Exit Through the Gift Shop. I wish I felt more strongly on the love/hate spectrum for this one, either direction. Hoax or not, this was a little… boring? I’ll add the disclaimer that street art isn’t really my thing. It was fun to see the gleeful rush that the artists get from making their projects come to life in the dark of night. There’s some kind of manic drive to it all, legal/ethical/logistical difficulties be damned.
I need to see this.
I’ve got my eye on you, People’s Champion. You can also watch the first five minutes.
Social occasions can work a certain magic. You see your friends in costumes and onstage as it were, and suddenly they turn from ordinarily familiar to strangely familiar: They achieve sudden glory.
Smiling, ruddy, polo-shirted middle-aged men with white baseball caps asking everyone “Howya doing?” are as North Carolinian as NASCAR and pecan pie.
The winner by a country mile is Pittsburgh’s PNC Park. More than 80 percent of reviewers gave it the top, 5-star rating, and its average score was 4.77 points. It is followed by Boston’s Fenway Park (4.59 stars), San Francisco’s AT&T Park (4.57), Minneapolis’ Target Field (4.53), and Baltimore’s Camden Yards (4.47).
I have a suspicion based on zero personal experience that Pittsburgh is one of America’s secretly great cities.
Avatar. I’m of two minds on this one. Glad to cross it off the list, but you could live happily without seeing it. It’s about as good as you can do a dumb movie. Strange pacing. Heavy-handed political parallels. So much swooping sweeping camera movement. Give James Cameron credit for, gradually, over the course of the movie, making me actually want to finish it, and for not being afraid to kill off side characters. Maybe I’ll watch Titanic this year, too.
It’s my theory that rock and roll happens between fans and stars, rather than between listeners and musicians—that you have to be a screaming teenager, at least in your heart, to know what’s going on.
Ellen Willis, quoted in The New Inquiry – Heroine: Ellen Willis on Rock Music. On a similar note, Daniel Mendelsohn says:
Strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even… Critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken.
See also both Little Steven and Elijah Wald on music and dancing.
Whatever the subject, a real critic is a cultural critic, always: if your judgment doesn’t bring in more of the world than it shuts out, you shouldn’t start.
In Apatow, the enemy is adulthood, which ruins life; in Phillips, the enemy is women, who ruin men.
What these auteurs truly have in common, though, is that they have systematically boiled away many of the pleasures previously associated with comedy — first among these, jokes themselves — and replaced them with a different kind of lure: the appeal of spending two hours hanging out with a loose and jocular gang of goofy bros.
‘The Hangover’ and the Age of the Jokeless Comedy – NYTimes.com
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/embed.html?videoId=100000000831937&playerType=embed
The Crossover on Display
The New York Times interviews Dwyane Wade, Allen Iverson, Tim Hardaway and Pearl Washington for a video profile on the crossover, basketball’s most lethal offensive move.
The more seriously I took everything, and how serious life was in general, the better laughs I got.
Buster Keaton is my jam. Quoting James Agee:
Perhaps because “dry” comedy is so much more rare and odd than “dry” wit, there are people who never much cared for Keaton. Those who do cannot care mildly.
The Genius of Buster by Jana Prikryl | The New York Review of Books
Sports by xkcd.
Meet the sloths by Lucy Cooke. “I filmed this at the Aviaros del Caribe sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica – the world’s only sloth orphanage.”
Lars and the Real Girl. A little dreary, perhaps? Lots of people talking quietly. I wasn’t looking for perverted gags or slapstick or anything, but I just couldn’t hang with this one. But it’s got a good heart.
Think about how easy it has to have one more—to go beyond what you allowed yourself and have one more piece, one more glass, one more handful. And yet, think about how much harder it is to do one more—one more lap, one more page, one more hour, one more rep than you intended. There’s always rationalization on hand for the one and an convenient excuse ready for the other.
This is timely.
The Frugal Traveler’s guide to ramen shops in Tokyo. I love the internet.
Mark Larson 