Go Down to the Basement, e.g.

Apropos of yesterday's post, here's a song I can't get out of my head lately, in the great tradition of songs wherein people tell you what they don't wanna do. Have you heard the new Kurt Vile album? It's maybe not quite as good as this one, but still probably the best album I've heard so far this year.



And here's a rock show you might want to know about, if you're in the area next week. Come one, come all! This time I will be into it, I swear.

Madness!

Still here, still tired. Oh, lord, this week feels like it will never end, what with all the finishing of projects that still has to get done. But it will, and very soon, and then I'll be working on completely different kinds of projects. So weird...

I've been rereading Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth for I'd say realistically the ninth time at least. Somehow there's always surprising stuff in there that I need to hear, even though I feel now like I should be able to recite it verbatim. I've also been watching the new season of Mad Men. Have you? Oh boy, I thought after that double episode it was maybe getting a bit boring and overly slick, but I'm totally hooked again after this last weekend's one. Way to go, Trudy, am I right?

Anyway, there are lots of interesting parallels between the show and the book. I've definitely noticed Buddhist themes popping up on MM before, but doing Tolle and Weiner together really makes for some extra levels of enjoyment on both sides. Check out these things-said-by-Eckhart-Tolle-or-Don-Draper, e.g.:

1. The people in the advertising industry know very well that in order to sell things that people don't really need they must convince them that those things will add something to how they see themselves or are seen by others; in other words, add something to their sense of self.
2. Paradoxically, what keeps the so-called consumer society going is the fact that trying to find yourself through things doesn't work: The ego satisfaction is short-lived and so you keep looking for more, keep buying, keep consuming.
3. Even though success is a reality, its effects are temporary.
4. The ego wants to want more than it wants to have. And so the shallow satisfaction of having is always replaced by more wanting. This is the psychological need for more, that is to say, more things to identify with. It is an addictive need, not an authentic one.
5. You're happy with fifty percent? You're on top and you don't have enough. You're happy because you're successful, for now. But what is happiness? It's a moment before you need more happiness. I won't settle for fifty percent of anything. I want one hundred percent. You're happy with your agency? You're not happy with anything, you don't want most of it, you want all of it. And I won't stop until you get all of it.
6. The physical needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and basic comforts could be easily met for all humans on the planet, were it not for the imbalance of resources created by the insane and rapacious need for more, the greed of the ego. It finds collective expression in the economic structures of this world, such as the huge corporations, which are egoic entities that compete with each other for more. Their only blind aim is profit. They pursue that aim with absolute ruthlessness. Nature, animals, people, even their own employees, are no more than digits on a balance sheet, lifeless objects to be used, then discarded.

Of course, 3 and 5 are Draper, the rest Tolle. But I love how completely conscious Don is of the power of egoic grasping and how to manipulate it, even while he has no idea what to do about his own.

WRT the last quote, by the way, I went to see Revolution in the theatre tonight with Alison. It's a really powerful documentary by the guy who did Sharkwater, this time about the larger issues involved in saving life on this planet, especially our own. It's awful and frightening, and everyone should see it, because we're all going to be extinct in about 50 years if we don't start getting frightened really fast. Especially Canadians — we really suck. I noticed that no one in the audience could look each other in the eye when it was over, even though it ends on a note of hope. And even though I'm quite sure none of us voted for Harper.

Now It Can Be Told

But I'm too tired to tell it properly. OK, I'll just come out with it: I have a new job! It's as associate art director for the Shambhala Sun magazine. I went for an interview last Monday, and there was a message waiting for me when I got home that I'd gotten it!

It's not quite the same job I applied for last year, but very similar. My friend Meg got that one, which was doing double duty for the Sun and their new, more broadly aimed offshoot, Mindful. Now it has turned into a position working just for Mindful, so the Sun part of the job became a new opening. That works out great for me, because I am actually much more interested in the content of the Sun than in Mindful. And plus, now Meg works there too!

I got to be a lot clearer this time around about why I wanted to work there, having had a year to kick myself over my unpreparedness in the previous interview. And I also got some hipper pants and shoes, the latter of which I'm convinced are what really got me the job.

So now I'm in the process of dismantling my freelance business. It's sad but also really exciting. I'm looking forward to getting out of the house every day and seeing real people. And it will be nice to have a regular paycheque, with health benefits and paid vacations. But mostly I'll be happy to be working on a publication that I actually enjoy reading, putting stuff into the world that I think lots of folks need and want to hear.

I start working there on the 22nd, and until then I'm working long hours trying to get all outstanding work done before other designers take over my clients' business. The clients are all super understanding about my leaving for my dream job, but they also suddenly need everything done that's been sitting dormant until now. Late nights and early mornings...

Tomorrow I'll be meeting Meg downtown for lunch, though, and afterwards she's going to show me some of the processes I'll need to know about. That will be my first real tour of the magazine's offices.

They occupy a floor of the Centennial building, which is coincidentally the same building my dad worked in when I was a kid in the seventies, on the top floor. It kind of looks like a smaller version of the building Bob Hartley's office was presumably in, as indicated by the camera panning up it before we saw Bob sitting at his desk on the old Bob Newhart Show. I used to go in with my dad sometimes when he had to get work done on the weekends. I would lean my head against the window and try not to freak out about how incredibly high up we were (probably about 12 stories, I think).

