Another Night at Gus'

Reference Desk show coming up this Saturday. Looks like a real winner of a lineup, too. Come one, come all!

Quilico 1, TDT 0

Well, so, that dance performance was a little underwhelming. Christina Petrowska Quilico, mind you, was amazing. Such nimble fingers keeping even time over very long stretches of very fast arpeggios. And it was cool to see how she reads the sheet music for each composition out of a giant book that holds about eight regular-sized pages on one two-page spread. I guess it would be virtually impossible for anyone to follow along carefully enough to turn the pages at the right time.

However, she didn't play the entire cycle, as I'd been led to believe. It was actually just a selection of the pieces — fewer than half — totalling a little over an hour. And the dance itself was not exactly anything to write home about. Three or maybe four of the dancers were quite good, while the remaining six or seven just seemed to be filling out the numbers.

The choreography was so unimaginative that it felt like a distraction, and I often found myself closing my eyes. The lighting and set were minimal to the extent that there often wasn't room for the dancers, who spent a lot of time either jogging around or wandering aimlessly in the half shadows until it was time for them to do something again. As for their costumes, Amber described them as "Zellers sleepwear,"which seemed generous.

We both still enjoyed the performance, mostly for the music. But it was an expensive outing, and I know from Seth that the Toronto Dance Theatre were an expensive company to bring in, so I guess I expected more. When it was over, they received no standing ovation, which in Halifax is equivalent to being booed.

Stepping Out Highbrow

I got tickets today to see a dance performance on Friday with Amber. The Toronto Dance Theatre is coming to town to perform Rivers, a piece set to the two-hour song cycle of the same name by Canadian minimalist composer Ann Southam.

I've loved this piece of music for a few years now, ever since I heard Laurie Brown play one of its movements on CBC's The Signal. The pianist performing that segment (whose fantastic recording I rushed out to buy and have treasured since) was Christina Petrowska Quilico. A widely acknowledged virtuoso, she was the first person to perform the cycle in its entirety. She's also the pianist who will be playing it live on Friday evening. So yes, I'm looking forward to this.

Here's a snippet of a past performance, sent to me by my friend and coworker Seth. It looks like the choreography will be a beautiful interpretation of the music's subtle, complex fluidity. Seth is the graphic designer for LiveArt, the local dance promoters who are bringing the TDT to Halifax for this three-night engagement. If he hadn't shown me the brochure he designed for them, I probably would have missed this rare opportunity. Thanks, Seth!

Motion Pictures

This is really incredible. The artist, Adam Magyar, filmed the platform at the Shinjiku station in Tokyo in high-speed video as his train pulled in. Then he slowed it down to make an 11-minute, beautiful, moving portrait of all the people standing there. Really great idea. Love the ambient sound, too. Although I could see Philip Glass doing a sombre, Koyaanisqatsi-like soundtrack for this. Needle-deedle-needle-deedle needly-deedly-needly-deedly!

Julia Louis-Dreyfus Made Me All Teary

I just watched Nicole Holofcener's Enough Said on DVD. Missed it in the theatres. It was just as funny and sweet and real as I've come to expect from her movies. For some reason, it made me think about what I would consider the most important piece of advice I could give someone learning to live with humans. Kind of random and platitudinous, I realize, but I'd like to record it here, if only to remind myself later:

Be really good at apologizing and better at forgiving.

Reading Roundup

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Psychic Fair are releasing our first recording tomorrow night at Gus' Pub. It's a cassette called Bees on Ice — eight songs and a download code for five bucks. Or you can just buy the download for the same five bucks on Bandcamp. I think the album sounds heavy and great, and I'm really looking forward to the show. Also on the bill are first-timers Sledge and art-lounge duo Bad PI. Maybe one other band. Come and check it out if you can.

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I had lots of time off over the Christmas holidays to read like a maniac. The pile of books I'd been in the middle of was starting to grow, and I'd promised myself I wouldn't pick up anything new till I finished what I'd started. That promise has mostly been kept, I'm happy to report.

