A Bulldozer With A Wrecking Ball Attached

For Column

2011-10-23T15:33:00.000-07:00

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The way we look to us all

2011-08-14T19:26:00.002-07:00

It was a slow day, and the sun was beating on the soldiers by the side of the road...

These are the days of tantrums and meltdowns, this is the terrible twos.

It's time to leave the park, but she doesn't want to go. It's nearly lunchtime and I still need to pick up some groceries before we settle in at home for the afternoon nap. There was an issue with an older girl who was grabby with the toys in the sandbox which led to a struggle over a shovel.

"Okay, it's time to go," I pick my daughter up and she screams. I carry her over to the stroller and explain that we have to go to the grocery store (a trip she usually likes) and then go eat lunch.

"No! I don't want to!"

We fuss with the stroller, but she twists and writhes. I throw her over my shoulder and push the stroller awkwardly with one hand. I abandon the shopping without a second thought and starttoward the northeast corner of the park, toward our place. She continues to flail and scream. Every few yards she wrestles free enough to start sliding down, so I have to stop, set her down, chase her, throw her back over my shoulder. It's awkward enough in front of the other kids and parents. But we have to go past the congregation of smokehounds and boozers who've claimed the corner of the park nearest our street.

For the most part, these people keep their distance from the playground. We've probably been to the park hundreds of times, and I can count the altercationsbetween the two solitudes that I've seen or been part of on one hand. Three of those have been me asking them to burn their reefer a bit further from the sandbox, and they've always been accommodating. When my daughter was smaller, she used to blow kisses to the people sharing a bottle on the east side benches (she blew kisses to everyone for a few weeks the spring she was 1). People are people, it's a public park, and I don't begrudge them their mostly out-of-the-way spot to spend the day.

I see a couple of dudes hanging at the bench along the path, smoking, yakking on their phones. Whatever. I hold on tight and try to get past them as quickly as possible. My daughter is still screaming, still thrashing.

Beyond pushing forward, I don't react. There's no point. She's lost in her fit and won't hear me anyway. It's embarrassing in front of the other parents and humiliating in front of people without kids. I know what they're thinking, I used to think it too. My face is hot and throbbing. I'm tired and cranky too, I whisper in her ear. Let's just get home and it will be okay.

We get to the edge of the park. I set her down for a second to get my bearings before we approach the crosswalk. It's a busy enough street and sometimes we have to wait a while for any cars to let us pass. I'm having a hard time negotiating the stroller and the howler. She howls and slaps at me. "Enough!"

She stops to catch her breath before launching into another howl and in the eerie, eye-of-the-storm calm I hear: "Why don't you get your brat out of here!"

I throw my daughter over one shoulder and turn my head over the other, finally given an outlet for the burning shame and frustration. "Why don't you go fuck yourself!"

I'm immediately aware of what I've just done. I had been embarrassed by my daughter's behaviour, but now I'm ashamed of myself. A woman on the other side of the crosswalk is looking at me. As we cross, she smiles sympathetically. I carry my daughter up the hill to finish her tantrum behind closed doors.

A day later, I'm picking at the florist on my way home from work. My daughter's not the only one in our family who can be unreasonable and awful to be around at times. I don't even know what I get, African Violets, maybe. A small, colourful arrangement. I take them to the counter to pay for them, and there's the woman from the crosswalk.

It's a big city, but a small neighbourhood. Especially when you spend most of your time in the company of young children. She must recognize me. I don't know, maybe she doesn't. Maybe when people see me out with my daughter, they remember her more than me. I'm like that with my neighbour. He's introduced himself at least twice, but I have no idea what his name is. His dog, on the hand, I know her name and I know her age. He seems like a really nice guy and I'm too sheepish to ask his name again, even though remembering his dog's name but not his is a totally sympathetic and possibly endearing thing. I've had that conversation in my head every single time he says "Hi, Emmet" when I pass him on the street.

The florist must know, as all florists can't help but know, that men don't buy flowers in August because they're proud of themselves. She must know that I've said something shitty to my wife and that I'm putting in some, however token, however clichéd, effort to say, "hey, I'm not completely self-centered." She must think I'm a horrible person.

Maybe it's time to move.

Since Nobody Asked...

2011-07-31T06:53:00.001-07:00

Part of what's exhausted me on most of the DC books that I once enjoyed so much is that they've all become so self-reflexive & insular. Their subtext, if they have any, is themselves. One of the last Teen Titans books I read (circa Infinite Crisis) involved a literal Revolving Door of Death! And of course, Watchmen and DKR were loaded commentaries on superhero comics (as is Grant Morrison's Batman saga), but they also had loads to say about REAL LIFE! Especially Cold War paranoia, the gift that kept on giving--superheroes as nuclear proliferation; Frank Miller had ~~Soviet~~state-sponsored Superman vs. quintessentially American capitalist rugged individualist Batman; Alan Moore gave us Dan Dreiberg's dithering liberalism and Adrien Veidt's aggressive interventionism on the left vs. the obviously psychopathic rightwing vigilantes Rorschach and the Comedian. These were comics about comics, yes, but they also spoke to world in which they were created.DC recently announced that in September, they will be relaunching all of their superhero titles from issue #1 with fresh, younger takes on all of their characters. I've suspected this was coming since just before 2005's Infinite Crisis, when DC started really ripping into its own past and undermining much of the history that gave its ongoing stories such fantastic emotional weight. Dead sidekicks were resurrected, unknowable secrests were revealed, Batman started wearing a yellow oval around his chest insignia again, a lot of stuff was just clean foolish.
But there was a clear attempt being made to clear out the cobwebs of history. At the respective ends of both Infinite Crisis and 2008's Final Crisis (echoing the events of 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths) the DC Universe was remade with mostly cosmetic changes. After Infinite Crisis, for example, it was revealed that the people of Superman's home planet Krypton had dressed in white flowing robes rather than the red tunics we saw them wearing in 1986. I'm actually not sure if there were any retroactive changes following Final Crisis. I don't think most of the people who write DC Comics even read that one.
And then there was the bizarre All Star line of comics. They sold like gangbusters and they were loaded with novel meditations on the Superhero's place in the modern world. But they were fraught with production issues, and DC didn't even try to spin the excitement over them into anything else.
Anyway, they've been tinkering around with the idea of of starting over for at least six years, and they're finally doing it. Sort of.
The information they've released about the new comics indicates that the continuity of their two best-selling lines of superhero comics, the Batman and Green Lantern titles, will remain fairly undisturbed. And I'm like, OH REALLY?
Because if you're going to go to the extreme of restarting Action Comics, the single most important comic book series in the history of comic books, from #1, but you're not actually starting at the beginning of the story of the DC Universe, that's pretty much total bullshit. Basically, it's the same thing DC did following Crisis on Infinite Earths 25 years ago. Some things (Superman, Wonder Woman) were totally different, some things (Green Lantern, the Flash) simply carried on. Some, like Batman, were a hodgepodge of new and old.
Here's how I would do a DC relaunch.
Start with just two titles, Action and Detective, and keep them fairly true to their historical significance. Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1, and that's where the story of superheroes should begin: The first public appearance of Superman in Action Comics #1. That's the Big Bang moment for your brand new fictional universe. Superman emerges, world in awe. After the first storyline is complete, you can launch Superman #1.

Batman is slightly more problematic. He didn't show up until the 27th issue of Detective Comics. So you launch Detective, but keep it Batman-free until #27. That gives you just over two years to build up Batman's mythos. Open the first issue as Batman: Year One opened, with Bruce Wayne returning to Gotham after his years abroad spent training to fight crime. Let him have costumeless adventures, let him fail and learn and grow into the Dark Knight. Give him 26 issues to figure it out. And then, on the last page of issue #26, let the bat fly through his window, ushering in his destiny. Think of the excitement you'd create by withholding Batman's first appearance. Comic fans would go nuts. Or you could even put Detective out weekly, if you don't want to wait two long years to sell Batman comics. Make it an anthology, showcase the street-level characters that will populate the new DC Universe.

Heck, make both Action and Detective weekly anthologies for their first two years, showcasing the flashy sci-fi heroes (Adam Strange, Green Lantern, etc.) in the former and the gritty urban heroes (the Question, Black Canary, etc.) in the latter. Have those be the only regular DC superhero comics on the shelves for at least the first year. That's a real commitment to your fresh start.

I, frankly, have no idea what to do with Wonder Woman. The tried and true method of bringing the character back to its roots that's worked so well for her male counterparts is problematic because, well, her roots are problematic.

Obviously, DC didn't ask me and they're going their own way on this. From what I've seen, I'm not hopeful. But I haven't really been following DC comics that closely the last three years anyway. Grant Morrison's Action Comics looks promising, especially since in his excellent and chatty new book Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human he repeatedly refers to early Superman as a socialist, and I can't wait to see how that plays out. Everything else, though, I don't know, not my thing.

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sick of arguing with white dudes on the internet

2011-04-27T08:05:00.004-07:00

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation thinks Ignatieff shouldn’t get involved in health policy questions.

That's what QMI Parliamentary Bureau reporter Daniel Proussalidis wrote. I quoted it on Twitter, then spent most of yesterday afternoon arguing semantics with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Derek Fildebrandt, National Research Director, chastised the Liberal leader for commenting on Vancouver's Supervised Injection Site, claiming Ignatieff had no jurisdiction to speak to the matter as healthcare is a provincial function. CTF's man in Alberta, Scott Hennig, via his Twitter feed, hounded me for an hour over the business.

I asked Hennig several times why the CTF had remained silent over these many years as Stephen Harper has waged an unnecessary wasteful and lethal war against Insite, yet jump in to dismiss Michael Ignatieff's comments on the subject.

Fildebrandt, perhaps, was not privy to Ignatieff's comments, which did not mention setting healthcare policy, and in fact showed respect for the provinces' jurisdiction over healthcare:

This is about harm reduction, and so we strongly support Insite. And as it proves its worth and as other provincial health systems adopt the valuable lessons learned at Insite, we would support its expansion, yes.

But the Canadian Taxpayers Federation wanted to dismiss Ignatieff's comments. I asked Mr. Hennig several times why the CTF refuses to speak out against Harper's shameful war on Insite and received no answer. I asked Mr. Hennig who the CTF's "supporters" are, again no answer. I asked Mr. Hennig if the CTF would draft a letter stating its belief that healthcare falls under provincial jurisdiction and therefore the federal government's Supreme Court battle to shutter Insite is unconstitutional and wasteful of taxpayers' money. He refused. The CTF says that federal leaders should not comment on provincial health policies, and yet tacitly condones by their silence Stephen Harper's jurisdictional interference in BC with regards to Insite. They apply their supposed principles inconsistently, and only when it benefits their ideological allies.

Their "cut taxes at any cost" ideology has infected municipalities across Canada, hobbling municipalities' ability to sustain even the most basic needs of infrastructure. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is a right-wing think-tank without the think and without the tank. When they turn their self-interested eyes toward healthcare, we should all be worried.

5 Simple Rules for Filming My Superman

2011-01-31T21:49:00.002-08:00

They did it. They finally did it. Damn them all to hell, they did it.
They cast the role of Superman in the Zack Snyder take on the Man of Steel that will be filming in Vancouver this summer. I dunno, some British guy. But I guess that means that they're actually going to go ahead and make a Superman movie for the 2010s.
Okay, look, I thought Snyder's Watchmen was a joylessly pedantic adaptation that mostly missed the point of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons series. Patrick Wilson was pretty good as sadsack superhero Dan Dreiberg, but then I'm a sucker for sadsack superheroes. I do respect Snyder's high regard for art direction, but come on, dude, even Tim Burton always ties his eye-candy to his movies' themes.

Snyder will be at a disadvantage here, compared to his previous comic book adaptations. Both The 300 and Watchmen were based on graphic novels (in Watchmen's case, it was a 12-issue series that was subsequently collected in the graphic novel format) that Snyder clearly used as storyboards for his film. But there is no Superman graphic novel. Oh sure, there are graphic novels that tell stories about Superman, but what's the greatest Superman story? What's Superman's Dark Knight Returns or Year One (both of which have been pilfered by Chris Nolan for his Batman movies). Where's Superman's "Death of Gwen Stacy"? Which story, in Superman's nearly 75-year history stands out as the perfect distillation of Superman's essence? There are certainly some popular favourites, "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" and the unimaginatively-titled "All Star Superman" come to mind. But it's unlikely either will be directly adapted for Snyder's talkie.

For one, so soon after Superman Returns, I don't think anyone is eager to have the word whatever in close proximity to the character. Second, "Whatever/Tomorrow" is a Supermanic Götterdämmerung, a Last Days of Chez Supes, that imagines an ending to Superman's story. That's no good for a big budget sequel machine. Third, who wants another round of Alan Moore whinging about what's been done with stories he wrote a generation ago?

All Star Superman, in its full glory, could be adapted as a trilogy of films. There's certainly enough story there. But that's not going to happen, since an animated adaptation will be coming straight-to-DVD (or whatever format things go straight to these days) sometime this year.

Interestingly, All Star Superman also concerns the final adventure of the Man of Steel. Most superhero mythos find their most iconic stories in characters' Secret Origins. But a great part of Superman's appeal is his endurance, his reliability, the longevity of his exploits. Superman was not only around for my childhood, and my parents' childhood, but also my grandparents' childhood--or at least their early adolescence. Of course, my daughter is already a Superman nut. And so it goes. We take Superman for granted, and it's generally good that we do. That's the kind of character he is. When writers seek to affect poignancy within a Superman story, it's more often than not his demise that drives home his significance. Ever since 1961--in a story written by Superman's creator, Jerry Siegel, no less--DC Comics has been wringing pathos and bathos out of sending off to arm-wrestle Great Caesar's Ghost. Like Lex Luthor says, "cry your hearts out, folks!"

But Zack Snyder probably won't kill Superman. Not in the first movie, at least. I get it, and mostly, I support it. Here are five things I would like Snyder to keep in mind as he constructs a new Superman film:

Do Not Stare Directly Into the Superman - One of the best developments in the Superman mythos is that his incredible powers are derived from our yellow sun. This isn't just pseudo-science mumbo-jumbo, this is poetry. Like the sun, Superman, as a concept is huge and nearly all-powerful. It's from his light that all other superheroes get their resonance. It's too much! You hear things like, "Superman's too powerful, it makes him unrelatable," a lot. That's a load, but, hey, no one says your audience has to relate to or identify with Superman. That's what his supporting cast is for. Filtering Superman's light through the lenses of Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen allows for all kinds of depth and resonance and all that stuff that changes readers (or viewers) into fans.
Lois Lane, Spell It Right - When was the last time there was a great Superman movie? Well, that would be the last time there was a great Lois Lane. Margot Kidder gave us a Lois Lane that was as potent a character as Superman. Why would a man with powers and abilities beyond those of mortal men fall so hard for a mere Earth woman? Because she's everything he hopes he would be without those powers: fearless, devoted to ideals like justice and truth and driven to make a change. This is your most important casting decision. Off the top of my head? Rashida Jones? Who else? Parker Posey? Why not?
Superman is an Archetype - You know what kind of story you should try to tell with Superman? A big one. Lay on the metaphors, bring on the allegories. Get operatic! Superman doesn't just have ideals, he is an ideal. Let Batman, Spider-Man, Wolverine, or even Kick-Ass play to our insecurities, they're great at it. Let them explore the darkness within, let them be complicated heroes on a journey to discover and define their own morality. But Superman will not work as an antihero. Yes, he may brood over the loss of his entire planet, a culture and family he'll never know. He may, in private, question whether he's up to the task of saving the world. But Superman must be super. He must use his powers and abilities for good, for that is his greatest power, goodness.
The Best Superman Story is All of Them - Remember what I said in the last rule about telling a big story? Forget it. Don't tell a big story. Tell a million little stories. One of many reasons there are few great superhero movies is that comic books are a serial medium. Comic books have traditionally translated better to episodic media like radio and television where characters aren't expected to develop at the same rate (if any) as they would in film or a novel. Of course, movies have become more episodic over the last dozen or so years. Nonetheless, Superman is impervious to character development like his skin is impervious to bursting shells. Again, this is why he has such a great supporting cast (especially Steve Lombard!); they grow and change and suffer because Superman can't. They are the workhorses of the serial melodramas that Superlore is built on.
That's Why They Call Him Superman - You can't put Superman into a grim, cynical world and force him to navigate the shifting ethics of uncertain times--outside of an origin story, that is. Whatever world Superman inhabits has got to be a greater, more optimistic place than this one right here that we live in for one simple reason: Superman lives there. He's the best at what he does, and what he does is very nice. A genuinely super Superman must change the course of humanity's destiny merely through his power of super-influence.

mp3: "Laughing With You" by Marcellus Hall

Red (Tape) Scare

2011-01-11T20:46:00.007-08:00

I don't usually get into it with people on the Internet.
On Twitter, yesterday, I said:

So the gov't of Sask would rather take its cues from anti-tax lobbyists than the SK Supreme Court?

in reference to the Saskatchewan Party proclaiming "Red Tape Awareness Week" on the same day its Justice Minister said he would try to find a way around the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal's ruling that provincial marriage commissioners may not refuse service to gay and lesbian couples. Okay, Mr. Wall, we get it, you don't like unions of any kind.
This morning, I saw a little blue dot under the "mentions" heading on my Twitter homepage. A fellow named Brian F. Kelcey, who self-identifies on the the Internet as a "professional troublemaker" (I'm still listed as a Hobo-Detective on the Internet--I investigate the disappearances of pies from windowsills, my fee is one pie, no refunds if I discover that I myself am the perpetrator, I'm the best there is at what I do), has seen my Tweet and says he doesn't understand why I would connect the two events. After some back and forth in which Mr. Kelcey continues to claim to not understand why, in an election year no less, it's worth taking note of whose counsel the ruling party heeds, he tells me that he knows better than I do and I back the fuck off.
But I'm wondering, who is this guy and why did he respond to my Tweet in the first place? Does he have a Google-Alert set for "anti-tax lobbyists"? He might, considering that Manitoba's Hansard service records him as representing the Manitoba Taxpayers Federation in 1996. Further digging around shows that he also did PR work for the disastrous Harris Government in Ontario around the turn of the century. He also runs a blog called "State of the City" where his bio states he's a fan of "20th Century noir fiction", so he can't be all bad.
A closer look at my own Twitter algorithms show that the original Tweet was reTweeted by none other than the CFIB, who where the ones I was suggesting were too cozy with the Saskatchewan Party in the first place.
Is it Kelcey's job to hang around on Twitter all day waiting for someone to badmouth the CFIB and its initiatives like "Red Tape Awareness Week" (which, um, sounds like exactly the kind of bumfluff a real taxpayers' watchdog group would be watchdogging against)? Probably not, and I don't want to begrudge a guy or gal for earning a living, or defending his or her beliefs on the Internet.
But I have to wonder why someone with such strong ties to anti-tax, anti-union, anti-regulation lobby groups like the CFIB and Canadian Taxpayers Federation would devote so much effort to distance such entities from the weirdo, religious right that they helped put into power in Saskatchewan.

mp3: "Dance to the Beat of Moody" by ESG

Whoop, there it is.

2010-11-23T20:26:00.002-08:00

Last night, on the bus, I saw a kid, maybe 8-years-old. He had a whoopee cushion in his hands, and a first aid kit strapped around his waist like fanny pack. He was clearly an experienced prankster.

He was riding the bus with what appeared to be his mother and what appeared to be his older brother. I say appeared to be, because I feel a sense of responsibility to this guy. Maybe it was an aunt and a cousin, maybe just people he knew. The point is, I don't know who these people are, where they were going, or what the series of events were that led to this kid riding the bus with a whoopee cushion and a first aid kit.
I wanted to say something to him, maybe bump his knuckles, ask him his story. I wanted to find out what he was gonna do with the whoopee cushion and why he decided he'd better bring along a first aid kit.
I never had a whoopee cushion of my own. When I was 7, maybe 8--no older because it happened in the house on 24th Street, and we moved from there the summer after my eighth birthday--my sister brought home a whoopee cushion from one of her trips downtown with her friends to get jelly shoes and Rick Springfield albums.
As a child, I was in love with downtown and I was in love with whoopee cushions. How could I not have been, when I read so many comic books?
At that point, mostly Marvel's Star Wars and Indiana Jones mags picked up at the 7-11, but my dad had lately started bringing me along to Westgate Books, at the far end of 22nd, just before Circle Drive, in the same ell-shaped stripmall as Duffers indoor minigolf, on his semi-regularly paperback-hunting excursions. Westgate, those first few trips especially, was the best place in the world (even though it wasn't downtown). It had shelves and tables overflowing with books, but it still managed to feel fairly open, unlike the smaller used bookstores in older buildings, which in their crampedness would later seem to me beguiling and romantic. Along the windowfront, facing the huge parking lot, were two rows of probably a dozen columns of comics. I would make my way through top row and then double back through the floor level boxes. Each comic had its cover-price halved (to the nearest nickel) in black grease-marker on the cover. Forty-cent comics, like the brilliant late 70s Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics--written by Denny O'Neil, with art by Alex Saviuk--were 20 cents, but so were the earlier, Mike Grell-drawn issues with a 35-cent cover price.

I didn't even know, back then, about O'Neil's earlier run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow, with art by Neal Adams. Those comics didn't end up in the bins at Westgate, or if they did, they were picked up by keener hands than mine.
At that time, standard cover price for new comics was 75-cents, so single issues at Westgate topped out at 40-cents. You could get a lot of comics for just a few dollars, and I did. Merely from repeat, obsessive visits to the Westgate bins, I managed to secure nearly a complete run of Green Lantern comics, from the 1976 relaunch to just shy of the current issue (along with considerable chunks of the Cary Bates/Carmine Infantino Flash run, Jim Aparo-drawn Batman team-ups in The Brave & the Bold and DC's great anthology "Dollar Comics" of the 70s, Adventure and World's Finest (which often featured Green Arrow in solo action drawn by the dynamic Trevor Von Eeden!). It wouldn't be until 1988, during the Millennium crossover event that I even thought of buying new comics, and about a year after before I realized there were stores that actually specialized in selling new comics.

Our visits to Westgate were hardly regular, though I remember needling both of my parents to take me there much more often than they actually did (the nerve!).
The 1970s were not so distant then, though I had no memory of them. My earliest memories are almost certainly from 1980, just prior to my brother Jesse's arrival. I remember Mayfair Playschool and my grandparents' acreage near Martensville--more than anything, I remember the Sunday night drives back into Saskatoon from the acreage: approaching headlights, the Husky gas station high above the highway near the overpass, a warm feeling sitting in there in the backseat, drifting off to sleep.

