Knocking the Windowpane

If pride cometh before the fall, you can expect my next drop to shatter my skull (again).  The Residuals will soon celebrate our album, Knocking the Windowpane, at our CD release party.  The event is at the Woods Ale House, October 6th, (2012), at 9:00 PM.  There will be a concert, CD signing, and a free Paddockwood beverage for your $5 entrance free. 

So how am I feeling?  A year ago this album was just a frightening concept for my ego and pocketbook.  Now I don't care if we ever sell another copy.  Listening to the culmination of all that effort in my car, seeing Kara tap her feet in the back seat is reward enough. 

And what an experience!  When we entered PulsWorks studio in December of last year, we were worried.  Some of us were terrified.  We were rehearsed and prepared, but as we sat before the microphones in the centre of the room, we were tense.  Were we making the right decision in our choice of studio?  The standard amount one can expect to pay to record an album is $10,000, but we were budgeted for half that amount.  Would our miserliness ruin our work?  Would we mess up and cause a fiasco?  Were we good enough to record an album?   

Indeed, nothing seemed to go right those first hours.  As we struggled through Patsy Geary's Jig and Miss McLeod's Reel, fingers fumbled, trembling hands strummed uncertain chords and tempers rose.  Ted's pipes squawked in the dropping humidity.  (We preserved a relic of our frustration at the beginning of the Patsy Geary Set track: Ted's drones fail to deploy and he growls, "Oh, you son of a gun.")
 

At the end of that day, we decided to try one last track.  It was Rick's song, The Blue Diamond Mines, a Jean Ritchie ballad about working coal mines.  For four brief minutes, everything went right.  We had a near-perfect one-take wonder instrumental track.  "It's a good thing we did that," said Rob, "Because if we hadn't, there wouldn't be a second day of recording." 

Over the next months, we got better at recording.  We relaxed.  We started to have fun.  And we also ripped through tracks with confidence and the good musicianship I've come to expect from my band. 

Soon, our instrumental tracks were recorded.  We left the big room we chose for its acoustics and entered a tiny padded room.  That was a fun day!  It's cliche, but we all experienced shock at hearing our voices in high fidelity (do I really sound like that?)  We recovered quickly and completed all of our songs in record time!  (notice the hilarious double-meaning there?) 

Next came editing.  Rob and I joined our engineer, Brady, in the studio to turn our work from kinda good into perfect.  It's amazing what a good sound engineer can do.  It's not just adding echoes.  The three of us surfed all of our music for not just the best takes, but the best sections of each take.  Seemlessly, Brady cut the rotten bits out, substituted good bits, and subtly blended the result so it didn't sound dumb.  His wonderful gadgets and gizmos were also able to easily change the duration of sung lyrics so that we sounded way tighter than we actually are. 

Perhaps some ultra-traditionalists are pumping their shillelaghs in the air in fury exclaiming, "Editing?  Why would ye want ta do dat terrible t'ing?"  It's worth noting that all the editing we did used pure "us", just the best of us.  No pitch correction tools were used.  Each track was recorded with all instruments in the same room, playing at the same time.  Also, no animals were harmed.  Also, go to hell you stereotypical conservative Irish straw-men! 

Rob recorded his tracks from prison

Then, one summer day, the recording and editing was finished.  I remember it because it was the day before my birthday.  Also, I fell down my front steps at home from exhaustion as the tension left my body.  As I was lying on cement at the bottom of my deck unable to move from fatigue, relief, and also pain from my twisted ankle, it became apparent that I was carrying a burden of stress from this project. 

At the time, I thought the stress was over, but there was more fun in my future.  There was the manufacture to arrange and make sure it would be in Saskatoon by FolkFest.  There was the booklet to design.  And also licensing.  Ohhh, the licensing.  Take it from me, if you're going to record an album, make sure you either write your own songs or borrow from the public domain.  8 cents per song per album may not seem like a lot of money to pay in licensing fees, but you pay tenfold in time-wasting as you fill out forms and hunt for composers on the internet.
 

Regardless of troubles, our baby is here.  I can be critical and severe, particularly regarding music, PARTICULARLY my own music, but I actually like our album!  My peeps tried their damndest and they succeeded in producing one hour of pleasing music.  What's it like?  Think Great Big Sea minus the drum kit and minus the cheesy songs designed to get them laid.  Or maybe imagine what the Dubliners could have done if they drank less. 

