By Martin Chilton
08 April 2013
...Blank's early films (click here) were intimate portraits of musicians, including a 1965 study of jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and a 1968 film about blues guitarist Lightnin' Hopkins. He made movies about the Texas blues guitarist Hot Pepper (1973), which features the zydeco accordionist Clifton Chenier; and Sprout Wings and Fly (1983), about the Appalachian fiddler Tommy Jarrell. He also made a 31-minute film with Huey Lewis and a movie with Ry Cooder (Ry Cooder And The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces).
He shifted his focus to food with documentaries, including 1980's highy-praised Garlic is as Good as 10 Mothers (he occasionally promoted what he called 'smellovision' or 'aromaround', cooking up garlic-spiced dishes in the cinema while the movie played), which was selected by the US Library Of Congress for inclusion in The National Film Registry. He also made 2007's All in This Tea and In Heaven There is No Beer, which won the Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize....Thirty years after Thatcher invaded The Falkland Islands, it is being turned into an oil slick.
By Brian Swint
April 04, 2013
On March 10 and 11, Falkland Islanders voted (click here) in a referendum on whether to remain under British rule. Of its 2,563 citizens, only three voted no. The victory set off howls of indignation in nearby Argentina, which fought a brief, disastrous war with Britain over the South Atlantic islands in 1982. On March 28, Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner tweeted, “An English territory more than 12,000 km away [from the U.K.]? The idea is not even worthy of a kindergarten of three-year-olds.”
Soon Argentines may have something else to be angry about. The Falklands are no longer just an archipelago of sheep farmers and fishermen at world’s end. A promising offshore oil discovery is expected to bring the British territory $10.5 billion in tax revenue and royalties over 25 years....
