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Time shifting my life

Mainly because we were going to see Lamb at Brixton late on Saturday night, but also because reverting back to Eastern time for the long weekend suited our lingering post-NYC jetlag, we decided to time-shift the weekend by getting up after what other people might refer to as “lunchtime” on Saturday and not changing back into British “Summer” Time until this morning (when we were forced to succumb to “the man” and turn up for work on time. Well, sort of). This meant that we could survive an afternoon down the pub in Clapham on Saturday and still be lively at 1AM when Lamb took to the stage. We’d got to the Academy half way through the set by the Scissor Sisters (ostensibly the headline band, but appearing first owing to the unusual gig scheduling, itself a result of this being part of Carling’s 24 hour live music event). I can only assume that the Scissor Sisters don’t share an audience demographic with the band we’d come to see, judging from the exodus of pairs of bald men as soon as their shirtless lead singer left the stage and the crew began dismantling their equipment. Not that I cared much, as this allowed us to head right to the front, and we watched the whole gig from within touching distance of Louise Rhodes. I don’t think I’ve ever been that close to the front at Brixton, in fact, and at times it felt like they were playing just for me. Which is a beautiful thing indeed.

Continuing the living-in-our-own-timezone theme, we didn’t venture out of the house the next day until well after 6pm, and ended up (some time afterwards) going to see the late showing of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I’d highly recommend, although perhaps not if you’re currently in a relationship on shaky ground. Also, although it isn’t saying much, it’s probably the best Jim Carrey film you’ll ever see–Sal dislikes him intently (which is sensible) and didn’t much care for Charlie Kaufman’s other films (which is sacrilege) and even she thought it was ok.

Sadly, if the trailers are anything to go by, Eternal Sunshine will be one of the few decent mainstream films out for a while. Everything else appears to be either an iffy remake (cf. Tom Hanks in The Ladykillers–what is up with the Coen brothers lately?) or a thinly-veiled remake masquerading as a new film (cf. Jennifer Garner in 13 going on 30–haven’t I seen this before, and wasn’t it called Big last time?*)

Anyhow. If only more weekends could be like this one, although I think it being three days long sort of helps.

* Looking for a suitable link for this film, I stumbled across this heated message board thread on the imdb. I couldn’t be bothered reading the whole thing, but it’s rather amusing anyway–as somebody points out early on: “a flame war on the ’13 going on 30′ message board surely means the end of the world”.