At the end of lunch, the four of us all ended up talking. It was one of those conversations where everyone is very polite, and there’s no expectation that the connection will last after the meal. Well, get this. The guy next to me (who wanted me to share his soup), works for the city in what he calls putrescibles. Until today, I was unaware of this fabulous word. Putrescible. Liable to become putrid.

So what kinda job does he have? He coordinates in moving all of the trash that the city collects from its residents and selling it somewhere else. New York doesn’t let any of its trash stay around here, so they gotta ship it all out. Where does it all go? Down south. Someplace like Georgia. Little towns that don’t have anything, and–let me tell you–we pay a nice amount for that stuff. One day, we’ll start seeing New York incinerate its own garbage and turning it into energy. That’s the future, absolutely. You’ll see. He’s a logistics guy. Served in the army for almost ten years, he says, so he loves this kind of stuff. Going on thirty years. He’s at around eight on a twelve-inch ruler–he holds his arms up like so–and it’ll be a little bit more time before he can, you know, practice his golf swing on a Monday afternoon. But hey, not many places have a pension anymore. Which is why, and he’s saying this to us ’cause we’re still young, you should always save your money.

I wish it wasn’t so late, and I had remembered more of what he said. Putrescibles.

Vladimir Nabokov referred to editors as “pompous avuncular brutes.” T.S. Eliot said that many of them were just “failed writers.” And Kingsley Amis, that laureate of cantankerousness, spoke of how the worst kind

prowls through your copy like an overzealous gardener with a pruning hook, on the watch for any phrase he senses you were rather pleased with, preferably one that also clinches your argument and if possible is essential to the general drift of the surrounding passage.

(From The New York Review of Books.)

Recently, I’ve been experiencing what I’ll call encounters on the Lafayette Street bike lane on my way home. The first is not worth mentioning. The second I found pretty funny.

It was late, maybe eight or eight thirty, and as I’m hauling myself up Lafayette, this white guy on a track bike with massive dreadlocks coasts next to me. “Shit,” he says to me. “It’s not raining, is it?”

I look up and see the clouds in the sky; I feel a little fuzz of rain in the air. “Think so,” I say. We’re pedaling in tandem.

“Just what I needed,” he says. Then he pulls ahead and calls out, “See you later!” He pedals off.

A little farther along, I catch up to him.

“Damn,” he says. “You’re fast on that old clunker.”

“Yeah,” I say. I laugh. It’s true–it’s a heavy bike.

“What’s your name?”

“Thessaly.”

“What?”

“Thessaly. Like with a T.”

“Thessaly. Cool. I’m _____. The famous bike messenger.” We pass Astor Place now, and some pedestrians are standing in the street. “WATCH OUT,” I scream at them. We’re moving quickly. The pedestrians jump back onto the curb, startled.

“Man,” he says. “The best is when they have shopping bags and their arms are raised, and you just go right under them and say, ‘Olé!’ They love that.”

I concede that would be a good trick. He’s got me laughing.

“Well,” I say. We’re by 10th Street. “I’m turning off soon. Nice to meet you ______ the famous bike messenger.”

“Do you live around here?”

“I do.”

“If you ever need some pot,” he says, “I do a door-to-door delivery service.” He reaches into his messenger bag. “Here,” he says, handing me a card as we’re both pedaling up Fourth Avenue. “That’s my buddy’s number but if you ask for me, he’ll be cool.”

I’m a little nervous I won’t be able to take the card as I’m pedaling–we’re both moving pretty quickly–but somehow, I manage to do it without looking like a dork. “Thanks,” I say.

“Later!” he calls, and he pushes off and bikes away.

Or rather, next, next year.

Or never!

• Notification: It’s funny, really, since Google must know that I’m not going to give up my other forms of online communication for their new tool. I am still very dependent on Gmail, chat, and Twitter. It’s annoying there is no outside-the-Wave notification system to alert me that a Wave has been updated or I have been invited to new one. So the best thing you can do is send someone an email saying, “Check your Wave.” Ultimately, someone recommended I try Waveboard, which is helpful, but it’s only available for Macs and iPhones. This is something that should be built into the system. Ideally, I’d like to be pinged by Wave.

• Linking: This builds on my first complaint. If I want someone in a Wave, I have to invite them through Wave. But because notification is only within Wave, and because, realistically, I still primarily rely on email and chat, there is no way to link a Wave to people outside it. I can’t send a chat to someone with a link to a particular Wave. In other words, say I want to alert my co-workers that I have started a new Wave to work on a project with a short deadline. I’ve already invited them, and I know they’re at their desk. They haven’t responded because maybe they’re on email or maybe they’re on the phone. Wave should allow me to have a link to a particular thread so I can chat or email someone and say, “Hey, please join this discussion. I need your input now.” Instead, as the current system works, they have to go to Wave and then find particular Wave I want them to work on, and click on it. This is inefficient!

• Read/Unread: Wave has this annoying bug/feature, where you have to click every single update in the thread before it becomes unread. That is tedious, and ignores the fact that often, when you’re catching up, you skim, since a lot of issues may be resolved by the time you jump in. As someone who is meticulous about keeping Inbox Zero, I have been forced to click “read” on every wave, even though I have already opened and scrolled through it.

