New Year's Resolutions 2014

1. Respect the daily requirements of sleep, exercise, and meditation.
2. Cultivate generosity and compassion, and watch carefully for opportunities to express them.
3. Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude.
4. Expect the unexpected.
5. Whenever possible, be the unexpected.

Happy New Year!

Winter Photo Dump

I've really been enjoying walking around wintry Halifax and its beautiful parks over these holidays. I promised a couple of readers (Mom & Dad) some photos, so here are my latest Instagram pics.

Also, as a postscript to the top ten list, I wanted to add that there were a couple of dance-pop albums that didn't make the cut, but are definitely worth a listen. Daft Punk's Random Access Memories and Janelle Monáe's The Electric Lady are both super catchy and smart. They will cause you to shake your groove thing against your will. I would have liked to include either or both of them to make the list a little more well-rounded and fun, except that neither seems to compel my repeated listening like the chosen ten do. That doesn't mean they're not top-ten worthy — just that I am no fun.

Top Ten for '13

(Click here to download.)

Don't get me wrong. I like carollers as much as the next guy — probably more. And jubilant church bells? Bring 'em on. But if Bing Crosby major-third-warbles and full-octave-glissandos his way through "White Christmas" one more time within my earshot, whoever has the misfortune of standing next to me is going to overhear some seriously impatient muttering. There may also be pronounced brooding.

Luckily, the odds of any of that happening are slim. Now that Christmas is just a fond memory and some indigestion-fuelled nightmares, we can rejoice in the ban on "holiday music." And what better way to cleanse our ears' palates [Can one sense apparatus be a metaphor for another? Seems suspect... cf. "The cold blue sky gave frostbite to the fingers of his eyes." —Ed.] than with a sampling of the past year's best rock, pop, and electronic music?

As always, my top ten favourite albums from the year are listed in no particular order. New this year, I've put together a compilation of songs from all the albums for you to download. So I guess they are in some order, which is the sequence I thought the sample tracks sounded best in. Anyway, just click the link under the cover image up there to get the mix.

And no capsule reviews this time around. You can find out everything you need to know about all these albums elsewhere, plus how many different ways are there to say I like something? Probably fewer than ten.

(OK, you might not find out too much about that Husband & Knife recording, which is a local download-only release available by buying a booklet of spooky black & white Dartmouth-at-night photographs from dronemaster KC Spidle, who wrote and recorded all the songs with the appropriately spare help of a few likeminded pals. But seriously, everything else on here is not exactly languishing in obscurity.)

Here's the album/track list:

Arcade Fire—Reflektor

Sample Track: "We Exist"

Dog Day—Fade Out

Sample Track: "Sunset"

My Bloody Valentine—mbv
Sample Track: "If I Am"

The Knife—Shaking the Habitual
Sample Track: "A Tooth for an Eye"

Atoms for Peace—Amok
Sample Track: "Ingenue"

Boards of Canada—Tomorrow's Harvest
Sample Track: "Cold Earth"

Oneohtrix Point Never—R Plus Seven
Sample Track: "Chrome Country"

Flaming Lips—The Terror
Sample Track: "Be Free, A Way"

Husband & Knife—Husband/Knife & The Drone
Sample Track: "Bring It Down"

Kurt Vile—Wakin on a Pretty Daze
Sample Track: "Was All Talk"

For maximum enjoyment, listen loud on headphones while getting lost in a snowy forest.

Merry Christmas

On Yuletide Retreat

Dear Edie,

I have a lot of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes through everything, is one thing. It's a dream already ended. There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.

Your eternal old man,
Jack

—Jack Kerouac

(courtesy of whiskey river)

Hospital Food

Wow, I had such a crazy dream last night. It was like a combination of Fight Club and Shaun of the Dead. People around me were getting into this fad called the "Zombie Diet." It involved finding discarded parts of humans from hospitals and eating them. I thought it was disgusting, but everyone said it was super healthy and would be the way all people ate in the future.

The whole thing really bothered me, so I tried to just ignore it as yet another aspect of my own culture that I would never understand but that hopefully would go away soon or at least leave my little subculture of one alone. But more and more people started getting involved in "ZD" and trying to convince me it was a good idea.

Eventually I ended up in some creepy old forgotten hospital basement with a bunch of zombified looking "dieters." Their eyes were all sunken in, and they had a crazed look to them. I guess human flesh was addictive, because they were all anticipating their next fix. It was like a dark, mouldy parking garage/morgue full of Smigels from Lord of the Rings. On the concrete floor, there was a detached arm around which they were all gathered.

One person in the middle was announcing to everyone else that he'd realized it could be dangerous to eat raw human flesh that was possibly diseased and anyway had been sitting around unrefrigerated for some time. This relatively ingenious hypothesis for some reason provoked mixed reactions. Some of the Gollums seemed to feel that the danger of ingesting who knows what manner of horrible bacteria was what made this diet exciting enough to stick with, as opposed to, say, the Canada Food Guide's conservative recommendations (yawn).

While folks were grumbling and debating, the guy pulled out an electric fork he had invented. He said it would cook the "meat" they were all hungering for, one bite at a time, thereby rendering their nutritional proclivities safer, if hardly any less nightmarish. He demonstrated by skewering a loose piece of the bare male arm on the floor. Holding up the fork — which looked a lot like the carving fork my dad always used on the Christmas turkey — he pressed a button, whereupon the flesh began to sizzle and brown quite quickly.

I thought it was a pretty good invention, if one could temporarily forget the despicability of its purpose. But someone else in the crowd was too impatient for such refinement. One of the more sunken-eyed ZD'ers lunged forward and grabbed the hunk of half-cooked elbow off the fork, stuffing it greedily into his mouth. That display was too much for the rest of the hungry crowd, who roared forward en masse to start ripping whatever they could get off of the rest of the arm with their teeth, like a pack of hyenas around a rotting zebra.

