2. “Here is the lyric: ‘Come on now, this beat is sick. I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.’ Here is the problem: 1. There is no ideal translation for the word ‘disco’ in this circumstance. 2. The word Ison might normally sign for ‘stick’ generally refers to what would snap off of a tree branch. Thus, if the sentence is translated word-for-word from English to its corresponding signs, the resulting phrase could come across as something like, ‘I want to ride on the twig of John Travolta’s dance moves.’” – from What sign-language interpreters make of the likes of Lady Gaga and Bon Jovi

3. Courtney Love has settled the Twitter-related defamation lawsuit brought against her by fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir to the tune of $430,000. [via THR]

4. After waiting six years since the release of the last novel in the saga, the next book in George R.R. Martin’s bestselling A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance With Dragons, has a publication date: July 12, 2011. You might want to start working out now, because at over 900 pages long, it’s going to be a total brick to lug around. [via EW]

5. Michael Stipe has asked filmmakers like James Franco, Sophie Calle, Albert Maysles, and Sam Taylor-Wood to create video clips to accompany each track on R.E.M.’s forthcoming album Collapse Into Now. [via Paste]

Bonus link: Blockbuster Training Video, c. 1990

The nude has a rich history in art, and its use as subject matter is constantly evolving, especially in contemporary photography and video. Spencer Tunick uses naked bodies to create installations of flowing flesh in public places, which he captures in photography and exhibits as prints; Katy Grannan finds her subjects via classified ads and photographs them nude or provocatively clothed in the privacy of their homes and in nature; and Pipilotti Rist puts sensuality center stage in her surreal video fantasies, where fruits, flesh, and flowers merge to create moving installations.

Kim adds to this discourse by exposing herself in industrial ruins and on city structures. Her pose isn’t flashy or provocative; instead, Kim becomes one with the space she inhabits. She is in awe of where she is — a place that she has discovered and climbed high and low to reach. She researches each site and learns its history and considers how the body, which metaphorically could be that of a child or an animal, might approach it. These abandoned and hard to find places become her playgrounds, where art can be made.

Hooked on hacking buildings, which she does alone, with her sister, and with her friends, Kim has traveled the world in search of sites to use as her stage. Her earliest pictures were made in the abandoned Revere Sugar Factory in Red Hook Brooklyn in 2005. Her next important find was a former asylum in Berlin, where she worked in the underground tunnels and storage areas. Returning to New York to get an MFA in painting from the Pratt Institute, she continued her perilous activity.

Networking with other urban explorers, Kim soon began to infiltrate broken-down power plants in Philadelphia and Yonkers, sewers in London, demolition zones in Seoul, and the famous catacombs of Paris, where she shot eleven of the photographs in her Naked City Spleen series. An image of her lying on a pile of bones in the catacombs sends chills down the spine, while another one of her going down the catacomb steps ironically brings to mind Marcel Duchamp’s modernist masterpiece, Nude Descending a Staircase.

The title of Kim’s body of work combines Naked City, an old nickname for New York, and Charles Baudelaire’s famous volume of melancholic poems, Le Spleen de Paris. In the process of making the series, she’s crossed paths with homeless men, rats, cats, wild dogs, birds, and even a dead person. Triumphing over the dangers, Kim projects a playful, liberated spirit that perches on ledges, climbs on machinery, balances on beams, and strolls down tracks and tunnels.

For her adventurous vision, Kim has already been the subject of several solo and group shows in the US. She’s been discussed in Time Out New York, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and Esquire; she was featured in an Ovation TV documentary about portrait photographers, directed by the legendary Albert Maysles; and she was invited to present her work and ideas at the forward-thinking  TED conference.

Rounding out her “rising-star” success, 48 of Kim’s photographs from the Naked City Spleen series, shot between 2005 and 2009, are currently on view at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul. The exhibition, which is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, runs through September 13.

View a photo gallery of Miru Kim’s work here>>

To celebrate the monumental event, concert promoters got together and created Zaire ’74, which took mega-American-talents like James Brown and B.B. King and matched them with other members of the African Diaspora’s musical royalty. Overshadowed by Ali and Foreman’s pugilist dance, the concert and the backstory of what it took to make it happen has sat in cold storage for over 30 years now. But it’s about to defrost.

Soul Power, opening in New York and LA this Friday, should join the concert film brotherhood of Gimme Shelter, Wattstax, and Woodstock; Flavorpill sat down with the film’s director, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, who also edited Kings, to discuss his return to the fall of ’74 and what was arguably the most historical musical moment to fail to get the big screen treatment.

Flavorpill: When We Were Kings felt like such a perfect cinematic moment. Why return to the footage now?

Jeffrey Levy-Hinte: The now is significant. It’s the thirteen-year interregnum, and part of it is being intimidated by Kings. The real reason to return to it, is to be able to explore the music festival element, which was present in Kings, but was subordinate. I just felt that the music festival was incredibly important and dynamic, and it needed to be put out there into the world. It needed to have its place. But going into it I was very anxious about the comparisons.