Knocking the Windowpane truly redefines Irish traditional music.  Nay!  Music itself!  Junk your other CDs, dismantle the recording industry, disband the Metropolitan Opera, send Bob Dylan to the gibbet, throw the Black Eyed Peas to the wall, dig up the corpses of the great composers and burn them.  You won't need 'em after you buy Knocking the Windowpane.  Am I over-selling this? Perhaps.  But I still think the Black Eyed Peas should be executed.
 

As the result of our hard rehearsing, our act is better.  We've doubled and trebled the number of gigs we've been playing.  However, for the Residuals, our big project is over and now we have time for some rest.  Rest, in this instance, means learning new material, enjoying alcoholic beverages in moderation and generally not worrying about stuff.  It feels good. 

http://pharaohphobia.blogspot.ca/

Movie Review of Nashville

The 59th movie on AFI's list is the Robert Altman film Nashville.  It's a typical Altman film with a giant ensemble cast, realistic dialogue and a rambling plot.  It follows a few days in Nashville's country and gospel music industry in the 1970's. 

I wasn't a huge Robert Altman fan before I saw this film, and I'm still not.  You would think that with realistic characters and authentic-sounding dialogue, a film would be interesting.  But Nashville is not.  I would even say that it is unspeakably dull.  Because the camera's attention wanders in and out of characters' conversations and doesn't cut during the boring parts, my attention span did the editing for Robert Altman by drifting in and out of the movie.  Things my wife was doing, the antics of household cats, the weather, and lint between my toes at various times were more interesting to me than the action on-screen. 

The movie's music is meant to be a snapshot of the real Nashville's music in the 1970's.  And boy-howdy, country music was in a bad place back then.  On the scaffolding of cowboy ballads, folk music and songs about unfaithful wives was built a teetering Babylon of maddening pretention where untrained singers screeched above full orchestras, when early synthesizers beeped and booped next to the howl of slide guitar, when nauseating, nasal male voices told you in no uncertain lyrics exactly what to think.  The lumbering adult-contemporary beast opened wide its maw, gobbled Hank Williams Jr. and took a shit on 70's culture.  That rhinestone-encrusted piece-a'-shit was country music from this era. 

Nashville is many things bad.  It's a black comedy that isn't very funny.  It's a snapshot of a musical genre that deserves infamy and scorn.  It's another reason I have to curse Robert Altman's name and progeny, and yet another selection from the supposed 70's golden age of cinema that just bores not just the hell, snot and shit out of me, but the lymph, earwax and spinal fluid. 

In conclusion: Fuck.  Nashville. 
1/2 a repetative refrain of "It Don't Worry Me" out of 100

My Wonderful Band is Making me Crazy

The St. Patrick's Day season has ended. Traditionally, this is the busiest season for The Residuals. In fact, it's the reason The Residuals were originally formed: to satisfy the glut of demand for Irish music around March 17. After it's over, the band always enters a state of hibernation, emerging a month or two later to prepare for some isolated summer gig.

Always? Apparently not this time. This year we have a one-week hiatus and then we're back to work. We're hitting the studio again soon to continue recording our CD and we already have several gigs lined up for the rest of the year.

I love it. I am so proud of my band right now. While the Residuals have been around for over ten years, our current lineup of players - myself, Ted Leighton, Rick Kroener, Rob McInnis and Meaghan Haughian - has only been together for three. Those three years have been a series of incredible leaps in musicianship for we five. As their skills improved, I've listened and smiled. I've seen layers of stage fright shed from them like onion skin. I've watched as each of them gained the confidence and talent to experiment and "play" when they're playing.

Since December, we've been recording our as-yet unnamed CD and been busy with many gigs. As happy as I am to play with the Residuals, there is a pretty massive downside. As I discussed in this post, music inspires feelings in me that prayer inspires in others. Between the few hours I spend playing, I'm waiting to play.

The CD especially has me excited and I just can't wait to get into the studio. Yet I must wait. And I can't do anything about it. When I should be concentrating on the present, I'm instead anticipating the future. It sometimes makes me depressed.

I just can't get enough of playing with my band. I want more gigs, more CDs, more victories! Touring would be awesome! And yet there lies the other problem. Everybody but me has jobs. There's no way they could ever go pro without quitting them. Or I could frame them and get them fired for misconduct, but that's a series of devious plots for later.

For now, it seems the only answer is to just be less enthusiastic. I'm not sure that's possible. Many high-fives, fist-smashes, and hugs (where applicable) to my excellent Residuals for a best-ever St. Paddy's Day season!

ps. during band introductions, Ted called me "The Always-Distracting Jeremy Cook". I've never thought about it, but I guess I am kind of distracting. Is that good or bad?

pps. If you haven't already done so, Like our fanpage on Facebook.

