You are viewing Zoilus without Toronto-specific content. To return to regular viewing, click here.
Pause Button
March 1st, 2010
This site will be “on hold” for the month of March while I’m getting a new web project organized. News about that will be shared when ready. There might be occasional other posts if something comes up & I can’t hold back, but meanwhile I’ll try to keep Toronto concert listings up to date until future notice. Thanks to regular readers for their patience.
Any Portland in a River Euphrates
February 25th, 2010
It’s late for me to be telling you this, but:
Frank Black and Carl Wilson: A Conversation About Modern Music and Taste
Thursday, February 25, 2010
7:00pm - 8:30pm
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave.
Portland, OR
Frank Black (Black Francis aka Charles Thompson III) writes and plays music as a solo artist and as a member of Grand Duchy and The Pixies. Carl Wilson is the Toronto-based author of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, about class, taste, cultural conflict and Celine Dion (part of the 33 1/3 Series).
They’ll have a dynamic, irreverent discussion about the changing meanings of “alternative” and “underground,” the relationship of indie to mainstream, emotion in music, and how what we like defines, creates and possibly distorts who we are.
Brought to you by the Portland Center for Public Humanities.
Now Read This: Significant Objects!
February 1st, 2010
My boyhood SF freak seems to have crept out when I was asked to write something for my friends Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker’s great project Significant Objects.
The idea, in case you haven’t run across it before, is to explore how things are invested with meaning, and therefore value, using eBay auctions as a laboratory. Josh & Rob have gone out and bought a bunch of junk, and then assigned each object (in my case, a vintage Charlie’s Angels lunchbox thermos) to a writer, who constructs a story around it. Then bidding is opened on the object at its “actual” value (in my case, $3) to see whether the story makes it more desirable, and by how much.
The result is - get this - I think my only piece of published fiction ever, though I was trying to draw on a little critical meta-thinking in terms of the various modalities of meaning-making that appear in the story. Oh, and the proceeds of the auction go to support 826 National, the non-profit tutoring and creative writing organization started by the McSweeneys/Believer gang.
Pazzed Out Cold (Balm in Indiead)
January 20th, 2010
The new Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll is up, and while it’s not the event it once was (because of past turmoil, competition [congrats on outlasting the now worse-than-useless Idolator, P&J], and finally the fact that it now comes lagging behind ten billion other lists and polls) and the top 5 are perhaps the most predictable P&J top 5 ever, there’s always some value in the essays and quotes. I liked (mostly) this remark from Michael Azerrad:
A lot of people sneer at so-called “NPR rock” for being wimpy or something, but it’s a hoary cliché that underground music has to be loud, fast, and out of control. Once upon a time, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied — look at the Velvet Underground droning about heroin while America tried to paste a fluorescent smiley-face over Vietnam; look at the Sex Pistols railing that “England’s dreaming” in ‘77 while the Queen’s silver jubilee distracted from rampant unemployment and racial unrest. But in 2010, mainstream culture isn’t complacent; it’s stupid and angry. So underground culture has become smart and serene. That’s not wimpy — it’s powerful and constructive, a blueprint for kicking against the pricks.
That’s an interesting thing for the guy who wrote the book about Black Flag and Husker Du to say. He’s right that there’s a basic impulse to make music as much unlike Glenn Beck as possible, and that there’s a philosophical/moral undercurrent to it.
I’m not quite so convinced of the historical myth of complacency - America wasn’t stupid & angry during the McCarthy era? Under Nixon? But I also wonder if the dropout oppositional logic of Animal Collective and others, which I applauded in 2004, isn’t now out-of-date - way less serviceable under Obama, who needs to be held to account, than it was under Bush, who was never going to give a shit what you said.
The mainstream mood now actually seems more a mixture of complacent and shell-shocked, and while that (and the nature of media) means that the stupid-and-angry faction resonates way beyond its proportions (as it did, agonizingly, this week in Massachusetts), it also makes it seem much less “powerful and constructive” for the “underground” to sound so compulsively self-soothing.
(Mike Powell makes an affecting case to the contrary although mainly by focusing on content rather than sound; I’m talking more about the thing his dad brings up at the top - all that reverb, smeared over the music like so much Vaseline on a lens, or Bert’s Bees lipbalm or something.)
Kiss and Say Goodbye:
Kate McGarrigle, 1946-2010
January 19th, 2010
how I attempted seduction
with a select and
careful playing of
The McGarrigle Sisters
how you seduced me
stereophonically the laugh
the nose ankle nature
repartee the knee
- from “The desire under the Elms Motel,” by Michael Ondaatje
That poem, from Ondaatje’s striking 1984 lyrical suite about marriage and infidelity Secular Love, always seemed to me evidence of the quiet way that Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s music insinuated itself into Canadian lives (or at least some Canadian lives), less as a main focus than as a climate, an atmospheric pressure. By power of understatement, they were able to attain, with remarkable frequency, something like perfection. (Kate’s children Rufus and Martha Wainwright’s songs sacrifice some of that perfection in favour of the sense of drama bestowed/wreaked upon them by their American dad, but it’s always available to them as singers when they reach for it.)
