Miral

Miral, directed by Julian Schnabel, is based on journalist Rula Jebreal’s autobiographical novel about growing up as a Palestinian in Israel. It tells the first-hand tale of three women whose lives unfold during the first intifada, the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation that began in 1987. Highlighting the remarkable work of a Palestinian woman named Hind Husseini – a woman who sacrifices everything to establish a school for refugee Palestinian girls in East Jerusalem and takes Miral in – the book and film show that hope still exists within a world of conflict. Bringing numerous elements of her own life into the story – Jebreal and her younger sister were taken in by Husseini after their own mother committed suicide.

"the real problem is the movie is pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel and it is going to be very difficult to get American audiences excited to see it," said one source.

Wikipedia | Guardian

Published by Serpent’s Tail Miral, the book, is out now. Miral, the film, is out now in the UK and released on 25 March, 2011, in the US.

The back story of Rula Jebreal's relationship with Schnabel is also pretty interesting.

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Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott

Description
Rosie Ferguson is seventeen and ready to enjoy the summer before her senior year of high school. She's intelligent-she aced AP physics; athletic-a former state-ranked tennis doubles champion; and beautiful. She is, in short, everything her mother, Elizabeth, hoped she could be. The family's move to Landsdale, with stepfather James in tow, hadn't been as bumpy as Elizabeth feared.

But as the school year draws to a close, there are disturbing signs that the life Rosie claims to be leading is a sham, and that Elizabeth's hopes for her daughter to remain immune from the pull of the darker impulses of drugs and alcohol are dashed. Slowly and against their will, Elizabeth and James are forced to confront the fact that Rosie has been lying to them-and that her deceptions will have profound consequences.

This is Anne Lamott's most honest and heartrending novel yet, exploring our human quest for connection and salvation as it reveals the traps that can befall all of us.

About the Author
Anne Lamott is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Grace (Eventually), Plan B, Traveling Mercies, and Operating Instructions, as well as seven novels, including Rosie and Crooked Little Heart. She is a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Going to order this today.

Time Magazine's Book Review | Order Book

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Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love

An OC Weekly writer reveals the dark side of the 1960s drug culture by tracking down members and associates of the Orange County counterculture group, who spoke of it for the first time in decades.

Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and its Quest to Spread Peace, Love and Acid to the World, by OC Weekly's Nick Schou, is the true story of the best-kept secret of the 1960s: the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

Dubbed the "Hippie Mafia," the Brotherhood began in the mid-1960s as a small band of peace-loving, adventure-seeking surfers in Southern California. After discovering LSD, they took to Timothy Leary's mantra of "Turn on, tune in, and drop out" and resolved to make that vision a reality by becoming the biggest group of acid dealers and hashish smugglers in the nation, and literally providing the fuel for the psychedelic revolution in the process. Journalist Schou takes us deep inside the Brotherhood, combining exclusive interviews with both the group's surviving members as well as the cops who chased them.

A wide-sweeping narrative of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (and more drugs) that runs from Laguna Beach to Maui to Afghanistan, Orange Sunshine explores how America moved from the era of peace and free love into a darker time of hard drugs and paranoia. Kirkus Review hails the book as "a fascinating read for any audience and essential reading for anyone interested in the roots of psychedelia."

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The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

In 1960, Timothy Leary set up an infamous institute at Harvard to experiment with psychedelic drugs. An exclusive excerpt from Don Lattin’s new book on how lifestyle guru Andrew Weil and other freshmen started tripping.

“Yes,” Leary said, “Huxley was the trailblazer. You know, I didn’t have a clue as to the potential of this research until I had my own experience with psilocybin mushrooms over the summer. At its core, you have to understand that this is not an intellectual exercise. It is experiential. It is, and I’m almost embarrassed to say it, religious. But it is more than religious. It is exhilarating. It shows us that the human brain possesses infinite potentialities. It can operate in space-time dimensions that we never dreamed even existed. I feel like I’ve awakened from a long ontological sleep.”

The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America. By Don Lattin. 272 pages. HarperOne. $24.99.