The Ten Worst Canadian Things... Ever!

Canada struggles for its identity. It hovers in the shadow of the United States, an economic and cultural powerhouse. Many seek to define Canada by what it isn't and produce a litany of cultural and historical characteristics that make us not the USA. Others point to Canadian victories in war (the reputation of fighting Canadians in the World Wars), victories in politics (Arts Boards, Medicare), victories in science and technology (insulin, the Canadarm, the telephone), or victories in sports (uh... there's probably some real-good sports victories out there to mention but I honestly don't give a fuck).

But let's face it. If we're going to be a real culture like the United States, we need, NEED, a list of bad things to define us. The US has a history of slavery, a bizarre half-assed colonial thing, unbelievable poverty in the midst of immense wealth and a weird news-media culture that can only be called a triumph of the subjective. As Canadians, we can look at these things and say, "See? We didn't do that. We're better than those awful Yankees." If we ever want to be taken seriously, we need a list of faults, bungles and morons that any American can see and say, "Thank God, thank God I'm an American!"

THIS IS THE LIST.

Here are the rules by which the list is compiled. The things on this list must be Canadian icons, people or influences that reached beyond our borders and spread their cancerous filth like gangrene upon the world. Canadian politicians are off the list because they're too easy and, also, one man's hero is another's devil. So as much as I want him here, Stephen Harper is safe. I have also omitted serial killers like Robert Pickton and Col. Russell Williams because, once again, they're too easy, nor do they have much comic potential. Now begins the countdown:

10. Krantz Films, Inc.

Perhaps you've never heard of Krantz Films. No actually, you have, though you were very young when it scarred you. For it was Krantz films that was responsible for those awful, lazy Rocket Robin Hood cartoons and, more famously, the Spider-Man series of the 1960's. The cartoons produced by this animation house can scarcely be called animation. When movement occurs, it is choppy and sloppy. Footage is re-used shamelessly.

"Come on, J. Adrian," you might say if you were in-the-know, "Krantz didn't make anything lazier than any other two-bit animation house of that era. Remember The Fantastic Four, The Hulk and Mighty Hercules cartoons?" Yes. But even they did not sink to this low: plots were re-used. Remember Dementia 5? You should, because both Rocket Robin Hood and Spider-Man traveled to Dementia 5, had the same acid-inspired adventure and in the process terrified two generations of children. Lame lame lame! Canadians did that.

9. Lord Black of Crossharbour
What's better than a rich, criminal media-baron? A rich, criminal media-baron who also happens to be an arrogant windbag, that's who. And it's Canada's very own Conrad Black. Or, I should say, was Canada's own, because he's renounced his citizenship to become a British Lord.

Hating free-speech seems like a strange trait for a newspaperman, but that's our Conrad. He and his supervillain wife, Barbara Amiel, have been a pair of howler monkeys in Canada's tree, annoying Canadians with their right-wing views for over twenty years. Black was so widely-hated that when Queen Elizabeth II wanted to make him a Lord, then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien intervened and argued that a Canadian cannot be made a Lord. That's when Black renounced his citizenship. Yay! Later, of course, he was convicted for fraud and obstruction of justice in the US. More good stuff. I hope you're enjoying Lord Black, Queen Elizabeth II. We don't want him back.

8. The Heavy Metal Movie
Have you ever wondered what would happen if a stupid glowing green ball called the Loc-nar was the cause of all evil in the universe? I didn't think so. And judging by the significance the Loc-nar plays in each of the short films in Heavy Metal, neither did the creators.

Yet the Loc-nar provides "unity" to the rambling tales that comprise Heavy Metal. It forces a little girl to watch scenes of ultimate evil which frighten her. Yet the ultimate evil she beholds include a bald barbarian congregating with topless chicks, some aliens getting high on a substance named Nyborg, a dastardly space captain and some more topless chicks. Scary stuff. Now, if the Loc-nar's evil plan was to bore us to death, I'd believe it.

No, really. Somehow the movie manages to make blood-spattered topless warrior chicks boring. The animation is painfully slow. The plot is constantly interrupted by "music-video" segments which might be appealing if you're stoned. SCTV alumni and Harold Ramis as voice talent could not save it. It's one of the most famous movies to be produced in Canada and it sucks Nyborg.

