Comedian Actor Russel Brand dismantles MSNBC show

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Re: Comedian Actor Russel Brand dismantles MSNBC show

Postby RocketMan » Mon Jun 29, 2015 8:40 am

seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 29, 2015 3:33 pm wrote:
American Dream » Wed Jun 24, 2015 9:57 pm wrote:
Tragicomic


That was when I knew it had Charlotte Church in its sights.




again with the Charlotte church :roll:

is every thread on this board going to have something to do with Charlotte now?


What's with the Charlotte Church...? Educate me? :starz:
-I don't like hoodlums.
-That's just a word, Marlowe. We have that kind of world. Two wars gave it to us and we are going to keep it.
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Re: Comedian Actor Russel Brand dismantles MSNBC show

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 29, 2015 8:55 am

well it started here and it could/should have stayed there but every thing here always has to boil down to facists/neo-nazis/anti-semites

Racist Trump Speaks - Charleston black church massacre
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39045

and I had the thread locked and then he moved on...and on....and on


The Charleston Church Shooting, the WACL & Operation Gladio
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39057



I'm surprised the Nuclear Meltdown wasn't the fault of the nazis :P


maybe this should all be in green .... :roll:

a tad sarcastic :partydance:
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Comedian Actor Russel Brand dismantles MSNBC show

Postby Nordic » Tue Jul 28, 2015 3:48 pm

Russel Brand posted this today on his Facebook page and it's spot-on, beautiful, and quite moving. (and the guy can write!)

Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain in their recent documentaries, Amy and Montage Of Heck, are crowned as underworld deities in the “they died too young” panoply.

It is eerie and gruesome that advances in home video technology facilitated the mundane chronicling of lives that had yet to become remarkable. We see infant Kurt incubated in perfect incompetence, a petulant toddler under a cherub’s bob ready to smash a Fisher Price amp with his “My First Guitar”. We see Amy untainted by fame and self-consciousness alchemically bending “Happy Birthday” into some chanteuse’s prayer and think “Fate has great things in store for thee…”
We get to see our heroes raw, pre-glamour, prior to the glistening lacquer of half-truths and stories already told. We see them ordinary and gifted. We know that they are set to embark on a journey that will follow to the letter the Faustian pathway to the gloomy tomb through a sewer of glitter.

Their stories, immediately identifiable, not just through memory but through something deeper than that, are beyond cliché, though that’s how we first receive them, they belong to myth. The mortal, touched by greatness or divinity escapes the drudgery and soars until the greatness that propelled them somehow devours them.

In the short film Death Takes Small Bites LINK Emily Cripps tells the story of her brother Jamie who like Kurt Cobain was a talented musician and a brilliant artist. He was also, like Kurt Cobain, socially conscientious, mentally fragile and addicted to drugs. Unlike Kurt Cobain he didn’t become the voice of his generation, when he died at 24 years old the waves of misery were not so far reaching but what I felt when watching the film was that Jamie’s death has a lot to teach us about why so many young people feel alienated, lost and unhappy.

We live in an unaddressed mist of assumed meritocracy, part of the star spangled legacy of the American Dream from which we are only just awakening, that fame and fortune are justly delivered and individual endeavour will rightly be rewarded. I remember though from my own slow crawl through bedsits and Open Mics that all over the western world there are unacknowledged armies living in gifted irrelevance, their big break never coming and their big breakdown just around the corner.

Part of my own conflict has been the need to be acknowledged by a system that I abhor, the unwillingness to relinquish a dream that has weighed me down. I have been diligently drilled to believe that self-esteem can be purchased or outsourced and it’s taken until my middle years to recognise that joy and peace come only from within.

Looking at Emily’s film about her big brother I am struck both by his ordinariness and specialness. A bright, brilliant boy, captured on home film, friends tell tales of kindness and compassion and when I later meet Emily in the Cornish convenience store in which she works she tells me he was torn apart by social injustice, by the bleak condition of our time.

You know what I’m referring to, you’re feeling it too, our TTIP times, our clamp down on union times, our cut benefits times, our poverty porn times, our times of ignored austerity marches, loathed immigrants, unpunished financial crimes, housing crises, more Tory peers, four more dreadful years, peadophile MPs, scripted reality TV, foreign wars on spurious claims, far-right rise – Muslims blamed. What affect do you imagine this is having on people coming of age now? Raised in an aquarium of unfairness and hate?

In his book Late Capitalism Mark Fisher points to the epidemic rise of mental illness and addiction as an indictment of our sociopathic time, a time defined by selfishness and greed, inculcated cruelty and institutionalised self-centredness. That mental illness on this scale can no longer be diagnosed as occurring in individual brains but is a shared sickness in our cultural mind. Our system is literally driving us crazy.

