(another section of the painting)(actual size)
March 2009 Archives
![WeDid_Porn_correction[1].jpg](http://fredericksfreisergallery.com/zaxart/sketchbook/WeDid_Porn_correction[1]-thumb-396x576.jpg)
(sketchbook page)
Do you want to know the new ridiculous thing in Hollywood? People who want to make movies about something deciding to hire an artist to make and distribute and sell a comic book first in order to then show the comic book to the movie studio and make them want to make the movie. It's the comic equivalent of a pre-packaged boy band.
In honor of it being Kasimir S. Pulaski Day, I now present some of the accumulated wisdom of Steve Albini:
"Jazz serves a cultural function in the music scene. It is a signifier for musical "adulthood." To embrace jazz is to don a kind of graduation cap, signifying a broadening of tastes outside "mere" rock music. This ostentatious display of "sophistication" is an insult, and I find the graduation cappers transparent and tedious. Certainly there must be interesting music one could call "jazz." There must be. I've never heard it, but I grant that it is out there somewhere.
"Jazz has a non-musical parallel: Christiania, the "free" zone in Copenhagen. In Christiania, like in jazz, there is no law. People are left to their own inventions to create and act as they see fit. In Jazz, the musicians are allowed to improvise over and beside structural elements that may themselves be extemporaneous. Sounds good, doesn't it? Freedom -- sounds good.
"The reality is much bleaker. Christiania is a squalid, trashy string of alleys with rag-and-bone men selling drugs, tie-dye and wretched food. Granted Total Freedom, and this is what they've chosen to do with it, sell hash and lentil soup? Jazz is similar. The results are so far beneath the conception that there is no English word for the disappointment one feels when forced to confront it. Granted Total Freedom, you've chosen to play II V I and blow a goddamn trill on the saxophone? Only by willfully ignoring its failings can one pretend to appreciate it as an idiom and don the cap"."
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""Organizationally we were commited to a few basic principles: Treat everyone with as much respect as he deserves (and no more), Avoid people who appeal to our vanity (they always have an angle), Operate as much as possible apart from the "music scene" (which was never our stomping ground), and take no shit from anyone in the process.
"It meant nothing to us if we were popular or not, or if we sold a million or no records, so we were invulnerable to ploys by music scene weasels to get us to make mistakes in the name of success. To us, every moment we remained unfettered and in control was a success. We never had a manager. We never had a booking agent. We never had a lawyer. We never took an advance from a record company. We booked our own tours, paid our own bills, made our own mistakes and never had anybody shield us from either the truth or the consequences.
"The results of that methodology speak for themselves: Nobody ever told us what to do and nobody took any of our money "
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"Doubt the conventional wisdom unless you can verify it with reason and experiment. "'
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"The woman I am currently crazy about was a vegetarian for a year until I started dating her. As is the case with most vegetarians, she had never eaten properly prepared meat, only commercially packaged or otherwise abused flesh."
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"It betrays hubris on the part of the artist to think his medium is limiting him, and I think we all recognize this."
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"yeah, people are fucking idiots"
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If you've ever heard Big Black, know how lucky you are. If you've never heard Big Black, you're even luckier, because you now you can go listen to "Songs About Fucking" today for the very first time.
(this is a small painting I made called "It Can Be Hard to Describe an Abstract Painting So Your Lazier Critics Pretend They Don't Exist")(the photo is actual size)