The stories in the comics from the 70s weren't that different from the more recent ones, mostly by the same handful of people (some of them still active today), but the ads from those older comics were amazing! Daisy air rifles, Lee Jeans, and Slim Jims seemed quite exotic and alluring. They presented an ideal of boyhood as outdoorsy and violent. Some of the oldest comics I picked up still had black & white ads for Charles Atlas self-improvement pamphlets and backpage, full-colour ads for Sea Monkeys. But the best ads I loved best were those cluttered paste-up jobs with tiny print and crude drawings, promising SEE BEHIND GLASSES, Scary Life-Size MONSTER GHOST, LEARN HYPNOTIC CONTROL, and of course, the fabulous whoopee cushion (occasionally sold as "POO-POO CUSHION", see above). These presented an ideal of boyhood that was urban, puerile and violent.

I could never screw up the courage to clip out the order form and send 35-cents off to obscure New York addresses that you never read about like Lynbrook or Westbury. It wasn't so much that I thought of even one of my comics as a valuable collector's item (despite the fact that some of them had those very words emblazoned across their covers) and didn't want to defile them as that, well, I recognized that these were old comics. There were no whoopee cushion ads in the Green Lantern comics by Len Wein and Dave Gibbons--my favourite era of the character, I might add. Those issues had ads for Dungeons & Dragons sets, primordial video games like Joust and Revell modelling kits, distractions of a very different kind of comic fan than I was or would ever be. These old ads, selling novelties and self-improvements, even by the 70s were throwbacks to the earliest days of comic books. The mighty M.C. Gaines--inventor of the saddle-stitched, four-colour, newsprint comic book, and father of Mad Magazine founder Bill Gaines--was, at the time of his inspiration, an out-of-work novelty salesman.

When my sister brought this whoopee cushion, this most sacredly vulgar item from the back pages of the comics that fired my imagination, I was beside myself.

"Let me try it!"

But my sister and her friend would have none of it. It was theirs and they were under no obligation to share with me.

I waited for them to be distracted by their new Rick Springfield record and then I took it! I held the flaccid pink rubber to my lips, inflated the cushion and threw it down on the nearest chair. My sister and her friend were sitting on the floor.

"Can I offer you a seat?" I asked, failing to conceal even a single manic twitch of zeal. They rolled their eyes.

I waited.

Maybe someone else would come into the living room.

No one did.

I couldn't take it anymore! I needed to see--to hear--the whoopee cushion in action. I sat on it myself.

Nothing.

I stoop up, looked down at it. It was still perfectly inflated. I sat down again.

Nothing.

I stood up. I looked around. I sat down again, as hard as I could.

Tsssssss....

I got up, the cushion had deflated, but had failed to make the appropriately flatulent noise. I brought it back to my lips.

"I hope you're not going suh-lobbering all over my whoopee cushion!"

Even as I blew, I could hear the air being released from the cushion. I looked it over, and, sure enough, there was a big rip in the seam. I had popped the whoopee cushion.

I was a failure as a kid! For generations, kids had been pulling genius pranks with whoopee cushions, eliciting demoralizing fart sounds from the pompous and the strict! Bullies could be brought to their knees with a single blast! But its power was beyond my capabilities. As a kid, I was incompetent.

I stayed away from whoopee cushions for many years after that, confused and saddened by my seeming inability to make use of that most basic element of boyhood mischief. It didn't occur to me until much later on in life that whoopee cushions were simply cheaply-made from flimsy material. I should have been surprised and disappointed if the damn thing hadn't burst.

So when I saw this kid on the bus, with his whoopee cushion (I understand they're self-inflating now) and first aid kit and a barely-contained glimmer of danger in his eye, I recognized him as a fellow traveller. Hail fellow well met, I thought as I passed him on my to the door, and our paths diverged. Me, back into the night toward home and adult responsibilities; him, onto great feats of artificial flatulence.

mp3: "Fields of Green" by Giant Sand

Hipsters, Craftsmanship & Lattes: the Sinister Spectre of Elitism

2010-11-10T14:06:00.005-08:00

ITEM!: As an incumbent Tory who lost his rural Saskatchewan seat in the last federal election to elect a right wing majority government, John Gormley knows about "the relentless pursuit of mediocrity." After careers in politics and law stalled out, Gormley came to rest as the media mouthpiece for the Saskatchewan Party in 1998, one year after the right wing coalition party's formation.
Gormley has regularly used his Rawlco Radio bully pulpit (as well as a weekly column in the StarPhoenix) to bash gays, immigrants, women, unions and liberals. He supports the pro-business lobby and the social conservatives by creating an atmosphere of antagonism, a false binary of "Us and Them". In short, the dude is full bag, equal parts scum and douche.
In his new book, what looks like a paranoid screed against the provincial NDP, he unleashes a fresh assault that finely illustrates what how out of touch he really is. On page 17 of Left Out (is he sad because he feels unwelcome or is he using the term as an imperative?), he refers to liberals as "latte-sipping" and "Birkenstock-wearing". FOR REAL. Because only communists can drink fancy coffees. That's why Starbucks has become an international symbol of leftist thought and the people's victory over free market capitalism. Welcome to 1991, John, we have received your fax!

ITEM!: Gaspereau Press keeps its cool in the wake of Giller win. Several things are at play here: 1) Gaspereau, in refusing to adapt their process to meet the swelling demand for Johanna Skibsrud's The Sentimentalists, takes a stand for the value of books as objects and the power of those objects as containers of art. 2) The Sentimentalists is widely available as an e-book, and that, undeniably, is where publishing is headed. 3) Gaspereau says they'll fill orders for indie booksellers first, who supported the book before it was a winner. What it means: Creating a successful book (by any definition) in Canada is not dependent on the current bookselling infrastructure.

ITEM!: I think this dude is calling me a hipster. First of all, awesome. Hipsters are rad. I know a lot of people who seem to be stereotypical hipsters who are fantastic people engaged in creative work that serves their community. I think it's great that young people today feel free to wear stupid clothes and grow ugly mustaches. Takes a lot of pressure of me. Second of all, the comment poster seems to be equating hipsterism with a fetishization of the obscure, and vain elitism of exclusion. Frankly, I don't see that at all. I see an appreciation of the paradox that is Lou Reed, someone who has managed to turn his most subversively iconic song into an advertising jingle and yet remains an symbol of integrity in the music biz.

mp3: "Three's Company" by Arabesque featuring Maylee Todd
mp3: "Lifetime of Deception" by Masonic

Rock Shirts Draped My Torso in Leaner Years

2010-11-07T19:46:00.000-08:00

You'd think I would learn.
I've written a lot of stuff since that day in July, 1997 when I walked in to the prairie dog offices and told them I was a writer. They were fool enough to believe me, and that's how it started. Probably 90 per cent of what I've written has not been about me--except when it secretly was about me--and that's for the best. In writing about other people (mostly short profiles of musicians), I learned a lot, about writing, about the world, and about myself. That's been great. Even though I don't take on as many assignments as I used, I still use arts journalism as an excuse to chat up people who do interesting things, like Richard Rosenbaum (editor of Can't Lit) or queer cinema legend Bruce LaBruce. These gigs are great because they're interesting, they're fairly easy to do, and they pay. I hear back on them sometimes. Mostly just, oh, you know, I saw that you wrote this, or I started to read this. That kind of thing.
But the stuff I really hear back on, the stuff that people write me long, moving emails about is, y'know, the other stuff. Where I reveal more of myself or write about something I care about. Which is, I don't know, pretty fucking great.

"The things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one."

I took a class last year. It was an adult education freelance writing class at Langara College. I hadn't written anything other this blog in about three years at that point. I was really into David Sedaris and the idea of being, I dunno, a personal essayist. Is that what he is? Nicole has loved Sedaris for a long time, even suggested Hugh as a name when we didn't know we were having a daughter, but for whatever reason, I was quite late to become fond of him. But that's what I wanted to get out of this class, I wanted to be David Sedaris. That's the way I get when I like a writer. I don't just want to read them and learn from them. I want to BE THEM. Kerouac, Brautigan, Hemingway, Meltzer, Thompson, Ames, Richler, Hiaasen, Ronson, Willeford--I have to work through these embarrassing periods of pathetic poseurdom and then, I cast off their skin and become me again, but a little bit (I hope) has stuck. It's a terrible way to exist, but it's my process and I'm too old to change now.
I didn't learn how to be David Sedaris, but I did get back in the habit of writing regularly, and I got some good advice and encouragement. The instructor was Mette Bach, who released her first book this summer, the very excellent Off the Highway: Growing Up in North Delta.

My point is that I got some great feedback from my Lou Reed t-shirt piece and some of my recent blog posts. People like me! People like to read about things I care about writing! I got one fantastic note from Maryanna Hardy, who went to Grade 8 with me at Georges Vanier (says Nicole: "Is that the school you went to after you got kicked out of the school where everyone beat you up?") in Saskatoon. Like Mette, Maryanna is releasing her first book this year. You can see the poster for the book launch in Montreal next Friday above. You should check out her blog for more of her illustrations and, of course, buy her book, So I've Been Told.

So, I'm going to write more (probably mostly here) about stuff that matters to me, like rock shirts and Superman and being a dad.

mp3: "Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain" by Andre Ethier (live)

What I've been up to lately

2010-09-11T19:35:00.005-07:00

Some advice for the kids going back to school.
Rae Spoon has a new album and it is essential.
I attended a Geist Magazine writing workshop led by Sheila Heti. The workshop was about making fiction from real life, and I don't know. I'm glad I went. I really enjoyed the passage Heti read from How A Person Should Be, her upcoming novel, and it was nice to devote a morning to thinking about writing. So yeah, I'm still bummed out about the Boyden workshop.
I did about seven minutes of stand-up at Guilt & Company, a chic Gastown bar that has really excellent improvised music on the nights it doesn't have comedy. The comedy night, Guilt & Comedy (obviously) is run by Kate Lumsdon and Lauren Martin and probably has a Facebook page or something. Despite not having been on stage in about five years, I felt really good about my set and would totally do it again if they asked (HINT, HINT).
Drag City has reissued Cats & Dogs, my favourite 1993 Royal Trux album.

mp3: "The Flag" by Royal Trux
mp3: "Death by Elektro" by Rae Spoon

Haters gonna hate.

2010-08-26T15:28:00.001-07:00

Somebody asked me once, when I was still writing for the newspaper, how it felt to write down to a fifth-grade reading level.
I didn't punch the guy for two reasons. One, he was a friend of a friend. Two, do you know me at all?
Now, I've got nothing against academics, post-modernists and other assorted eggheads, but, likewise, I've got nothing against readers. Writing in plain, everyday, accessible language isn't the cakewalk some might think. Especially when, as many newspaper reporters do, you deal with such enemies of clear language as politicians and public relations officers.
Roy Peter Clark tells us to use shorter words, sentences and paragraphs at the points of greatest complexity. We write because we have a desire to communicate. We've got something to say, and we hope somebody's gonna get it when we do.
That's why I can get behind the sentiment of Steven W. Beattie's essay from last year, "Fuck Books", if not the method of delivery. Beattie, along with Alex Good, got people talking about Canadian books this week with a pair of posts at the National Post's The Afterword blog. The overrated list filed similar complaints against the abuse of poetics in CanLit as Beattie's "Fuck Books" and, I don't know, is it open season on poets again?
I don't read enough CanLit to enter too deeply into the debate on this one, but I do worry all the fucking time that this novel I'm writing isn't CanLit enough, doesn't meditate lushly enough on a tableau of tapestries, either ironically or earnestly, doesn't distill through a fractured lens the frissons of post-colonial metaphors. And then sometimes I worry that it does all of these things just a little too much. Mostly, though, I remind myself how inadequately I've fared whenever I've tried to fit in. I remind myself of Herbie Popnecker, and what he told JFK. And I wage on.
mp3: "Liv Tyler" by Roadside Graves
mp3: "Everything" by Roadside Graves

Boring people

2010-08-12T16:07:00.002-07:00

"Only boring people can be bored," my Eighth Grade teacher used to say. About four years ago, I saw those words postered on a wall just outside Blood Alley every night during a string of graveyard shifts in one of Canada's most notorious slums*.
It wasn't the first time since 1991 I had reason to think of Mr. C, and it wasn't the most recent. How do you not constantly go back to the lessons you learned when you were 13? Inside and out of the classroom, that's when we shrugged off the final crumbs of our childhood and learned how to walk in adult bodies. It's when we got our first glimmers of having to take some responsibility for ourselves and when we were lucky, we got a hint of the power that lay in that responsibility.
And we were lucky.
Mr. C told us that he became a teacher because Education was the last thing you could get into at the University of Saskatchewan after you'd flunked out of everything else. He'd briefly been a punk rocker in his youth, he said, until he realized that you couldn't be a punk rocker if you were riding around Moose Jaw in your parents' stationwagon.
Mr. C ran a music appreciation class where we would bring in our own music, play a song and then the class would talk about it, with Mr. C usually schooling us on why the music we liked wasn't as cool as we thought it was, but not in a condescending way. During one class someone (it might have been me, but I don't think it was) played "Kiss Off" by the Violent Femmes. Mr. C asked for a show of hands if we liked it. All hands up. He asked for a show of hands if we identified with the lyrics of the song. Again, all hands up. I still don't know what to make of that moment, when I realized that all of my classmates, to some degree, felt the same as I did: alienated, shunned, hopeless--even the ones who made me feel that way.
Our school canceled the Valentine's Day dance that year because it fell during Lent. Our class try to reason with Mr. C. "Isn't Christian sacrifice meaningless," our class posed, "when the one making the sacrifice doesn't have a choice?"
"Yeah," I agreed. "If we have to give up dancing, you should have to give up something you enjoy...like music!"
"I'm way past enjoying music. I do it because I have to," Mr. C answered, and we were reminded that the forces that ruled us were often ambivalent.
Mr. C later confided in me that he was just being tough, he still enjoyed music. And, y'know, I was young and naive, but not that naive.
At the beginning of the school year, Mr. C told us that despite what we may have heard about him, we shouldn't get our hopes up. He'd turned 30 over the summer and his good years were over, he said.
I'm older now than Mr. C was when he taught me so much. I wonder how much of his Weltschmerz was a put-on and I wonder how thick he lays it on now.
Mr. C turns 50 today. Happy birthday to one of the coolest people I've ever met. If you're entering his class this fall, I hope he promises the same to you that he did to us, and I hope he keeps that promise in the same way.

mp3: "Summer Nights Lakeside" by Gospel Claws
mp3: "Visions of You" by Modern Superstitions

*in case the face that I was working in a place called "Blood Alley" didn't make that clear enough

The record-buying public shouldn't be voting.

2010-07-29T15:40:00.005-07:00

Kathryn Calder's debut album shares a name with my second favourite P.D. Eastman book. You can read my review of Are You My Mother? here.
And because I know that most of you reading this blog are completists when it comes to record reviews written by yours truly, here's one I did a few issues back on the Mohawk Lodge's new album Crimes.

mp3: "Arrow" by Kathryn Calder
mp3: "Bad News" by the Mohawk Lodge

Awwww crap!, part two in a series

2010-07-28T15:27:00.000-07:00

I heard the news today, oh boy (yesterday actually).
Regina's Polymaths are calling it quits for quite legitimate, life-goes-on reasons. I haven't even heard their only album, Home Again, so I'm not, y'know, heartbroken. That doesn't mean it's not a loss for music fans and for a Regina pop scene that has surely matured in my absence.
Their 2008 EP, So Long, Castle Road, pleased me in so many ways: It's smart, catchy pop full of local references.
I'm pretty sure I first learned of their existence by reading Pat's Sound Salvation Army blog, so props to him, and props to Polymaths. If you're in Regina on Thursday night, go pay your respects at O'Hanlon's.

mp3: "Wrecking Ball's Kiss" by Polymaths
mp3: "Strike" by Polymaths

Awwww, crap!

2010-07-24T11:08:00.009-07:00

Here's how things were supposed to go:
I show up with my moderately wonderful second draft tucked under my arm. Perhaps I am wearing a tweed coat with suede patches, perhaps I am not. It is mid-October, the weather could go either way.
I am cordial with Joseph Boyden, perhaps even a bit shy, as I often am with people I admire. But I make an quiet mention of how his Moosenee characters in Through Black Spruce have similar speech patterns to some of the characters (especially Antoine Batiste) in Treme, which is set in the place where Boyden mostly lives now, New Orleans. He realizes I am a perceptive reader, and he begins to form a genuine interest in reading my manuscript. He tells me stories about the people he knows who inspired characters on Treme, and I dazzle him with my arcane knowledge of Clark Johnson, who hasn't been on Treme, but was on the final season of The Wire, which Boyden still hasn't watched at this point, and his interest in my novel grows as my eyes widen when I talk about the scene in Homicide: Life On The Street where Johnson's character, Detective Meldrick Lewis, allows his strained marriage to finally collapse under the weight of a black-velvet painting of Teddy Pendergrass.
"So what's your novel about, anyway?" he asks.
I explain to him that it started out as your typical vaguely-autobiographical, grudge-settling first novel, but grew into something else. Inspired in equal parts by Jonathan Ames's first novel I Pass Like Night (as well its direct influence, The Catcher in the Rye), Walter Mosley's first Socrates Fortlow book Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned and Jack Kirby's 18 issues of Mister Miracle comics.
Boyden doesn't quite get all the references, but his wife, Amanda, who is co-presenting the retreat, says, "You watch a lot of HBO, don't you, Emmet?"
So they read the damn thing, the beast I've been working on not-quite-as-steadily-as-I'd-like since January, when I registered for the retreat. They like, it shows promise. "There are some really great ideas in here," Joseph Boyden says.
"I agree," Amanda agrees. "But we have some notes."
The next four days are an ecstatic blur, as we workshop through the novel's problems--and there are problems. After the day's writing and rewriting is done, we go for a long walks in the cool night and I tell them all about my wonderful, supportive wife and my ridiculous daughter, who is, by October, speaking in sentences and, oh, the things she says!
At last, the retreat has run its course, and Nicole and Lill have come over to meet me in Campbell River for a little family holiday before the drag of everyday life resumes. Joseph and Amanda, my new best friends, invite the three of us to New Orleans "sometime after Mardi Gras" and Joseph tells me he wants to show my next draft to some important people.
The next spring, in Louisiana, a chance encounter in Louis Armstrong Park leads to a meeting with David Simon, who immediately buys the rights to my novel and offers me a job, forever changing my fortunes.
Here's how things went:
"Hello, Mr. Matherson? I'm sorry to inform you that the Art of Fiction writing intensive with Joseph and Amanda Boyden has been cancelled."
Awwww, crap!
###
Here's Big Tree, a New York band who play what I call Hippie Jazz, performing a terrif version of "Little Brother" live. The song is also on their self-titled 2008 album, but this live version just kills it. If you're in the Canadian Maritimes, they'll be playing Julie Doiron's Sappyfest on July 31.

MP3: "The Concurrence of All Things" by Big Tree from their brand new EP, Home (Here)

Google Me

2010-07-22T14:57:00.003-07:00

So, um, the number one search term leading to this blog over the last week was "Bon Jovi Emmet Matheson". Also, a lot of visits have been coming in from Iran. I don't want to jump to any, I mean, I don't think the two are, well, that's one heck of a coincidence.
I wrote some words about Bon Jovi for the prairie dog, and also about Das Racist. The Bon Jovi thing is a follow-up to something I wrote last fall. I don't know why I've written more about Bon Jovi in the last year than any other band, and I don't know why they care so much in Iran. But I'm glad they do.
Meanwhile, remember Bigg Jigg? I featured him here a few months ago. Just like the Rural Alberta Advantage, the Deep Dark Woods, Women and the Parkas, great things have happened for Bigg Jigg aka The Breadwinner since appearing on ABWAWBA. He's just signed to Universal Music Group, who will release his debut longplayer I Am The Go 2 Man on August 20.

mp3: "Google Me (Dirty Version)" by Bigg Jigg

now is better than before

2010-07-22T08:59:00.003-07:00

Wednesday on the swings, a girl, maybe 4 or 5 years old, yells to be pushed higher, harder, faster.

"You're boring, Dad," she says to the man behind her.

He looks at me and smiles with pride, "She has no idea how hard I work at being boring."

mp3: "My Daughter" by Lucky Fonz III

mp3: "We Are Still Young" by Lucky Fonz III

The city was my teacher, I left an apple on her desk

2010-07-20T16:01:00.000-07:00

Nicole asked me the other night, "When people ask you where you're from, what do you say?"

I usually say I'm from Regina.

"But you're not from Regina, you grew up in Saskatoon."

I started to get into "Well, okay, I had my childhood in Saskatoon, but I was a teenager in Regina, and that's really what it is to grow up, that's the crucible of youth..."

But Nicole was just asking what I say when people ask.

And people do ask. Nobody's from Vancouver. Somebody must be, my daughter is, but even the most Vancouverish of people I know come from elsewhere: Marrakech, Burnaby, Saskatoon.

I left Saskatoon for Regina three months after my 15th birthday. My adolescence to that point had been relatively smooth and uncomplicated. I never thought about leaving Saskatoon, never thought of Saskatoon as a place to escape or, worse, as a place impossible to escape. I don't doubt that I would have eventually found Saskatoon to be a set of shackles around my ankles when I'm trying to jump a train. Nearly all my friends from Saskatoon have left (most of them are here in Vancouver), most them as soon as they could.

But the fact remains that I didn't stay in Saskatoon long enough to resent it. When I left, Saskatoon was still big enough to hold my dreams. Saskatoon teemed with adults I admired. Important people walked among us. Though we never saw him, we had heard that a famous and respected novelist lived on the same crescent as Dan and John, not far from Market Mall. Our Eighth Grade teacher had put out a record! All around us there were poets, visual artists, musicians, upholsterers, sewage engineers, whatever. Maybe I was just too young and naive to think otherwise, or maybe I was just lucky, but the people I knew--peers and adults alike--were really engaged with the community. Those people seemed harder to find in Regina.
Of course, I never really had to negotiate Saskatoon as anything other than a child, a teenaged child, okay. Even at my most independent, I could always count on certain securities. I always knew that my parents, teachers (with a few horrible exceptions), or other responsible adults would take care of me. Even when I stayed out all night or showed up at school with tiny dots of red paint on my glasses the Monday after someone spray-painted a pentagram and surrounded by the words Mötley Crüe on the portable classroom, I always felt like a part of something.

I don't mean to suggest that Regina is a shit place and that all the people I met there were shit people and that the writers, artists and musicians I got to know there as a teenager were shit writers, artists and musicians. Far from it. The truth is that Regina never had a chance. I became a sulky teenager almost from the moment I arrived and it was through those eyes that I saw Regina. Saskatoon, meanwhile, remained the city of my childhood. For years, I only saw Regina for what it wasn't.
I still dream about Saskatoon sometimes, but I don't pretend to know what it's become. Regina, I'm less angry at all the time.
I still don't have a good or wholly accurate answer to "Where are you from?" But I'm working on it.

mp3: "This Affair" by Soft Reeds

Notes on Tower of Song

2010-06-06T16:37:00.000-07:00

In my previous entry, I listed 100 singer-songwriters supposedly greater than Leonard Cohen and supposedly lesser than Hank Williams. It was inspired by a few things:
I. Obviously, Leonard Cohen's aw-shucks humility in "Tower of Song".
II. The stereotype of obsessive list-making pop music devotees (exemplified by John Cusack's never-ending Top Fives in High Fidelity) that I curiously missed out on during my decade of music writing. Despite the fact that I've written (and continue to write) hundreds of record reviews, I don't think too highly of my skills as a critic. I mean, I'm a great listener and I'm a pretty good writer, and sometimes I'm able to bring those two skillsets together in alternatingly informative and entertaining paragraphs. But as far as being any kind of "this is better than this" authority? That ain't me.
My tastes are mine alone, idiosyncratic (and I don't say that as an elitist of any kind, but after some honest appraisal of how come so many of my favourite acts have failed to capture the minds and hearts of every, or sometimes any, other person on the planet) and irrevocably flawed and I'm in no position to shit on anyone for loving what they love. Nor would I want to. What I consider my real apprenticeship as a writer during the decade I covered the Hit Parade for the prairie dog and the Leader-Post was the feature-writing. Interviewing and reporting. Amassing the raw materials of a story and assembling them in a coherent and hopefully engaging narrative. I won't say that's where my strengths were, but that's where my strengths became. Certainly it's where my interest took me.
I've never been too chummy with other music writers, but I don't think many others looked at it like that. This is pure speculation here, but it seemed as though the features and profiles were--usually better-paying--means of subsidizing low-paying review-writing. That's how I saw them at first. In the hubris of youth, I figured that my talents as a taste-maker were being wasted on write-ups for upcoming shows. Reviews, man, were where I could really say something, and boy did I have something to say. Why should I let someone else's words eat up my precious column inches?
Features, or profiles, are far more restrictive in their structure and far less conducive to baring my tortured writer's soul. I had chops to work out, damn it! But, y'know, I got older and wiser, and actually started listening to what the people I interviewed had to say and started actually being curious about the people who made the music I had so many opinions about. I became something approaching a journalist, I guess. I cared less and less about telling people what I thought and more and more about showing people why they should care.
Despite my disenfranchisement with what I believed to be convential rock-write-think, I still love the pop critics and their endless list-making. I still took part in end-of-year listmaking, but as time passed, my lists became unwieldly and uncomprehensive.
III. I've been half-assedly interested in different ways the Internet and social media are changing the way content is generated. Blogger Dan Zambonini has done some interesting things pointing out the relationships between metrics and culture, and his recent post on The Januarist coincides with the basic premise of my Tower of Song list.
IV. The prairie dog's Gregory Beatty said some terribly snobbish things about Country Music that I felt needed to be refuted. I didn't quite address that in the list, but it was on my mind as I created it. Perhaps I'll compile a list of Awesome Mainstream Country Songs sometime.

SO. I created this list. It's inconsistent and there are some glaring omissions (John Hiatt, Alex Chilton, just for starters). I'm not that pleased with it, but I made it through to the end, and I even got a comment on it from perhaps the world's leading poet on the subject of Leo Cooper, Gus Braveyard. The list has already become my most popular posting on this blog since the time I wrote about Mike Reno's toupe. But, as an executed concept, it is a failure.

Some notes:

If the fact that Cohen is on the first floor and Williams is on the hundred-and-first is to have any significance, the singer-songwriters must be greater as the floor number increases. Demonstrably not so on my list. I tried to rationalize that I was merely compiling a continuum of singer-songwriters who would fall into similar levels of greatness as Cohen and Williams and that, hey, there's really such a slim margin of greatness between the two of them than any gradation of quality on such a scale would be measurable only through quantum physics, right? But, come on.
Youtube let me down. I decided early in the project that I wanted to back my claims up with links to proof of singer-songwriter greatness. The easiest way to do this uniformly was through Youtube. I left Neil Hagerty off the list because I couldn't find any decent quality vids of him as primary singer of a great song written by him. Surely he's written better tunes than, I dunno, Greg Dulli, but Afghan Wigs have better vids than Royal Trux.
I know I said no roomies, but then I put Hall & Oates together. Coulda made the case they within a singer-songwriter continuum they exist as one being, but then I gave all three Bee Gees their own individual floors.
Punk rock, heavy metal and rap are dismally underrepresented. What can I say? I don't listen to that much punk or metal lately, and rap songwriting credits are confusing. Sorry, dudes.
Never mind that the order of the listings create the illusion of really poor judgment in ranking, there are some pretty questionable choices on here. Well, at one point, the criteria for making it on the list was that the singer-songwriter in question only had to have ONE SONG that was as good as or better than Leonard Cohen's "Tower of Song", which is a pretty good song, but not one of Cohen's ten best ("There is a War", "Jazz Police", "The Captain", "Who By Fire", "Field Commander Cohen", "Sisters of Mercy", "Avalanche", "The Future", "I Can't Forget" and "The Law"). Still, some people got through who might not have lasted a more thoughtful compilation process.
Floors 2-10, 12-16, 19, 21, 25-29, 33, 36, 37, 41, 42, 44, 46, 83, 93 and 99 should be uncontroversial by any canonical standard.
I had originally intended to leave Willie Nelson off the list entirely because I truly believe he is a stronger ideal of singer-songwriter-osity than Hank Williams, and would hence be on the 102nd floor, but I couldn't figure out how to make that explicit w/o explicitly saying it like I just have.

mp3: "When Will This Heartache End?" by the Blue Shadows

Tower of Song Residents List: Floors 2 through 100

2010-06-05T18:52:00.010-07:00

I said to Hank Williams 'How lonely does it get?'
Hank Williams hasn't answered yet
But I hear him coughing all night long
A hundred floors above me
In the Tower of Song

Leonard Cohen, "Tower of Song"

FULL DISCLOSURE

We're going to assume several things.
1. Cohen's talking about Hank Williams, Sr. and not Bocephus
2. Residents of the Tower of Song are alotted the entire floor. No roommates!
3. Cohen is on the first floor. There's no reason to assume this, but since we won't be concerned with anyone on floors below, we'll just act as though there aren't any floors below.

THE SET-UP

If Leonard Cohen is on the first floor, and Hank Williams is a hundred floors above him (ie, Floor #101), Floors #2-100 are inhabited by singer-songwriters greater than Leonard Cohen but lesser than Hank Williams. Please disagree.

THE LIST

Floor #2: Joni Mitchell
Floor #3: Lou Reed
Floor #4: Ray Davies
Floor #5: Bill Callahan
Floor #6: Nick Lowe
Floor #7: George Jones
Floor #8: Buffy Sainte-Marie
Floor #9: John Prine
Floor #10:Dolly Parton
Floor #11: Kenny Loggins
Floor #12: Neil Diamond
Floor #13: John Darnielle
Floor #14: Lee Hazlewood
Floor #15: Bo Diddley
Floor #16: Tom Waits
Floor #17: Mike Feuerstack
Floor #18: Lyle Lovett
Floor #19: Serge Gainsbourg
Floor #20: Mark E. Smith
Floor #21: Brian Wilson
Floor #22: Michel Pagliaro
Floor #23: Loretta Lynn
Floor #24: Joe Tex
Floor #25: Andy Kim
Floor #26: Vic Chesnutt
Floor #27: Roy Orbison
Floor #28: Frank Black
Floor #29: Guy Clark
Floor #30: Daryl Hall & John Oates
Floor #31: R. Kelly
Floor #32: Lindsay Buckingham
Floor #33: Otis Redding
Floor #34: Teddy Pendergrass
Floor #35: Dwight Yoakam
Floor #36: Merle Haggard
Floor #37: Jonathan Richman
Floor #38: Bruce McCulloch
Floor #39: Lhasa de Sela
Floor #40: Missy Elliott
Floor #41: Nina Simone
Floor #42: Prince
Floor #43: Will Oldham
Floor #44: Elvis Costello
Floor #45: Howe Gelb
Floor #46: Willie Nelson
Floor #47: Mark Sandman
Floor #48: Roger Dean Young
Floor #49 : Dean Wareham
Floor #50 : Marcellus Hall
Floor #51 : Nils Edenloff
Floor #52 : Andrew Vincent
Floor #53: Chuck Prophet
Floor #54 : Hayden Desser
Floor #55 : Jesse Winchester
Floor #56 : David Berman
Floor #57 : Clay George
Floor #58 : Ian Svenonius
Floor #59 : Trevor Anderson
Floor #60 : Adam Franklin
Floor #61 : Don Covay
Floor #62 : Roky Erickson
Floor #63: Neko Case
Floor #64: Ric Ocasek
Floor #65: Greg Dulli
Floor #66: Joel RL Phelps
Floor #67: Jason Molina
Floor #68: Gillian Welch
Floor #69: Kim Mitchell
Floor #70: Robbie Fulks
Floor #71: Jennifer Herrema
Floor #72: Cindy Walker
Floor #73: Lucille Bogan
Floor #74: Joel Plaskett
Floor #75: Andre Ethier
Floor #76: Shuggie Otis
Floor #77: Randy Newman
Floor #78: Raphael Saadiq
Floor #79: Mary Gauthier
Floor #80: Matthew Smith
Floor #81: Chuck Prophet
Floor #82: Arthur Alexander
Floor #83: Neil Young
Floor #84: Julie Doiron
Floor #85: Robin Gibb
Floor #86: Barry Gibb
Floor #87: Chan Marshall
Floor #88: Maurice Gibb
Floor #89: Tony Joe White
Floor #90: Tanya Tucker
Floor #91: Bobby Bare
Floor #92: J Mascis
Floor #93: Chuck Berry
Floor #94: Doug Yule
Floor #95: Aaron Riches
Floor #96: Don Matsuo
Floor #97: James Hetfield
Floor #98: Kate Bush
Floor #99: Marvin Gaye
Floor #100: Mark Knopfler

mp3: "Private Eyes" by The Bird and The Bee (scroll down a bit to see my review here)

In defense of bad writers

2010-05-18T21:29:00.003-07:00

American writer Richard Bausch, in a recent essay for the Atlantic, bemoans the proliferation of writing manuals, or the people who buy them. Or the both of them. Or something. At any rate, he wants us to know that he no longer dresses like a bum.

Take a cursory look online. Amazon.com lists 4,470 titles under the heading of How to Write a Book. There, mixed with titles like How to Write a Chick Lit Novel and How to Write and Sell Your Novel are titles like How to Manage Your Home Remodel. Of course it’s the how to phrase that makes the listing what it is and where it is, but in fact, in terms of the expectations and the implied message, these books belong together, and according to the prevailing wisdom of our time, constructing a novel or a poem or a play is no different than building a back deck on your house.

I've yet to build a back deck or successfully construct a novel, but I've done some writing and I've done some building. I spent some time near the Michipicoten River in the Algoma District of Ontario, building bridges and clearing brush, and I put in some years writing record reviews. I tore up the train station in the town where Duddy Kravitz bought land and I once had a short story published in my friend's literary mag. I learned pretty early that you don't buy new shoes when you're out of town. Lately, I've been doing my best to put in an hour a day on a terrible novel so that I can

get

that

over

with

and move on to write something, y'know, at least approaching good. I've got ideas, plots, characters, scenes, beats, notes and notes piling up for all the good novels I'm going to write once I write this first terrible book that I've committed to. But this guy--in his Buster Browns from Brooks Brothers, who's too good for $10,000, who says he knows a lady that writes like "one of those electronic calculators"--shits all over people who are trying. Okay, he says that his quarrel (and the fact that he uses the word quarrel is a strong sign that he doesn't like you) is actually with "the implication" of writing manuals. And if that had played out in his essay, I'd probably have Twittered a link to it and moved on with my life. Because I could get behind a quarrel with the implications of writing manuals. A quarrel against those who seek to exploit amateurs and profit from their hopes while providing them with nothing useful. Hell yeah, that's a quarrel worth quarreling.

But Bausch instead spends far too many words and far too much vigour saying that people who want to write about zombies probably have bad skin, that genre fiction is "harmless, and honorable enough" and that people who read writing manuals don't want to be writers, they merely want to pose as writers. And why wouldn't you, when you too could have been horseback riding with Jane Smiley before she was Jane Smiley?

He rails and rails at these poseurs, these amateurs, and but maintains his chummy relationship with the publishers of the obviously snake-oil writing manuals, and even agrees to write a chapter for one of their guides. Ultimately, though, he can abide no longer, when the editing of said writing manual "does violence to my meaning."

Fuck his meaning. And fuck the Brooks Brothers shoes he walked in on.

Writing is not a mystical butterfly to be captured in a net woven from the tears of a warlock who cries only at the beauty of a lady-in-waiting who waits no more, but goes down to the valley and tempts the unicorn from her cave with sweets from beyond the realm of her saints. Y'know?

Writing is this basic thing that usually requires nothing more than fingers and ideas. And sometimes not even that much. In his excellent and humane writing manual, This Year You Write Your Novel, Walter Mosley defines the novel as "a pedestrian work about the everyday lives of bricklayers and saints." I can get behind that. I can take umbrage in that. I can relate to that.

What I can't get behind is Bausch's reckless snobbery. He gives an example of what he believes to be poor writing, but provides no context before condemning it as "unwittingly hilarious." Come on, Bausch (unless you've made up the example yourself), even a soured lime like you can't believe a line like "He tweaked her nipple and grabbed it as though it was the arm of a small child" could be hilarious in other way than quite wittingly.

I've been lucky enough to spend a few afternoons with facilitators from Megaphone Magazine's writing workshops in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. I've seen them encourage and enable absolutely wonderful prose and poetry from barely literate writers.

SPEAKING OF WHICH: Do donate to Megaphone's writing workshops.

I don't know what Richard Baush is afraid of. He's achieved a career as a writer of novels and stories (very good ones, by most accounts), and certainly shouldn't feel threatened by the legions aspiring just that. There are many useful books on writing, there are many more that are a total waste of time. You didn't need me to tell you that.

Ironically, Bausch closes his penultimate paragraph with:

To my mind, nothing is as important as good writing, because in literature, the walls between people and cultures are broken down, and the things that plague us most—suspicion and fear of the other, and the tendency to see whole groups of people as objects, as monoliths of one cultural stereotype or another—are defeated.

What a dick.

mp3: "Millionaire Walk" by Bigg Jigg

Awful old days

2010-05-04T21:41:00.004-07:00

A kid showed up at my door selling chocolate-covered almonds. "To keep me off the streets," he said. I bought two boxes, because that's my weakness. The streets.

When I was a kid, that was where I wanted to be. That was where I was. In the summer, on my bike, 10 or 11 years-old, finding new neighbourhoods. I'd bike around until I found a bunch of kids my age or older, call them some names, like "fatso" or "wheezebag", and then let them chase me until they got bored. Sometimes I'd wheel around their block again, if I couldn't find any other action. I never got caught and I never worried about what might happen if I did.

One time, some kids nearly had me, I think they might have been faster than me. But I was in my own neighbourhood, and I just tore up onto the lawn of a family I knew and started screaming until Mrs. Leversoll came out and chased the other kids off. Of course, I knew where to find them again.

Charlie Drabinsky was two years older and went to the same school. He grew up around the corner from me and we'd known each other as long as either one of us could remember. There weren't a lot of kids on his street, so he had to come over to ours, and we were all younger and smaller than him. Sometimes we looked up to him, because he was older and faster and stronger. It bugged him, though, to have to hang out with us younger kids all time. Like it was great that he could be his own team against three or four of us in football on the lawn of the apartment building across the street, and it was great that he could always beat us. But no one ever through a touchdown pass to him. No one ever gave him a high-five when he scored. He was with us, but he was apart.

At school, especially later on, he didn't say much to me. The first little bit on the bus in the morning, he'd be friendly enough. I'd say, "Hey Charlie! Did you catch that Jays game last night?" and he'd say, "No, I wasn't wearing my mitt."

I'd laugh, not sure if I was supposed to. And then the bus would pick up the Sawatsky kids and Frank, the oldest, would sit with Charlie at the back of the bus and they'd both ignore me. The kids at school who weren't from the neighbourhood called him Charles, and eventually everyone called him Charles. He stopped knowing the entire spoken intro at the beginning of The Six-Million-Dollar Man. He stopped taking me on bike rides out past the university, to wild, overgrown riverbank. He stopped telling me I was all right, "for a total nincompoop." He stopped being Charlie and started being Charles.

mp3: "Caravan of Love" by Arabesque

And then Lois says, "You've got me. Who's got you?"

2010-02-23T13:21:00.001-08:00

Look, I need to say upfront that Lex Luthor is a genius. An evil genius, sure, but nobody's perfect.
So when some guy on the Internet says that Christopher Nolan is the wrong guy to revitalize the Superman movie franchise, I say to myself, well, that guy's no Lex Luthor.
When news broke that Nolan had been hired to shepherd the Man of Steel back to glory, I wasn't thrilled, but not because I didn't think he was up to the task. My worry is that the silver screen version of superheroes could become as homogenized as their comic book counterparts.

TANGENT: This condition was institutionalized at DC Comics last week with executive shuffling that names Geoff Johns Chief Creative Officer. As recently as 2004, you could find a wide array of storytelling in the DC Universe. You had the moody police procedural of Gotham Central, the anything-goes super-soap opera of the early run of Superman/Batman, and the fearless cartooning of Kyle Baker's Plastic Man. If you bought an issue of Detective Comics starring Batman and an issue of The Flash, you could count on each comic having its own tones and rhythms. Then, beginning with Identity Crisis and continuing on from Johns's well-intentioned disaster Infinite Crisis to his current thuddingly-dull Blackest Night, the whole line became this dour, depressing series of catchphrasing and limb-rending. END TANGENT

C. Robert Cargill, however, thinks that, much like Lori Lemaris, Nolan is "wrong, wrong, wrong" for Superman. And he was kind enough to break it down to five reasons, all of which are based on the pretty insulting assumption that Nolan only knows how to make one kind of film. As if a Nolan-driven Superman movie will feature Jor-El and Lara taking Kal-El home from the opera when all of a sudden a man comes out of the shadows and blows up Krypton, unwittingly giving birth to Superman's neverending war on opera.

1. According to Cargill, "Superman ISN'T a dark hero." Really? He's the last survivor of his entire species. If the deaths of millions, probably billions, of people and the destruction of an entire planet isn't a dark subject, what is? Batman lost his parents and became a pouty creature of the night. Superman lost his whole freaking planet. Brood on that, Bats.
2. "Superman isn't a detective," says Cargill. No, he's just a reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper. Nothing sleuthy going on there, no sir. Especially not from that very un-detective-like Lois Lane, who, as a nervy dame with a nose for news, never finds herself in over her head in situations that might as well be lifted right out of the noir textbook. Nope, nothing like that to see here. And since when is Nolan a detective filmmaker? Batman Begins and The Dark Knight succeed largely as science fiction films dressed up as crime thrillers. Certainly The Prestige is full on sci-fi, and at its heart, so is Memento. The Prestige and Memento are both exactly the kind of stories that used to feature in Superman comics back when Superman was the most popular fictional character on the whole planet. Thanks to his frequent contact with futuristic sorceresses and Red Kryptonite, Superman was always losing his memory or discovering imperfect duplicates of himself.
3. "They're throwing out the current continuity," Cargill mentions. I actually can't find any reference to Nolan in this "reason why Nolan shouldn't oversee the new Superman film", so I'm tempted to overlook it. Also, because it's a stupid reason. Also, because hopefully filmmakers will recognize that they've been telling Superman's origin for the last 10 years or so on Smallville and just tell a good Superman story.
4. "Nolan is great on story, but terrible on staying true to its history," Cargill claims. By now, I'm not sure if Cargill has ever seen a Christopher Nolan film, or any film at all for that matter. Nolan, like Tim Burton before him, excels at creating style and atmosphere, setting an appealing and intriguing tone for his films. The storylines and plots of his films tend to take a backseat to tone and theme. That's not the worst flaw for a filmmaker to have, and it's consistent in his films.
5. "Superman is science fiction," Cargill says. "Nolan is real world." This seems to be the same reason as #2, but what the heck. Cargill's got Nolan here, since Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige and The Dark Knight were all faithful adaptations of true stories. Cargill notes that Nolan's upcoming film Inception is science fiction, but dismisses it because nobody knows if it will be good or not. Unlike his Superman movie, which Cargill knows will be bad. Cargill also proves that he hasn't seen Superman III in this paragraph, which is too bad, because I think he'd like it.
Stayed tuned for an upcoming post where I'll outline ways that a new Superman movie could be awesome (regardless of who's involved), including my top secret idea for a 30th Century Bromantic Comedy co-starring Lar Gand and Jo Nah.

mp3: "All This Trouble" by the Fugitives

It Helps if You Dress Like a Detective: Intro to Crime Fiction

2010-02-14T19:46:00.000-08:00

I've always been a fan of crime fiction. I mastered reading on the Hardy Boys novels (and entrenched my fascination with detective work in The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook, which featured a brown colour scheme instead of the usual blue, underscoring its grim purpose) and DC Comics (DC originally stood for Detective Comics, but now it doesn't stand for much at all). When I returned to reading comics as an adult (after a 13-year indifference), I was surprised to find superhero comics generally lumped in with Science Fiction. To me, they had always been detective stories, four-colour morality plays of crimes punished and justice avenged. Even the more glaringly sci-fi stuff like Green Lantern featured readily identifiable elements of crime fiction.

