1. This is bloody amazing. It’s a cartoon by this guy named Ryan Pequin called “The Walk.” I know nothing more about the guy. I mean, apparently he’s a Canadian and a webcomic kid, but beyond that — I was just linked there.

Also fantastic is the song “Kilkelly, Ireland,” which you can listen to via youtube (which tells me this version is song by Robbie O’Connell and the Clancy Brothers), and which is amazingly sad. Brendan Dutch played it (via youtube or a CD) to my folklore class, and I was writing a poem today that was sort of chanelling it, so I went and found the song. I almost remembered the name, but was thinking Kilkenny, rather than Kilkelly, and so I had to look it up in my old journal.

2. Movies. At MALBA.

Saturday night I went to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which you should check up on via wikipedia if you’ve never heard of. (Woah, syntactical incongruity!) For my first time ever seeing it in theatres, I was alone, the majority of the audience had never seen it, and there was neither a floor show nor call back lines. It was a pretty strange experience to hear people actually laughing at the movie. It was subtitled in Spanish, of course, which was similarly strange — not because the translations were bad (although they were certainly funny on occasion; they were off the internet, and I think they were good, but not great), but because the subtitles made me realize that there were actually pointed where in the past I had never had any clue what was being said, but had just sort of brushed over it. I was tempted to call out callbacks on occasion, but I figured that the kids in the theatre wouldn’t understand either the English or the reason behind it, and would just be mad. Anyway, it was fun.

Sunday I structured my day around Vincent Gallo’s visit to MALBA. I got to the museum by noon, waiting on line for maybe ten minutes, and then received a ticket to his talk that evening. Then I wandered around Recoleta (went to the cemetary, had lunch and coffee, and so on), before returning to MALBA by 16:00 for “Buffalo ’66,” Gallo’s critically-aclaimed first film. I wasn’t really expecting it to be either good or interesting, but it was both. I loved the colors of the film (apparently that has to do with the film it was shot on), and the characters were intriguing and reasonably deep. Gallo plays a man who made a losing bet he had to default on, and ended up spending years in jail as payback to the bookie. On getting out of jail at the film’s beginning, he kidnaps a young dancer (Christina Ricci, who plays the part at 17), and takes her to his parents’ home to pretend to be his wife. In the process, we meet his lunatic parents (Anjelica Huston plays his mother), learn about why he was in jail, and learn that he wants to kill the guy who technically lost him the bet — the football field goal kicker from the Buffalo Bills.

In any case, “Buffalo ’66″ ends up being well-done, and while you don’t like Gallo at the end of it (I didn’t, gah he was annoying), I found him at least somewhat intriguing, and I guess I wanted things to work out. I felt like I’d heard the story before (not in the sense that it was unoriginal, but literally I think I’ve heard it before in another form), so maybe that had something to do with my enjoyment of it.

Afterwards, I went and had a coffee. They screened “The Brown Bunny,” Gallo’s second film (he’s acted a lot, but he’s only directed two), but I didn’t have a ticket, and they gave the last ones away while I was talking to my father, and they didn’t let me sneak in.

At around 8:30, I got let back in, and I sat down on the floor in the front of the theatre. It was packed full of people. Gallo is in his late-forties, now, but he still looks reasonably imposing. He’s tall and thin, dark-haired in a way that makes him seem half like a magician and half like an evangelist preacher and an imaginary half like a salesman or a carny. You really oughtta read a bit about him, so you know why it’s easy to assume he’d be a tool. He wasn’t. He was funny, he was normal. He wasn’t the best speaker — sort of funny, sort of conceited, sort of boring. It was nice, and enjoyable, and a cool experience. I got a photo or two of ‘im.