Following Kate’s sad death on Monday, after four years of suffering from liver cancer, many people will speak reverently of their singing voices, and perhaps of how they brought Quebec Acadian folk music for the first time to larger English audiences. But the sisters’ remarkable touch as songwriters is often neglected: so subtle, positively allergic to flash, but so sure and firm, with lines that shift and intensify in repetition and by geographic references and juxtaposed allusions to folk songs that do the emotional work of narrative without many of its explicit trappings - much the way Ondaatje’s poem has it, “ankle, nature, repartee, the knee.” You can hear the deep satisfaction other singers, such as Linda Ronstadt, Maria Muldaur and Emmylou Harris, always took in covering them.
It’s hard not to be saddened by the death of someone whose cherishing of family, place and history were so obvious and so generously shared with her listeners, in concert and on their Radio Hour and family Christmas albums. You couldn’t help but feel a little like one of their cousins (especially for those of us to whom Montreal is also personally dear). Kate was still appearing on stage to sing with her loved ones up to almost the very end, when she must have been very ill, which reinforced the feeling that this was a sustaining activity for them - that sharing a song was as integral to life as sharing a meal, or a drink, or a heartfelt conversation. Some music is interior and some is social but it’s a rare trait for music to be deeply intimate and deeply communal simultaneously (no wonder Ondaatje’s narrator found it erotic). Kate McGarrigle and clan achieved this with liberty, equanimity and sorority.
Talk to me of Mendocino
Closing my eyes I hear the sea
Must I wait? Must I follow?
Won’t you say, “Come with me.”
- from “Talk to Me of Mendocino,” by Kate McGarrigle
Profound sympathies to Martha, Rufus, Anna, Jane, Sloan, Loudon, Lily, Dane, Chaim and all the other McGarrigles, Wainwrights, Lankens and friends. Donations can be made to the Kate McGarrigle Fund, supporting cancer care and research at the McGill University Cancer Centre and McGill’s teaching hospitals.
This is the Story of Haiti & Regine
January 14th, 2010
The Arcade Fire has some advice for you about how to help with the crisis in Haiti (vocalist-violinist Regine Chassagne’s family emigrated to Canada from there). It parallels what I’ve heard from other people with Haitian aide experience, so it’s probably the best plan:
Friends,
Haiti needs your help in her darkest hour.
We just got off the phone with our friends at Partners in Health.
Most of the medical infrastructure in Port-au-Prince is down. Since Partners in Health’s clinics are in situated the surrounding areas and haven’t been damaged, they are mobilizing their resources towards the capital, setting-up field hospitals to treat the injured on the ground. Also, Paul Farmer (the founder of PIH) is at the UN and has access to the best information on where to direct the money… so for the moment if you want to help, we suggest sending funds here.
Canadian residents with Roger cell phones can text HELP to 1291. $5 will be directed to Partners In Health’s Haiti emergency fund.
Please be generous as time is of the essence.
love,
Win and Regine
If You Were Thinking of Studying
Aesthetic Philosophy
January 11th, 2010
… you don’t have to any more, now that you’ve got Douglas Wolk’s 5-Minute Guide to Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (as interpreted through images from Marvel Comics). Somehow I missed this when Douglas first posted it, the latest proof that he’s the one to beat in the genius-multimedia-lecture game.
In His Way, Yes: RIP Vic Chesnutt
December 28th, 2009
If you care you probably already know about Vic Chesnutt’s death over the holidays, at the age of 45. I first heard of him when a tribute album was organized to help pay the wheelchair-bound (from a drunk-driving accident in his teens) singer’s medical bills in the mid-1990s. But those financial burdens only got heavier over the years, with Chesnutt reported to have owed $70,000 in hospital fees at the time of his death - which happened to coincide exactly with the passage of the defanged U.S. health-care-reform bill in the Senate. Whether the new legislation could have provided someone in Chesnutt’s situation any “sweet relief” I can’t say, though I am inclined to doubt it, and judging by the timing of his apparent suicide, perhaps he did too, although speculation on what is sounding in the depths of someone’s heart when they take these desperate measures is really out of bounds.
I could rhapsodize for days about what a fascinating songwriter Chesnutt was. While he was more than capable of crapping out or trifling with his own talent - and even that said something about his fearlessness - his strongest moments offered this unusually philosophical music that reminds me of the aphorisms of E.M. Cioran (the author of books such as The Trouble with Being Born), who wrote, “Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.” But Chesnutt’s was, unlike Cioran’s excoriate-the-cosmos Romanian po’face, a southern-gothic existentialism that also partook of moments of transcendence in which the same things that make life intolerable also make it worthy of the love that pokes its crooked nose out between the bars of his songs - songs that find the pungency in a pun and heroism in just squinting hard enough to see your way clear to survival. … Most of the time.
The video above was made just a month ago, which makes it hard to endure, the thought that all that liveliness could be so suddenly given up and gone.
PS: His close friend Kristin Hersh (ex-Throwing Muses) provides a Paypal link to donate to Chesnutt’s family, along with her own moving tribute.
