⁣The fact that the footage of 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival that makes up the bulk of Summer of Soul languished for so long outside of the public eye is an injustice. The fact that first-time filmmaker Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson has now brought it all brilliantly into the light makes him not only a documentarian but a revolutionary. The stunning 1969 performances themselves are worth the price of admission, but they grow even more transcendent when spliced together with delightful talking head interviews and haunting historical context. The result is both archival and activating, showcasing a past cultural moment while pushing audiences to pour new energy into the present and the future.

Dubbed “the Black Woodstock” by Hal Tulchin, the man who rolled cameras as the event unfurled, the moving parts of the Harlem Cultural Festival represent a movement that is far more than what that nickname might suggest. The brainchild of event organizer Tony Lawrence, attended by thousands, and boasting a lineup of essential artists, it was and remains an overwhelming example of co-creative, faith-fueled community organizing. There are abundant shots of the crowd accompanying the footage of the performers, but these attendees never seem as if they are simply onlookers. They instead look like they are simultaneously at church, at a rally, and at a club, showing how intersectional true spiritual experience can be, pulling in elements from all three sacred spaces and crafting something that can’t exist without all of the ingredients.

And, in turn, the performers deliver a combination of a service, a protest, and a show. Though good showings are to be expected from names like Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, The Fifth Dimension, Sly and the Family Stone, and Gladys Knight and the Pips, the performances in Summer of Soul reach greater heights than could be expected. Whether or not these are the best technical performances that these stars have achieved is hardly the matter; these aren’t just performances, they’re incantactions, invocations, and explosions of unshakeable inspiration.
Though there are countless high points, the centerpiece of the performance footage is an impromptu “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” duet between a weary Mahalia Jackson and a fresh-faced Mavis Staples. This collaboration would have been a wow moment even if just performed well but these two vital voices combine to craft something almost otherworldly, something that truly must be experienced to be understood.

The interviews and accompanying contextual footage add both levity and gravity to the proceedings. Hindsight reflections from performers and audience members show the human hearts and souls at the center of the excitement while accompanying snapshots of what was occurring in the world outside Harlem’s Mount Morris Park keep the happening firmly planted in the bending moral arc of the universe.


Together, these aspects make Summer of Soul a truly prophetic offering, not simply a chronicle, not merely a concert film, but something wholly different and beautifully holy. It’s a passion project that not only unearths and restores a long-hidden piece of history; it might also contain enough restorative breath to unearth a collective liberative spirit that is in need of regular resurrection.


REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.spiritualityandpra....ctice.com/films/revi

⁣This film exposes the climate alarm as an invented scare without any basis in science. It shows that mainstream studies and official data do not support the claim that we are witnessing an increase in extreme weather events – hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and all the rest. It emphatically counters the claim that current temperatures and levels of atmospheric CO2 are unusually and worryingly high. On the contrary, compared to the last half billion years of earth’s history, both current temperatures and CO2 levels are extremely and unusually low. We are currently in an ice age. It also shows that there is no evidence that changing levels of CO2 (it has changed many times) have ever ‘driven’ climate change in the past.

Why then, are we told, again and again, that ‘catastrophic man-made climate change’ is an irrefutable fact? Why are we told that there is no evidence that contradicts it? Why are we told that anyone who questions ‘climate chaos’ is a ‘flat-earther’ and a ‘science-denier’?

The film explores the nature of the consensus behind climate change. It describes the origins of the climate funding bandwagon and the rise of the trillion-dollar climate industry. It describes the hundreds of thousands of jobs that depend on the climate crisis. It explains the enormous pressure on scientists and others not to question the climate alarm: the withdrawal of funds, rejection by science journals, and social ostracism.

But the climate alarm is much more than a funding and jobs bandwagon. The film explores the politics of climate. From the beginning, the climate scare was political. The culprit was free-market industrial capitalism. The solution was higher taxes and more regulation. From the start, the climate alarm appealed to and has been adopted and promoted by, those groups who favour bigger government.

This is the unspoken political divide behind the climate alarm. The climate scare appeals especially to all those in the sprawling publicly-funded establishment. This includes the largely publicly-funded Western intelligentsia, for whom climate has become a moral cause. In these circles, to criticize or question the climate alarm has become a breach of social etiquette.

The film includes interviews with many very prominent scientists, including Professor Steven Koonin (author of ‘Unsettled’, a former provost and vice-president of Caltech), Professor Dick Lindzen (formerly professor of meteorology at Harvard and MIT), Professor Will Happer (professor of physics at Princeton), Dr. John Clauser (winner of the Nobel prize in Physics in 2022), Professor Nir Shaviv (Racah Institute of Physics), professor Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph), Willie Soon and several others.

