I received this e-mail from the Brass Tacks propaganda machine:

Hello Friends,

The World Premiere of Brass Tacks is only a few days away. We look forward to seeing you there and wanted to pass on one final reminder about the screening, tickets, and the After party.

There are only a few tickets left for the Friday screening so please call the Box Office (925) 866-9559 or visit http://www.sffs.org/fest04 to purchase your tickets online.

The After Party will be immediately following the screening at the 1751 Club. The Club offers a full bar and dining room so please feel free to reserve a table beforehand. There is plenty of convenient parking at and around the club.

As a thank you for your support everyone at the After Party will be receiving a complimentary copy of the Brass Tacks Advance soundtrack. The live music featuring POSITIVE PROPAGANDA and Agua Dulce will begin around 10 p.m.

If you’re in the Bay Area, call up the box office of the Kabuki Theater and go see my buddy’s film. I saw it here in Atlanta at a special pre-final-release screening, and it’s worthy. The film is funny, soulful and the musical performances are amazing—all filmed/recorded live. Once you’ve seen Quintin Baxter play drums, you’ll realize that technical domination and musical expression are not mutually exclusive.

Quintin is one of those types of players that makes one who plays the same instrument realize that what they thought was “playing” his instrument was, in fact, just pretending to play his instrument. And what I mean by that vague “technical domintation” versus “musical expression” statement is that I am, without a doubt, not a proponent of that whole technical proficiency=great musician school of thought. If that, and the corrolary theory—that great musicans automatically make great music—were true, then we’d all listen to Rush. But Quintin Baxter is different thing entirely. His playing is musical, soulful, unbelievably complicated at times, yet always seems effortless. He is in complete control of the drum set, and can express, at will, any shade, nuance, thundering crescendo, complex rhythm or any damn thing he pleases. It’s stunning to watch. I had the honor of sitting in on several of the film’s shooting days, and got to watch him live. I had to pick my jaw up off of the floor on many occasions.

On an unrelated note, I stumbled across this on the Stanford website:

Followers of film theory as practiced in this arcane language may say that diegesis and/or diegetic means something other than narration or narrative, but anyone not understanding an argument that uses either word would go to the dictionary and find the definition: narration. If film theorists believe it means something else, then it is incumbent upon them to define the use within the argument, because the dictionary simply does not support any other meaning. It is this sort of lexiconical hocus-pocus that leads many of us to conclude that the use of such language is mere sham since it cannot be understood in the public domain without an explanation from the individual writer invoking the words. As ES points out, there is no common agreement that I have seen among theorists as towhat diegesis means, and therefore the word doesn’t mean more than what it is. It essentially means nothing.

To which my postmodern literary sensibilities scream with a wink: EXACTLY!