Friday

This year's NWNW Festival at On the Boards is heavy on the dance (weekend two is mostly dance.)  Attended the first night of the Studio Showcase earlier tonight: Violets on Smoke Rooms, Faith Helma I HATE POSITIVE THINKING, Makeith Wyeth 31 and Counting, and Nancy Ellis Nancy's NANCY.  (I'll write more on this, working one more film festival shift, shortly.)

Earlier I'd gone to a screening of The Glamour and the Squalor at the Harvard Exit.  A documentary on the radio DJ, Marco Collins, who pretty much changed the music landscape of the early nineties by breaking bands on KNDD in Seattle.  I remember my friends and I feeling hopeful and excited when we started seeing signs around that there was gonna be a new radio station...it was such a dismal radio market if you weren't into testosterone-fueled rock or oldies.  (There were the college radio stations, but there was some weird programming thing going on at KCMU (now KEXP) and people were boycotting it.)  I was going to a lot of shows, finding out about bands through record stores and friends, but there wasn't much airplay of stuff I liked.  When it came on the air it was such a breath of fresh air, like "someone gets me."  (Me and thousands of others.)  Music has always been to me, not just something in the background, but as necessary as breathing.  If I listen to it (and even more so when I was younger) I really listen to it, I pretty much stop doing anything else.  So if I hate the music, it's incredibly grating, and they were playing things I loved.  I just remember that first night it went on the air and being so happy.  (And hearing veteran DJ's Pat O'Day and Marty Reimer basically speak their minds about radio in the film, how calculated and controlling the format is, was incredibly refreshing.)

It was such a perfect moment.  (And I hadn't realized how many risks he was taking to get the music on the air, i.e., the time he locked the station, turned out the lights, unplugged the phones and fax machine and played the entire "Vitalogy" album before it was released.  Nor how many musicians can thank him for having a career, because if he liked it and played it, other venues picked it up.)  Marco is not on the radio now, except as a guest DJ sometimes on KEXP (which is the only radio station in this market regularly playing new music.)  I think there may come a time again where people want that gatekeeper again, there is so much out there with the internet, how do you find the gem amidst it all?

And while it wasn't quite as deep (it's close) as the Cobain documentary (which he was involved with as well), it was pretty honest about who he is, what he's been through (the bullying, the addictions, his sexuality.)  Pretty vulnerable to put that out there.  Just makes me like him more, and appreciate everything he's done more.