The Power Of Nightmares/Adam Curtis

YOU THINK YOU ARE A CONSUMER BUT MAYBE YOU HAVE BEEN CONSUMED

Haven't watched these clips yet but I do love his TITLES.

The cuts may be right, or they may be stupid - but the astonishing thing is how no-one really challenges them.

orly

I think that one of the reasons for this is because a lot of the power that shapes our lives today has become invisible - and so it is difficult to see how it really works and even more difficult to challenge it

difficult to challenge yes, invisible no. these days there are probably as many people trying to pull the wool away from our eyes as trying to pull it over.

finished the mayfair set. a little shrill perhaps, but interesting.

and p.s. hmm, the treatment of mohammed al fayed was a little bit ... euphemistic. i'm not saying it was explicitly racist. that is for other people to say.

blimey ..this is dire

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/interactive/2013/jul/08/adam-curtis-massive-attack-what-is-reality

Seems to have been taken down.

What was that, Bob Six?

It says "This article was temporarily taken down on Monday 8 July 2013."

Was an except of a poem/text that went with a video installation he did with Massive Attack in Manchester. Several b/w pics, maybe a video clip (couldn't see, was on my phone), quite long, didn't read, just scrolled and saw bits and pieces here and there - do you know what reality is, nicolai ceaucescu and his wife were shot, that's about all I remember :-/

More info without the actual excerpt: http://m.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/jul/07/adam-curtis-massive-attack-review

it's had a few sniffy reviews up here even from the Curtis fanbase. a fair few people walked out of the opening night supposedly; spending 2 hours standing up (with no bar!) in a darkened warehouse on a Friday night hasn't gone down to well with folk expecting a more traditional 'gig'.

£36 a pop too.

(SPOILER)

liz fraser's in it.

yeah, it's pretty disappointing, esp if you went to It Felt Like A Kiss a few years back. spoke to AC afterwards and he said he's working on turning the current thing into TV production for the BBC but there's a bunch of legal issues to get past so it might never happen (will prob end up on his blog though). He's also working on a new documentary series about massive institutions and how they're broken - including the BBC - *for* the BBC.

http://www.latitudefestival.com/line-up/artist/alan-moore-mitch-jenkins-adam-curtis

"RD Laing challenged the psychiatric establishment in the 1960s THATCHER THATCHER DEATH WE ARE ALL PROSTITUTES something about prozac"

"but this was an illusion."

Got tix for this off the back of Curtis's involvement rather than Massive Attack, looking back upthread seems nuts that It Felt Like A Kiss was 4 years ago. Generally hit a lot of the MIF events, but with recent Babby A we could only really organise childcare for one proper evening event.

I read quite a lot of the mealy mouthed early reviews and was ready to be underwhelmed, but in the end came away feeling like it was something of a triumph - the immersive nature of the film screening was really effective and MA's involvement was understated yet powerful, takes a bit of grit for a band to avoid playing almost any of their own material and the covers were mostly great. I felt like Liz Fraser was a bit underutilised, but god hearing that voice live was a treat and the Russian pop song super beautiful. Could spend a long time going round the plughole of what Curtis is actually saying, and picking his argument apart, but during the show I was swept up into it and enjoyed it very much (same went for Mrs A and friends we were with). The Saturday night crowd laid into some thunderous applause at the end, and didn't see any walkouts from where we were. The Mayfield Depot was a v interesting and cavernous space to stage it in too, odd to think that such huge structures still lie derelict in the heart of the city.

On a tenuous note, we'd also been for a meal at Zouk in Manchester beforehand and Daddy G was in there, dining solo, on some kind of grilled chicken starter and then steak in a "lonely guy thinking baout things" mode.

Adam Curtis on MI5:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER

Watch the film before you read Curtis on the people featured:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/ONES-PRIVATE-LIFE

Enjoyed the Whicker documentary.

