'The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story' is a documentary released on DVD on 24 March 2003, produced by Otmoor Productions in 2001 as part of the BBC's Omnibus series and originally called Syd Barrett: Crazy Diamond (in the US, a slightly modified version aired as the last episode of VH1's Legends series in January, 2002). Directed by John Edginton, the film includes interviews with all the Pink Floyd members - Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright - plus the "fifth Pink Floyd", Bob Klose, who left the band in 1965. The film includes rare early television appearances of Pink Floyd and home movies.

One of the most famous creators and characters of the psychedelic era, Syd Barrett has not conducted an interview or released music since the early seventies yet his self-imposed anonymity still fascinates fans old and new. The original songwriter for Pink Floyd was only with the band for a vibrant 3 years when he left in 1968, yet when the band released their greatest hits album in 2001 Syd had written over a fifth of the tracks. It's been over 35 years since Syd Barrett left the band yet mystery still surrounds this prodigy of rock.


The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story retells the fascinating story of the start of one of the largest and most influential bands in rock and the drug induced breakdown of their original song writer and lead man. The release of this personal and candid profile of the once effervescent musician and now cult figure of Syd Barrett. Roger Waters, Dave Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright retell how Syd's slip from reality haunted the band for many years and this is clearly demonstrated in the tracks Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Wish You Were Here. There are also insights from former girlfriends, landlords, flatmates, producers, managers, friends and famous fans. Also featuring rare early footage of the band performing; including a live show at the UFO Club, and an appearance with former landlord Mick Leonard on Tomorrows World.

The focus of the film is Syd Barrett, the lead vocalist and guitarist of the early Pink Floyd, who created their unique psychedelic sound and most of the band's early songs, including the singles "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play" and much of their first album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

Syd Barrett's name passed into rock folklore when he quit Pink Floyd in 1968 and, after two extraordinary but erratic solo albums, disappeared from music altogether amid rumours of a drug-induced breakdown.

The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story has contributions from Humble Pie drummer Jerry Shirley (who played on Syd Barrett's two solo albums The Madcap Laughs and Barrett as well as Syd's final London concert on 6 June 1970 with David Gilmour, when Barrett abruptly left the stage after playing only four numbers), bassist Jack Monck who played at Syd's last ever public concert in 1972 at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, producer Joe Boyd who produced Arnold Layne, photographer Mick Rock who photographed Barrett for The Madcap Laughs cover, and artist Duggie Fields who shared an apartment in London's Earls Court with Barrett in 1968 and witnessed his changing mental state at close hand.

According to his sister, Barrett actually watched the documentary when it was broadcast on the BBC. He apparently found it "too loud", although he did enjoy seeing Mike Leonard, who he referred to as his "teacher". He also enjoyed hearing "See Emily Play" again.

A little about Syd ...

Born Roger Keith Barrett in 1946 in Cambridge, Syd Barrett obtained his nickname from regulars at a local jazz club who when finding out his surname, christened him after as old drummer from the area. Aged 17 he moved down to London to attend the Camberwell Art School. In London he met up with old friend Roger Waters, who he had an understanding with since they were young that they would start a band together. Syd consequently joined up with the people Roger was playing with.

Syd quickly became the main songwriter, and named the band after two Georgia blues men Pink Anderson and Floyd Council. Their experiments with feedback and electronic sound quickly made them the hippest band among London’s early psychedelic set. Whilst Pink Floyd were experimenting with sound and light they also started experimenting in the other side of London’s psychedelic set - drugs. Some thought that with the aid of drugs Syd was more liberated and had the freedom to write memorable songs. Nevertheless his grasp on reality was slipping away. He didn’t turn up for interviews and started to refuse to perform though he’d quite happily practise. His behaviour became so erratic that an American tour had to be cut short.

The band was in a dilemma; Syd was becoming a liability yet he still wrote the majority of their songs. Their solution in January 1968 was to excuse him from performing to concentrate on song writing. Dave Gilmour was asked to join the band to cover for Syd. Two of the songs that he wrote Vegetable Man and Scream The Last Scream were not released by EMI but their apparent autobiographical style was not lost on many. Pink Floyd admit that their style back in the late sixties was if there was a problem they would ignore it, then one day it came to a point where they did ignore the problem by not picking Syd up.

