Rock Shirts Draped My Torso in Leaner Years

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

• 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

Awwww, crap!

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)

Notes on Tower of Song

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

In defense of bad writers

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

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

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 #2: Holiday

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

Purdy in Pink

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

A Choice of Frenemies: Reader Mail

"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

Oh, Regina, You Virgin Queen

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

Frank Black is the Capital of Kansas

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

"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

When your compass only points to you...

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.

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

Influenced.

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

My Hands Are A City!: 2008 in Review

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

A Bulldozer With Apocrypha: OK You Win All Right

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

A Bulldozer With Apocrypha: Part of What it's There for is to Make People Stupid

Between the Augusts of 1997 and 2006, the main thing I did was write record reviews. I wrote 'em for free and I wrote 'em for pay, and I wrote 'em still when I had nothing to say*. It was, at first, good training for writing. I mean, it was writing, but it was also a bunch of other things. Mainly, it was me teaching myself to write. I've had no instruction in composition since high school, and what mentorship I've had has been indirect. For a long time it felt like I had to rediscover fire with each piece I did, and I wasted a lot time at the top of a hill with twigs in my hands, screaming for the lightning to come.
Eventually, I got pretty good. As a writer. I'm not so foolish that I don't recognize the progress I've made, and I'm not so smug and condescending that I'll pretend otherwise. But I don't think I was ever that good as a reviewer. I don't know that a reviewer who glommed on to Richard Meltzer so early in their career ever really had a chance. I was only just starting to make a little coin from the hustle when Meltzer told me, "I think a lot of work has to be done in ignoring the immensity of it and writing about any little particle of it. It's a big monster, rock. And it exists for certain pre-ordained reasons that were not part of the package once. Part of what it's there for is to make people stupid. To make people cease to resist. It's crowd control."

mp3: "Goodbye Pork Pie Cravat" by Richard Meltzer (last known sighting)

So I pretty much started off wrong. I mean, aside from Meltzer, I barely read any music writing before I started doing it. I had no idea what I was doing, and I didn't really care, just as long as I was doing. Along the way, though, I did start reading other rock-write, and along with the Hemingway, Brautigan, Kerouac, Thompson (both Jim and Hunter S.), Richler, Tosches, and Doestoevsky I was reading back when I was still soft and malleable, it creeped into my own writing and I eventually started to recognize my stuff as actual rock-write, or at least wrock-rite. And then I started doing interviews and profiles and the odd feature (like when I was Santa!), but record reviews were always my bread and free CDs were my butter.
I pretty quickly got to the point where I was getting about 10x more CDs every week than I could ever hope to review, never mind listen to. Most of the time I selected which CD would get the honour of 150 of my words by no less arbitrary means than do I have a good joke I could hang around the album?
I had a lot of good jokes, and probably would've been better off writing record reviews disguised as comedy routines than vice versa, but no one was offering me 10-to-25 cents/word for comedy routines four-to-eight times a month. Do the math, in Regina, in the early 2000s, you could almost pay your rent on that. You couldn't eat or turn on the lights, but you could pay your rent. Wait a minute, I just did the math, you couldn't pay your rent on record reviews, but you could probably pay one bill. Like maybe your phone bill, if you didn't have any friends.
Anyway, good times. I wrote for dailies, weeklies, bi-weeklies, monthlies, bi-monthlies, and I even did one assignment for a quarterly, though I never got paid for it, even though the peice ran (minus my byline, which is why I missed it for over a year, which kinda makes it my fault for not getting paid--well no, it's still Mr. Campbell's fault, and I'd still like the money). And for all the money I wasn't making from my writing (or a variety of dayjobs), I always had a giant box of CDs to sell at the end of the month.
But I also had an ever-growing number of boxes full of CDs that I hadn't yet reviewed for whatever reason, but still loved and intended to review someday.
SOMEDAY = TODAY!