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Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures

Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures by Graham St John is the most wide-ranging and detailed of all the books on rave. More than the study of a musical movement or genre, Technomad offers an alternate history of cultural politics since the 1960s, from hippies and Acid Tests through the sound systems and 'vibe-tribes' of the 1990s and beyond. Like Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, Technomad makes unexpected but entirely convincing connections between people, movements and events. Like Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, St John's book introduces us to unknown heroes, committed geniuses and genuine revolutionaries. Beautifully written, with a genuinely international perspective on electronic dance music culture, Technomad is one of the best books on music I've read in some time."

via | buy
Just ordered it from Amazon. In paperback; hardback already sold out.

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Aubrey de Grey on "The Singularity" and "The Methuselarity"

With his long flowing beard and optimistic predictions about engineering an end to death, Aubrey de Grey has become a legend within the longevity community. He is currently the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a US-based charity focused on applying regenerative medicine to the problem of aging.

His most recent book is Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs that could End Human Aging in our Lifetimes.

The general concept, which for the past nine years I've pioneered and promoted under the name "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" or SENS is, in my view, our best bet for seriously -- maybe even indefinitely -- postponing the ill health of old age for people who are already alive today. I have broken down the problem of "preventative maintenance for the human body" into seven major sub-problems, many of which are well on the way to being overcome with contemporary biomedical technology and the remainder of which are, in my view, probably less than ten years away from proof of concept in laboratory mammals and less than 25 years away from clinical application.

link | Aubrey de Grey photo credit BJ Klein, Wikipedia.

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Living My Life by Emma Goldman

I was looking through my saved books and partial books online and thought this book of Emma Goldman was worth a post. You can read all 500+ pages online which I find amazing.

"How well I remember that day! It was a Sunday. The West Shore train, the cheapest, which was all I could afford, had brought me from Rochester, New York, reaching Weehawken at eight o'clock in the morning.

I came by ferry to New York City. I had no friends there, but I carried three addresses, one of a married aunt, one of a young medical student I had met in New Haven a year before, while working in a corset factory there, and one of The Freiheit, a German anarchist paper published by Johann Most."

Link

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A Is for Acid, G is for Grok

In John Bassett McCleary's book, "freak" is "a self-denigrating term used by hippies to describe themselves." And "flower power" is "pacifism, the turning of one's cheek."

That's because McCleary's book is The Hippie Dictionary, a 720-page archive of a now-vanishing lexicon.

"I started out carrying a pad of paper and pen, and writing down every word that came to me in a conversation, book, or movie. That took over five years," the author says. "I then started writing out definitions that I remembered. Later, I went to the library and dug into other slang and ethnic dictionaries to verify my definitions." That's when McCleary was startled to discover how many words on his list had never before been officially defined: "I also realized that much of the language of the time consisted of phrases — words combined to form new ideas or feelings, such as 'right on,' 'far out,' 'get it on.'"

via | link

I don't really know why exactly, but words from this era still make me queasy. Other people would have described me as a hippie. (It's hipp-IE, not hipp-Y.) I never uttered the phrase "right-on". And "far out"? -- maybe twice. "Get it on"? Ne-ver. We said "ball" which wasn't quite as crass as "fucking". ha!

In my opinion these phrases and idioms were repeated by the media and were used in movies and eventually perpetuated by weekend hippies or late bloomers but for some reason I found them cringe-worthy and embarrassing. To me, someone who hit on all the hippie slang was probably a narc; which reminds me of lots of fun stories for another time. Good times.

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Lauren Dukoff's 'Family' of Free Spirits

Devendra Banhart and Lauren Dukoff walk around the Space 15 Twenty gallery in Hollywood, giggling. Friends since they met at Malibu High School 10 years ago, the pair, who call each other Obi (Banhart's middle name) and Lo, are also artistic collaborators: Dukoff has been photographing the indie folkie-turned-major-label-star since Banhart was spending his afternoons practicing piano in the high school music room.

The photos collected in her new book, "Family," offer an intimate glimpse into the lives of Banhart and an ever-widening creative tribe that has formed here in L.A.



Spanning the period from May 2006 until late last year, "Family" follows Banhart from stages around the world -- including a headlining gig at Carnegie Hall -- to private moments writing at his desk and playing guitar on the deck of his Topanga Canyon home, where sketches, lyrics and found art decorate every wall, and the crimson velvet couch was said to have belonged to Jim Morrison.

Wearing sandals, bell-bottom jeans and a vest in one shot, and suspenders and sunny yellow jazz oxfords in another, Banhart also reveals the original fashion sensibility that has inspired international designers such as Roberto Cavalli and Karl Lagerfeld and local names like Trasteverine and South Paradiso.

