Category: Music

Jericho & other natters

Saw Plough at Jericho. I really wish Keith could have been there, they were totally in the O Brother Where Art Thou groove and very very musical and fun, and lively and young and respectful to the audience… and don’t forget banjo and fiddle and guitar and standup bass…..

Katie K took me. Her car is only plated for another week or so; we are making best advantage of this. Consuming burgers and sitting on the beautiful deck at the Sailing Club while sucking back Raven on tap. Singing and playing and having half a dozen people come up to me afterwards and exclaim over my tunes (I played Words Fail (also known as the Telecom song) and Bruise (also known as Green and Purple and Black and Blue)). The rest of the open stage was uniformly excellent, as always.

Tom and Peggy also came out to see Patrick Metzger who in addition to being the bassist for Lesismore is the guitarist/bassist for Plough; Katie and I talked to them briefly; Katie knows them from way back from Beacon when her kids were in Religious Education there.

I’m bagged, suddenly… it is bedtime.

I have learned three new chords and booked the CAN car Prius for a little tour

Tee hee.  Wish me luck on both; I am NOT enjoying Eb dim, and by the way Peggy that’s actually D dim, no matter WHAT your chords for “Absolutely Bonkers” say.  It just doesn’t sound right otherwise.
Now if I can just remember how to get into the car.

May a special spot in a government lineup be reserved for the guy who keeps smoking in his apartment without turning the fan on.  I keep telling him, and telling him.  But does he listen? What an ageist old sow I’m turning out to be.  God knows – and to the eternal disgust of my non smoking friends and family – I enjoy the occasional foray into tobaccoland, but I really try to take other people’s feelings into more consideration.

Sundry and various

I met a man with the largest collection of musicals in BC, possibly Canada.  To give you some idea of the scale of his collection, he moved sometime in the last few years and put the stuff that he could bear to part with on ebay and cleared enough money to buy a house in rural Saskatchewan.  I am going to email him today and ask him if he has a copy of Zou Zou, one of Josephine Baker’s movies.

Tammy had a wonderful time on Gabriola and has promised pix.  I’m going over to her mom’s today to see her before she leaves tomorrow morning.

I am very happy about signing up for the CAN car, and the illiterate SUV drivers who keep parking in that spot are going to think I’m a evil evil hag, because I’m going to start calling for towtrucks on people.  Seriously, why are the people who take that spot almost always SUV drivers?  Was that a rhetorical question?  Is this?
The young man downstairs from me gets one more gimme before I rat him out to the landlord. I have now addressed him personally twice; I will give him three times.  I don’t enjoy being woken up like that and his apologies are wearing thin.

After a decade of living in this town I finally poked my head into Sikora Music down on Hastings.  I picked up a couple of CD’s which will go in the Christmas present pile.  I tried to go into Long and McQuade but they weren’t welcoming enough.  I also emailed L&M a few days back and started my email with “Your website sucks a Greyhound bus station men’s room mop.”  And the webguy emailed me back to acknowledge that I was funny, but didn’t actually address my question.  I know it’s not an e-commerce site, but a list of what snares you carry when I search on “snare” would be useful!!  And why am I suddenly interested in snares?  Well, I’m thinking of some portable and classy percussion, and a snare head with brushes, which I had recently seen used to great effect, got me thinking.  My percussive friends are smiling and nodding.
Katie K is back from Maine and visiting rellies.  She said “The theme for this trip is cognitive dissonance.”  My father is nodding and saying to himself, “That’s just a fancy way of saying, “Can I go home now?””

Dinner with Keith, Kate and Tammy went wonderfully, and I completely kept out of the conversation Tammy had with Katie, since it was everything I’ve been telling her for aeons, except Tammy is both more forceful and more tactful, tact being something I should really work on, except nobody would recognize me.  Keith bitched me out for not inviting Paul, and I phoned Paul to try and get his side of the story (and also to alert him about a possible change of address for Katie), but he appeared unconcerned and hadn’t really expected to be invited.  A whole paragraph detailing why he should be happy he wasn’t invited has been deleted, thank god.
Re the change of address for Katie…. stay tuned.  She’s having her troubles, and now she’s working on graceful exit strategies.

