A little defeated today, a little crushed. Getting by doing even more with drastically less is the forecast for at least the next four months at least. This week’s crowning glory was persons planning a return trip to Canada doomed to inevitable deportation just to try and avoid a cholera outbreak for a month. No way of shining up that turd of a case, but you’ve got to admire their moxie.
I am burned out trying to contribute to hopeless cases this week and I’m back on the imaginary cigarettes while I still have this cough.
There is, however, an odd feeling of togetherness that I’m enjoying with the work folks. Picture angry optimists lying half strangled in a mud puddle shouting at cowardly retreating backs “come back here and say that again, bastard. You just wait until I catch my breath and then we’ll see what’s what. You just wait. I’m just going to lie here a minute.”
Friday, December 12, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Brain Fugue
I have been ill. The fever has receded at last but I have a cough that would make Dashiell Hammett proud. It strikes at the strangest times. I'm cruising along and it even feels like I'm breathing normally and then suddenly I'm in the midst of a coughing fit that actually frightens people on the bus away from me.
Not quite a cough at Dash Hammett's level mind you. TB or no TB he kept smoking 70 packs of cigarettes a day, drinking whiskey by the crate and injecting typewriter ink directly into his veins. Men were made of sterner stuff in those days. Hammett kept a spare Underwood on hand at all times to beat men to death if they tried to take his cigarettes or booze away. I make sad little whimpery noises, drink juice and watch all the little fever hallucinations float by. Bah.
Not quite a cough at Dash Hammett's level mind you. TB or no TB he kept smoking 70 packs of cigarettes a day, drinking whiskey by the crate and injecting typewriter ink directly into his veins. Men were made of sterner stuff in those days. Hammett kept a spare Underwood on hand at all times to beat men to death if they tried to take his cigarettes or booze away. I make sad little whimpery noises, drink juice and watch all the little fever hallucinations float by. Bah.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Bells Clanging
Last Friday night I sat in the back room of the Railway Club having a drink and waiting for the music to start. I was there to see Bells Clanging; a show that I hoped would cleanse my headspace as last week was the beginning of Christmas carol onslaught 2008. The first week of many to be top-heavy with glossy pop retreads of lousy 50’s era seasonal jingles, with the occasional original version thrown in to remind you that they were almost uniformly awful to begin with. For me, Christmas music (Vince Guilardi’s ‘It’s Christmas Charlie Brown’ theme music aside) is something that can only be enjoyed by people desperate to reinforce the appearance of holiday cheer. People who have never worked a retail job where you can’t escape any of these horrible tunes no matter how hard you try.
Bells Clanging have a surprising and delicate sound composed of high, brittle melodies. It’s hypnotic and shifty pop, textured and spare. The first time I saw them play the band had a human rhythm section that has since departed; it’s more of a one man show now. Jason Starnes’ vocals accompanied by his own guitar, keyboard and an array of programmed beats.
There’s a Radiohead comparison to be made to Bells Clanging, but that’s probably just a lazy reaction to the sound of Mr. Starnes’ voice. I love Radiohead, but he tone of Bells’ songs and the nature of the melodies lack the sense of anxiety and doom that shroud Radiohead’s music. It’s emotive without digressing into vocal wankery, ambitious without being pretentious, joyous without being sappy.
I was humming the brilliant “Even Stars Burn Out” by B.C. as I headed to the men's room and was greeted by the sight of a wad of blood stained toilet paper rotating anti-clockwise in a toilet bowl constantly trying to refill itself. I love the Railway Club on a Friday night.
I returned to the back room, four men sat close by reaching the end of a loud aggressive drunkening. As they got up and prepared to walk out into the frigid arms of the evening one stood out as extra annoying. His skin was badly mottled with drink; a pork pie hat was pushed back over his broad greasy forehead. He wavered a short distance across the room where his much slimmer, more attractive Australian friend had found himself pulled into conversation with two women.
Loud boy pushed himself into their midst and heard his friend utter the word "virgin". He was clearly not going to let a little thing like a total lack of conversational context keep him from shoehorning his excess of charm into their lives. He pointed a sausage-like finger at his friend for emphasis as his beer breath washed over them like a toxic cloud.
“Virgin?” he shouted. “So what you’re trying to say here is that you’re a virgin?”
