November 30, 2003
Edmonton, AB
By all accounts my first solo appearance was a great success. I did mess up a bit, but apparently did a good job at weaving my mistakes into the fabric of the songs.
After the show, I was physically and emotionally exhausted (even though I only did four songs), and missed the opera and my friend's party in favor of sleeping. I feel much better now.
November 29, 2003
Edmonton, AB
So... after Rapunzel leaves her tower, she lives happily ever after? Wouldn't she sometimes miss hanging out all day, staring out the window dreamily? Perhaps that's not the real ending to the tale:"Happily Ever After."
I saw a copy of the Grimm Brother's Fairy Tales in the window of Wee Book Inn yesterday. Maybe I'll stop in after my show and check it out.
November 26th, 2003
Edmonton, AB
Well Carolyn, I happened to dip into the sauce myself tonight. I let it breath
for about five seconds and then downed it within a half hour. "It is better to
be a whino than a whiner (?)"
Yes, I love wine. Thank you Wanda for the inspirational photo session and the
bottle of Okanagan red.
Painting Daisies are trying to rehearse but their ever faithful tour van, Muffy
the Highway Slayer, has died yet again. We don't know the diagnoses but she is
currently acting as storage space for all of Rachelle's scheize. I am Rachelle
by the way and i have a lot of scheize. Our new rehearsal space is out on the
Yellowhead Highway and I have found that carrying a 200 pound keyboard on a bike
in -28 degree weather for 20 km doesn't work so well. May Muffy's god have
mercy on us, PLEASE! I just want to play rock n' roll. You can quote me on that.
November 25, 2003
Edmonton, AB
The sun is rising (again). Every morning, I wake up and watch it rise as I eat my oatmeal in the kitchen. I sit on the counter with my feet on the window sill, and if I find my thoughts wandering, I remind myself to look up and out and enjoy what nature is giving me. Beauty.
Beautiful sunrises make it worthwhile to wake up in the morning.
November 24, 2003
Edmonton, AB
The Fabiano Amarone Della Valpolicella got a little too much of my love last night.... a really nice wine; she was definitely worth the attention. I was upset with my first glass, as after having decanted the bottle for nine hours, it still gave me an alcohol burn on my upper palate. I put the bottle remorsefully aside. The next evening, with the wine having sat in the decanter for 29 hours, I gave it another go. The ladies at venomania were right... this bottle really did get better when it opened up. Wow.
David is doing better. He is slowly recovering from the attack. I had opened the Fabiano with the intention of sharing with him... sorry! My wine collection is now completely kaput, and here I am, 11 months away from my next birthday. Darn. Maybe I'll score well at Christmas...
November 23, 2003
Edmonton, AB
My cappuccino was worth the 27 block walk. I don't normally drink coffee... just when I'm at Tra Amici. I enjoy their espresso. I'll sometimes drink it in my cafe as well, just because it is good and I hate to see it go to waste (we always brew double shots and often the customers only want a single).
The coffee is enjoyable at Tra Amici, and I find that I can get a bit of work done because most of the conversations are in Italian. I'm not really distracted by background noise in languages foreign to my ears. There is, however, some English too. That can sometimes be a tad distracting. I have to be very cautious not to use my finely tuned musician ears for the purpose of eavesdropping. Today, to avoid such a possibility, I put my headphones on and blasted the Mozart as I worked on a band agenda.
Even the English conversations are not as distracting as I imagine they will be in the future -- when many of the conversations will be about me. Not to sound egotistical, but I know that the reality of having a job in the public eye (i.e. rock musician) has that kind of effect. People are attracted to celebrity, even minor celebrity (remember Joe Millionaire's tour of Edmonton's bar scene? I rest my case). It's already happening to a minor degree. Oh well. I'm a people person (most of the time)... it should be fun.
Oh, the staff at Tra Amici is also very nice. Prompt service and always some odd remark that causes me to smile. I imagine I'll be going there for a while yet to come.
November 21, 2003
Edmonton, AB
Our soundman and good friend David was jumped outside a club last night. A mild concussion, broken wrist, and some injury to his back. I am very upset that someone would do such a thing to him.
If Karma exists, David is proof that it flows from one life to the next. I don't know what he was in his past life, but it must have been something pretty horrible because he's sure paying for it in this one. David is the sweetest, most honorable man I know, and yet he never seems to get a positive break... Crazy stuff happens to him all the time; weird stuff -- like when the lady sitting next to him on the bus died a few years ago (on Christmas, no less!) -- like when he buys a new ladder and it breaks the first time he uses it (another broken wrist incident)... I don't know what else... so many things.... bad karma?
My life is the opposite of David's. Good Karma. I'm lucky. Very few accidents despite the high risk situations I've often placed myself in in the past (i.e. my driving as a teenager. I was very stupid... exciting, but stupid). Somehow, though, it seems as though we struggle the same amount with living, David and I. How does that work?
Maybe there's a certain amount of adventure that everyone needs to fulfill in their lives, and those of us who don't fulfill our allotment via stealing cars and living with street kids must make up for it in other ways-- having crazy accidents and stuff. Yet there are people for whom the most mundane of activities can seem adventurous... Ahhhh... perhaps it is because of our world view. David is the only person I know who has as few inhibitions and (generally self-imposed) psychological restrictions as I perceive in myself. Due to this condition (or rather, lack of condition), he needs more sensory activity to achieve a sense of "adventure". As he does not (at least not to the extent of myself) achieve this activity via conscious action, it is dealt to him via a subconscious predisposition to crazy situations. Perhaps this steaks me as a fatalist.... don't label me too quickly, however. I do believe in causality (ex-physics student, how could I not (ha ha )), but not an inflexible fate... but I am wandering off my subject now...
David was jumped outside a club last night. He'll be returning home soon to start healing again.
November 20th, 2003
Muffy is dead again. She died on the way home and took her last breath as I drifted up to my house. I think it is the alternator again. "Set fire to her", as Harald, tour manager Nazi would say.
It was a full day of scheize. Lots and lots of snow which makes me very happy despite the fact that it makes riding bikes very dangerous. Cars don't stop as fast and neither do bikes. I really want to go out into the backcountry this weekend but now we must focus on the tv special. I wonder if this tv show validates my career? Dad, is this considered a real job now? We had a band meeting today with Steve Glassman of CBC. We watched the CBC special on Kim's wall. Yikes! It looks really good. I am so stoked for you guys
to see it. We all have cleavage! And, more importantly, we play really well and the songs sound killer. Good work CBC crew. I am super tired so I must stop rambling. I need a thorough floss and that means must go now and NO SOLITAIRE.
November 19, 2003 Edmonton, AB
The moon is a bright white sickle, high up in the deep blues of early dawn.
We moved into a new practice space yesterday. It's in a rock warehouse. My sister would be trapped there for hours looking at all the magnificent samples. I was there by my own free will for hours contemplating another type of rock.
And you all -- how are you doing? My urge to hibernate is draining some of my energy... I imagine I'm not alone in that.
No rest for now... we've found out that our CBC special will be aired on December 30th (7pm) -- a full two months earlier than we were expecting. That means that all the things we were planning on doing for the next four months have to be done NOW. Lucky we excel under pressure. Excel or hibernate...
November 16, 2003
Well, here I am again. Four in the morning, at my computer because I am very awake... maybe I'm caught in some sort of recurring dream/reality thing. I think it would be called a cycle. Interesting.
What better to do at a quarter to five than write in your blog? I'm sure that there must be at least a half million other insomniacs in my time zone alone, perhaps some of them will become appreciative of my way-too-early-in-the-morning ramblings. Maybe I'll start a quarter-to-five internet chat room so we can non-sensically communicate in lines of typed grunts and howls... sort of a primal cave-woman with computer thing. I would definitely appreciate some primal communication right now.
Rachelle and I had a great gig on Saturday. The only thing really missing from the evening was the presence of a couple of my friends... I was sad for a while at their ditching, but pulled out of my funk well enough vis-à-vis talking with another friend about a camping trip to some hidden hot springs.