FP: I’ve read that the version of the film being released now was not your original cut, and that you had another version that didn’t test well because it was lacking a narrative arc. But seeing the film, and experiencing the power of the raw footage, I can kind of understand why you would just want the images and music to wash over the audience without as much context as Kings. I was wondering what your thoughts are on these two different versions.

JLH: Well, it’s always finding the balance, and those early test screenings weren’t finished films. They were all works in progress, which I do for all the films that I produce… It’s the only way to step outside the insular world that you’ve created and understand how other people are going to perceive it, and ultimately you’re making the film for other people. I think what’s most fascinating about it for me is hearing other people question it, and articulate their interpretation of it, which invariably makes it a film that I’m happier with.

So in a way there is no compromise whatsoever. You want to find the film that speaks most honestly to what you are trying to do, and that’s what I approached it as. As opposed to trying to find the film that I thought would be the most popular, or most successful, or most sellable. I didn’t think I had any chance of selling it anyway [laughs].

FP: Really? But When We Were Kings was an Oscar-winning film, and this one has a cast of characters who are larger than life.

JLH: I loved it, and agree with those two elements; I’m just very cynical as to the state of independent film distribution. Fortunately I have a wonderful distributor with Sony Pictures Classics, but you know, they’ll pick up one or two documentaries a year. The marketplace has really been decimated the last few years.

FP: Yeah, documentary had a spike for a little while and then just died.

JLH: I think what you are seeing, the general pattern, is that the distributors who step into the space, for better or for worse, they don’t really have the capacity to mount more significant theatrical elements. So you are really relegated to niche theatrical distribution, if any, and then DVD and cable. And that’s all well and good, but that also comes with them not being able to pay you.

FP: With this project you had a mountain of footage. What strategy did you use to tackle it all?

JLH: The first thing you do is you watch it all. There were seven hundred or so camera rolls, and as you watch them you make notes: which scenes were interesting, which scenes are compelling, which scenes are relevant. And from that we derived 50 or 60 scenes that we edited down. And from that we put it into an assembly in rough shape.

Then the real work happens. You refine, and move around and really try to understand what works and how the pieces relate to one another. And of course the most painful moment when you have a piece, and it speaks to you, but there’s no place for it in the movie. That’s where the real discipline comes in.

FP: Have you screened the film for any of the original participants, or anyone who was there?

JLH: Yeah. Stewart Levine, who was the concert promoter. Some of the camera people have seen it, Kevin Keating, Albert Maysles, Paul Goldsmith, Roderick Young. Some of the performers have seen it. I believe Bill Withers has seen it, but I haven’t spoken to him, Fred Wesley, and Big Black…

FP: And their reactions?

JLH: Everyone seems to be universally enamored with it. And very complimentary, but you never know, they could just be being nice. I think for the most part people are digging it. I think the film has the aesthetic that they [the performers] were trying to create. It’s kind of a throwback, or an homage. I prefer to think of it as an homage. Other people find it annoyingly retro.

FP: Do you mean an homage to the time?

JLH: To the time, to the event, to that style of filmmaking. It’s a little bit more looser, more willing to take leaps, and not trying to be rigidly narrative. For me, the primary value was not imparting information about the event. If you want that you can read an article or a book. It’s really about wanting to provide the kind of experience, and to give you a sense of what it was like for the performers, and what it was like for the people who were there to observe it. And for me, that’s what I really tried to accomplish.

FP: As for the music, one thing the film brings up is that this was the first time that a lot of these musicians, from different cultures, were seeing each other perform live. I was wondering if you could comment at all, or have you spoken to anyone, about this moment in 1974 having an effect on the trajectory of certain musicians from that point on?

JLH: I haven’t spoken to somebody who has made the grand statement, although I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it. I’d be extremely interested to find out as well. But I think in small ways, the ways it influenced the performers who were there; that I could see in the movie and I’ve heard things afterward about its impact. I don’t know. I’d be really curious to find out, because when you watch it go down you do get the sense, certainly in the moment, that it was very powerful, very important, and significant in peoples’ lives. But you never know how that’s going to relate over time.

I think that as far as the impact of the event, in some ways because the film wasn’t finished and the albums weren’t put out, I think its impact was truncated. I mean I always think, what would Woodstock have been without the film or the recordings? It would have been a bunch of hippies saying that this was an amazing thing, but it became an iconic cultural event precisely because of the way in which it was distributed through media. And this event didn’t have the same trajectory.

FP: So originally there was supposed to be a film about this event that never saw the light of day?

JLH: It all got mired. It was incredibly ’70s. There was bankruptcy of the production company, and general confusion around how to finish it, and lack of resources and legal battles…

FP: That sounds pretty contemporary.

JLH: Yes, but now things are much more programmed. There are still tremendous problems, but the scale of this effort. I mean they spent a couple million dollars. Today I can’t even imagine the equivalent. I mean the equivalent would be one of the Scorsese music projects going into obscurity. I think we’ve all paid the price of not having the chance to live with this cultural experience, but I certainly get a great benefit, because I’m able to make the movie. If not, it would have just been another movie that I got to watch.