There was a translator provided to translate his English for the non-speakers, but he quickly got frustrated with pausing and would just speak uninterrupted for as much as fifteen minutes before giving the translator a quick minute to sum it all up. (See: arrogance!) He talked primarily about the controversy over “Brown Bunny” (in brief, there’s a sex scene at the end wherein Chloe Sevigny gives Gallo a blow job; the film is overwhelmingly motonous and Roger Ebert, the film critic, and Gallo got into a nasty fight over it; Ebert claimed it was self-indulgent and so on, and said it was the worst movie ever made, and the insults escalated; my personal favorite was when Ebert said that his colonoscopy was more enjoyable than “Brown Bunny”). He said, err, “To get a blowjob… it’s really easy. I didn’t spend three years working on a movie just to get a blowjob.” And, after talking about being shy, he said, “I wasn’t waiting my whole life to show my pecker in a movie.” Which all seems like fair points — he claims the movie isn’t about being narcissistic or self-indulgent, but about showing the pain in loneliness and love, and so on. Shrug; I haven’t actually seen it yet. (Hah!)

He showed us a few short films, then, after the two Roger Ebert reviews. (In one, it’s “possibly the worst film ever made”; in the next, it gets a thumbs up.) The first is “Hunny Bunny” (or, possibly, “Honey Bunny”), a four-minute short he made before “Brown Bunny,” which is a film that primarily consists of objectified shots of women turning in a circle, which at the end changes into a twirling toy bunny, and then into Gallo’s blurry, bearded face. I have no clue. He said, “I still kind of like it,” this version, and that it’s about obsession and fetishization, in a more direct way than “Brown Bunny,” but similarly nonetheless.

He also showed us what he claimed were his two earliest films — “Vincent Gallo as Jesus Christ,” a repetitive stop-motion film that looped maybe five times, of him jumping in the air and holding a Jesus pose; and “Rocky X,” a testament to his hatred for the idea of “Rocky II,” which was a montage of images, including a shot of Gallo being hit by a car. These were both from 1979.

Lastly, he showed us a short film he made while filming “Buffalo ’66,” which he said was of him reacting to his new power (he directed, wrote, starred, did music, edited), but was really just a day-in-the-life. It ends with Ricci on the phone, lying to her parents about where she was. It was called “Looking for Enemies finding friends,” with just that capitalization & punctualization.

I don’t know. It doesn’t blend, but it was interesting. And a good enough time.

3. Dancing.

On Saturday night, after Rocky Horror, I went to Amerika, a club a short distance from where I live. Going to clubs by yourself is strange — especially since I was too cheap to drink anything, and so I was completely sober by the time I got in there. The music was techno, the dancing was fine, but I was reasonably unimpressed — not all too many attractive folks, not all too many good dancers, a poor showing in general. I am not giving up on clubs in general — I think they can be fun when you’re with friends, and I think they can be fun alone if you’re into the music or getting hit on, but I’m just saying I don’t think it would have been all too much more fun even if I’d spoken the language and been able to talk to folks. Still, I was pleased to find that while I still think of myself as a bad dancer, even without anything to drink I was fine with dancing alone. Surrounded by people, of course.

On Monday night, at around 7:30, I walked to the same general area, past Abasto Mall, and to Konex, which on Monday nights hosts La Bomba de Tiempo. I’ve mentioned it before — it’s this really great drumming circle, with thousands of people crowded in to watch and dance. This time, after checking my bag, I bought a beer and drank it (and buy “a beer,” I mean a plastic cup filled with Quilmes, and beer here comes in 950 cc bottles), quickly, watching the people around me. (I wanted to dance, honest.) Mostly the crowd is twenty-somethings, maybe one-third foreigners, but there were a few mothers there with little daughters. I watched this one woman with her two-or-so-year-old on her shoulders, dancing slightly. In front of her, holding the little girl’s gaze, another woman danced with her hands in the air. With perfect facility, the little girl mimicked the older woman’s movements, her face pulled into a huge grin. It was this great moment of THIS is what we’re trying to achieve at work.

And then I finished my beer and danced for an hour, and didn’t make any friends but had a good time, smiling at all the flushed faces, and watching that guy who thinks he’s an eagle again.

I suppose that’s more than enough, neh?