Meet Me in the Bathroom

12/16/2022

Another good doc about a place in time (Y2K/9-11) and the people who created art our to pain and desire. Lots of good archival footage and some driving interviews that make you want to go out and start a band too. Best line I’ve ever heard about how to relate tp parents disappointment about wanting to be a musician: “my parents were immigrants and you tell them you want to be in a band, I may as well have told them thanks for all that but I wanna go put on some clown shoes”. Simply awesome.

1/13/2024

Not that it's exactly comparable, but I grew up very much amidst a folk music scene with loads of extremely mediocre working-class musicians - ballad singers, guitarists, fiddlers etc., who all thought they would go on to some sort of musical greatness. Watching this, it's good to know that those ridiculous pipe dreams were not just confined to Glasgow in the 1970s. Spool on to the early naughties and we are presented with a collection of "musicians" living in Yew York City with aspirations that in the vast majority of cases way outstripped their talents. The one exceptions is probably Julian Casablancas, who managed with "The Strokes" to get his head above the parapet of bland noisemaking, and here the documentary is quite potent at illustrating that the stresses of achieving and building