The first thing to go was also the most recently begun. I'd borrowed Lynda Barry's Cruddy from Amber — who said it was her favourite book when she was in junior high school — and basically devoured it. The novel reads kind of like young-adult fiction, and the narrator/protagonist is a teenager, but it's so dark that I'm not really sure it's meant to be read by young adults. The levels of extreme rural poverty and amorality depicted make Deliverance look like an issue of Country Living. Any sentence randomly chosen is guaranteed to contain some combination of damage, disease, depravity, drugs, obscenities, literal filth, meat processing, or murder. It's really quite nauseating. It's also full of the pitch-perfect tragic-youth voice I've always loved in Barry's comic strips, and funny as hell.

Lynn Coady's latest short story collection, Hell Going, was next, as it was another borrow. Coady won the Giller Prize for this one, and it's easy to see why. The language is economical, and the narrative voice is audible and familiar. The characters are compellingly flawed and realistically complex. The plots are full of surprise twists, resolving gracefully and leaving lots of unanswered questions. I always seem to avoid CanLit, but I'll definitely be putting more Lynn Coady on the To Be Enjoyed list.

Then there was some non-fiction. If You're Lucky, Your Heart Will Break is a rumination on some of the principles of Zen Buddhism and its practice in real life by James Ishmael Ford. It was in the cast-off box at work, and I'm really glad I picked it up. Maybe it's because he's a Unitarian minister, but I found myself connecting with this guy's views big time. He has a healthy skepticism of dogma and borrows liberally from the beliefs and practices of other religious traditions, always looking for the kernel of truth that can be better viewed from multiple angles. This is pure conjecture, but I feel like Ford would never, for example, use the phrase, "the true dharma." I hear and read that one a lot lately, and it becomes more unsavoury to me every time.

Waging Heavy Peace was the last to go. Neil Young's memoirs are casually written in short, blog-like chunks of whatever he happens to be thinking about, which makes for a fun read. The book goes on a little long and gets sort of repetitive towards the end, which is why I hadn't finished it. But still, great to get some insight into how Young's mind works and to hear his voice on the page, whether you'd typically be interested in the subject at hand or not. The main themes that keep coming up are:

1. Neil has known and worked with lots of amazing, beautiful people, for which he is eternally grateful.
2. His family is super important to him.
3. His career has included lots of hilarious adventures, often involving drugs and/or cars.
4. Cars are awesome, but should be made to run in sustainable ways, which he plans to prove is possible.
5. Music is awesome, but should be delivered in non-crappy-sounding formats, which he plans to prove is possible.
6. Crazy Horse are awesome in some kind of unexplainable, mystical way.
7. The creative process can never be pinned down, but Neil has learned some rules of thumb along the way.
8. He hopes that quitting drugs and alcohol has not permanently cut off his connection to the songwriting muse.

As do we all. But thanks, in the meantime, for a good read.

Having done so much finishing-off, I immediately started in on a new batch of material. Right now I'm in the middle of Morrissey's Autobiography, which Alison gave me for Christmas, and George Saunders' amazing short story collection Tenth of December. I also picked up a new book co-authored by Douglas Hofstadter and a French psychologist, called Surfaces and Essences, on the central role analogy plays in all cognition. Seems super nerdy so far, but I've barely made a dent in it. I'll keep you posted as things progress.

Talking about Cake

I've been trying for many years to track down this one-woman sketch by Lily Tomlin. It finally showed up in a secondhand record store today, and of course once I knew the title it turned out to have been on YouTube all along.

I heard this piece on the radio, probably around 30 years ago, and have been wanting to hear it again ever since. Lily's parents try to have a normal, if slightly dull, conversation about some cake, and their sullen teenage daughter flips out over their banality. It's weird, but I feel like I know every word of this bit intimately, even though I only ever heard it once. As funny today as when I was a sullen teenager myself.

(I don't know what's with all the extra stuff at the end. Maybe the poster couldn't remember how to take the needle off a record.)