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May
06
    

In the summer of 1970, the year after Woodstock and Altamont, a crazy collection of future legends of rock and roll took a train across Canada, playing (in every sense of the word) en route as well as stopping for concerts in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Calgary.

The Band, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Buddy Guy, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and a dozen lesser lights sang, drank, and communed across the map between June 27 and July 4, while cameras recorded the escapade. “This was kind of like a traveling circus,” remembers Ken Pearson, a member of Joplin’s band. “It was a train full of insane people careening across the Canadian countryside,” Dead guitarist Phil Lesh recalls. People got very little sleep, Buddy Guy says, “because every time I went to bed I was afraid I was gonna miss something.”

Click here for the full review by David Loftus.


 
May
06
    

These days, when you watch a movie and wonder “How did they do that?”, it’s typically a technical question. How did CGI create that dragon, those thousands of Middle Earth warriors, the Chinese swordsmen skipping across a lake, that web-slinger’s battle with Doc Ock? How did they get that incredible angled shot of Victoria Falls (or a bird plummeting a thousand feet)? How did they get those dangerous exotic animals into the same frame with the hero?

With the 2004 surfing documentary “Riding Giants,” “How did they do that?” becomes a different question—or rather, two. There’s the psychological one: Where did those young men get the cojones, never mind the skill, to ride a board down a 40-foot wave, at 35 miles an hour and more, with white foam curling behind, rocks up ahead, and a vicious undertow below? Then there’s a procedural one: Just how did they produce that 1950s video footage of big-wave surfing off Waimea Bay, Hawaii, and how did they manage to live out there, year after year, simply to surf?

Click here for the full review by David Loftus.