Grumpy

They showed Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in its entirety on Walt Disney last night. That is one great cartoon, despite its child-manipulating gothic/romantic themes. The painted backgrounds and the animation are just beautiful in their gauzy imperfection. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm being a nostalgic old curmudgeon by finding the sheen and precision of computer animation nauseating; other people seem to like it just fine. But no — it really IS better to feel the hands of the artists in there, and this movie proves it. Did you see when she was singing to her own reflection in that wishing well? That's all I'm going to say about it.

My Deal This Morning

We got up late today and listened to Brent Bambury's less-than-superb Go radio show on CBC with our coffee. He was talking to an audience of teenage-to-twenty-something kids, who were eating up his every word, about what makes the perfect pop song. It was a celebration of blandness. Is it just me, or have we not seen a generation so accepting of the status quo since the invention of pop culture after WWII? I can't remember when was the last time I heard about any youth-generated phenomenon that snowballed into a loud buzz by telling us old farts we're doing it all wrong and have made a mess of everything.

Which we definitely are, and have, so why are all these kids just sitting around happily consuming whatever garbage music and clothing and video games and iPacifiers we hand them and tell them they should like? I realize my generation — fittingly labeled with an inexpressive 'x' thanks to faux-punk Billy Idol — wasn't exactly an earth-shattering bunch of political revolutionaries. We definitely disappointed our hippy forebears, who had hoped we'd carry the man-sticking torch for them by the time they'd grown fat and nostalgic. But at least we hated everything. Y'know? Now I'm fat and nostalgic, and the kids are alright with that.

I used to listen to Brent Bambury on Brave New Waves in the 'eighties, when he was a young man, educating me and all my unseen comrades about weird, alien, excitingly anti-establishment music that we never would have found out about otherwise. Record labels hadn't invented the term "alternative" for it yet. He and others made me realize that there was another, oblique-looking possible world out there beyond our immediate bleak-looking one, and even if we might all destroy ourselves tomorrow, we could at least live in that world today simply by believing in it. Now he's an old man telling our youth about the history of popular music by playing Phil Collins and Taylor Swift songs, and instead of throwing eggs at him or at least giving him the finger, they're cheering him on. What gives?

My Deal Tonight

It's late at night and I should be asleep. We'll be helping our friends Meg and KC move into a new apartment tomorrow, a little closer to our neighbourhood. I'm drinking a cup of tea and trying not to drift off before I get into the bed, but I just wanted to say that I'm super busy with work, having been blessed with THREE new clients this week, one of whom was not even referred to me, but found me on the internet on their own. Great stuff, as long as I can actually get all the work done.

Besides work work work, I've been reading a very interesting book about Kurt Gödel's and Albert Einstein's friendship at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study in the 'forties. Specifically, it's about a very surprising physical fact that Gödel was able to prove during that time: that in any universe described by the Theory of Relativity (which of course includes our own), time cannot exist. Einstein himself admitted that he could find no refutation to this proof, and it should have left any minds which hadn't already been blown by G's Incompleteness Theorem of 1931 somewhere in the stratosphere. But instead, it was completely forgotten. Pretty fascinating.

I've also been listening to Elliott Smith a lot. Have you heard of this guy? Kidding, of course, but I don't know why it's taken me till now to get around to giving him a fair shake. I really love it — like Nick Drake and John Lennon and Neil Young all rolled into one guy. What the heck was wrong with me in the 'nineties? I didn't have time for anything that wasn't Beck or Radiohead?

Anyways, that's my deal tonight.

R.I.P. Alex Chilton

"Shakin' the World" - Alex Chilton


"Alex Chilton" - The Replacements

Shop Talk

I just remembered today that I never did show you the other bit of branding I did, for my friends Jen and Aidan's gluten-free baked goods. Here's the front of their business card. The URL on the card redirects to their current website, as the new brand doesn't launch until early next month. If you were wondering.


