I watched the Velvet Underground documentary and The Reuben back to back. I like music and skateboarding but not the kind that you hear in stores or on sports broadcasts. Pastiche. This word comes up in VU reviews because it sounds tony. They were called dangerous too.
The Reuben—the sandwich and the video—is very New York. It’s a pastiche of dial-up modem America but not dangerous like doing heroin is. There’s a Bronze animation of a dude shooting up a skateboard bolt. I think.
Bronze is odd… or maybe that’s just how Mr. Sidlauskas makes videos. They’re never hit-or-miss, just different levels of great. The Reuben stands out because it’s the same but different. It begins like an Antihero video minus the outdoorsperson vibe. It ends with a trick down a double set that feels very suburban. It’s a great trick done well.
In 1966 The Velvet Underground played San Francisco for the first time. The hippies hated them:
“We spoke two completely different languages,” Mary Woronov,a dancer with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, said. “We were on amphetamine and they were on acid. They were so slow to speak with these wide-open eyes—‘Oh, wow!’—so into their ‘vibrations’; we spoke in rapid machine-gun fire about books and paintings and movies. They were into ‘free’ and the American Indian and ‘going back to the land’ and trying to be some kind of ‘true, authentic’ person; we could not have cared less about that. They were homophobic; we were homosexual. They were eating bread they had baked themselves—and we never ate at all!” - The New Yorker 12.08.2015
I don’t know what the rest of the world thinks of The Reuben because I live in New York City. Josh Wilson kind of skates like Lou Reed.
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