Supporting Rolê

I've been neglecting the blog again, partly because of being overworked, partly because I've been writing other stuff and partly because I enjoy taking a break from it every so often. At the weekend I went to see Bonde do Rolê play a free gig at Parc André Citroën, which, given that it cost me absolutely nothing, was probably the most rewarding gig I've ever been at, not least because we got to have a very drunken natter with them afterwards. The music, by the by, was great too, as their debut album, 'Bonde do Rolê with Lasers' is.

I also saw a superb French documentary about American political opinion entitled Kings of the World, filmed in the month before the 2004 presidential elections. It is refreshingly lacking in lazy European preconceptions about Americans and it benefits from having an amazing cast of ordinary Joes and Joannas to interview, the pick of whom are a witty, Union-supporting cocktail waitress from Reno, Nevada; a boorish, cantankerous Bush-supporting beef rancher also from Nevada; a cross-dressing performance artist from Salt Lake City, and a multi-racial liberal family from San Francisco, whose dinner party even manages to sound interesting. Filmed on what I can only imagine was a shoestring, it is a gripping piece of incisive reportage that is a fitting successor to those great French studies of American society conducted by Tocqueville, Derrida, Baudrillard and Louis Malle.

Here's the video for Bonde do Rolê's 'Office Boy' for diversion: