Saskatoon's Irish Music Community

For centuries, the Isle of Erin has been exporting the Irish. They left because of persecution by the English, potato blight, service in foreign armies, and hope in the new world. Every city across the globe has an Irish community. Quietly and without fanfare, every week, they gather in pubs to sing and play instruments: the Irish Music Session.

Ten years ago, I knew nothing of this. The circumstances that led me to Saskatoon's Irish Music community are part of a well-rehearsed tale. It's a story that's all too-familiar to those close to me, but I must recount it again.

In 2000 I was in my mid-twenties and lost. In the 90's, I had wanted to be a classical musician and composer. I pursued a Bachelor of Music degree with a Theory and Composition major when I left high school. However, I soon fell out with my University's chief composition professor, he being a strict modernist who studied with John Cage, I being a headstrong tonalist. After a few years of frustration and resulting low self esteem, I changed my degree to escape him. I briefly played viola with the Saskatoon Symphony, but was let go. After I finished my degree, I put my viola aside and did not touch it for two years. I truly thought that music was over for me. I felt angry and betrayed.

I cannot tell you how painful this separation was. Music, for me, is the closest thing I have to church. My first truly religious experience where my skin tingled and my consciousness soared occurred when I was playing viola in the last movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. Music has since been my proof, however vague, of a higher power. My instrument has been my altar and melody and harmony my prayers.

Soon after the decade turned, I met Eileen Laverty, who told me of the existence of the Irish Music Sessions at Lydia's pub, hosted by Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann. The following Saturday, viola in-hand, frightened and not sure what to expect, I stepped into Saskatoon's Irish Music Community.

All around me was the thump of bodhrans, the strum of guitar and bouzouki, the ringing of fiddles and lively voices singing beloved songs. Jigs and reels whirled in my brain. There again was that divine exhaltation I had lost, lifting my consciousness into ecstasy. After three glorious hours had passed, I was dizzy and elated.

It has been ten years since that day and Irish folk music has never left me. The people I met there welcomed me. Through them I discovered that I could sing, fiddle and play the banjo. I founded the wandering evening session that started at The Publican, but found a home at McGettigan's, the Brass Monkey, The Park Town and finally the Mendel Art Gallery. I've spent wonderful hours with the South-Central Ceili Band and the Residuals.

Last month, I stood up at the Lydia's session and told all present how grateful I felt. But that's not enough to thank all those musicians I have met over the years. If I had enough money, I would have expressed those thanks in beer that day. I'll write it here again: Thank you all, my friends. Even that is not enough. The gift that Saskatoon's Irish Community has given me, my renewed love of music, is greater than any alcohol or words could commend.

A special props goes out to my peeps in The Residuals. Ted Leighton, Rick Kroener, Rob McInnis, Meaghan Haughian, Bettina Grassman, Mike Podiluk, Gareth Bond, Erin Gaucher, Chris Meek and all those who have ever been a Residual, you're the best. Thank you for the music and the memories.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

Homeless and Harris-bound

To those reading my blog who haven't heard otherwise, my wife and I are moving from Saskatoon. The house is sold and we're moved out, but we're awaiting the possession date of a place in Harris, SK, a town 45 minutes southwest of Saskatoon. That leaves us homeless for a month.

Moving is always a time of mixed feelings for me. For the last twenty years, with minor blips never more than five months long, Saskatoon has been my home...

...and a cat just dropped out the window. I'm house-sitting and this second-story window doesn't have a screen. Francis the kitten decided to test the theory that cats can't fly. The sound I heard went scrape-scrape-scrape-plop. Poor kitty! Don't worry, Francis seems fine. Just scared shitless and now in hiding. We now return to our scheduled programming...


... Okay. Saskatoon. My hometown. From what I can tell, it's a town without an identity. It's Saskatchewan's largest, but has little personality. It's pretty but not a hub of culture. It boasts only one landmark building, the Bessborough Hotel, a castle-like structure where I was married this fall, but that's it. I was amused to hear a small-town lady I met yesterday refer Saskatoon as "a big place" when most of the world's residents would probably think it unremarkable or small.

When I first moved here in 1989, Saskatchewan was in serious decline. The Devine and Mulroney governments were in the process of bankrupting us. When they were voted out, drought hit and didn't let up for a decade. In an agriculture-based economy, that sucks. People were leaving the province by the hundreds every month. Saskatoon's population stayed steady as established residents fled the city to Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto while people from rural areas took their place. Jobs seemed very scarce, and while the city was still pretty with its river valley and elm-lined streets, it still felt like Saskatoon had nothing going for it.

Then a few years ago, that changed suddenly. In the space of half a year the prices of houses doubled. People started moving here from abroad. In my travels about Canada, Saskatoon seemed to be the name on everybody's lips as "that place I'm thinking of moving to".

The funny thing is I'm not sure why this has happened. No gigantic factories have, to my knowledge, opened their doors (in fact the big Mitchell's slaughterhouse closed). There was no winter Olympics. There was no great cultural revolution that attracted the intellectuals of the world. With the exception of some boring suburban neighborhoods on the edge of town, it's just dumb-ol' Saskatoon but with more traffic problems. Oh, I guess the University now has a psychlo-tron... psycho... synchno... a scientific thingy that nobody is sure what it does.

I'm not going to complain. If it wasn't for the boom, Suzi and I would not be able to buy our home in the country with cash and we would still have mortgage payments. I'm not even going to say that I miss the old, quiet Saskatoon: it kinda sucked. What I will say is that with Saskatoon growing, civic leaders now have to think hard about what this town is becoming.

