…and it has never felt so good.

Argentina vs West Germany in the World Cup Final, Mexico 1986.

We do.

Hippies Wail for Dead Trees

All time favorite movie Hoop Dreams is available to watch free here.

The Century of the Self, part 1/6.

Los Angeles Plays Itself, 2003. The film is Thom Andersen’s 2-hour, 49-minute “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” a cinematic essay/meditation and labor of love on how this city has been depicted on the screen. Smart, insightful, unapologetically idiosyncratic and bristling with provocative ideas, it’s as sprawling and multi-faceted, fascinating and frustrating as L.A. (an abbreviation Andersen despises) itself.

It took Andersen, who teaches at Cal Arts, four years to put “Los Angeles Plays Itself” together. As with his too-little-seen last film, a keen examination of the output of blacklisted screenwriters called “Red Hollywood,” the new work reveals Andersen to be a director with a constitutional aversion to conventional thinking.

As with “Red Hollywood,” the heart of “Los Angeles Plays Itself” (and the reason why a commercial release is problematic) is brilliant and extensive use of clips from a hoard of feature films.

Starting with a startling opening shot of distraught stripper Sugar Torch running on a downtown street, from Sam Fuller’s “Crimson Kimono,” through a closing segment on the black independent films “Bush Mama,” “Killer of Sheep” and “Bless Their Little Hearts,” Andersen serves up segments of more than 200 films, from 1913’s “A Muddy Romance” through 2001’s “Hanging Up.” Truly, as the voice-over read by fellow independent filmmaker Encke King suggests, this has to be the most photographed city in the world.

These are not just any clips from any films. Andersen seems to have seen all movies made with a local connection. He’s familiar with everything from Laurel and Hardy’s 1932 classic “The Music Box” and the 1972 gay porn film “L.A. Plays Itself,” which gives Andersen’s work its name, to “Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf” and “Death Wish 4: The Crackdown.” Working closely with editor Yoo Seung-Hyun, he also has impeccable taste in what to select.

With its tart, acerbic tone and politically progressive stance, “Los Angeles Plays Itself” was clearly made by a sophisticated insider, someone who loves the city, is capable of comparing “Dragnet” to the work of Bresson and Ozu, and has no tolerance for the reason its name got shortened in popular usage (”Only a city with an inferiority complex would allow it”).

The bulk of “Los Angeles Plays Itself” is divided into three sections that detail the different uses the city has been put to on-screen, sections that try to answer the question: Have movies ever depicted Los Angeles accurately?

The first of these, “The City as Background,” recounts how Los Angeles has been considered so visually malleable that it could play as anywhere. Though the James Cagney-starring “Public Enemy” takes place in Chicago, there’s a scene in it in front of Bullock’s Wilshire. And downtown’s Bradbury Building has been used as sites including a Mandalay hotel, in what was then Burma (”China Girl”), and a European military hospital (”White Cliffs of Dover”).

Because Andersen is architecturally sophisticated, familiar with the critical works of Esther McCoy, and David Gebhard and Robert Winter’s indispensable book “An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles,” he shrewdly points out the many ways that modernist architecture, especially the work of John Lautner, has been denigrated by Hollywood by being repeatedly used as the major villain’s home of choice.

The next section, “The City as Character,” deals with films that gave Los Angeles a personality. Here Andersen, among many other things, tracks down the house that was Barbara Stanwyck’s residence in “Double Indemnity,” a film he says convinced everyone that Los Angeles is the world capital of murder and adultery. He also has some kind words for the late, lamented neighborhood of Bunker Hill, urban renewed out of existence but living still in “The Glenn Miller Story,” “Criss Cross” and “Kiss Me Deadly.” He also admires “The Exiles,” Kent MacKenzie’s landmark 1961 independent film about Native Americans who lived up on the hill.

The final section, “The City as Subject,” shows what happened when Los Angeles became conscious of itself as a place a film could be about. Some of his most provocative comments come in relation to “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential,” films he says jointly promote the notion there is a secret history of the city that it is futile for ordinary citizens to even attempt to know.

As the director says in the press notes, films like this can serve “to dissuade naive viewers from political engagement by telling them that they are condemned to ignorance and powerlessness no matter what they do.” This politicized point of view gets more intense when “Los Angeles Plays Itself” closes with an examination of the work of black directors Charles Burnett, Haile Gerima and Billy Woodberry.

Brilliantly discursive, filled with intriguing detours that follow connections only the director’s mind could make, “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” will please natives of this city more than any other. Finally, the film agrees with the narrator in Jacque Demy’s “Model Shop,” who says, “It’s a fabulous city. To think some people claim it’s an ugly city when it’s really pure poetry, it just kills me.”

The Exiles chronicles one night in the lives of young Native American men and women living in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles. Based entirely on interviews with the participants and their friends, the film follows a group of exiles — transplants from Southwest reservations — as they flirt, drink, party, fight, and dance.

Filmmaker Kent Mackenzie first conceived of The Exiles during the making of his short film Bunker Hill—1956 while a student at the University of Southern California. In July 1957, Mackenzie began to hang around with some of the young Indians in downtown Los Angeles. After a couple of months, he broached the subject of making a film that would present a realistic portrayal of Indian life in the community.

Mackenzie spent long hours making friends and earning the confidence of these Indians who finally agreed to re—enact a scenes from their lives for this picture. All of the actors, some of whom were recruited on the spur of the moment during the shooting, play themselves in the film.

The Exiles was directed and photographed by a group of young filmmakers — Mackenzie’s college mates, fellow employees, and friends holding down a variety of day—to—day jobs in the motion picture industry. Much of the picture was shot on “short ends,” the leftovers of 1,000—foot rolls (varying from 100 to 300 feet of stock) discarded by major film producers.

In collaboration with cinematographers John Morrill, Erik Daarstad, and Robert Kaufman, the shooting of The Exiles began in January 1958 and the first trial composite print was privately screened in April 1961. Premiering in the Venice Film Festival that year, the film received acclaim from many critics but tragically never found commercial distribution.

It was Thom Andersen’s compilation documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself which kicked off the rediscovery of this lost masterwork. Andersen contacted the daughters of Mackenzie to receive permission to use footage to illustrate the lost neighborhood of Bunker Hill. Although the original negative and fine—grain (interpositive) existed for the film, it was decided that a theatrical distribution of the film could put the materials at risk. So Milestone, in cooperation with USC’s film archivist Valarie Schwan, brought the film to preservationist Ross Lipman and the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Milestone who distributed last year’s critical and box office hit, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, is releasing the restored version of The Exiles, will be playing at UCLA through Saturday (8/23).

Thank you Stephen

Belog is a blog by Tiffany Malakooti which posts links to articles and websites about Persian (Iranian) “Secrets” — a culture which has been largely overlooked by the national media considering it’s rich history of contributions to the arts (pre and post Revolution).

The Occult and Music
By Gary Gomes

The Scene, dance show from Detroit.

To cope with the difficulty of hobo life, hoboes developed a system of symbols, or a code. Hoboes would write this code with chalk or coal to provide directions, information, and warnings to other hoboes. Some signs included “turn right here”, “beware of hostile railroad police”, “dangerous dog”, “food available here”, and so on.

More info here, here and here.