Weekend Retrospective Three

I've got loads going on this week, and just got my younger brother kicked out of a bar, so briefly:
-Sweet Jane
When I worked in a boutique, I got to play music, and among the CDs they had was Loaded, which I listened to over and over and over. This song kind of epitomizes them for me - "And the poets they studied rules of verse, and the ladies, they rolled their eyes" kind of sums up every generation of young bohemians.

-White Rabbit
Jefferson Airplane are obviously another favourite, but I actually started listening to them when a friend's younger brother (who was about eleven at the time) was singing this and imitating Grace Slick's voice uncannily well. This is probably Jefferson Airplane's most famous songs, but that doesn't make it any worse.

-You Name Begins with "A" (Native Spirits)
Strange but weirdly exhilarating Mayan background music that I used to listen to while doing chores and homework and suchlike.

-La Mia Ragazza Mena and
-Dentro Alla Scatolla
Once, I somewhat liked a boy I wasn't supposed to, which I knew at the time - ah the follies of youth. But he gave me Italian punk and rap and various other music, which was good, or at least interesting. It's interesting to note that music seems to get better when we can't understand it...

Sudek for a godawful day

Sip champagne and it tastes just like cherry cola

Yesterday, I climbed outside in the cold white stillness of southern Québec forests.
Today, I sit inside and rewatch lectures and eat a lobstertail from Patisserie Roma and nurse my welldeserved headcold.
Coloured pens make the world a better, or at least more organized, place.
We can't all be Wolfgang Gullich or Barbara McClintock, but there is worth in pursuing things without being the best at them.
This, perhaps, is the most important thing.

The title of this post is from the Kinks' Lola. The Faculty of Theology librarian turned me onto the Kinks one Sunday at 1 A.M. in a bar, a story too good to make up. When I first heard Lola (a few days ago) I realized that I was missing a huge part of the history of rock and roll. I then went around talking about how poignantly the song tells of a wimp being made a man by an older, powerful woman. It turns out the song is actually about a transsexual. Ah.

Second Sesquiannual Weekend Retrospective

This week, I made my professor (a sad, bitter old man) laugh using the word sequiannual. I mark it as one of the better achievements of the week.

Well, here we are. I'm trying hard not to have all of this be "things I listened to in highschool for a week or two" but it's very hard when I was extremely unaware of the musical word before I turned fifteen or so, but I'll try.

Telegraph road - Through a strange cultural twist, Czech Republic of the early 20th century was really into the American Wild West. So here's a cover of a song about the wild west that my dad used to listen to.
Too little too late - I can't say I ever listened to this song voluntarily, but for a few weeks in freshman year it was absolutely unavoidable - the bitchy timbre of an angry girl's voice as she berates her exboyfriend made it a onestop hit for a while.
Acetate - The Speechwriters LLC! Oh, the Speechwriters. The band of (I believe): The boyfriend of a girl who was friends with a friend of my highschool acquaintance's exboyfriend. Two guys with acoustic guitars with not very many fans but thoughtful and intelligent and catchy and generally protest- and love- and life-related songs. This version isn't very good, but the nice thing about the Speechwriters is that they post their songs on the Internets. The sort of blogging, self-deprecating snarky artists that seem to be a dime a dozen these days. Associated with Trader Joe's sunny lawn picnics and (for some reason) jellied lemon slices I used to buy for 16 cents. Note to self: find where those are sold, and buy them.
Wasn't born to follow - My friends had a habit of playing midnight semi-legal capture the flag in monasteries and abandoned construction sites in high school. As a part of that, I got chased off a (small) cliff (really I guess just an embankment) by a kid I had a crush on. He saw me crumpled in a heap on the gravel, jumped down, tagged me, and then asked me if I was okay. I was bleeding profusely from somewhere but insisted on finishing the game. I later went to the emergency room with one of my best guy friends and hallucinated a bit and internally chanted Buddhist prayers because they were the only thing that made sense at the time. The next day my face was swollen so I skipped school and watched Easy Rider and discovered this song (and one of my favourite sad angry overblown hippie road motorcycle movies)
Tunnels - Associated with a close nerd-cum-hipster friend who added a lot of music to my perceptions.