Keith’s first two days of Dispensing Optician school appear to have gone well.  He loves the new campus, says “The air here is better than it was in high school” (not hard) and seems to be thriving on being so busy, although he’s kinda sharper and more brittle than I remember him.  He went on at length, as he tends to do, about writing projects he never actually does anything about (I keep saying, find a comic book artist, there’s less writing) and various media things, like TV Tropes which I forwarded him a link to yonks ago and which is still causing him fits of hysterical laughter.  Keith also recited a William Blake poem, which he recently memorized.  I will now pause while my mother recovers from her swoon of happiness.

I also bought a Moleskine.  I am a little fashionable sheep, but it sure is a pleasure to write on.

Now, since my apartment is tidy and all my clothes are clean, I guess I’ll have to actually do some work before I phone Tammy at nine….  The major projects are:

  • Getting all the pictures in albums and labelling them to the extent I can.
  • Entering my songs into Songwriter (now that after four berloody months I found my list again!!).
  • Purging as many of my books as I can.
  • Re-establishing a filing system.
  • Working on a budget.
  • Practicing on my guitar and mando.

But hark, what scent from yonder café breaks??  I think I’ll go downstairs to the Renaissance and fuel up.

Jericho & other natters

The first thought in my head this morning was “If I ever own a country house I’m going to call it Guinnessfree.”  And I think my mother is the only person who reads this blog who will appreciate that.

Jericho was lovely. The headliners were Kathy Francis and Andrea Smith and they played a most wonderful assortment of songs, and even closed with a filk of “I only have eyes for you” which laments the fact that BC teachers can no longer give F’s but must give “I’s”.  So “I only have “I’s” for you” got a big laugh as the closing number.  I got to go up second during the open stage, which as always was great and included AMAZING slide resonator guitar.
I took a wonderful picture of the moon but I can’t get it to resize so I can post it.  Grr.

Every night since I came home from Victoria I’ve lain for about five minutes, convincing myself that the stupid scary rabbit from Donnie Darko isn’t in my room.

I’m never taking the Skytrain coming home from Jericho again, the bus is way more civilized.  The 135 runs pretty well all night and the 145 stops at 12:30, so I’ll take the 4 to Hastings and the 135 home. I cleared my door before midnight. And I would have been home sooner but I missed the 10:35 by about 30 seconds, which was annoying.

During one of my internet Drunkard’s Walks

I found a devotional singer called Sada Sat Kaur.  I have been listening to her version of Adi Shakti and really enjoying it.  There’s something about the way she sings, and in particular the last harmony on the track, which is very energizing and uplifting.  Also, she uses dobros with tablas, and you don’t get to hear that every day.

Elly’s journey

My friend Elly is the subject of a ten minute documentary about her recovery from bipolar illness. As I have seen her in a very bad way, and been her friend over 20 years, and I conveniently live in Vancouver, I got elected to talk a bit about the difference between then and now. Frankly, she’s not the same person, and everybody’s really happy about that, especially Elly.
Recovery from mental illness is not always possible. It is not easy to have enough insight to start working on it. Step one, take responsibility for it. Step two, learn to cope with stress and learn what your triggers are. Step three, eatrightexercisemeditate&sleep. Step four, let people into your life who support your recovery with open arms, and move away from people who don’t support your recovery – without taking on a big load of grief or guilt. Rinse. Repeat. The steps are simple. Doing it is backbreaking work. I’d like to point out the link to her website here, commercial plug.
The energy level, sincerity and professionalism of the VFS students making the film was a palpable thing – I got a contact high hanging out with them.

And one of them showed me a Youtube video he made. It was SO GOOD! I think I’ll watch it again. It’s called Making me Nervous, and the band is called Brad Sucks.