May 23

BUG-tastic

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Went off to BUG 07 this evening at the BFI for another evening’s revelatory music video malarky punctuated by Adam Buxton’s ranting and the reading of various expletive laden missives from deranged YouTube viewers for whom the concept of constructive criticism is utterly alien.

As usual the mix was pretty funny, more for the pre/post match analysis than the actual videos themselves. The videos weren’t aided by a frankly shite sound system, which was conveniently blamed on Frank Sinatra for some vaguely logical reason that currently escapes me but made perfect sense at the time and served to explain all the circumstances behind Frank’s death a few years ago.

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My picks were Interpol‘s Rest My Chemistry, which is what all MP3 visualisation tools dream of becoming when they grow up, super trippy shit; Flight Of The Conchords‘ Ladies Of The World, which was every movie Will Farrell has ever tried to make distilled to 4 minutes 51 seconds; and Josh Raskin‘s animation of 14-year old Jerry Levitan‘s interview with John Lennon in 1969, I Met The Walrus. The sound quality on this may be really shit, but in this case we can’t blame Frank Sinatra, as it sounds like it was shit in the first place. Doesn’t stop the animation being fantastic though.

However, my personal favourite was the video for Aussie Rules post-rock group Pivot‘s In The Blood. As usual it confirms one of the key Rules of BUG (aside from Rule 1 ‘Don’t mention BUG as the tickets sell out fast enough as it is and we don’t want any more competition for places thank you very much’), namely the best video stories are all reserved for obscure guitar/metal/thrash monkeys and that no matter how hard you try you can’t ignore the fact that there is always room for creative stupidity. This video starts where Spielberg‘s JAWS and Todd Haynes‘ Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story leave off, so it’s crazy dolls v plastic sharks with lashings of claret.

Quality moment was during the interview with director Dougal Wilson. Now Dougal may be creative and all his videos have at least one interesting idea in them even if they are someone else’s, and yes Bat For Lashes‘ What’s A Girl To Do is pretty fucking neat in a ‘I’m ripping off Donnie Darko‘ sort of way, but those Goldfrapp videos are bloody terrible. Either that or the new Goldfrapp album is simply godawful cokebaiting eartrash. Anyway, Dougal is relating his many curious run-ins with people recently and culminates in a story of how in BUG 06 he has a run-in with someone who dared to accuse him of actually making money out of the music video racket. Both Buxton and Dougal are about to vent spleen on the hapless malcontent, when up stands friend of the Palace, Charles, saying, ‘It’s a fair cop guv, it was me’. At this point they can’t simply howl him down as he is embracing the moment and have to invite him onstage to universal acclaim. Fortunately Charles’ moment won’t go away as it was being filmed, probably for future use in one of Dougal’s videos.

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