Morning, folks!
Behold, the iPad’s new killer app: censorship activism! On Saturday, two men showed the controversial, Christ-composting video, A Fire in My Belly, on an iPad in the National Portrait Gallery to protest its much-ballyhooed removal from the museum’s new “Hide/Seek” exhibit. The men were then themselves removed and asked never to return.
Another activist was later arrested for taking out his own iPad and showing a video of the previous pair of activists showing the video on their iPad.
Just kidding, that last part didn’t happen. Still, if you want to see the film that launched a thousand tweets, the Manhattan-based gallery P.P.O.W. is streaming it on its website.
The Kennedy Center awards were last night. WaPo has interviews with two of the honorees, Merle Haggard and Sir Paul McCartney, as well as a tribute to the Beatles’ first visit to D.C. in 1964, when they played the Washington Coliseum—a venue that has not aged nearly as gracefully as McCartney has.
New York Times Magazine, meanwhile, profiles Mick Jagger—painting the flamboyant sexigenarian as a master entrepreneur who, unlike some of his contemporaries, was never bashful about commercialism and has thus made a big pile of money without ever allowing himself to be pegged as a sellout. To wit:
It is not clear… that Jagger was ever that serious about insurrection. Others may have seen the Stones’ music as a sacred repository of anti-establishment values, but for his part, Jagger has always seemed much more interested in rock ’n’ roll as theater, as performance — as show business.
All this might help explain why Shine A Light is such a vital film… and perhaps why Stones in Exile is such a crappy one. Jagger never fancied himself king of the underground. (BTW, mythological indie spectre Jeff Mangum played a surprise show in Brooklyn on Friday!) He can have his $310 million gorgeous, gigantic girlfriend cake and eat it too.
Anyway, according to a new study from a bunch of Oxford physicists, history is not linear but cyclical, with the universe dying and being reborn over and over and over again. So, yeah, have a good Monday.