The film was written and directed by the British filmmaker Martin Durkin and is the sequel to his excellent 2007 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. Tom Nelson, a podcaster who has been deeply examining climate debate issues for the better part of two decades, was the producer of the film.

⁣BOMBSHELL: Dr. Clare Craig Exposes How Pfizer Twisted Their Clinical Trial Data for Young Children.

STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- The trial recruited 4,526 children aged six months to four years old. 3,000 of these children did not make it to the end of the trial. Why was there this drop off?
- There were six children aged two to four who had severe covid in the vaccine group but only one in the placebo group. So on that basis, the likelihood that this vaccine is actually causing severe covid is higher than the likelihood that it isn’t.
- The only child who was hospitalized in the trial for a fever and a seizure was vaccinated.
- In the three week period, after the first vaccine dose, thirty-four of the vaccinated children got covid and only thirteen in the placebo group which worked out as a 30% increased chance of catching covid in that three week period if you were vaccinated.
- They ignored that data and then there was an eight week gap between the second dose and the third dose where again, children were getting plenty of covid in the vaccine arm. They ignored that data.
- There was then several weeks after the third dose which they also ignored, which meant that in the end they had ignored 97% of the covid that occurred during the trial and they compared three children in the vaccine arm who had covid with seven in the placebo arm and they said that this showed the vaccine was effective.
- The children who would have been placebo, the control group, were followed up for an average of six weeks and then unblinded and given the vaccine. That’s your safety control gone forever.
- Emergency Use Authorization is meant for a situation where there’s a risk of serious injury or death. Children under five are not at risk of serious injury or death from covid.

MORE RESOURCES:
https://organicconsumers.org/b....ombshell-dr-clare-cr
https://telegra.ph/BOMBSHELL-D....r-Clare-Craig-Expose

⁣The interconnected epidemics of anxiety, chronic illness and substance abuse are, according to Dr Gabor Maté, normal. But not in the way you might think.
One in five Americans are diagnosed with mental illness in any given year [1]. Suicide is the second most common cause of death in the US for youth aged 15-24 [2], and kills over 700,000 people a year globally [3] and 48,300 in the USA [4]. Drug overdose kills 81,000 in the USA annually [5]. The autoimmunity epidemic affects 24 million people in the USA [6]. What is going on?
“So much of what we call abnormality in this culture is actually normal responses to an abnormal culture. The abnormality does not reside in the pathology of individuals, but in the very culture that drives people into suffering and dysfunction.”
— Gabor Maté

In The Wisdom of Trauma, we travel alongside physician, bestselling author and Order of Canada recipient Dr. Gabor Maté to explore why our western society is facing such epidemics. This is a journey with a man who has dedicated his life to understanding the connection between illness, addiction, trauma and society.
“Trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is what happens inside you, as a result of what happens to you.”
— Gabor Maté

Trauma is the invisible force that shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, the way we love and the way we make sense of the world. It is the root of our deepest wounds. Dr. Maté gives us a new vision: a trauma-informed society in which parents, teachers, physicians, policy-makers and legal personnel are not concerned with fixing behaviors, making diagnoses, suppressing symptoms and judging, but seek instead to understand the sources from which troubling behaviors and diseases spring in the wounded human soul.

⁣Webinar: COVID-19 Early Home-based Treatment with Dr. Peter McCullough.

⁣With unfettered access to the Zappa family trust and all archival footage, ZAPPA explores the private life behind the mammoth musical career that never shied away from the political turbulence of its time.


Alex Winter’s assembly features appearances by Frank’s widow Gail Zappa and several of Frank’s musical collaborators including Mike Keneally, Ian Underwood, Steve Vai, Pamela Des Barres, Bunk Gardner, David Harrington, Scott Thunes, Ruth Underwood, Ray White and others.
Directed by Alex Winter
http://www.thezappamovie.com/

For more great titles, check out Magnolia Selects:
https://www.magnoliaselects.com

'Frank didn't adhere to any movements': behind the Zappa documentary (The Guardian)

