China takes another chunk of the USA

I noticed something funny here the other day when I was going to watch “The legend of Bruce lee” from 2008.

The movie is telling the story of Bruce Lee’s unorthodox life. It shows him to be more than just a martial art hero. He is portrayed as a very intelligent person with great interest in philosophy and scriptwriting in addition to his contribution to marital art scene.

Surprisingly enough I was not able to find a single version of this movie that was not “dubbed” in Mandarin. It was not until I looked up the movie in IMDB (The internet movie database) that I discovered the truth: That this was in fact a Chinese production in USA.

Maybe I’m way off, but that seems to me like a pretty big step forward for the Chinese within the movie and art domain. Don’t get me wrong: I am sure there must have been several Chinese movies recorded in USA the last few years, but this was such a big production and made so well that I thought it was a Hollywood production. The fact that Bruce Lee was an American, more or less, made me anticipate that this movie would be an American production

While this can be seen as an isolated incidence it is pretty obvious to me that Asia in general is slowly rising to challenge Hollywood. There are an increasing numbers of skillful Korean movies hitting the market these days. Hollywood seems to be stuck in the same old pond without really being able to get out of it. They are “stealing” from Scandinavia as well as Asia.

Is this a premonition of what is going to happen to America’s role as a superior power in the near future, or is art and politics not connected? What do you guys think about this? Could a Bruce Lee movie of this proportion have been produced in the same manner ten or twenty years ago? Are the times changing?

Ullevål sykehus (Norwegian Poem)

Nu skal de gamle få svingt seg litt

Nu skal de gamle få pint seg litt

her på ullevål sykehus underholdnings 

klinikk

Some "undiscovered" metal music you might like

These guys that call themselves Agartha are streaming their whole album. The music is something like progressive black or death metal. It is pretty hard stuff for those who like that.

With Leprous comes a Norwegian progmetal band that has gotten a lot of nice critiques with their last album. It is pretty hard for being melodic prog metal:

Mnemic is a pretty hardcore metal band that has both screaming and mellow vocals:

Here comes a theme based space metal opera about a travel in space and time. It is a very melodic and easy listening piece of metal music:

Here is some pretty catchy, yet rough metal with the Devin Townsend Prjoject - Deconstruction. The video is pretty funny as well: 

If you still have not listened to Myrath I would recommend to do so:



Personally I like their earlier work better.

If you like very catchy and melodic metal that has a similar sound to a lot of pop music you should check out Saint Deamon. They are a great live band:

En manns historie (Norwegian Poem)

Hvor lenge hadde du holdt deg våken for kunsten?

Hadde du traktet kaffe gjennom gamle underbukser for å skaffe resultater?

Jeg gikk lenger

Jeg satt tyve år i mørket

for å få frem dette

Jeg ville ofre alt for menneskeheten

Jeg ville gi verden den absolutte inspirasjon

Min ide om de fortrengte sansers tilbakekomst

har falt i grus

Tyve år har gått 

og jeg føler meg like tom 

som da jeg frivillig gikk inn i min mørke hule

Tyve år av mitt liv

og ikke et ord som kan forandre verden 

har jeg tatt i min munn

En ungdoms ide,

måtte betales med mitt beste gode

Dette må være menneskehetens største sløsing av tid

New vocal amp for the Illusion Suite recording

Hello guys. This Christmas I was going to try out my new vocal amp that I purchased to record the second Illusion Suite album, so I decided to record a few christmas carols as christmas presents for my family.

Unfortunately I had a brand new vocal amp that broke down three times after it had just been fixed. The last time it broke down it was as I was recording these christmas songs. Now, the good news is that I was offered the model that is one step up with free shipping because of all the problems.

First I thought I would present these songs only to my family, but then I figured: why not...so here it is: My own version of "Have yourself a merry little christmas":

 Have yourelf a merry little christmas by Bill Makatowicz

And with this I want to wish everybody a happy new year. May it be a year in the sign of the metal gods, he, he