Sunday, April 24, 2005

latenite musings

I'm very excited to have found this link to Saul Steinberg's 1976 New Yorker cover drawing, "A View of the World from Ninth Avenue." My grandparents have a framed copy of it on their wall and it is one of the funniest things ever.

Just got done watching two music DVDs with my friend Lindsay. The first was a collection of musical performances from an old British TV show called The Old Grey Whistle Test that ran during the '70s, and some of them are absolutely fantastic. This must've been the real-life inspiration for stuff like This Is Spinal Tap. The second DVD was the Radiohead documentary Meeting People Is Easy, which is probably the weirdest concert/tour film ever made. At several points, filmmaker Grant Gee cuts away from the performance going on onstage to security cameras positioned outside the venue as people mill around and the band can be heard faintly in the background. He's more interested in what other people think of the band than in the band itself. This holds throughout the movie, as when we see clueless reporters asking the band members the same stupid questions over and over. It's a movie you could potentially enjoy even if you weren't a big fan of Radiohead but were a big fan of avant-garde documentary filmmaking — but then again, it's a hard to imagine there's anyone under 40 who fits into the latter category but not the former.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, I wrote one thing for "Dreams Awake" many (i.e. three) years ago, and yet it's still the first thing that comes up when you Google my name...I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

Unknown said...

Yeah, I couldn't find any other pages about you... :(