Syd went on to release two solo albums The Madcap Laughs and Barrett in 1970. After the poor reception of the second album Syd retreated to his mothers house in Cambridge. Back at home he joined up with some Cambridge musicians and formed The Stars. But Syd's involvement was like his attention span, short. During the following years Syd moved between London and Cambridge staying on friends’ floors. In the mid 70s he even turned up at the studios where Pink Floyd were recording Shine On You Crazy Diamond the song written about Syd.

In 1978 he got tired of London and walked back to Cambridge, where he now lives, calling himself Roger Barrett having left Syd behind. The Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett Story is a moving portrait of a cult figure.


References :

• The Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett Story : Wikipedia
• The Pink Floyd & Syd Barrett Story DVD : Pink Floyd.org

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Zen : The Best of Alan Watts is a documentary film directed by Elda Hartley presenting the Zen Philosophy as known to Alan Watts. Alan Watts (1915-1973) who held both a master's degree in theology and a doctorate of divinity, is best known as an interpreter of Zen Buddhism in particular, and Indian & Chinese philosophy in general.

He authored more than 20 excellent books on the philosophy and psychology of religion, and lectured extensively, leaving behind a vast audio archive. With characteristic lucidity and humor Watts unravels the most obscure ontological and epistemological knots with the greatest of ease.


While many in the 60's played the stock market and paid their mortgages, Alan Watts lived aboard a colorful houseboat, writing, speaking, and inspiring a generation to re-assess their values.

For more than forty years, Alan Watts earned a reputation as a foremost interpreter of Eastern philosophies for the West. Beginning at age sixteen, when he wrote essay for the journal of the Buddhist Lodge in London, he developed an audience of millions who were enriched through his books, tape recordings, radio, television, and public lectures.

In all, Watts wrote more than twenty-five books and recorded hundreds of lectures and seminars, all building toward a personal philosophy that he shared in complete candor and joy with his readers and listeners throughout the world. His overall works have presented a model of individuality and self-expression that can be matched by few philosophers.

His life and work reflects an astonishing adventure: he was an editor, Anglican priest, graduate dean, broadcaster, author, lecturer, and entertainer. He had fascinations for archery, calligraphy, cooking, chanting, and dancing, and still was completely comfortable hiking alone in the wilderness. He held a Master's Degree in Theology from Sudbury-Western Theological Seminary and an Honorary DD from the University of Vermont in recognition of his work in the field of comparative religions.



He held fellowships from Harvard University and the Bollingen Foundation, and was Episcopal Chaplain at Northwestern University during the Second World War. He became professor and dean of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, made the television series "Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life" for National Educational Television, and served as a visiting consultant for psychiatric institutions and hospitals, and for the United States Air Force. In the mid-sixties he traveled widely with his students in Japan, and visited Burma, Ceylon, and India.


References :

• The Alan Watts Archive
• D.I.Y : Alan Watts Audio Archive
• The Alan Watts Podcast

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Based on the hugely popular book by best-selling author Deepak Chopra, the How To Know God Movie is an exciting, insightful journey towards a better understanding of one of life's greatest mysteries.

Uniquely blending science and philosophy, Chopra offers such an inspiring approach in spiritual thinking, that any viewer, regardless of faith, can undergo a profound quest "to know God"...and attain a new concept of what they think they know !

Ultimately, through Chopra's brilliant narration, one may come to understand that the quest for God is really a journey in self-understanding. Thought-provoking, practical and thoroughly entertaining, this material, presented by one of the most advanced thinkers of our time, is perhaps the one of the most uplifting movies you'll ever see.


Here is an excerpt from Deepak Chopra's "How to Know God : The Soul's Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries" ... God has managed the amazing feat of being worshiped and invisible at the same time. Millions of people would describe him as a white-bearded father figure sitting on a throne in the sky, but none could claim to be an eyewitness. Although it doesn't seem possible to offer a single fact about the Almighty that would hold up in a court of law, somehow the vast majority of people believe in God -- as many as 96 percent, according to some polls. This reveals a huge gap between belief and what we call everyday reality. We need to heal this gap. What would the facts be like if we had them? They would be as follows. Everything that we experience as material reality is born in an invisible realm beyond space and time, a realm revealed by science to consist of energy and information.

