So, there was this little rock band from England, and they got pretty famous and all, so famous that they initiated the era of stadium concerts, back in '65, at a little place in Queens called Shea. But there was an opening act that night, led by a sax-blowin' fellow name of King Curtis, and he kicked total muhfukkin ass, and it wasn't even with his baddest band! You can hear them here. Jump Back! [more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite on Aug 15, 2008 - 25 comments

Adam Curtis' "The Trap" is a documentary broadcast in 2007 on BBC exploring the development of modern concepts of individual freedom.
[Google video links] Episode one: F#@^ You, Buddy; Episode two: The Lonely Robot; Episode Three: We Will Force you to be Free [more inside]
posted by Burhanistan on Mar 21, 2008 - 33 comments

Reverse Graffiti. Alexandre Orion makes it for a cause and sometimes gets caught [YouTube]. "Moose" of Symbollix makes it for fun and profit. [more inside]
posted by brain_drain on Oct 17, 2007 - 11 comments

The Flow, by Paul Myerscough

That image gives way, quickly and successively, to a series of others: a young black woman smoking, smiling at the camera through a reinforced glass window; three teenage girls in a car, laughing, filmed through the windscreen; a whip-pan to the American flag, pierced by sunlight, drifting in the breeze; a DIY programme on a pixellated TV screen; a ride-along shot of a family in an oversized golf buggy; two different angles of a man alone in a lecture theatre; two more of traffic at night; a woman, suspicious of the camera, wearing a polka-dot dress and partly obscured by glassy reflections; a blurry shot of a long windowless corridor; a man wearing shades in a crowded street; a woman pursued down the cosmetics aisle of a supermarket; and, as Curtis comes to the end of his three short sentences, a woman seen jogging in the wing-mirror of a moving car. The entire sequence takes 26 seconds. There’s too much to take in. Or, you don’t know what you’ve taken in, and how deep the impression has been.

posted by acro on Jun 20, 2007 - 18 comments

The Mayfair Set [Google Video]. A BBC Documentary series on how City of London bankers systematically dismantled British industry from the 1960s-90s and removed the power of the state to protect people from the greed of the market A thought provoking documentary from Adam Curtis whose other documentaries The Power of Nightmares and The Century of the Self have been previously discussed and well received on Mefi. It is almost four hours long but well worth the effort.
posted by ClanvidHorse on Dec 2, 2006 - 24 comments

The Century Of The Self. It's a documentary, and the four parts are available at archive.org [2][3][4] -- with a higher quality bittorrent option [via mindhacks]. The program is about the use of psychoanalytical techniques to manipulate and control the "bewildered herd", "engineering consent" in a world fraught with "irrational impulses" [more inside].
posted by gsb on Feb 26, 2006 - 16 comments

The Power of Nightmares, the BAFTA winning BBC documentary previously discussed here, is now available for free download - in excellent quality - from the Internet Archive.
More: The Guardian - The Making of the Terror Myth; The Guardian - Adam Curtis: Fear gives politicans a reason to be; Wikipedia - Adam Curtis
posted by mr.marx on Jul 13, 2005 - 16 comments