Monday was my first day since the end of December of being both caught up on my journal and of not having things to study for a course. There was no ready-made routine to replace the old one though, and I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but I felt very sleepy all day. I went to bed at 10:45 until 12:15 and then I took another siesta at 17:15 until 18:45. I think I could have slept even longer if I hadn’t forced myself to get up.
I wanted to get
back into the routine of working on one page of French grammar exercises a day,
but I had to search a while to dig up my old notebook so I could see where I’d
left off several months ago. After I found it I couldn’t work on the next
exercise because I’d accidentally peeked at the answers, so I’d have to wait
until the next day when it wasn’t fresh in my memory.
I copied some
documents, videos and music files and pasted them into my external hard drive,
then deleted them from my computer to free up space.
I went onto the U
of T student web service so see if my Continental Philosophy mark had been
posted, but it hadn’t. I noticed though that I’m listed as being in third year.
I’m pretty sure there are some second year courses that I still need to take.
I’m about three
quarters of the way through watching the first season of Gunsmoke and there
hasn’t been much to write about it. I watched two episodes that evening though
that were interesting. In one of them, Dillon gives a young man in trouble a
break and Doc Adams compares this to preventative medicine. But when the kid
keeps getting in trouble the doctor tells him that sometimes metaphorical
surgery is necessary.
In the second
episode, a sixty year old farmer, relatively wealthy but naive farmer had come
into Dodge after his mother had died with the intention of finally marrying. He
had come with his housekeeper of twenty years but he thought he’d be able to
find a wife right away in Dodge. He took a liking to Miss Kitty and told her
that he was going to marry her. She told him to stay away from her or she’d
blow his head off with a shotgun. Shortly after that the old man is attacked
from behind by a shotgun and a woman’s footprints are found nearby. Because
everyone in the saloon heard Kitty make the threat, she is the prime suspect.
It turns out though that it was the old man’s housekeeper and that she’d merely
peppered his ass with buckshot. When she went to see him in the doctor’s office
and told him that she’d done it because he’d been ignoring her for twenty years
as a potential wife, instead of being angry he was suddenly interested in her.
When Kitty found this out, she looked at Matt and said, “Buckshot eh? That’s
all it took?” to which Dillon replied, “Hey! Now wait a minute!”
As I was getting
ready to leave for the Tranzac Open Stage on the night of Monday, May 9th,
I took my bicycle down from its hook and wheeled it out into the hallway where
my two second floor neighbours were discussing the fact that the heat was still
on. The furnace is controlled by a temperature sensitive thermostat, but as
soon as it detects a drop below 16.7 degrees it starts to blast and stays on
for quite a while. My oldest neighbour told us both that he’d heard that the
landlord would be coming within a day or two to shut off the furnace.
As I started up
Brock, the sky was a slightly lighter shade of dark blue than it had been the
week before. To my left, above the houses, the moon was an illuminated sliver
of fingernail enclosed in a circle of mist. It was cooler outside than I’d
expected, so it was a good thing that I’d anticipated that my expectations
would be wrong and wore my hoody under my jacket.
When I arrived,
Chris Banks was doing what I think is his bi-weekly Monday night show, “Happy
Hour with Chris Banks”. He was playing his upright bass with a jazz piano
player. After seeing Chris at the Tranzac over a period of two years, this was
the first time I’d ever heard him play. He’s a pretty good bass player and he
looks good doing it because he’s almost as tall as his instrument.
When they were
finished, Chris went for a drink at the bar. No MSG arrived and came up to tell
him, “I’m fifty-three years old and I finally get the Sex Pistols!” He said
their songs have the structure that a song is supposed to have. He had never
understood the hatred of Disco and so Punk and its political agenda had never
had any appeal to him. He added that when Punk was made more palatable in the
form of New Wave, it was colourful but still irritating and he couldn’t connect
with it. He got into Jazz and Blues and the sound of the cymbals was like white
water soothing him. The bridge, the departure and the other sections. Bob Dylan
is not the Blues but he’s eight bars and he keeps on going and it’s really
good. Eight bars become bricks and mortar in all these different genres, “so I
leave Jazz”. Chris asks him if he really means he left Jazz or if he’d rather
expanded out from it. No MSG explained that he’d always seen Jazz as an
apprenticeship to composing, to being a tunesmith, a guy that writes melodies
or lyrics. “You got guys who write melodies for the theatre and you got guys
who write lyrics for the theatre …” He continued talking, but it was quarter
after, and Dave Lang, from Dave’s Bass Lesson. The other half of the band and
hosting team, John Sladek was sick that night, but Colin Puffer, the Tranzac’s
sound technician was helping out on piano and voice for their opening song,
which he chose from his own repertoire. He told us, “I promised that I was
going to do stand-up, but I’m going to do sit down. I was listening to Johnny
Webb all day, but Dave doesn’t know the words to Macarthur Park”. Colin played
a Neil Young song called “Birds” that I’d never heard. I’d also never heard
Colin sing before- “ … When you see me fly away without you, shadow on the
things you know, feathers fall around you and show you the way to go …”
The first performer
on the open stage was Steven Lewis. As Steven was loading a harmonica into his
holder, he blew into it and then took it back out, to reach for another in his
guitar case, saying, “I’ve got the wrong harp.” Dave responded, “Well, it’s the
right harp, it’s just the wrong song.”
