Harud
Harud (also known as Autumn) is Aamir Bashir's directorial debut. It premiered at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival. The film stars Reza Naji and Shahnawaz Bhat and takes place in Kashmir.
External links
Harud at the Internet Movie Database
The Four Seasons (Vivaldi)
The Four Seasons (Italian: Le quattro stagioni) is a group of four violin concerti by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives a musical expression to a season of the year. They were written about 1723 and were published in 1725 in Amsterdam, together with eight additional violin concerti, as Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione ("The Contest Between Harmony and Invention").
The Four Seasons is the best known of Vivaldi's works. Unusually for the time, Vivaldi published the concerti with accompanying poems (possibly written by Vivaldi himself) that elucidated what it was about those seasons that his music was intended to evoke. It provides one of the earliest and most-detailed examples of what was later called program music—music with a narrative element.
Vivaldi took great pains to relate his music to the texts of the poems, translating the poetic lines themselves directly into the music on the page. In the middle section of the Spring concerto, where the goatherd sleeps, his barking dog can be marked in the viola section. Other natural occurrences are similarly evoked. Vivaldi separated each concerto into three movements, fast-slow-fast, and likewise each linked sonnet into three sections. His arrangement is as follows:
Grass (Animal Collective song)
"Grass" is the first single from Animal Collective's 2005 album, Feels. Upon its release, it was showered with critical praise for its delicate balance of melodic pop sensibilities and discordant yelping. Pitchfork Media listed the song at #31 on its list of Top 50 Singles of 2005, claiming it is "as infectious as anything on the pop charts this year, and lots more fun to scream along with". The song was subsequently placed at #73 in the same publication's list of "Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s". Stylus also placed it in its Top 50 Singles of 2005 (this time at #44), praising the band's ability to "play tug of war between typical pop dynamics and the skewed perspective of experimental music". The title track was included in the 2008 book The Pitchfork 500.
The single was released in the United Kingdom on both CD and 7" vinyl. On March 21, 2006, it was released in the U.S. and Canada (July 3, 2006 worldwide) with a bonus DVD; the DVD contains music videos for "Grass", "Who Could Win a Rabbit" and "Fickle Cycle", as well as a video and sound collage, "Lake Damage", made by Brian DeGaw of Gang Gang Dance.
Grass (1999 film)
Grass: History of Marijuana is a 1999 Canadian documentary film directed by Ron Mann, premiered in Toronto Film Festival, about the history of the United States government's war on marijuana in the 20th century. The film was narrated by actor Woody Harrelson.
Overview
The film follows the history of US federal policies and social attitudes towards marijuana, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century. The history presented is broken up into parts, approximately the length of a decade, each of which is introduced by paraphrasing the official attitude towards marijuana at the time (e.g. "Marijuana will make you insane" or "Marijuana will make you addicted to heroin"), and closed by providing a figure for the amount of money spent during that period on the "war on marijuana."
The film places much of the blame for marijuana criminalization on Harry Anslinger (the first American drug czar) who promoted false information about marijuana to the American public as a means towards abolition. It later shows how the federal approach to criminalization became more firmly entrenched after Richard Nixon declared a "War on Drugs" and created the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973, and even more so a decade later and on, as First Lady Nancy Reagan introduced the "Just Say No" campaign and President George H.W. Bush accelerated the War on Drugs. The film ends during the Bill Clinton administration, which had accelerated spending even further on the War on Drugs.
Cannabis (drug)
Cannabis, also known as marijuana and by numerous other names, is a preparation of the Cannabis plant intended for use as a psychoactive drug or medicine. The main psychoactive part of cannabis is tetrahydrocannabinol (THC); it is one of 483 known compounds in the plant, including at least 84 other cannabinoids, such as cannabidiol (CBD), cannabinol (CBN), and tetrahydrocannabivarin (THCV).
Cannabis is often consumed for its mental and physical effects, such as heightened mood, relaxation, and an increase in appetite. Possible side effects include a decrease in short-term memory, dry mouth, impaired motor skills, red eyes, and feelings of paranoia or anxiety. Onset of effects is within minutes when smoked and about 30 minutes when eaten. They last for between two and six hours.
Cannabis is mostly used recreationally or as a medicinal drug. It may also be used as part of religious or spiritual rites. In 2013, between 128 and 232 million people used cannabis (2.7% to 4.9% of the global population between the ages of 15 and 65). In 2015, almost half of the people in the United States have tried marijuana, 12% have used it in the past year, and 7.3% have used it in the past month.
Continuum (Ligeti)
Continuum for harpsichord is a musical composition by György Ligeti composed in 1968, and dedicated to the contemporary harpsichordist, Antoinette Vischer. The composer describes the conception and result of its technique:
Amy Bauer (2004, p. 130) describes the piece as trompe-l'œil, creating "a sense of stasis through extremely rapid activity." She compares it to a patient's description of their schizophrenic experience of, "an intense cerebral activity in which inner experiences took place at greatly increased speed, so that much more than usual happened per minute of external time. The result was to give an effect of slow motion." (Sass 1992)
This piece has also been arranged for barrel organ and for two player pianos by the composer.
The piece has also been compared by classical music reviewers to the magnetic fluctuations of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko as detected by the space probe Philae after the fluctuations were sped up 10,000x in order to be audible.
References
Continuum (season 3)
The third season of the Showcase television series Continuum premiered on March 16, 2014 and concluded on June 22, 2014. The series was created by Simon Barry, and centers on Kiera Cameron (Rachel Nichols) as she travels back in time from 2077 to 2012 pursuing a group of terrorists. Kiera is focused on stopping the terrorists, unifying the time line and finding a way back to her time and family. All episode titles in this season use the word "Minute".
