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