cheech

Wednesday - I saw a couple of films with yetimike. Musical Brotherhoods from the Trans-Saharan Highway had a lot of footage of street musicians at night fairs in Morocco. Some great stuff, on banjos and other stringed instruments with battery amplification and lots of drummers on hand-drums, bongos, n such. Very lively stuff, much fun. Sumatran Folk Cinema was more varied, about the music but also TV, ads, and some current events in Indonesia. It was okay too, but I preferred the straightforward musical presentation in the first film. I would've gotten on here sooner to write about it, but it won't be sold on DVD for a year, so if you're in one of the cities where it is shown (they mentioned Baltimore, I remember) you should check it out.

Thursday - Went to a play, Genet's The Maids, at the Back Door Theater on Hawthorne. Sort of a gender-crossing thing (obeying Genet's original plans for the play), with two maids, becoming mentally unstable, plotting to kill the bimbo-rich-woman of the house, and all roles played by guys. Mixes comedy, drama, and wellll The Bizarre of course. Good fun.

Haven't been up to much besides burning some more CDs, figuring out how to empty and re-format my empty hard drive, and since I didn't get anyone on my MySpace offer of doing stuff last night I just borrowed a couple DVDs from Mikael/ Les, who've been sick- got Masked and Anonymous (which was okay) and The Big Lebowski (which of course I've seen before).
Lebowski really helped me back in '98, and still does. I can watch it when I feel like a loser, when my life doesn't have much progress or momentum (especially in the vocational department) and say "Well, neither does Dude's life, and he's doing okay." Really, I NEEDED that message when it came out, and still do sometimes. The Coen's silly mystery movie has actually provided one of the best and most vital "messages" of any film that I've seen, certainly more than any "important" Oscar-winning message movie.