Another Night at Gus'

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

Quilico 1, TDT 0

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

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

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

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

Stepping Out Highbrow

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

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

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

Motion Pictures

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

Julia Louis-Dreyfus Made Me All Teary

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

Be really good at apologizing and better at forgiving.

Reading Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talking about Cake

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

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

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

New Year's Resolutions 2014

1. Respect the daily requirements of sleep, exercise, and meditation.
2. Cultivate generosity and compassion, and watch carefully for opportunities to express them.
3. Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude.
4. Expect the unexpected.
5. Whenever possible, be the unexpected.

Happy New Year!

Winter Photo Dump

I've really been enjoying walking around wintry Halifax and its beautiful parks over these holidays. I promised a couple of readers (Mom & Dad) some photos, so here are my latest Instagram pics.

Also, as a postscript to the top ten list, I wanted to add that there were a couple of dance-pop albums that didn't make the cut, but are definitely worth a listen. Daft Punk's Random Access Memories and Janelle Monáe's The Electric Lady are both super catchy and smart. They will cause you to shake your groove thing against your will. I would have liked to include either or both of them to make the list a little more well-rounded and fun, except that neither seems to compel my repeated listening like the chosen ten do. That doesn't mean they're not top-ten worthy — just that I am no fun.

Top Ten for '13

(Click here to download.)

Don't get me wrong. I like carollers as much as the next guy — probably more. And jubilant church bells? Bring 'em on. But if Bing Crosby major-third-warbles and full-octave-glissandos his way through "White Christmas" one more time within my earshot, whoever has the misfortune of standing next to me is going to overhear some seriously impatient muttering. There may also be pronounced brooding.

Luckily, the odds of any of that happening are slim. Now that Christmas is just a fond memory and some indigestion-fuelled nightmares, we can rejoice in the ban on "holiday music." And what better way to cleanse our ears' palates [Can one sense apparatus be a metaphor for another? Seems suspect... cf. "The cold blue sky gave frostbite to the fingers of his eyes." —Ed.] than with a sampling of the past year's best rock, pop, and electronic music?

As always, my top ten favourite albums from the year are listed in no particular order. New this year, I've put together a compilation of songs from all the albums for you to download. So I guess they are in some order, which is the sequence I thought the sample tracks sounded best in. Anyway, just click the link under the cover image up there to get the mix.

And no capsule reviews this time around. You can find out everything you need to know about all these albums elsewhere, plus how many different ways are there to say I like something? Probably fewer than ten.

(OK, you might not find out too much about that Husband & Knife recording, which is a local download-only release available by buying a booklet of spooky black & white Dartmouth-at-night photographs from dronemaster KC Spidle, who wrote and recorded all the songs with the appropriately spare help of a few likeminded pals. But seriously, everything else on here is not exactly languishing in obscurity.)

Here's the album/track list:

Arcade Fire—Reflektor

Sample Track: "We Exist"

Dog Day—Fade Out

Sample Track: "Sunset"

My Bloody Valentine—mbv
Sample Track: "If I Am"

The Knife—Shaking the Habitual
Sample Track: "A Tooth for an Eye"

Atoms for Peace—Amok
Sample Track: "Ingenue"

Boards of Canada—Tomorrow's Harvest
Sample Track: "Cold Earth"

Oneohtrix Point Never—R Plus Seven
Sample Track: "Chrome Country"

Flaming Lips—The Terror
Sample Track: "Be Free, A Way"

Husband & Knife—Husband/Knife & The Drone
Sample Track: "Bring It Down"

Kurt Vile—Wakin on a Pretty Daze
Sample Track: "Was All Talk"

For maximum enjoyment, listen loud on headphones while getting lost in a snowy forest.

Merry Christmas

On Yuletide Retreat

Dear Edie,

I have a lot of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don't worry. It's all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don't know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes through everything, is one thing. It's a dream already ended. There's nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.

Your eternal old man,
Jack

—Jack Kerouac

(courtesy of whiskey river)

Hospital Food

Wow, I had such a crazy dream last night. It was like a combination of Fight Club and Shaun of the Dead. People around me were getting into this fad called the "Zombie Diet." It involved finding discarded parts of humans from hospitals and eating them. I thought it was disgusting, but everyone said it was super healthy and would be the way all people ate in the future.

The whole thing really bothered me, so I tried to just ignore it as yet another aspect of my own culture that I would never understand but that hopefully would go away soon or at least leave my little subculture of one alone. But more and more people started getting involved in "ZD" and trying to convince me it was a good idea.

Eventually I ended up in some creepy old forgotten hospital basement with a bunch of zombified looking "dieters." Their eyes were all sunken in, and they had a crazed look to them. I guess human flesh was addictive, because they were all anticipating their next fix. It was like a dark, mouldy parking garage/morgue full of Smigels from Lord of the Rings. On the concrete floor, there was a detached arm around which they were all gathered.

