Fair Warning

I realize it's been awhile since there's been a new post. Just so you know, there's a big one coming. It's in everyone's favourite format — the rant — and it's going to be dense. A lot of different ideas have been suddenly converging for me and I'm all excited about them, so practise sitting up straight and get out some toothpicks to prop your eyelids open.

Meanwhile, everything's good here. I recently completed a long book and a logo design, and am in the process of developing the general look for a classical concert series's upcoming season. Alison is taking on more work with the commercial photographer she often assists. Assuming I can finish plodding through the snow-covered hedge maze that is this year's tax return before Jack Nicholson comes after me wielding a freshly sharpened audit, we'll be doing all right for money.

I'm reading a really good book on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, called The Meaning of Everything. My friend Charles and I are going to play a set of as-yet-unwritten instrumental music in early June, as Lac Secret. There are Lodge shows coming up too. And then a trip to Toronto to see Pavement for Alison's birthday! Time continues to overwrite its current state, refusing to settle into any kind of stable pattern. What a joker.

Easter Pics

Here, as promised, are some photos from our Easter weekend south shore visit. I guess I was kind of excited to be out of doors. As usual, no one took any pictures of Ali. Who watches the Watchmen?

My Life in the Ghosts of Bush

Last weekend we went to our friend Johanna's parents' cottage on the South Shore and had a real nice time being in nature, conserving water, and playing Careers. We also rode on the LaHave ferry and explored a few beaches not too far away. Soon I hope to have pictures to show you. I know you Facebook people have already seen some (grrr), but there's some others that I'll be posting when they become available.

In the meantime, since there's nothing else going on around here but lots of work, let me share another piece of pop culture that has no connection to my own life except insofar as I like it. Which is quite sofar, actually, in this case.

It's the latest Joanna Newsom album. I received it in the mail last week and haven't been able to stop listening to it. I don't know what you guys think of her (though I'm pretty sure there's at least some of you who think she has the most irritating voice imaginable and I'd have to be some kind of masochist to listen to more than 10 seconds of her singing in a sitting), but I'm a pretty big fan. I know she sounds like Lisa Simpson. Maybe that's part of the appeal — that despite such a weird idiosyncrasy she manages to make something so beautiful and compelling.

But anyway, on this album, Have One on Me, which, by the way, is three CDs long, there's an element of maturity to her voice that I don't think was there before. It's a little less brittle, a little sweeter. I also hear some Kate Bush and even Joni Mitchell influences creeping in, the former especially on this song right here.



I was never a huge Kate Bush fan back in the 'eighties, but lately she keeps popping up in contemporary music as an influence (Björk, M83, Bat for Lashes, Fever Ray) and I find myself consistently gaga over the hopelessly romantic results. So maybe it's time to revisit that missing link in the evolution of my personal taste. Any recommendations of where to start?

Help, My Retinas Are Burned.

I don't watch music videos very much, but I just had to share this one, as it has completely captivated me. Not being very "with it," I can't tell you much about the artist, but I'm sure you can read all about him in the latest issue of Tiger Beat magazine.

The video's only two minutes and 42 seconds long, but there's just so much packed into it, it feels more like 20 minutes! At least, I think that's the reason... If you can make it to the part where he starts laughing and pointing, congratulations and hang in there — you're into the home stretch.



You're welcome. If you still need more entertainment, about the only thing I've ever seen that could possibly beat this is the remix.

Thanks to WFMU for bringing these to my rapt attention.

Strange Loops

So this is pretty weird. I'm reading this book about Gödel's kooky denial of time's existence (which, by the way, I thought might somehow tie in with Eckhart Tolle's kooky denial of time's existence, only in a more scientifically rigorous way, but that turns out not to be the case; whereas for Eckhart time doesn't exist because there is only ever the now, Gödel says that actually it's precisely the now that doesn't exist — there is no objective moment which is THIS moment independent of frame of reference, according to Einsteinian relativity — and, in fact, it's possible to invent universes in which one can travel to a past moment, using a really fast but sub-light-speed spaceship, thereby creating a closed time loop; hence, the concept we mean when we talk about time [moves in one direction, can be divided at any given moment into past and future, ...] doesn't actually exist), and I come across an interesting bit of trivia. It turns out that Gödel's favourite movie was Snow White! He used to rave about it to all his friends and try to convince them of its greatness!

I guess his friend Alan Turing, who developed the precise account of recursive functions contained in G's 1931 first incompleteness theorem into a deep analysis of computability, thereby making the modern computer on which I am writing this blog post possible, must have been at least partially listening, because when he decided that his (at the time criminal) homosexuality was not curable, he decided to take his own life... by eating an apple that he had injected with cyanide! Gödel, by contrast, was morbidly afraid that others were trying to poison his food, and starved himself to death.