Have a lovely Sunday.

In which I get an A+ in pupusa ordering

So I failed my first exam today. Though there have occasionally been speedbumps on the road to academic glory, they usually aren't this bad. After the initial shell-shock and despair and self-beratement, I did what any reasonable person would do: I took myself out to lunch to celebrate losing my exam-failing virginity (how many things are wrong in that sentence?). I went to one of the Salvadorean restaurants in my neighbourhood (apparently, I live in an unofficial Little El Salvador, which is pretty awesome, if you ask me), and there discovered the national meal of El Salvador: the pupusa.
I was initially apprehensive, fumbling with my Spanish and occasionally slipping into French as the impassive salvadorian waitress looked me unimpressed. Living in Montréal has elevated my French to slightly below-conversational from essentially zero while bringing my Spanish down from near-fluent to also slightly below-conversational, meaning that basically I can't say anything to anyone. However, after an awkward moment I succeeded in ordering a pupusa revueltas, and sat awkwardly flipping through a paperback waiting for a very long time for my food to come. I had no idea what to expect but was instantly gratified as soon as I saw it: A flat fried pancake chock-full of gooey cheese and thinly minced unidentifiable-but-delicious pork bits, which came with a flagon of soupy pepper sauce, a saucer of hot sauce, and a JAR OF CABBAGE SALAD AS BIG AS MY HEAD. Because cabbage salad vaguely reminds me of the motherland and fatty cheese and meat really needs no help, I enjoyed my lunch immensely, reveling in the sensory overload and pleasantly full-but-not-overful feeling afterwards. When I went to the stoic waitress to pay for my lunch, I received a bill for $2.54, including tax, and went on my merry way.

Failure is often the second-best option.

Love,
Tom

I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now

It's difficult to convey the feelings a particular piece of music evokes without sounding clichéd or overblown. The long-haired music-loving fiends of today (and of yesteryear, come to think) seem to tend to talk about music with a sort of lazy-smile, yeah-man nonchalance, a facade of cool. I have a theory that it's exactly because music is so powerful and we are so invested in it that we don't want to talk about it to people who aren't close friends. It's as though we invest a lot of our personal identity into what we listen to, which is fundamentally funny - "this are the resonance frequencies I enjoy perceiving, this is who I am", but in that vein, everything is, so I wouldn't worry about it overmuch. (Man, I'm just a bunch of phosphorelations, ya know. And then one day, they stop phospohorelating.)

All that to say: I remember looking through my old music - my parents' tapes of Bob Dylan that first introduced me to him, my rusty iTunes, even the records I can't play for lack of gramophone (my grandmother has The Wall, she's pretty much really awesome in every way) and am slowly starting to realize how much it influenced me, and I'd like to examine that a little, informally (no formal proofs here, goddammit). So through the medium of this blog, I'm going to try to write a Weekend Retrospective about a fews songs I remember.


The Moldau - I know this song because the Czech Airlines used to play it whenever we landed in Prague and to me it was as close to home as sound could get. The movement is so powerful, so joyous, so alive, and so unapologetically an ode to the beauty of a river, an area of the world, and existence. This particular version is conducted by Rafael Kubelik and is bitchin', as kids say these days.


This used to be my favourite Bob Dylan song. I don't know why, but I love the imagery, and I love the sort of understated intimation of a notperfect but perfect love from an asshole poet. I used to listen to this song a lot in high school - on long car rides, on long runs, reading books in bed on rainy days, and I still love it.


I was mocked by my more discerning friends for listening to this Vermont jamfool thing, but this was the first Phish song I'd ever heard, and though I never really listened to Phish much after all, I like the laughing irreverent absurdism. It reminds me of West Virginia bluegrass festivals and mistcovered mountains and all that sorta thing.


