Google Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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