His friend squirmed visibly, tried desperately to acknowledge his friend and somehow maintain eye contact with the women as their orbs rotated disgustedly to the left.
“Yep. I, I guess that must be what I’m saying.” He said.
The question was repeated a few more times at greater volume and got the same response. Loud boy seemed frustrated that the ribs of his audience weren’t shattering under onslaught of convulsive laughter. He had become the anti-wingman but couldn’t see it. Another of his table mates collected him and guided him out with surprising and totally unearned gentleness. You could see the same word twisting its way out of everyone left in their wake. A potent phrase for annoying dude-bro motherfuckers like him, a word whose passage you can taste. We dubbed him Douchebag.
When you see a man like this in a bar, a man who no less than three times punctuated his drunken jackassery by throwing an imaginary woman across the table to mime fucking her roughly while slapping her invisible ass, there is no word that springs to mind faster. But I don’t think it’s all that fitting a description. Actual douchebags serve a purpose in the world and honestly, unlike a douchebag, when I looked at that guy I found it really hard to believe he'd be inserted into a woman, ever.
I eventually left the back room of the Railway and pushed myself near the front of the stage for the set. Bells’ songs start more gently now without the drum kit banging away. The songs don’t have the incessant energy that live drums can provide, but rather draw you in with how simply, heartbreakingly pretty they are. The show had the immeasurable benefit of the great Kris Hooper on second guitar providing a restrained tone of mixed chime and bite and Leanne Coughlin playing keys and providing a lovely harmonic counterpoint. Choreography was provided by the hypnotic blinking of LED lights racing back and forth across the drum machines.
Their music made all the douchebag pain go far, far away. I’d like to see them play several more times as the holiday approaches, if for no other reason than to provide actual beautiful sound to wash away the taste of Christmas’ musical NutraSweet.
Bells Clanging have a surprising and delicate sound composed of high, brittle melodies. It’s hypnotic and shifty pop, textured and spare. The first time I saw them play the band had a human rhythm section that has since departed; it’s more of a one man show now. Jason Starnes’ vocals accompanied by his own guitar, keyboard and an array of programmed beats.
There’s a Radiohead comparison to be made to Bells Clanging, but that’s probably just a lazy reaction to the sound of Mr. Starnes’ voice. I love Radiohead, but he tone of Bells’ songs and the nature of the melodies lack the sense of anxiety and doom that shroud Radiohead’s music. It’s emotive without digressing into vocal wankery, ambitious without being pretentious, joyous without being sappy.
I was humming the brilliant “Even Stars Burn Out” by B.C. as I headed to the men's room and was greeted by the sight of a wad of blood stained toilet paper rotating anti-clockwise in a toilet bowl constantly trying to refill itself. I love the Railway Club on a Friday night.
I returned to the back room, four men sat close by reaching the end of a loud aggressive drunkening. As they got up and prepared to walk out into the frigid arms of the evening one stood out as extra annoying. His skin was badly mottled with drink; a pork pie hat was pushed back over his broad greasy forehead. He wavered a short distance across the room where his much slimmer, more attractive Australian friend had found himself pulled into conversation with two women.
Loud boy pushed himself into their midst and heard his friend utter the word "virgin". He was clearly not going to let a little thing like a total lack of conversational context keep him from shoehorning his excess of charm into their lives. He pointed a sausage-like finger at his friend for emphasis as his beer breath washed over them like a toxic cloud.
“Virgin?” he shouted. “So what you’re trying to say here is that you’re a virgin?”
His friend squirmed visibly, tried desperately to acknowledge his friend and somehow maintain eye contact with the women as their orbs rotated disgustedly to the left.
“Yep. I, I guess that must be what I’m saying.” He said.
The question was repeated a few more times at greater volume and got the same response. Loud boy seemed frustrated that the ribs of his audience weren’t shattering under onslaught of convulsive laughter. He had become the anti-wingman but couldn’t see it. Another of his table mates collected him and guided him out with surprising and totally unearned gentleness. You could see the same word twisting its way out of everyone left in their wake. A potent phrase for annoying dude-bro motherfuckers like him, a word whose passage you can taste. We dubbed him Douchebag.
When you see a man like this in a bar, a man who no less than three times punctuated his drunken jackassery by throwing an imaginary woman across the table to mime fucking her roughly while slapping her invisible ass, there is no word that springs to mind faster. But I don’t think it’s all that fitting a description. Actual douchebags serve a purpose in the world and honestly, unlike a douchebag, when I looked at that guy I found it really hard to believe he'd be inserted into a woman, ever.
