Fair Warning

I realize it's been awhile since there's been a new post. Just so you know, there's a big one coming. It's in everyone's favourite format — the rant — and it's going to be dense. A lot of different ideas have been suddenly converging for me and I'm all excited about them, so practise sitting up straight and get out some toothpicks to prop your eyelids open.

Meanwhile, everything's good here. I recently completed a long book and a logo design, and am in the process of developing the general look for a classical concert series's upcoming season. Alison is taking on more work with the commercial photographer she often assists. Assuming I can finish plodding through the snow-covered hedge maze that is this year's tax return before Jack Nicholson comes after me wielding a freshly sharpened audit, we'll be doing all right for money.

I'm reading a really good book on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, called The Meaning of Everything. My friend Charles and I are going to play a set of as-yet-unwritten instrumental music in early June, as Lac Secret. There are Lodge shows coming up too. And then a trip to Toronto to see Pavement for Alison's birthday! Time continues to overwrite its current state, refusing to settle into any kind of stable pattern. What a joker.

Easter Pics

Here, as promised, are some photos from our Easter weekend south shore visit. I guess I was kind of excited to be out of doors. As usual, no one took any pictures of Ali. Who watches the Watchmen?

My Life in the Ghosts of Bush

Last weekend we went to our friend Johanna's parents' cottage on the South Shore and had a real nice time being in nature, conserving water, and playing Careers. We also rode on the LaHave ferry and explored a few beaches not too far away. Soon I hope to have pictures to show you. I know you Facebook people have already seen some (grrr), but there's some others that I'll be posting when they become available.

In the meantime, since there's nothing else going on around here but lots of work, let me share another piece of pop culture that has no connection to my own life except insofar as I like it. Which is quite sofar, actually, in this case.

It's the latest Joanna Newsom album. I received it in the mail last week and haven't been able to stop listening to it. I don't know what you guys think of her (though I'm pretty sure there's at least some of you who think she has the most irritating voice imaginable and I'd have to be some kind of masochist to listen to more than 10 seconds of her singing in a sitting), but I'm a pretty big fan. I know she sounds like Lisa Simpson. Maybe that's part of the appeal — that despite such a weird idiosyncrasy she manages to make something so beautiful and compelling.

But anyway, on this album, Have One on Me, which, by the way, is three CDs long, there's an element of maturity to her voice that I don't think was there before. It's a little less brittle, a little sweeter. I also hear some Kate Bush and even Joni Mitchell influences creeping in, the former especially on this song right here.



I was never a huge Kate Bush fan back in the 'eighties, but lately she keeps popping up in contemporary music as an influence (Björk, M83, Bat for Lashes, Fever Ray) and I find myself consistently gaga over the hopelessly romantic results. So maybe it's time to revisit that missing link in the evolution of my personal taste. Any recommendations of where to start?

Help, My Retinas Are Burned.

I don't watch music videos very much, but I just had to share this one, as it has completely captivated me. Not being very "with it," I can't tell you much about the artist, but I'm sure you can read all about him in the latest issue of Tiger Beat magazine.

The video's only two minutes and 42 seconds long, but there's just so much packed into it, it feels more like 20 minutes! At least, I think that's the reason... If you can make it to the part where he starts laughing and pointing, congratulations and hang in there — you're into the home stretch.



You're welcome. If you still need more entertainment, about the only thing I've ever seen that could possibly beat this is the remix.

Thanks to WFMU for bringing these to my rapt attention.

Strange Loops

So this is pretty weird. I'm reading this book about Gödel's kooky denial of time's existence (which, by the way, I thought might somehow tie in with Eckhart Tolle's kooky denial of time's existence, only in a more scientifically rigorous way, but that turns out not to be the case; whereas for Eckhart time doesn't exist because there is only ever the now, Gödel says that actually it's precisely the now that doesn't exist — there is no objective moment which is THIS moment independent of frame of reference, according to Einsteinian relativity — and, in fact, it's possible to invent universes in which one can travel to a past moment, using a really fast but sub-light-speed spaceship, thereby creating a closed time loop; hence, the concept we mean when we talk about time [moves in one direction, can be divided at any given moment into past and future, ...] doesn't actually exist), and I come across an interesting bit of trivia. It turns out that Gödel's favourite movie was Snow White! He used to rave about it to all his friends and try to convince them of its greatness!

I guess his friend Alan Turing, who developed the precise account of recursive functions contained in G's 1931 first incompleteness theorem into a deep analysis of computability, thereby making the modern computer on which I am writing this blog post possible, must have been at least partially listening, because when he decided that his (at the time criminal) homosexuality was not curable, he decided to take his own life... by eating an apple that he had injected with cyanide! Gödel, by contrast, was morbidly afraid that others were trying to poison his food, and starved himself to death.

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.