Fred and I once met someone who claims they saw Banksy. He had gone to see the Banksy show in L.A. He was flying back (to London I think?) from the show, and he was reading Lauren Collins’s article in The New Yorker when he looked over at the person sitting next to him on the plane. The guy was wearing a hoodie, and he had paint on his hands. They made eye contact, and the guy swears that it was one of those moments where “he knew that I knew that he knew.” Who knows!

Sundance is fun because there aren’t any publicity campaigns telling you what to do, there aren’t critics telling you what to think. You go and you watch. If you don’t like it, you can leave. (And people do.) So I didn’t know what to expect with the Banksy film, but the hype surrounding him in recent years made me skeptical. Hadn’t he sold out?

“Exit Through the Gift Shop” is about a French man living in Los Angeles named Thierry Guetta. He owns a thrift store, has massive sideburns and a paunch, and is obsessed with documenting his life with a video camera. There is no explanation for what he films. There are shots of the toilet being flushed, of him taking a bath with his children. His wife, exasperated, accepts it. His friends learn to ignore the camera. It’s not until Guetta starts filming his cousin, the street artist named Space Invader, that he finds his calling.

Guetta starts telling people he is making a documentary about street art. And through his cousin’s network, he gets access to all kinds of street artists, each with names more awesome than the next: Monsier Andre, Zeus, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, Neckface, Dotmasters, Borf, Buffmonster. These artists agree to let themselves be filmed, despite the fact that what they do is illegal. “Street art has a short life span,” Banksy says at one point. “It needed to be documented. It needed someone who could use a camera.” (Btw–forget any chance of learning Banksy’s identity. He appears in a dark corner, with a black hoodie obscuring his face; his voice is modified.) One of the best things about the movie is the amazing footage Guetta logged: a breathtaking shot of an artist wheat-pasting in the middle of the night from the top of an enormous building; a slap-stick moment of Shepard Fairey on a ladder, pasting up an Obey poster in front of a couple of oblivious cops in broad daylight. It’s funny, daring, and beautiful to watch.

Only one street artist eludes Guetta: Banksy. And Guetta loves Banksy. Like, really, really, really loves him: “He was–He is–He was,” Guetta gushes at one point. “I really like him.” He will do anything to meet Banksy, anything to have the opportunity to film him doing his work.

How Guetta meets Banksy, and how Guetta leverages his connection to Banksy into an enormous art show in downtown Los Angeles with a Warhol-like factory employing dozens of minions, raking in over a million dollars–well, I’ll leave that to the film to explain.

But I will say this: I don’t think Banksy sold out. The film, in a brilliant way, salvages his reputation. Banksy, in casually taking us step by step through Guetta’s journey, slowly pulls the focus of the camera away from himself and onto Guetta and the art world. And Guetta, in emulating Banksy and cashing in on the street art craze, ultimately embodies everything that is rotten about the art industry.

As Nigel says in Spinal Tap, “This one goes to eleven.”

The Egyptian Theatre, with its Art Deco vibe, and old-fashioned seats, is a reminder of what the typical movie experience used to be. The crowd was chatty, and as I sat there, waiting for the premiere to begin (most screenings at Sundance, I learned, don’t start on time, but you still have to get there early), I could hear industry insiders catching up with one another. (The woman behind mentioned her lunch with Michael Moore three times: “He said some really interesting things, things I can’t repeat here.”) Either way, everyone seemed quite pleased that their screening was special enough for Robert Redford to take the stage before its start. He’s quite charming in that all-American way, with his cowboy boots, tousled hair and perfect posture. Here’s what he said to us:

I want to say, this is an opening tonight, the Shorts Program. Maybe a lot of people don’t know that. And there are a lot of things we’re doing differently this year. One of the things we wanted to do, tying to the diversity of Sundance and the fact that we have different types of films–rather than putting all the eggs in one basket—’OK, we’re going to have a grand opening at the Eccles Theatre’–we’re going to have multiple openings featuring the different parts of Sundance that we hold with equal importance. And Shorts is that: equally important. So we’re really happy to have this screening tonight as an opening. I just wanted you to know that.

On the idea of shorts: Over the years Sundance has been committed to forging new ground in film. We started with documentaries in the late eighties on the assumption that documentaries would and should reach the level of narrative films, and find a marketplace.

When we select, we ask people to send tapes and they usually send shorts. So we look at these shorts to evaluate the filmmakers and see if they can come to Sundance. Well, looking at those shorts–it’s very, very impacting, because they are all stories–and it occurred to me a long time ago that this category should be encased and put into a kind of program. That someday there would be a future in the marketplace for them. So we were doing a lot of that for a lot of years and now with the advance in the new technologies and the shortening attention span, now there is a distribution marketplace for shorts. And I think the shorts programs are going to play a greater and greater role.

I think it’s interesting that Redford said this (the bold is mine), in part because YouTube was a big sponsor for the festival this year, but also because I think he’s right. The Internet may have caused a lot of trouble for the movie industry, but I think it is also the perfect home for short films.

I caught a bit of Robert Redford on my Flip camera, too:

Robert Redford at Sundance from Thessaly La Force on Vimeo.