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God Speed You! Black Emperor, by Mitsuo Yanagimachi, 1976

Yanagimachi follows Japanese Motorcycle gang The Black Emperors as they do bikerish teenage things.

This is a classic. So watch it.

thedocumentarian-blog

Serbian Epics, by Paweł Pawlikowski, 1992

During the first Bosnian war, BBC documentary-maker Pawlikowski had intimate and unprecedented access to the Serb nationalist leadership – including President of Republika Srpska Radovan Karadžić and VRS Chief of Staff Ratko Mladić – as they laid seige to Sarajevo. The film he produced about the men who went on to be charged with hideous war crimes is slow and strange and totally haunting. It also does a brilliant job of illustrating quite how firmly Serbian nationalist identity is underpinned by ancient myth and folklore. Watch the full movie here.

Thanks again to Seb Ross.

essayist-blog

by John Jeremiah Sullivan,

On the morning of April 21, 1995, my elder brother, Worth (short for Elsworth), put his mouth to a microphone in a garage in Lexington, Kentucky, and was—in the strict sense of having been “shocked to death”—electrocuted. He and his band, the Moviegoers, had stopped for a day to rehearse on their way from Chicago to a concert in Tennessee, where I was in school at the time. Just a couple of days earlier, he had called to ask if there were any songs I wanted to hear at the show. I requested something new, a song that he’d written and played for me the last time I’d seen him, on Christmas Day. Our holidays always end the same way, with my brother and me up late, drinking, trying out our new “tunes” on each other. There is something almost biologically satisfying about harmonizing with a sibling. We’ve gotten to where we communicate through music, using guitars the way fathers and sons use baseball: as a kind of emotional code. Worth is seven years older than I am, an age difference that can make brothers strangers, and I’m fairly sure the first time he ever felt we had anything to talk about was the day he caught me in his basement bedroom at our old house in Indiana, trying to teach myself how to play “Radio Free Europe” on a black Telecaster he’d forbidden me to touch.

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thearchitrave-blog

by David Foster Wallace. An essay that is particularly dear to my heart.

For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny ... Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the extraordinary power of his stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common... I might invite students to consider what is really being expressed when we refer to someone as “creepy” or “gross” or say that somebody was forced to “eat shit” in his job. Or to reread “In the Penal Colony” in light of expressions like “tonguelashing” or “She sure tore me a new asshole” or the gnomic “By a certain age, everybody has the face he deserves.” Or to approach “A Hunger Artist” in terms of tropes like “starved for attention” or “love-starved” or the double entendre in the term “self-denial,” or even as innocent a factoid as that the ety- mological root of “anorexia” happens to be the Greek word for longing.

essayist-blog

by Wells Tower

This morning, employees of Amsterdam’s de Dampkring (“the Smoke Ring”) coffee-shop franchise have convened at the unbohemian hour of 9 a.m. for a daylong refresher course on the finer points of effective and responsible weed salesmanship. Not long from now, I’m scheduled to spend a week behind the hash bar at one of de Dampkring’s two local branches, but what I know about the art of marijuana retail—not to mention Holland’s perverse and hazy drug statutes—wouldn’t fill a golf-ball dimple. So at the request of the shops’ rightly nervous manager, I’ve crossed the pond early to undergo a spot of preprofessional cramming.

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by Ian Frazier (stolen from TETW)

What do wild hogs do that’s so bad?

Oh, not much… eat red-cheeked salamanders and short-tailed shrews and red-back voles and other dwellers in the leaf litter in the Great Smoky Mountains, and destroy a yard that had previously won two “‘Yard of the Month” awards on Robins Air Force Base, in central Georgia, and knock over glass patio tables in suburban Houston, and muddy pristine brook-trout streams by wallowing in them, and play hell with native flora and fauna in Hawaii, and contribute to the near-extinction of the island fox on Santa Cruz Island off the coast of California, and root up American Indian historic sites and burial grounds, and root up a replanting of native vegetation along the banks of the Sacramento River, and root up peanut fields in Georgia, and root up sweet-potato fields in Texas, and dig big holes by rooting in wheat fields irrigated by motorized central-pivot irrigation pipes, and, as the nine-hundred-foot-long pipe advances automatically on its wheeled supports, one set of wheels hangs up in a hog-rooted hole, and meanwhile the rest of the pipe keeps on going and begins to pivot around the stuck wheels, and it continues and continues on its hog-altered course until the whole seventy-five-thousand-dollar system is hopelessly pretzeled and ruined.