Pop culture treasure, high culture trash.

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Jem is truly outrageous

Sharpie yr calendars, Minneapolitans: the Walker will be premiering Jem Cohen's new film Chain, starring Mira Billotte (of Quix*o*tic and White Magic loveliness), Miho Nikaido and some empty parking lots, on April 26th at 7:30 pm. "Stark!" promises the Walker. "Disturbing! Universal resonance!" Cohen also made the epic Fugazi chronicle "Instrument," so they're probably not that far off. Cinema Scope, flexing its thesaurus, tagged Cohen "a bricoleur by intuition" and called Chain a "synthesis of the real and the imagined, the poetic and the pedestrian...a very personal response to the impersonal forms of late-capitalist culture." Holy Brett Vapnek! I am there with Marxist bells on.

Cohen is also doing a free public talk at the Walker on Thursday the 27th but I cannot go, because I will be at EMP Pop Con talking about a vastly different Jem. The paper is slouching towards half-finished. There are outlines, and quotes from Gaar, Raha and Shepherd, but the operose, world-on-pause, fingernails-in-mouth writeration has yet to slalom in earnest. In regard to which--if you are a feminist musician/fan/critic/ writer/observer/aerobics instructor and you have been influenced by Jem & the Holograms, I would love to hear from you. Tell me what you thought of the show as a kidlet and whether it affected yr perceptions of female musicians and I will shimmy you into my paper, all eleventh hour-style. Yodel at dancingvioletsnail@yahoo.com.

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