Culchah Consumah

I've been sick in bed for a few days now. Kind of all week, actually, off and on. Sore throat with an aching, hot/cold fever. Could be strep again; I find out tomorrow. I guess that means I have plenty of time to update this blog. But frankly, it feels like I don't have much to tell you and I've just been enjoying the first season of Project Runway on YouTube so much that I haven't felt like doing anything else. But I finally saw the end of it last night.

Is it just because I'm a designer that I get so sucked into that show? Probably not: it's very popular. I guess I could go on at length about what a great show it is... but that would probably be pretty boring.

I will just say that it's so entertaining to watch a contest that's judged on actual creative imagination and ability, where good character can help a competitor deal with a stressful (albeit quite artificial) work environment, instead of hindering his chances of "putting one over" on his competition. And that Tim, the mentor, is one of the most likable people on television. And that I'm in love with Heidi Klum, even though (/because?) she terrifies me.

But actually, there is some other stuff to talk about around here. For instance, I'll be flying to Montreal in a couple of weeks to do this show with spooky indie folk songwriter Laura Borealis. She's recorded an album's worth of duets with various guys, and I did one of them with her. The show will be an exact recreation of the recording, and will also be recorded, as well as filmed. The album will then come out as a double vinyl one, with the studio recordings on the first record and the live show on the second. In other words, I'm flying up on Saturday to sing one song that night, and then flying back Sunday morning. Luckily, it's not on my own dime. I may also do some songs with Al Tuck — who will, hopefully, be there too — as an opener.

Last night I'd planned to go into Halifax after work for a jam session with The Lodge, but I was sick and there was a giant snowstorm going on, and we were only going to be able to play for an hour, so it seemed like a bad idea. But Charles and I have both been working on new material, so I'm really itching to get together and jam it out into something songlike. Meanwhile, our album will be coming out digitally next month, and physically the month after that.

Another pretty interesting thing that's happening is that I've joined a reading group to read and discuss John Ralston Saul's latest book, A Fair Country. Its thesis is that Canada would be less neurotic if it admitted to itself that its main attributes have derived from Métis, and not European, culture. My friend and old etc. Press officemate Alain has started the group because the book was exciting him so much that he needed to talk to people about it. I'd been wanting to read the book anyway, being a Saul fan of quite a few years, so I jumped at the chance. Actually, come to think of it, it was another etc. Press coworker who turned me onto JRS: Matt was reading On Equilibrium and told me a little about it and I was so intrigued that I bought it and quickly devoured it. It's still my favourite. Around that time, CBC was doing its top ten Greatest Canadians thing, and I voted for Saul as the greatest. It was a tough choice between him and Wayne Gretzky. Of course Gretzky made the list and Saul was nowhere to be seen once the tallying had been done. But so anyway, it turns out that JRS will be in Halifax in April to talk at King's College [Maybe he'll come to our little university too? You know the one...], and he's heard about our reading group and wants to somehow meet up with us! And, as Alain is working that night, I'll be one of the people to chat with the author. I hope I don't get starstruck and start talking like a teenage girl on speed, or just stare into space and drool.

I've also lately read This Is Your Brain on Music and Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl. Both are books which I had pretty much decided in advance what they would be like and by which I ended up being pleasantly surprised. I don't know how I managed to avoid reading the Anne Frank in my youth, but it's really very good. She's so level-headed, and such a good writer for a fourteen-year-old. I can't imagine a girl of that age today writing something that thoughtful and compelling. At first it felt a bit like watching a snuff film, knowing how it would end, but then I realized that all biography shares that feature. The story then becomes not about the ending but about sharing in the experience of the middle part that leads there.

