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| TRACHTENBURG FAMILY SLIDESHOW PLAYERS, BEDROOM WALLS by scribble 08/19/2005, 3:25pm PDT | ||||
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| LA Weekly - July 11 - 17, 2003 issue
Russel Swensen TRACHTENBURG FAMILY SLIDESHOW PLAYERS, BEDROOM WALLS at the Silverlake Lounge, July 2 The Trachtenburg Family's shtick is simple: They attend estate sales and buy slide albums of the deceased, examining the frames for further meaning, embedded narrative, further possibility in lives foreshortened. Dragging even a corner of the unseen into the light is noble; why shouldn't a couple's mountain trip to Japan be immortalized? Isn't even mentioning it insisting that it mattered? But the Family's lighthearted treatment is more demeaning than awestruck, and I'm standing here saying they should be awestruck. Their slaphappy drawl is worse than distasteful in regard to the human condition: immoral, an insult to whatever exists. Thom Gunn, unbowed poet of the AIDS epidemic, carved a fitting rebuttal to this kind of thing: Walker within this circle, pause/ Although they all died of one cause/Remember how their lives were dense/With fine, compacted difference. The difference here is one of respect. Perhaps it'd be forgivable if the Trachtenburg's intent announced itself as one bereft of significance; however, the strut, the blather, the banter, the blubbered projection of self? Imagine They Might Be Giants as Sonic Youth. This is a band gagged with themselves like a sloppy joe with meat, so sure of their importance that I couldn't shove a spoonful of their too-thick gruel past my lips - unlike the adoring crowd, sitting as if learning instead of hearing. (Between sets, a bar full of guys from El Salvador, after hearing a description of the Family's act, wanted to throw down, for the families of those diminished. I begged off. Still, I yelled for the 9-year-old drummer to show her tits, and repeated the slur to the front man - "Let her show some pink nubs! Rock with your pencil erasers out!" - because rock & roll isn't about being polite to an affront to a genre I still consider sacred. The band gave me drink tickets to rid themselves of me.) Bedroom Walls, on the other hand, continued to push romanticore in flame-red suits and feeling, half Morrissey, half Silver Lake. Bedroom Walls, contrary to their own manifesto, aren't about drinking peppermint schnapps because it's the last thing in the house - they're about drinking it as if it's the last thing in the house. (Russel Swensen) |
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TRACHTENBURG FAMILY SLIDESHOW PLAYERS, BEDROOM WALLS by 08/19/2005, 3:25pm PDT  |
