Culture
19 Oct 09

Catapulted To Fame

aught In The Net is much enamoured of the video for the new Charlotte Hatherley single, ‘White’, which finds the former Ash and current Bat For Lashes guitarslinger splattered with paint. Before you make any unbecoming comments, it’s the clip’s Pollock-esque qualities we admire rather than the fact that Chaz is all covered in gunk.

Anyway, this retina-pleasing three minutes is the work of Elliot Manches, the young British director who’s also responsible for the excellent DAM: Hip-Hop Palestinian Style documentary short, which can be viewed at www.elliotmanches.com.
Billed as “a fresh take on both rap and the Middle East”, it focuses on three Israeli-born Palestinian rhymers as they make their first visit to London.
DAM star as well in Slingshot Hip Hop, a Sundance Award-nominated documentary, which traces the scene they head back to source.
“Look at how great this title is – Fear Of A Black Planet,” enthuses DAM’s Tamer Nafar as he takes us on a guided tour of his record collection. “It’s about how the White Man is trying to stop the growth of the black population. Every time I speak Arabic I get stopped by a cop. They can’t stand hearing our language. They want to erase us.” www.slingshothiphop.com has the trailer.
From there it’s but a mere mouse-click to www.oversharers.com, our favourite new killing-time-at-work website, which scours Twitter for tweets that give way too much information.
“Just urinated wee-bubbles that made an exact map of Australia (with Tasmania). Ran to get camera but by then it had separated. Gutted,” confides DomHarvey while twtaryan muses: “Some times I wish I were a dog, and could just sit around all day licking myself.”
Don’t we all Dom Harvey, don’t we all!
While Caught In The Net has little – actually, make that no – sympathy for the predicament Roman Polanski currently finds himself in, we thought you might like to peruse the www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=45029 footage of him getting wed to Sharon Tate and the star-studded reception attended by the likes of Candice Bergin, Michael Caine and a seriously bopping Joan Collins that followed. It’s part of a vast online British Pathé archive dating back to 1896.
Which just leaves time for quick visits to www.inudge.net/index.en.html (we feel an ambient techno hit coming on); www.flickr.com/photos/86199328@Noo/3924216098/ (is this Tommy Tiernan’s doing?); and www.unionversity.com/?p=560 (well, it made us laugh).