Empty Potpourri

I just got home from recording some keyboard tracks on a Buck 65 collaboration record that's in the works. Do people still say "record" anymore? A young guy at work always makes fun of me for it. Pretty soon I'll be mis-stressing new technology, I guess. "Now, what's this blue TOOTH I heard someone talking about?" Actually, I really don't know what bluetooth is. Very embarassing.

Anyway, I'm sorry the delay between posts has been getting pretty long. There really is nothing going on worth telling you about. I noticed that my calendar at work had nothing written on it from last week. I tried to remember what I actually did and seriously, NOTHING came to mind. It was kind of scary. I guess there was a pretty good rock show in there, and of course a lot of work. I've been feeling quite tired at work lately and sleeping more than I should. Probably need some exercise. We had the first yoga class of our last 10-class session with Michi last night, and it really kicked our butts. In a good way, though. I felt much better today than I have in awhile, and actually enjoyed some of my work. I don't know what we're going to do when Michi leaves for Japan in June. I predict a lot of tears.

Alison's been getting to do some photo shoots at the glub glub club. That's what we call the government. Government = gub'mint = gub = glub glub club, if you must know the derivation. Last week she was responsible for taking all the pictures of a bunch of rare 18th century coins they recently pulled out of a shipwreck off Nova Scotia, and tomorrow she'll be covering an all-day conference. It's pretty great practice for her, especially shooting people in a room full of strangers all day.

Right now she's teaching her class, and I'll be leaving to walk her home soon. Before then, I have to devote some time to figuring out a band name for this project Charles and I have started up. That's really what I've been spending every spare moment on. It drives Ali crazy, when she's not caught up in the act herself. Both of us seem to be all right at coming up with joke names, but terrible at real ones. Some of the funnier ones have been Ironic Butterfly, The Whom, How They Get Rope, Weird Beard, and Post Modern Band Name. Really, those are the funnier ones. It's been hellish for awhile.

Is it true that the Thompson Twins — the band from the eighties, that is; not the characters in Tintin comics — shaved their eyebrows? Alison swears that the white man and woman had no eyebrows, which explains their weird, unemotional appearance. If it is true, then it really seems like maybe they didn't actually want the black guy in the band, but couldn't think of a way to tell him without seeming racist. So they called the band The Thompson Twins, hoping he'd take the hint, and when he continued to stick around, oblivious, they took the radical step of epilating their foreheads, thus drawing a veritable Venn diagram circle around themselves. I'm sure I'm just making this up, but it's kind of an intriguing theory.

- Andrew

People — Ya Gotta Love 'Em

Welp, South-by-Southwest's come and gone. They call it "South-by" down there. It was pretty fun, but there wasn't much time for wandering around or seeing shows. Actually, none. But our show went really well and the hired pedal steel player from San Antonio, Tommy Detamore, turned out to be a fantastic musician and swell guy. We had a lot of fun practising and hanging out with him.



On the way home, as on the way there, all of our flights were late, causing us to miss all of our connecting flights. I don't want to sound like a whiner, but it really was a very tiring ordeal. For awhile it looked like we were going to be stranded overnight in Houston, because the snotty little nineteen-year-old behind the Continental Airlines desk told us it wasn't his airline's fault what the weather was like and there was nothing he could do. The shoulder shrug that accompanied the following "sorry" sucked any sincerity it might have pretended to contain right out of it. He wouldn't put us on another flight or give us any hotel vouchers, so we asked him if we could talk to someone else. Maybe someone older and less solipsistic? He told us we were welcome to try the desk two airport terminals away, where we would be told the same thing. We thanked him sarcastically and were wished, equally sarcastically, "May Jesus go with you." At that point we took off as fast as we could, so as not to unintentionally punch the dear little disciple's face in, so, to be fair, it's not clear whether Jesus' ticket would have been offered gratis.

Luckily, the (older) woman at the other terminal did turn out to be much more sensible, and got us standby onto a flight leaving half an hour later. Mind you, our general demeanour was probably more menacing at that point, but still, she was very kind and efficient. She may even have pulled a bit of bureaucratic weirdness to get us on a tiny flight that was allegedly full. There was a passport check at the gate before they started boarding, and when they did board us, they called the people who had shown their passports first. People who had happened to be in the washroom or wandering around when we'd lined up to show our ID were pushed to the side, and I never did see them get on. The really weird thing is that one of them was wearing sandals and kept asking the flight attendants why they had forsaken him.

