Month of November, 2003

post from the Blisscent mailing list:

November 2nd 2003

I regretfully announce the closing of my store, See Hear. The fallout of an ill-fated business expansion onto St. Marks Place in the 1990s coupled with the economic fallout of 9-11 has made it next to impossible to run a viable small-bookstore business.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all of the customers of See Hear, and the supporters of fringe publications, who've come into the shop or done business with the store via the internet over the years.

it seems to me sometimes, that rock criticism is a pointless function in a world over-saturated with different ways to tabulate taste, none of which look towards the culture bearers or so called experts. being an expert is something of a stigma, actually, as eclecticism and outsiderness, the huge push of critics away from their 'rockist' pasts to their '-hoppist' posturing in an attempt to stay young and, dare i say, relevant.

hot off the presses is the high low culture backlash of the nytimes critics

this is just the type of thing you want to be watching while reviewing meandering albums. it'll keep you from those godforsaken visual to musical metaphors we all slip to sometimes.

finally saw the matrix this evening and it wasn't terribly terrible. things ought not swarm like that, i think. amusing that they laid off the crappy techno and went for the low impact orchestral/choral aspect, aka, imbuing the mundane with the epic. reminds me of the last cremaster film, which was just as obtuse as the rest but held together by that dark, awesome opera. all things should be staged thus...like the bergman version of 'the magic flute,' which i have to get my hands on sometime soon.

in more news of the weird, my hometown has it's own scene report, which doesn't even look that lame. the nyabinghi is a great little club if you ever blow through on I-80 on tour or towards points west, stop by to meet some real hardcore biker types who do a mean karaoke.

ahh, i'm so deep in shit reading about SoundScan and Big Champagne for...ick....a paper

but check out

this article by my friend chris, who writes with an amused distance about the disgusting worship of limited distribution. all hail the obscure (drunken and rambling!)

from the Soleilmoon catalog listing from this week:

05339 GRIDLOCK Formless CD 12.99