One person in the middle was announcing to everyone else that he'd realized it could be dangerous to eat raw human flesh that was possibly diseased and anyway had been sitting around unrefrigerated for some time. This relatively ingenious hypothesis for some reason provoked mixed reactions. Some of the Gollums seemed to feel that the danger of ingesting who knows what manner of horrible bacteria was what made this diet exciting enough to stick with, as opposed to, say, the Canada Food Guide's conservative recommendations (yawn).

While folks were grumbling and debating, the guy pulled out an electric fork he had invented. He said it would cook the "meat" they were all hungering for, one bite at a time, thereby rendering their nutritional proclivities safer, if hardly any less nightmarish. He demonstrated by skewering a loose piece of the bare male arm on the floor. Holding up the fork — which looked a lot like the carving fork my dad always used on the Christmas turkey — he pressed a button, whereupon the flesh began to sizzle and brown quite quickly.

I thought it was a pretty good invention, if one could temporarily forget the despicability of its purpose. But someone else in the crowd was too impatient for such refinement. One of the more sunken-eyed ZD'ers lunged forward and grabbed the hunk of half-cooked elbow off the fork, stuffing it greedily into his mouth. That display was too much for the rest of the hungry crowd, who roared forward en masse to start ripping whatever they could get off of the rest of the arm with their teeth, like a pack of hyenas around a rotting zebra.

And then I woke up to this Satie piece coming from my alarm clock. Put me in a very weird mood for the rest of the morning.

Sunshine and Frost

We got a bunch of snow yesterday that stuck around on the ground. Tomorrow promises more of the same, up to 30 cm, followed by freezing rain and then just plain rain. But today was a gorgeous sunny in-between day, good for walking around and enjoying the beauty.

It was also cold as heck, mind you, but at least there was little in the way of wind. I'm still pretty phlegmed up and woozy from the rotten head cold I ended up getting Tuesday night, so I decided not to rush or try to get too much done.

I drank some coffee and did some slow yoga and an extra long meditation in the indoor sun before heading out into the cold air for a late brunch and a few Christmas-related errands. Something about the weather/walking/open-schedule combination made me happy to be alive, even while realizing how sad the world I happen to be alive in is. It was almost like a kind of joyful sympathy, if that makes any sense.

I had also just finished reading Charles Bukowski's Women (thanks for the recommendation, Dave), which might have had something to do with my bittersweet mood. The novel was hilarious and dirty and tragic and hopeless and full of real love complicated by desperate desire. Highly readable, in other words.

But so I just wandered around in the freezing cold, in love with everyone I encountered: the helpful girl at the post office, the excitable man in the video store, the couple arguing about soup recipes, and the old lady in her car who smiled when I waved thanks from the crosswalk. They were all so real and fragile and temporarily satisfied with their own impermanence, like delicate flowers in the snow.

Maybe the extreme cold makes us each a bit more aware of our own and each others' mortality, so we become a little more genuine and thoughtful. I don't know. But I easily got all my Christmas presents bought and sent off without resenting any other shoppers, clerks, corporate retail franchises, Christianity, Canada Post, Stephen Harper, late capitalism, or anything. Then I came home to finish the Sunday NY Times crossword and listen to the Lowlife soundtrack in my warm living room. The cats enjoyed the tuba drones on the other sofa and helped me with some of the longer themed answers. There was also time for a pot of tea, some light house-cleaning, and a chat with my mom. It was a great day.

Favourite Song on the New Dog Day Album

Sunset, by a mile. So far, anyway. It sounds like a Christmas Carol to me. I could totally hear a nice children's choir singing this over the tinny speakers in a crowded Gap store. It's pretty positive, in a weird Dog Day kind of way: Life is mostly hard work and there isn't time to get it all done, but I won't be ashamed when I die, because at least I tried and saw some beauty along the way. Ho ho ho, pass the egg nog.

Sorry you can't listen to the song without opening a new window. I thought I'd find a video of it or at least an embeddable YouTube still of the album cover, but all that came up was this.

Last Night at the Marquee

Proof that I am not a complete loser. It was nice to see Greg Clark again and play on this stage for the first time in probably eight years or so.



And Dog Day were amazing; no surprise. I bought the CD.

Nice Quiet Day

Sick in bed today. I stayed home from work with a sore throat and headache. Hoping to sleep off whatever's trying to get me, although I ended up having basically as much work to do from home as I would've had if I'd gone in. But it was sunny out and pleasant to look out the window from my hospice.

