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In this Discussion
- 000 May 2013
- flossy_log_lady May 2013
- Leland May 2013
- MirandaJuly May 2013
- swamp_knobbler_mahan May 2013
- the_owls May 2013
- ThickeningAgent May 2013
- UncleBoatShoes2011 May 2013
- YoursTruly May 2013
- zin May 2013
Harry Smith Seance - May 16 7pm @ H'wood Theatre
Hello friends,
I know there is an important musical show this Thursday, but if you can find time to attend two events, you might consider coming to the Harry Smith Seance at the Hollywood Theatre. The show starts at 7pm and you can find more details here:
http://hollywoodtheatre.org/harry-smith-seance/
Matt Carlson (of Golden Retriever) and Jordan Dykstra (of Jordan Dykstra) will be providing live musical accompaniment for HEAVEN AND EARTH MAGIC. I have attended a rehearsal and it sounds super, super cool. There will also be some live slide projection color and masking effects that will give the event a special performative air.
Also, if you want to go to an afternoon thing instead, there will be a panel on the topic of "Harry Smith in the Pacific Northwest," also at the Hollywood, starting at 3pm:
http://hollywoodtheatre.org/harry-smith-in-the-pacific-northwest/
They are going to be showing the short experimental documentary for which I recently did the sound design: HARRY SMITH OF THE GUIDE: FIELD RECORDINGS AND A LOCATION. It's a very short (7 min.) short, providing an impressionistic account of Harry Smith's time in Bellingham, WA.
Thank you,
Andrew
I know there is an important musical show this Thursday, but if you can find time to attend two events, you might consider coming to the Harry Smith Seance at the Hollywood Theatre. The show starts at 7pm and you can find more details here:
http://hollywoodtheatre.org/harry-smith-seance/
Matt Carlson (of Golden Retriever) and Jordan Dykstra (of Jordan Dykstra) will be providing live musical accompaniment for HEAVEN AND EARTH MAGIC. I have attended a rehearsal and it sounds super, super cool. There will also be some live slide projection color and masking effects that will give the event a special performative air.
Also, if you want to go to an afternoon thing instead, there will be a panel on the topic of "Harry Smith in the Pacific Northwest," also at the Hollywood, starting at 3pm:
http://hollywoodtheatre.org/harry-smith-in-the-pacific-northwest/
They are going to be showing the short experimental documentary for which I recently did the sound design: HARRY SMITH OF THE GUIDE: FIELD RECORDINGS AND A LOCATION. It's a very short (7 min.) short, providing an impressionistic account of Harry Smith's time in Bellingham, WA.
Thank you,
Andrew
Comments
Entertaining but not very cohesive. Also, kind of intense awkward part addressing the audience and insisting that he didn't care about us or our opinions of him (which is TOTALLY FINE), but it was followed by an hour of self-justification/defense. But I kept falling asleep due to the warm, dark room and 2 pregame ciders, so better to ask the boys.
Also, Mike was annoyed by the old, goofy audience shuffling around and holding full-on conversations and participating too much and decided to be crotchety about Portland's old art-goers.
SORRY GARY
For some reason, experimental music is easier for me to access than film, perhaps because I can just put it on in the background and I don't have to give it all of my attention?
*Exception: I love George Kuchar because his movies are campy, shitty, and full of toilet humor.
The monologue was all very closely connected to his Apple scandal and various ways that he's dealing with it. He tried tearing down journalism, to bring journalists closer to his level. (They lie through omission, mainly.) But, of course, he adores journalists, he pointed out repeatedly. He educated us on the theater — that audiences understand that what he says on stage is not literal fact. He elicited sympathy from the audience by talking about his suicidal feelings. He connected himself and his career to that of Spalding Gray, something I've heard him do before. He pointed out that the performance was not an apology, but referred us to his previous apology. He said he never should have said things to the media that were untrue.
In the end, he said he thinks he had a bigger impact than if he hadn't lied. The focus of his work, at this point, is to address the problem that there is no labor journalism, just business journalism. He will go to Bangladesh.
There are some that are too impenetrable or boring or obnoxious or pretentious-in-a-bad-way and almost all of them are too long, but for the most part I am pretty "in" now. Gary watches SO MANY and I watch a lot of them with him and there are so many amazing ones. So exciting to see stuff that challenges you and forces you to think!!! Thinking hard when you aren't given many clues as to what you're supposed to be thinking ABOUT is uncomfortable and I think a lot of the time we can be too quick to write something off that is just asking us to really ponder it. At least, this is what my experience has been--I would find myself resisting being asked to confront my own assumptions about what a movie is supposed to be, etc., and once I stopped resisting I gained a ton of entry into what I had previously found impenetrable and tedious.