Steve’s first song
was an original entitled “Prairie Sky”, in which he sings about how nice the
prairie sky is.
His second offering
was another of his own, this one being named “DC-3”. He told us that a lot of
pilots bought DC-3s after the war and used them for smuggling – “If I had a
time machine I’d go back to the 1950s … flying from Istanbul to Casablanca and
all points in between … hauling contraband to secret places … flying the skies
in the fifties in my DC-3.”
Nest on the list
was Robert Labell, who started with what he said was an ode to summer. It was
one of his own compositions, played with a slide, called “Hot Girl With Power
Tools”.
Robert’s second
choice was a Leo Kottke composition named “Busted Bicycle”.
The following
performer turned out to be an entire band with a lead singer, an electric
guitar, an electric bass, and a drummer playing the house drum kit (which I’d
never seen anyone do on the open stage). They called themselves “Mango
Reinheart”. The singer told us jokingly that she wasn’t actually part of the
group and that they had only found her outside. She told us apologetically that
they would be playing nothing but break-up songs.
I didn’t hear her
drop the title of their first song, but my guess is that it was called “Sugar”
– “When I met you sugar, sugar, you were the one that made me so sad … Your
eyes they were brown, sugar …”
Their songs had the
feel of early sixties Brill Building factory written rock and roll songs
similar to the kind that Connie Francis sang.
Their second was “Alone” – “You standing
there … that song came on about lovers so true … I sip my drink and watch the
moon spin … I was the one who would miss you …”
Then it was my turn. First of all, I
asked the members of Mango Reinheart if they were influenced by Connie Francis.
The lead singer sarcastically answered that they were, but I wasn’t sure if she
even knew who Connie Francis was.
I started with “Judy”, my translation of
Serge Gainsbourg’s “Judith”, saying that it was a Doo Wop song without the
“doo” or the “wop” and that it was about what happens when obsession meets
infidelity – “ … Can’t decide if I should laugh or weep, I can’t find the right
words to speak to one who spins a lie like a spider traps a fly, If I cry it
just leads to rage, if I laugh there’ll be more damage, I really can’t tell if
I’m in heaven or hell …” When I finished the song there was dead silence, until
finally the couple that were the only ones in the room not signed up for the
open stage began to applaud and then everyone else followed. I assume that
people just didn’t know the song had ended, but it seemed to me that it had a
very clear finish.
For a follow-up I did my own “Memo to the
Heart of Insecurity” – “I guess I put too much faith in my own perspective, I
guess I should have helped with this tower of babble you erected, because it’s
all in bits, like an exploded box of Post Alphabits, I stand here surveying the
strewn debris, and marvel how you spelled love so many ways, each one so
emptily …”
Just after I sat down, Cad and Goldie
walked in and I cleared a space for them to sit at my table. Cad said they’d
only heard the end of my second song.
Next up, from Sidney, Australia, was
Daniel Twining.
Daniel’s first song was “Lone Winter
Pine” – “ … Gone honey gone, like a lonely pine at the end of a long old
country song … We’ll have to screen our phone calls from my dad …”
In setting up the next song, Daniel
confessed that he didn’t think he could play it because he’s too much of a
bastard. He said it was a song we all knew but might not recognize because of
how he played it. He played and sang it slowly and soulfully, but I didn’t pick
up until he got to the chorus that it was a song that was a big hit for the
Jackson 5 when I was fourteen called “I Want You Back”, written by “The
Corporation” which was a Motown songwriting team made up of four guys, one of
whom was Berry Gordy - “When I had you
to myself I didn’t want you around, those pretty faces always make you stand
out in a crowd … Oh baby give me one more chance …”
Daniel was certainly the most
professional sounding performer of the night. Dave regretted that he hadn’t
checked to see if the sound has that upside down reverb like they have in Australia.