Ah, yes, teen angst. I remember my Pink Floyd phase - though I suppose my Pink Floyd phase was my entire childhood, as my dad sometimes has good taste, it escalated when I asked for The Wall for Christmas one year (to the joy of everyone except my mother, as my little brother decided to learn to play acoustic guitar by playing tabs from The Wall over and over). This song is so despondent and pathetic and wonderful. Pink Floyd combine their life sucks attitude with ballbreaking talent, so at least my sixteen year old self was blindly angry at the establishment to good music.


Emmaretta! Another long car ride song, riding west at 3am (I rode west at 3am a lot.), playing Deep Purple to stay awake. Deep Purple usually aren't melodic enough for me, but this is sufficiently plaintive and has cool drums.

And there you have it. Not exactly groundbreaking, but never fear.
Cheerio, then.

(Or, J.R.R. Tolkien was a baller)

I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were, taken 'a vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless...



Sincerely,
Tom Bombadil

"The sea! The sea!" "That's the St. Lawrence." (In which it is revealed that I am a plebeian)

So I went to the Opera the other day. I saw a performance of Nelligan, about the Québecois poet. And, I must say, I didn't enjoy it as much as I had expected to. The plot can be summed up as follows: young poet prances around dreaming to the disapproval of his father, young poet worries his mother, young poet argues with poet friends about who's more bourgeois, young poet goes downhill, young poet produces seminal opus, young poet goes even more downhill and starts committing depraved acts, young poet is committed to an institution, young/old poet is dying alone.
The imagery and casting were both very good - young Nelligan was appropriately naive and desperate and windswept and even received a sort of sympathy, and old Nelligan was perfectly beaten down and dark. The evocative and aesthetically pleasing lighting and set design cast the scene into a very dramatic view. However, I had several issues with the production, quite possibly because I am Uncultured. Firstly - the plot was awful. It was predictable in its steady downward crawl. There were no truly ecstatic (or even moderately happy) moments - even the celebration of Nelligan's opus didn't reach the heights that creating one's greatest work merits! This may have been the point, and it's a bit much to ask for running around being a pirate and seducing maidens and bullfights and swashbuckling and fairies and water spirits and lanterns in a Serious Work, but it still doesn't make the viewing inherently joyful. Secondly - on a purely aesthetic level, the often banal dialogue in operas sounds better when it's in a language that I can't understand. Though the writers used an interesting mix of English and French to bring to the forefront the bilingual tensions that would have been evident in Montréal at the time, (Nelligan's father was Irish and dissaproved of his passionately French output), things like "A poet! A poet! Anything but a poet!" repeated over and over are perceived better when one can dissociate their sound from their meaning. My final complaint would be that it was a bit drawn out. Maybe I, a product of the Internet generation, just have a short attention span, but a descent into madness that lasts more than two hours simply doesn't capture my imagination as vividly. However, the opera was still interesting and definitely exposed me to a poet that I had never previously taken the time to learn about.

Amusing fact: Emile Nelligan lived on the same street that my boyfriend lives on today, making them spatiotemporal neighbours!

Talkin' 'bout identity theft...

-Is a lovely song by Nellie McKay (no really, listen to it!)
-The backtoback apostrophes above are either unnerving, lame, or swell, I can't decide which.
-(As far as I'm concerned, Pluto's still a planet.)
-To do this week: eat another five pounds of clementines.
-Also, listen to Klímentajn over and over.
(I have a huge amount of respect for the czech cultural scene of the sixties, especially the theatre Semafor - witty, relevant, irreverent, and infused with equal parts a humour that preserves nothing and class that cannot be taken away by anything.)
-Plot.
-Attend an opera, ah, yes, an opera. (This is me smoking an imaginary cigarette and half closing my eyes and looking debonair.
-Watch Ciao Manhattan online at the cost of my homework.

Love,
Mad Max

The sun shines on Decarie

and mountains recede into the mist of memory
as smiling baristas bring me another cup of coffee
on Fairmount Street I stand under their shadow in the morning sun
thinking of dark roast and mountain goats
another warm sesame bagel
another community playground
another bike path
another hint of a lazy joint
yet as the world turns to water
(and brown turns to green)
in the land of Molispeare I look
singletrackmind towards the summer
singletrackmind towards the world