From what I've seen, Saskatoon's planners have a serious case of Calgary-envy. Take, for example, the Weir. It's a depression-era irrigation project which was designed to raise water levels, but since the South Saskatchewan was dammed upriver, it's main use is to look pretty and occasionally remove stupid people from the gene pool. Calgary had a weir on the Bow and recently removed it. So naturally our wannabe oil-baron, six-gun-shootin', cattle-rustlin', Olympics hostin' city council wants to get rid of ours. Why? "It's dangerous and stuff! Won't somebody think about the CHILDREN???" Honestly, more people have been killed over the years on 8th Street in traffic accidents, but we're in no hurry to put it to the jackhammer.

Anyway, that's just a tiny part of the we-wish-we-was-Calgary bullshit that goes on here. In my mind the most troubling way Saskatoon is developing is the way it is developing outwards. The new neighborhoods are following a pattern seen everywhere else in North America, not just Calgary: twisty streets that confound travelers and ambulance drivers, laden with shitboard houses cobbled from environmentally unsound materials. Beyond these are the estates of the rich: huge mansions that leak energy onto the windswept prairie, sitting on bald lawns that the owners never use which would be growing wheat in other circumstances, disgorging Hummers and trucks from multi-car garages for the single-occupant drive to work every morning.


All civic planners know this is a problem. With such low-density housing, mass transit, which is already a joke in Saskatoon, will remain a joke. If the city continues to grow in such a fashion, it will become Calgary: crappy, traffic-jammed, 1-hour-commute Calgary. (As a side note, there are still many areas in town, especially the industrial ones, that you cannot reach by bicycle unless you put your life in jeopardy) Why is nobody doing anything about this? Why is nobody showing any sort of foresight in my town when they see what is happening in almost every city in North America?

I once read a great book called "How Cities Work" by Alex Marshall that had a section on Portland, Oregon. Most cities that have excellent mass transit systems like New York or Vancouver got lucky by having their cores crammed onto little juts of land surrounded by ocean. In their developing days, these cities grew upward instead of outward because growing out wasn't much of an option. Portland, at least at the time of the book's writing, had recognized the problem of Suburban sprawl. City planners discouraged expanding the city limits and encouraged high-density residential areas. As a result, mass-transit became easy and profitable. The city got greener and easier to navigate than, say, Calgary.

That's a pretty hard one to swallow for many people. I myself prefer the ideal of the one-family home with the backyard and barbeque and all that, but I'm not so sure that's the best thing for the health of the city or indeed the world. What with the world population expanding and agricultural land getting more scarce, maybe it's not the best idea to be barfing out low-density homes onto prime cropland. On the plus side, if we decide we need the farmland back, all those shitboard houses should be really easy to demolish. Or we can just continue saying, "It's not my problem" until we run out of oil and food.

Speaking of which, and here's the really funny part, It's not my problem! Bye-bye, Saskatoon! In about three weeks time I'll be living in a single-family dwelling in Harris with a huge yard in which to hold family barbeques! Ha! Isn't the hypocrisy just delicious? At least I don't own an SUV or a mansion yet and I'll be using my yard to grow vegetables. But it does make me wonder how far down the consumerist rathole I'll slide during my lifetime. Perhaps during the next decade I'll be thinking about how much room my kids' hockey equipment takes in the backseat and considering a new Hummer H7.

As a post-script, my friend Max has a company to build environmentally-friendly homes. If you're tired of energy-bleeding shitboard homes and have some land, you should consider letting him make you a home out of rammed earth or straw bales. It's truly a noble undertaking and he needs willing customers. His number is (306) 260-9191.

Toodles.

http://www.pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

Fire in the Head

I am feeling very passionate right now. About what, I don't know. Is that odd? Perhaps some words violently tapped upon my keyboard will reveal the mystery.

I often get in moods like this late at night. I feel I am on the verge of something great and profound. I want to shout the injustices of the world and reveal some great hidden truth.

Underneath this urge is the threat of crippling nostalgia. My memory is a curse. While I struggle with basic concepts like, "I have an appointment at 3:30 today," I have a vivid memory for my place in the past. Long-gone smiles, remembered smells and snatches of music torment me. I can close my eyes and recall a moment almost perfectly. I get lost and when I open my eyes I want to cry. Days gone by can never be relived.

It doesn't matter if the memory is from a rotten time in my life. Why on earth would I want to be back in the mid-late 90's? Was I not frustrated, lonely, socially retarded, terrified of women and defeated? Yes I was. But there was this one time I was looking out the window of my apartment on Broadway at night, a Radiohead B-side was playing and giant snowflakes were falling. I stared into orange street lamps, feeling cold air leaking through the window. The radiator clicked and cooking dust drifted into my nostrils. I was lonely but content. I was free. It was the late 90's, I was there and I will never be so again.


Even as I sit here typing I wish I could just have an hour in that time and place, walk Broadway as it used to be and visit the young versions of my friends. We were so... I don't know... heady? Full of possibility. Now reality has scarred and scattered us. I miss us, those young people with their cigarette smoke, ironically-enjoyed b-movies and their, "What do you want to do?" "I dunno, what do you want to do?". I miss my apartment. I miss how it all made me feel.

Aw, Jeez. I guess I've strayed into crippling nostalgia. It's at times like this I must remind myself that the 90's weren't that great. Three of the ten top-selling albums from the 90's were by Celine Dion. There was this huge recession that nobody acknowledged, this awful, boring, drawn-out economic slump that affected everybody except baby boomers. My apartment had mice. Mealworms lived beside my bed. Dr. Jim Pankiw was my MP.

This isn't working. Thinking about the 90's vermin is making me nostalgic. I should probably just stop typing. Before I do, if any of my 90's friends are reading this, I'll just say I love you. We should hang out and watch a lousy movie sometime.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/