Vistaprint produced a whole whack of these, along with fridge magnets, for a really good price, and I have to say I'm very impressed with the product. Usually digitally printed business cards are kind of flimsy and crap, but these are virtually indistinguishable from offset printed ones, which would have been multiple times more expensive.

Besides that, there's been plenty of business coming through the old shop these days, with no end in sight so far. Right now there's a couple of posters, a government educational kit for schoolkids, and a whole new look for a classical concert series's marketing in the works, among other things. Today, though, I forced myself to get outside for awhile because it was absolutely gorgeous out. You know that first day that actually feels like spring, and everyone goes around smiling and congratulating each other on getting through the winter, willfully ignoring the fact that there will probably be at least two more rounds of snow before the weather turns dependably like this? That was today.

I met a guy at a party a couple of weekends ago who does silkscreening really cheap just because he likes doing it, so I'm also working on some T-shirt designs now in my spare time. Just for fun. I'll be sure to run them by you when they're done.

Oh yeah, and happy St. Patrick's Day to all my Irish and/or alcoholic friends!

A Mystical Poem

I dreamed I looked through a keyhole
And saw a beautiful tree,
And sitting on the grass below
Was a man who looked like me.

But could he really be myself
While I observed his soul
And even the eye that saw such things
Was less real than the hole?

OK, it's no "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," but then again, what is?

A Song and a Story Before Bed

Here's a song I just finished recording for a compilation that'll be coming out on Gooseberry Records. The album will comprise recent recordings by people who were involved in the Halifax indie rock boom of the '90's. I think it's to be called Aftermath. I hadn't recorded anything for quite awhile, and had recently written this thematically apt song about people who were prominent in that scene but then just kind of dropped out unexpectedly, so this was a perfect excuse to get back on the Garageband horse. It's somewhat scrappy, but I'm happy with it.



There's been a lot of movie-and-TV-watching around here, but that's all about to change as the winter weather breaks and our enthusiam explodes. Can't happen too soon, either, I say. Last weekend we watched the entire Academy Awards ceremony. Why? I have no good answer for that. We hadn't even seen any of the movies that were up for prizes.

Alison had an inspiring spring experience on the bus home today. I guess this kid of around 20 got on, and he had one of those haircuts that's all sticking up in the back, so she reckoned him to be a hipster scene guy. But then she realized his hair was just really messy and he was actually incredibly nerdy. She says he looked exactly like the "McLovin" guy in Superbad. And talked kind of like him too.

The bus was crowded, so he stood up and held onto the overhead bar. He had a plastic bag with something in it in the same hand he was holding on with, and it kept swinging back and forth, hitting the girl beside him in the head. He said to her loudly, "I'm sorry my bag is hitting you repeatedly in the head." She smiled and said it was OK. Taking the smile as a good sign, he continued, "I can't wait to get home so I can put this bag down."

Then some more people got on and he said, "They'll have to use a shoehorn if they want to get any more people on here." The girl didn't really react to that one, so he reiterated, "I can't wait to get home." This time, he elaborated that he had a paper to write for Monday.

"Good luck with that," the girl sympathized.

"Yeah, and I also have to study for a midterm," he said, "which is also on Monday." Another sympathetic look. Further encouraged, he continued, "And I have to make some cold calls related to this private detective case I'm trying to wrap up."

The girl ignored this last admission.

"Long story," he rolled his eyes.

And then... he started singing! Quietly, at first, but no one was complaining, so he continued a little louder. Alison didn't recognize the song, but it was something complicated and prog-rock-y about the nativity scene. He sang it in its entirety, and when he was finished, the bus was very silent. Finally, the girl said, "That was pretty good."

"Oh yeah?" he beamed. "In that case, for my next number, a little Genesis." And this time, there was no holding back as he began to belt out a Gabriel-era crowd-disperser. Alison couldn't even look at him, she was trying so hard not to either hug him or burst out laughing. People were grumbling and looking mad. The bus driver eventually told him to shut up, and he did.

"I didn't realize singing was considered offensive in these parts," he mumbled to the girl.