A third recently finished book is David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster. It's a collection of essays, à l'A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and is of course fantastic. In particular, the review of an English usage dictionary, which becomes a long meditation on political correctness and prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar, had me nailed to my chair for hours and will be photocopied for my dad as soon as I can get it back from Johanna. But I think I've been doing too much non-fiction lately, and need to get back on the fiction horse for awhile. I'll probably start Moby Dick again because it keeps coming up and I was loving it years ago but never finished it. I should also try some more recent novels, to get me out of the "what's-the-point-in-continuing-now" slump I've been in ever since finishing Infinite Jest. I thought Martin Amis's Yellow Dog might pull me out, and it was promising at first, but its unrelenting ugliness eventually bored me into dropping it. Anyone got any suggestions?

This bed is really comfortable. I'm so glad Alison has a laptop. Being sick used to be so boring, when it meant watching soap operas or talk shows about makeovers and B-list celebrities. Instead, I can now watch stressed out designers shine in all their human glory or burn out trying, for hours on end. Or really any other manner of crazy stuff I care to look for. Here are some of the more entertaining random bits that have recently been brought to what I ironically call my attention. Enjoy, while I start in on Season 2.

- Andrew

Happy Valentine's Day, Ali.

And HVD to you too!

- Love, Andrew

Some Illicit Reading

I guess this is probably an abuse of a blog, and it's definitely a violation of copyright, but I just loved this article in the last issue of Believer magazine so much that I wanted to make it available to anyone who cares to read it. It's about the current economic crisis and how it's symptomatic of a systemic problem with capitalism as we currently practise it and is therefore not going to go away anytime soon. I'd never read anyone whose views on the subject were so close to my own, so I got kind of excited. Here you go, if you feel like reading it.

(By the way, the square in the middle of the second page wherein a guy talks about biblical texts is part of an unrelated piece running sporadically through the magazine. Same with the Hamburglar.)





And if you got through that adult portion, here's some dessert: a two-page spread from a book Alison's been reading, called Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir. Much less of a downer.


- Andrew

Five Not Exactly Significant Facts from the Past Week

1. WE'RE ON TWITTER NOW.
Crazy, I know, especially since I still refuse to have anything to do with popular internet selfhood-trivializer, Facebook. Our friend Ron talked us into it. I want to feel more connected to the people I know but don't see very much, without having to get into the whole ego trap of making a profile for myself that tells everyone in the world who I am as defined by my photo-, opinion-, and "friend"-collections. That's what this blog is for (see Fact 3). If you don't know what Twitter is, and actually even if you do, it's pretty much popular internet tool of the devil, Facebook, whittled down to just the status line. You get 140 characters to say what's going on right now, and everyone who is subscribed to you gets an update. And of course you get updates from people to whom you're subscribed. I'm thinking of it as an experiment. We'll see whether it turns out to be useful for valid social connection or just another excuse to be on a lousy computer at all times.

2. I TAUGHT A CLASS OF CA. 30 ENGINEERING STUDENTS HOW TO DESIGN A POSTER.
If you're on Twitter too, you already know this. Their professor had asked me to come in and give them some fundamentals of graphic design, as they were all being asked to produce a poster, aimed at high school students, advertising the benefits of studying engineering. It's for a contest run by Engineers Nova Scotia to promote their cause during National Engineering Month ("January 28, 2009 – March 31, 2009" [sic]). The prize is $100. So, for a hundred bucks, ENS is getting to contract who knows how many designers from across the province and then choose the one poster design they like the best, based on the brief they've given to all of them. Not a bad deal! Plus now some of those would-be designers have been given an hour-long training session in poster design for free from an ACTUAL designer. But anyway, valid complaints aside, it was kind of fun, or at least preparing for it was. The teaching part, I don't know; not really my thing, I don't think. However, even though I didn't really think I'd have much to say, I ended up using the entire time allotted for the class. I'll be interested to see what the kids come up with.

3. I FIGURED OUT HOW TO PUT A PLAYLIST THINGY ON THE BLOG.
Don't know whether anyone noticed it on the right-hand side over there. It comes from iLike. It's kind of cool, I think, although it only plays snippets from each song. But I can very quickly and easily make a mix of stuff I've been enjoying lately (see Fact 5).

