Dance Music, etc.

Reading The Stranger on my busride home from the library today, I noted an interesting comment by James Murphy in an interview to hype his DJ night at Chop Suey.

Marcus Lambkin [Shit Robot] taught me how to DJ, and before that I just hated dance music.

A few weeks back I'd decided that the book Last Night a DJ Saved My Life was integral to my enjoyment of dance/electronic music, but hadn't considered the simple act of being a DJ. I've often remarked to people that even just radio DJing is fun because you get to listen to music in a different way by (hopefully) spending most of your time making connections between tracks and thereby creating a sequence of music that makes sense. It could be coincidence, but I started enjoying dance/electronic music at almost the exactly the same time I was figuring out how to put manipulate music for a desired cumulative effect, a function for which dance music is perfectly suited.

In a chronologically related but thematically unrelated note, during my time at the library I read Paul Schrader's "The Film Canon" from the most recent Film Comment Rather than just a list, though he includes his own at the end, it's more of an investigation into what a film canon should be or do, and how we can even begin to make objective judgements about particular films--artistically, aesthetically, etc. Utterly essential.