She looked genuinely sympathetic and said, "Well, everyone in this section was enjoying it, and that's no joke."

And that's how two people's days were made. Three, if you count me.

Hi-Q, Take Two

There was a big, windy rainstorm here on Friday, and now we seem to have no telephone service. A bit disconcerting, but at least there's still power, internet, and cable... If anyone's been trying to call us in the past couple of days, that's what's up. UPDATE 3/01: It's working again. Not sure what the problem was, but it came back on last night.

Yesterday, after brunch at the Good Food Emporium with our friends Jill and Rebecca, we went for a scenic drive to Lawrencetown Beach. We got out to admire the powerful waves, then continued along the Cole Harbour Road up the eastern shore, where I grew up. The scenery was bleak and beautiful, and it brought back a flood of surprising memories and emotions, some of them pretty grim. Their intensity grew as we continued east through Seaforth and Grand Desert, peaking when the road ended at Lakeview Elementary, the school where I finished third grade when my family first moved out that way.

When we got back, I wrote a long blog post about the trip and my memories. Its general theme was loss of innocence, and it made the point that there is something mystical and dark about the natural and cultural beauty of Nova Scotia's eastern shore, as it embodies a certain amount of violence, death, and even possibly evil. The post was frankly way too severe for general consumption, and also not very well written. And it didn't make it clear that both my childhood and our afternoon drive were enjoyable despite the gloomy undercurrent. Or, rather, the gloom was included as part of our enjoyment.

So instead of a sloppily analytical essay, here are a few haiku which I think give a much more accurate picture of the afternoon. I know I said I wouldn't inflict more haiku on you, but really, if you saw the alternative, you'd thank me.

Clouds after a storm —
The ocean reaches for them,
Salt in the cold air.

Crow in a dead tree
By the road watches our car
Go over the hill.

White ship on black waves:
The front end is supposed to
Go under like that.

Out on the icy
Salt marsh, four Canada geese
Burying their heads.

Sunday, the paint on
My old elementary
School peels in the wind.

It was actually Saturday, but it felt more like a Sunday. Poetic licence.

Quiet Freakout

One of the most annoying things about popular internet relationship-destroyer, Facebook, is that sometimes there is actually some pretty cool stuff on there, but of course you can't access it without, as my friend Carol says, "drinking the purple Jesus juice." Our old friend Peter, for instance, has been making downloadable mix tapes and posting them on his Facebook page, account, or wall — whatever you techno kids call it. Each one represents a certain genre or theme or mood, and they come with nice cover art. Peter has really good taste in music, so I was glad that Alison, being an unabashed Facebooker, has been able to email me the download links, along with descriptive text.

All this is to say that, having enjoyed many of these things (except possibly the all-Bruce-Cockburn one, and even that had some nice surprises), I've been inspired to make my own mix-tape-for-the-world. Here it is:

The Other Woman
An alternate title for this mix might be That's a Dealbreaker, Ladies!, because for each of these songs, you will know at least one person who would not be able to sit through its entirety. Here are the freaky, folky femmes from the wrong side of the music industry. To be fair, some of them have been quite successful, but they're all unique in some love-it-or-hate-it kind of way. I happen to love them all, and my aim here is to convince you to feel the same.

Most of the arguable oddity comes in a subdued, understated package, though a few of these gals do occassionally let loose with some actual wailing. And mostly it's the voices that will drive your closed-minded friends to press the eject button. But in some cases it has more to do with the non-white-Anglo cultural origins of the music. I'd like to point out that the inclusion of these latter cases in a mix of ostensibly "weird" or even "annoying" music does not mean that I am a racist — just that I think your friends are.

Hi-Q

Ever since rereading Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenter I've been meaning to check out the Japanese poet Issa, especially as translated by R. H. Blyth, since both/all those stories recommend him/them so highly. Well, I finally got around to it on the weekend and had my mind immediately expanded in the pleasantest of ways.

