Words & Music

Just finished a record review for my friend KC's free monthly coffee shop read, Concrete News. This is the second one I've done for him. The idea is that he gets local musicians to write short reviews of classic albums. They're a lot of fun.

But when I say, short, I mean SHORT. He asks you to keep them to around 100 words. I always think I have nothing to say, and then in the end there's not nearly enough space. The first one I did was for Wire's Chairs Missing, and this one is for the Pogues' If I Should Fall from Grace with God. It'll come out in the March issue, just in time for St. Patrick's Day:

In 1988, the Pogues find the sweet spot where Britpunk and Celtic rollick cohabit in beautiful misery. The connections turn out to run deeper than a shared love of beer and the eff word, though there's room still for plenty of each. 

In the wrong hands, a mashup of traditional Irish romanticism and postmodern London irony could fail miserably. The word "fusion" comes to mind, and a couple of these songs actually flirt with "exotic" motifs.

But Shane MacGowan careens boldly between the cornfields. Banjos and penny whistles somehow rock. Sneering sentimentality becomes lyrical, transcendent poetry. You'll be weepin' into yer green pint ere this one's o'er.

See what I mean? I could've gone on for 1,000 more words just about "Fairytale of New York" alone. Didn't even get to say anything about the lovely Kirsty MacColl…

Nor did I get to talk about seeing the band when they toured this album. They played in the Masonic Hall in Toronto, where there was an ingenious setup: the stage was on the main floor, and the bar was downstairs by the washrooms. So the extreme hubbub from the constant line of celtophiles buying beer in plastic cups and then getting rid of it in one way or another didn't distract from the music at all.

Not that there was any way anyone could have drowned out that band. They were LOUD. And very drunk, as was everyone in the audience, this reporter not excluded.

In fact, I got so drunk I didn't even trust myself to get home to the suburbs on public transit. I ended up calling my sister Dana to pick me up. Somehow I knew she was out that night in our parents' car. She obliged, and I entertained her all the way home with my uncharacteristic enthusiasm and barely coherent speech. We had to stop halfway home so I could get out to urinate in someone's freshly ploughed field along the side of the highway. I remember that being hilarious to both of us, for some reason.

But so anyway, the necessarily short version of the review will be in the newsletter, as will this ad for my own album:

Maybe if they're on the same page and if I can maybe get onto the local college radio chart that gets printed every week in The Coast, then maybe I'll force myself into the public consciousness and maybe sell some virtual records. This is my carefully considered marketing and publicity strategy.

Sail Away, Little Boats!

Well, I felt quite a bit better today. Who can say what brings on these periods of anguish? They seem to come and go with zero predictability or connection to any real circumstances. But I got plenty of sleep last night and exercised this morning, which apparently warded off the feistier demons.

And guess what? I kicked my own ass this evening and finally put an album of solo material on Bandcamp, as I've been threatening to do for a couple of years now. Geez, some of these songs are over ten years old!

Anyway, my children are free at last. It's like a giant weight I've been lugging around has been uploaded from my shoulders. There were two more songs I'd planned on finishing and adding to the collection, but it just never seemed to happen. I guess those ones will have to wait for the next album.

Maybe I'll Write a Blog Post or Whatever

Can't believe it's been over a week since my last post. And also that I forgot to wish my good friend Carol a happy birthday on the 14th. Where has my head been?

I guess I'm just not feeling it these days. You know, the whole do-something-valuable-with-your-time-'cause-life-is-short-and-death-is-long thing. Lately I'm just putting in my hours at work to be able to come home and distract myself for a couple more hours till it's time to go to sleep. It all seems so pointless and exhausting. Winter blahs, I suppose.

There's definitely nothing situationally wrong. Apartment's great, friends are great, music's fun, job is or at least should be rewarding. Writing first thing in the morning is rewarding when I actually do it. Girls is back on weekly, and there's a third season of Borgen. I've got money, health, records, and snacks. Why does all that only make me feel worse about feeling bad?

Amber had some minor surgery on Monday, about which I'd been worrying quite a lot, so that's at least something potentially negative. But it went as well as it possibly could. They stuck a tube with a balloon on it into her leg's major artery, then blew up the balloon to make more space for blood to get through. Now her leg is warmer and more alive-feeling than it's been in almost two years. It's kind of a miracle.

So maybe I'm just bored or something. How's that for a first-world problem? Somebody throw some tragedy my way, so I can enjoy the adrenaline boost. Guess I'll get to bed early and see if the morning brings some fresh motivation.

Happy birthday, Carol.

