Score One for the Dark Guys

This video just came out and it makes me really happy. It's a song by one of my favourite local bands, Monomyth. They recently got signed to Mint Records, so now they get to make cool promotional videos for their fun, catchy songs. My bandmate Josh Salter is one of the members of Monomyth, so that makes me extra happy.

But what makes me happiest about this video is that it's directed by weirdo/outsider advocate Seth Smith and stars weirdo/outsider Matthew Grimson. Matthew's a dear friend of mine and an all around genius, so it's great to see him doing his freaked out thing in such a public forum. Now if only people would listen to his songs...

Everything Looks Better in Black and White

I rented Visitors on DVD last week, knowing nothing about it except that it was the fourth instalment in Godfrey Reggio's "Quatsi" series. Koyaanisqatsi, his first, made a huge impact on me when PBS aired it in 1985. I'd never been so moved to question the prison of our modern human culture before, nor had I ever heard the beautiful, repetitive music of Philip Glass.

Now an experienced culture-hater and Glass-lover, I wondered how Reggio's latest film would affect me. The third one, Naqoyqatsi, had been pretty ugly and disappointing, or at least that's how I remember its computer-generated weirdness. But Visitors ended up amazing and hypnotizing me with its surprising simplicity.

For one thing, I had no idea it would all be in black and white. For another, almost the whole film is images of human faces in super slooooow motion. Sounds potentially very dull, I know. But the slowness really makes you pay attention to the minutest of movements and expressions, until humans seem creepily beautiful and endlessly fascinating. As in Koyaanisqatsi, the simple act of distorting time causes you to wonder again and again, "How have I gone this long and missed all this?"

The music is really good, too. There's the usual Philip Glass arpeggiation, but it's slow and varied, rich and beautiful, never veering into the intentionally irritating zone that some of the original film's soundtrack occupied. Quite haunting, really. And then there's the quality of the black and white.

I don't know anything about the special camera that was used to film this movie, but the depth of tone is  truly astounding. It's really what gives the whole viewing experience such a special, eerie quality. All the shadows are a really rich black, and the midtones are darker than usual too. The highlights, on the other hand, are plenty light, yet you don't feel like there's too much contrast. Instead, things (mostly faces) seem to step out of the darkness into a soft, painterly light like Vermeer subjects without their hues. There's maybe a slight purple cast, humanizing things subtly.

When the film was over, I got kind of obsessed with the possibilities of monochromaticity. All my Instagram posts for the next week became about testing the limits of black and white, trying to capture a similarly dark romanticism. I guess those Sable Island horses probably had something to do with this obsession too, now that I think of it. Anyway, here's what I've gotten so far.

Down the Garden Path

Been awhile. Sorry. I suddenly have nothing to say. Here's a diversion while I try to come up with something meatier. It's a fun little weird grammar-quiz/word-game/puzzle-thingy I wrote for a website my friend in Toronto edits. Keep it to yourself, though, because it hasn't actually been published yet.

The Edge of Nonsense
Ever start reading a straightforward-seeming sentence and suddenly find yourself scratching your head in confusion? You're not alone. The following "garden path" sentences will have you second- and third-guessing how you thought English worked. They're all punctuated properly and make grammatical sense, but it might take you a few passes to figure out how. Hit the Huh? button [it'll be a button on the actual website —ed.] when you think a) you've understood, or b) you're so lost you can't remember words how go.

1. The dog walked by the mailman barked.

Huh?
No barking civil servants are needed to make sense of this weird sentence. The trick is that everything but the final word is the subject. So, the thing that barked is the dog that was walked by the mailman. Implausible, you say? I figure there's gotta be at least one mailman out there who owns a dog. Right?

2. The club admitted a new member was bribed.

Huh?
I'm glad that club confessed to bribing a new member. It doesn't legitimate their recruiting methods, but their acknowledgment of wrongdoing will be taken into account by the court.

3. Many fish the river.

Huh?
Many fish live in rivers. Probably even more do not. But this sentence is not about any of those fish. It's about a popular waterway and the many anglers who try their luck in it.

4. Fall in love with a friend is vibrant.

Huh?
By now, I'm assuming either you're loving these or you've moved on to something more immediately gratifying elsewhere on the internet. Probably involving cats. If you're still with us, here's a nice poetic image for you: fall is vibrant when you're in love with a friend.