For some reason, I've never paid much attention to haiku, which is weird because I went through a huge Zen phase in high school and a huge Kerouac phase a little later. I think the blame for my lack of interest rests on the way haiku is taught in North American English classes, as if it's little more than a formal constraint on the number of syllables. They usually mention nature in there too, but that's about it. It's too bad, really, because the 5-7-5 syllable thing is a constraint which works in Japanese much better than in English. Most English haiku writers, and almost all translators of Japanese haiku into English, actually ignore that rule completely.

Much more important is the idea of the poem being very short and pithy, capturing a particular moment as observed by the poet, but eschewing any extra value judgment that the poet's mind might try to impose on that moment. It should be dry as a bone, drawing the reader into the same perception that caused the poet to write it, before it got all tangled up with extra-perceptive stuff like thoughts and emotions. It's a very unromantic form in that way, so maybe not particularly apt for Valentine's Day, but then again who cares whether Hallmark is pleased with my reading habits?

The poems bear some resemblance to jokes too, though they're not usually funny, as such. But the required pithiness, along with the prevalence of homographs in the Japanese language, often leads to puns or subtler double meanings. And there's also a sort of set-up and punchline aspect to it, with the third line generally surprising the reader or revealing an unexpected aspect to the moment that deepens our understanding of the first two lines. Kind of like the whack on the back with a stick that can sometimes bring about satori in Zen meditation. There's a really good article about the connections between Zen and haiku here, if you're interested.

Having thus hopefully convinced you that it's worth the brief time it'll take, here for your reading pleasure and general enlightenment are a few of Issa's/Blyth's haikus.

It's not a big deal—
the poppy and I
are both alive.

The spring day lasts
a little longer
around water.

The temple bells stop—
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.

The older we get,
the more easily tears come
on a long day.

The world of dew
is the world of dew,
And yet, and yet—

(That last one was written when his two-year-old daughter died. He had a pretty unlucky life. Which is why he became such a great poet? Who knows?)

Having primed myself with such extraordinary fare, I started seeing the world through the eyes of a haikuist, and two immediately came to me. They're more Basho than Issa, and they seemed to want to be in the 5-7-5 format, so I let them. Sometimes I'm a traditionalist.

Winter morning light,
the cat asleep on my legs—
a truck rumbles by.

All the fat sparrows
are sitting in the same tree.
Here comes another.

I'll be very happy if they keep coming, though I won't continue to inflict them on you.

The Original Buffy

In between watching every episode of Saturday Night Live from the 1979–80 season (we rented the DVD box set) and hiding in my bed from mean old February, I find myself listening to a lot of folky women with crazy voices lately — Karen Dalton, Sybille Baier, Joni Mitchell, Vashti Bunyan, Joanna Newsom, ... I think I feel a mix tape brewing. Anyway, I just "discovered" this one today — "Vampire," from Buffy Sainte-Marie's Illuminations album of 1969. I guess I never realized how awesomely freaky and psychedelic she was. I'll have to check out more of her catalogue.

She may not fare as well against the titular baddy, but I'll take this Buffy over Sarah Michelle Gellar's any day.

Good Enough for Now

OK, it's debugged and up for all the world to see, thanks to a very nice free site that shows you what any web page will look like in different versions of Internet Explorer. Don't know what I would have done without that. I was about to install Windows on my Mac and reboot every time I wanted to check my work. Would have been an absolute nightmare.

So take a look, if you wouldn't mind: www.focusdesign.ca. Bookmark it, and you'll even get a nice little icon beside it in your favourites.

If you're on Internet Explorer 6 or lower, I think there will still be some weirdness — light-coloured boxes behind images and some frames that don't sit exactly the way they're supposed to. But I'll tackle that later. Three different versions of the same website for different browsers is close enough for jazz, at least for tonight. Again, please let me know if you notice anything really untoward. Like not being able to view the work samples, which is only the entire point of the site in the first place... Ai yi.

UPDATE: Now available for IE 6! Anything lower, I think I'm gonna have to say screw it. You've gotta draw the line somewhere. I could easily spend the rest of my life pushing pixels around.

Finally!

