The Mountain Goats, All Eternals Deck
3 hours of breakdance music at Battle Royale III, Flips & Fitness, Baton Rouge, LA
Kick Ass
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Sunday:
Brigitte Fontaine, Est
Sherlock
Britney Spears, "I Wanna Go"
Dave Eggers, Zeitoun
- It's like we just discovered that we have Netflix streaming and its wealth of timesuck BBC crime dramas and HBO off-hours movies.
- I've fallen asleep twice through Exit Through the Gift Shop as well as the Season 1, episode 3 of Sherlock I am ignoring right now to type this. Sherlock is brilliant for this particular sort of media enjoyment, a contemporary upgrade with a lot of reliance on smartphone culture, though I'm waiting for a crucial plot point where our cocksure fop genius' battery gives out because he leaves his charger back on Baker Street. Exit - I'm not sure I buy it, the story of Banksy being subverted into being a story about the obsessive film-maker. I mean, the whole of Banksy is manipulation of intention and authorship and carefully channeled public effect. I'm half-convinced that Banksy is not a thing unto itself but a campaign for something else, or maybe even an objective-free campaign. I feel a little it's a set-up. I do like the art, especially the post-Katrina stuff he did in New Orleans, whatever or whosever it is, which I suppose is the important part.
- I have been humming the chorus of "I Wanna Go" ever since Bravo start using it for their default eveining bumper music. The digitized tessellation of such a banal impulse, I-I-I-I-Wa-na-na-na-go-go-go-go (something unintelligible) to-night, is a sharp an encapsulation of the Britney Thing, all trajectory without a starting point (well, the Mickey Mouse Club; perhaps the two black round ears can be read as a (0,0) coordinate on all axes) or a fixed endpoint and I wanna go to. Who doesn't want to hitch a ride on a comet's tail?
- I was sent to cover a breakdancing competition on Saturday - a statement that says a lot, I think - and I consiered it a lark largely justified by the fee and my getting to try a taqueria on that side of town. I walked out 4 hours later convinced that I don't know how to use my body at all - it's like when there's a TV genius detective who has a mutation that allows him to use more than 20% of their brain or something. His thought processes manifest as lots of overlays of the person calculating pi to the 100th digit, Leonardo's Vitruvian Man spinning his arms and legs like windmills/sped-up clocks/cosmic orbits/electrons/everything. Like that, but for breakdancing. The event was sweet and generally inspiring. People care about things that no one cares about and it's not the things that bear fruit, it's the caring. I am aware of how dopey that sounds, but I mean it.
- The episode of Sherlock I am presently half-watching revolves somehow around the golem myth, the slave-monster made of clay brought to life with G-d's name scratched into his chest. Sherlock and Watson are in quite a pickle! I won't ruin it for you, but the moral is never underestimate the leverage of underestimation. Or, I think so at least. I wasn't really watching.