end where there’s no drums, just bass, guitar, and those sweet keys):

and the mixes I’ve enjoyed since last time:

August 2, 2024

Gritty n grimy LA indie noir Angel’s Flight:

from grime to the sublime, it’s Balanchine’s La Valse recorded in 1973:

and here are some mixes I’ve enjoyed since last time:

Also, here’s a NEW CONSPIRACY THEORY for ya: AI has been introduced and pushed to slowly make the internet even more useless than it currently is. Check out this result I got when Googling ‘countries with an official state religion’

See the last bullet point there? Islam is the official religion of Israel according to Google now. It’scrazy, and it gives those spreading misinformation an easy out: ‘hey, it was that wacky AI, who knows how that thing works?’ There will be more and more mistakes and law enforcement is already using AI in some places. Remember racist algorithms?

June 15, 2024

Thinking a lot about The Seven Deadly Sins, the Brecht/Weil/Balanchine collab from 1933. The ballet is lost but the text and music remain. I like this version from the 80s, made for TV I think. This playlist is missing one section and it’s in 240P but it still retains its power…

While we’re on low-quality images of high-quality performances, here’s Barbara McNair in a Scopitone (?) of The Best Is Yet to Come:

Lonnie Smith live performance from 1970:

And to wrap-up an all-YouTube update, here’s Cutting Class, a so-so slasher with baby Brad Pitt. The flic is worth the watch for a cool sequence under the bleachers during a basketball game, and a trampoline kill that reminded me of a recent holiday movie. HAPPY PRIDE EVERYONE!

May 11, 2024

I believe that the promotion of drug culture in the 60s was part of an effort to defang the radical left in America. This cool, scattershot, handmade, paranoid documentary from Steven Hager definitely pulls out one vibrant thread of that effort. Some very interesting people talking about interesting (in the Chinese-curse sense of the word) high-times.

Speaking of nefarious covert actions, here’s an essay by Shirley Freitas on how the CIA shaped the literary fiction genre through MFA programs. Ever wonder why most characters in novels don’t have to struggle to make a living?

I like this talk about the origins of culture (in both the artistic and anthropologic senses of the word) by Terry Eagleton:

I disagree that culture comes from surplus though. I think even a community of starving people has culture.

Here are some mixes that i’ve enjoyed since last time:

April 29, 2024

What the fuck are we doing arming a genocidal ethno-state and giving them billions to kill children and civilians? Even if there’s a ceasefire today, why should we continue to prop up an unsustainable apartheid regime? Thank god for college students who have the guts to stand up and say the obvious: THIS ISN’T RIGHT!!! It must stop!!!

Benny Broke and the BrokeWorld Corporation are against killing children and we highly resent living in a world where we have to make such an absurd statement.

More light-hearted fun shit soon!

April 7, 2024

Saw a clip of this on Insta and found it on YT. The dancing is sublime, but the filmmaking is excellent too—shot composition, editing, lighting, it’s all butter. Check out the sequence at 1:07:14. Also, early Makarova at 1:15:49.

I was already looking forward to Megalopolis, but this article got me super-hyped. He’s taking inspiration from Graeber? YES! I can’t decide if I want it to be a perfect masterpiece, or a big bountiful mess of a movie, either would be great. Francis Ford Coppola is a true art-hero.

Been listening to Stoned Soul mixes on soundcloud (see below) and I was blown away by this tune. How come I’m just hearing this now? Was this a hit? If not, it should’ve been!

these are the mixes I’ve been playing since last time:

And following up the Adler and Meisner vids from last time, here’s a Lee Strasberg. The stuff about his daughter in this is weirdly heartbreaking? Also, who knew Mr. Rogers had an interview show for grownups?

March 19, 2024

Been thinking about actors lately and how what they do is weird and magical. These two docs on YT are a fascinating window into the process.

Writing to solo instrumental music these days, here’s a pair of LPs that help me. It’s anything but background music.

Two soundcloud mixes I’ve enjoyed this month:

Just listened to the audiobook of Big Red and thought it was pretty fuckin great. This is a nice interview with Jerome Charyn. He talks about Balanchine too!

February 18, 2024

Kill the Moonlight used to be hard to see, but the filmmaker, Steve Hanft, put it up on YouTube! Thanks Steve!

Steve Hanft has also made a ton of music videos, including “Get Off My Log” which is an unheralded hip-hop classic.

I enjoyed reading this article in Granta by the novelist Nell Zink:

Corny? Yes. Great? Also yes. Allegra Kent doesn’t get the props she deserves in my opinion. Her memoir is a great read.

So in the movie, when the junky finally scores some quality dope, they shoot up and this plays:

And here are some mixes I liked so far this year:

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