Today I am a webmaster! My self-promotional website's up and accepting visitors. (My professional one, I mean.) I just finished it and made it live today. Check it out here.

Working on a Mac, I haven't had a chance to view it on a PC, so if anyone notices anything weird going on, please let me know. But take it easy on me, 'cause this is the first time I've ever put together a website myself, and I'm kind of proud of my rickety little baby held together with chewing gum and arbitrary negative margins.

Have I mentioned that I hate web programming? So frustrating!

UPDATE: Ugh. It looks terrible on Internet Explorer! I basically have to redo the whole thing a different way for that one particular browser, because it's such a piece of Microsoft junk. I'll let you know when it's back up again for universal viewing. If you're innarested.

Way to Go, JDS

So, J. D. Salinger died four days ago, and the long-held unrealistic hopes of millions were simultaneously dashed: we will never see another Catcher in the Rye, or even another Seymour: An Introduction. Unrealistic hopes are usually the hardest ones to let go of, so it's no surprise to hear rumours that Salinger maintained a safeful of unfinished novels — as many as fifteen of them. Less hopeful are the further rumours that he intended them all to be destroyed.

Me, I'm just relieved he made it to the natural end of his life. For some reason I was always convinced he would one day be found dead by his own hand. I guess because suicide came up quite a bit in his stories, but he also just seemed like one of those guys... the kind who seem to understand everything, and are therefore not generally understood themselves.

I always end up admiring those guys. In fact, I've lately been compiling a list of people whom I greatly admire who also happen to be suicides. Seems morbid, I guess, and maybe it is. But don't worry — this is not some kind of really crappily veiled cry for help. Please, I am definitely an extra-thick-or-no-veil-at-all kind of metaphorical bride. I just find it interesting and, yes, sad that so many of those whom I would consider the great ones seem, like Seymour Glass, not to have been made for this world. Here's the list which J. D. so deftly evaded for 91 years, to which I say congratulations.

Diane Arbus
Albert Ayler
Vic Chesnutt (probably)
Kurt Cobain
Hart Crane
Ian Curtis
Nick Drake
Sigmund Freud
Kurt Gödel
Vincent Van Gogh
Ernest Hemingway
Spalding Gray
Primo Levi
Joe Meek
Phil Ochs
Sylvia Plath
Elliott Smith (possible homicide, I guess)
Hunter S. Thompson
John Kennedy Toole
Alan Turing
David Foster Wallace
Virginia Woolf

Plus possibly Frida Kahlo, Malcom Lowry, Marilyn Monroe, and Peter Tchaikovsky. Best dinner party guest list ever, IMHO.

Bees Knees

Just working away over here. When I'm not working, I'm thinking about work. So this is what it's like to be The Man. Maybe if I got some minions it wouldn't feel so weird. Or maybe that would be the last nail in the coffin containing my formerly bohemian existence.

Business cards are being printed. They look like this.



They're expensive, but I got a ridiculous deal from my old boss at the print shop where I worked for nine years.

My website is almost finished. You'll be the first to know the minute it's up. Web design is hard! Did I already tell you that? Actually, it's the combination of web design and web programming that's hard, because they are about as well suited as print design and Microsoft Word. Or Microsoft anything, really. The left and right sides of my brain are constantly at war. I guess that explains why I keep punching myself in the head.

I'm rambling here because I have nothing new to tell you. Here, watch this. It's weird and beautiful and I miss it.

Jan Won, Twenty-Ten

Happy new year, folks! I predict it's going to be a good one. Cultural trends this year:

• Fantastic Mr. Fox provokes a huge slump in Pixar box office sales, as people remember the pleasures of animation produced by actual artists.

• More generally, a popular resentment builds against the time-wasting role of technology in our lives. In particular, people become angry about the hours they have been forced to spend keeping up superficial and vacuous relationships through the aid of high-tech gadgetry. Facebook and Twitter memberships plummet. "Hello? I'm on the bus," is an overheard conversation of the past when the most popular cellphone plan becomes "outgoing only." No one remembers what "apps" were.