Sure, I was into Star Wars as a kid, but my Sci-Fi/Fantasy interest didn't go much further. On my bookshelves today, non-comic book Sci-Fi appears infrequently. I have some Soviet Sci-Fi, a novel written by a Regina author, and Jonathan Lethem's Gun, With Occasional Music, if that even counts. The Yiddish Policemen's Union won a Hugo, but, hey, come on, that's a crime novel.

Richard Price talks about how he uses the act of investigating a crime as a means of taking readers to place they otherwise wouldn't have access to, be it the tenement courtyards of Clockers or the condo-converted synagogues of Lush Life. The investigation of a crime, especially a murder, is a distorted reflection of the way fiction writers work: building files on their characters, coming up with plausible scenarios and then breaking them down, constantly asking what if, what if, what if? It's no surprise, then, that so many writers use the crime novel as a vehicle to explore larger themes than merely whodunnit, and that there are so many terrifically-written crime novels. The first two entries in our series are examples of this socially aware crime fiction.

The Story of a Crime: The Martin Beck Series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö - This ten-book series is the big daddy of Scandinavian crime lit (Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, etc) and colossally well done. Hyped by Michael Connelly and Michael Ondaatje, this is straight-up police procedural at its finest, but also remarkably potent (but never polemic) social criticism. Before they started this series with Roseanna in 1965, married couple (and affirmed Marxists) Sjöwall and Wahlöö worked in poetry and journalism, and the skillsets of those two trades are used in perfect harmony here. Witness:

Ten yards away stood a lone dismal figure, a pipe in his mouth and his hands thrust deep down in his coat pockets. This was Fredrik Melander of the Murder Squad in Stockholm and a veteran of hundreds of difficult investigations. He was generally known for his logical mind, his excellent memory and unshakeable calm. Within a smaller circle, he was most famous for his remarkable capacity for always being in the toilet when anyone wanted to get hold of him. His sense of humour was not nonexistent, but very modest; he was parsimonious and dull and never had brilliant ideas or sudden inspiration. Briefly, he was a first-class policeman. (from The Fire Engine That Disappeared)

As you can probably tell from that passage, Sjöwall and Wahlöö were not interested in supersleuths or tough guys. American crime fiction is full of disenfranchised mavericks, often working in competition with the authorities, even when they themselves are members of a police force. It's that rugged individualism of one man against the world, or at least the system. But the detectives in the Martin Beck series are presented as civil servants, who solve cases not through passion but through process. They wait weeks for lab results, stumble blindly into breaks, sleuth by way of talking to people and reading reports. In between, they go home to their wives (the books were published between 1965 and 1975 and reflect an era when there were few women in policing), their model ship kits, and Sax Rohmer novels. The series epitomizes Walter Mosley's idea of the Novel as "a pedestrian work of the everyday lives of bricklayers and saints."

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley - This is the first of three collections of short stories featuring Socrates Fortlow (the others are Walkin' The Dog and The Right Mistake). Mosley is one of Bill Clinton's favourite writers, and also one of mine. In the Watts neighbourhood of L.A. of the early 90s, we meet Socco, fresh from a 27-year bit in an Indiana prison for the murder of two people. We follow him through his neighbourhood as he struggles to give purpose and meaning to life on the outside. Mosley never shies away from Socrates's darkest parts, and never resorts to sentimentality, all the while creating a remarkably sympathetic portrait of a very hard man. HBO made a pretty damn fine miniseries out of it starring Laurence Fishburne Jr.

mp3: "Bowsprit" by Balmorhea

Vanhattan? More like Vanhassle!

2010-02-05T10:52:00.000-08:00

Last spring, I’m waiting for the #3 Downtown bus at the corner of Main and Broadway. I’m on my way in for a 12-hour shift, on a Sunday, so I’m not in a great mood to start with. The bus, unreliable at the best of times, seems to follow no schedule at all on Sundays. So I’ve got to get out way ahead of time just be on time. I’ve got to hustle like a keener just to keep from being a slob.
But here comes the bus, I can see it way down the street.
During the week, the #3 is like any other bus I’ve ever been on in Vancouver, packed. By the time I get on, no more than ten minutes from the city core, it’s standing room only, usually with the pleasurable view of the sleeve of someone’s wet raincoat. But Sunday mornings before 8, it’s mostly shift workers like me. Security guards in turbans with shopping bags full of groceries from the 24-hour supermarkets, nurses in their colourfully printed scrubs, and the occasional straggler from Satuday night’s revelry. Sunday mornings, I can count on sitting down on the bus.
The bus stops at a red light across Broadway, and I can’t believe my eyes. The digital display reads “Sorry. Bus full.” The light changes to green and the bus carries on in the centre lane.
As it goes by, I see them: Sun Runners, in their T-shirts and shorts. Chipper with their power shakes and lattes. Laughing, ha ha. As I watch the bus make its way down the hill, I quietly pray for rain. Hail, even.
Another bus passes by. As if!
Finally, I get a break. The third bus is no less full, but the driver is at least a reasonable human being.
I edge on to front of the bus sideways, like a Tetris block. I can’t even get in far enough to validate my Faresaver. Upfront we’re elbow to eyeball, but craning my neck, I can see empty seats at the back. Lots of them.
The Sun Runners, these fit folks who ride the bus maybe five days a year—to hockey games or fireworks—are bogarting their personal space. They’re doing stretches in the aisles.
And I’m late for work.

To live in Vancouver is to deal with frustration. If it's not the Sun Run--an annual 10km race sponsored by the city's broadsheet publisher of the New York Times Crossword Puzzle--it's made-for-TV film shoots, infrastructure mega-projects, Victorian-era zoning bylaws, or gang-related shootings. It's not the awe-inspiring natural surroundings that lead so many Vancouverites to yoga, it's the hope of learning to cope with constantly thwarted plans.
The Olympics will just be an extreme manifestation of this essential Vancouverism.
What's saddest about the Olympics as an event--aside from the 800 teachers the province might lay off to help pay for it, or the dozens of innocents who will inadvertently read a Shelley Fralic column--is that visitors are going to miss out on the best parts of Vancouver. Parking restrictions and transit priorities will leave little opportunity for tourists to see what daily life in the Soggy Apple is really like. It won't be impossible, but it won't be easy for the determined to get to the other side of Gastown and drop in on Robert at Solder & Sons, the Downtown Eastside's coffee and books emporium (the coffee is new, the books are used) where you can challenge the regulars to a match of Scrabble, or just hang out with the fixed-gearheads from Super Champion, the bike shop next door. Or take your Americano down the street to Crab Park Fight your way back to the Downtown side of Gastown for a Najib's Special at Nuba, arguably the finest lunch in all of Vancouver. Or, how about Cambie Village? The area paid a dear cost during construction of the Canada Line, and now, in the hinterland between City Hall and King Edwards stops, will they reap any benefit?
Of course, the real best parts of Vancouver have nothing to do with the city itself. Without the bridges, without the SkyTrains, without the souvenir shops, without the people, the mountains and ocean would still be here. There are wild parts of the city, such as the steep banks of the Millennium Line at Commercial Drive, overgrown and lush, that remind us how we've changed the landscape to suit our needs. Raccoons and coyotes, great blue herons even, roam the city streets before dawn. Many progressive agencies in the Downtown Eastside acknowledge the idea that Vancouver sits on unceded Coast Salish territory, and the persistence of these nocturnal fauna is a reminder of our late arrival here.

Gary Stephen Ross, editor-in-chief of Vancouver magazine, wrote an essay on "the idea of Vancouver" for the current issue of The Walrus. It's accompanied by brilliant photos of Vancouver by Grant Harder that capture the range and depth of Vancouver life. Also in the issue, a powerful piece by Marian Botsford Fraser on the Canadian penal system, and a fantastic report on Rush by Jason Anderson. In fact, my favourite part of the issue is on the Contributors pages, where it says that Anderson is working on his second novel, about the Canadian film industry. It's a hell of an issue, you should buy it.
Ross compares Vancouver to Philip Seymour Hoffman, who starred in the film Owning Mahowny, which was based on the book Stung, written by Gary Stephen Ross. Hoffman, you'll remember, also played Lester Bangs in that terrible Cameron Crowe movie about ten years ago, and Bangs, who died in 1982, wrote that The Bells is Lou Reed's best solo LP. Bangs didn't live long enough to hear Mistrial, but I don't think it would have changed a thing. Bob Seger is reported to have written a song about Lester Bangs, called "Lester Knew." Bruce McCulloch definitely did write a song about Bob Seger, called "Bob Seger." It's on his album The Drunk Baby Project. It is also better than anything on Mistrial.

mp3: "Nobody Can Turn Me Around" by the Sojourners
mp3: "Bob Seger" by Bruce McCulloch

BONUS TEN GREAT SONGS 2009 #8: I WANNA KNOW GIRLS
mp3: "I Wanna Know Girls" by Lambchop

Ten Great Songs 2009 #6/#7: Easiest Game/Disco Mystic

2010-01-20T23:31:00.001-08:00

At this point, moving toward the end of January 2010, who really cares about 2009 anymore? So, like, if I want to put a song that came out at the end of 2008 on my Best of 2009 list, nobody's going to notice anymore. How about a song from 1979? How about a whole album from 1979 that I didn't even hear until 2010? Look, Emmet, if you're still slogging through your year-end list this deep into the new year, well, whatever gets it done, pal.

So that's why I'm telling you about The Bells today. Lou Reed's ninth solo album, released between Street Hassle and Growing Up in Public. When I cared about Lou Reed (and I cared, man, I cared) Street Hassle (1978) was his last good album until New York (1989)--which was his last good album until that one with the song about getting an eggcream. As far as I was concerned, there was a whole decade where if there was a difference between Lou Reed and Joe Piscopo, there wasn't enough of one to matter. It was just a big clusterfuck of red joysticks, original wrappers and drum programs.

Well, if any theme has emerged in the narrative of this blog, it's that I used to have bad judgment (now I'm spot on about everything). So, The Bells.

#1: "Stupid Man" - I can't believe I didn't know that Lou Reed had a song mentioning Saskatchewan until a couple of months ago when I heard this song by accident. If I'd heard this at the right age (13/14) it might've changed the course of my life. Maybe not. I'm kinda glad I only heard it now, when I can relate more to the baby daughter lyrics than to the hitch-hiking out of Saskatchewan lyrics.

Right away you know this isn't typical Lou Reed. The song starts with piano, probably electric, then drums and great disco bass line. Lyrically, this is a country song, it's "Memphis, TN" by Chuck Berry. It's the Prodigal Father, trying to get home where he belongs. Nobody's wired on down, nobody's trying to hit it sideways.

Country lyrics, disco rhythm? This is Lou Reed?

#2: "Disco Mystic" - This is the craziest song I've ever heard. It foreshadows "Druganaut" and "99 Problems" at the same time. It's relentless, it's murder, it's brilliant.

#3: "I Want to Boogie With You" - Whatever happened to rock sax?* The first line here, Lou sounds like Flight of the Conchords doing Bowie. This is the first track on the album where Lou actually sings like Lou a little bit, and it's a laundry list of people who don't like him, people who want to see his ship sink, etc. But he just wants to boogie with you, down on the corner. Because he's Lou Reed, that's where he boogies.

#4: "With You" - This is another Lou Reed put-down song, continuing his late-70s collection of songs where he basically shits on people ("Dirt" and "Leave Me Alone" from Street Hassle, "Temporary Thing" from Rock and Roll Heart, etc).

#5: "Looking for Love" - Like "Boogie" this is a riff on Springsteen (who guested on Street Hassle) and built around rock sax. It's a little more downtown-lyrically, a little more Lou Reed-y, but still sorta chooglin'. I think he kinda sounds like the guy from the Violent Femmes on this one, but I guess it's the other way around.

#6: "City Lights" - Rhodes piano, kazoo and found percussion wouldn't sound as good together again until Royal Trux's 1998 album Accelerator. That alb, incidentally, closes with "Stevie (for Steven S.)" which is a tribute to Steven Seagal just as "City Lights" here is a tribute to Charlie Chaplin, another actor better known for his physical presence on screen than for his ability to deliver lines convincingly.

#7: "All Through the Night" - Especially in the 70s, but probably always, Lou Reed was a great recycler of ideas. Here he uses the same overdubbed snippets of conversation effect he used on "Kicks" from 1975's Coney Island Baby. It's used more precisely here, and all the voices seem to be Lou. We hear other people laugh, but always at Lou's bon mots. He says things like "he didn't age gracefully, he aged overnight" or "the drink's aren't on the house, they're on me!" This is actually the song where he sounds like Gord Gano, but I didn't have a lot to say about "Looking for Love".

#8: "Families" - When I think about Lou Reed's family, I think about "Kill Your Sons" from 1972's Sally Can't Dance. It's his presumably autobiographical song about getting electroshock therapy as a teenager and it doesn't paint a kind portrait of his kinfolk. But this is a letter home with heart. Even though he tells his father, "there's nothing we have in common except our names" he shows some real compassion (not Lou's trademark) and there's a genuine sadness to the refrain "I don't come home much no more."

#9: "The Bells" - The title track, the capital city, THE BELLS. Marty Fogel and Don Cherry skulking horns over a sparingly recurring three-note bassline for 5:30 and then! Theremin and Lou talks some nonsense about when actors leave the stage, "looking out he thought he saw a crook, and he hollered, 'look there are the bells!'" Yeah, sure. It's too bad the lyrics are so whiffy, because Fogel and Cherry have really worked up a terrific free-jazz rock dirge and the song weighs a ton for mood and tone and sometimes you just have to go, "Okay, Lou, go ahead."

I bought the album on iTunes, marking the first time I've owned any Lou Reed in any format other than cassette (not true: I have owned White Light/White Heat on vinyl since October, 1995). Which tells you how long it's been since I really, really wanted to be able hear some Lou Reed when the moment struck. According to iTunes, the top five Lou Reed albums are (in order) Transformer, New York, 1969: The Velvet Underground Live with Lou Reed, New Sensations, and Berlin. The first two seem obvious enough, his biggest hits. The live VU album is an aberration (fine though it may be, esp "What Goes On") and has no business in the solo Lou section. Berlin, I can see, that's a pretty harsh album and people who like Lou Reed seem to go for the harsh stuff, same with Sarah Silverman, y'know? But New Sensations? Why not Legendary Hearts or Mistrial? Why not the one with the song about eggcreams? I guess it means that everybody already has Sally Can't Dance and Coney Island Baby in other formats? It bothers me more than it should. I mean, yes, New Sensations has "My Red Joystick" but it also has "Doin' the Things That We Want To". Mistrial, meanwhile, is wall-to-wall brutal. "No Money Down", "Video Violence", "New York City luh-uh-vers, Tell It To Your Heart!"

*Rock Sax? I'm glad you asked! Andre Ethier's Born of Blue Fog came out very late in 2008 and, just like Lou Reed's The Bells, is easily his best work to date. "Cop Killer", maybe the greatest song ever recorded by a Canadian, isn't a Body Count cover, but it does snatch a line from Jay-Z and it has rock sax, bringing this whole thing full circle. Thank you for coming, buy Born of Blue Fog.

mp3: "Disco Mystic" by Lou Reed

mp3: "Easiest Game" by Andre Ethier

EDIT: As Paul points out in the comments, the lyric to "The Bells" is, indeed, "Looking out he thought he saw a brook," according to Lou's Pass Thru Fire (via Google Books).

Ten Great Songs 2009 #5: Eid Ma Clack Shaw

2010-01-14T08:32:00.002-08:00

If you like concerts, but don't like going out or if you like desks, but hate work NPR's Tiny Desk Concert Series is your new pal. Our old pal Bill Callahan performed just such a concert last summer and it's pretty much the be-all/end-all of internet music videos. Callahan released his second album under his own name a little before, and, as usual, it changed the way we think of Bill Callahan. Callahan's best songs have always been about either birds or trees and on Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, he manages a song that's about both birds and trees. It's the last song on his Tiny Desk Concert.

Other recommended TDCs:

Lightning Dust just killing it and sounding so warm and close and different from their albums.
Raphael Saadiq, formerly of Tony! Toni! Tone! and my dad's favourite neo-soul artist.
Kurt Wagner of Lambchop, real nice.
Vic Chesnutt, who we miss.

mp3: "Eid Ma Clack Shaw" by Bill Callahan

Ten Great Songs 2009 #4: All the Money I Had is Gone

2009-12-31T10:45:00.009-08:00

Michelle Lang was the agriculture reporter when I started at the Leader-Post in 2001. My job was mainly to sort the mail, archive each day's edition, and tame the wild fax machine. It was the closest thing to an adult job I've ever had. I held on to it far longer than I should have because I was afraid that that was as good as I was going to get in this world. And also because they let me write CD reviews and interview Bruce McCulloch and Bob Newhart and Charley Pride.

By the time I started at the L-P, I'd been writing consistently for about four years for the student press, alt-weeklies, and the odd not-quite-glossy music mag. Among the amateurs and the activists, I thought I was pretty hot stuff. I was quickly humbled at my leftover desk on the edge of a real newsroom, watching real journalists do real journalism every day. I spent the next five years wallowing in a wounded sense of inadequacy that mostly manifested itself in self-sabotage.

Early days, before I resigned myself to a lifetime of fax wrangling, it felt like my lowly position might be a springboard to better things. During that first year or so, some reporters would ask me to help search the archives (before the archives went digital). One day Michelle stopped by my desk and said she'd heard I had the best French in the newsroom.

"That's not saying much," I said. I'd helped translate some French documents once.

Well, Michelle explained, of course I'd heard that such-and-such federal agriculture program was falling apart and the provincial Ag Dept. was publicly considering pulling out or going ahead anyway or something. She knew that Manitoba had already bailed and had heard that Quebec might be too. Trouble was, her French wasn't good enough that she could call up the Quebec Agriculture Ministry to confirm. Would I, could I?

So, with my horribly out of practice French and extremely limited knowledge of agricultural issues, I dialled up the Quebec Ministry of Agriculture. "Etes-vous...?"

I made a transcript and translated it and left it on Michelle's desk. The Quebec Ministry was weighing their options and promised to act in the best interest of their producers. When Michelle got back to the newsroom, she thanked me for my help. It felt great to be challenged and to come through on it. Good work is its own reward, I figured.

The following morning, I immediately opened the paper to the Ag section to see how much ink my little adventure had generated. The Quebec Ministry of Agriculture featured in one tangential sentence in the article, which was mainly about how Saskatchewan farmers were dealing with the mess. At the bottom of the the article, in italics, read: with files from Emmet Matheson.

Damn. I doubt Michelle realized how much that acknowledgement meant to me. For her, the whole thing was routine: you follow through on stories and you give proper credit. That's just good journalism, that's just being a decent human being.

I think everyone who worked at the Leader-Post back then would agree that working there became a little less fun and interesting after Michelle left for the Calgary Herald.

Michelle Lang, along with four Canadian Forces soldiers, died yesterday in Afghanistan when the vehicle they were traveling in hit an improvised explosive device.

mp3: "All the Money I Had is Gone" by the Deep Dark Woods

Ten Great Songs 2009 #3: Going Out Tonight

2009-12-23T17:24:00.000-08:00

Recidivism. A great, dark theme for a great, dark song. It starts with that spare twang-y chord, like it's an outlaw country murder ballad. And it is, in its way.

The song finds its narrator at a point of despair so low that bottoming out seems like redemption. Maybe this is what's happened to (the hopefully fictional) Gary Hache in the decade since Andrew Vincent first sang about him. Ten years younger, getting loaded and mouthing off to cops sounds like a lot of fun. But sometimes bad boys grow into sad men , and this song catches one of them in a quiet moment, and nails it.

mp3: "Going Out Tonight" by Andrew Vincent

You Should Have Loved Them When You Had the Chance

2009-12-17T09:09:00.002-08:00

Originally published in a December issue of prairie dog magazine.

You Should Have Killed Us When You Had the Chance

Parkas

Saved By Radio

4 dogs

Proof there’s no God: The Parkas were twice as good as Two Hours Traffic, yet somehow failed to reach even half the national profile of the Two Minute Miracles. The Parkas played their final show last July in Toronto and you probably didn’t even know they existed until you read this paragraph. WTF, my friends?

You Should Have Killed Us When You Had the Chance comes to us like an infant in a rocketship from a doomed planet. Each song is a feat of strength magnified by our yellow sun and lesser gravity. “Isolation Pay” is David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” ferociously played as if an outtake from This Year’s Model, the lyrics rewritten as a convincing blue collar anthem. “Bad Comedian” is one of two odd setpieces (the other is the brilliantly simple “Face the Facts”), a roman a clef that recalls Toronto writer Jason Anderson’s overlooked 2005 novel Showbiz in the way it plies the tragedy out of comedy and then socks it right back. “Brighton Hurricane”, “Don’t Say No” and “The Gang’s All Gone” are prime examples of the meaty, muscular brand of rock the Parkas have always excelled at. “Goodnight, Nemesis” calls back to the themes of the Parkas’ first album, 2003’s Now This Is Fighting, and highlights how the band has matured. Back then, on “Giants in My Field” the Parkas cheekily riffed on Aretha, spelling “R-E-V-E-N-G-E, find out what it means to me.” Now, older and wiser, they broodingly tell us “Sometimes justice is just a grudge." You Should Have Killed Us... shows a band that held on to all that was good and interesting about itself and continuously found new ways to make it work.

mp3: "Face the Facts" by Parkas from their new, final album You Should Have Killed Us When You Had the Chance

mp3: "Scam the Tram" by Parkas from their first album Now This is Fighting

mp3: "Get on the Cardboard" by Phasers on Stun, a pre-Parkas band featuring the world famous Rhyno Bros Rhythm Section

Showbiz, Part Two: Escapism

2009-12-13T20:00:00.001-08:00

“I read and review a lot of CanLit where there really isn’t a plot,” Jason Anderson told Taddle Creek magazine about his debut novel, Showbiz in 2005. “A lot of character, a lot of theme, but there’s really not a ripping-yarn story element to it.”

Showbiz follows Nathan Grant, a freelance journalist whose career has stalled out in the middle of an intersection, as he gets in over his head chasing down a story that could make his career or break his legs. That's plot taken care of. Out of the plot, or maybe alongside?, come all kinds of great characters and themes. And jokes.