Also luckily, I had purchased in Austin a copy of Daniel Dennett's latest masterpiece of rational Darwinian thought, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, so I was plenty entertained and enlightened all day, despite my frustration and exhaustion. It's really a great read (at least so far, and I see no reason to think it shouldn't continue to be), and, as with most of his work, I wish I could somehow force everyone in the world to read it. Of course I know I can't, and that trying to would make me into the worst kind of preacher — the unprovoked pedagogue — but thinking about what would compel others to read it has caused me to stumble onto what I think is a pretty great idea in the field of cultural phenomena: the Motivated Book Exchange (MBE). The basic idea is that one person thinks another person really needs to read a particular book, so in exchange for that actually happening, the first person agrees to read any book that the second person would like her to read. That's it. They just have to read. No arguing or intellectual bullying need occur, though they could agree to sit down and discuss what they've read afterward, in order for two people to get a substantially better understanding of another point of view than the one they currently harbour. It could potentially be more eye-opening and profoundly affecting than the traditional debate, which can get derailed by slow thinking and blinding emotion.

And the MBE wouldn't have to be limited to individuals, either. Traditionally disparate social groups could have the majority of each others' members read a work that they believe key in breaking through long-held misunderstandings. Or a country could agree to teach a certain book in its schools in exchange for another country's leader's reading a book they've selected democratically. The possiblities for local and international consciousness-raising are excitingly abundant. I personally think it would be fun to read something outside my usual tastes, knowing that in exchange someone else was going to get an education I thought they needed but never dreamt they'd get. Now I just have to figure out how to get Oprah to tell everyone about it.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, nothing too exciting has happened around here since I got back. We've gotten a few more snowfalls and other March bum-outs. Saturday morning we woke up to a city laminated in ice and blanketed in fog. It was quite eerie and beautiful.


That afternoon we went to see Music and Lyrics (wait for the DVD) with Matt, Meg, and Johanna, and later that evening Matt and Johanna and I visited Gus' Pub to see The Got to Get Got and a band from Montreal called Thundra. I didn't know anything about the latter, but they turned out to be a really interesting and exciting experimental-type rock band of young upstarts. A fun show that made up for the Blonde Redhead one I didn't get to go to at South-by.

- Andrew

The ULTIMATE Mix Tape

As promised:

1. Silent Shout - The Knife
2. Electric - Boris
3. Un-deux - Serena Maneesh
4. Spanish Bombs - The Clash
5. Now to War - Guided By Voices
6. Jonathan David - Belle & Sebastian
7. Don't Let Me Lose This Dream - Aretha Franklin
8. French Disko - Stereolab
9. Revolution Blues - Neil Young
10. Pulled Up - Talking Heads
11. I Got Your Ice Cold NuGrape - The NuGrape Twins (from the last Oxford American music issue's compilation CD)
12. Allison - Pixies
13. Little Miss Strange - The Jimi Hendrix Experience
14. Just Drums - Tapes 'n Tapes
15. Brother - The Organ
16. Rubber Ring - The Smiths
17. Put Your Records On - Corinne Bailey Rae
18. Mike Mills - Air
19. No Complaints - Beck
20. Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) - John Lennon
21. On Again, Off Again - Sean Lennon
22. Keeper of The Flame - Nina Simone
23. Things We Said Today - The Beatles
24. Thirteen - Big Star

Seriously, try it out. You'll never want to listen to anything else again.

Work is completely insane and I never have a spare moment right now. Why am I doing this? An unholy but potent blend of sheer stupid pride and the goodness of my heart.

By the way, we finally sat down and watched An Inconvenient Truth, and soon realized that everyone in the world should be forced to watch it. Especially Americans. Grrr! Check it out and get mad enough to do something.

- Andrew

Dumb Dream

I had a dream last night that I was in the cast of "Are You Being Served?" I've never actually watched that show because it looks absolutely terrible, and I'm sure it's not really like this, but in the dream every episode had to end with all the characters throwing up their hands and shouting in unison, "Are you being served?" Then they would freeze the shot and roll the credits. I woke up laughing.

- Andrew

Soundtrack for a Perfect Day

Yeah, so for some reason the Blogger software robots determined that this might be a spam blog, and prevented me from posting to it for about five days in total. I had to put in a request for a human to look at the blog and verify that it was not spam to get publishing capability back again. When I clicked on the link to find out what a "spam blog" might be, I read:

"The ease of creating and updating webpages with Blogger has made it particularly prone to a form of behavior known as link spamming. Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text..."