Also I wonder what you really mean by "experimental film." What would be a definition of that term? I would argue that all kinds of films are actually highly experimental, if we're taking as our normative standard some kind of Hollywood narrative structure. "Southland Tales" is very experimental, e.g. Is Guy Maddin "experimental?" He's not popular or mainstream but is that the same thing as "experimental?" His movies tell very straightforward stories but they look very weird, etc. etc.
Also Alex what experimental music are you talking about? Would love to know details
Stuff I still can't get into no matter how I try:
- Hollis Frampton
- Various orgy documentaries from the 60s (I don't want to see that many cervixes and limp penises and why is everyone in facepaint, god, the 60s are horrible)
- anything Godard made after he stopped being a young asshole and became a middle aged/old asshole
- anything along the Mirror Father Mirror lines, which, lets face it, any given "weirdo art scene" is going to have its share of Mirror Father Mirrors
Then again I kind of love Mirror Father Mirror
Tim Hecker
Loscil
Pete Swanson
Grouper
Aphex Twinmans
Daniel Menche
Rob Walmart
Fennesz
Enya
Dr Octagon
White Rimbus
Peace
Eats Tapes
Lloyd + Michael
Other weird noise/techno/string-based shit I don't remember the name of but I saw at Valentines or Holocene or whatever
Also Olivia Tremor Control are super poppy but also did some very weird sound/tape collage stuff.
I was so excited initially by the disembodied voice we heard welcoming us I thought the whole evening would be very "produced" in a fun way but that soon slipped away to people introducing people introducing people introducing people about the idolotry of Smith but it didn't seem like that much about his actual work was thought about.
The first two short films were nice.
The long film was good but long. I thought the music was great. I appreciated that they went to extremes to present it with the extra projections but those were sometimes distracting and I'm just not the best theatre watcher so i dipped in and out of rapt attention. I liked it but didn't love it.
I much enjoyed some experimental films programs I've seen in the last couple years like the Cinema Projects program last year with 2 nights of experimental films from Los Angeles called Inner & Outer Space (Great!) and Andrew Ritchey's series he put together called Sound, Sound, Sound, Sound, Screen! at YU some months ago. Yet I've still very much an experimental film novice.
Yeah, UBS, so true, re the introducing of introducing and the betrayal of the fun promise of the opening!!
I loved the movie but it was way too long. Then again I think this about so many movies!! I always feel betrayed by it, because I'm like "I AM LOVING THIS!" but then 3 more hours go by and by the end I am like "HOW DARE A PERSON MAKE SOMETHING THIS LONG"
The sound and music was wonderful. So good!
Gary's talk at the all-day event was really fun too.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1082&bih=594&q=harry+smith&oq=harry+smith&gs_l=img.3..0l10.567.1641.0.2048.11.8.0.1.1.0.153.821.5j3.8.0...0.0...1ac.1.14.img.26dELCa6goM#imgrc=L2AW66Xh-idnTM:;ULkNi6AQHXPhUM;http%3A%2F%2Fwww.queuedebeton.com%2Fcockrock%2Fsmith-w-milk.jpg;http%3A%2F%2Fblog.wfmu.org%2Ffreeform%2F2011%2F06%2Fharry-smith-the-paracelsus-of-the-chelsea-hotel-.html;425;457
Did anyone ever listen to the band The Gongs? I thought that was pretty listenable experimental music from an academic origin.
Unfortunately, only the first few hundred words of this piece are out in the public garden. The rest are locked behind a pay wall. Maybe one of the academics among us would consider releasing a copy....
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/apr/09/recapturing-the-american-sound/?pagination=false
This article got me imagining parallels between many of the 1960's artist's identification of Authentic Practice in the Hootenany's and rare transcriptions of early 20th Century blues, bluegrass and gospel and the Alternative Generation's identification of Authentic Practice in the networks of punk shows and houses and rare transcriptions of independently produced dystopian social music of the early 1980's.
I also love that he was transcribing his Lummi neighbors' indigenous language and performance in his mid teens in Bellingham. And then later I imagine him carting home boxes of rare lacquer recordings from his day job at Boeing, such records as were coming from around the country to be melted down for aircraft building materials during World War II.
It's hard not to make him the super deity of all arty northwest nerd boys. Fortunately his big hand-painted amphetamine dirt leaf batik found filmstock movies are so boring or we'd have all grown up with linoleum kitchen counters based on his imagery IN ADDITION TO all the interminable baby boom careers launched by covering songs from the recordings he collected.