I had the pleasure of viewing a cinematic masterpiece yesterday: Akira Kurosawa's "Ikiru". Anyone interested in waxing philosophical or verbally vomiting intellectual on the subject of this great film can email me. We'll go have some coffee and let words fly. Worlds collide. You and I.... and then, goodbye.
November 16, 2003
p.s. Buy Isabel Bayrakdarian's "Joyous Light, Raffi Armenian" rather than "Azulao". Maybe buy two copies of Joyous Light to make up for not supporting her new effort... I hope that Hatzel's "Light From the Cross" is captured with grand passion whenever she's recording that one. With a voice like hers, the absence of grand passion in an overall recording is a horrible shame.
November 15, 2003 Edmonton, AB
Well, here I am again. Four in the morning, at my computer because I am very awake. What's on my whirring mind? The right things -- Rachelle and I playing together at the Sidetrack tonight (only twelve hours to sound check); my cafe (I'll be running it on my own for the first time ever next week); my homework (I'm going to have to shell out another $500 for extensions ---- aaahhhhh!!! I've got to finish my courses, this is crazy!); and just a dash of other lovely things such as drinking espresso and dancing. Good.
A perfect juxtaposition to my evening state of mind of last week.
Saltspring Island was so quiet and so dark at night that I slept continuously for three nights in a row. Of course we had killed ourselves the previously two days with nine hour drives and playing shows and loading gear (the usual touring musician 18 hr a day grind)... it's hard to imagine that we used to do that for months at a time. Crazy. I have a bad hip now from five years of loading gear that weighs more than I do. A bad hip and a stubborn mind... no, my stubborn streak has been around a lot longer than five years...
I would tell you about the shows and more about how wonderful Randy and his wife are... I may yet tell you more about that... but it's four in the morning and my thoughts really aren't focusing themselves right now.
I'm going to go play my bass for a while. Bye.
November 14, 2003 Edmonton
Edmonton, AB
A great experience... thank you Randy, Denise, Paul, Kasia (hope I spelled that right!) and Susanne. No time to write now... soon...
November 7, 2003 Edmonton
Today we head out on the highway
To take care of business
In Nelson, Vancouver and on Salt Spring Island.
Randy Bachman has invited us to Salt Spring. He has generously offered to open both his guest house and and his recording studio so that we may work together and see if we can get some audio magic brewing. We're not sure what will be recorded... Perhaps some people would be going crazy at this point, but lack of organization and pre-planning seems to be the price we all must pay for living in the moment. I guess that's why bands have managers -- so that they can be where they are and not end up suddenly finding themselves old, poor, and listening to the hit songs they never saw any royalities for playing daily on "Golden Oldies -- hits from the sixties, seventies and eighties"...
If I ever hear my songs in that context, I imagine they'll seem to be more brass oldies than golden.
I hope this wasn't supposed to be a secret (I usually don't do secrets because I speak my mind quite redily and forget what's meant for sharing and what's not) -- yea, I hope I'm not spilling the beans... ah.... I wish it was later in the day so I could call Rachelle or Daisy and find out if it was a secret....
I don't know. Anyhow, Randy will be coming to our Railway Club show, and we might do something together. I'm going to have to get my Guess Who cd back from Kim so I can get a better feel for Randy's tunes. Who knew that a walkman could be so handy? I bought mine (and my cost-more-than-a-month's-rent Grados) specifically to listen to Jeff Buckley's "Grace" after the cd was given to me as a gift... They've been serving me quite faithfully since then ... Chopin, mahuvishnu (spelt wrong), mingus, Miles, lady astride the tiger, a little Tom Waits... Sarah Vaughn (memories...). Oh, I bought the new Isabel Bayrachdarian, and it (predictably) kicks ass. The first few tunes are not really to my taste, but it does get awfully good later on. Buy it.
November 6 , 2003 Edmonton, AB
p.s. Rachelle, I love skiing -- especially skating -- it can give such a sense of freedom!