Mixed Results

Last night may have been about the lamest Saturday night of all time. Attempting to hear Prins Thomas spin at the Beach Party at Water Taxi Beach (did you know he's remixed not only Bebel Gilberto, as mentioned below, but Stephen Malkmus as well?), I left the apartment at 9:00, boarded the B43 bus at 9:20, got off in Greenpoint (a few stops too soon) around ten, crossed the Pulaski Bridge, and probably got in line about 10:20. At 10:40 I reached the front of the line, and stood just to the side for about five minutes looking for my driver's license which I'd apparently misplaced for the first time in the ten years since I got my first Iowa permit.* At this point I left and boarded the 7 train into Manhattan, getting off earlier than planned as there was a shouting match in my car; for the record, it was between a group of annoyed pre-adolescent black girls and some loud drunks who didn't seem to know any English--Russian, perhaps?. I then took the 4 at Grand Central, the Q at 14th St, and the 4, again, at Atlantic Ave, getting off at Franklin Ave and walking home in a roundabout fashion so as to bypass the kids shooting off firecrackers on the sidewalk, finally arriving back at my door at 12:15. And then Saturday Night Live turned out to be a rerun of one of the two episodes I saw from last season.

Today was a bit better, I suppose, as I saw two great movies (Cruel Winter Blues and Traces of Love) at the IFC Center, and another that probably has a lot of merit (In Between Days), but I couldn't get into it. The Asian Film Festival has been handing out prizes before all their screenings, and today I finally won one, a DVD of Peppermint Candy. I also somewhat impulsively bought a membership, but I calculated that if they keep programming stuff as good as they've had in the first half of 2006, I'll probably at least break even on the deal. At worst some will wind up as a donation to the most enjoyable cinema in the city.

*Hopefully this happened at the Bowery Ballroom when I went to see Panda Bear a couple weeks back. Otherwise I have no idea what happened and will need to get a new one.