Behind The Critic
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NEXT »: Literacy Patrol - What's-It-All-Mean Edition
Geeks Redux
Gee, I wish I had come up with a title like "Blood Sucking Geeks." Cool or what? That the entry was so feistily, fiercely smart was almost a bonus. Still trying to figure out this blog: does it make more sense to confine one's comments to arts journalism or to practice it here, like Bob did, by writing about something artistic? I can't say I've been knocked over by much I've seen here in Berlin, which doesn't shake my faith that this is a happening a world center for innovative arts: I either hit a lull or guessed wrong. One thing I would wish for German (European, really) stage directors, composers, writers, artists et al. is to throw off the weight of their past, at least a little. Not so much Nazism and such, but the entire load of Western civilization, which too many young artists seem compelled to consider or rebel against or radically re-interpret. Whatever they do, it's always there, sucking blood. Americans may be ignorant of the past, but that ignorance sometimes frees them to do truly original work.
Far as I'm concerned, my post was about arts journalism--it dealt entirely with the record's press coverage. I expect to do such stuff a lot here--seems completely within NAJP's purview. But I wouldn't limit myself to it--sometimes a comment on an artistic event might well be appropriate, or at least irresistible.
I was last in town for the Berlin Electronic Music Festival in 2005; impressed me how techno and its related micro-genres seemed almost to have become the city's folk music (ie: history begins post-WWII).
Noted that one of the rhythmic motifs in a lot of this stuff was sampled from/inspired by the sound of ping-pong, which is apparently quite popular. Something very comforting---indeed, folksy---about that sound...