I eventually left the back room of the Railway and pushed myself near the front of the stage for the set. Bells’ songs start more gently now without the drum kit banging away. The songs don’t have the incessant energy that live drums can provide, but rather draw you in with how simply, heartbreakingly pretty they are. The show had the immeasurable benefit of the great Kris Hooper on second guitar providing a restrained tone of mixed chime and bite and Leanne Coughlin playing keys and providing a lovely harmonic counterpoint. Choreography was provided by the hypnotic blinking of LED lights racing back and forth across the drum machines.
Their music made all the douchebag pain go far, far away. I’d like to see them play several more times as the holiday approaches, if for no other reason than to provide actual beautiful sound to wash away the taste of Christmas’ musical NutraSweet.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Slowly My Poor Brain Engages
Slight delay over the last few weeks, basically because I’m lazy. I’m trying to finish something off to post here and it’s not quite coming together. In the meantime, here’s a little light music.
Tremble before the awesome power of the Hex Dispensers.
Tremble before the awesome power of the Hex Dispensers.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
There's No Time To Lose
Well, that’s a relief.
At one point while they were still counting the votes the TV news coverage cut to a split screen of the Obama and McCain crowds waiting for the results to come in. The Obama crowd milled about, tense and hopeful, the McCain footage didn’t show the crowd, just some Nashville wonk strumming his way through a plaintive country ballad. It was the perfect soundtrack for a generation of sociopathic neo-cons weeping and counting what remains of their money before they ooze off in disgrace.
For once it appears voting for hope and change trumps hate and fear. Toby Keith's Album Sales Are Going to Plummet.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Don't Make Me a Target
The #19 bus journey serves up the same sights and sounds every day. There's a rustle of bad commuter papers that make up for their total lack of news merit with brevity. Commuters send cold glares at each other or quickly avert their eyes from elderly people looking for reassuring conversations, or pipeheads looking for someone to bark at for awhile. Shoulder to shoulder we bounce off each other as the bad transmission of the cheap eco friendly electric bus lurches through every intersection switch. There’s a tinny symphony of cranked MP3s in the air this morning; dull thudding bass and overwrought shrieks from miscellaneous pop divas.
I’m disgorged into the street, into the cold snap of too-early-in-the-morning air. It’s lightly scented with financial district musk: expensive cologne, perfume, Italian coffee, baked goods, diesel exhaust, and the greasy funk of bike courier body odour. One Quebecois courier waits at an intersection pounding on the hood of a car that’s nearly killed her, cursing its terrified carpoolers in thickly accented English. She flips them off, winks at me and takes off a fraction of a second after the light changes.
Two terrifying things await me at my desk. One, an advisory that something called “Scary Bingo” is going to begin circulating to assist in ramming this month’s enforced fun agenda down our throats. I’m afraid to ask what Scary Bingo is. Certainly the dauber stained people standing outside Planet Bingo in my neighborhood are certainly scary enough some days, but I don’t think this is what’s meant.
Scary thing number two is a Happy Halloween card that’s been sent to us by one of our low function sex offenders who’s taken to incessantly calling us. He is the world’s worst mascot. It looks like it was drawn by an eager to please six year-old. It has the same obvious determination to stay inside the lines hidden in the black and orange strokes of pencil crayon. One dimensional black bat on the front says “boo”. A bedsheet ghost next to it smiles happily.
Good morning downtown.
I’m disgorged into the street, into the cold snap of too-early-in-the-morning air. It’s lightly scented with financial district musk: expensive cologne, perfume, Italian coffee, baked goods, diesel exhaust, and the greasy funk of bike courier body odour. One Quebecois courier waits at an intersection pounding on the hood of a car that’s nearly killed her, cursing its terrified carpoolers in thickly accented English. She flips them off, winks at me and takes off a fraction of a second after the light changes.
Two terrifying things await me at my desk. One, an advisory that something called “Scary Bingo” is going to begin circulating to assist in ramming this month’s enforced fun agenda down our throats. I’m afraid to ask what Scary Bingo is. Certainly the dauber stained people standing outside Planet Bingo in my neighborhood are certainly scary enough some days, but I don’t think this is what’s meant.