5. When army camps are civilians ever jealous.

Huh?
And why shouldn't those civilians be jealous? Maybe they'd like to camp too. Why should army have all the fun?

6. If bananas don't advertise it.

Huh?
This is just a bit of advice you can take or leave as you see fit. Keep your craziness to yourself. It only makes others uncomfortable. If you're perfectly sane, go ahead, act however you want. I'm sure you'll be accepted and probably make lots of friends. But if less than 100% there, you might want to watch that you're not broadcasting your mental state too loudly. In other words, if bananas… Am I over-explaining this?

7. Sparrows called from the treetops seldom reply.

Huh?
Sparrows THAT ARE called… Those sparrows can see that you're not one of them. They're not dumb, you know. Now get out of that tree and stop advertising how bananas you are.

8. Fruit flies like nesting chickens dance.

Huh?
From sparrows to dancing chickens! OK, this is probably the trickiest one here. Are you ready? Fruit is to flying as nesting chickens are to dancing. I.e., it doesn't do it. My profoundest apologies.

9. Bosses can corrupt or lazy employees.

Huh?
I guess this one's pretty hard too. Replace the word “can” with “fire” and it will all be clear. You really are a good pal to have stuck around this long. And have I told you how great you look in that sweater?

10. Drowning swimmers can be helped and is wrong.

Huh?
This sentence is much easier to understand if you reverse the terms on either side of the “and”: Drowning swimmers is wrong and can be helped. Tempting, sure, but there's really no defense for it.

Assuming you got this far without causing yourself or anyone else bodily harm, congratulations on being a bona fide linguistics nerd. And if you understood all the sentences without any help, congratulations on being Noam Chomsky!

Method

Collect all unfulfilled desires,
however ludicrous, banal,
perverse, or painful.
Place on glass slides,
one by one, neatly stacked.
Squeeze together tightly.
There should be no air bubbles.
Then hold in front of a high window
on a moonlit night
for many hours until
the colourful projection,
dark and rich on your bare floor,
exactly resembles the sound
of the distant coyotes.

Wild, Wild Horses

Alison and I went to see a beautiful and amazing photography exhibit at the Museum of Natural History on Saturday for her birthday. The show is around 30 or 40 very large black-and-whites of the wild horses on Sable Island, by photographer Roberto Dutesco. You can see the full collection on his website. These are some of my favourites.

He's really gotten both the complex relationships among the community and the magnificent character of its individual members. And so many moods! Serene, lonely, unbridled, courageous, threatening, content, serious, playful...

I just couldn't stop looking at them — so much mystery and beauty and strength and tenderness. It's an austere portrait of 400 animals surviving alone and fitting naturally into a weird, alien landscape in which they never originally belonged, and now they're part of that landscape's weirdness. I feel like that's a theme most of us can relate to.

This Be the Passage

I'm afraid I have to quote some more from A Death in the Family. I hope you won't mind too much. It's just that I got to the exact midpoint of the book on my lunch today, and there, just as literature teachers tell you it's supposed to, an important turning point happened.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, the author/narrator/protagonist, comes to reflect on the book he is in the process of writing at this point in this book he has already written, and on his reasons for writing in general. It turns out to be an attempt at relief from the feeling that everything that can happen in the world is already understood. This feeling is completely wrong, he recognizes, and is caused by the fact that the world we live in is mostly one of our own creation, in our own minds, composed of linguistic categories like concepts and beliefs and ideas. There is always a tension between one's feeling that one already understands everything and one's longing to escape the world that produces and validates that feeling — a tension he is compelled to ease by writing about it.

What I was trying to do, and perhaps what all writers try to do — what on earth do I know? — was to combat fiction with fiction. What I ought to do was affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are, in other words, revel in the world outside instead of searching for a way out, because like this I would undoubtedly have a better life, but I couldn't do it, I couldn't; something had congealed inside me, a conviction was rooted inside me, and although it was essentialist, that is outmoded and furthermore romantic, I could not get past it, for the simple reason that it had not only been thought but also experienced, in these sudden states of clear-sightedness that everyone must know, where for a few seconds you catch sight of another world from the one you were in only a moment earlier, where the world seems to step forward and show itself for a brief glimpse before reverting and leaving everything as before…

Reading this at the large staff table while eating my lentil soup, I suddenly gasped with astonishment at the sharp, insightful, but ultimately impotent self-awareness going on here. Someone else at the table asked me if I was still enjoying the book, and all I could do was nod sweatily. What I was reading was exactly what it's our project at the magazine to point people towards and help guide them through. Yet it was being framed in such a psychological/literary rather than moral/spiritual way, I didn't feel capable of talking about it without alienating the other lunchers.

