I once tried to impress a girl by putting Philip Glass on the stereo, she shot me a look of faint disgust – ‘oh, architect music’. I was an architect at the time and most of my more anally retentive 0.1mm ink drawings were fuelled by the mechanical trance that onsets after six hours of Glassworks on repeat play.
So Philip Glass came to San Francisco this week, and we went to see him play along to a series of short films which were mostly great, but then we had to sit through half an hour of turgid travelog and cutesy, derivative nature shots sponsored by Bulgari – sorry Bvlgari!
Philip Glass is the apotheosis of modern, a musician that even dresses like a modernist architect, how weird then to be watching his troupe accompany silent films. How strange also that the only people wearing black polo necks last night were the ‘Glass Ensemble’ and that Mr. Retro himself, Tom Waits (namedrop – come on, you don’t get the opportunity that often in SF), should be in the audience.