Mostly Anderson gives us a nervous Canadian navigating the USA, a post-paranoid landscape yin-yanging on the axis of exhibitionism and secrecy. Reality TV and conspiracy theories. All of which is plenty entertaining and worthwhile, but what really makes the novel crackle are the insights Anderson teases about, well, Showbiz. Throughout the book, we get brief italicized vignettes from Grant's quarry, presidential impersonator Jimmy Wynn; internal monologues as he psyches himself up for another curtain call in the good old days. As the novel winds its way through show biz meccas New York City, Las Vegas, L.A. and rural Californa desert toward a climax that could only happen on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, the parallels between the art of impersonation and the craft of writing start humming like tines of the same tuning fork. The last half of the book is really enjoyable.

The first 30 or so pages are a little awkward. There are scenes at an art opening and a bar-qua-barber shop that don't do a lot to engage the reader or necessarily set up the rest of the book. Anderson eases in to the parallel reality of his novel--a world where JFK was named Teddy Cannon and killed in New Orleans, Lenny Bruce survived to turn into a low-rent Ed McMahon, though the Shaggs persist (albeit under a different name) because even on a quantum level, no universe could exist without them--a little too slowly, giving the impression at first that he's just too chicken shit to use real names. But once we meet Anderson's pudding-loving Lenny Bruce the idea finally clicks and the novel really takes off.

Plus, Anderson includes my favourite joke (best told as an orphaned punchline by Detective Meldrick Lewis throughout several seasons of Homicide: Life on the Streets) about a bear.

mp3: "Stylin' on Tang" by Kavalier and Clay

mp3: "Walk On" by Kavalier and Clay

Ten Great Songs 2009 #2: Holiday

2009-12-09T16:10:00.000-08:00

If you're looking for a perfect gift for that special someone in your life who is trying desperately to make the transition from writing incoherent 250-word record reviews to full-fledged novelism, you could do a lot worse than Jason Anderson's 2005 novel Showbiz.

Anderson plays keyboards in The Two Koreas and, more importantly for our narrative today, writes arts journalism out of Toronto for a bunch of places that you'll probably recognize if you live in Toronto, and won't if you don't. Like the CBC.

About 12 years ago, Anderson was the music editor at Eye Weekly, and I was very slowly making my way from Regina to Montreal to become a writer. Seriously, that was the plan: Move to Montreal, become a writer. I made a flowchart and everything. I was well on my way to achieving both goals, because I had published at least five record reviews in Regina's prairie dog magazine (it was a monthly back then) and was temporarily living in a London, Ont. basement apartment. I was 20, I was destined for greatness.

I had already faxed (!) my tearsheets to the Mirror before I even left Regina, to give them time to find me a desk, I suppose. But my plans were still malleable, so I decided to send Eye an email, just in case. I included a couple of my better pieces (I didn't have a lot, but it was still obvious which ones were better) and an offhand remark about how I was the second coming of Richard Meltzer. Of course, this was 1998 or something, and Meltzer was more or less entirely out of print at the point and I don't think I'd even read anything by him, I'd just read about him and decided he was my hero based on that. Well, maybe I'd read some of his stuff on Addicted to Noise, which was kind of a kickass website back in tha day. But I certainly wasn't familiar with his style, just his reputation.

So I get an email back from Jason Anderson. He commends my intention to be the next Meltzer, says he likes one of the samples I sent him and invites me to pitch to him. He even suggests I use more jokes. So I call him up, he talks to me as if I'm a peer, telling me that the new Plant & Page album really sounds like an Albini recording (because it was) and I'm like, oh shit. I'm just a guy who's written a handful of CD reviews, I don't know what an Albini recording is supposed to sound like! I'm in way over my head. I have one pitch, not a great one, based on a musical obsession I was on the verge of growing out of. Anderson whittles it down a bit, but accepts it, gives me an assignment. He never hears from me again.

I spent the next few months in Montreal, writing horrible poetry and short stories that were even worse.

Eventually I went back to Regina and have incrementally become almost as good a writer as I used to tell everybody I already was. Give me another twelve years.

More about Showbiz tomorrow.

mp3: "Holiday" by Pink Mountaintops

One Year Later...

2009-12-07T06:05:00.001-08:00

I think back to those dark days of last December, sleepless and harrowed, wandering the streets near on midnight looking for the late-night supermarket in the snowy mystery. One foot in front of the other, one diaper change to the next.

Those early days, you were losing more weight than you should have. Just by a little, just enough to scare us. We supplemented and regulated, stepped up the frequency of your feedings, every three hours, no matter what. It really felt, and I supposed it was, that all we had to do was keep you alive. It was easy to forget about ourselves. But when we remembered, we were famished.

I went out into the night, I didn't remember the last time I'd been out, I didn't know what day it was. It was dark, but it had been snowing so the ground reflected the light from the standards above. Everything was new, built in anticipation of the Canada Line, it was like walking through a window display.

I got to the store just as they were starting to close up. I wandered the aisles in a hurried fog, not wanting to be last out, but without much idea of what I should be buying. By the time I made it to the cashier, my basket was full of random frozen meals, unripe fruit and a salad mix. I had no business buying groceries in my state of mind, but what else could I do?

I got home, put a frozen lasagna in the oven, and hoped it would be ready before your next meal.

A week or so later, the danger had passed, but no one was getting much sleep, no one had recoverd. We took you out to our neighbourhood coffee shop. I wore the same green corduroy Snuggli my parents had carried me in, 31 years earlier. You were so calm and quiet, I was afraid I'd smothered you. You were so fragile. I took nothing for granted.

Yesterday, we took you out for brunch, you walked part way. You ate a pancake and some fruit. You raised a ruckus and laughed, laughed, laughed. I laughed too.

mp3: "Daddy Loves Baby" by Don Covay

Ten Great Songs 2009 #1: Rising

2009-12-03T10:21:00.006-08:00

A few years ago, I went to see The Marriage of Figaro. Not my favourite opera, but related at least. It was a pleasant enough experience, but I wasn't all that impressed by the supertitles projected above the stage. I'd seen foreign movies, so I was prepared to read and watch at the same time. I wasn't, however, prepared for how pedestrian the libretto seemed when translated to English.

I get what Opera is trying to do with the supertitles, and I appreciate that they're trying to broaden the audience and democratize the artform. But, geez, I like the mystery! What's obscure and unknowable is half the appeal! I don't want quotidian Opera, I want it so grand that I can only respond to it on an emotional level.

So I was a little worried when I noticed a number of English-language songs on Lhasa de Sela's new album, Lhasa. Her previous albs were mostly sung in Spanish and French, and though I understand French, I often choose not to. Luckily, Lhasa didn't flake out on me. The album is a country & western album in about the same way that Leonard Cohen's Various Positions is a C&W record. "Rising", written with Patrick Watson, is a great song.

mp3: "Rising" by Lhasa de Sela

Parkas.

2009-12-01T00:14:00.000-08:00

What's funny is that I bought a new parka the other day.
I live in Vancouver, I don't actually need a parka. I could get away with a windbreaker over a sweater. Growing up on the Prairies, though, I had some parkas, yes sir. Big puffy numbers from the Hobo Shop, three-quarter length Hudson's Bay doozies, and yeah, oversized army surplus parkas. When I was 15, everyone I knew either had a green army surplus parka or was about to get one. Friday nights we slouched and loitered around the South End of Regina imagining ourselves ruthless street toughs until the minivans and station wagons rolled into the DJ Cinnamons parking lot at 9:30 to take us home, where, if we were lucky, our mothers would make us hot cocoa and popcorn.

My big green army surplus parka followed me around the country the winter of 1995/96. We were out there near Hawk Junction, tending to the snow mobile trails, trimming the undergrowth with Husqvarnas and Stihls. I used to put a mandarin orange in the pocket of my parka as we'd leave for the trail in the morning. By midafternoon, the juice would be frozen, but not the pulp, making for a sweet, slushy snack.

For the last three years, since I've been out on the coast, I've made do with a flock-lined corduroy jacket, real rugged-like. I bought it at a mall. In the suburbs. Aside from how heavy it gets in the rain, it's been a good coat. The main problem I've had with it is that wearing it supercedes wearing corduroy pants. Which I really like to do. But you can't wear top and bottom corduroy. Unless you're in the woods. Wrestling Bigfoot. In the year 1978.

My new parka, purchased downtown, has street cred. It's fitted, with a vinyl shell and a fuzz-lined hood. At first it reminded me of Han Solo's parka from Empire, but I don't have goggles for it. Yet.

What it really reminds me of is the type of coat tough, young single mothers from Queens wear in hip hop videos and inspirational movies. You know, that stereotypical image of the girl with the big hoop earrings and her hair back in a super-tight ponytail. She won't listen when everyone says she can't do it, or she shouldn't do it, because she has a dream and can't no one tell her she can't chase her dream. I have the same parka as her. And for a minute or two today, I was her.

It wasn't raining, so I had a choice of outerwear. Lill and I were going to the grocery store to pick up some bananas and bread, two of her favourite foods. It was just cold enough that I wanted something snug, so I wore my new parka out for the first time. I zipped it all the way up, like a turtleneck, and let the hood sort of half hang off the back of my head. On the way back, I pushed the stroller up Commercial Drive, a cloth grocery bag slipping off my shoulder. I started to feel a little swagger in my hips, a little J.Lo in my attitude. I became Emmet from the Block, and I was gonna go to beauty school and someday take my baby out of this neighbourhood and have a nice house with a yard and little fence, and well, it's just a little dream, but it's my dream and you can never take it away from me. I bobbed my head as I thought these strange thoughts and gave the stinkeye to all these people on the street judging me, thinking I'm just another girl from Queens going to beauty school, learning how to do extensions. But I'll show them, I'll show all them, that I'm something else. I'm something else.

***

The Parkas of Ontario release their final album today. You Should Have Killed Us When You Had the Chance. Great record, great band. I'll hopefully have more to say about it by the end of the year. Until then, here's a fitting track, "The Gang's All Gone" from the new alb, you can buy it from the Parkas. As well, what the hell, a track from their previous alb, Put Your Head In the Lion's Mouth: "You and What Army".

mp3: "The Gang's All Gone" by Parkas

mp3: "You and What Army?" by Parkas

Is this thing on?

2009-11-23T15:09:00.004-08:00

Hey pals!

Just checking in to say HEY and let you know that regular blogging will resume shortly. And by regular blogging, I mean I might have something ready by the middle of December (probably sooner).

In the meantime, here's a recent CD review I did for the prairie dog:

The Circle

Bon Jovi

Island/Universal

3.5 dogs

A quarter century in, Bon Jovi makes the most vital album of their career with The Circle. It’s not just a return to the rock power anthems we expect from Bon Jovi after a slight detour into country power anthems on 2007’s Lost Highway, it’s total fucking dominance of the rock power anthem. You’ll hear songs from this album in locker rooms, auto ads, and on the campaign trail for years to come.

Two intertwined things make The Circle work so well. One, it’s the Bon Jovi-est album Bon Jovi has ever made. They haven’t merely refined their sound, they’ve definitively mastered it. “We Weren’t Born to Follow”, “Live Before You Die” and especially “Work for the Working Man” actually include immediately identifiable elements of previous Bon Jovi hits and repurpose them into mostly better songs. Two, the album is essentially a song-cycle about the shitstorm of economic uncertainty and cultural fear America has created around itself.

“Work for the Working Man” is one of the album’s most intriguing and most problematic songs. It’s a remake of 1987’s “Livin’ On A Prayer” for the Corporate Bailout Era. While it’s pretty righteous to hear JBJ howl for American labour, the song lacks the emotional power that came with “LOAP”’s narrative of Tommy and Gina. Sure, that’s a trick Bon Jovi stole from Springsteen, but it’s a good trick and it works. The lyrics of “Working Man” have no such emotional hook and, though the chorus does its best, it never quite achieves the resonance of “Livin’ On A Prayer.”

It’s Recession Rock, with a Bon Jovi twist: In the internal logic of all Bon Jovi songs, there are no problems that can’t be solved by some brash expression of rugged individualism, like driving a fast car, playing baseball or saying “Yeah!” Hey, this is Jon Bon Jovi, not John Kenneth Galbraith.

In the meanertime, here's Mark Matos & Os Beaches, whose press materials would have them compared to Os Mutantes, the Byrds and Pavement. I don't really hear the Os Mutantes on this track, but it's an exceedingly pleasant country-rock number.

mp3: "Hired Hand" by Mark Matos & Os Beaches

Is Don Morgan the new Dorothy Parker?

2009-10-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

In some ways, Saskatchewan Justice Minister Don Morgan's crusade to seize alleged profits from the sales of wife-murderer Colin Thatcher's new book Final Appeal: Anatomy of a Frame is cute, quaint even. That Morgan, daydream believer that he is, believes there are riches to be had in Canadian publishing, well, it makes me glad he's not Finance Minister.

That said, Morgan's Profits of Criminal Notoriety Act is toothless policy and smacks of nothing more than a hollow attempt a snagging some cheap public approval points without actually, y'know, doing anything. If Morgan and his Sask Party bossman Brad Wall were really interested in righting the wrongs done in the murder of JoAnn Wilson they could have enacted stronger domestic violence legislation, allocated more money to women's shelters, or done any number of things that would actually prevent future spousal-homicide. But instead, the Sask Party is using public funds to pay legal fees to seize money from Thatcher and ECW Press. Morgan says any seized money might go to Thatcher's children, who have remained close to Thatcher and would likely benefit from any profits Thatcher received anyway. So, besides a public contribution to the bank accounts of a handful of Sask Party-friendly lawyers, what's the point?

More troubling is that the Profits of Criminal Notoriety Act threatens to suppress many voices that have already been marginalized. According to 2005/2006 numbers, nearly 80% of Saskatchewan's prison population is Aboriginal (compared with 15% of the at-large Saskatchewan population. We may never get to hear their stories, stories that could very well be essential to creating a more equal and just Saskatchewan for all of its citizens. Without at least the potential for profits, what publisher would bother? The Act promises to muffle, if not silence, voices of dissent, voices of that don't come from a background of privilege.

The Act does not apply where a crime is recounted for law enforcement purposes, in support of crime prevention or in support of victims services programs.
"We realize some stories have a value to society, and may serve as a positive inspiration," Morgan said.

Authorial intention and artistic or social merit really aren't questions for government, are they? Certainly not this government.

Most troubling about the Profits of Criminal Notoriety Act, though, is that it reveals a contempt for the intelligence of the people of Saskatchewan. The Sask Party, otherwise champions of the free market, seemingly don't trust the people of SK to recognize Thatcher's book as the manifestation of an egomaniacal persecution-complex seemingly too vain to hire a ghostwriter (only John Gormley and his staff seem to have found much merit in the book). For all their fifth-grade understanding of capitalism, maybe they don't have faith in the system of supply and demand after all.

mp3: "Mr. Fixit" by Al Tuck & No Action

mp3: "Train of Thought" by Al Tuck & No Action

Paradise Domed

2009-09-27T12:44:00.000-07:00

If Winnipeg is mini-Detroit, can Regina be mini-Winnipeg? At least until R-Town gets the domed stadium that promises to be the (sadly) hottest issue of its fall municipal election. Then maybe Regina can be mini-Vancouver. It's already rocking the urban poverty thing like no one else can (though not as sensationally as Wpg), so why not let well-fed white guys* watch football indoors? What's the worst that could happen? Municipal and provincial taxpayers blow an obscene amount of money that might be better spent on social services, infrastructure, health care & education? So Regina closes a few libraries, a few highways fall into disrepair and the inner city rots further into third world levels of poverty, disease and despair. Think of the KISS concerts, won't anybody think of the KISS concerts?
So Dome-Lovers like Pat Fiacco, Brad Wall, John Gormley and Kevin Blevins might be guilty of narrow-minded, irresponsible arrogance. Big deal. This is Melville-level sleazebaggery, Moosejavian at bes t. If these fellows really want Regina to be a world class city on par with, say, Vancouver, they're gonna have to try a little harder.
Here in the Lower Mainland, we've made something of an art of scuttling sensible priorities in favour of corporate-interested extravaganzas. Gordon Campbell's Liberal government has lately made sweeping cuts to education--including pulling funds already promised and budgeted for by school boards, sports teams and parent groups--and health care. All standard issue deficit-battling that should be familiar to all who remember the early years of the Romanow gov't in Saskatchewan, with the big difference being that amid all these "tough love" cuts Campbell has boosted Olympic spending by 27.5 per cent. These aren't cuts to high-falutin' sculptors who make statues of dead Paraguayan tone poets out of cat feces (though, yes, there are some killer cuts to the arts) or cancellations of programs that protect the rights and safety of drug addicts (likewise, nasty cuts), these are cuts to high school sports, which purportedly are the foundation of the ideals the Olympics are supposed to be promoting the first place.
Y'know, at least Fiacco is being upfront about his vainglorious, wasteful, potentially harmful plans before the election. On a sliding scale of scumbaggery, that puts him in misguided oaf/lackey of industry territory well below Gordon Campbell's Lex Luthor-level of treachery and deception.

mp3: "Pennies, Fountains And Stars" by Mack Mackenzie
mp3: "Used Car Salesman" by Ira Lee

*some of my best friends are well-fed white guys

Meet and Greet

2009-09-15T14:39:00.004-07:00

I was actively minding my own business. (jump in don't get hung up on first sentence) I had just sat down outside CC with an A'cano and the NYT x-word puzzle. (first sentence + last sentence: fact/question/observation) This was how I liked to start my day back then: By withdrawing, in public. (opening paragraph: topic sentence knock it out and get to the next paragraph)

Have been writing since 1997. (Honourable mention) Writing has appeared in prairie dog magazine, the Regina Leader-Post, No Depression, the Calgary Herald, Exclaim! Magazine, Rev Magazine, Degrees Magazine, CBC Radio 2 & Global TV. For five years, contributed avg. 2.5 stories/wk to L-P arts & life section as well as weekend CD reviews. Have maintained a blog since 2006, which has been cited by the blog of New York Magazine. Which is nearly the same as writing for New York Magazine, except for I didn't write for New York Magazine. Have worked in radio, TV, as well as performed stand-up comedy. Am from Saskatchewan which ought to count for something. I've interviewed Steve Albini and Bob Newhart. I once got a fan letter from Roy Shivers, which I wish I still had. All my past editors still take my calls. (clear, concise, personal history/professional, get name right, specific details: Miscellany.)

mp3: "Meet and Greet" by Slaraffenland

Purdy in Pink

2009-08-16T14:01:00.007-07:00

or, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret Atwood

from the Aug. 13, 2009 issue of prairie dog magazine

by Emmet Matheson

“The sad fact is that the next generation of Canadian writers is working at Starbucks because writing doesn’t pay the bills.”
Richard Rosenbaum is being a little facetious, but probably not as much as he wishes he could be. As associate and online fiction editor for Broken Pencil, the magazine of record for zine culture and independent arts, he’s better positioned than most to know what’s going on with the Giller nominees of 2025.
Rosenbaum recently edited Can’tLit, an anthology of fiction published by Broken Pencil over the last decade, which will be published by ECW Press this fall.
Assuming you already have a latte, that’s where you’ll find Canada’s freshest writers.
You’ll also find them in magazines, at least for now. But magazines are in trouble around the world, facing the double whammy of a global recession and an online audience that expects everything for free. Canadian mags are even more vulnerable, faced with the overwhelming free flow of content from the U.S. and a federal government that’s at best suspicious of all things cultural.
Most ominously, Masthead, a Canadian magazine about Canadian magazines, folded last October. But while they last, magazines like Broken Pencil, Winnipeg-based Border Crossings, and The Walrus continue to present the best in Canadian writing, both fiction and non-fiction.
“Magazines that publish fiction are always at the forefront of discovering new talent,” says Rosenbaum, “because the newest writers who are just discovering themselves and experimenting with forms are writing short stories, and magazines are practically the only medium that prints individual short stories.
“If you’re looking for really exciting writing, that’s where you’re going to find it,” he says. “I don’t think most people realize that. Because if they did, Canadian magazines would be in a much better state. Broken Pencil has been around for 15 years but it’s always just barely kept its head above water. The Walrus is practically bankrupt. It’s a matter of insufficient funding certainly, but it’s also that I think people just don’t realize how much great stuff there is out there.”
The Walrus was founded in 2003 as a Canadian answer to high-minded American general-interest mags like Harper’s or The New Yorker. Since its launch it has consistently cleaned up at the Canadian National Magazine Awards, and was recently awarded the “Best Writing” prize from the Utne Reader’s annual Independent Press Awards.
The Walrus boasts a paid circulation of 60,000. Not bad for what publisher Shelley Ambrose calls “a Canadian magazine for smart people.”
But perhaps The Walrus’s most notable achievement, the reason it deserves to be enshrined as a national treasure, was its March cover-dated issue. At a time when every magazine, American, Canadian, Uruguayan, whatever, had U.S. President Barack Obama on their cover, The Walrus stood out on the rack with its cover featuring a Marco Ventura portrait of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Ambrose recently posted a video appeal on the magazine’s website, calling for donations to the Walrus Foundation, the non-profit organization that guides and provides a third revenue stream for the magazine, beyond the traditional circulation and advertising dollars. But as the global recession claims its casualties in the corporate world, the once-titans of ad buying, like GM, just aren’t spending like they used to.
“Our advertising revenue has plummeted,” Ambrose says, “because we are attached to the outside world.”
That’s why The Walrus was founded on a model based on the funding structure of U.S. mag Harper’s, which is partially funded by the McArthur Foundation. Similar to the concept of Community Radio, The Walrus accepts that what it’s doing may not always be commercially viable, but nonetheless takes on the important and vital task of presenting Canadian voices.
The Walrus has bet its life that means enough to Canadians that they’ll support it.
“If Canada is going to have a magazine like this, it’s going to have to be based on that funding model,” Ambrose says. “Though it’s difficult for many Canadians to understand why they should give money to a magazine. There’s no reason for someone to pick up The Walrus instead of a magazine like Harper’s or The Economist except that it’s by and for Canadians. Those other magazines, as good as they are, don’t talk about us.”
Lee Henderson is a Saskatoon-born writer living in Vancouver. His short story, “The Nerve”, is featured in the recent “Summer Reading” issue of The Walrus alongside fiction by Joseph Boyden and Stephen Marche.
Henderson’s first novel, The Man Game, recently won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize at the B.C. Book Awards.
“If The Walrus didn’t exist in Canada, the country’s national identity once again goes into hiding,” says Henderson. “We need this ferociously weird, shaggy broom-bristle-moustached ice monster to stand tall for our shiftless, passive national intelligence.
“I love The Walrus,” he says.
Henderson is also a contributing editor at Border Crossings. Border Crossings published his short story “Conjugation” in 2005, which went on to win the gold medal for fiction at the 2006 Western Magazine Awards.
Henderson has also written journalism and criticism for both Border Crossings and The Walrus.
“Journalism is a necessary part of a writing life,” he says. “It takes me out of my sordid brain and into the world to meet real people and learn their stories. At its best, journalism is a deeply selfless art. I look to do journalism that will help me research or inspire my fiction projects.”
Both Henderson and Rosenbaum attest that Canadian readers do indeed have a desire to read Canadian writers.
“Broken Pencil’s annual online fiction contest, the Indies Writers Deathmatch, I think has proven that Canadians do have a craving for the new and the weird if they just knew where to look for it,” Rosenbaum says.
“We have to find a way to let Canadian readers know that this is really where the boundary-pushing art is happening. Nobody has a lot of money right now, but if you knew that for like 20 dollars a year you could discover all this great new stuff that would genuinely enhance your life and help Canadian artists survive, wouldn’t you want to do it?”
Can’tLit features nearly 40 different writers ranging from total unknowns to more established scribblers like Joey Comeau and Zoe Whittall. Rosenbaum is quick to point to highlights like Emma Healey’s “Last Winter Here” as “one of the best things we’ve ever printed,” “Panties” by Greg Kearney as “hilarious and weird in exactly the way we love” and Janette Platana’s “heartbreaking” tale of the Clash playing in Regina, “Some of This is True”.
Canadian writers, it seems, will always be with us. They’re a tenacious bunch with something to say, usually about ourselves. Often unflattering.
One believes, one hopes, that in a world where Canadian bands like Arcade Fire or Broken Social Scene can attract the gaze of the world, Canadian writers will somehow, some way, finally attract the readership they deserve right here in Canada. Maybe Canadians will someday come to appreciate learning about themselves, perhaps from a magazine that dared to put Stephen Harper on their cover at a time when it was really important for Canadians to know something about Stephen Harper.
“If The Walrus weren’t around,” Shelley Ambrose muses, “where would you be reading an in-depth profile of the sitting Prime Minister? Not in Harper’s, not in The Economist, not in The New Yorker.”
Maybe Fox News?