• Homosexuality in Hollywood is finally accepted as a prevalent and unremarkable reality when A-list celebrities come out of the closet and virtually dare the world to stop loving them. Think Tom Cruise, Oprah Winfrey, and Sacha Baron Cohen.

My resolutions this year are:

1. To tell the people I love how great they are.
2. To finish creative projects I start as quickly as possible, before they can lose what initially excited me about them.
3. To take more hikes in the woods.
4. To embrace my inner nerd.
5. 72 dpi

And you?

Good Year for the First Half of the Alphabet

Time for the top ten albums of 2009. Here they are, in alphabetical order. It's a weird list this year, in that:

a) almost all the artists start with a letter between A and M,
b) there's very little rock, as such, on it, and
c) it's probably very unrepresentative of what people have actually been listening to this year.

There's just so much music out there, and I've spent most of 2009 quite broke and therefore not wanting to know what I was missing out on, that I feel like what I did end up discovering could seem very random and full of glaring omissions. I mean, I haven't checked these picks against those of the fascist trendy tastemakers yet or anything. Many of these albums were all picked up at one particular time in the summer when Alison and I were about to drive to Maine, so we'd have new stuff to listen to, so that portion of the year is probably over-represented. And I know there are albums on here that fans would say are not even the best albums by the artists who put them out. But this is just what I happened to stumble upon in my bumbling way and enjoy, so make your own list if you think it's not an accurate reflection of the year's best.

One other thing: I've included a sample streaming track from each album this year so you can hear what I'm talking about and see whether you agree with me. As the whole post is intended to convince people to buy the albums listed, I hope this blatant copyright infringement won't offend anyone. But if it does, I will gladly remove any and all of these tracks. Thanks.


Animal Collective
Merriweather Post Pavilion
I know this one's going to be on a lot of people's lists. And so it should be. It seems like after that Panda Bear album did so well AC decided they should try to make music for the masses. I guess that means it's a little less weird than their previous stuff, but they've gone through a pretty natural evolution to get to this place, and it's highly enjoyable, and it's still not exactly The Beatles or anything. I mean, are you really going to force yourself not to like something this catchy and celebratory just because everyone else does? Is that even possible? Come on, man.


Bat for Lashes
Two Suns
This is one of those might-not-be-as-good-as-some-earlier-work-but-it's-the-first-thing-I-heard-and-I-love-it-so-screw-ya entries mentioned above. It's very spooky/romantic in a Kate Bush kind of way, so I suppose you have to be in the right kind of mood for it. But it gives me the shivers and makes me feel like I'm in high school again. That might not sound like a good thing, and I don't have time to figure out why it is in this case, so just take my word for it and check it out.


Bibio
Ambivalence Avenue
Another discovery after the fact. In fact, it seems this guy put out another album earlier this very year which may be even better than this one. I guess one of these days I'll get around to listening to it. This one reminds me a little of Caribou, in that it sounds like a guy who's into electronic music trying to make folk songs. Except Bibio's a bit funkier and more dance-oriented. Very pleasant on a long car trip, for instance from Nova Scotia to Maine.


Cass McCombs
Catacombs
Cass McCombs, on the other hand, sounds like a guy who's into folk music trying to make electronica. I suppose that makes him somewhat like Smog/Bill Callahan, who also put out an album this year that almost made it onto this list. McCombs doesn't sing as low as that guy, but his lyrics are similarly dark and/or personal. The songs are pretty and generally a bit more tuneful. I think he has some association with M. Ward too. He probably has other albums, some of which may or may not be better than this one. I should really find these things out if I'm going to pretend to be some kind of expert, eh?


Dog Day
Concentration
The only local release on this list. That probably makes me a jerk, as I'm sure there were lots of wonderful albums released by other Haligonian artists this year. But, as you may be starting to gather, I'm not exactly with it these days. At least, that's the excuse I'm going to stick with. I like this album at least twice as much as Dog Day's first one, and that's saying a heck of a lot.


