I've never seen a show succeed in pointing out all of the posers among the audience as well as this show.
About 40 minutes into the set of improv noisy jamming, people started to slowly trickle out of the auditorium. They were trying to be sneaky about it at first, slowly became more obvious about it, and eventually getting to the point of being all hipster art-fag-ish snotty with their exit. Meaning some woman and her dude left out of the exit door at the front of the theater, blinding all of us with the outside light after our eyes had adjusted to the barely lit stage inside the dark theater, and closing it with a giant slam. I have a feeling this must have been the same poser woman who yelled out "D.B. Cooper!" right when the show was about to start, when everyone was silent, I guess to try to get everyone into "party mode" or something. If I had come to the event WITH her, I would have disowned her immediately and sent her back to LA or whatever other place where people move to Portland from because of its "authenticity". By the time the lights came back up, about 90 minutes after they had been dimmed down, the auditorium was barely more than half full. What a shame for a show that was sold out and likely had a lot of people who actually wanted to see the show not be able to attend due to the SOLD-OUT-ISH-NESS of the evening.
I believe this to be the perfect illustration of Portland's Hipster/Poser Artist problem.
Going into this show, while you didn't know exactly what would happen, you had a rough idea of what to expect if you used your brain and had any familiarity with the artists that were performing. Jandek is an until-recently recluse, and what they refer to as an "Outsider Artist", who has put out almost a billion album since the late 70's. The fact that he was going to be performing with Thurston Moore said to me that perhaps something like this was happening for several reasons. The first being that it seemed very unlikely othey would be doing a set of Sonic Youth covers and really rocking out. But if they aren't going to do that, why fly Thurston Moore all the way to the opposite side of the country from where he usually hangs out? Would they really do all that just to have him accompany Jandek as an extra guitarist? Hmmm. Lets see. Well, I do know that both Thurston Moore (and Sonic Youth as a whole) like to experiment with noise and sounds. In fact, a lot of people are at least aware of that. There is even a lame attempt at a joke about that in the "movie" Juno. I heard people laugh at it when I was at the theater which says to me that the type of people who know enough about the two guys who were performing that night to actually buy a ticket and go, likely know that Thurston Moore does that sort of stuff A LOT. So lets see, we have an "outsider" musician and a constant noise musician performing together, my guess is that there is going to be something strange and different happening.
And yes, it was strange and different than what most everyone was expecting. I wasn't expecting it to be improvisation. I didn't know Jandek was into "Jamming". But as soon as it started, it made sense. It was strange and different and COOL. The guitar tones that Jandek was playing around with for the majority of the show were some of the most interesting tones I have ever heard come from a guitar. And watching Thurston Moore display his mastery of manipulating a guitar to make all sorts of different noises was a pleasure. Watching and listening to them play off of each other was a treat. All of it was great. I feel happy and privileged to have been able to be there for it. Two legends from two different music scenes, performing together, and I saw it, and it was awesome.
It's really too bad that many who were also there, couldn't look past what they were expecting, and had to leave in a disrespectful (to both the audience and the musicians) sort of way. It seems like they came to the show merely due to their need to be able to tell their poser friends that they saw Jandek, in the hopes that they might get the "cool" seat at the Aalto Lounge the next time they all get together.
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