And then came the best description of a mystical experience I think I've ever read:

The last time I experienced this was on a commuter train between Stockholm and Gnesta a few months earlier. The scene outside the window was a sea of whiteness, the sky was grey and damp, we were going through an industrial area, empty railway carriages, gas tanks, factories, everything was white and grey, and the sun was setting in the west, the red rays fading into the mist, and the train in which I was travelling was not one of the rickety old run-down units that usually serviced this route, but brand new, polished and shiny, the seat was new, it smelt new, the doors in front of me opened and closed without friction, and I wasn't thinking of anything in particular, just staring at the burning red ball in the sky and the pleasure that suffused me was so sharp and came with such intensity that it was indistinguishable from pain. What I experienced seemed to me to be of enormous significance. Enormous significance. When the moment had passed the feeling of significance did not diminish, but all of a sudden it became hard to place: exactly what was significant? And why? A train, an industrial area, sun, mist?

So honest and perceptive. I really think he came close here to fulfilling his mission of fighting fiction with fiction. I hope he felt as much relief from getting that out in words as I felt from the recognition that profound yet ineffable glimpses of reality are not just one's own private delusions. They are there to be had and sometimes maybe even effed.

Favourite Song of All Time of the Day

In the toilet paper aisle of the grocery store today I noticed they were playing a Big Star song over the PA. I was pleasantly surprised. There's been a lot of fairly obscure but undeniably good music popping up in there lately, and I'm not sure why.

For instance, a couple of days ago I was reaching for a big bag of Que Pasa corn chips when James Brown's "Get on the Good Foot" started up, with its shouted intro: "Que pasa, people, que pasa — hit me!" That one had my head reeling for awhile, even as I found myself doing the funky chicken toward the checkout.

But the song today was one I couldn't quite place. It was definitely Big Star, but a tune I was barely familiar with. One refrain sounded melodically like the repeated lines, "All I want to do / is to spend some time with you" in Chris Bell's "You and Your Sister." However, this song was a much more upbeat, driving rock number.

It got stuck in my head as I walked home with 24 rolls of 100% post-consumer recycled toilet paper under my arm. As soon as I got back, I set down my bulky load and listened to every Big Star song I considered myself less familiar with. Mostly Third/Sister Lovers stuff. But that stuff was all messed up and sad, whereas this song was catchy and feel-good. Then I listened to all the other songs from all three albums, to make sure I wasn't overlooking something I thought I knew.

I wasn't. There was a live album and a collection of oddities I didn't know well, though... Maybe it was in there somewhere? Skipped through that stuff on Grooveshark as fast as I could. Still couldn't find the song I'd heard in the store.

Then I started thinking it might be an Alex Chilton solo recording. Or, wait! Possibly a non-"You-and-Your-Sister" song from Chris Bell's solo album the genius of which I'd missed in the shadows of "I Am the Cosmos" and "Y&YS" itself. I began going through that album carefully, track by gorgeous track.

I hope you're not thinking at this point that there's going to be some satisfying reveal at the end of this story, because I never did figure out what the song was. Maybe it's not even Big Star, after all; could be some other powerpop band completely ripping them off, down to the brittle Fender guitar tones. Frankly, I don't really care anymore.*



No, the end of this story is that I got so completely wrapped up in "You and Your Sister" that I couldn't stop listening to it and decided to forget all about that other, inferior song. "Y&YS" is so heartbreakingly good it gives me goosebumps, especially when the second verse starts and Alex Chilton comes in underneath with the lower harmony. And that ghostly "Your looooove won't be leaving" in the bridge leaves me breathless every time.

Maybe Chris Bell really was the cosmos, as his album title ludicrously boasted. Right now I'd believe it. That title track has always slain me, but today all my tears are devoted to its beautiful B-side.

Good thing I've got lots of tissue on hand.

* Disclaimer: OK, I actually do still care, quite a lot. If anyone has any ideas about what that song might have been, please let me know.