Gimme Shelter

So, yesterday was a very surreal day in Halifax, what with the Rolling Stones — not to mention Kanye West, Alice Cooper, and Sloan — playing a gigantic outdoor show on the Commons, right behind our house. The whole city's been going completely bonkers about it for months. The Daily News printed a special five-page "Stonegazing" section, wherein "We investigate where the Rolling Stones will likely stay, and tell you what you should — and shouldn't — do if you meet them." (Delta Halifax, be nice, ask for free tickets.) Heaven forbid we embarass The Daily News with our small-town behaviour. The week leading up to the show was particularly insane-o as they built the humongous stage and seating and closed off street after street to traffic, thereby causing long impassable jamups. Basically, if you think about the Halifax Explosion, you start to get a sense of the historical importance this event holds for the city.

Here's what the scene looked like the night before and then morning of the concert.



This guy has kept a great photographic record of the week-long preparations.

When Sloan took the stage in the afternoon we were walking past on our way back from yoga and grocery shopping, in exactly the opposite direcion from what seemed like most of the rest of the city's population. It felt weird to hear Chris Murphy's voice echoing around everywhere, expressing excitement that they were opening for the Stones. They launched into the Future Shop commercial, which sounded great, just before we got home.

I think I've already gone into why we weren't going to the show. The most succinct and funniest way I've heard it put was on the Halifax Locals bulletin board: "If I wanted to see a bunch of seniors jumping around, I'd watch The Price Is Right." Tickets were over a hundred dollars for general admission standing room (which was absolutely no better than standing outside the fence for free, if you felt like doing that) and over three hundred for bleacher seating! They really raked it in, as did the many, many citizens in the area selling hot dogs, water, raincoats, Rolling Stones hats, slightly used undergarments, and pretty much anything else they could think of from their front doorsteps.

The whole show was very loud, especially when the main act finally came on at about 8:00, and we could hear everything from our back yard.



This was the opening number. The bang at the beginning is fireworks going off, visible out our window, and the cheering and barking at the end are other neighbourhood residents enjoying the show from their balconies. Even the light show was pretty spectacular and psychedelic.



When it was almost over, we headed out to catch Al Tuck at Gus' Pub a little further north. Agricola Street turned out to be a pretty great place from which to enjoy the spectacle, and lots of people were doing just that.


The scene was different, but almost as interesting, when we stumbled home many hours later.


Now they're tearing all the scaffolding back down, and the 200 people who suffered from mild hypothermia due to the fact — and who could have predicted this in Nova Scotia, really — that it rained, not to mention the more seriously and innumerable hungover are recovering nicely and humming "Bitch" to themselves, smiling through the pain. And I hear the Commons may even be usable as a sports field again in another year or two.

- Andrew

Must...find...horizontal...surface...

Very tired. Too many late nights. Can't seem to work up the energy to give clauses subjects, but just wanted to keep you up to date on stuff.

We went to see Billy Bragg at the Rebecca Cohn last night, and he was great as always. I think I've seen him play about eight times. He's so engaging and witty, and such a great songsmith that it didn't even matter he didn't play most of my favourites. But it went quite late (thanks in part to the long and unexpected opening set by PEI's favourite and utterly boring busker, Nathan Wiley) and then I had to come home and do some design work, and then Ali and I had to watch some videos of talking and totally insane cats, so today was very groggy.

Alison got home from Toronto on Tuesday night, right on schedule. Even though she didn't have a pot-headed Fisher Price person in her luggage, I was still really happy to see her. I guess I can let the cat out of the bag now that she's going to be teaching a class! It'll be a one-night-a-week continuing education course on digital photography at the community college, and it starts in two weeks. She's getting lots of great ideas about it. I think she's pretty excited, even though the whole thing is pretty nerve-wracking.

