Krumpers, Clowns, Quads, and Quarks

I really couldn't decide whether to classify this post as "Film" or "Sports".  Over the weekend I ended up seeing not one, but two documentaries: "Murderball" and "Rize".   In some sense these couldn't be more different  from one another.  "Murderball", which I saw at the Landmark Sunshine Theater down on Houston St., follows the lives of quadraplegic athletes who have risen to the elite ranks of Quad Rugby (essentially guys in custom wheelchairs who crash into each other -- when not trying to dribble every 10 seconds -- to get a little ball into their endzone).  "Rize" follows the lives of teenage "clown dancers" and "krumpers" as they rebel against dead-end lives in South L.A. by forming various troupes based on a hyperkinetic, and continuously evolving, dance style.  The odd part of seeing these movies in the same weekend was being faced with scoreboards superimposed at the bottom of the screen during climactic moments.  In the Quad Rugby case, it was usually "USA 10, CANADA 9" or something (the North American rivalry being the focus after a championship USA QR player defected to coach Team Canada after being cut from the US team).  In the Rize case, it was "CLOWNS 7, KRUMPERS 4", these being the competing factions (of course the oldest Krumpers having apprenticed in the group of Tommy the Clown, inventor of...well you get the picture).  So you see what I mean about not being sure if this post was about Film or Sports?

The thing which really struck me after walking out of Rize on Sunday night was that I had just paid $10+ each to see two documentaries in real movie theaters.  Where were the Hollywood products that I was trained to see?  And then I realized that I hadn't seen a good (original - remakes don't count) story coming out of Hollywood in a long time.  Even "Crash", which I also saw recently, had an elegant Altmanesque interweaving of multiple storylines that danced around each other and eventually all converged, but you could sort of see it coming, and you knew that the screenwriter knew that you wanted them to converge, to reach some satisfaction.  These documentaries, while not devoid of cheesy dramatic devices (e.g. scoreboards), which were introduced by clever deployment of footage gathered over years, boggled my mind since I couldn't imagine anyone making them up -- or if someone had, no-one would consider them plausible.  And yet, the Quad Rugby league is international, and these guys meet beautiful girls in bars and in the league -- i.e. the world has caught up with them. And yet, the Clowns and Krumpers compete in huge sports arenas, dragging most of LA's teenagers to come watch.  These are mass phenomena, even if you and me in the masses haven't heard of them yet.

So here's the sleight of hand where I make this a Quantum Diaries post, rather than a "what I did this weekend" post.  As we've been prepare for this year's Quark Matter conference, upcoming in August in Budapest, Hungary, which may be our last one for PHOBOS as a working experiment, I've been reflecting on how strange each of them have been in the last five years.  You walk into the conference with one picture of how the world is, based on the experimental data you're familiar with and scores of papers by theoretical physicists trying both to describe the world as it is, and how it really should be (if you could ignore certain pesky features of the data...)  And then you see a talk which shows you some facts that just don't "make sense", so clearly no-one could have made them up -- and suddenly you can't remember *not* knowing that fact as your previous view of things morphs to accomodate it, recontextualizing some of those old facts, and seriously problematizing some of those theory papers you've held so close.  So given the various rumors I've heard about how weird the copper-copper collisions are, which were meant to be so much smaller than gold-gold, and thus somehow simpler (or more like proton-proton) collisions to think about, I'm expecting nothing less this year. 

Kind of like being in a documentary, but the director is still getting more footage.

Comments

[wrekle$$ king neo]

ohh hell ye i could use dragon ass a krumper in our crew wrekless we do talent shows check us out at my space.com my email is wrekless_baller@yahoo.com password battleking please get a my space and send me a messege!!!!!i beg...lol...jk...peaceout dragon rize till we die yea

[Lil viche]

hey dis be lil viche out from New Zealand commenting on the way use have brought out Krump and clowning to express your anger having a story behind it. man use don't know how it has made me realise it's time to get out there and krump for God there is so much that we could do to change the way people look at dance bringing it down to business and al but dis be the new meaning to dance praising God through KRUMPING lil viche!!!
hola @ faith_strengf@hotmail.com

[jose torres]

i like the clowns and the krumpers all u guys do a good job and the girls 2

[shequille]

tight eyez da shit dancer my name is shequille my krumper name is lil miss