James Dean News

12/13/09 And "King Of The Hillvery, very good song that metaphorically equates the brutal world of geopolitics to the childish game of the title, exactly the sort of blending of the personal and political the band was known for. It's tough to blame the group for the accompanying video; a lack of commercial success and dedication to the D.I.Y. ethos of "jamming econo" made a big-budget high-concept production seem silly. But "King Of The Hill," filmed in one afternoon in an L.A. suburb, is so low budget that it's almost a warning against doing it yourself. As the pudgy D. Boon cooks up a heapin' helpin' of store-brand hot dogs, local punks enact a depressingly literal-minded version of the lyrics in a cinematic anti-extravaganza that couldn't have cost more than ten bucks. Top it all off with Boon's absurd roll down an actual hill and the song's sublime metaphor being communicated in the form of a cheap costume-shop crown, and you've got a video that's as lousy as the band was great. Videos are notoriously tricky to do well, and The Minutemen are far from the only respected act to transform a good song into an egregiously awful video. Even artists acclaimed for their visual sense, savvy iconography, and canny self-presentation, like Madonna or David Bowie, can stumble horribly. It's all too easy to fuck up a good song both by trying too hard and not trying hard enough. 2.  |  The A.V. Club

10/29/09 Debuting on the list in third place is musician Michael Jackson.  |  JAM! Showbiz

10/26/09  |  OK! Magazine

09/23/09 In searching the Cinematical archives to see whether or not this commercial that, quite brilliantly, imagines what James Dean's life would have been like had he not died in a car crash in 1955, I came across this post from Cine writer Martha Fischer honoring the legendary actor on the 50th anniversary of his death.  |  Cinematical.com

09/03/09 Scraping by as a struggling songwriter in Amsterdam and Berlin, he falls in with a succession of bohemians and art-world hangers-on, trying to reconcile the romantic vision of African-American expatriates like James Baldwin and Josephine Baker with the reality of being the sole black face in an all-white world full of self-styled revolutionaries who still obediently go home for Christmas.  |  The A.V. Club