***

mp3: "This Is It" by The Wheat Pool, from their forthcoming second album, Hauntario

James Luther Dickinson, Rest in Peace

2009-08-15T13:42:00.005-07:00

Classic weirdo country-soul-rock musician Jim Dickinson has passed on. To get a full appreciation of the man's contributions check out Robert Gordon's awesome book It Came From Memphis. Short version: He played piano on the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses", and produced Big Star, the Replacements and Mudhoney.

mp3: "Wild Bill Jones" by James Luther Dickinson

UPDATE: Here's a massive, but no doubt incomplete, list of Dickinson's credits. The dude played with everyone from Aretha Franklin to Primal Scream.

A Choice of Frenemies: Reader Mail

2009-07-29T12:55:00.008-07:00

"The internet gives us the illusion that we're wonderfully gregarious people. When we type away on discussion boards and post comments on one another's blogs, it feels as if we're sitting outside a pub in the evening sunshine with our attractive, cool friends. But we aren't. That's what we did before we got addicted to the internet. Instead we perform some empty, unsatisfying facsimile of that. We sit alone in our rooms, becoming more and more isolated from society. And, inevitably, this turns us into mad, yelling, wild-eyed loons."
That's Jon Ronson, the British writer and broadcaster, from a May, 2007 column in the Guardian, and also from a BBC4 Radio doc.

It's not the first time I've posted that passage, but I think it's time again. Not so much because you need to read it, but because I do. Maybe you haven't noticed it, but there's been a certain smugness creeping into the ol' bloggue lately. Nick Miliokas noticed.
"Instead of coming across as an intelligent commentator, you came across as an asshole," he writes. "And even a strong argument is difficult to make from way up in there. I tell you this for your own good."
Something to think about over the next few weeks as I take my summer hiatus and go back to that part of the world what sprung me and spewed me forth. I don't know when I'll get back to blogging, but I'm sure I won't be long without an opinion, ill-advised or ill-expressed, that I can't contain.

Nick also sent in a list of restaurants you would probably never want to eat at unless, like me, you were an out-of-control Mordecai Richler nut:

1. Son of a Smaller Hero Sandwich
2. A Choice of Entrees
3. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Radish
4. Cork, Sir?
5. St. Urbain's Horsemeat
6. Joshua Hen and Sow
7. Solomon Gherkin Was Here

Pat, either Fiacco or Book (I know they both read the blog), also sent in a lit-chit:

Omlette (Hamlet)
Grape Expectations
the Ketchup On The Rye
Lord of the Fries
the Fry Machine

Finally, Sask-Lit titan Cliff Burns dropped a note on my pouty post about Regina:

To tell you the truth, Saskatoon is more like my kinda town. It just seems hipper, less uptight, more open and artsy. I lived in Regina for over 10 years and formed some roots...but with the loss of places like Buzzword Books in the Cathedral area, friends who have moved on, it's just a place I visit (and very rarely).

Before I go any further, I highly recommend you seek out a copy of Burns's Righteous Blood (straight from the guy himself is probably your best bet!), a twisted pair of horrific novellas impressive for both their ambitious imagination and economy of narrative.
Anyway, thanks for reading, Cliff! I'm glad you mentioned Buzzword, because it was actually the memory of that 13th Ave. bookstore that prompted the essay. The first draft actually wound up being an attempt to talk myself into moving back to Regina to open up a bookstore. I nearly had myself convinced.
But man, Gord pushed so many great books and authors on me, and also just had weird and interesting stuff on hand. He pushed all the big name writers from The Wire (Price, Pelecanos & Lehane) on me before The Wire was even a concern. He always had a great selection of books on jazz, like the Roland Kirk biog Bright Moments. When Buzzword shut down, well, that was kinda the beginning of the end for me in Regina. There were lots of other factors, but none so thematic as the loss of a cultural landmark in my own personal Queen City topography.

*****

Durham, N.C.'s Megafaun is in town tonight, playing a show at the Biltmore. They sound kinda like the psychedelic-side of the Sadies mixed with the Alan Parsons Project. In a good way. So it's no surprise they're pals with Bon Iver. They're pushing their new record, Gather, Form & Fly.

mp3: "The Fade" by Megafaun

mp3: "Kaufman's Ballad" by Megafaun

I really need to stop reading the L-P

2009-07-24T16:25:00.005-07:00

As someone who despite everything actually does love Regina--so much so that I wouldn't cheapen such a love by advertising it on a t-shirt (a mug, meanwhile, totally classy)--I'm incredibly disheartened to read the Leader-Post's Kevin Blevins's blog post about critics of the proposed domed stadium in Regina.
Sure, he's not the first L-P opinion writer to combine a small and dim worldview with unimaginative and lazy prose, nor is he the only Reginan who seems to think that anyone who criticizes the Queen City's abysmal record of dealing with urban issues like sprawl, poverty, addiction, housing, transit, business development , etc. is a hare-brained communist.
"A city is many things," Blevins writes in response to Regina activist Jim Elliott's criticisms, "And it can't just be about trying to solve poverty issues, which seems to be Elliott's position over and over again."
Maybe, just maybe, if Regina actually did something to address its poverty issues, Elliott wouldn't have to stand up for them over and over again.
I'm not going to fume too much over this here, because Wade already did and the Jurist already boiled it down. If you want to read how a real journalist blogs about Regina's dome of destiny, here's Will Chabun on the matter.

If I've had Regina on the brain lately, it's because I'll be there during the first two weeks of August. I mean, isn't there enough urban blight in Vancouver to keep me occupied?

mp3: "The Place Where We Lived" by Hayden

Oh, Regina, You Virgin Queen

2009-07-18T18:57:00.003-07:00

Here's a short essay I wrote that ran in the prairie dog about a month ago.

My friends Scotty and Kristen, of the pop group the Choir Practice, came back to Vancouver last summer after playing shows in Regina with shocking news. They loved it.
This was not what I was used to hearing from touring musicians who play my hometown. Empty clubs or inattentive bar crowds who talk through the whole set are the usual reports from the road, so Scotty and Kristen’s raves about their enthusiastic audience and great gigs left me a little confused. Then Kristen gushed about the vibrant downtown and beautiful Victoria Park. And that’s when I knew what they were talking about.
They didn’t play a show in Regina, they played the Regina Folk Festival. A totally different beast. The Folk Festival is one of several times throughout the summer when, like the lost city of Shangri La, a different Regina reveals itself. It’s the Platonic Ideal of Regina, a place where arts, culture, food and community are valued and celebrated. It’s a city that approaches the cosmopolitan. It’s the Regina that Regina could be all the time, if only it would let itself.
That’s not the Regina I left three years ago. The Regina I walked away from was the one with only one, almost quixotic movie screen left downtown. It was the city whose economic growth didn’t have room for the inner city neighbourhoods, where urban sprawl is valued over urban growth. It was a city that no longer had a centrally-located new bookstore where you could just easily find Saskatchewan authors Dianne Warren, Cliff Burns and Dave Margoshes alongside works by Noam Chomsky, George Pelecanos or Richard Meltzer. It was a city I wasn’t sure shared my values anymore. It was a city I had little confidence in.
A few years ago, back when I still believed in Regina, my friend Mike Burns, that great promoter and defender of the arts in Regina, liked to repeat a line from the David Mamet film State and Main: “Everybody makes their own fun. If you don’t make it yourself, it isn’t fun. It’s entertainment.”
It all seems so easy and simple during the honeyed days of summer. From the Cathedral Street Fair to the Folk Festival to the Farmers Market, there’s that Ideal Regina, making its own fun. That’s the Regina I love, that’s the Regina I miss.
I keep hearing that Regina’s changed these last three years, I hope it’s been for the better.

mp3: "Black Water" by Roger Dean Young & the Tin Cup

Restaurants with Bad Service

2009-07-18T18:36:00.005-07:00

Last night, while I was making my famous gazpacho, aka Mathezpacho, Nicole and I made up names of restaurants based on books. Here are some of them, along with some further gags:
Barney's Venison
The Three Muskox-Eaters
The Grape Gatsby
A Complicated Winelist
Szechuan & Sensibility
Slaughterhouse Fries
A Farewell to Coleslaw
The Coleslaw of the Wild
Are You There God? It's Me, Coleslaw
A Coleslaw Orange
The French Lieutenant's Coleslaw
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Coleslaw
Nineteen-Eighty-Coleslaw
AND
The Spy Who Came In From The Coleslaw.
thank you, goodnight.

mp3: "Memory of a Specific Silence - to Paul Auster" by Mats Gustafsson

Frank Black is the Capital of Kansas

2009-07-05T13:56:00.005-07:00

originally published in the July 2/09 edition of prairie dog magazine. Black Francis plays solo acoustic at the Exchange on Wed., July 8.

In between breaking up the Pixies in 1992 and reuniting with them in 2004, Black Francis released nine albums as Frank Black. The first song on his 1993 self-titled solo debut was “Los Angeles”. The last song on 2003’s Show Me Your Tears, his final album with his country-rock band the Catholics, was “Manitoba”. Kind of like Nia Vardalos in reverse.
Now, a decade might seem like a long time to cover the distance from the world capital of show biz to the longitudinal centre of Canada, but consider this: In 25 years of writing Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler never achieved the required artistic confidence or intestinal certitude to send his private investigator to The Pas. Frank Black not only went there (at least in his song), but he brought in Van Dyke Parks to work on it.
Fascinatingly, during the 1920s, Manitoba had a provincial treasurer by the name Francis Black.
The Pixies’ six-year-run of off-kilter, noisy pop and infighting makes for great rock & roll mythologizing, and it’s hard to argue with Surfer Rosa and Doolittle as two of the best albums of the 80s, but it would be a shame to overlook--as many do--Francis’s solo career, which has been just as interesting, rewarding and often as surprising as his Pixies material.
He’s travelled through styles, growing out of the Pixies’ sound over his first three albums. He’s done country songs and soul songs, and even cut an album of wild minimalist electro-jazz remakes of Pixies songs with David Thomas of Pere Ubu’s collaborators Two Pale Boys. He quit making records for labels in the 90s, just before labels quit making records. Instead, he makes his own albums and then licenses them to labels for promotion and distribution. He once told me that he’s taken voice training. He’s one of the most down-to-earth people ever to record an album inspired by a semi-obscure Dutch painter (2007’s Blue Finger celebrates the late Herman Brood). Lately, he’s started a new band with his wife Violet called Grand Duchy and released their debut album earlier this year. He’s equally effective singing about Pong as he is about Spanish missionaries showing up in what would become the state of California. He’s an artist who is endlessly fascinating because he himself seems endlessly fascinated with the world.
In 1998 he recorded a song about Jonathan Richman, a fellow Bostonian whose first band the Modern Lovers cut what was probably the first actual punk rock album in 1972, but broke up before it was released in 1976. Richman, in fact, had by that time completely changed his sound, and to this day disappoints fans who come out to hear “She Cracked” by singing about Johan Vermeer. Surely there was some self-reflection involved when Frank Black wrote “The Man Who Was Too Loud.” I wonder if he’ll play that song at his upcoming acoustic show when Pixies fans shout out for “Debaser”?

Vancouver-related: Mats Gustafsson of The Thing was in town last week, playing half a dozen shows for the ends-today Jazz Festival, and I missed them all. But the new Thing album Bag It! is killer.

mp3: "Drop the Gun" by the Thing

Frank Black Francis is the A.J. Liebling of Rock

2009-07-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

"The only way to write is well," A.J. Liebling says, "and how you do it is your own damn business."
Okay, A.J., fair enough. But how do you account for Jana Pruden's column in the Leader-Post? I knew Jana when I was at the L-P, and I've known her husband Evan since I was in high school. They are both smart, hip, funny, even sassy. They are both very nice people. So why does Jana's column in general, and her most recent one specifically, bug me so much?
Because it's not smart, it's not hip, it's not funny and it's not sassy. In fact, it reminds me of Peggy Hill's Musings columns from Mike Judge's King of the Hill, only those were actually funny.

When Pruden took over the general interest column from disgraced retiree Bob Hughes, it seemed as though the paper was finally starting to pay attention to the 20-55 age group that has rarely seen itself in the Regina daily. Finally would come a fresh voice from someone engaged with urban life, someone who valued art and culture at least as much as football, someone with something different to say. Instead, we got Bob Hughes in a skirt. Well, the most benign form of Bob Hughes in a skirt. I haven't read all of her columns, but I doubt that Pruden has attacked organized labour with the reckless meanspiritedness that Hughes embarrassed himself with. But Pruden definitely carries on Hughes's legacy of joyless solipsism, stories about cats and uninspired boasts about not understanding what's the big fuss about current trends. Pruden's latest col overdoses on puns as she states and restates her love of shoes. Why am I reading this?

I continue to read, I guess, because I know Jana Pruden to be capable of fine writing. You can see it in her court reporting. You know it if you've ever had a conversation with her. So why is she punching below her weight class with these asinine columns, wasting primo real estate with sad, Diagnosis Murder-style pap like "after some serious sole-searching" or "invariably, I flip-flop" when there's a readership starving for interesting commentary?

mp3: "The Man Who Was Too Loud" by Frank Black & the Catholics
mp3: "Rat's Ass" by Danny Barnes

Don't Haunt This Country: A Canada Day Mixtape of sorts

2009-07-01T09:10:00.006-07:00

About a year-and-a-half ago, I wrote about how the Rural Alberta Advantage was pretty much the greatest thing since snowmobiles with two skis, and little has changed in that time. Except that the RAA got signed to Saddle Creek, my fave Pitchfork writer gave 'em the thumbs up, and they embarked on a big-ass tour. That tour brings them to Vancouver on the fifth of July, which is a Sunday this year. The show's at the Media Club.

We here at ABWAWBA would like to apologize for neglecting the ol' country blog for the last few months, as our attention has been changing diapers and writing for sweet, sweet cashola. So, in the spirit of Canada Day (is there a Spirit of Canada Day?), here's some great Canadian music (or music about Canadians) just for you, the reader.

mp3: "Don't Haunt this Place" by the Rural Alberta Advantage

mp3: "Merde Il Pleut" by Pawnshop Diamond - sweet Vancouver country rock

mp3: "Burgess Lake" by the Lazy MKs - Regina instro-country, I guess if we call instro-rock post-rock, this is post-country. Wahoo!

mp3: "Belles" by Feuermusik - skronky Toronto fazz-junk
mp3: "Saskatchewan" by the Wooden Stars - Rheostatics cover by one of Canada's best groups
mp3: "Louis Riel" by John Millard - great, idiosyncratic folk, often with a cabaret twist
mp3: "Louis Riel" by Doug Sahm - not the same song as above, but at least Texan Sahm knew how to pronounce Regina.

Reason #425 why my Mom is awesome.

2009-06-08T11:12:00.005-07:00

mp3: "The Place Where We Lived" by Hayden

When your compass only points to you...

2009-06-07T11:15:00.011-07:00

Now that I'm well ensconced in my thirties, I've got the privilege of looking back on my twenties in disgust. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they were a total waste of time, they got me to where I am. But I coulda done better. I coulda done better by a lot of folks.
At the very least, I coulda--shoulda--done better by the many people who tried to help me. The other day we were browsing the online Arts & Entertainment section of the Leader-Post, the Regina daily newspaper for whom I wrote for five years. Nicole asked a seemingly innocuous question about an article, and my mind flashed on a particular episode about midway through my time at the L-P. But looking back on it, it was painfully obvious that I had misread the whole thing. And if I misread that, well, probably I was wrong about most everything. But what's really eating me is how wrong I was. For five years, I was wrong to Gerry Krochak.
Gerry was the one who'd invited me to write for the L-P. I'd been writing for prairie dog magazine and the student press for about four years at that point. Much respect to Mitch Diamantopoulos and Stephen Whitworth at the dog for their invaluable faith, encouragement and patience during those early years, but it was at the Leader-Post that I really started to become something resembling a writer.
I used to give Gerry sideways looks when he'd bring me leads and assignments. Can you imagine? Here's this guy, giving me the opportunity to make money doing what I say I want to do, and I'm acting like an asshole. I'm acting like he's kicking dirt on my new sneakers. I even through a tantrum or two. Meanwhile, I'm blowing deadlines and carrying on like, I dunno, like I'm too good or something. Like I'm such a great writer and I shouldn't be wasting my time on the Doobie Brothers or whatever. But Gerry kept bringing me leads, kept bringing me assignments. Gerry--along with Nick Miliokas, one of the finest wits and best editors in the whole racket--kept giving me gigs though, and most of the time, I kept taking them.
So, like, this must have been around 2003, maybe 2004, which were the prime years of my arrogance. Gerry asked me to speak with another aspiring entertainment writer, maybe give him some tips, point him in the right direction. And me, I'm all chuffed. Like, why is he putting this on me? All these years, I'd been carrying that as an insult, as an offence against me.
So the other night, after Nicole's words had spurred that memory, and I saw so clearly, that wasn't an insult, that was a compliment. And not a small or hollow one, either. The whole time, Gerry was helping me out. And I was too wrapped up in my own arrogance to even see that, let alone show some gratitude.
Now, in the present, I'm sticking some toes back in the kiddie pool, doing a few CD reviews and the odd interview, and building up to bigger things. You can find my name from time to time in prairie dog magazine and Planet S, thanks to the friendship and forgiveness of Stephen Whitworth. And, inevitably, you'll be seeing my byline everywhere and you'll be so sick of me. I'll be rich and discovering a whole new kind of arrogance, you thought I was insufferable before.
Gerry's moved on from the L-P, to Calgary, I've heard. I hope he's doing well, and maybe sometime he'll come out to the coast for a Lucinda Williams show or something, and he'll look me up and let me buy him an Indian lunch, huh? Who knows.

mp3: "The Highway Divides" by the Parkas
mp3: "Back Where I Started (Live)" by Marcellus Hall & the Headliners

Well, he's got a point.

2009-05-31T15:36:00.007-07:00

ITEM: Kanye West tells Reuters, "Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book's autograph." (via NYMag) I think I may have read some of the same books as he has. We do have a lot in common, you know. We were born on the same day, in the same hospital. (Well, I don't know if he was born at Saskatoon's City Hospital, Wikipedia says no, but y'know, that could just be more of Wikipedia's general anti-Saskatchewan bias.) Also, despite the fact that we are both disgustingly rich, neither of us feel that we have yet achieved our true potential. Our biggest difference? His book is finished and published. Mine is still just a bunch of weird notes about Frankenstein, the Barr Colonists, and club house sandwiches.

ITEM: Vancouver weekly the Westender wonders on its current cover: "Are bloggers making it hip to have kids?" I haven't read the article because I don't live in the West End, and, y'know, I stay outta theirs, they stay outta mine. A friend who does live in the West End told me, though, that the report says the ME of Only Magazine--which I can't read either, since I have siblings--has column about being a dad. Another reason I can't read Only Magazine is because they filed their Eugene Mirman article under "Music" instead of "Not-Music". Other than that, Only's pretty fine. Maybe they'll Google themselves, find this page and ask me to write for them. I wouldn't automatically say no.
Back to blogging dads, well, more power to them. For this dad, blogging's been at the bottom of my priority list because A) who wants to blog when you can make noises with a six-month-old? B) I'm taking a writing class and y'know how that is C) I'm doing a tiny little bit of writing out in the world with an interest, if not a lot of time, to do more D) Did I say blogging was at the bottom of my priority list? That's just cuz listening to music didn't even make the list. E) is for Emmet F) is for Fiction, which is slowly, oh so slowly taking shape G) what, I still have to explain myself? Didn't you see reason A? That's my bottom line. The fam. It's where I'm at, it's where I'm happy, it's where I'm (kinda) needed. I'm also not blogging that much about my little girl because I'm saving all my observations and experiences to pitch a sitcom to HBO about what it's really like to be a parent.