Anyway, not feeling very talkative. Or typative. But here are a couple of (I think) beautiful Chinese prints that were posted on 50watts today. They're both woodcuts by an artist named Li Qun. The first is from 1957, and the second from 1980. Now I'm starting to look forward to the first snow on the trees, when they get that pretty, three-dimensional, highlit effect as if they're being illuminated from the side by blinding white light.

Three More Days

Another late Psychic Fair practice tonight. We are ready for this show on Saturday! Plus our album is ready too. Just have to figure out how to release it as a physical object and what sort of event to make out of that. It'll be called Bees on Ice. Here's the first preview track, available on our bandcamp page.


Saturday's gonna be a really fun show, with Cold Warps playing a set between us and Dog Day. I haven't heard the new DD album yet, but I plan on devoting some serious time to it tomorrow. You can stream the whole thing here. [12/05/13 OK, I've checked it out, and it's just as great as I expected. Maybe even better than their last one. Two ardent thumbs up! —Ed.]

I know I keep going on about this show, but I am seriously excited about it. Dog Day are one of my favourite bands, so I'm doubly psyched that they have a new batch of songs and that I'll get to play with them in celebration thereof. What could be cooler?

Humbuggery

"I read somewhere
     just waking up can kill you."

—Elizabeth Ross Taylor

Days are getting shorter and colder. And yet the warm comfort of sleep eludes me. I feel that dark December mood creeping up on me again. I want to spend more and more time indoors, eating rich foods, and less time doing things that will make me feel better, like being active or contemplative or creative. Better stay away from the stores as much as possible, with their ugly Christmas displays and saccharine music...

And it also probably wasn't a great idea to watch this super bummer of a Bergman melodrama about a mother coming to visit her two estranged daughters, one of whom is severely handicapped and the other of whom hates her guts and spends a whole night telling her why. Ingrid Bergman as the mother really shines, though, in her final role (and the only film she ever made with Ingmar Bergman). Still, it's not exactly Elf, if you're looking to tame the "holiday season" blues.



Tomorrow I will try to find a way to visit some nature. A walk in the woods, or a half hour staring at the ocean. That's usually the most reliable way of staring down "Black Pete."

Meanwhile, I had a really great band practice tonight with Psychic Fair, which always offers some relief. We're playing a show Saturday night at the Marquee, opening for Dog Day, who are releasing a new album. I believe I already mentioned that in another post, but it's worth repeating. Bring your friends!

First Satori of 46

What a nice birthday weekend. It was really the best one I've had in a long time. Thanks to everyone who came over and/or otherwise helped me celebrate. I feel very lucky to have so many kind and interesting friends.

The week leading up to Friday was kind of cranky in general, so birthday fun at the end was especially appreciated. I'd been feeling a little alienated and overwhelmed at work, plus wondering why I forced myself to invite people over when I generally hate parties and hadn't had time to properly prepare the house for guests.

But then, on the way to work Friday morning, I was hit with this spiritual insight out of the blue that made life seem a whole lot easier and more fun. The sun was shining on my face, the air was a little warmer than it had been recently, and out of nowhere the thought occurred to me: You are neither the inside nor the outside, but the window between the two.

Usually we think of ourselves as a soul inhabiting a body from the inside and having to deal with an outside world that limits the options of that soul but has only partial access to it. Avoiding the limits and allowing the access both take work. Plus, we know that it is morally correct to empathize with other souls, so we try to imagine ourselves as the world outside our body at the same time, which also requires a lot of will and energy. Mostly all this hard work makes us angry and resentful.

But if I'm only the window, I can suddenly drop all that. The inside and the outside will continue to do what they are designed to do, and all I have to worry about is keeping my particular window as clean as possible. This character I've created on the inside doesn't need my protection, and this world I've separated myself from doesn't need my judgment. All they really want is to see each other clearly, and that's my whole job in this life. What a huge load off if you can really feel that way, because clear perception and genuine self-expression are the most pleasant things you can do, once the striving is taken out of them.

So far, this existential stance has persisted into this week, I'm happy to report. We'll see how long it lasts before my author starts identifying too strongly with his characters again. But, for now, I'm just really enjoying the break.

Amber sent me this birthday poem tonight that happens to capture what I'm talking about poignantly and beautifully:

Soul
What am I doing inside this old man's body?

I feel like I'm the insides of a lobster,
All thought, and all digestion, and pornographic
Inquiry, and getting about, and bewilderment,
And fear, avoidance of trouble, belief in what,
God knows, vague memories of friends, and what
They said last night, and seeing, outside of myself,
From here inside myself, my waving claws
Inconsequential, wavering, and my feelers
Preternatural, trembling, with their amazing
Troubling sensitivity to threat;
And I'm aware of and embarrassed by my ways
Of getting around, and my protective shell.
Where is it that she I loved has gone to, as
This cold sea water's washing over my back?

- David Ferry