a rant
last night the collective turned up for a ridiculous pr event for the philadelphia live arts/fringe festival.
which we are playing sept 11-12
(reflex plug, like a headless chicken walking around)
amira and laura did a duet reading. no-one could hear laura because she stood to the side of the microphone. it did not really matter, given the space.
brett and i did not play.
it was one of those events that began as awful awful awful and managed somehow to transcend that, achieving a level of foulness that makes you question why you do anything that would bring you into any contact with these people ever.
it was one of those evenings that starts off bad and ends by engendering a series of questions concerning one's committment to doing a performance based artform at all. this is accomplished by presenting a situation far beyond the boundaries that one draws in order to maintain a serious committment to something in a space of general indifference....why bother to work on music or poetry or anything?
why bring any of it out when your stuff is framed by the aggressive mediocrity of folk like this? no matter what you do, it gets flattened back into this one-dimensional space moderated by braying idiots proud of their idiocy, secure in it, revelling in it microphone empowered.
"do not worry...hahaha.....just sit and have another drink......we are all in this together.......i dont get it either.......hahaha."
we were there to shill.
i am pretty sure that the only people in the place were also there to shill their shows. so we shilled each other.
it was like practicing.
we did get a cd copy of some of our stuff to a columnist who writes for a weekly pseudo-hip paper in philly.
a columnist whose column i read but never like.
whose sole virtue in this case is that he exists.
but that was ok.
relatively speaking.
mangled fragment of a conversation with the columnist, after the usual introductions and coded acknowledgements of mutual indifference:
the guy: so did someone inform you of my listening habits?
[this with an air that indicates his assumption that he is such a big deal in this miserable backwater of a city that any and all personal habits are transmitted through social circuits that always always buzz buzz buzz]
me: um.......no.
[at which point a shift in tone, like a needle had been moved from one track to another, almost the same, but not quite...]
the guy: this sounds great--i'll check it out.
[[[[later]]]]
me: so what do you listen to?
the guy: o everything from britney to brand nubian. i write for alot of music magazines you see.
[i thought about making some joke concerning his working his way through the letter b. and was inclined to take the cd back. somehow i refrained on both counts. i am learning.]
here ends the summary of the evening's positive parts.
then there was the rest of it.
allegory is best in a situation of irritation, i think,
a single instance that stands for the whole.
one act was a guy playing an oud.
oud:
http://www.kairarecords.com/oudpage/Oud.htm
the hosts did not know what an oud was.
they yelled at the crowd for a while about not knowing what an oud was.
"we do not know what an oud is" they said. "hahaha"
"this is an oud" the oud player said.
"what is that?"
"this is."
so he played two pieces
the first was indeed an oud piece.
the player claimed it was based loosely on indian forms, but did not say which, and proceeded to play a piece full of led zeppelin quotes.
for the second, he switched to hand drum, and played a series of generic patterns.
he was joined by a local Jazz Musician, who plays far too often out, who turns up everywhere playing the same basic thing--in this case, he played "night in tunisia" over the drum patterns, ornamented with a sequences of modal patterns.
the hosts began trying to act like they were doing drunken impersonations of belly dancing.
hahaha.
there is layer on layer of being-patronised in this little story.