⁣Kevin Macdonald's three fictional movies have taken him to Idi Amin's Uganda, Washington DC and the northern reaches of Roman Britain. They're all thrillers of various kinds, as are Touching the Void and One Day in September, the tightly focused, feature-length documentaries that preceded them. Touching the Void centres on a dangerous expedition by two British climbers in the Peruvian Andes in 1985 and uses interviews with the real participants and simulated scenes played by actors. One Day in September is about the massacre of Israeli athletes by Arab terrorists at the 1972 Olympics and, in addition to interviews and archive footage, employs computer graphics to explain the course of events.
His new film, a cinebiography of Bob Marley is a bigger, baggier and simpler thing. It's the story of a man who lived an extraordinarily full yet oddly mysterious life and died a world figure 30 years ago, shortly after reaching the age of 36. It is, however, told without any reconstructions or impersonations and neither Sidney Poitier nor Morgan Freeman was called in to deliver a rousing commentary explaining the man's contradictions, achievements and significance.
The picture begins in West Africa at an old fortress on the Gold Coast (now Ghana). Through its "Door of No Return" leading to the sea passed many of the millions of shackled slaves who were shipped across the Atlantic. This was the journey made by his ancestors that shaped Marley's life, identity and music and the belief system that drew them together.
He was born in the remote Jamaican village of Nine Mile in 1945 and Macdonald takes us there in a lyrical aerial shot across the steep, wooded hill country. His mother, Cedella, was black and 16. His father, Norval Marley, a white man aged 65, was employed by the forestry commission to prevent the theft of timber. He rode around the countryside like a seigneurial Cossack and styled himself Captain, though there's no evidence he'd held any commissioned rank or served in any war. In the only known photo of Norval, he's on horseback attempting to look authoritative and his family refused to recognise Bob when he once called on them for help.
Macdonald sees Bob as a man who felt rejected by both the black and the white communities, an outsider who was to find a symbolic home in Africa through embracing Rastafarianism, a style of personal independence and social defiance, and a mission to bring people together in a grand international, inter-racial brotherhood.
Marley grew up in extreme poverty, first in the countryside, then in the slums of Kingston's Trenchtown, where the first photograph of him was taken at the age of 12. The documentation of the early life is thin, but Macdonald is able throughout to draw on the colourful testimony of his formidable mother, his friends, fellow musicians, a variety of female companions (Marley had nine or 10 children by six or seven different women) and later some businessmen, politicians and gangsters.
There are splendid anecdotes about survival, about Bob and his band, the Wailers, developing a new kind of music that fused local and international forms into a distinctive form of reggae, and the zig-zagging of a career that took Marley to the United States, where his mother had relocated, to Europe and to Africa. Much of what we hear from Jamaican witnesses is spoken in a beguiling, if sometimes obscure, patois and there are the kind of contradictions in the individual assessments of his character and the accounts of the fraught progress of the Wailers that one would expect. This is Rashomon territory.
But there are compromises and concessions of a different kind that have come about through the need to secure interviews, musical rights and other necessary forms of co-operation. These are reflected in the names of several family members and various close business associates listed in the credits as producers. Some of these people provide the finest testimony.
Among them are Bob's Cuban-born wife Rita, who worked in his backing group and recalls seeing stigmata on Haile Selassie's hand during his triumphant visit to Jamaica; Bob's three children by her (Cedella, Ziggy and Stephen); the beautiful, spirited Cindy Breakspeare, his trophy companion and former Miss World who bore him a child but refused to embrace Rastafarianism; and the laidback British impresario Chris Blackwell of Island Records.
If Marley ultimately remains something of a mystery (he gave few interviews and in none was particularly forthcoming), we nevertheless get a vivid impression of a career that included a brief stint on a Chrysler production line in Delaware, a long period of apprenticeship as a composer (initially working with homemade instruments) and a rise to local and international stardom. Gradually, the dreadlocks, the music and the cloud of ganja smoke come together to form as recognisable an image as that of the equally short-lived Che Guevara.
He was, however, altogether less militant than Che, virtually apolitical, which did not prevent competing forces seeking his allegiance or seeing him as a valuable symbol for their causes. In 1976, an assassination attempt in Jamaica drove him into exile. It wasn't, however, a bullet that did for him but the stud of a boot during a game of his beloved football in a London park, triggering the melanoma in his foot that eventually consumed his body.
We hear of a beautiful moment in a wintry Bavarian clinic where Bob's mother read the Book of Job to the emaciated singer, his dreadlocks lost to chemotherapy, shortly before he flew across the Atlantic to die in Miami in May 1981.
Perhaps this impressive, thoughtful portrait should have ended there. Instead, it concludes with a succession of Marley's hits being sung in a various languages by cheerful young people on every continent. That's all a little too "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" Coca-Cola-ish for my tastes.

REVIEW RESOURCE: https://www.theguardian.com/fi....lm/2012/apr/22/bob-m