New Pogues CD on sight, believe or not

[Belgrader]

http://id.mind.net/~extang/acGeneral.html

Welcome to alexcox.com


The purpose of this site was two-fold --

1) to communicate information re my films and other matters;
2) to commercially induce you to buy stuff.

1) is more-or-less still the case.
2) is not the truth. It doesn't matter if you buy stuff or not.

Q: What does this mean to me, the consumer of this site?

A: The new STRAIGHT TO HELL CD comes out this year - thanks to Dan Wool, webmaster, and Prayer for Rain, and Philip Chevron, of the Pogues, who has found the long-lost masters. The new CD contains all the music from the film (many Pogues tracks were missing from the first album), in sequence. Exterminating Angel Ltd http://www.exterminatingangel.com will put up a downloadable script of the delightful and optimistic script WALDO'S HAWAIIAN HOLIDAY, never-filmed sequel to REPO MAN; followed later in the year by BUGS ARE MY BUSINESS, Tod Davies' biography of Bunuel.

Q: How do I get hold of these items?

A: The soundtrack will be released on the noble Pogues label, details to follow. You'll be able to download the scripts for free.

Q: So some stuff is free and some not? How does that square with the old diatribe that used to be here, saying everything should be free?

A: That diatribe is still available, and follows. The more you read writers like Said, and Klein, and Monbiot, and Ross, on whatever subject - be it Indian call centre workers, or Korean farmers - the more you can substitute "independent filmmaker" from Mexico or Liverpool for whoever they're writing about. Because all face the same challenge: how to survive, and preserve what's important, when all the institutions that have been set up by their authorities seem to drive all of us to destruction.

And on a historical level, writers like Mark Lane and Robin Ramsay and great conspiracist journals like PROBE and THE THIRD/FOURTH DECADE point towards the clearly guilty parties.

This is a major fight. It isn't just about studio films being bad, and independent films being better, or about slow food being more nutritious than McDonalds crap, or about the Texas oil companies whacking Kennedy. It's a fight to reverse the bogus journalism of the past and present, to reclaim our vision, and our dreams, and to pick the direction of our lives. Which is not a bad thing to do, especially given the alternatives.

Over the next couple of years some interesting new possibilities will emerge, and there will be room for decent artists and academics and workers and, yea, even politicians to manoeuvre. But any new spaces that open up will be immediately claimed by the corporations. They will become another battleground. We'll have to fight for the free stuff. Like the right not to carry UK ID cards made by a CIA-linked company. The right to vote for a political party that actually does what we say. And open source software for those Diebold computer voting machines!

A different, but entirely possible, world.

Alex Cox

Liverpool

Jan 2004