I'm trying not to feel slighted.

Things have been busy as usual in the past week, but not too much interesting to write about. The Buck 65 song-learning and rehearsing process has begun. Some of the material is quite simple, but there's a lot of it and we're leaving for Texas a week from Monday, so I'm getting a little anxious about it. Once there we have a day to rehearse with Rich for the first and only time, and also with the Texan pedal steel player who's been hired to accompany us. Should be verrrrry interesting.

Song-building has also been continuing with Charles and Cliff. We already have jammed out a fair amount of tunage, and now have to start imposing some structure and, the most dreaded part, writing some lyrics. Hopefully it will be a process of each implying things about the other in a bootstrapping fashion.

The weather's been really mild here all week, then yesterday we got a huge blizzard up from Ontario. Everyone locked themselves away with movies, and then today the sun immediately came out and melted everything. It's been an absolutely gorgeous day. People are out everywhere with big grins on. And I guess there's a lunar eclipse tonight. Very excitin'.

Somewhere in there Ali and I watched The U.S. vs. John Lennon. It was great — informative and inspirational. There was tons of footage of John and Yoko I'd never seen before.

We got a phone call from our friend Tim in Toronto on I think it was Monday night. We haven't talked to him in a long time and it was really nice to hear from him. Now he and I have started up a game of email chess, which should be good for a cerebral laugh.

Our other friend from Toronto, Matt, is back in Halifax for an extended stay while he does some sort of journalism internship at the Chronicle Herald. Haven't heard from him yet, but we're super excited to hang out with him.

This may seem sillly, but the most exciting thing for me recently has been putting together a couple of mix tapes (actually CDs, but "mix tape" just sounds way cooler; I sort of wish they really were tapes, as I could have gotten the volume levels of different songs more consistent that way, though it would have been significantly more work and the sound quality would have suffered) that are really killer. There've been a bunch of songs lately that I keep thinking would be perfect to hear in the middle of a compilation, and when I got introduced to Amy Winehouse the other day, the mental percolating was tipped over the edge into necessary actuality.

There ended up being way too much for only one CD, so I've split it into two: The Ultimate Mix Tape and the still really really good, just not quite ultimate Penultimate Mix Tape. They're both stellar, and I can't stop listening to them. I tried to make the flow as natural and exciting as possible, and stick to my self-imposed rules that any song on a mix tape should make you think either:

a) Oh yeah, I love this song! And it's exactly what I'm in the mood to hear after that last one, or
b) What is this song? I love it! or
c) I love this artist, but I'm not too familiar with this song. Wow, it's really just as good as the ones I know better. Who knew?

Plus I got to have some fun setting up short themes or other tricky connections between consecutive tracks. I really wish I could just put the entire mixes on here for you to listen to, but they're 24 songs and over an hour each, so that's not gonna happen. However, since I'm convinced these really are the ultimate (and penultimate) mix tapes and therefore everyone should have a chance to hear them, I'll give you the track listings so you can make them yourself. Check it out:

The Penultimate Mix Tape

1. Anytime - My Morning Jacket
2. Come Into Force - Imitation Electric Piano
3. Out - Wire
4. I Can't Get Next To You - Al Green
5. Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken - Camera Obscura
6. Close to Me - The Cure
7. Kissing the Lipless - The Shins
8. Netsanet - Mulatu Astaque
9. Walk and Talk - The Velvet Underground (from the Peel Slowly and See box set)
10. Stop Breathin' - Pavement
11. Not a Friend - Sebadoh
12. I Can't Make Up My Mind - The Zombies
13. Pigeon Quest - City Field (local band; this one might be kind of hard to track down)
14. 52 Girls - The B52's
15. Me & Mr. Jones - Amy Winehouse
16. Swisha - Ratatat
17. See No Evil - Television
18. A Lazy Farmer Boy - Buster Carter & Preston Young (from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music box set)
19. Place To Be - Nick Drake
20. Tougher Than Tough - Derrick Morgan
21. Gotta Get the First Plane Home - The Kinks
22. Secret Agent Man - Devo
23. Chain Saw - The Ramones
24. Goin' On - The Flaming Lips

Next post: The Ultimate Mix Tape!

- Andrew