Black Friday

I had a busy day on Friday.

It wasn't just any Friday. It was Black Friday, a truth that was only to be revealed later on that day, in all its gory majesty. It is a day, I learned the hard way, when otherwise rational and restrained human beings succumb to the most primordial of their acquisitive natures and engorge themselves in a communal orgy of commercial exchange and borderless cupidity.

It began just like any day, although it was a Friday. The week long tedium of Work was coming to a close. I must have suffered a nasty and febrile dream Thursday night, as I woke up with the melody of a KISS song reverberating in my head. As I ground my coffee beans, I caught myself mouthing the lyrics to "2000 Man". I don't like KISS, and never did (but hearing Gene Simmons imitate Geddy Lee's vocal stylings was a happy event for me earlier this year). As a nine year old kid, however, I did buy the "Dynasty" album. I had seen too many kids wearing their older brothers KISS Army t-shirts to school, and I wanted to find out what all the fuss was about. I was very disappointed. But I still played the shit out of that album on the family stereo unit because, as bad as KISS seemed to me, it was still better than my older sisters' Supertramp and Meat Loaf albums.

On Friday morning, as I drank my morning coffee, I performed the usual routines. I checked out my fantasy sports results from the previous night. My hockey team (defending champion hockey team, I might add) was still resting all too comfortably in fifth place. Nor did my football team harvest much on American Thanksgiving Day -- Dez Bryant and Jermichael Finley combined for a heady 6 points. At least my Harbaugh had prevailed in the epic Battle of the Harbaugh brothers.

After cramming a day's worth of work into a morning, I had to get on with other things. My poor mother has been waiting for a laptop computer for a long time. First it was her birthday gift. In 2010. Then it was a Christmas gift. Then a Mother's Day gift. Then it was a birthday gift again. Then, as the days drifted unrelentingly towards the end of another year, it was a Christmas gift yet again.

I had bought everything on Tuesday, when the waters were much calmer. I even snagged myself some sweet headphones, the obscene price of which was salved by a store credit that had been hard won and well deserved from an incident a couple of years ago. But I was picking up the laptop and its accessories on Friday. Little did I know what was, quite literally, in store for me.

I rounded up everything I needed for a weekend in the Glen, including my own laptop and its accessories, and embarked on my way down to the suburban entrepot. "2000 Man" was still playing clumsily inside my head in a rather anti-virtuosic manner, despite my frantic search for a radio diversion. I had to remember to pick up a "chill pad" for the laptop, as I had forgot to add that to the package on Tuesday.

The traffic was heavy, even for an early Friday afternoon in a government town. And everyone seemed to be driving in the same direction as me. Except, unlike me, most of them appeared to be frothing at the mouth in anticipation of some kind of bacchanalian ritual that would whip them into a rabid frenzy of an unhealthy sort.

I was getting worried. "2000 Man" was still in my head, but it wasn't reassuring me. Rather, it was considerably distressing me. I needed a chill pad of my own. I wanted to get down there, pick up the goods, and get the fuck out of town before rush hour. I knew I still had to do a bit more work once I got to the Glen, and then I had to setup the laptop, the printer, and all of the other stuff.

When I finally got into the store, I knew something was very wrong. People, old and young, were everywhere. A sea of wretched humanity. Gnashing their teeth. Clutching and grabbing for every shiny bauble that danced before their deadened eyes. Disturbing moans and groans gathered into a crescendo above the bubblegum pop soundtrack of the store as many of these unfortunate creatures were told that the treasure they coveted was no longer in stock, while others shrieked in paroxysms of delight as they fled towards the cacaphonic symphony of the cash registers. It appeared to me as hellish as a detail from the right panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Fuck the chill pad, I thought to myself. I'll get it another day. I just gotta find that cute little Filipino salesgirl, get my stuff and get out of here alive. Then I dutifully got in line, completed my business, and loaded up the New Idler. Earlier that morning, over my first cup of coffee, I had hatched an elaborate scheme to pick up some other badly needed things during this rare foray into the commercial abyss. But waiting in line had sent me into the rush hour. After aborting the original plan, I sped out of the city in a Bournean/To Live and Die in L.A. flourish and set out for the bucolic sureties of the Country Home, bearing the long awaited laptop and all the accessories.

