Saturday, April 23, 2005
L.A. readers who see this in the next three hours: consider heading over to Vancouver artist Carrie Walker's opening tonight.
~~~
Beside-reread Paul Auster's New York Trilogy over the last week. Not sure why, maybe the noir connection, though I hadn't remembered that one of the narrators pauses to recount the entire plot of Out of The Past. What's relevant here is this passage from The Locked Room:
"Only darkness has the power to make a man open his heart to the world, and darkness is what surrounds me whenever I think of what happened." Wonder which Mekon read this? More evidence, a few paragraphs earlier: "I spend that night in Sophie's bed, and from then on it became impossible to leave it."
~~~
Thought of linking to any number of post-EMP roundups, but Barbara Flaska has done the job for me. Just a few out of many:
Oliver Wang supplies the soundtrack to Matos' "Apache" breakdown. Teamwork!
J-Shep posts Shayla's photos. I look like I'm planning to solve a crime before returning to tending my orchids. Re comments: Jessica, there's a law -- like a law of physics, I mean -- against photos of me dancing circulating on the interweb. Unless I'm doing "The Sacramento Stomp"; maybe next year.
Speaking of J-Hop, see her before and after for totes zhivago perspectives on D. Thomas and the infamous DQV. In the face of at least three people I respect giving Thomas a thumbs-down, I'll just register that I had mixed feelings about his talk: As a performance, it scored, as one would expect, and I was genuinely glad to see the surviving Ghoulardi footage after reading accounts of Cleveland horror-hosts in Cle and Wind-Up Toy; but I was not crazy about his closed-off attitude during the q&a about competing accounts of punk and his hometown's place therein, though he played it for laughs. Explicable, but not excusable. And no, making interviewers cry, not good -- I've done two phoners w/ him over the years, one (for the minor Ubu album Ray Gun Suitcase) pretty bland, the other (for the L.A. version of the Distastodrome! minifest) more engaging but essentially canned. I could go on about which of his recent incarnations I still think have juice (hint: not '90s-'00s Ubu), but that wasn't the point at hand.
Douglas distills Daphne Brooks' presentation (I was in and out of several sessions at the time, only saw half) down to a notion of how 'rockism' might be used in a more limited, hence more useful way; I was calling it 'rockonormativity.' I think I had some other conversation about whether a artist/recording could be rockist, or only a critic/response -- the second was argued, but I think the first is possible. I gather it's already an injoke over at ILM to raise mock-earnest questions about the meaning of 'rockism' -- it's ovah, it's, you know, corny.
That said, the inevitable afterthoughts thread over there was worth a skim, inc. some not-too-defensive rebuttal from Justin Farrar.
~~~
Dialogue notes on The Dark Corner (1946), deciphered from what I could write on a coffee cup in the dark: "I'm playing by the book, and I won't even trip over a comma." "There's a pepper-pot under this hat." "Lovers of beauty never haggle over price." "It was a busto-crusto." "How I hate the dawn...The grass looks as though it had been left out all night." "I didn't think he'd take a brody. He came out of there like a hot rivets. Funny, I never yet seen one of those guys bounce." (I think you can guess which of these lines was spoken by Clifton Webb's art dealer; moral of the movie was, in essence, never trust an aesthete.) Sidelights -- in nightclub scene, Teddy Wilsonish piano jazz by one Eddie Heywood, will have to look into his recordings. Based on a story by Leo Rosten (The Joys of Yiddish), who, oddly, also wrote the screenplay to last night's second feature, Douglas Sirk's Lured with its remarkable, freakish Boris Karloff set-piece.
~~~
Beside-reread Paul Auster's New York Trilogy over the last week. Not sure why, maybe the noir connection, though I hadn't remembered that one of the narrators pauses to recount the entire plot of Out of The Past. What's relevant here is this passage from The Locked Room:
"Only darkness has the power to make a man open his heart to the world, and darkness is what surrounds me whenever I think of what happened." Wonder which Mekon read this? More evidence, a few paragraphs earlier: "I spend that night in Sophie's bed, and from then on it became impossible to leave it."
~~~
Thought of linking to any number of post-EMP roundups, but Barbara Flaska has done the job for me. Just a few out of many:
Oliver Wang supplies the soundtrack to Matos' "Apache" breakdown. Teamwork!
J-Shep posts Shayla's photos. I look like I'm planning to solve a crime before returning to tending my orchids. Re comments: Jessica, there's a law -- like a law of physics, I mean -- against photos of me dancing circulating on the interweb. Unless I'm doing "The Sacramento Stomp"; maybe next year.
Speaking of J-Hop, see her before and after for totes zhivago perspectives on D. Thomas and the infamous DQV. In the face of at least three people I respect giving Thomas a thumbs-down, I'll just register that I had mixed feelings about his talk: As a performance, it scored, as one would expect, and I was genuinely glad to see the surviving Ghoulardi footage after reading accounts of Cleveland horror-hosts in Cle and Wind-Up Toy; but I was not crazy about his closed-off attitude during the q&a about competing accounts of punk and his hometown's place therein, though he played it for laughs. Explicable, but not excusable. And no, making interviewers cry, not good -- I've done two phoners w/ him over the years, one (for the minor Ubu album Ray Gun Suitcase) pretty bland, the other (for the L.A. version of the Distastodrome! minifest) more engaging but essentially canned. I could go on about which of his recent incarnations I still think have juice (hint: not '90s-'00s Ubu), but that wasn't the point at hand.
Douglas distills Daphne Brooks' presentation (I was in and out of several sessions at the time, only saw half) down to a notion of how 'rockism' might be used in a more limited, hence more useful way; I was calling it 'rockonormativity.' I think I had some other conversation about whether a artist/recording could be rockist, or only a critic/response -- the second was argued, but I think the first is possible. I gather it's already an injoke over at ILM to raise mock-earnest questions about the meaning of 'rockism' -- it's ovah, it's, you know, corny.
That said, the inevitable afterthoughts thread over there was worth a skim, inc. some not-too-defensive rebuttal from Justin Farrar.
~~~
Dialogue notes on The Dark Corner (1946), deciphered from what I could write on a coffee cup in the dark: "I'm playing by the book, and I won't even trip over a comma." "There's a pepper-pot under this hat." "Lovers of beauty never haggle over price." "It was a busto-crusto." "How I hate the dawn...The grass looks as though it had been left out all night." "I didn't think he'd take a brody. He came out of there like a hot rivets. Funny, I never yet seen one of those guys bounce." (I think you can guess which of these lines was spoken by Clifton Webb's art dealer; moral of the movie was, in essence, never trust an aesthete.) Sidelights -- in nightclub scene, Teddy Wilsonish piano jazz by one Eddie Heywood, will have to look into his recordings. Based on a story by Leo Rosten (The Joys of Yiddish), who, oddly, also wrote the screenplay to last night's second feature, Douglas Sirk's Lured with its remarkable, freakish Boris Karloff set-piece.