The Rolling Stones are playing here on the Commons in two days. The whole city is going completely bonkers. It's going to be basically right in our backyard, so we won't be able to help but hear it. Tonight we rented the third season of Arrested Development and a documentary called Stevie, by the director of Hoop Dreams in preparation not to step foot outside. But we do have a yoga class to go to at 2:00 which will take us right past the epicentre of the shenanigans, so please mention us in your prayers the night before.

Good night.

- Old Man Grumpus

Rew

The scenes of the universe are continually shifting, and one object follows another in an uninterrupted succession; but the power or force, which actuates the whole machine, is entirely concealed from us, and never discovers itself in any of the sensible qualities of body.

- David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding


"Living backwards!" Alice repeated in great astonishment. "I never heard of such a thing!"

"—but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways."

"I'm sure mine only works one way," Alice remarked. "I ca'n't remember things before they happen."

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.

- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass


After that, we headed over to Stage 9 to see Matthew Grimson play some dark, intense piano songs and have Al Tuck mesmerize us with his quiet power. Both sets were intimate, magical, and way too short. There was a table of I'm going out on a limb here and guessing students behind us, making inhuman amounts of noise, which was probably more irritating than it would have been if there had been any other tables of people in the place besides our two, and what were they doing in there anyway with the cover being six dollars and all if they just wanted to drink beer and publicly and obnoxiously empty the contents of their brains isn't that what blogs are for, but we found that we didn't even notice when exactly they had gotten up and left, so entranced had we become by the music.

Played some billiards with a fine bunch of ladies last night, including regular characters Meg and Johanna. It was really fun, but the balls kept popping up out of the pockets and attaching themselves to the cue ball whenever I put my cue up to it. Made the game somewhat difficult. I found, however, that I could coax out the opposition's balls by aiming the stick at the last pocket they'd sunk one in, and soon our team would be winning again. But then we would invariably decide we had lost and, sure enough, the 8-ball would appear while our team still had balls on the table. It was almost as if the games were pre-determined or something.

I guess Hume's point is supposed to be that the phenomenon of causation is one we can't experience directly, but can only infer, in a never fully justified way, from experience itself. Just because drinking too many beers the night before has always given me a headache the following morning up until now, who is to say that the next time it happens I won't feel fine? Or even that I won't get the headache the night before and wake up the next day drinking the beers? There's no logical necessity to be seen here. I'll just have to keep on trying.

Hume is very careful to never put it exactly like this, but I think in the end he's questioning why we believe in causation at all, or where we get the idea of it. And if you think about it, those are the kinds of questions you can't really ask. Not to be a logic nazi or anything, but questions like why, how, and where does it come from sort of presuppose the concept of causation. If you're not going to talk about a cause, what kind of answer could you possibly give? It's a pretty firmly entrenched idea in our language and lives, and hard to just imagine away.

Martin Amis gives it a pretty good kick at the can, though, in Time's Arrow, a deeply disorienting novel in which the main character experiences time backwards, and therefore all effects precede their causes.



Speaking of the Smiths, I bought a secondhand record by Bert Jansch the day before yesterday. He's a British folk guitarist from the sixties who was a huge influence on The Smiths' guitar player, Johnny Marr, believe it or not. I can't really hear much in the way of similarity, except that they both play delicately and complicatedly. But it's a very enjoyable record and I'm glad I bought it. Thank you, Bert, for getting Johnny to play that way so that I would fall in love with The Smiths as a teenager and therefore be led in later life to pick up one of your recordings. It was very forward-thinking of you. I'd thought the price tag said five dollars, which would have been a steal as it was an import, but it turned out to be twenty-five. The two had been covered by a descriptive label on the outer plastic sleeve. The guy was nice enough to knock five bucks off the price, though.

So in the book buildings rise out of rubble and people get apologetic right before they hit you, and angry afterward. Doctors are evil because healthy people go to see them and are made unhealthy in all sorts of horrible ways. The main character performs all his morning rituals just before going to sleep, and says something like, "I don't even want to tell you what happens on the toilet." After awhile you stop reversing things in your head and just get used to the backwards world, and then watch out when it's time to put the book down! I found staircases to become particularly difficult.