4. ALISON CAME DOWN WITH A COLD.
She was out whooping it up till all hours on Wednesday night, then had to work on Thursday, and on Thursday night, while I was preparing for my lecture (see Fact 2), her punishment came a-calling. I'd had some fun plans for us this weekend, so that was kind of a bummer — she's spent most of the weekend in bed drinking grapefruit juice and echinacea tea. We did go for a nice walk in the woods yesterday, then we went immediately to the video store to stock up on laptop-in-bed-watchable movies before coming home. Which leads me to Fact 5:

5. WE WATCHED A MOVIE CALLED WENDY AND LUCY.
It was really good, albeit kind of a bummer. It's directed by the same woman who did Old Joy, which we liked a lot, and again has Will Oldham in it, but just in a minor role. Michelle Williams, of Dawson's Creek fame, plays the former title character, a young vagabond on her way to Alaska. Lucy is her dog. Wendy makes some bad decisions, loses Lucy, and spends the rest of the film trying to find her. It's very slow, quiet, and touching, just like Old Joy. My current playlist is I guess kind of inspired by the mood of the movie, or at least my mood after watching it.

- Andrew

Five Significant Moments from the Past Two Weeks

1. IN A BOLD CHANGE OF RECENT CHARACTER,
the people known as Americans have elected a new leader whom both they and others seem to actually like. Evangelist and vocal homophobe Rick Warren tries to ruin an otherwise stirring and yes I'll admit even sometimes a little tear-inducing inaugural ceremony by delivering a long and vacuous Christian prayer. I'm watching at home during my lunch hour on CNN.com live and they're running a constantly updating feed of comments from people who subscribe to popular internet time-waster Facebook. I wait for the barrage of comments regarding the mixing of personal religion with public government, a definite no-no if we are to believe the words of this country's founders. But it doesn't come. Oh, one guy types, "what evr hapend 2 teh separ8ion of church & st8?" but everyone else pretty much ignores him. Just as my bonhomie begins to fade, the entire country redeems itself when another of its Facebooker asks, "Why does he keep mentioning that Obama's black? Does he think God hasn't noticed?"

2. ONSTAGE AT THE REBECCA COHN AUDITORIUM,
Al Tuck is celebrating the release of his latest CD by playing to an intent and decent-sized audience. The show is being taped for later broadcast on CBC radio. Al is backed by a band of eight musicians, twice as many as usual, and I am the bassist. We are a few songs into the set.

The day has been stressful. I haven't confirmed a ride from Halifax back to Acadia for the next morning, at which latter place I'll be expected at 8:30 am to resume tackling the inhuman amount of work that is waiting on my desk. The sound check earlier this day seemed to go well, but Al was in a sour mood afterward, and none of the band members can say what his thoughts are about the set we have practised, nor predict how faithfully he will stick to it. In fact, it was left undetermined what the first song would be as we all took the stage (ca. 15 minutes ago?), and Al then set the paranoid mood by first fumbling around excruciatingly with his guitar and amp, mostly with his back to the silent audience, and then asking the band to start without him. Playing with Al is always a little chaotic and keeps one on one's musical toes, but that's part of the appeal, at least in theory. However, many of these musicians now under the scrutiny of

a) some very professional, i.e. bright, lighting and
b) a soft-seated crowd comprising an approximately even mix of peers and pre-format-change-CBC-listeners, plus
c) an as yet only imagined and therefore necessarily hostile future audience of post-format-change-CBC-listeners spanning the world's largest country

are not used to this element of chaos and are understandably uneasy.

We have started the next song, and it seems to be settling itself into something resembling a groove, but things could easily go horribly wrong at any moment and everyone in the auditorium is aware of it. Then a strange sound none of us has ever heard before begins to make its presence felt. It's not clear at first what it is, but it is definitely musical. There is a violin involved, and some harmonizing female vocals. It is sad and lonesome, but also urgent and beautiful. It has now gotten a foothold in this psychic and acoustical space, and compels all who hear it to give themselves over entirely and willingly to it. One can feel the swell of hearts, smell the smoke of synapses firing. It is the sound of a swoon. It is a sound transmitted directly from heaven, and I am only dimly aware that part of it is coming through an instrument I hold in my hands. This is what making music is about.