But then don't you know, I'm a 2000 Man.

Fulcrum

Downtown walk in an autumnal Arcadia
Weekday faces fade away
Almost makes you feel
The past is not here today

It is time.
It has always been time.

There and Beck Again

Cousin and I have a relationship analogous to the one between Tony Soprano and Tony Blundetto. Brotherly throughout our early lives and into our mid-twenties, then we each went our separate ways. I cut my teeth on life out on the West Coast, and Cousin has been doing time down in Huronia.

But Cousin has a hall pass this weekend, and is heading north to the old hood.

Almost exactly 22 years ago, when I was a pimply teenager at the concrete bunker in the northern hinterlands of Toronto known as York University, Cousin drove down to Toronto in his diesel Datsun, filled to the brim with empty Little Caesar's pizza boxes. We navigated the Byzantine labyrinth of the TTC, and got ourselves down to the feet of another concrete bunker, the newly opened eighth wonder of the North American world. SkyDome.

The roof was closed, and inside was the latest stop on the "Guitar Heroes" tour: Jeff Healey, Jeff Beck, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. Vaughn had just released "In Step" that summer, and was the de facto headliner of the tour. I had bought that album a few months earlier, and had recently snagged Jeff Beck's "Guitar Shop", his first album since "Flash", an ill advised experiment that was intended to vault Jeff Beck into commercial viability, and not just universal respect and veneration amongst his peers. How could he miss with Donny Osmond as a guest vocalist? Not a bad album, just Ambitious.

I had been caught in the Crossfire all summer, and was just beginning to revel in the virtuosity of "Guitar Shop". With the great Terry Bozzio on the kit.

Cousin and I found our seats in the nosebleeds (undergrads and pizza deliverymen didn't rake in huge dollars back then). We decided it was time for a pint. I walked the concourse a few times, and all I saw was McDonald's. There were more McDonald's than bathrooms. There were more McDonald's than people. Dumbfounded, we proceeded to our blue plastic seats with milkshakes in hand.

The late Jeff Healey went on first. Nice set. He had just released "Hell to Pay", and was riding a wave of celebrity, at least in Canada and with George Harrison.

Then it was Hello Jeff time. The reason Cousin and I were there, slurping our milkshakes. Jeff didn't tour much back then. He preferred to stay in his castle and work on his collection of custom cars. The rest of the crowd liked him, even if they were there for Stevie Ray. Jeff appreciated it.

Then Stevie Ray rolled out, and the real rock n' rollers around us began to cry out for some real rock n' roll. We stayed for a bit of Stevie Ray's set, then we finished our milkshakes and headed out for Yonge Street. There was drinking to be done.

Tragically, it turned out to be one of Stevie Ray's last tours, as he died in a helicopter crash in August of 1990.

Jeff is a survivor, literally and figuratively. He has traversed the decades and the genres: late 60s/early 70s hard rock, jazz fusion, session man for Billy Cobham and Stanley Clarke, the ambient turn, alt-country. If you can find it in the history of contemporary music, Jeff's done it. Or worked with those who did. After hearing "Guitar Shop", Roger Waters had to recruit him for his "Amused to Death" album. His work on the opening track "The Ballad of Bill Hubbard" haunts me still.

Tomorrow night, almost exactly 22 years ago, Jeff Beck will be performing at the National Arts Centre. After not releasing a single album between 1989's "Guitar Shop" and 1999's "Who Else?", he has released three albums in the 11 years since. Cousin and I will be there, as will Snakey, who was supposed to be there in 1989.

Its been a long, strange trip, there and back again.

We're gonna Head for Backstage Pass.

Cinematic Soundings

For me, great films are great primarily due to their extraordinary images. Narrative, characterization and dialogue run close behind. But an inspired soundtrack also has its place, and can often lift a film out of mere goodness and propel it into greatness.

Not all of the films I'd like to talk about are great in my estimation. Some absolutely are. Others are films with soundtracks that lift them out of mediocrity and into memorability.

By "soundtrack" I'm not only referring to film scores composed for the occasion, selections from which perforate the entirety of the movie.

I'm also including a director's use of recordings, both popular and esoteric, that he/she chooses to be a part of the soundtrack to their film, even if only of a fragmentary nature.

