Danny MacAskill – Bike rider extraordinaire….

Another video and TV related post, I’m afraid (I do do other things with my evenings, honest) but I saw this guy on TV last night and just had to put his video where I knew I could find it easily.

It speaks for itself really, bike skills like I’ve never seen before…

There are lots of other videos of Danny doing crazy stuff on YouTube (this one filmed in Edinburgh is pretty awesome) but for me, the jump from one train track to the other with a 180 turn and the trick where he rides along the cable in the video below are truly amazing.. In fact I’m still not wholly convinced they didn’t use trick photography……

Banksy TV & Logorama

We watched Banksy’s “Exit through the gift shop” last night on Channel 4, as the artist himself took control of the station for a few hours.

Not seen the film before, and I’m not wholly convinced it wasn’t a complete set up, designed to both take the piss out of the art buying public whilst simultaneously upping the status of both Banksy and Shepard Fairey (he of the ubiquitous Obey design)…

If you haven’t seen it, the documentary approach of the film revolves around the story of Thierry a French cameraman who started filming graffiti artists “back in the day”, before a chance meeting with Banksy provided him with an opportunity to make a film about the street art/ graffiti movement. The film as it turned out was so atrocious that Banksy himself persuades Thierry to give up film making and become a graffiti artist …. which he then does so successfully that he sells one million dollars of work over the week long period of his first ever show…

All very enjoyable, but I thought it all seem rather contrived, all fitting together rather too nicely… The internet is full of theories of course, but in the end it doesn’t really matter, Banksy wins either way…

If it was genuine then it was a good story and well worth watching. If it was a hoax, and the LA public fell for it, buying derivative work from an unknown artist, then more fool them. But you could also argue that if it was a hoax and the work really was by Banksy and Fairey, then paying a couple of hundred dollars for some of their work is probably a bit of a bargain…

Part of Banksy’s programming for Channel 4 last night, included this rather excellent short called Logorama,  in which almost every aspect of the beautifully crafted and animated film is a recognisable corporate logo…

See how many you can count before the land falls into the sea and everyone dies…