Fever Ray
Fever Ray
Do you already know about this? Do I need to explain that it's the woman from electronic duo The Knife? I'll assume I do. You know how that The Knife album had that one really cool song, but then everything else, even though it was very spooky and weird, had this kind of goofiness to it that you just couldn't quite embrace or ignore? Well, this record managed to ditch the goofiness, while maintaining the darkness, including the super creepy Laurie Anderson style pitch-shifted vocals. Does that mean I'm saying the guy in The Knife is a goof? Maybe it does.


The Flaming Lips
Embryonic
I've already gone on at length about this album elsewhere. Here's another song, in case you weren't convinced by the first one. My friend Charles criticizes them for ripping off other bands, specifically Can on Embryonic. But I just can't not like it, no matter how hard I try. And I'm a very big Can fan. So that makes it legit, in my book. Kanye West made a whole song directly out of a Can sample, for Pete's sake, and I'm sure he made a lot more money off it than Wayne Coyne will see for his trouble on this awesome but very uncommercial record.


Tim Hecker
An Imaginary Country
Ambient electronics. If you like that kind of stuff, which I do, Tim Hecker produces some of the best that's out there. If it bores the hell out of you, well, you won't like this. If you're on the fence, give this track a try. You can listen carefully to the gorgeous attention to detail here, or let it envelope you in a blissed-out meditative fog, or you can just put it on in the background while you're working and not be distracted by it at all while you remain mysteriously calm. So many states of consciousness accessible through one artist's music... and he's Canadian too!


Mountains
Choral
Mountains are very ambient too, but not so electronic. Choral sounds to me like a hi-fi, long-play version of the Buddha Machine. The band name is appropriate because this music is beautiful and pastoral, rather than purely hypnotic. Dare I compare it to early Popol Vuh? The CD sleeve says this actually came out in 2008, but iTunes lists it as 2009 when I load it in, and it wasn't on last year's list, so it definitely deserves a spot here, even if it's not quite contemporary with the other entries.


Phoenix
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
I'm sure you've already heard this album. It's everywhere. I'm pretty sure I heard this song in a Cadillac commercial. We used to call that "selling out." Now it's called "making a buck however you can, what with everyone and her grandmother putting out music and no one buying it." So what? Good for them, I say. If you somehow have avoided the hype, they're French and they sound like The Strokes. They're also undeniably catchy, to the extent that they made it onto this list despite ruining the near-perfect alphabetic pattern mentioned in the title of this post. And you KNOW I love a good alphabetic pattern.

Honourable mentions:
Sonic Youth The Eternal
Air Love 2 (See? This one would have made the list completely regular. AND they're also French! Damn you, Phoenix!)

Some Good News

Hey, guess what? Sherman Hines paid me the money he owed me! Or, rather, he paid the Nova Scotia Department of Labour and Workforce Development, Labour Standards Division, and they paid me. Big thanks to Sandra McDougall, Labour Standards Officer, who took on the complaint and extracted a settlement.

Otherwise, news around here has been all Christmas gatherings and shows. Al Tuck played last Friday with the band that recorded Brave Last Days with him, i.e. Tracy Stevens, Brock Caldwell, and Charles Austin. It was a very special show at Tribeca. Sounded great, everyone had a good time, and there were lots of familiar faces there, including some out-of-towners. That's one nice thing about Christmastime — catching up with the expats.

The Lodge also played a show on the weekend, at the Paragon. It was a benefit for kids at the IWK hospital, and I was happy to see a pretty good turnout for a cold Sunday night. Nice intimate atmosphere in that place. This show went a heck of a lot better than our last one there. In fact, we were pretty darn good, if I may say so.

Speaking of which, our album, Take That, Devil showed up yesterday in the number two spot on Herohill's top five local recordings of the year. We were beat out only by Joel Plaskett, whose recording was a very ambitious triple album. Not too shabby! Guess it's time to put together my own top ten list...

How to Prepare for Winter

1. Reread Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters for the first time in decades, both in one week. Maybe skip Seymour, an Introduction.

