MetaFilter posts tagged with Curtis

King Curtis

flapjax at midnite — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:35:22 -0800

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! Opening their show with a appropriately energetic version of the Ray Charles chestnut What'd I Say, Curtis and his band turned in a fine performance that evening, for the sweaty young throngs packed into Shea Stadium to see the most famous band in the world. Although the audio quality is less than sterling, here is their short set in its entirety (audio only). From the same live TV studio performance as "Memphis Soul Stew" (under the here link of this FPP), here's Ridin' Thumb and Soul Serenade, albeit with weirdly squashed video. But let's go back a few years, to the tune where Curtis first really made his mark: as the saxophonist on the Coaster's infectious Yakety Yak, which, by the way, was the inspirstion for Boots Randolph's famous Yakety Sax. Here's a soulful little number called Foot Pattin'. Video is another one of those that just shows the record spinning. Nice. Like Booker T and the MGs, Curtis and his band recorded instrumental versions of lots of 60s R&B hits, as well as rock numbers made famous by the likes of Led Zeppelin, Procol Harum, etc. Here are three: I Heard It Through The Grapevine, Whole Lotta Love (with absurdly unrelated video here), A Whiter Shade of Pale (Again, what's with the video? Stupid...). And here's Champion Jack Dupree with a slow blues, joined by King Curtis. And look who's there in the front row, at the beginning of the clip: that's Aretha! Which brings us to another point: King Curtis was Aretha's musical director and backing band leader in 1971, the year he was tragically murdered in the hallway of his apartment building on the Upper West Side of New York City. And, finally, hey, let's give the drummer some. The man who put the seriously funky percussive underpinning to much of King Curtis' work: the great Bernard "Pretty" Purdie. While we're talking Kingpins, let's not forget the great guitarist Cornell Dupree, either, eh?

The Trap on the Google Video

Burhanistan — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:25:46 -0800

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 Previously. Related. Two interviews. Bonus short film by Curtis.

Reverse Graffiti

brain_drain — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 08:40:12 -0800

Reverse Graffiti. Alexandre Orion makes it for a cause and sometimes gets caught [YouTube]. "Moose" of Symbollix makes it for fun and profit. See also -- Early reverse grafitti. Dirty car art.

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.

acro — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:18:39 -0800

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.

Business and the decline of political liberty

ClanvidHorse — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 10:26:16 -0800

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.

Happiness Machines

gsb — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 00:43:01 -0800

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].

On the politics of fear

mr.marx — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 10:13:18 -0800

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