Joel RL Phelps The Downer Trio
Customs
Moneyshot Records
2004
4 stars

Phelps used to be in Silkworm, who may have opened for Shellac in Regina in 1999. But at the time Customs came out, I kept getting Silkworm and Spoon mixed up, so don't count on it. Phelps left the band, moved to the Kootenays or somewhere, and started the Downer Trio. Which is exactly what it sounds like, ie, not a band for your wedding. I mentioned Shellac earlier and now I'm gonna call back to that, because they are/were(?) also a trio that specialized in downers with monstrous percussion. So if you like that, you'll like this. But if you prefer the brutally exposed emotional honesty of the Mountain Goats, you will also like Customs. Phelps treads both the power-rocker and the troubadour (seriously, there's some non-hyphenated folk troubadour stuff on this alb) paths, usually at the same time, and usually with a sense of macho grace that thoroughly distinguishes him from either of the bands I just compared him to.
Customs, like the rest of Phelps's Downer Trio stuff, is currently out of print, which is a fucking shame. Phelps seems to have disappeared from the music bizz altogether in the last four years, which, y'know, good for him/bad for us.

mp3: "From Up Here" by Joel RL Phelps Downer Trio - This is the first cut, and it starts off so tough and crunchy, but then a steel drum comes in doesn't change the tone or tenor, but gives it something unexpected, something perfect.

mp3: "Kelly Grand Forks" by Joel RL Phelps Downer Trio - My parents lived in Grand Forks, BC before I was born. Then, after I was born, I lived not all that far from Grand Forks, ND, though I never went there. This song also features amazing percussion, but I like it even more for the cutting lyrics like "you can freeze your faith and loyalty because that's what winter's for".

*You too can write a country & western hit!

Even my rejection letters make me happy

"Fucking good writing and clearly informed but funny too," the editor wrote. Excepting only "mind-bogglingly large cheque enclosed", these are the words you most hope to read in reply to a submission query.

My life is insanely great right now. It's not perfect, not by a long shot. But stepping back and looking at the big picture, things have never been better. I could list them all, but that'd just be cocky, and would probably jinx all the great things that are right around the corner.

mp3: "I Believe In You" by Lambchop

Two years without a byline

"Passing to Where?"

Sometimes I take out my passport,

look at the photograph of myself

(not very good, etc.)

just to see if I exist

Tokyo
June 12, 1976

by Richard Brautigan

I left Regina near the end of August, 2006. Mainly because I was bored. I had outlived my usefulness to the city and vice versa. But we were still on speaking terms. It had been a rough couple of years for me and the Queen City. Both Buzzword Books and X-Ray Records closed up shop, and while Dave re-opened the record store a few months later and a few blocks over, the inbetween time cost me a lot of my faith in Regina to be the kind of place I wanted to live in. Sure, I love Regina as much as the next guy, but I was starting to get the feeling that Regina didn't love me back.

I had given the city my mercurial youth, wrapped up my ambitions in its ridiculous flag, and in my Quixotic folly, I believed I would be rewarded. Perhaps it was my definition of reward that got me in trouble. Chasing wealth and popular respect, I only found a chip on my shoulder. At the very least, I wanted to believe that I could expect to make a real living from my writing without leaving the city.


The problem was, I had no idea what I was doing. My sense of self was so entangled with seeing my name in print--like the Richard Brautigan poem at the top of the post--that I couldn't let go of my stalled-out writing career. I had a couple of promising leads that I hoped would take me to the next level...but various reasons, both only led to more frustration and dashed efforts. Neither of them won me anywhere near the money they initially promised, and since by then I was measuring my success by the size of my cheques.

And then...I walked away. As of this past weekend, I haven't written for money in two years (a milestone which officially ends my eligibility for membership in the Writers Guild of Canada--not that I was ever a member, but I considered it). My last paid article was an interview with the Zombies for the Leader-Post, a nice bookend to a tour of duty that started with a Joe Cocker interview. I haven't even drafted a query letter since I left R-Town.

Obviously, I haven't stopped writing. What you see on this blog is just the tip of the iceberg--and also the Titanic. I've got stuff on the go, stuff I've enjoyed writing more than I've enjoyed writing stuff in years. Stuff that's been seen by no one's eyes but my own.

But last month--has it been a month already???--my uncle Rick told me that he's read my blog and he doesn't understand half of it. OK. Let's face it, it's got no form, no theme, no purpose. But Rick also said that he used to enjoy reading my interviews with people. And y'know what, I used to enjoy conducting interviews with people. Most people. Some people, not really. But the point is... hey, there's no reason I can't still do interviews. So let's do some interviews.

mp3: "Lying on a Beach" by Joel Plaskett
mp3: "Sunshine and Grease" by Royal Trux