{"id":55,"date":"2008-08-07T07:41:08","date_gmt":"2008-08-07T07:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp\/?p=55"},"modified":"2008-08-07T07:41:08","modified_gmt":"2008-08-07T07:41:08","slug":"point_of_reference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/2008\/08\/point_of_reference\/","title":{"rendered":"Point of Reference"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\" style=\"display: inline;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"wagon.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wagon.jpg\" width=\"275\" height=\"270\" class=\"mt-image-left\" style=\"float: left; margin: 0 20px 20px 0;\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Speaking of getting on the bandwagon, Pitchforkmedia.com, a site often driving these\u00c2\u00a0conveyances\u00c2\u00a0for a significant swath of the nation&#8217;s music fans, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pitchforkmedia.com\/article\/record_review\/142606-carl-stone-elodie-lauten-woo-lae-oak-the-death-of-don-juan\">reviews new music<\/a> this week in the form of new discs from Carl Stone and Elodie Lauten. In your humble opinion, how well did they do?\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I give Mike Powell points for risking mixing entertaining, over-the-top language&#8211;i.e. &#8220;foofy, inert bullshit peddled by charlatans to suckers who would stoop to intellectualize a rock&#8221;&#8211;with some universally comprehensible analysis:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"webkit-indent-blockquote\" style=\"margin: 0 0 0 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;\"><p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-style: italic;\"><br \/><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"webkit-indent-blockquote\" style=\"margin: 0 0 0 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;\"><p><i>Woo Lae Oak<\/i> is an amnesiac for itself, an ever-renewing blank slate. The problem with assessing records like this is that they rely on the listener&#8217;s tolerance and imagination, which, comfortingly for all parties involved, nobody has any control over. &#8230;Stone even named the piece after the Chinese restaurant of his choice, a self-effacing gesture that acknowledges peace as marketable chintz&#8211; where other composers might aspire to recreate ancient prayer scrolls, Stone takes refuge in fortune cookies. Even when I can&#8217;t fully immerse myself in it, I leave with the important lesson that there&#8217;s no inherent grandeur to size, no necessary seriousness to serenity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"webkit-indent-blockquote\" style=\"margin: 0 0 0 40px; border: none; padding: 0px;\"><p><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>Evocative writing, but it&#8217;s not telling us what we&#8217;re used to when it comes to new music record reviews. Are you missing what you&#8217;re not reading? I like that there&#8217;s no name-dropping. You don&#8217;t need to know jack about any other recorded music in this genre to understand what&#8217;s being discussed. That&#8217;s not everyone&#8217;s cup o&#8217; tea and sometimes the name-checking is vital to the issue at hand, but\u00c2\u00a0after reading this review\u00c2\u00a0I&#8217;ve seen the work from a fresh perspective and am excited to hear it again. That means it&#8217;s done its job as far as I&#8217;m concerned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaking of getting on the bandwagon, Pitchforkmedia.com, a site often driving these\u00c2\u00a0conveyances\u00c2\u00a0for a significant swath of the nation&#8217;s music fans, reviews new music this week in the form of new discs from Carl Stone and Elodie Lauten. In your humble opinion, how well did they do?\u00c2\u00a0 I give Mike Powell points for risking mixing entertaining, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-55","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/gap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}