Film scores that belong in the former category, it seems to me, are within the generally normalized tradition of international film production. Within the past 15 years or so, however, I have been impressed by a number of complete film scores contributed by musicians outside the traditional film scoring guild. Notable examples are original compositions for a couple of P. T. Anderson films, Jonny Greenwood's for There Will Be Blood, and Aimee Mann's for Magnolia.

In his earlier films, P.T. Anderson (and other contemporary American filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino, whose films have varied wildly in terms of quality, but that's a blog for another day) are surely influenced by the use of contemporary music in the films of Martin Scorsese.

There are also many of my favourite filmmakers who consistently work(ed) with one film score composer. Ennio Morricone with Sergio Leone. Howard Shore with David Cronenberg. Carter Burwell with the Coen Bros. Angelo Badalamenti with David Lynch. Michael Nyman with Peter Greenaway (although that association seems to have ended as Greenaway slips further away from narrative coherence and into increasingly esoteric experimentation).

It is surely no coincidence that many of my favourite films feature judicious choices of music while having no general and consistent film score. Lars von Trier's chapter cards in Breaking the Waves include period pieces, played at nearly full length, from Jethro Tull, Roxy Music, Mott the Hoople et al. Kubrick, of course, sprinkled Strauss, Beethoven and Ligeti throughout his movies from 2001 through A Clockwork Orange to The Shining. These choices can even lift an otherwise pedestrian genre film into a memorable one. Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later includes a significant chunk of Godspeed You! Black Emperor's epic "East Hastings" that arrives at a crucial point during the opening scenes and does not overstay its welcome.

28 Days Later also includes a brilliant piece from Brian Eno, who after leaving Roxy Music in the mid-70s went on to create the ambient genre (not to mention working with David Bowie on his two best albums and producing, with Daniel Lanois, some of the best albums of the 1980s and 1990s, including U2's "Achtung Baby").

Jack Bruce wrote a "Theme for an Imaginary Western" a few years before Eno's ambient turn, but it was Eno who created a genre of interesting, cinematic soundscapes for films that didn't exist.

"An Ending (Ascent)" didn't seem to fit the visuals at the end of Boyle's homage to the zombie film (a good movie that should have put an end to the zombie genre but unfortunately did not until, regrettably, the vampire film secured its succession).

However, it perfectly fit the ending of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, and that final scene transformed that movie, in my opinion, from an interesting to a great film, even if Soderbergh ripped it off from a British television series.

I wish more selections from Eno's soundtracks for imaginary films (Music for Films volumes 1-3, Music for Airports, among others) found their way into actual films. No doubt they have.

Another filmmaker who, usually, makes very good choices is Michael Mann. None better, perhaps, than the decision to replace his original (and very conventional) choice of end music for Heat with Moby's magisterial "God Moving Over the Face of the Water". As if it needed any further reason to be remembered as one of the finest American films of the 1990s.

The cheapest trick of all

I was going to go to this show.

I changed my mind on Sunday morning, largely because of the heat wave that has been scorching the earth around these parts since the beginning of July.

I was going to go to this show because Cheap Trick was once an important band to me. Perhaps the most important one.

When I was eight and nine years old, our family stereo unit held a secret cache of LP's and 45's. My Dad had his collection, mostly consisting of Charlie Pride and Tanya Tucker. My mother had her Olivia Newton-John and Nana Mouskouri albums. And my much older sisters (at least they seemed much older at the time), they had their records.

On most occasions when the family stereo unit was in heavy rotation, I had to endure a rather unhealthy dose of Supertramp (Breakfast in America was indelibly branded upon my brain before I turned ten years old; a cruel and unusual punishment if you ask me), Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell (the album cover looked cool as hell, I thought, but it sure didn't sound cool as hell), or K-Tel compilations subjecting me to the truly hellish excesses of late Disco, the Bay City Rollers, K.C. and the Sunshine Band et al.