ITEM: I think I was also going to say something about Paul Auster, but, um, I'll save it.

mp3: "Dangerous Fun" by Jesse Winchester

The real reason newspapers are failing

2009-05-27T09:15:00.004-07:00

You call this a scoop? Back in my day, you had to jump out a window to secure an exclusive rescue/interview or turn the Earth backward on its own axis to qualify as a scoop. I guess times really are hard.

mp3: "Hard Times" by Baby Huey

M is for the Many Sleepness Nights

2009-05-09T16:24:00.000-07:00

My mom was in town last month. She dropped perhaps the most shocking revelation in my entire family history ever: She's never seen the original Star Wars movies in their entirety. If she had told me this five months ago, I would have called her a liar, right to her face, my own mother. How could someone who raised three boys and one girl in the 1970s and 80s not have seen the Star Wars movies? Get real, Mom.

Of course, now that I'm a parent--now that I have just the slightest idea of what it's like to be a mother--I get it. While we were busy watching Han Solo get frozen in carbonite for the 80th time, Mom was busy, y'know, TCB. Motherhood, like rust, never sleeps. Never watches Return of the Jedi, either.

Not that she wasn't familiar with the material. She used to let me stay up late to listen to the Radio Dramatization of Empire on CBC. She helped me learn to read with the Star Wars storybooks and novelizations. She abided my ambition to become a Jedi Knight, tolerated my Lego tornadoes and dutifully reminded me when I had left my action figures in the freezer again.

These days, I've got a baby of my own. I'm a pretty good father, in my opinion. I'm getting better at it all the time. I like to think that if I had to, I could take the world on my back for my little girl. But my wife, the beautiful mother of my beautiful little girl, she's there carrying the weight every single day. I don't want to undersell the importance or hard work of fathering here, but mothers, man, I don't know how they do it. I do know, though, that I couldn't do it without 'em. And I certainly wouldn't even want to try.

This is all an inadequate show of appreciation for both my own mother and the mother of my baby, and all the sacrifice, hard work, and love they commit every single day.

mp3: "Be Careful There's A Baby In The House" by Loudon Wainwright III

Dear Newspapers, Be Better Please

2009-04-26T17:03:00.000-07:00

I still buy the newspaper. On Saturday. What can I say, I like the idea of the Weekend Review section, I get excited by the heading Issues & Ideas, I look forward to the book reviews. I like the readers' letters, which, unlike readers' comments on newspaper websites, are generally worth a damn, even if they're often just as bogglingly boneheaded.
Which is not to say that newspapers never let me down. They do. Frequently. Yesterday's featured Issues & Ideas essay was from lifestyles columnist Shelley Fralic, sort of the Bob Hughes of the Lower Mainland, and warned us that we'll miss newspapers when they're gone.

Where, for instance, will Canucks fans find in-depth daily coverage of their beloved team -- the locker room perspective, the game analysis, the stats upon which hockey pools are won and lost?
It won't be from radio, which can air a game, but already rips and reads much of its content from newspapers.
It won't be from television, which can broadcast a game, but can offer little
beyond 30-second news clips.
And if you think that bloggers, Tweeters, Facebookers and fan sites will provide the quality of sports reporting you now get from this newspaper, coverage you've enjoyed these past 40 years in hockey-mad Vancouver, you're dreaming.

Really? Is that the best you've got? Cuz the broadcast media and the Internet have been kicking newspaper ass in sports coverage for years. The Internet might as well have been invented for fantasy sports leagues (the jock version of D&D) and hockey pools. It will even do the hard math for you! When was the last time a newspaper did your math? Also, the Sun's sister paper, the Province, is generally regarded as most sports-friendly.
Fralic goes on to blame newspapers' woes on free online content, rather than, y'know, 30 years of corporate greed, convergence, monopolies and mismanagement. Newspapers have survived and even prospered in the face of far more radical societal changes brought on by radio and television. It's not the Internet that's killing newspapers, it's newspapers.
The last few decades have seen newsroom staffs cut in half several times over, inevitably leading to reduced coverage of local issues. In its place, we got more wire copy, more celebrity gossip, more rewritten press releases, more of what one of my former newspaper colleagues sneeringly calls bumf, short for bum fodder.
Sadly, newspapers either don't have the will or the capital to put up a decent struggle anymore. I love the newspapers, and I hope to see them back on their feet someday. In the meantime, wouldn't it be great if they decided to go out with their heads held high? With a little class? If they decided to be truly papers of news. Be papers of depth. Be papers of investigation. Papers of questions and answers. Papers of consequence. Papers of integrity. Papers worthy of our esteem. Be good, be better.
Speaking of good and better, I saw my dissimilar doppelganger again the other day. Lee Henderson was at my favourite coffee/book shop Friday afternoon. As was I. Once again, I didn't introduce myself, for a variety of reasons. Mainly, because I have to to finish reading his novel, The Man Game. I was about two-thirds through it when my new roommate showed up and completely disrupted my habits. I want to finish the book before I speak to him. I think that's really the decent thing to do. Also, I probably suffer all kinds of social anxieties that make me a terrible person to know. I only even brought it up because yesterday Henderson was announced as the winner of the Ethel Wilson Prize at the BC Book Awards. The prize money will buy him, if he so desires, 1,000 Americanos at the coffee/book shop. Congratulations.

mp3: "Don't Talk In Your Sleep" by Magik Markers

Rest in Bea

2009-04-25T15:24:00.003-07:00

Bea Arthur, 1922-2009

Interesting Bea Arthur fact: Mitchell Hurwitz, creator of Arrested Development and all around comedy hero, was a writer on Golden Girls.

All the pieces matter.

2009-04-18T19:21:00.000-07:00

If you haven't been following Covered, the blog where artists recreate comic book covers both classic and otherwise, you are officially missing out. Yesterday's entry, Robert Goodin covering a 1958 Carl Barks Donald Duck cover, is nothing short of awesome. Other recent favourites: Dan Zettwoch covering David Collier, Ben Newman covering Sheldon Moldoff, and Mike Lowery doing Kirby & Ditko.

And come on, spending 15 minutes a week looking at drawings on the Internet is a lot easier and more manageable than reading a book. Books are tough. I'm sitting on a mountain of books. I'm not even at the top of the mountain, I'm not even sitting. I'm at basecamp, and the mountain keeps getting bigger. Aw, hell, I'm under the mountain with a plastic beach shovel. A week ago, I was between books. I'd just finished the surprisingly excellent Martin Beck Police Thriller The Laughing Policeman, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, which I only picked up because I really liked the Walter Matthau movie. I wandered in and out of bookstores. Sometimes I wandered with my baby tucked snug against my chest in her carrier. Sometimes I wandered solo. I talked to coworkers, lent them books, gave some away forever. By the time yesterday hit, though, what began as a simple quest for something to pass the time on the bus and on my lunch breaks by the port (on days w/o rain) had become a mountain. Some words now on who/where/how/why/whatever. When, I already dealt with.

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard - I mentioned this book yesterday. Y'know who else wrote about Annie Dillard yesterday? Roger Ebert (He also talks about God and science: "If I'm wrong about this, I'm encouraged."), that's who.

The Man on the Balcony by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (seriously, umlauts over both ö's?) - Dollars to donuts, Ian Rankin musta read at least some of the Martin Beck Crime Thrillers.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - Lent to me by coworker Jamie, who can't believe I've never read it. But Mike read it when we were 13, and he spent most of the Eighth Grade talking about it, so I've always kind of felt like I have read it. Even now that I'm reading it, Mike's is the narrator's voice I hear.

The Corner by David Simon and Ed Burns - Look, David Simon, I know you read my blog. Give me a call. I've got a few ideas. I know you're busy making Treme (with Steve Zahn and Melissa Leo, no less!), and giving awesome interviews on PBS, but I'm willing to let you be my mentor and benefactor.

Alligator Pie by Dennis Lee, with illustrations by Frank Newfeld - I loved and feared this book when I was little. Even though Lil already has a lot of books, and doesn't yet have the comprehension to distinguish between books, I felt it was important she have this one.

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak - Same as above, with added urgency to get an edition w/o movie tie-in or other merchandising elements.

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley - Walter Mosley. Haven't read anything by him for at least a year. Gotta make amends. Also, that reminds me, gotta finish This Year You Write Your Novel, and then, um, write my novel. Damn.

Also, a couple of Dortmunder novels from Donald Westlake, at least 15 Rebus books, at least 6 issues each, sometimes more, of back issues from Captain America, Blue Beetle, The Spirit (going all the way back to when Darwyn Cooke was still doing it), The Winter Men (since the final chapter came out about 3 years after the previous, I gotta go back and read the whole thing), plus Eddie Campbell & Dan Best's The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard and the latest Scott Pilgrim book.

Damn.

Finally: While I can and sometimes do sympathize with people who get frothingly mad about typefaces, I gotta wonder: What are you not getting mad about that you have that kind of surplus righteousness? But then, who am I to make fun? I used to be a rock critic. I used to waste all kinds of energy getting mad about useless junk.

mp3: "Stronger Than Jesus (Harlem Session)" by A Camp
mp3: "Vampire" by Pink Mountaintops

Influenced.

2009-04-17T16:48:00.002-07:00

Roger Dean Young & the Tin Cup w/(another band) Little Mountain Studios, Main and 26th, Vancouver, BC Doors @ 9 pm $5 to get in

Not a lot of bands list me as an influence on their Myspace page. A few, but not a lot. RDY & the Tin Cup is one such band. I'd been thinking about Roger and his wonderful band already this week, even before he emailed about the show tonight, ever since I picked up Annie Dillard's pamphlet The Writing Life at my new favourite (work) neighbourhood coffee & book depository. Dillard, you see, is one of my cohorts on RDY's list of influences, along with such luminaries as Cam Dilworth, Daniel Brodie and Wang Wei. Her meditations on writing are worthwhile and enlightening. I was hoping to start a writing course next week, a fiction writing course. But there was insufficient enrollment, so the class was cancelled. Nobody reads fiction anymore, I knew that. But I thought, at least, there were still enough fools like me who still want to write it.

I won't make it to the show, I'll be at home with my women, where I belong. But when I do venture out to see a show again, I hope it'll be to see Roger.

mp3: "Carry On Heather/Rhapsody" by Roger Dean Young & the Tin Cup

The Batman Who Stares At Goats

2009-04-10T16:39:00.000-07:00

Okay, so you've got Batman, Obi Wan Kenobi (2.0), Lex Luthor, the Dude (or Tron, if you'd rather), T-1000, and Jimmy James all in one movie, based on one of my favourite books by one of my favourite Randy Newman fans. All that's missing for 100% Pure Emmet Bliss is Clark Johnson!

Speaking of which, here's some new music from Montreal's Elephant Stone, led by former High Dials bass/sitar player Rishi Dhir. Their self-titled debut is due out May 5, which is sooner than you think.

mp3: "The Seven Seas" by Elephant Stone

Perspective

2009-04-07T12:25:00.002-07:00

Day in, day out, it's easy to get caught up in how much work it is bringing up a baby. It's easy to start feeling like you've given up so much, like it's such a big chore and you're such a saint because you change a couple of diapers and miss out on a few hours of sleep. And then you read a story (Globe & Mail) that lets you know in no uncertain terms just how little you've sacrificed, how much you have and how good you have it.

mp3: "These Tears Could Rust A Train" by the Theater Fire

"both ridiculous and offensive": just another day at city hall

2009-04-01T19:30:00.005-07:00

There really are times when I miss Regina.
Jason Hall and his Regina Landlord's Association had their say before the City of Regina's Executive Committee today. It seems that it was indeed a sideshow. "City Solicitor Byron Werry noted occupation — in this case, landlord — wasn’t a protected ground against discrimination," writes the Leader-Post.
It warms my heart to think that despite ridiculously pro-business governments at both municipal and provincial levels, Regina sluml--excuse me, landlords are feeling like polar bears, threatened and unprotected.
It feels odd to be using the term landlord in the 21st Century anyway. It's so feudal. My landlord says he won't turn on the heat in my building until we bring in the wheat and rid the forest of bandits. If they want to be taken serious (and I wonder if they do) the Regina Landlord's Association needs to think about their branding. Even Moose Jaw, in a suprisingly unexpected move, is thinking about branding. The Regina League of Property Management Executives has a nice to ring to it.

mp3: "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Anymore" by Laura Barrett

Four thousand.

2009-03-31T23:16:00.003-07:00

That's how many complaints Jason Hall and the Regina Landlord's Association have filed under the City of Regina's Property Maintenance Bylaw since Dec. 22, 2008. Hall's letter to the City's Executive Committee is here (pdf).

The document is curious for several reasons, least among which are the writer's curious word-processing choices. It's impossible to tell if this is a Fratboy prank or a cry for help from someone suffering from a serious and possibly dangerous persecution complex.

The Community and Protective Services report on the RLA's deluge of complaints is here (pdf).

The whole sad biz should come to an exciting head tomorrow at 11:45 a.m. in Henry Baker Hall at Regina City Hall (here's where we pause to reflect on the dunderheadedness of having a hall within a hall, never mind that a Hall will likely be in attendance). This is civic politics at its best and worst. (Thx to Paul Dechene at prairie dog magazine's blog for keeping tabs on Regina City Hall).

While I'm talking 'bout Regina, and while I'm ripping off other folks' blogs, I was super-excited to read about the Lazy MKs on SoundSalvationArmy last week. The most excellent instrumental trio gets their post-(country) rock groove on like a back forty Precious Fathers. One question though: Do you say "the Lazy em-kays" or "the Lazy Marks"?

mp3: "Young Sad" by the Lazy MKs
mp3: "Burgess Lake" by the Lazy MKs

EDIT: SSA link fixed, and bonus Jason Hall quote (via CBC, last September): "At one point, and I would probably say two years ago, we were desperate to put anyone into a place just to make the mortgage payment," Hall said. "Now, what we're seeing is, we have a lineup of people wanting to take places — a better brand of tenant. And, you know, landlords can be a little more fussy now."

Friday in Western Canada

2009-03-13T15:05:00.001-07:00

If you're staying home tonight, and why wouldn't you, you might want to check out The Fifth Estate on CBC at 9 p.m., as they present "Staying Alive", their documentary on Vancouver's Supervised Injection Site. If you watch closely, you might see me in the background. But that's not why you should watch it, and don't let it distract from the most indepth look at the SIS in broadcast history.

The fine people at Flemish Eye have announced the May 19th release of the self-titled debut album from the Pale Air Singers (pictured above), a collab between two of my favourite Western Canadian groups, The Cape May and Run Chico Run. The track (below) they've released in preview showcases TCM singer Clinton St. John's wide prairie vocals and that's good enough for Gladys, as we used to say on the Bridge Building Crew.

mp3: "Convict Escapes" by Pale Air Singers

If you're in Regina on Saturday, check out Deep Dark Woods at the Exchange. Their new album, Winter Hours, is some kinda fine Saskatchewania.

mp3: "All the Money I Had is Gone" by Deep Dark Woods

Speaking of Regina, I can't get enough of Paul Dechene's municipal politics updates at the Prairie Dog's Dog Blog. Regina City Council meetings are a glorious, frustrating thing to behold, and I always appreciate that someone is there paying attention.

Print's charming

2009-03-07T15:52:00.000-08:00

If you needed any proof that newspapers as we know and love 'em have entered their End of Days, it might be from a question posed a last week's WonderCon comic book convention in San Francisco. "Will The Daily Planet face a collapse like every other American newspaper?" a fan asked of writer James Robinson at a panel.
Robinson, who writes a rather lacklustre Superman comic, replied with non-committal reference to Morgan Edge, a toady of the extra-dimensional despot Darkseid. In the Superman comics of the 1970s, Edge's Galaxy Broadcasting System bought out the Daily Planet and summarily gutted it to enhance their broadcast media division. Most notoriously, Edge poached mild-mannered Clark Kent from the Planet newsroom and set him up as the anchor of WGBS's nightly newscast.
It might be interesting to see how the collapse of print media is portrayed in the Superman universe, but can we trust a print media outlet like DC Comics to have any perspective on it? At this point, I'm more likely to watch the Fables of Print's End Times on Ugly Betty.

Reliable sources tell me, howev, that the finest pre-mortem on the cadaver-in-waiting is Season Five of The Wire, but damnit, we found another glimmer of hope for the old broad(sheet). Anyway, I'm nowhere near Season Five, just getting settled into Season Two, thanks. Yes, I watch TV at a slower-than-normal pace, but that's the beauty of the 21st Century. You can do things faster, but you can also do things more slowly.

It wasn't blogs that killed print, though, bunk. There's not as much useful and meaningful knowledge in ten thousand blogs, be they Huffington Post or the Longmont Urban Hens Coalition, as there is in the front section of any daily broadsheet. Don't point your finger at the blogs. It was Craigslist, yo. Slam dunk. Y'see, there used to be these dense, fine-print pages in the back of the paper. Places where people used cute and clever language to sell Adult Services in such a way that everyone knew what was for sale, yet neither the newspaper nor the local morality squad seemed to care. Places where people looked when they lost their glasses at the Northwest Leisure Centre. Places where the people told each other stories: Wedding dress, only worn twice. $50 obo. Or, Will pay cash for lawnmower and someone to push it by end of weekend. That kind of thing. People used to pay for the privelige of selling their own and buying someone else's junk. It used to mean something. If you wanted to get rid of your ski boots in July, you had to think about. You had to write a letter, or at least make a phone call. You had to get someone else involved. You had to be a committed seller. These days, jeez. There's a million pieces of crap for sale on the Internet, and if you actually want to do someone the solid of buying their three-drawer Creamsicle orange dresser for $45, you've gotta spend a week emailing and calling them before they agree to sell it to you. And it's lucky for you that your parents raised you to be a halfway decent person who calls ahead before showing up on someone's door to pick up the piece of furniture, because in the three hours between agreeing to sell you the item and the agreed-upon-by-both-parties-time of pick-up, the lousy zeke has up and sold it to someone else. Without so much of a solid as calling to let you know.

Speaking of solids, Gentleman Reg's new album is called Jet Black. Reg's first couple of albums came out on the lovely and missed Three Gut label. Three Gut was home to some of the early 00s' finest Canadian music like Royal City, Jim Guthrie and Cuff the Duke. I reviewed Reg's debut, Make Me Pretty, for No Depression back in the day when No Depression was a print mag and I was a guy who wrote for print money.

mp3: "You Can't Get It Back" by Gentleman Reg

In this job you gotta be able to howl at yourself, or else you die inside.

2009-02-26T17:59:00.000-08:00

I don't know if I've ever seen a Kate Winslet movie, but I know in my heart of hearts that she's never been as good in a movie as Melissa Leo was in Frozen River. And I'm not just saying that because I love Homicide. Which I do.

Frozen River is one of those small, flawless movies, like In Bruges or The Visitor, that quietly goes about its business of being a damned fine movie. It deals in the small truths of people doing their best to make through this world and into the next, all the while trying to take care of their own without losing too much of themselves.

Andre Ethier is like those movies. I've written about him before, and don't have a lot to add, except that sometime in the last few months, likely late 2008, he released a new album, Born of Blue Fog, which is the follow up to On Blue Fog, released on Blue Fog. No fanfare, no tour. Just an album. Just one hell of an album.

It's interesting to see the reactions to the just-published review of Saskatchewan's Needle Exchange Program. Sask. Health Minister Don McMorris would like to see a higher rate of rig return than the 90% they're reporting, which is a pretty freaking high return rate. I think he--and, in turn, the L-P Editorial Board--is just looking for something, anything to complain about in a report that seems to show success, both in terms of public health and public finance, through following harm reduction models. I'm curious about the report's finding of cocaine and morphine as SK's top substances. The "poor man's speedball" of Talwin & Ritalin has traditionally been associated with Saskatchewan, particularly among the too-often overlapping First Nations and prison populations.

mp3: "Polynesian Beach" by Andre Ethier
mp3: "Flash in a Bottle" by Dead Heart Bloom

Not that Pat's Pub: Rah Rah plays Vancouver tonight

2009-02-16T14:09:00.004-08:00

Tonight at Pat's Pub in Vancouver, Regina's very own Rah Rah!

mp3: "F--- NAFTA" by Rah Rah
mp3: "The Innocent One" by Rah Rah

Actually, every baby cries differently

2009-02-11T13:50:00.000-08:00

Tuesday morning at the doctor's office. All the babies are crying except mine, but that's only because she just peed on the scale. A good pee always mellows her out. She's going to be so mad at me in eight years for writing this.

Before I had one of my own, or rather before I became owned by one, sure, babies all looked and sounded the same. Right up to the day before she was born I worried I wouldn't be able to tell my baby apart from others. I shouldna worried. My baby's got personality. Like the way she pees whenever she's weighed.

These other babies in the waiting room, they're screaming. There's one in an Edmonton Oilers sleeper with a nasal cry, and another one, a tiny little baby with no hair, who gasps between sobs. My gal, though, she's calm and smiling. She gives me a funny look when one of the other baby screams. Like, "What's her problem?"

It's Tuesday night. We're out walking, because that calms her down. And what calms her down, calms me down. We eventually find our way to the late night bookstore, because it's either that or the late night grocery store, and I'm sick of browsing broccoli. We slowly pass through the children's section. I've got my eye on some Mercer Meyer, but we're still working on Hands, Hands, Finger, Thumb. I can't wait to find out how that ends. I kinda think the toes did it. But then, I always think the worst of toes, and that's not really fair to them. Toes are useful. Well, most of them are. Pinky toes? Overrated.

Eventually, we end up at the magazine racks, and the current events section is a sea of Obama, even the Canadian mags are all repping Barack. Like, even Canadian Needlepoint & Cross-Stitching Quarterly has a crocheted "Hope" cover. I mean, come on. But then something catches my eye. A portrait of a fellow with decidedly less charisma, with decidedly less star power. The Walrus has a cover feature on Stephen Harper. It's an excellent, if not exactly revelatory, piece with no new information in it, but it's nice to see the Walrus making an effort to stand out. Too often in the past, it has felt like just a poor cousin to Harper's or the New Yorker. Canadian mags have never had an easy go, remember the long, slow deaths of Saturday Night? Or Toro? And those both bit the dust before the Internet killed print dead.

But I still like the magazines. I like flopping down on the couch and reading about Scrabble freaks or video games I'll never play. I like that a magazine is bigger than my hands, but lighter than a cup of coffee. I prefer flipping pages to scrolling, and I really, really like rolling up a mag and sticking it my back pocket for later. And I love newspapers. Especially broadsheets. Especially local papers. Good local papers. I love reading about city councils and development plans. I like following provincial legislatures and reading local columnists who write about local issues. And I hate the recent redesign of the CanWest papers' websites. I like to think of it as Print's revenge. Its navigatability is cumbersome and counter-intuitive. It hides the local content, which is the reason I go to specific papers' sites, rather than just skim Google News. For all the Kumbaya glory of the electronic global village, local interest sure gets short shrift on the Web.