I'm starting to think this guy was onto something.

"In order to awaken, first of all one must realize that one is in a state of sleep. And in order to realize that one is indeed in a state of sleep, one must recognize and fully understand the nature of the forces which operate to keep one in the state of sleep, or hypnosis. It is absurd to think that this can be done by seeking information from the very source which induces the hypnosis."

 - George Ivanovich Gurdjieff

This amazing surrealist film by Alejandro Jodorowsky is said to have been based on a couple of books by one of Gurdjieff's students. I bought a copy of it a couple of weeks ago because it's one of my favourite movies and somewhat hard to find. Haven't cracked it open yet, though. I'll need a couple of hours of free time and some wide open headspace to get the full benefits of another viewing. Soundtrack by the Don Cherry, by the way. The gifted collaborator of Ornette Coleman, not the loudmouthed hockey idiot.

The Blind Impress*

I found this astonishing short documentary today. It comes from the New York Times website, where you can also read all about its genesis. The concise description they give of the film tells you everything you need to know:

In 1983, after years of deteriorating vision, the writer and theologian John Hull lost the last traces of light sensation. For the next three years, he kept a diary on audio-cassette of his interior world of blindness. This film is a dramatization that uses his original recordings.

Watching it at work this morning, I found myself more moved than I generally like to be in a shared office space. I guess that's my version of an "NSFW" warning. The quiet depth and beauty of Hull's observations haunted me for the rest of the day.

One of the filmmakers' inspirations was apparently Stories We Tell, Sarah Polley's documentary comprising interviews with her family members. I've come very close to renting that one a few times now, so next trip to the video store should be a quick one.

*This phrase is from "Continuing to Live," a poem by Philip Larkin that is far too excellent to have a silly pun made out of it. Richard Rorty got a lot of good mileage out of it in his equally compelling Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.

Happy Birthday, Amber!

27 years young, as of yesterday. World traveler and militant 1970s poet/lecturer.

OK, here's a smiling one.

There Is No One What Will Take Care of You

Ugh. Can't sleep. I think it's too hot in here. I went to bed at 8:30 tonight, exhausted from the night before, when The Reference Desk played a show at Gus' Pub. As always, it was super fun but super late. Didn't get to sleep till 3:30 that night.



So tonight I went to bed as soon as I got tired, but I guess I left the heat up a little high in my room. Now it's 1:30, and I've just woken up in a sweat from a nightmare about driving a minivan. Driving dreams are always nightmares for me, which probably has some bearing on my not doing it in real life.

The brake pedal on this minivan was very stiff, and needed to be pushed in beyond the full extension of my leg to get the car to stop. There were a few friends in there with me, and they didn't seem to notice I was having any trouble. In fact, I felt like I was doing a pretty good job of getting us around safely, beyond the nagging feeling that I might have sailed through a few red lights.

But then we came to a crosswalk full of children going to school... Well, you can imagine how that turned out. I'm glad to have woken up before witnessing too much of the bloodbath. Still feel kind of shaken, though.

I'm sure the dream was brought on by this letter of mine to The Coast. That's our free weekly entertainment paper in Halifax. I was ignored or nearly run down at five crosswalks on the way to work one morning last week and felt fed up enough to complain publicly.

There's been a lot of talk generally about crosswalk safety here due to a spike in the number of pedestrians getting hit on them. Plus, a universally beloved member of the Halifax Buddhist community was killed by a drunk driver in Hamilton right after she had moved there back in October. It's on people's minds.

I felt it necessary to point out that drivers bear the responsibility in these cases, because every time the subject comes up, people start telling stories about how irresponsible pedestrians are at crosswalks. These stories always end with the moral that crosswalk safety is a shared responsibility between drivers and pedestrians. That is even the government's own line on the issue whenever PSAs are produced.

You'll see a second letter after mine making this exact point, and then some ding dong in the comments section trying to argue the same case by steering the issue away from morality into pure physics, as if car accidents were uncontrollable acts of God. I guess he got his revenge on me by putting me in the driver's seat in my unconscious.

Anyway, I stand by my assessment. The day this letter came out, my friends Meg and KC were lightly ribbing me about it as they drove me to band practice. We had the radio on, and a story came on the news about a police car having hit a woman on the sidewalk that very day. The cop had been pulling out of a parking lot onto a busy road, and didn't notice the pedestrian. The news reader said that it had been determined the driver looked both left and right before proceeding, so no charges were being laid. Then she said, "This story should be a reminder to us all that road safety is the shared responsibility of drivers and pedestrians."

Be careful out there.