2. On a late afternoon in early December, go out for a long walk.

3. Forget about Christmas. Just don't even think about it. It's cancelled this year.

4. See the decorations on people's houses and lawns. Notice how pretty some of them are.

5. As with all seasonal changes, it's all about the trees and the sky. Check out the bare branches against the grey-blue-brown smoke texture. Look at the pale sun region trying to shine in the middle of the swirling haze.

6. When it starts getting dark, admire all the lights that come on. Think about the crazy amount of work that humans do to make what is basically an alternate reality for themselves to live in, just because they like things to look a certain way. Even if a lot of that work's results don't come anywhere near achieving the expressive and aesthetic standards you think preferable and know possible, it's still pretty goddamn impressive that so many members of our species are willing to spend that much time and energy working on it. I mean, look at it! It's everywhere!

7. Rent The Royal Tenenbaums.

8. Cry when Margot walks off the bus in slow motion to Nico's "These Days," a perfect expression of inescapable and hopeless love on her face. Laugh when Gene Hackman says, "Oh, no no... that's um... dog's blood."

9. Pay special attention to the cemetery and rooftop scenes — the saturated foreground browns against the cold grey-blue sky. There's those tree branches again!

10. The next day, after it has snowed for the first really substantial time, go out for another long afternoon walk. This time, look at how the snow on the trees brings out their three-dimensionality, like a sort of reverse shading. It's as if they're being illuminated from above by a very bright spotlight.

11. Write down everything you are feeling. Try hard not to emulate Salinger, but allow yourself one "goddamn," just as a tribute.

Now you're all set! Enjoy the show for the next five months or so.

Watch Out — Hot Iron Coming Through!

There's been an awful lot of design work going on around here, which explains why I never seem to have much in the way of personal anecdotes these days. The good news is that some of the work I've been doing is actually kind of fun, and I'm even — maybe "proud" is not quite the right word, pride being one of not only the seven deadly sins but also the ten fetters in Buddhism blocking the way to samsara; so let's say "unashamed"; yes, that seems right — I'm even, I say, unashamed of some of the results. For instance, here's a logo I just finished for a video store in Wolfville. It's the kind of store that doesn't have the largest selection of movies, but is very picky about the quality of movies it stocks, and even takes some unashamedness in some of its more obscure titles, if I may be so anthropomorphistic. We went through the whole branding procedure together, including defining all the core brand values and naming the place. It's really nice when you get to be part of the entire process from start to finish like that.


And, while I'm at it, I don't think I've shown you my own logo, have I? Obviously, I was in on this entire branding process too, a process which is not exactly finished, as I'm still working on my website. I don't know how many of you out there are web designers, but it sure is a different kettle of fish from designing for print. I've done some of it before, but never actually the production part where you lay everything out in a web designing program and eventually make a live, interactive site that has to look right on all browsers and monitors, etc. It's finnicky and unrewarding! I'm really starting to see why tech-savvy web people and designers are always butting heads and talking past each other. It's like two completely different languages that are in no way intertranslatable. I'm developing a lot more tolerance — well some more tolerance, anyway, which I guess is not really saying very much — for all the messy and just plain hideous websites out there. The internet does not make good design easy. Stoopid internet. Anyways, here's the logo:


I'm just about finished branding a third company, too. My friends Jen and Aidan's gluten-free retail business. It's called Schoolhouse Gluten-Free Gourmet, and the logo has a nice (if I may say so) drawing of the old schoolhouse wherein they make all their products. I'll show it to you once it's finalized. Their tagline, which is necessary because after about a million rounds we finally had to admit that we couldn't get all the core values and character traits into the name without making it either religious- or medical-sounding, is "Taste the Possibilities."

"Hey, man, what's with all the taglines, and why is every one of them in the imperative mood?" I hear you asking impatiently, and I don't really have a good answer except that maybe after getting bossed around by finicky clients all day it feels good to boss their customers around a bit, even if it's in an inviting sort of way. Make of that what you will.™