But that was many years ago, when I'd first met Alison. Now she's in her place of origin, Waterloo, sifting through old toys and assorted junk that her parents have had in storage there for like ever and would like to take out of storage i.e. throw away. There'll probably be all sorts of surprises in there of the kind that only the past can bring. I know she's particularly interested in rescuing her old Fisher-Price people. The ones with wooden bodies, before they became plastic, then large and chunky, then limbed and completely unrecognizable. We were trying to describe them to Meg, who, not growing up in North America, had never seen them, and I found I was able to draw an almost perfect rendition of the mother's face from memory.

But I'm especially hoping that she'll find the kid with the pot on his head. I love that guy. It's very strange that the characters Fisher-Price saw fit to give our imaginations were, almost without exception, really generic icons — father, mother, sister, brother, dog, "bad" (= freckles and a frown) kid — and then there's this oddball with a pot on his head. An actual cooking pot! What the hell, man? I guess he was the punk/non-conformist/stinky kid that the other kids didn't want to sit beside. Is it because of my later outsider status, real or imaginary, that I am so drawn to this figure? Or, conversely, did I come to picture and thereby invent myself as an oddball because of an early childhood identification with the interesting weirdo character? Or, finally and much more spookily, did the kind of person I would later become somehow retroactively CAUSE that pot handle to be so appealingly chewable? I guess I'll never know.

- Andrew

Summer Is Officially Over

The weather's suddenly turned cold as of today. A good time to haul out the Smiths. This one's one of my all-time, as well as current, favourites. Every time it comes up on the mp3 player while I'm wandering around, I'm instantly back in high school in the suburbs of Toronto, waxing solipsistic and feeling sorry for myself. But somehow I enjoy reminiscing about that feeling. Maybe because stuff like this made me feel like someone somewhere understood. Plus it's just such an undeniably great song: how the hell is Morrissey able to express such depth with so little, lyrically? And on what planet did he find those gorgeous ad libbed yodels at the end?

Softball playoffs were yesterday. We lost both of our games, but played admirably. More importantly, we finally got team T-shirts, at the eleventh hour. Logo courtesy of yours truly.
Here's me and Meg hamming it up in our new shirts.

Here's a better look at the beautiful logo, modelled by Ali.

A happy team after losing by only one run.

The final sign that the apocalypse, I mean autumn, is here, is that the students are back in droves, virtually doubling the city's population in the space of about a week. First thing I heard upon walking into a restaurant Saturday for brunch: one young 'un says to the other, "It's, like, an ILLUSION of democracy." But I shouldn't complain. This is a great city full of delightful weirdos, as seen today at the Ecology Action Centre's hippy dippy food and music festival, and later at the North End Festival on Gottingen Street, where people walked through the crowd on giant stilts with deer hooves for feet, and a parade of cyclists in inflatable white costumes pedalled into the wind, thereby growing humps and wings.

The Wizard of Oz, by the way, was as great as it always is, and there was a nearly full moon behind us for the whole film. Our friend Jeff was down from Toronto so he came too. Meg and her friend Tomomi were also there, seeing it for the first time. They loved it, as did the many adorable kids in the audience. We got to hang out with Jeff a few more times over the weekend, as well. All in all, a very nice changing of the seasonal guard.

- Andrew

Combo Platter

Hi, everybody! I've got a couple of minutes before we head out the door, so I thought I'd put a few pictures on here I've been meaning to post for some time. Meg took all of them. The first couple are from the barbecue we had with her and Johanna in our back yard/sunroom, and the second pair are from the rock show on the tall ship I told you about a few posts back. Plenty of dancin' good times!






Tonight we're going to see an outdoor showing of arguably the greatest movie of all time (and you can mark me down in the "for" camp if you decide to organize such an argument), The Wizard of Oz. "Well, you see, awhile back, we were walking down the Yellow Brick Road, and..." Got the popcorn and the chairs, and now we gotta scoot! See yas.

- Andrew

Best Holiday Ever!