But newspapers and magazines don't calm my baby down. Not yet, at least. For now, the only medium she's at all interested in is music (well, she likes light too, which includes that of the television). Her mom plays her Patsy Cline, Nina Simone and Dinah Washington albums during the daytime, y'know, the classy stuff. At night, and on my days off, I've been testing stuff from my collection out on her. So far she has liked, or at least not screamed through, "Shiver" by Giant Sand and "Blue Rol" by Roland Kirk.

The one song she unquestionably likes, as in she calms down to and smiles at, is "Stealin, Stealin'" a 1928 recording by the Memphis Jug Band. I think it's the kazoo she likes best. I'm hesitant to get her attached to my other favourite Memphis Jug Band song, for fear that she'll learn the words and repeat them in polite company. Cuz I don't wanna field that call from her eventual pre-school.

mp3: "Stealin', Stealin'" by the Memphis Jug Band
mp3: "Every Baby Cries the Same" by Make-Up

Hurray! Nobody wins!

2009-01-28T12:00:00.002-08:00

So Ignatieff wants progress reports? Harper and Flaherty are willing to listen to Liberal suggestions? The NDP and the Bloc lose their chance at having a bigger role in Parliament? Geez, sounds like shit sandwiches all around.

mp3: "Consolation Prize" by Julie Doiron

Where the teeth are paved with gold: 2008 in review

2009-01-15T15:33:00.001-08:00

With the U.S.A. mere days away from having a more progressive head of state than Canada for the first time since, um, Diefenbaker:Kennedy, are we going to start seeing Canadians start threatening to move south the way Americans threatened to move north in 2004?

Probably not. Especially since the Canadian economy is still just swirling in the bowl and not right down the crapper.

Besides, does anyone really think the Harper government will make it until the end of the year? Other than Harper, that is. He's gonna have to be one hell of a budget.

Since it's already the 15th of January, I might as well knock it off with my half-assed attempt at looking back on 2008. There's one last album I wanna call your attention to before we start talking about other things. Dallas/Fort Worth area group the Theater Fire released a frighteningly amazing album, Matter and Light, in the closing days of 2008.

It's a haunting and rollicking Tex-Mex jumble of jugband hollers and Calexico-ish ambience that's totally captivating. It's everything I love about Americana music and none of what drives me crazy. The front page of their website streams a generous sampling of songs from all three of their albums. You kinda owe it to yourself to check them out if you're into that kind of thing.

mp3: "Coyote" by the Theater Fire

My Hands Are A City!: 2008 in Review

2009-01-13T13:06:00.005-08:00

After five weeks of being a full-time dad, I gotta go back to work. I don't mind my job that much, but damn, it's hard to not be at home. On that note, if there's anybody out there who wants to pay me for this nonsense, get in touch.

In the meantime, if you're hungry, check out Vancouver Coastal Health's Food Inspection website. It's more useful than Zagat.

I caught the last five minutes of a particularly gross episode of Kenny vs Spenny last night that featured music from the Hylozoists. Which reminded me that Toronto's FemBots (who have been known to play with the Hylozoists) put out a really excellent album last year called Calling Out. "My Hands Are A City", heard below, is ten kinds of awesome and is a song on my shortlist of tunes I'll probably singalong to with Lillian in a year or so.

mp3: "My Hands Are A City" by FemBots

NAFTA Please: 2008 in Review

2009-01-07T17:37:00.004-08:00

You know you're getting old when the coolest band in your hometown is led by your friend's kid. True, Marshall Burns of Rah Rah's dad Mike is, like, way older than me. And y'know what? I'm fine with being old, cuz I was young long enough.

I try to think of Regina with nothing but affection, but sometimes I can't shake the feeling that it really is the cultural wasteland it pretends to be sometimes. Putting aside the question of whether or not there was any real merit to spending $18-million so that a handful of privileged kids could vie for glory while a dozen or so blocks away hundreds of kids live in abominable squalor, the most annoying thing about the Big Dig was the unimaginative and tiresome name. Nobody asked, in commemoration of the Big Dig's fifth anniversary, here are five better names for the megaproject:

5. The Excavation Proclamation
4. Shakes on the Plain
3. The Behemoth Burrow
2. The Fiacco-Goodale Canal
1. The Tunnels of Moose Jaw

As easy as it is to laugh at Regina from afar, there's no denying the musical renaissance underway right now led by Rah Rah and the Polymaths and who knows who else?! Rah Rah released their debut long-player in 2008 called Going Steady. It's a heady mix of pop, politics and pah-rump-a-pah-pum-pum hapless romance and it's worth mentioning again.

mp3: "F--- NAFTA" by Rah Rah

2009 already?

2009-01-06T17:45:00.000-08:00

Newborns become infants, five o'clock shadows become beards, snow becomes rain, and then back again. Everything changes, everything stays the same.

Some things worth reading if you have the time to read:

The Comics Reporter's holiday interviews series, with folks like Jeet Heer, Eddie Campbell, Kurt Busiek. Highly recommended is the verbiage with critic Abhay Khosla. Khosla's stuff can be a little rich sometimes, but he's always a rewarding read. Especially when he says things like, "People don't think mainstream comics might mean things! People think mainstream comic creators are brainless fanboys just because mainstream comic fans are brainless fanboys. It's a bizarre culture. But look: does anyone want to hear the opinion of Marvel comic book fans on the Middle East peace process? Me neither times infinity."

Dave Segal's "Dispossessed", in the Stranger, about losing his vinyl collection. (via Signal Response) Which reminds me of the unknownish classic Alan Zweig doc, Vinyl.

A few months back we told you about Andrew Vincent (seen above) and his new album, Rotten Pear, and how it was going to come out in November. It didn't. It's gonna be ready on Jan. 27, and he'll be playing shows around Ontario in support of it.

mp3: "Hi Lo" by Andrew Vincent

my baby don't tolerate

2008-12-23T15:53:00.005-08:00

A lot of people told me that having worked the nightshift for over two years, I'd be ready for the sleepless nights. That's like saying working 9-to-5 prepares you for not sleeping during the day.

Winnipeg's Paper Moon have a new EP out in advance of a forthcoming long-player due in the new year. The album will be Only During Thunderstorms, the EP is What Are You Going To Do With Me? and it's available, like, now at the Endearing online store. EP includes this rad cover of everyone's favourite Hot Little Rocket song.

mp3: "Down With Safe" by Paper Moon

The new lady in my life

2008-12-10T12:22:00.000-08:00

Lillian Simone Matheson, born 6:07 a.m., Sunday, Dec.7/08 at BC Womens' Hospital in Vancouver. Birthweight: 7 lbs, 14 oz

Everyone's healthy, no one's sleeping enough.

mp3: "Sweet Child of Mine" by Luna

Yeah but we're gonna chicken out, cuz we don't like to fight...

2008-12-04T09:27:00.006-08:00

I can't believe I got up at 6 a.m. (PST) for this. When Harper walked out of Rideau Hall with his prorogation, I let out a pre-emptive yawn the size of Meech Lake.
Short term, well, good for Harper. Long term, what's the strategy? He's burnt his bridges with the Liberals and NDP, and he's done even worse with the Bloc, which otherwise would be his only chance of getting a budget passed.

The highlight of the morning, though, was Don Newman talking to John Baird, Minister of Transport in the House of Commons. Baird laid out a bunch of the typical "separatist coalition" party line, and Newman called him on it every time, saying Baird either hadn't read or hadn't understood the coalition accord. Baird continued saying blatantly unfactual things, and Newman called him on it every time. Even the Newsworld anchors seemed unsettled at how many bald-face untruths came out of Baird's mouth. It was nice to see the media holding politicians accountable for what they say. Feels like it's been a while.

mp3: "Rats' Revenge, Part 2" by the Rats

Pot, meet Kettle...

2008-12-03T12:38:00.008-08:00

Stockwell Day, ladies and gentlemen, the gift that keeps on giving.

Meanwhile, Harper booster Stephen Taylor says, "not a single person voted for a coalition government." Is it just me, or did half the country just forget what a Parliamentary system entails? This is what it's all about folks. Stephen Harper was elected with a minority mandate, which means the will of the Canadian electorate was that the Conservative Party work with the Opposition parties to run the nation. When Harper, Flaherty and Flanagan tried to put their collective loafer to the Liberal Party's financial throat under the flimsy flag of dealing with the economic downturn, they showed nothing but contempt for that expressed will of the people. They had a chance to govern, and they blew it. Big time.

A coalition government, right now, is the best possible outcome for Canadians. The current members of Parliament have been elected and it's time to let them do their jobs. Whether or not the Liberals and NDP will be able to keep it together long enough to actually pass a bill is another question, but the Conservatives have abused their opportunity to govern and deserve to lose it.

In happier news, here's a vid of Brian Borcherdt covering Kim Mitchell. And here's a track from Borcherdt's swell new EP, Coyotes.

mp3: "While I Was Asleep" by Brian Borcherdt

Is this what you're looking for?

2008-12-01T11:05:00.000-08:00

Bulldozer rampage.

Holy F#%k! Kim Mitchell?

2008-11-29T16:25:00.004-08:00

Stephen Harper on the role of the opposition in a minority government. (via Paul Wells @ Macleans) Oh, you see what he's doing there, he means a Conservative opposition. That's why what he said then doesn't line up with what he's doing now.

Martha Wainwright: very good. Great voice, great energy, great band. Biggest surprise of the show: Opener Brian Borcherdt (whose myspace profile pic does him no favours--unless he wants to look like Jared Leto in a Star Wars fanfilm???), best known as one of the founders of T.O. electro-skronk instrumentalists Holy Fuck, has a really great singing voice. He played songs from his new album Coyotes and closed with a sweet Kim Mitchell cover. I've long and loudly argued for a critical second look at Kim Mitchell, so was especially glad to see/hear my cause has found adherents. RIYL: Jason Molina, Chad Vangaalen

mp3: "Easy to Tame" by Kim Mitchell

I know I'm married, but my sister has feelings too

2008-11-28T12:41:00.007-08:00

So the Harper gov't thunk twice. But it might be too late for them. Their Stalinist-by-way-of-Tom-Flanagan power play has spurred the long-dormant Liberals into action.
Whoops!

For more LOLZ-Harper, Paul Wells at Macleans laid it on solid yesterday, with bonus awesome photo that will be my new desktop.

Meanwhile, there's a boatload of shows in Vancouver tonight, in case we need something to take our minds of the best political intrigue this country's seen since Gerda Munsinger.
We got AC/DC at GM Place, the Neins Circa at the Western Front, and Martha Wainwright at the Commodore. I'll be at the MW show with my sister, cuz that's the point of having a sister.

mp3: "This Life" by Martha Wainwright
mp3: "Factory" by Martha Wainwright

Just when you thought they couldn't get any lower...

2008-11-26T23:28:00.006-08:00

Bad: Stephen Harper's idiot government is going to try to cut subsidies to political parties, for motives that couldn't be more transparent--to crush the Liberal Party. Because a minority of Canadians elected Harper and his mostly anonymous pals so they could carry out a bullshit vendetta against the Loyal Opposition with a reckless disregard for, y'know, actually running the country during a time when it seems like it really fucking matters to be paying attention. Right?
Worse: Harper's Conservatives are going to sell it as if it's some altruistic belt-tightening in the face of the economic crisis that they're not really ready to admit exists (maybe it has something to do with their fear of science), as if the $30 million savings to taxpayers does anything but pale beside the BILLIONS and BILLIONS Harper & Pals have given to the banks. And hey, banks, while I've got your attention, if you didn't set any money aside for a rainy day during the last decade of constant record-breaking banking profits amid the near annihilation of banking jobs, then fuck you. You deserve nothing. If you can't make ends meet between ATM fees and interest--not to mention those shitty calculators you try to sell me when all I want to do is order new cheques--you don't deserve to call yourselves banks. You're just a bunch of ugly buildings with nice chairs that no one wants to sit on because they're afraid to be comfortable around you.
Worsenator: Of course Harper's Tories are going to make this a Confidence Vote, which means either the Liberals will have to vote in favour of getting shafted bigtime or they'll have to pull the plug on a Parliament that's barely had the chance to make ass-prints in its chairs.

mp3: "All The Money I Had Is Gone" by the Deep Dark Woods

A Bulldozer With Apocrypha: OK You Win All Right

2008-11-25T13:23:00.003-08:00

After a full weekend of childbirth class, buying and assembling a crib, and thinking of the future, I return to my living room where I still have too many CDs leftover from nine years as a compulsive record reviewer. Each time I've moved--which has been lots--I've divested myself of giant chunks of the collection, but it's such a giant heap that it's hard to notice any difference.
I like to think that my career as a reviewer was notable more for my appetite than for my taste, which was and is constantly under development.
I didn't keep any souvenirs of those days, aside from the hundreds of CDs that keep the north wall of my living room up. That's really enough, I guess. More than enough, for sure. Every now and then, when I'm about to cook or do dishes or whatever else I do in the kitchen, I grab a CD from the wall that I haven't played for a while and give it a listen to see if it's worth keeping around. This is what I found last night.

Wayne Omaha
Let It Mellow
Transsiberian Music
3.5 stars

This is one of those groups (not a dude) that I know next to nothing about. The liner notes list a bunch of first names and feature a vintage map of Woodstock, Ont. Production was done by Dale Morningstar and Andy Magoffin, which means these dudes are probably at least decently known within Toronto's rock scene. And Wayne Omaha sounds like a Toronto rock band. There's that 416/905 blend of Neil Young & Velvet Underground influences that you used to hear in 13 Engines, Lowest of the Low, Rheostatics, whatever. Which is not to say that Wayne Omaha is just another T.O. rocker combo, even though they kinda are. But they're waaaaay looser--which sets them apart. Sometimes it sounds like they're gonna fall apart, but they hold it together, just barely, with melodica and caulking bought on sale with Canadian Tire Money. It's rugged, ragged and far from right, but it sounds good.

mp3: "It's All Right" by Wayne Omaha
mp3: "OK You Win All Right" by Wayne Omaha

Make Mine Midwives!

2008-11-17T19:10:00.002-08:00

November seems to be Midwives Awareness Month or something here in BC, and let me tell you, midwives are pretty awesome. I don't know what it's like to go through this with an OB-GYN, and the real moment of truth (birthing) is yet to come, but based on our experiences so far, I have no reservation about recommending midwives to any expecting parent. Well, not any. Obviously, if your pregnancy is complicated and you need a medical practitioner, that's your best choice.
But if your pregnancy is healthy and problem-free? You owe it to yourself and your community to go with a midwife, or more likely, a group of midwives.
Midwifery has been legal and regulated in BC since 1998, and as such it's covered by the BC Medical Services Plan, which reduces the costs and other strains on the provincial healthcare system. Our team at Westside Midwives has been awesome at providing care and information in a very relaxed and calming way. I've been known to be high strung and super-cynical, especially about so-called alternative healthcare*, but the midwives we've dealt with have allayed all my anxieties and not once caused me to roll my eyes. Admittedly, I'm not the patient in this situation, but they've never treated me as though I shouldn't be there or as if I'm not part of the pregnancy (which some of the So-You've-Decided-To-Become-A-Father books have warned against--Question for discussion at another time: Why do 60-to-80% of all fathering books/websites/resources/etc come across as being created by unbalanced men who own more than three firearms?).

mp3: "Rock the Cradle Alone" by Nimrod Workman

* Don't get me started.

Toronto enough tonight?

2008-11-17T11:38:00.003-08:00

Hogtown get ready for the bossest hog of all! Tonight, for one night only, Jesse Matheson & His Midnight Snacks will grace the stage at the legendary Horseshoe Tavern. FOR FREE!

Jesse, if you say it all fancy-like, sounds like French for "I know". Which is what you can say now if someone asks you where Jesse is playing tonight.

My other brother, who lives in Toronto will be there too, which makes me the other brother right now.

mp3: "Nothing at All" by Jesse Matheson

If you're not the new Dylan, who are you?

2008-11-16T22:04:00.009-08:00

A week ago, Sound Salvation Army's Pat bemoaned the, well, Dylan-ness of Dylan. That ultimately punk rock way that Dylan has always managed to command respect and contempt at the same time from the same people. I didn't see the current tour, so I don't know. I saw him ten years ago at what was then called the Agridome, and, well, it was pretty damn cool. It was Dylan, knocking out hot guitar and plowing through a bunch of songs that half the world knows at least some of the words to. This tour saw Dylan play keyboards, which is less hot than guitar, as everyone knows, and also, according to the Winnipeg Sun, Dylan wore leather pants. Which, y'know, not cool, Bob. Leather pants, if you're not actually riding a motorcycle, only put your judgment into question. That's all they do. So this is not to call Pat out for being wrong. He's probably right.
But it got me thinking, I might have a higher tolerance--or even preference for folks who don't sing right. Off tune, off beat, oh yeah, give it to me! And truthfully, there's a case to be made that these singers who aren't blessed with a naturally redolent voice are actually better singers than the ones who were mellifluous to begin with. To create something aesthetically pleasing out of something unpleasant is true craftsmanship, and I'll roll my eyes at anyone who says otherwise.
All of which is just preamble to praise Andre Ethier, who sometimes sounds so much like Bob Dylan that you almost think he's trying to be Leonard Cohen.
Last summer, when I was in Regina, Dave and I were catching up on good records that had come out since last we spoke, and Andre Ethier's On Blue Fog album was one of them. Any Andre Ethier album is a good one and will definitely scratch yr nu-Dillung fever, but still give you a lot more. An Andre Ethier album you might not know about, unless you live in Peterborough (which sounds like a made-up place--I've never met anyone from there), is Dear Stranger, which is actually a Silver Hearts album. The Silver Hearts are a big folk/country band from Ptrbrgh (it looks more authentic w/o vowels) who have made some albums of note (I do remember hearing about that Rain Dogs remake), but seemingly have not toured beyond their little corner of the country, despite playing country/western music. Go figure.

mp3: "Nothing Is Written In Stone" by Andre Ethier
mp3: "Last Real Poet" by the Silver Hearts

EDIT/UPDATE: mp3 link fixed
bonus mp3: "Last Days of Chez Nous" by the Silver Hearts (not an Ethier tune, but 100% worthwhile if you love cruel honkytonk break-up songs)

Friday Roundup

2008-11-14T15:05:00.003-08:00

Vancouver: Take your mayoral pick: A dude who skimps on transit fare or a dude who put his personal ambition ahead of his own party's welfare in a way that would even make Paul Martin embarrassed.

The 2010 Olympics want to control your entire life. And not in a good way. Next up: mass evacuation of all Vancouverites who don't work for official Olympic sponsors?

The Danks play at the Biltmore tonight with Two Hours Traffic. But me? I'll be at Louis CK.

mp3: "I Mean, Come On" by the Danks

(CanWest) Global un-Warming

2008-11-13T21:59:00.008-08:00

CanWest Global announced Wednesday they'll be cutting 560 jobs, or 5% of their workforce. Some of the finest people I know work for CanWest, and I hope they're okay.
Further says the CP, "The company will also cut the physical size of some newspapers to reduce costs and focus efforts on expanding digital media operations."
That sounds dismal and calls to mind CanWest's failed Dose commuter tabloid, the horridness of commuter tabloids in general, and usually awful programming on so-called specialty cable.
Commuter tabloids are generally barely worth what you pay for them, unless it's raining and you need something to put between your dry pants and a wet bench on the bus. And don't get me started on their columnists--all of them--but, hey, I like to imagine that since they write for a publication that's handed out for free, the columnists are probably writing on a volunteer-basis, and so I try to cut them a bit of slack.
CanWest has never really had a good grasp on what makes a good newspaper, though the full blame for the National Post can't really be laid entirely at their feet. What people want in a local newspaper, meanwhile, seems so obvious: quality local content. And yet that's what always seems to go on the chopping block whenever convergence rears its head. There are hundreds of places to get national and international news, but there will always be demand for a good local daily newspaper--even in the digital age. With the whole planet at our fingertips online, communities need to know about and see themselves that much more.
Case in point: the two federal elections this fall. Okay, fair enough, the US election was genuinely exciting and historic on a number of levels. But I was appalled at how little heat the Canadian election generated (and obviously, that was part of Harper's gameplan in calling the vote amid the billion-dollar fervour of the US campaign) among Canadians. This shit matters. A lot more than Tina Fey in a bad blazer. But the media seemed just as disinterested in the Canadian election as, well, the nearly 41% of Canadians who didn't even bother voting.

mp3: "Folksong Oblivion" by the Phantom Band

You mean I gotta vote on my day off???

2008-11-12T15:32:00.008-08:00

Sick of elections yet? Too bad if you live in BC where municipal elections are set to take place this Saturday, November 15. Saturday??? What the heck is that all about? The rest of the country does their voting during the week, which seems natural and good. But BC likes to think of itself as supernatural, so go figure.

Having spent not quite as much time as I'd like lately engrossed in Lee Henderson's The Man Game, a wrasslin' epic set in an alternate universe 1880s Vancouver, I kinda thought there might be some ridiculous reason going back to frontier times. Back in Regina, my go-to-guy on weird and interesting civic/historical factoids was Will Chabun, a veritible warehouse of Saskploitative arcana. But if Will has a Vancouver counterpart, I've yet to meet him or her. So I asked Frances Bula, longtime Vancouver reporter and probably the best blogger on civic issues around. Even the execrable Alex G. Tsukamis reads her blog! Maybe I didn't phrase the question enticingly enough, or maybe I'm the only one who finds this interesting, but here's the complete reply I got from Bula:

Not sure why it is Saturday, but it's been that way forever. Third Saturday in November, written right into the legislation.

At least it's in the fall, and not the spring, like BC's provincial elections.

Saturday or not, we still gotta vote, and to be honest, I've barely got a clue who to vote for, and I'm actually interested in this stuff!

Thank You, Jim Flaherty, For Thinking Of The Banks

2008-11-12T09:04:00.003-08:00

Lately, I've been losing sleep, worrying about the well-being of our precious banks. Luckily, I'm not the only who cares. The good ol' Harper gov't has been caring about banks too, why they must have worked through Remembrance Day figuring out this one. Well, back to bed, Canada!

mp3: "The Bank" by Louis CK
mp3: "End of Bank" by Louis CK

P.S. Louis CK is in Vancouver on Friday at the Vogue.