Word: singers
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...dark memory will occlude the band's sunnier disposition - May 18 marks 25 years since Joy Division's lead singer Ian Curtis hanged himself. His suicide ended the short but revolutionary run of New Order's precursor. Formed in 1977 by working-class Mancunians Curtis, Sumner, bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris, Joy Division embraced the social anger and energy of punk and took it in a different direction - improvising with electronic sound and synthesizers. The band was on the cusp of commercial success, but Curtis, an epileptic who was tortured by his failing marriage, took a sad shortcut...
...Bryan Singer, director of the X-Men movies and the upcoming Superman Returns, is strolling through the rolling cornfields around what will soon be Clark Kent's childhood home. The corn is 12 weeks old, he says proudly, and was grown especially for the movie. "This entire house was constructed on a soundstage," Singer explains, "and then disassembled, rebuilt here in Tamworth [Australia] and then redressed." Not only are we not in Kansas anymore, but apparently we were never there in the first place...
...kind of information we're used to having delivered to our computer screens. Lately, making movies has become a strangely transparent process. Directors and studios, in their never-ending quest to build buzz for big summer releases, are opening their sets to the public via Web-based video diaries. Singer's video blog, bluetights.net joins several other real-time movie blogs, such as the text-only diary Zach Braff did for his movie Garden State gardenstate.typepad.com and the video journal of the King Kong shoot that Peter Jackson is keeping at kongisking.net These guys are releasing the making of movies...
Ultimately, the success of the videos hangs on the personality of the director, and fortunately for King Kong, Jackson's self-deprecation and boyish excitement about his movie are infectious. Singer has delegated more, and the diary focuses less on him. "It's the same reason I like to invite friends to set," says Singer of why he agreed to do bluetights.net "It exposes the amazing technical and sometimes emotional theater that's involved in making films of this type." But is there such a thing as too much information? Does it deplete the movie's magic? On the Superman...
...have to give yourself over to your collaborators and be willing to forget what you know. On this album, we were doing a piece of Mugam music from Azerbaijan with Alim Qasimov, an unbelievably great singer, and he says, "This is the way it goes. Now play!" Well, it wasn't written down, and every time we played it, it was different. So finally we just learned it the Azerbaijani way, by oral tradition. And we got something great...