After Daniel, I was surprised to hear
Dave say that we’d finished the list. I guess it was because the four members
of Mango Reinhart were under one name but hadn’t chosen to perform individually
too as bands usually do at the Tranzac. Dave then suggested a lightning round
of one song each, going through the list again.
As Steven Lewis once again headed to the
front Cad and Goldie started telling me that they’ve been volunteering at the
Jewish Festival and just saw a very sad movie. As Steven told us the title of
his third song was “Fever”, Cad told me that he has a writing ap on his phone
that writes for him. From Steven’s song – “Doctor can you help me? Am I
certifiably mad? Is it all an illusion, out my mind’s control? The fever’s
high, your mind’s a blur …” at this point Steven began to hum because he’d
forgotten some words, but then he recovered and finished the song.
While Steven had been singing, someone
new added his name to the list, so Dave called Gerard to the front.
Gerard stood at the microphone while
holding his phone and told us, in his Irish accent, that he would be doing a
rendition of Beyonce’s “Lemonade”, but then said that wasn’t true. He then
began an odd sort of stand-up routine in which he related the story of a recent
break-up – “I lost everything! I grabbed onto her like a drowning man!” Then he
declared, “Me and Holocaust survivors feel exactly the same!” I heard Goldie
say, “Oh really?” After gave a bit of a monologue about being hard done by,
which I think was meant to be a parody but sounded a little too real to be
funny, Goldie called, “You’re too young to be so depressed!” He put on an
elderly voice and responded, “I’m as old as the hills, mamn!” Then he went on
to give an outsider’s viewpoint on Canadian culture – “You’ve thrown away
culture … We’re all going to be coffee coloured … We’re gonna lose
individuality … So don’t race mix … You can imagine what an Irish person looks
like: an inflated, pink man running around a field chasing his children, but
nobody knows what a Canadian looks like … You’re all beautiful … In Ireland we
legalized Gay marriage, while we used to just put them in the priesthood … I’m
not at the height of happiness right now, so it’s nice to make other people
uncomfortable!” Then he began telling us about his health problems. He said he
took a crap and his shit started bubbling – “My shit literally farted!” I
called out that he could mail his shit to a doctor. He responded, “Yeah, I
could send a stool sample but …” Then I said, “But it has to be a shitty
doctor!”
Next was Robert Labell again, doing
another Leo Kottke cover. This one was entitled “I Yell At Traffic”.
I was supposed to be next, but a guy
who’d been sitting with his girlfriend even during Chris Banks’s performance,
asked Dave if he could do something. As he walked to the piano, I think he said
his name was Aaron Cuomo. He played an instrumental piece that sounded like it
probably has lyrics that just weren’t sung.
Then there was me. I did my translation
of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Un Violon, Un Jambon”, which I call “Hang Up A Ham and a
Fiddle In Your Window” – “ … You say that your girlfriend has tossed all your
friends out. Women! They just aren’t serious, and love is legally blind, of
that there is no doubt, and it’s blindingly obvious …”
The final performer of the night was
Daniel Twining, singing a song which he said was about getting broken up with
on Christmas Eve by text message – “ … There’s another old sailor hanging on
your arm tonight, so I’d better call a tailor because these rags aren’t gonna
do … I spent all my time and my money too, but I never knew how lonely I was
till I was living with you …”
Dave said, “That concludes the
post-Mother’s Day open stage at the Tranzac!”
I asked Cad and Goldie to tell me about
the depressing movie they saw at the Jewish Film Festival. They told me it was
called “Princess” and in the story, a mother’s boyfriend was raping her
daughter, but when the girl displaying symptoms of trauma, the mother
interpreted it as mental illness and sent her to a special school.
I looked this up, saw the trailer, and it
actually looks very good, but somewhat different than the way Cad and Goldie
described it. As far as I can tell from the promo, the girl meets a homeless
boy who looks almost exactly like her and who seems to be living or winds up
living a very similar life to hers.
Cad said that he hates Israeli films.
Goldie said that she was sent to an
alternative school when she was seventeen and she hated it because there was no
structure.
As we were leaving, I remembered the art
school known as Three Schools that used to be in the neighbourhood of the
Tranzac and that Cad had gotten kicked out because he was ogling the female
models. He told us that he would draw the women, put fishnet stockings on them
and then draw a cage around them. I cracked up laughing at the things that Cad
gets himself into, seemingly in total innocence.
Goldie, Cad and I walked along Bloor to Christie
station, while Cad told us about how spiritual he is becoming because of the
course he’s taking right now. They told him that all dreams are out of body
experiences.
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