We have come to tolerate the low hum of shared insanity. Like a fridge that’s never quiet. David Cameron’s victory speech a perfectly laid stool of untruths. Syriza crushed in Greece by Germanic financial might. Jeremy Corbyn slammed. Obama grey and damned. These stories are the wallpaper of our time and everywhere the young and young at heart can feel it and know there’s nothing they can do, so they write songs and do drugs and turn within or rage without or self harm. Make a down payment on a slow suicide.

Once in a while a dirty Seattle Icarus will light up the sky or a Camden angel will cry out and we all attend because they momentarily, maybe even inadvertently, articulate our impotent longing and then they’re gone. Or maybe it’s your brother that’s become a cypher for this discontent or your cousin or a girl with scars on her arm, some goth kid down your street that never meets your eye. Or did you already lose someone too, like Jamie or all the kids too clever and gentle for this time?

We’re told that everybody’s special but not everybody’s specialness can be mined and sold. My hope is that the wound we collectively feel may be our salvation. That we share this pain and that will be our redemption. For every crash and burn story there is an anonymous army suffering in silent faith knowing that true glory comes not from feted individuals but belongs to us all and although the dark is frightening it means the dawn is near.
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
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Re: Comedian Actor Russel Brand dismantles MSNBC show

Postby semper occultus » Tue Jul 28, 2015 4:02 pm

Mark Fisher's book's called Capitalist Realism

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Re: Comedian Actor Russel Brand dismantles MSNBC show

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 09, 2015 9:48 am

Russell Brand – A Second Coming review: sincerity shines through in a hectic character study

Candid encounters sit beside Brand’s over-familiar media appearances in a portrait of a man whose ‘revolution’ is still a work in progress
Hectic … Russell Brand: A Second Coming
Full of incident … Russell Brand: A Second Coming
Steve Rose
Friday 9 October 2015 06.51 EDT Last modified on Friday 9 October 2015 07.12 EDT

“I thought you were a knob for years and you’ve absolutely turned it round,” says one admirer in Ondi Timoner’s hectic documentary. Those who still consider Brand a knob are unlikely to flock to a feature documentary on him, having already been subjected to the comedian’s many appearances on TV, radio, internet and stage, not to mention his “Booky Wooks”. Under-exposure has never been an issue with a figure who once took it upon himself to strip naked on top of a police van at a protest march (he’s amusingly self-deprecating about the incident, especially when it comes to the size of his knob).

But even his critics have to admit that Brand’s story is full of incident: drug addiction, sex, fame, celebrity marriage, media controversy, repentance, political activism and his self-diagnosed messiah complex – which is also the title of his latest standup show. The problem for Timoner, who came to the project at a relatively late stage, is how to shape the material into something new when Brand has already forged his own gospel out of it with such candour and articulacy.

Thankfully, there’s a surfeit of that material. Between excerpts from his live shows, we dash through the Brand biography at an almost attention-deficit clip. We see Brand revisiting his childhood home in Essex. There are a few revealing encounters with his parents (his father was a womaniser and a motivational speaker – an avenue that demands further exploration), and some micro-interviews with a bizarre array of talking heads, including Noel Gallagher, Mike Tyson, David Lynch and his ex-wife Katy Perry, who half-jokingly tells Brand: “You make me look good … That’s why I picked you.” The most entertaining moments are his outspoken media appearances, many of which we’ve seen already: his heroic hijacking of a US breakfast news programme; his acceptance speech at the GQ awards, where he pointed out that sponsor Hugo Boss outfitted the Nazis; Sachsgate, etc.


As with her acclaimed music documentary Dig!, though, Timoner has an eye for those revealing moments. Giving Stephen Merchant a tour of his new Los Angeles home, Brand expounds once again on his desire to create a “spiritual revolution”; Merchant questions why, then, he has a standard lamp made out of a gold-plated machine gun. There’s an all-too-brief combative exchange between Timoner and Brand in the latter stages that only hints at what could have been had she been in control from the start.

As for the political awakening, let’s just say it’s a work in progress. All too often, Brand’s success as an activist is presented in terms of YouTube hits and media response. Much is made of his alternative news channel The Trews – a project Brand has since wound down, and there’s disappointment when his own vaunted political tome, Revolution, is panned by the critics (including this paper). If nothing else, Brand’s passion and sincerity shine through. This feels like a study of a man still seeking how to apply them. You sense his story is not over yet.

• Russell Brand – A Second Coming is at the London film festival
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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