Or else I'd type hilarious messages about poop and my friends and my friends' poop into the keypunch machine and print them on cards full of numbers and rectangular holes, while my dad puttered around in a room full of wall-sized boxes and reel-to-reel tapes that he called a "computer." I have no idea what he was doing in there, but it involved giant paper constantly coming out of a very loud dot matrix printer.

Anyway, the elevators in that building still smell the same as they did then, I'm happy to report, and they even have the same square buttons with the Futura numbers like a Wes Anderson film. So, needless to say, I'm looking forward to calling the place home from nine to five very soon.

Schleprock

I have some big news to report, but not quite yet. Soon, soon. Meanwhile, let me tell you about this show The Reference Desk played at Jacob's Lounge in Dartmouth on the weekend. This is not a self-congratulatory story, if that makes any difference to whether you feel like reading it. It is a bit long, though.

We were the first of three bands, and there were quite a few people there. Quite a few hip people whose opinions I actually care about, including the members of the other two bands. I always get somewhat nervous playing live shows, but this night I was extra anxious. It probably had to do with the big news I'm not telling you about yet, plus I wasn't sure whether Amber would be coming in from Musquodoboit Harbour with her aunt who has probably never attended an indie rock show in her life and already has mixed feelings about me, plus I'd heard there might be a fairly sizeable crowd according to the Facebook event page, possibly because Joel Plaskett may or may not have mentioned the show on stage a couple of nights earlier. Anyway, for whatever reason, before the show even started I felt like this:



And also a bit like this kid:



(Sorry — no good English versions of that scene available. We've all seen it though, right? Poor Lawrence...)

Unfortunately, I didn't have Jack Black there to tell me how cool I am, so I just had to tough it out feeling uncool and incredibly self-conscious. Sometimes that can work out OK, if I can just go with the shy weirdo vibe and inhabit it as an interesting persona. David Byrne taught me that trick. But there were extra problems this night, because the microphone I was singing into was a weird kind I'm not used to, and I couldn't figure out how to get the angle right while still being able to see what my guitar-playing hands were doing, if necessary. Turns out it's more often necessary than I would have thought.

Besides all that, there are no monitors at Jacob's. Usually the musicians on a stage get to hear their own special mix of what everything sounds like through small speakers that are aimed at them (monitors), because they have to be behind the speakers that are pointed out at the audience (the "PA"). If the microphones get in front of the latter speakers, they'll feed back like crazy, because those speakers are generally super loud. But even though they're loud enough for the whole audience to have its ears blasted by them, they're also directional, so that listening to what's going on from behind them gives you a weird, muddled perception with no detail. So the smaller speakers give the musicians a quiet but more accurate idea of what they sound like. Sometimes the monitors can even be given a special mix that's different from what the audience is hearing, if a musician needs to hear certain things better than others in order to perform well. That's called being a "diva." Not really — it's perfectly acceptable when available, although I always feel a bit sheepish about asking for "a little bit more of the rhythm guitar" or whatever.

Anyway, if you're a musician, sorry for the preceding paragraph. The point is that Jacob's doesn't have monitors, so it can be kind of hard to hear what you and your bandmates are doing. Last time we played there, it didn't seem to be a problem, but this time it was really throwing me. I had to be extra careful about my singing, to make sure I wasn't accidentally belting out some completely inappropriate note. That meant I couldn't just relax and let my voice do what it felt like doing to a certain extent. I also could barely make out the bass, and my guitar sounded like utter garbage to me — somehow both too loud and too quiet at the same time. It's an awful feeling when you're trying to get a song across to an audience, and you really want them to like it, but to you it sounds just terrible. Hard to fake being into it in that case, and probably just embarrassing to everyone if you try.

So I just kept playing, reminding myself that it must sound all right to the audience, because they were very appreciative after each song. But I could feel that I had a really sour look on my face the whole time, and there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it. I thought about what it would be like to watch a performance where the singer had such a sour look on his face, and that made me feel worse and look even sourer. I think I even sighed with exhaustion at the end of one song. The set seemed to go on and on... Why did we write such a long set list? Did we have to play every song we know? And why were all the songs so energetic and aggressively catchy, when my mood was more suited to a slow number with minimal chord changes? Who wrote these stupid songs, anyway?

In desperation, a few times I looked back at my bandmates for some camaraderie. Maybe we could all laugh at what a taxing show this was turning out to be. But there seemed to be a huge physical distance between us, so that I couldn't even get their attention. Besides, they had their heads down and wore looks of extreme concentration, obviously having just as hard a time as I was...

I wish I had a hilarious surprise ending to this story, but in fact all that happened was that we continued to work really hard and eventually made it all the way through the set. People said it sounded really good out front and that we shouldn't worry about what the onstage sound was like. Ron said it was our best show ever, but he always says that. Amber turned out to be there with her aunt (they had come in a few songs into the set and slowly made their way past the front of the stage without me even seeing them), and they had both enjoyed it. But I was inconsolable. I didn't even care whether it sounded good or not. What really bothered me was that I got so invested in all the problems that I couldn't manage to have any kind of a good time or at least have an entertainingly authentic bad time. Instead, I just turned inward and "performed," in the worst sense of the word. I know you'll say it doesn't matter, and everyone has good shows and bad shows, and you'll be right. But that night, I had disrespected the spirit of rock with my inauthentic self-preserving attitude, and the whole next day I couldn't listen to any music out of utter shame.

But I feel OK about it now. Just thought you might appreciate some insight into the periodic nightmare that is caring about one's art.