Short Cuts

This Ain't No Foolin' Around Dept.: Who'd have thought the Talking Heads would get so much airplay so long after they called it quits? (Then again, who'd have thought David Byrne would have a smash hit moonlighting with X-Press 2 on a track celebrating the joy of slackerdom?) "Life During Wartime" is conspicuously absent from Clear Channel outlets but keeps cropping up as the bandwidth-clogging back-music on various and sundry Web sites and blogs with a war or anti-war slant, of which there are suddenly very, very many. We mentioned the great Independent Media Center's www.austin.indymedia.org site a couple of weeks back, and as the slog to and through Baghdad continues apace, local filmmaker/activist Kyle Henry has returned with a ripped-from-the-headlines collection of short films and videos "from the front lines of the war ... here in America." Henry, along with Refraction Arts' Bluescreen program and Cinescape, will be presenting another edition of the War Report, Monday, April 14, 7 and 9pm, at the Hideout (617 Congress), $5 general, $4 students/AFS/Cinemaker Co-op. The program is a compilation evening of mostly war-related shorts and docs with an eye toward documenting the rampant abuses of power currently masquerading as the federal government. Included in the expansive lineup are a handful of supernotables, including Guerilla News Network's Aftermath, which explores a few of the many unanswered questions surrounding 9/11. Narrated by renegade hip-hopper Paris, whose new disc Sonic Jihad makes Fear of a Black Planet-era Public Enemy look like poli-sci flyweights (do yourself a favor and check out his site at www.guerillafunk.com). The film includes interviews with former CIA analyst David McMichael and local cable-access shouter Alex Jones. Also featured in the War Report are new NYC-protest docs from the Ohms Media Collective as well as samplings from Free Speech TV (www.freespeech.org) and Democracy Now (www.democracynow.org). All told, an excellent retort to the "fair and balanced" reportage of the corporate media. Remember kids, only you can prevent creeping totalitarianism... Suffering from war overload? Good news: Charlie Sotelo of The Show With No Name (airing Sunday, April 13, 10pm, on cable Channel 10) sends word that this week's edition will feature the very rarely screened second film (ever) from the then-21-year-old Martin Scorsese, "What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?" Sotelo calls the nine-minute short "quirky or funny, depending on how you look at it" and notes that even at that young age the patented Scorsese style is "all over the film." Delicious.