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John Zoller, A Happy Farm Boy in Ohio, 2001, 60 x 72 inches, acrylic and oil enamel on canvas. From the series United States: Color and Learn.
The film Moog is, I'm sorry to report, not so good. Theremin or even Modulations it's definitely not. Synthesizer inventor Robert Moog is himself a charming and highly intelligent interview subject, but the film unfortunately consists of him being flown around the globe for on-location tete-a-tetes with Musical Bores of the World. DJ Spooky holds forth with his usual spiel about sampling until it dawns on him that Moog is only feigning attention; he abruptly switches tracks and compliments him for all the analog hiphop beats his work indirectly influenced. Rick Wakeman and Bernie Worrell go on, like bad drunks at a party, about how a synthesizer is like a woman who must be coaxed, made to scream, yadda yadda. The live music depicted in the film is uniformly pretentious and blah: Stereolab, Keith Emerson, Luke Vibert and Jean-Jacques Perrey all manage not to shine. The highest spots involve not the keyboard instrument but the Theremin, which Moog got his start building. Solos by Pamelia Kurstin and Moog himself are beautiful and otherworldly--music from thin air, only two controls (pitch and volume), no moving parts, it's the soul of economy and still inherently futuristic. How did we ever lose track of the concept?
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Your so-called liberal media at work: from a New York Times review of the recent flop The Alamo on DVD:
From Touchstone, the studio that brought you "Pearl Harbor" with a happy ending, here is a bafflingly upbeat version of the battle of the Alamo, the second most famous defeat in American history. Directed by John Lee Hancock ("The Rookie") from a script by himself, Leslie Bohem ("Taken") and Stephen Gaghan ("Traffic"), the film imposes a not-so-subtle 9/11 framework on the action, with the Mexican general Santa Ana (Emilio Echevarrķa) strutting around in peacock military garb like Saddam Hussein.Saddam, Osama bin Laden, whatever. But wait, there's more Bush propaganda:
The 200 brave men of the Alamo go down with all due spectacle, but then the film tacks on a 30-minute coda in which Houston leads a victorious invasion spurred by the famous words "Remember the Alamo" - presented as 1836's anticipation of President Bush's ground zero speech, "The people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon."I guess we know who the reviewer, Dave Kehr, is voting for.