But to their credit, my older sisters record collection also introduced me to some glories of late 70s rock, particularly Queen's News of the World (now there was an album cover that looked cool as hell and so did the music) and Cheap Trick's Live at Budokan. Like much of the material that generates the playlists of putative "Classic Rock" radio stations, I don't know that Cheap Trick's music (let alone its band members) has aged very well, but at one time they were the biggest and baddest band in the world, at least within my eight-year-old world. When I saw them on TV Variety Shows/Specials, that peculiar late 70s/early 80s species of mass entertainment, I would marvel at Rick Nielson's five-neck guitar and Bun E. Carlos toiling away on the drum kit while the ubiquitous cigarette dangled from his mouth. When I started to buy my own albums a year or so later, one of my initial acquisitions was Heaven Tonight, advertised on Live at Budokan with "Surrender", probably the most enduring song they've ever released.

While Cheap Trick has not survived as a sonic companion of mine since those years (frankly, I couldn't believe that they are still touring), I was nevertheless considering checking out their gig at Bluesfest, if only for nostalgic reasons.

Might have been a hoot, had the stage not collapsed.

Luckily, nobody was seriously injured.

Yup, they're all alright -- they just seem a little weird.

North by Northwest

I've always been drawn to the Pacific Northwest.

Especially the state of Washington and the city of Seattle.

As a eight year old kid, I was fascinated by books on cryptozoology. I used to pour through accounts of Bigfoot encounters and wistfully imagine that one day I would go hiking among those rain forest conifers and come across a North American Great Ape. Then I watched an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man that revealed that Bigfoot was really a robot from outer space, and I lost interest. I didn't care much for space when I was a kid.

As I got older, I started to read some science fiction, and Frank Herbert quickly became my favourite. I burned through many of those Berkley Books paperback editions of his novels, and not just the Dune series. I learned that Frank Herbert was from the Seattle area, and that the sand dunes on the nearby Oregon coast were, reputedly, the inspiration for the series. But I enjoyed his other novels as well, and a few of them had a Northwest setting.

I knew it rained a lot in the Pacific Northwest, and that was fine by me. Unlike most other people, I soon realized, I liked the rain. I still do, even after living for the better part of nine years in Vancouver. It matches the melancholia that I inherited from my Outer Hebridean ancestors. I seem to think better when its raining, and a sublimity sets in that elevates my mood.

One of the first Sports Illustrated magazines that was given to me featured Paul Westphal, who just left the Phoenix Suns to play for the SuperSonics. I knew and cared little about the NBA then, and that hasn't changed over the years, but at the time I knew that the SuperSonics had won back to back NBA titles not long ago.

In the other three sports that I truly cared about at the time, Seattle had made little impact. They didn't have an NHL team then, and its not likely that they ever will. The Seahawks and Mariners were expansion teams in the later 1970s and therefore were simply awful. For some reason I still found myself following them. Before my dear old Dad unknowingly torched them all in a fit of pyromania, I had football cards of Jim Zorn, Dave Kreig, Steve Largent, Curt Warner et al. I don't remember being interested in the Mariners until the late 1980s when Mark Langston was the best lefthander in baseball. The Expos then traded Randy Johnson to the Mariners for half a season of Langston before he moved on to the Angels in free agency. The rest of that sad story doesn't need to be told.

I also knew that Jimi Hendrix was born and raised in Seattle, and that seemed pretty cool to me.

My initial visit to Seattle was in the fall of 1997. Five of us crammed into the Old Idler and embarked from Vancouver on a pilgrimmage to Powell's, a legendary used bookstore in Portland Oregon (this was before ordering books online became a part of my ordinary life). Crossing the border was a bit of an adventure, as the Idler was full of international students, including one from Mexico. The border guard refused to believe that we were entering the US just to visit a bookstore. Needless to say, there was a considerable delay. We stayed overnight at a friend's apartment near the University of Washington. The Huskies were hosting Ryan Leaf and the rival Washington State Cougars, so it was a bit nutty.

I returned to Seattle and Portland the following spring. While the atmosphere inside the Old Idler was vitriolic, as my ex-girlfriend and I were at each others' throats the entire time, the drive back up the Pacific Coast Highway from the San Francisco Bay area was unforgettable. I finally saw the white beaches of the Oregon coast as well as the sand dunes that had inspired Frank Herbert so many years ago.

Over the course of my remaining years on the West Coast, I took the opportunity to return to Seattle, if not Portland, many more times. Unlike Vancouver, Seattle is a port city that makes good use of its downtown shoreline, which I remember as dotted with bars and cafes.

