Iain Cameron's Diary
"Click here to access the Fruitful Album" - Click here to visit Music for the Highveld Project
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2005-03-05 - 9:30 a.m. I stayed in to nurse my cold and dragged myself out to get some shopping. Luckily FOPP had a 1984 DVD of Miss M just in. It opens with Wild Things Run Fast and a cartoon version of Raised on Robbery. Its interesting the way the solos have crossed the threshold to semiotic impact on this DVD relative to the semantic approach on the Santa Barabara vid. She offers herself within the visual language of the time apparently without irony � but then so did Hall and Oates. What is she getting at when she talks about �laughing at how our perfection would always be denied�. I had been talking to Paul W about her cultural position n the 80s � without the advantage of this document. She must have been in her early 40s. There s a version of Sweet Bird which is just as well cos most weeks I cant get out of my head. I once flew from Detroit to LA reading about Miss M and the guy in the seat next to me remarked on it. He was into Georgia O Keefe and he had discovered Miss M because she bought a few of the pix. Maybe its irony � they hammer their way through Banquet from For the Roses. Bunuel is cross-cut. Discrete ? (Not quite). Another view: �Fans of the reclusive artist�this critic included�know that there are really two divergent musical personalities constantly struggling within Mitchell and her musical canon. One is the pop chanteuse; the gal who penned such glorious anthemic examples of three-minute majesty as "Big Yellow Taxi," "Both Sides Now," and "Woodstock." Then there is the experimental jive jazz torch, a lady working out her complex internal issues in equally perplexing time-shifts and arcane chord changes. That both antagonist entities can work together so well over the course of nearly four decades is a miracle.�
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