3. WALKING BACK TO KRISTA'S APARTMENT,
where we're spending the night after the above-mentioned Al Tuck show, six of us are being pelted by wind-blown freezing rain that has at some point turned into just plain rain. Our feet are wet and our pants are frozen to our legs as we negotiate the slush-covered skating rink of the Halifax Commons.

As a distraction from this potential misery, I ask Kasia whether she was a fan of the sci-fi television series Space: 1999. Alison and I have recently been watching episodes of it because I remember it from my childhood as much more sophisticated and thought-provoking and somehow religio-philosophically oriented than its cornier sibling, Star Trek (the Shatner one) — which aired in reruns contemporaneously and possibly even on the same day of the week, i.e. Sunday afternoon — even though it, S:1999, turns out in retrospect to be very silly and corny in its own right, plus weirdly static and monochromatic (white) and also kind of unintelligible in its plotlines, which may help to explain, Emperor's-New-Clothes-style, its apparent sophistication, and yet we have still found it to possess an oddly compelling quality that is hard to explain.

Kasia WAS a fan, it turns out, and immediately remembers the episode where there were evil, slimy creatures on Moonbase Alpha that looked kind of like giant versions of the McDonald's "Fry Guys," or at least WOULD have looked like them if anyone could actually have seen them, which they couldn't. The aliens may have squelched their way over people and turned them into puddles of organic goo. Shapeshifter Maya becomes one of the creatures in order to communicate with them, but then finds that she can't change back into her own form. This is pretty much the only episode I remember too. It must have been a particularly scary one.

By the way, has anyone else noticed the dramatic if not measurably exponential increase in complexity and specificity of science fiction television show premises over the years? Viz.

Battlestar Galactica: Robots have turned against their human creators and tried to destroy the entire species, causing the surviving humans to search the universe for the legendary planet Earth, where they will (they hope) finally be left alone to multiply and evolve. In the "re-imagined" later series, further complications are introduced, such as the robots looking exactly like humans and having developed their own culture, including a monotheistic religion.

Space: 1999: An accidental explosion on the moon, Earth's de facto nuclear waste dump in the futuristic year of 1999, sends it and the few humans who had been working on it hurtling aimlessly through space, where they meet with random adventure.

Star Trek: Some humans have decided to explore space, where they meet with random adventure.

Just kind of interesting, is all I'm saying.

4. CANADIAN ROCK HEROES THE SUPER FRIENDZ
are onstage at the bar Tribeca, again in Halifax, playing a reunion show. They are blowing Haligonian minds both young and old, exactly the way they used to in their mid-nineties heyday, mine included. As excited as I have been and am at this moment about the show's rock element, the reunion aspect of it suprises me with its uplifting force. I am REALLY enjoying being surrounded by people I know and love, and this, I realize, is a rarity in Wolfville. Without warning, I find myself briefly but seriously considering the positive benefits of being on Facebook. This thought scares me more than a little, but also forces me to admit that immersion in a tribe of one's choosing is maybe more important than I'd previously noticed.

5. BACK IN WOLFVILLE,
I take a walk in the snowy woods. Two pheasants are scared out of a pine as I approach, and I am subsequently scared by them. Anyone who says the world keeps getting more complicated hasn't looked carefully at the branches of a pine tree. Maybe the real problem (and most seem to agree that there is at least some kind of problem here) is that human culture — which is not subject to the low speed limit on biological evolution, as it can be both transmitted and transmuted within one organism's lifetime — is now approaching the complexity of the natural world from which it has emerged. I'm not sure yet why this would in itself be a problem, as emergent properties generally ARE more complex than their constituent components, but I feel like there is something there. Something to do with nature not being able to keep up with a culture that affects it faster and more systematically than what it has developed responses for, even as that culture is ultimately dependent on the natural system upon which it is wreaking havoc. Anyone got any clever intuitions?

- Andrew