...Versus Getting Away from It (Some Afterthoughts on the Prior Post)

And there are a lot reasons why cinematic treatments of art are often so terrible. One is that seems that the people who write these films don't understand their subject matter, or grossly misjudge how to get it across on film. Usually you get some naively starry-eyed romanticization of it all, or some pathetically misfired attempt at satirizing the artworld and how it supposedly operates. (Or in some instances, a deeply confused combination of the two.) The video above somewhat follows in this latter mould, but unlike most art-related films I can think of, it's actually somewhat enjoyable to watch.


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The parodic gist of the Modeselektor video brings to mind the recent craze for art fairs, since that's obviously what helped inspire the thing. I went to a few art fairs back in the mid-to-late 1990s, and soon decided that I'd be better off avoiding them as much as possible in the future. Little did I know at the time that they were about to become the "wave of the future." And in recent years, a lot of critics and artists and various artworld people have decried the rise of the art fair. Reputedly a lot of gallerists hate them too, but feel that they're a "necessary evil" in keeping their businesses operating and economically afloat.

Everything's AOR

A little dearth in activity on this end, on account of being out of town, fighting off the threat of a seasonal malady, and just generally recalibrating on a few things. A few things for the outboard spots -- small, tangential, music-related. First, a casual overview of the work of James 'Blood' Ulmer, which was prompted by the big "guitar solo" theme they've been doing the past two weeks. (The a similar thing about guitar riffs last year.) Everyone's been joining into this one -- Carl, Wayne, even Dominic Fox, and Simon has (once again) run off with the ball on his own arc, going so far as to field a wide array of associates and musicians on the matter.

Additionally, a couple of choices from the 1970s punk canon, as well as some sidenotes on the whole matter of geetar solos (a and b).

Update / Addendum: Admittedly, this is all a little (as they say) "outside my comfort zone." For the most part, solos (in rock, anyway) have never been something I've gravitated to, ever given much consideration. I mean, I think the breaks or solos when they somehow manage to extend the energy or melody of a tune, yet somehow also do a little work with expanding upon or even compressing it. But I never regarded it as a thing-in-itself, regarded it in any other terms than in relation to the overall gestalt of a song/composition. Like I said, I often feel like I'm missing a key chromosome in this area.

So it's funny to read Simon more-or-less echoing some of my own ambivalence on the matter. There's plenty I might add in terms of the history of such stuff, but yes I believe he's narrowing in on the crux of it all by suspecting that Hendrix and the Brit blues-rock scene of the 1960s played a big part in steering things in a particular direction. As far as his remarks about such tendencies being largely absent in rock's early day, I'm not so sure. Having once (and very briefly) owned a copy of the album below, I'm inclined to say it was there (kinda, sorta...implicitly) in some form or another from the start...

...When you bring Jimi Hendrix and the blues-rock movement into the matter, however, a few problematic issues arise. Greg Tate addressed one such issue as it related to the former some years ago (and suffered a backlash from Hendrix worshipers as a result), and Phil Knight recently floated out a highly interesting, unorthodox take on the latter buried in one of his recent posts over at Faces on Posters.