Read More | Buy @ Amazon

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WHOLE EARTH CATALOG

WHOLE EARTH CATALOG
The Whole Earth Catalog is now online. This collection is not complete—and probably never will be—but it is a gift to readers who loved the CATALOG and those who are discovering it for the first time. The great stuff found on these pages is a celebration of the genius of Stewart Brand and all those associated with the WHOLE EARTH family of publications.

link | via MiShi on Facebook

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Thomas Woodruff's Freak Parade

Thomas Woodruff's Freak Parade
Lovely little freaks. Go see all the freaks in a row. Or get the book.

I can't believe I've not posted any of his work here before because he's one of my favorite artists. (Must have been posted before on my SU or Tumblr website.)

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Harmony Korine On His New Collected Fanzines

The Collected Fanzines, released today, compiles eight long-gone booklets from 1992 to 1999, a period that spanned Korine's graduation from high school, Kids, and his first two features, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy.

link

I've always been intrigued by Harmony, especially as a director, and think he's way ahead of his time.

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Burroughs and Kerouac - an unpublished collaboration

The young generation: Burroughs and Kerouac - an unpublished collaboration

In 1944, two aspiring writers named William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac were implicated in a murder that scandalised New York. The episode inspired a collaboration, a debut that remained unpublished – until now. John Walsh gives the lowdown on the novel that set them on the road.

Fans of the Beat generation have known for years about The Novel That Kicked It All Off, but they've had to wait until the death of a journalist at United Press International for it to be published. The appearance in print of And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks by William S Burroughs and Jack Kerouac is a literary event, not only because it drew two of the three leading Beat writers into confederacy, but because the book told a story – of male friendship, gay obsession and murder – that came to fascinate a score of American authors.

[Read More »]

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Alan Moore Interview

Stripping Down the Comic With Alan Moore

Most writers are boring, and the less they're allowed to talk about what they do behind closed doors, the better. But some writers are verbal rock stars, able to tear off entrancing philosophical riffs or to lay down a hypnotic anecdotal solo upon request. One of the few modern writers who can entertain a general audience is Alan Moore, Britain's bard of the industrial wastelands of Northampton, and the man whom people call the world's greatest living comic-book writer. (Mr. Moore has made it clear in the past that he writes comic books, describing the term "graphic novel" as "something some idiot in a marketing department came up with.")

link | photo via: comicvine

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Radical Simplicity:
Small Footprints on a Finite Earth
by Jim Merkel

Imagine that you are first in line at a potluck supper. The spread includes not just food and water, but all the materials needed for shelter, clothing, healthcare, and education. How do you know how much to take? How much must you leave for your neighbors behind you - not just the 6 billion human beings, but our fellow creatures and the yet-to-be-born?



Some believe that recycling and use of energy efficient appliances is sustainable living. In Radical Simplicity, Jim Merkel argues that to live in a sustainable manner requires a complete rethinking of our way of life. If the world's total bioproductive area is divided by the world's population, each of us gets a 4.7-acre share. Right now Canadians use up on average 22 acres of natural resources a year. To close this gap truly requires radical solutions.

Another thing I heard him say once was to think in terms of NEED and WANT when you're met with a consumer issue.

"Do I NEED this item, or do I simply WANT this item? Try to stick with just what you NEED."

This book came out about 5 years ago, but it's been crossing my path recently and followed me here to Easy Bake Coven.

Buy Book | Order Film | Global Living Project

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This post is a little out of sync for Easy Bake Coven, and at the risk of sounding like an infomercial, I wanted to turn my readers on to this opportunity to work from home on their computers.

Little White eBook - Your complete guide to virtual call center jobs in the US and Canada.

Would you like to work from home as a customer service representative, telemarketer, reservation specialist, or other virtual call center agent?

You shouldn't make another move without reading and consulting the Little White eBook. A few of my friends never finished reading the 218 page book because they found a good job soon after thumbing through it. I don't usually recommend anything on my website career and job related but I've seen this book yield excellent results and wanted to pass along the information.

Not only do you get most all the WAH leads via names of companies hiring, you get additional information such as their BBB report, the salary paid, who's hiring now and everything you could possibly need to know to apply and get a job from one of hundreds of virtual employers.

Homeshoring is the latest trend to sweep the corporate world - in fact, hundreds of employers have brought their call centers home to the U.S., literally. Rather than outsourcing to India, many call centers have found that it's more economical and customer-friendly to outsource right here at home.