It was interesting to see Elizabeth Jane Howard, as I'm just reading her autobiography and just finished the part covering her marriage to Peter Scott.

oh Adampaws

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/02/adam-curtis-interview

i sort of like the general ways this guy's mind works (esp. his emphasis on how right-thinking decisions can have disastrous or just bizarre unintended consequences, or his general chaos theory of world civilization) but the actual films (or videos) strike me as kind of 'roided out and glib. i'm not sure if i'm expected to take them as righteous muckraking or a kind of craig-baldwin-esque video theater and i don't think the confusion is particularly educational.

He turned out to be engaging and personable, veering frantically one from one topic to another,

this basically describes his films

yeah a sort of ADD thing. What I thought was a bit 0_0 in that interview were his pronouncements on music, I mean who knew that Rihanna might be making better records than the Arctic Monkeys? SCALES FALL FROM EYES

also it kind of figures that he's one of those britishers who confuses "the state of music" with "the type of music that gets covered in the UK music press"

"i am so tired of how ALL OF MUSIC is just looking backwards, viz. savages"

britishers seem to get all up in arms arguing about music that they would be perfectly within their rights to be ignoring like everybody else

he also reminds me that punk rockers (and post-punk non-rockers) are among other things late baby boomers. that punk was a trend WITHIN baby-boom culture, not against it. 'cos just sub out a few words and he could just as easily be saying, "music isn't original anymore. remember when we had STEPPENWOLF?!"

also i get the feeling from his work that he's both sententious /and/ misanthropic, which is kind of a toxic combo.

(as some ILX posters habitually remind me)

What people are yearning for now is some kind of romantic visions of something beyond our present condition, and that would be good music.

thanks, prof!

it's kind of endearing that the best he can come up with is Massive Attack, lol 1992 grandad! But then again, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that a middle aged bloke is a raging rockist.

he's a rockist in popist clothes

so you might say he's a pop-rocksist

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-X17saFn9hgw/T9djDVKtd_I/AAAAAAAABEM/uZKjhY6eYqo/s1600/PopRocks_square600.jpg

Curtis should have probably kept his mouth shut but reading you on this has made the supposedly offending comments a lot better.

It could've been a more disciplined and coherent attempt to map music to what is happening but at least he is making the attempt. At least that whole thing of music as thermometer is present.

I'm not going to criticise his musical ideas when he's brought me the soundtracks to those films.

But the truth about the elite was much stranger and more unsettling.

takes an odd turn towards the end.

good(?) article

yes, tho' I like the anecdotal George Davis/Lambton stuff more than the big thesis, and haven't had time to watch the videos yet.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/mar/11/bbc-iplayer-revamped-adam-curtis

Curtis will make three iPlayer-only films exploring themes of hypocrisy, deception and corruption in contemporary Britain – Out There, At the Mountains of Madness and Dream Baby Dream – available from July.

Have any iPlayer-enabled Britxors seen this yet?

i wonder if they were ever up on iPlayer in July? they're not there now if so. i never recall hearing anything about them.

oh, ok - I can't tell, I'm not in Britain myself.

I wondered if the third documentary will be related to this bit from the Massive Attack thing, since "Dream Baby Dream" is the Suicide track that's playing:

http://vimeo.com/76571554

there is this blog entry from 25th july

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/NO-FUTURE

Long! Thanks for the link.

Bitter Lake. January 15th.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/TRAILER-TRASH

lol @ the kanye cue

love this guy but the title card that says BUT THEN // EVERYTHING BECAME CHAOTIC AND UNPREDICTABLE is self-parody. politicians invented a radical new kind of chaos, but in order to do this etc.. anyway def gonna be worth watching for the footage.

if you can get ahold of it, Afghantsi by Peter Kosminsky is an amazing portrait of the the bewildering pointlessness of the Russian experience in Afghanistan

There's an interview in the Guardian today - http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/jan/24/adam-curtis-bitter-lake

Bitter Lake is up at 9pm UK time tomorrow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM

His segment on the Charlie Brooker end of year review was incredibly dumb.

Anybody seen Bitter Lake yet?

I half watched it whilst cleaning up the pad for a flat inspection. Seemed engaging. Lots of Burial!