HOME CONTACT US Get our RSS feed: DISCLAIMER: Music hosted on this site is for preview purposes only. If you like what you hear please buy the artist's work. You can find much of it here: ARCHIVE January 2007

Off the Wall After Sunday night’s wrist-slashingly dull Oscar ceremony we’re glad to hear one of film’s most quixotic talents is set to return in 2007. Harmony Korine was the enfant terrible of 90s independent cinema and divisive as his films were (his 1997 directorial debut Gummo was named ‘worst film of the year’ by the New York Times and “the work of a young master” by Werner Herzog) they were always daring, imaginative and hard to shake. Unfortunately, after 1999’s Julien Donkey Boy, Korine started to lose the thread. In fact, he went completely nuts. Spiralling crack addiction may have been responsible for his next project, the frankly insane and unsurprisingly incomplete Fight Harm. The then 25 year old explained his concept to a journalist at the 1999 Venice Film Festival: "I go around provoking passers-by, trying to start a fight while the video camera follows me and films everything. It's very brutal -- I've already broken a collar bone and been arrested. The punches and kicks are all real, it's one of the most disgusting things you'll ever see. I wanted to push humour to extreme limits to demonstrate that there's a tragic component in everything." Filming stopped shortly after, with Korine having to serve a two-and-a-half-month prison sentence following a third arrest. But now, thanks to the help of his pal, professionally spooky David Blaine, he’s fully recuperated and clean. His new film Mister Lonely is due later this year and stars Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, Denis Lavant, Anita Pallenberg, David Blaine, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Werner Herzog (whose performance in Julien Donkey Boy is one of the funniest we’ve seen). Korine describes it thus, and it sounds awesome: "It’s the story of a young American man lost in Paris. He scratches out a living as a Michael Jackson look-alike, dancing on the streets, public parks, tourist spots and trade shows. Different from everyone else, he feels as if he's floating between two worlds. During a car show Michael Jackson meets Marilyn Monroe. Haunted by her angelic beauty he follows her to a commune in the Highlands, joining her husband Charlie Chaplin and her daughter Shirley Temple. A place where everyone is famous and no-one gets old. Here, The Pope, The Queen of England, Madonna, James Dean and other impersonators build a stage in the hope that the world will visit and watch them perform. Nuns fall out of airplanes and children ride pigs. Everything is beautiful. Until the world shifts, and reality intrudes on their utopian dream." Here's a barely related song, Transformer di Roboter's wonderfully odd, Mac startup noise-sampling cover of Michael Jackson's Stranger In Moscow: Transformer di Roboter - Stranger in Moscow [mp3] [buy] 8 Harmony's infamous (and very funny) Letterman debut from 1995: And a more ramshackle (and even funnier) appearance from 1997: Here's Korine's Mac Culkin-starring video for Sonic Youth's Sunday: And finally, here's Korine's brilliant video for Bonny 'Prince' Billy's No More Workhouse Blues: Posted by: Scott 28/02/07