Many companies require you to have a particular headset, high speed internet, a land line telephone and you're on your way. Go check it out for yourself and tell me how it works out for you.

Buy Little White eBook at Google checkout.

Disclosure: One of the companies I work for is highly regarded in this book.

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Rev. Billy Graham: A Prince of War Exposed

The propaganda machine of the Evangelical Christian Right will soon be in counter attack mode. One of its darling preachers is about to take it on the proverbial chin. The Rev. Billy Graham, who has created a multimillion dollar media empire, that a Rupert Murdock would envy, is the subject of a shocking expose’ due out on Nov. 15, 2007. It’s entitled, "The Prince of War: Billy Graham's Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire". The author is Cecil Bothwell. He hails from Asheville, North Carolina and is an award winning investigative reporter. Bothwell’s unflattering portrait of Rev. Graham shows him as a wily warmonger and a lackey for the Establishment. He describes Rev. Graham as a public figure who: "Undermined the Founders’ skeptical Deism and sought to rebrand the U.S. as a Christian nation, [and] its armies [as] the rightful instruments of [a] Christian crusade and empire."

Read the Review

Asheville's Cecil Bothwell's compelling book sure has people talking. I can't wait to read it.

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Generation On Fire

There's no shortage of books, films, and accounts of the Sixties. Some of the protests and the pioneers are reasonably documented, but I believe there's still an important element of the early sixties and civil rights movement that's underreported so I'm thrilled when I see a book like this gaining the attention it deserves.

In his new book, Generation On Fire, Jeff Kisseloff highlights those voices of revolutionary civil rights activists by applying an extraordinary voice of his own.

Kisseloff profiles 15 people who had the courage to stand up to social injustice in the 1960s and continue to fight against racism, sexism, pollution, and other social ills. Among his subjects are Freedom Riders Bernard LaFayette and Gloria Richardson, peace activist Daniel Berrigan, Vietnam vet turned protester David Cline, gay rights activist Frank Kameny, and feminist Marilyn Salzman Webb. Kisseloff precedes each interview with a brief historical overview and includes photographs of the activists in the 1960s and currently. Interview subjects explore their personal development as activists and the convictions that have carried their activism into their middle and later ages.

Generation On Fire

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Lucid Dream Lounge

Lucid Dream Lounge Presents The Plucker: A Book by Brom

The Plucker leaned down until its face hung a kiss away from Angel, peeled back its black lips, and exposed the most sincere smile its rotting teeth would allow. "You will be such a treat," it whispered.

The Plucker is a 160 page hardbound illustrated novel. Original story/artwork by Brom.

link | via

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I CAN SEE FOR MILES

The Who's Pete Townsend is sharpening his writing skills online for his upcoming autobiography. I'm enjoying the details of his early years. Below is an excerpt.

"On March 20th 1966 an Observer magazine story about The Who phenomenon was published; on its front page was Colin Jones’ unflattering iconic portrait of the band. The story inside was a puff by their buddy John Heilpern for Kit and Chris; we were represented as lightweight braggarts, spendthrifts, vain Dandies and ugly scumbags. My depression deepened. I began to drive to the Scotch of St James nightclub whenever I had free time, to drink Scotch and Coke, and hang out with stars like P.J. Proby, Brian Jones, John Walker and Gary Leeds of the Walker brothers and others. It was not like me at all, but I was pleased to be feted, and built up a friendship with Brian Jones that meant a lot to me. Together we saw one of Stevie Wonder’s first London shows there; Stevie got so excited he fell off the stage."

"May 1966. Car crashes, several. A fight with Keith Moon on stage (he was threatening to leave and form a band with the stupid name of Led Zeppelin, such a stupid name would never have caught on)..."

"Keith Moon had been through something even more powerful in his early relationship with his wife Kim, who had been a professional photographer’s model once pursued all the way down to her home in Bournemouth by Rod Stewart. It was this kind of paranoid, unhinged thinking that spurred me to write I Can See For Miles, one of the best songs I produced in the period... About the sick and viciously jealous intuitions of a cuckolded partner."

Well, here's a poke at you
You're gonna choke on it too
You're gonna lose that smile
Because all the while
I can see for miles and miles

A perfect "fuck you" to a broken love affair.

Pete Townsend

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