just got back from a party where we watched "it's a great pumpkin, charlie brown," and you know, that snoopy as WWI flying ace sequence still weirds me out. there's so much space, slow pacing, in that cartoon, and the jokes are positively two-dimensional. it was actually sort of painful, like going back to read something you wrote five years ago. i'm still waiting for someone to sit in the pumpkin patch with me though - i believe!
saw dig! with some of the girl groupers after our totally amazing fall 04 meeting (at the city bakery, good times). courtney taylor (from the dandy warhols) narrates what becomes sort of a ridiculous, super rock-ist fetishization of his friend anton newcombe (brian jonestown massacre)'s madness. newcombe's messed up, violent, drug-addled garbage is not hidden from the camera and after watching about 30 minutes of his kicking fan's heads, screaming at girlfriends and harassing bandmembers, i was both annoyed that anyone would allow him to continue treating him that way (classic abuse - no one wanted to leave because they all believed he was a genius) and glad to have the evidence on hand so that anyone who really wanted to glorify the band in the future would have to contend with newcombe's fucked up behavior. still, the whole thing was so 'the last REAL rock band left on earth,' which is just b.o.r.i.n.g. to me. the david lachapelle video shots for the dandys were hilarious, as was courtney's sort of effusive descriptions of how awesome and well-adjusted his band was. afterwards, caryn talked about how all the cool bands in portland hated the dandys, but how they all now admit that they wished their projects had been successful like the dandys had been.
in other news, the arts section of the times today was totally gay, including this Tommasini review of ""The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music and National Identity." Notice how Tommasini refuses to contribute any praise or damnation about the scholarship of this book, although his mention of 70 pages of footnotes (musicologists are the antithesis of critics, they can and do back up EVERYTHING they say with actual research and evidence. imagine! how awful that would be! for rock!). He seems to pussyfoot around the idea of compositional methods having gender associations (while i'm sure danny tenaglia's ears are just tuned for such things) and ends with this circular argument (extra-textual, a whole world of boing argument in musicology that totally ignores reception history/theory):
"Ultimately, what we may most value about music is that it moves us in powerful but indistinct ways. It's the one thing that cannot be analyzed or deconstructed for its expressive content, and thank goodness for that."
Brahahahaha. Who's we? What's value? (what's music, har har) and why's he so thankful?
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