This invisible source of all that exists is not an empty void but the womb of creation itself. Something creates and organizes this energy. It turns the chaos of quantum soup into stars, galaxies, rain forests, human beings, and our own thoughts, emotions, memories, and desires. In the pages that lie ahead we will see that it is not only possible to know this source of existence on an abstract level but to become intimate and at one with it. When this happens, our horizons open to new realities. We will have the experience of God. After centuries of knowing God through faith, we are now ready to understand divine intelligence directly. In many ways this new knowledge reinforces what spiritual traditions have already promised. God is invisible and yet performs all miracles. He is the source of every impulse of love. Beauty and truth are both children of this God. In the absence of knowing the infinite source of energy and creativity, life's miseries come into being. Getting close to God through a true knowing heals the fear of death, confirms the existence of the soul, and gives ultimate meaning to life.

Our whole notion of reality has actually been topsy-turvy. Instead of God being a vast, imaginary projection, he turns out to be the only thing that is real, and the whole universe, despite its immensity and solidity, is a projection of God's nature. Those astonishing events we call miracles give us clues to the workings of this ineffable intelligence. Consider the following story: In 1924 an old French villager is walking home. With one eye lost in the Great War and the other severely damaged by mustard gas in the trenches, he can barely see. The setting sun is bright, so the old man is completely unaware of the two youths on bicycles who have wheeled around the corner and are barreling down on him. At the moment of impact an angel appears. He takes the lead bicycle by its two wheels, lifts it a few feet in the air, and sets it down safely on the grass beside the road. The second bicycle stops short, and the youths become tremendously excited. "There are two! There are two!" one of them shouts, meaning that instead of just the old man alone, two figures are standing in the road.

The entire village becomes very worked up, claiming afterward that the youths were drunk or else have made up this fantastic tale. As for the old man, when he is asked about it, he says he doesn't understand the question. Could we ever come to an answer ourselves? As it happens, the old man was a priest, Père Jean Lamy, and the appearance of the angel has come down to us through his own testimony before his death. Lamy, who was saintly and beloved, seems to be credited with many instances where God sent angels or other forms of divine aid. Although reluctant to talk about them, his attitude was matter-of-fact and modest. Because of Lamy's religious vocation, it is easy to dismiss this incident as a story for the devout. Skeptics would not be moved. Yet I am fascinated simply by whether it could have happened, whether we can open the door and allow helpful angels into our reality, along with miracles, visions, prophecy, and ultimately that great outsider, God himself.

We all know that a person can learn about life without religion. If I took a hundred newborn babies and filmed every moment of their lives from beginning to end, it wouldn't be possible to predict that the believers in God will turn out to be happier, wiser, or more successful than the nonbelievers. Yet the video camera cannot record what is happening below the surface. Someone who has experienced God may be looking on the entire world with wonder and joy. Is this experience real? Is it useful to our lives or just a subjective event, full of meaning to the person having it but otherwise no more practical than a dream? One bald fact stands at the beginning of any search for God. He leaves no footprints in the material world. From the very beginning of religion in the West, it was obvious that God had some kind of presence, known in Hebrew as Shekhinah. Sometimes this word is simply translated as "light" or radiance.

Shekhinah formed the halos around angels and the luminous joy in the face of a saint. It was feminine, even though God, as interpreted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is masculine. The significant fact about Shekhinah was not its gender, however. Since God is infinite, calling the deity He or She is just a human convention. Much more important was the notion that if God has a presence, that means he can be experienced. He can be known. This is a huge point, because in every other way God is understood to be invisible and untouchable. And unless some small part of God touches the material world, he will remain inaccessible forever. We personify God as a convenient way of making him more like ourselves. He would be a very perverse and cruel human, however, to remain so hidden from us while demanding our love. What could possibly give us confidence in any kind of benevolent spiritual Being when thousands of years of religion have been so stained by bloodshed? We need a model that is both part of religion yet not bounded by it. The following simple, three-part scheme fits our commonsense view of God. Shaped like a reality sandwich, this scheme can be pictured as follows :