Scary thing number two is a Happy Halloween card that’s been sent to us by one of our low function sex offenders who’s taken to incessantly calling us. He is the world’s worst mascot. It looks like it was drawn by an eager to please six year-old. It has the same obvious determination to stay inside the lines hidden in the black and orange strokes of pencil crayon. One dimensional black bat on the front says “boo”. A bedsheet ghost next to it smiles happily.
Good morning downtown.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
That’s When I Reach For My Revolver
Friday morning the sky was full of hazy clouds slowly beginning to thicken and obscure the sun. I had a perfect vantage point to slowly watch everything turn grey. There was one last gasp of incredibly bright sunlight that washed over the building across from me. A huge reflection of gold on the obsidian black windowpanes of the financial district before the clouds closed in fully and the sky started to look like the inside of a smoker’s lung.
True Vancouver October at last. The air turns cold and the wind slowly leeches away the last of the summer heat stored in the pavement and in the building stones. The rain starts in earnest and rinses away the last lingering scents of piss and rotting garbage that haunt the alleyways all summer long. That’s the real signal for the beginning of fall. By mid-October I’ll be shivering outside in the gusty damp trying to keep a cigarette lit while the rain undoes any plans I have to stay even half dry by coming at me sideways.
Mission of Burma played a brilliant show this week. It’s a rare treat to see a band reform and not only play incredibly well, but to clearly be having a really great time while doing it. Hell of a loud set too. Roger Miller doesn’t wear the industrial headgear he used to use to combat his tinnitus anymore. I guess the last tour allowed them to spring for fancy, nearly invisible earpieces. Sadly the ringing in my own ears after the show was not sufficient to drown out the three-way hippie drum circle that broke out on the bus on the way home.
Picture a Tim Buckley circa 1970 looking tye dyed alpha male, arm slung around peasant skirt wearing earth mother with a drum clutched between her matronly thighs. Third wheel dirty sidekick in a camouflage baseball cap (what kind of self respecting hippie wears a camouflage cap anyway) cackling like a madman throughout the rhythmic frenzy. All of them proudly flying the freak flag, 40 years too late.
Perhaps they were celebrating the coming of fall, or the fact that Phish reformed, or some such thing. A common sight in Vancouver during the summer months. Watered down, fourth generation counter cultural bullshit sadly mistaking annoying all and sundry with “blowing our minds”.
The trip with them was mercifully brief, and this behavior is one that is also seen less and less once the fall rains start; I guess all the damp in the air makes hippie drum-skins too flaccid to help them freak out the squares. Welcome back October. I've missed you.
True Vancouver October at last. The air turns cold and the wind slowly leeches away the last of the summer heat stored in the pavement and in the building stones. The rain starts in earnest and rinses away the last lingering scents of piss and rotting garbage that haunt the alleyways all summer long. That’s the real signal for the beginning of fall. By mid-October I’ll be shivering outside in the gusty damp trying to keep a cigarette lit while the rain undoes any plans I have to stay even half dry by coming at me sideways.
Mission of Burma played a brilliant show this week. It’s a rare treat to see a band reform and not only play incredibly well, but to clearly be having a really great time while doing it. Hell of a loud set too. Roger Miller doesn’t wear the industrial headgear he used to use to combat his tinnitus anymore. I guess the last tour allowed them to spring for fancy, nearly invisible earpieces. Sadly the ringing in my own ears after the show was not sufficient to drown out the three-way hippie drum circle that broke out on the bus on the way home.
Picture a Tim Buckley circa 1970 looking tye dyed alpha male, arm slung around peasant skirt wearing earth mother with a drum clutched between her matronly thighs. Third wheel dirty sidekick in a camouflage baseball cap (what kind of self respecting hippie wears a camouflage cap anyway) cackling like a madman throughout the rhythmic frenzy. All of them proudly flying the freak flag, 40 years too late.
Perhaps they were celebrating the coming of fall, or the fact that Phish reformed, or some such thing. A common sight in Vancouver during the summer months. Watered down, fourth generation counter cultural bullshit sadly mistaking annoying all and sundry with “blowing our minds”.
The trip with them was mercifully brief, and this behavior is one that is also seen less and less once the fall rains start; I guess all the damp in the air makes hippie drum-skins too flaccid to help them freak out the squares. Welcome back October. I've missed you.
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