Rock Talk

Lest I be accused of disappearing off the face of the Web, here's some footage from a Record Store Day show I played yesterday. Somebody thoughtfully recorded the whole in-store set and put it on YouTube in three installments.



That's my new bass backing up Matthew Grimson's songwriting genius there. I've just recently been enlisted in this band, and this was the first show I'd played with them. You can kind of tell. I think it generally went pretty well, though, and was a lot of fun. Taz, the record store, gave us each a $50 gift card for playing, which was a complete and welcome surprise. I picked up Thurston Moore's first solo album and the new Shins record, both on vinyl.

The Lodge played a poorly attended but well-received show the weekend before at Gus' Pub, which turned out to be our last. Mike's got too many other projects on the go to continue being a puppet/clown shouting our ridiculous lyrics while we hide behind him. Fair enough — especially since those other projects are both more lucrative and more creatively fulfilling for him. But Charles and Cliff and I will carry on in some, likely instrumental, fashion. Might just take us awhile to regroup. Meanwhile, there are some unfinished Lodge recordings that we still plan on releasing eventually.

And Guts, a.k.a. Kristina and me, continues to develop its sound weekly. We have about seven or eight songs that are slowly getting hammered into some kind of presentable shape. I want it to sound really good before we unleash it on the world. Watch for a public unveiling in, oh, I'd say a couple of months.

Celebrating Spring by Staying Inside

Hope everyone had a good Easter weekend. Alison and I spent a nice couple of days together at her apartment, doing the crossword, eating good food, and playing arcade-style video games from circa 1983 on her laptop.



Burger Time was a running favourite for awhile, then we got hooked on Phoenix. I was starting to get the hang of dealing with those aggressive little pixelated birds and ignoring the nightmarish computer squeals that accompany them, but not really getting anywhere near as good as I remembered being at the game in my youth. I couldn't figure out what was going on, until I accidentally pushed a different button one time and suddenly realized there was a SHIELDS option I'd completely forgotten about! Total game-changer.

Alison's taken Buster the Wonder Cat to see how he likes it at her place, and he seems to be settling in OK now. At first he just curled up in one of her jackets and didn't move for about a day, but when I came over he perked up a bit and is now exploring and generally owning the place.

I was supposed to go for a hike along the coast on Sunday with some friends, but we got a big pile of wet snow in the morning, which is how I ended up spending hours dodging digital bird poop instead. But here's a photo Alison took a few weeks ago when we went for a Sunday walk on Crystal Crescent Beach.


It's a bit springier now than it looks here. But not much.

Hey, I just realized what a direct contradiction of my last entry this entire post is. Hilarious!