What a vacation! Our week at the Green Bay cottage was fantastic. So relaxing. We took LOTS of photos, so pull up a comfortable chair. I took the B&W ones, and Ali took the colour ones. I spent most of today adjusting the colour, but for some reason when you put them on the web it changes. Aargh. You'll get the idea, though. Here's the cottage we stayed in: the "Bonnie Dune".


There were some nice wild flowers in a coffee urn on the table when we arrived. Check out Flatbear. He'll make a reappearance later.


Our friends Charles & Kelly weren't there for the first few nights, but we had a nice woodstove to keep us company while we played Yahtzee and cribbage.



Monday was grey and a little rainy, but we walked down to the crossroads to meet up with Matt & Laura, who were in town from Toronto for a few days. There was plenty of nice scenery along the road.





NOT a Constable painting, believe it or not, but an actual photograph.

Matt & Laura showed up right on schedule and we all went into LaHave for some lunch at the bakery, followed by a walk through the Risser's Beach conservation area.




It was way too short a visit. We were all pretty bummed to have to part ways so soon.

The next day Charles & Kelly and their two little girls, Ava & Molly, arrived. We all went for a walk down the road to one of the many little beaches along the shore. For some reason neither Ali nor I got any decent shots of Kelly. I think she's got some pretty advanced camera-avoidance techniques going on.








They left again the next day to visit a friend, and Ali & I made a trip to Risser's Beach for some swimming in the surf. We'd been loaned a couple of bicycles by the super nice couple that owns the cottages. They only had one gear each, and it was a pretty high one, but we didn't mind standing up on the pedals.




That night we took a walk fairly far along the shoreline while the sun went down. It was gorgeous. Oh yeah, and that was one of the numerous after-dinner-ice-cream-cone-from-the-canteen nights.






I did a lot of this over the week, too. I actually read two entire books while there — unheard of for me. I don't know when's the last time I took less than three months to finish something. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go was full of tightly controlled secrets like only his books are. Thanks for the recommendation, Mom & Papa. And Stephen King's On Writing was way more enjoyable than I had dare hoped. He's full of great advice, that guy. If only the samples of his own fiction he uses made you feel like the advice might lead somewhere worthwhile, it would be a really great book. I enjoyed the heck out of it, though.


Another day, we went for an even longer walk, with bikes, along the same shore. The path seemed to go on forever.



After awhile, we stopped for a snack and Alison had an impromptu photo shoot with Flatbear. The agency was not exaggerating: he IS an excellent model.









Further on, we found a patch of flowers just like the ones in the coffee urn, which had started to wilt, and picked a nice bunch for our dinner table.



The walk that night only went as far as the canteen for some more of their delicious ice cream, but the sunset was beautiful.


And then the next day, we got up in time to see an equally, if not more, beautiful sunrise.




After breakfast, we went for a fairly long ride to this little museum on the LaHave Islands that we always visit when we're in the area. It was a great day for it, and on the way back we rode along Crescent Beach. It's a kilometre-long, flat, white beach with sand that's hard-packed enough that people drive and bicycle on it.




Our friends came back just after lunch that day, and we went for another walk with Charles and Ava. She really liked climbing on the rocks, and didn't want to stop, even though we were going to the beach. We finally persuaded her and ended up building a pretty nice sand castle with her at Risser's (not pictured here).



Just before we left, Molly became semi-fascinated with Alison's shoes, for some reason.


Luckily, we got back just in time to see my sister Erika and her husband Mike and son Bennett. Spent a quality day with those three and their friends Davio and Julia, all of whom had been here on vacation for a week and were leaving the next day.







What a cutie that Bennett is. He had us eating out of his hand.

We'll actually be getting some more photos back later from our last beach visit, but that oughta hold you for now. I've pretty much spent all day getting these on this stinkin' thing. I guess I'm making up for a week with no modern technology. But now I'm off to sleep in my own bed. G'night!

- Andrew

P.S. Happy birthday, Granny Gwen!