And then I woke up to this Satie piece coming from my alarm clock. Put me in a very weird mood for the rest of the morning.

Sunshine and Frost

We got a bunch of snow yesterday that stuck around on the ground. Tomorrow promises more of the same, up to 30 cm, followed by freezing rain and then just plain rain. But today was a gorgeous sunny in-between day, good for walking around and enjoying the beauty.

It was also cold as heck, mind you, but at least there was little in the way of wind. I'm still pretty phlegmed up and woozy from the rotten head cold I ended up getting Tuesday night, so I decided not to rush or try to get too much done.

I drank some coffee and did some slow yoga and an extra long meditation in the indoor sun before heading out into the cold air for a late brunch and a few Christmas-related errands. Something about the weather/walking/open-schedule combination made me happy to be alive, even while realizing how sad the world I happen to be alive in is. It was almost like a kind of joyful sympathy, if that makes any sense.

I had also just finished reading Charles Bukowski's Women (thanks for the recommendation, Dave), which might have had something to do with my bittersweet mood. The novel was hilarious and dirty and tragic and hopeless and full of real love complicated by desperate desire. Highly readable, in other words.

But so I just wandered around in the freezing cold, in love with everyone I encountered: the helpful girl at the post office, the excitable man in the video store, the couple arguing about soup recipes, and the old lady in her car who smiled when I waved thanks from the crosswalk. They were all so real and fragile and temporarily satisfied with their own impermanence, like delicate flowers in the snow.

Maybe the extreme cold makes us each a bit more aware of our own and each others' mortality, so we become a little more genuine and thoughtful. I don't know. But I easily got all my Christmas presents bought and sent off without resenting any other shoppers, clerks, corporate retail franchises, Christianity, Canada Post, Stephen Harper, late capitalism, or anything. Then I came home to finish the Sunday NY Times crossword and listen to the Lowlife soundtrack in my warm living room. The cats enjoyed the tuba drones on the other sofa and helped me with some of the longer themed answers. There was also time for a pot of tea, some light house-cleaning, and a chat with my mom. It was a great day.

Favourite Song on the New Dog Day Album

Sunset, by a mile. So far, anyway. It sounds like a Christmas Carol to me. I could totally hear a nice children's choir singing this over the tinny speakers in a crowded Gap store. It's pretty positive, in a weird Dog Day kind of way: Life is mostly hard work and there isn't time to get it all done, but I won't be ashamed when I die, because at least I tried and saw some beauty along the way. Ho ho ho, pass the egg nog.

Sorry you can't listen to the song without opening a new window. I thought I'd find a video of it or at least an embeddable YouTube still of the album cover, but all that came up was this.

Last Night at the Marquee

Proof that I am not a complete loser. It was nice to see Greg Clark again and play on this stage for the first time in probably eight years or so.



And Dog Day were amazing; no surprise. I bought the CD.

Nice Quiet Day

Sick in bed today. I stayed home from work with a sore throat and headache. Hoping to sleep off whatever's trying to get me, although I ended up having basically as much work to do from home as I would've had if I'd gone in. But it was sunny out and pleasant to look out the window from my hospice.

Anyway, not feeling very talkative. Or typative. But here are a couple of (I think) beautiful Chinese prints that were posted on 50watts today. They're both woodcuts by an artist named Li Qun. The first is from 1957, and the second from 1980. Now I'm starting to look forward to the first snow on the trees, when they get that pretty, three-dimensional, highlit effect as if they're being illuminated from the side by blinding white light.

Three More Days

Another late Psychic Fair practice tonight. We are ready for this show on Saturday! Plus our album is ready too. Just have to figure out how to release it as a physical object and what sort of event to make out of that. It'll be called Bees on Ice. Here's the first preview track, available on our bandcamp page.


Saturday's gonna be a really fun show, with Cold Warps playing a set between us and Dog Day. I haven't heard the new DD album yet, but I plan on devoting some serious time to it tomorrow. You can stream the whole thing here. [12/05/13 OK, I've checked it out, and it's just as great as I expected. Maybe even better than their last one. Two ardent thumbs up! —Ed.]

I know I keep going on about this show, but I am seriously excited about it. Dog Day are one of my favourite bands, so I'm doubly psyched that they have a new batch of songs and that I'll get to play with them in celebration thereof. What could be cooler?

Humbuggery

"I read somewhere
     just waking up can kill you."

—Elizabeth Ross Taylor

Days are getting shorter and colder. And yet the warm comfort of sleep eludes me. I feel that dark December mood creeping up on me again. I want to spend more and more time indoors, eating rich foods, and less time doing things that will make me feel better, like being active or contemplative or creative. Better stay away from the stores as much as possible, with their ugly Christmas displays and saccharine music...

And it also probably wasn't a great idea to watch this super bummer of a Bergman melodrama about a mother coming to visit her two estranged daughters, one of whom is severely handicapped and the other of whom hates her guts and spends a whole night telling her why. Ingrid Bergman as the mother really shines, though, in her final role (and the only film she ever made with Ingmar Bergman). Still, it's not exactly Elf, if you're looking to tame the "holiday season" blues.



Tomorrow I will try to find a way to visit some nature. A walk in the woods, or a half hour staring at the ocean. That's usually the most reliable way of staring down "Black Pete."

Meanwhile, I had a really great band practice tonight with Psychic Fair, which always offers some relief. We're playing a show Saturday night at the Marquee, opening for Dog Day, who are releasing a new album. I believe I already mentioned that in another post, but it's worth repeating. Bring your friends!