Recently, it seems that I'm more familiar than ever with the daily events of Seattle. While I work each day, I listen to KEXP, a local radio station that allows its disc jockey's to program their own music sets. (Thanks to the Cravat in Van City for that tip).

Oh yeah, and the music that broke out of that town in the late 80s and early 90s was really fucking good.

Songs from the Road

A happy July 14 to all my fellow sans-culottes. May you storm the Bastille of your chosen oppressor, real or imagined.

And a very happy birthday from Little Brother to Big Sister.

I recently returned from my first post-Interruptnal road trip.

It started with a little night music in Confederation Park. Robert Plant and his new band played a set that included many satisfying reworkings of some of my favourite Led Zeppelin songs, including Black Country Woman. And Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Jean-Luc Ponty trading sonic soliloquies under a setting sun.

The next morning I packed up (I no longer travel lightly), loaded up the New Idler, and took off on the two-lane blacktop for parts known and unknown. Ahead of me on the temporal horizon, almost two weeks of liberation from the tedium of Work and the prerequisites of Policy and Protocol.

The New Idler's CD player never stopped Whirring as I floated down the 401 on a River of Pride. That old white line was sure a friend of mine, and it was good time I was making.

After a sleepover at Big Sister's house on the outer rings of the gas giant that is the GTA, I GOTrained it downtown. Its been a long time since I lived in the megalopolis, so not surprisingly I took a wrong turn out the worst possible exit from the thoracic mass of transportation options that is Union Station. It was rush hour, of course, and on this particular late June day it made Penn Station look like a rural route that requires you to lay across the tracks to force the train to stop and pick you up.

When I emerged into the sunlight, I seemed to be trapped in a canyon of industrial wasteland tucked somewhere within a diabolical pentagram triangulated by the CN Tower, the Gardiner Expressway, and the concrete monstrosity formerly known as Skydome. Despite this post-apocalyptic environment, there was a senseless number of commuters going to and fro, walking at me, not with or around me.

Finally I found a dozing cabbie who appeared to be convalescing from the mind melting heat, and we were off for the Annex, where I spent two wonderful days with my dear old friend Curry and his charming family. On another one of the hottest days of the summer so far, I made a puzzling decision to walk east on Bloor from Bathurst to Yonge, only to then turn south down Yonge to Dundas, then all the way west back to Spadina. When I returned to the Annex, blood was seeping through one of my socked feet a la Curt Schilling in the 2004 World Series. I didn't feel like a "gladiator", as Mr. Schilling was preposterously anointed, but it was grotesquely visible enough for the twins to inquire about over dinner that night.

On my way back to the downtown train, my affable cabbie and I almost drownded, as the Young Artist would say, in a wave of baseball fans (really? in Toronto?) rolling down the road, sweeping everything along in its wake. Must have had something to do with Roy Halladay starting for the Phillies. Hard to imagine that I was once a subscriber to Baseball America and knew the names of most middle and long relief pitchers in the league. That ended almost 20 years ago -- and that had something to do with 1994, I'm almost sure.

Once I picked up the New Idler back east of town, I got back on the two(six?)-lane blacktop and Highway Star-ed it west into the heart of Huronia. I hadn't visited Cousine in his backyard since the summer of 2001. It was surreal to have conversations with his near-teenage boy and girl. Cousine and I had our obligatory evening of obliteration - Darts, innit? - and it seemed to me that I had once again sailed across oceans of Mill Street and Sleeman. However, perspectives and horizons, not to mention youthful stamina, have inevitably diminished. We were both a Victim of Changes as we re-enacted the Days that Used to Be. And Yet, we talked and drank until the daylight began to break, the temporal and physical distance between us dissolving into the rosy-fingered dawn.

I spent four nights with Cousine and his family, and one more overnight visit with Big Sister, a Circean bacchanalia that sent me off in fine style the next morning. Then it was time to move on to the closing books of the epic road trip -- the voyage home.

Once again the New Idler's CD player was put to good use as I Noodlanded my way towards the End of Music and O-town.

Once I got home, and still had a few days of vacation remaining, I slept like a log. A Victim of Changes, indeed.

http://youtu.be/AaTYdUQzgg4