7. Apartheid
Bwah? Well, rumour has it that during a trip to Canada, visiting South Africans observed our system of Indian Reserves. "What a great idea!" they said, "We should do that to our black people!" They took it a step further. Several steps, in fact, leading to one of the most racist and evil policies of planet earth.

Only #7, you say? Surely this is worse than Celine Dion? Yes, but Canada doesn't get full credit. Our exclusionist policies only inspired Apartheid, after all. Realistically, Canada need only feel guilty about confining our aboriginal peoples to the least-wanted farmlands available to teach them agriculture, stealing the food we promised them and refusing to give them jobs for a hundred years.

Nah, let's just ignore that issue. It's easier.

6. Tom Green
Okay. I'll admit it. I did not see the manifestation of Tom Green's true talent, a little film called "Freddy Got Fingered". By the time it was released, I knew better. Reports that it was one of the worst movies ever made confirmed my prejudgments.

I had previously watched the Tom Green Show. I knew his shtick. The usual show would go something like this: Awkward onstage banter. Tom drinks some kind of bodily fluid. Cut to Tom with something stupid on his head irritating people in a public place. I change the channel.

Don't get me wrong. From a comic perspective, there is nothing wrong with taboo humour, whereby social norms are broken. I've watched and enjoyed enough Sacha Baron Cohen and Kenny vs. Spenny and know what it looks like when it's done well. Tom's brand of taboo humour was limp, aimless and poorly executed. When he pretended to hump that roadkilled moose, he could have created no more potent a symbol. The moose represented Canada's reputation. Or perhaps comedy. I haven't decided yet.

5. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police
I will receive disagreement from many quarters for this one, but I fervently believe in my choice. Things have changed since the image of the dutiful Dudley Do-right were formed in the consciousness of the world. The RCMP has since forgotten that it is a national police force and not a political entity or a business.

Like most police forces, it has the usual array of brutalities against protesters, questionable taserings and invasions of privacy. What makes the RCMP special is that starting about 50 years ago, it has an odd history of being naughty with fire and explosives: stealing dynamite, burning down barns, and if Wiebo Ludwig is to be believed, staging an attack on a pipeline to frame him. Then there's the time that the RCMP let the Americans know that a muslim(!) Canadian, Maher Arar, was on board a flight in New York. The Yanks quickly bundled him off to Syria to get tortured. That's some nice treatment of our citizens abroad, boys.

Next, the RCMP has been forgetting that it is supposed to be an impartial police force and behaving like a partisan political entity. They used taxpayer money to pay individuals to write negative opinion pieces in newspapers attacking Vancouver's safe injection site in 2008. Then there was the RCMP researching people applying to appear at Prime Minister Stephen Harper's gatherings during the 2011 election, giving helpful tips on who he might not like, and assisting Conservative goons in escorting CITIZENS away from the PUBLIC gatherings! That is not helpful. That is some authoritarian bullshit.

And a final strike against them. We all know the redcoated image of the mountie smartly saluting with his black pants and boots. Did you know that the RCMP sold the rights for this image to the Walt Disney Company for five years? That's great, fellahs. While we're at it, let's license the Canadian flag to Time-Warner. All this adds up to an organization whose brass have forgotten the meaning of the symbolic Mountie: dutiful, friendly, helpful and ready to serve all citizens.

4. Celine Dion
She is one of the most popular Canadian musicians of all time. Of the top ten best selling albums of the 90's, two are hers and a third, the "Titanic" soundtrack, was popular only because of her featured Oscar-winning song.

Her music is the epitome of bland. The second her albums left the charts, we began to hear them piped over the sound system in supermarkets. I know I've heard her music a million times, but for all that, I couldn't name you a single tune except for the one about the big boat and it goes, "Ooooo".

Yet I know there is this invisible class of persons who love Celine Dion, subscribe to the National Enquirer, can be seen shuffling out of scrapbooking shops in sweat pants with weary eyes focused on the pavement, collect animals made out of glass crystal and have no greater joy than when Ellen DeGeneres dances. The following statement is made not on their behalf but from the rest of Canada to the world: We are sorry. We're so, so sorry for Celine Dion. If there's anything we can do, anything at all to atone, please call us when you stop being angry.

3. The Alberta Oil Sands
As the world's oil supply burns into oblivion and prices rise to levels undreamed, you'd think that Canada would be trying to find an alternate fuel source for the future that doesn't cause global warming. Nope. Instead, Canada has encouraged a more expensive, more filthy, more inefficient, more environmentally damaging way of extracting oil from the earth. It requires large amounts of natural gas and alarming amounts of water to do so. Sadly, from a price perspective, it's totally worth it.