The picture is not new in its top and bottom layers, placing God above the material world and removed from it. God must be separate from us, or else we would be able to see him here, strolling about as he did in the Book of Genesis. There, after the seven days of creation, God walked in the garden of Eden, enjoying his handiwork in the cool of the evening. Only the middle element of our diagram, called the transition zone, is new or unusual. A transition zone implies that God and humans meet on common ground. Somewhere miracles take place, along with holy visions, angels, enlightenment, and hearing the voice of God. All of these extraordinary phenomena bridge two worlds: They are real and yet they are not part of a predictable cause-and-effect. To put it another way, if we stubbornly cling to material reality as the only way to know anything, skepticism about God is totally justified. Miracles and angels defy reason, and even though holy visions may be catalogued time after time, the rational mind remains defiant, defending its sure grip on the material plane. "You really think God exists?

Well, let's break it down. You're a doctor, I'm a doctor. Either God is causing these diseases we see every day, or else he can't do anything to stop them. Which one is the God you want me to accept?" This voice is from a skeptical colleague I used to make rounds with in the hospital, a confirmed atheist. "I don't want you to accept either one," I would protest. But he would press the point. "Reality is reality. We don't have to argue over whether an enzyme or hormone is real, do we? God can't survive any kind of objective test. But we all know that. Some of us just choose not to keep on fooling ourselves."

On one level he was right. Materialist arguments against God remain powerful because they are based on facts, but they fall apart once you dive deeper than the material world. Dame Julian of Norwich lived in England in the fourteenth century. Dame Julian asked God directly why he had created the world. The answer came back to her in ecstatic whispers: You want to know your lord's meaning in what I have done? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. For Dame Julian God was something to eat, drink, breathe, and see everywhere, as though she were an infatuated lover. Yet since the divine was her lover, she was elevated to cosmic heights, where the whole universe was "a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand."

Reference :

• Spirit Sight
• Deepak Chopra : How To Know God

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Pink Floyd The Wall is a 1982 musical film by British director Alan Parker based on the 1979 Pink Floyd album The Wall. The screenplay was written by Pink Floyd vocalist and bassist Roger Waters.

The film is highly metaphorical and is rich in symbolic imagery and sound. It features very little dialogue and is mainly driven by the Pink Floyd sound ...

Directed by Alan Parker ; Produced by Alan Marshall
Written by Roger Waters ; Narrated by Pink Floyd

Starring ...

Bob Geldof
Christine Hargreaves
Eleanor David
Alex McAvoy
Bob Hoskins
Michael Ensign

Music by Pink Floyd & Michael Kamen (orchestrations)




The film depicts the construction and ultimate demolition of a metaphorical wall. Though the film is open to interpretation, the wall itself clearly reflects a sense of isolation and alienation.

Pink played by Bob Geldof, the protagonist of the film, is a rock star, one of several reasons behind his apparent depressive emotional state. He is first seen in a quiet hotel room, having trashed it. The opening music is not by Pink Floyd, but is the Vera Lynn recording of "The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot". During the following scenes, it is revealed that Pink's father was killed during World War II while he was just a baby.

The movie then flashes back to Pink as a young English boy growing up in the early 1950s. Throughout his childhood, Pink longs for a father figure. At school, he is humiliated for writing poems in class. The poems that the teacher reads aloud are lyrics from "Money" from the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon. Pink is also affected by his overprotective mother. He eventually gets married, but he and his wife grow apart and she has an affair while Pink is on tour. When Pink learns of the affair, he resorts to acquiring expensive materialistic possessions and turns to a willing groupie (Jenny Wright), only to trash the hotel room and drive her away.

Pink slowly begins to lose his mind to metaphorical worms. He shaves off all of his body hair (an incident inspired by former band member Syd Barrett, who appeared at a 1975 recording session of Wish You Were Here, having shaved his eyebrows and body hair and, while watching The Dam Busters on television, morphs into his neo-Nazi alter-ego. Pink's manager (Bob Hoskins), along with the hotel manager (Michael Ensign) and some paramedics, discover Pink, and inject him with drugs to enable him to perform. On stage, Pink hallucinates that he is a neo-Nazi dictator, his concert a rally in a suburban neighbourhood singing "Waiting for the Worms". The scene is inter-cut by images of the animated marching hammers ...

References :

• Pink Floyd The Wall Film (Wikipedia)
• Pink Floyd

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