Trapped

Mary Beth and I had another neighborhood walk yesterday evening. Then later I went up to Crosstown to watch the screening of Sisters with Transistors. It was quite good. I had a little trepidation given its a subject I love and you never know how a documentary is going to be outside of its content and also I wasn't crazy about the title. But it was mostly quite good. One person I wished it'd included is Else Marie Pade (not that I think you can ever have everyone, but she's quite important and I'd love to hear more about her), but on the other hand they talked about one person I wasn't familiar with: Maryanne Amacher so that was exciting. The other thing is they kind of just shat on Wendy Carlos. They got to the bit on her and it was the briefest of all and it ended with just Suzanne Ciani saying how retrograde her music was. I mean, I get it on the one hand, and I do personally prefer the more experimental approaches, but Wendy Carlos is still great and I think there's room for both approaches. I wouldn't've even minded the discussion around it if they'd also included a more rounded look at her work and given her as much focus as anyone else instead of being a very quick "here's Wendy Carlos oh and here's someone we've already talked about a lot more saying why she doesn't like her...the end!" That aside, I liked the approach it took. I didn't get a ton of new information, but maybe some bits of details or elaboration on a few people. And it was nice seeing all the original footage together. It didn't go super in-depth with anyone, but served as nice introductions to a lot of important female electronic composers. I tried to start to do this post this morning, but I stuck this cd in my stereo cd player and it got fucking eaten! It's a minimax disc (where it's like a small 3" mini cd "inside" a standard 5" cd with the outside/unplayable portion filled in with clear plastic instead of the normal silver) so I'm not sure if it had trouble with that or I laid it down on the tray wrong or a combination of both. But it went in and got stuck somewhere inside and didn't ever load. I took a coathanger wire and managed to knock it loose but then it just fell in behind the tray and was stuck. I had to take the case apart, but that ended up being pretty easy and I managed to get it back out (the hard part was unhooking all the wires and getting my whole stereo out of the shelves). I'm not taking any chances and am now listening to it on a boombox. It'll be a long holiday weekend soon...