It's almost impossible to describe an oilsands development area unless you've been. I haven't visited, but my wife has and it horrified her. I've only seen pictures: vast expanses of sand, filth, machinery and tailings ponds. They dump their industrial waste into these open water pits and position sound cannons around the perimeter to scare waterfowl away. But sometimes mistakes happen and northern Alberta has been witness to many dead, tar-covered ducks and workers.

Oilsand extraction is big business. It makes billions of dollars per year, yet for some reason the Harper government keeps giving them more than a billion dollars a year. They don't need the money, dumbasses! They were going to develop those oil sands anyway because it's extremely lucrative. Quit it!

And lastly, Fort McMurray, which was an awful town to begin with, has grown into a sprawling, poorly-planned blight upon the forest with ONE ROAD connecting all the neighborhoods. Ever seen a traffic jam in the forest? Young people are drawn to the oil sands for the money, find expensive homes in Fort McMurray, get depressed because they're separated from their families and working twelve-hour days, spend their money on abundant booze, drugs and hookers, then get fed up and move home just in time for their partners to ask for a divorce. Fort McMurray, by all rights, should have its own entry on this list, but I've chosen to amalgamate it into the oilsands entry because it is merely a symptom of the oilsands problem.

People are people and we only change during crises, so we will not be rid of oilsand development until the last drop of oil is extracted and civilization is left scratching its head and wondering, "Now whadd'r we gunna doo?" Cheer up! Canadian scientists are busy, busy working on ways to extract oil from oil clay, a method that promises to be even more expensive and harmful than oilsand extraction! Yay!

2. Usage-Based Internet Billing
Netflix has shaken media as we know them. One day it shifted its focus from mail-order rentals to streaming videos on the internet. It offered this service to Canadians for a low price of $8.00 a month. And Canadians were very happy.

They were so happy that they stopped paying stupid amounts of money for on-demand movie and television with their local service providers. Rather than lowering their prices and "competing", as it's called by capitalists, the big internet and television companies whined to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (a government body which would deserve its own entry if it wasn't a local Canadian thing) and asked it to allow them to charge the small companies who rent their internet lines according to how much data they use. Streaming video, such as that offered by Netflix, uses a lot of downloading capacity.

This has opened the door for an idea called UBB, or Usage Based Billing. Basically, internet companies have put an arbitrary cap on the amount of data Canadians can download. If they go over, they get charged large amounts of money. This led to a storm of complaints toward the the CRTC and the big internet companies. Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised to open an inquiry into the CRTC decision and the Minister of industry threatened them, but so far nothing has happened. Bell and Shaw are planning to make the switch to UBB and have hired their propegandists to turn the Canadian public against itself, claiming there are "problem users" who download massive amounts of data and raise the price for everybody, trying to convince us that people should pay for the amount that they use.

Here's the thing. Let's put aside issues like the facts that UBB is an obvious ploy by monopolists to destroy their enemies and a cheap grab for more money without doing any work. Usage Based Billing is contrary to the vaunted ideas of our Information Age. It might even be contrary to civilization. The internet has always been exalted as a repository of information and entertainment accessable to everbody. With caps on data usage, it means that people will use the internet less to save money. That means that we will be less informed and less entertained. It means that market innovators like Netflix are being punished. But it's not just Netflix that will be affected. The video game industry is relying more heavily than ever on online components to their games and having to worry about download limits will simply make Canada less fun. As computer technology expands, our downloading needs too will expand and I am skeptical that UBB providers will be nice about raising the caps. Also, none of the internet providers have been able to provide a reliable meter that shows exactly how much we've been downloading. In other words, there is no accountability. If Bell says you've downloaded a certain amount, you have to trust them.

UBB is not just one of the worst Canadian things ever, it is one of the worst ideas ever. It is lame beyond imagining. It represents everything that is wrong when monopolism gets confused with capitalism and our own damn government is helping the bastards. I get the sense that the rich and powerful are watching Canada right now, testing UBB on an alternate market like its ketchup-flavoured potato chips before they unleash it on the United States. For the good of civilization, crush, annihilate, destroy UBB before it gets there.

1. "Mister Tambourine Man" as performed by William Shatner
It starts with a classical opening with harpsichord and flute, pizzicatto in the strings. Then the brass and trap set join, transforming the performance into jazz. Then, relentless thumping... a glorious chorus of tambourines! A quiet, tentative voice almost whispers, "Mister tambourine man?" It's Canada's own Bill Shatner, chanting the musical performance that would define him.

It's so bad it's good, then it's awful, then good again and then sublime when Shatner howls the final words, snuffing the music. Shatner's protagonist is a deranged lunatic in the midst of a psychotic break with reality, obsessed with an unfortunate tambourine man, longing to hear the sweet instrument's rattle and clatter. He is rebuffed. He is driven to madness.

Mister Tambourine Man stands as the absolute worst thing any Canadian has ever done, conceived or been.

So, there stands the list. I may come back and edit it if I think of anything else in the future. As it stands it is a fine example of the worst Canada has to offer. May foreigners look upon it in anger and fear, may we view it with shame. For within it lies the secret to our identity. I'd rise and sing O Canada at this point, but to be honest it's a pretty crappy national anthem.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

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/

The Disaster that is Art, Part II

In my last Disastrous Art post, I explored the reasons why artists, musicians, actors, writers and craftspeople in North America are forced to choose between their art and survival. In this post, I wish to examine the very idea of art itself and how Art is deepening the divide between itself and its audience. I am not talking about the generous, broad definition of art which can be defined as "human expression". I'm also not talking about indigenous art that collectors fawn over because they want to make themselves look worldly. I'm talking about Art.


It goes by many names. Fine art, high art, literature, art-music, classical music, or just Art with a capital "A". It is difficult to define, but some people define it by what it isn't. It isn't pop-art. It isn't genre-fiction. It isn't popular music. That would be fine, except "pop-art," "genre-fiction," and "popular music" are all terms equally difficult to define. At best, Art can be defined as human expression which is "better" than others.

Why is this definition important? Because many institutions place high value on Art. For example, within my own experience, Grain Magazine publishes "engaging, surprising, eclectic, and challenging writing and art" according to their website, which is code for "we're not looking for genre-fiction". The Saskatoon Symphony differentiates between its main concerts in which it plays "classical" music from established masters and new Canadian composers, and its "Pop Series", in which it plays film music by John Williams and ABBA. When I applied for arts funding from the Saskatchewan government, I was advised that if my project was "popular" in nature, I should apply to the extra-governmental Saskfilm for funding.

I see Art-exaltation in people around me, particularly those with a university education in an artistic field. People who work in artistic fields have much of their self-esteem tied into Art, and many feel that they are better than other artists because they practice true Art instead of vulgar entertainment and commercialism. I too have a Bachelor of Arts degree and for a long time I believed in Art. I believed that some art was better than others, that some human expression should be written-off as "entertainment". It was the cause of much snobbery, haughtiness and pooh-poohing on my part. However, since I graduated I have been tormented with the suspicion, then the conviction, that the concept of Art is total bullshit.


I believe that Art is a holdover from less democratic times. Hundreds of years ago, nobles needed a way to make their form of entertainment seem superior to the entertainment of their smelly, toothless subjects. As a noble, the myth of superior breeding had to be upheld. Not only was a noble born better than his subjects, everything he did and appreciated was better. This was essential to his survival, because appearing unworthy of leadership could lead to his head on a pike. Thus was born the concept of entertainment that was better, smarter and elevating. With the growth of the middle-class in the 19th Century, the new moneyed class desired to imitate the nobles. So they bore the noble concept of Art, showing themselves to be cleverer and more refined than those who had less money. While the nobles and their courts have vanished, the concept of Art has lingered among the wealthy, intellectuals and professionals. In our society, it is permissible for people well-versed in Art to hold themselves in superiority over people who do not.

I have said that people believe Art is "better". So what does "better" mean? Firstly, it means a higher degree of skill on the part of the artist. Skill comes with hours of practice at the art form, to a point where technical mastery is achieved. I have no objection to this, although it's worth noting that technical mastery does not equal art. A potter can create a functional plate with mastery, but it does not become art until he uses the medium for expression with glaze and decoration.

Secondly, in the past, Art was distinct because it sought to "elevate" the audience. Elevation is the result of "the sublime", a strange concept based in grandeur, bigness, beauty and proximity to God. An elevated individual is brought into the throes of ecstasy by the Art in question. However, with the decline of religion in Western Society, so has the idea of the sublime fallen. Now, many would submit, Art is achieved by breaking boundaries and expectations. Art must be new, intellectually stimulating and challenging.

Lastly, and most importantly, Art is only for certain people. Many people mask this intent by saying that Art should not be "commercial" or "out to make money". However, what they mean is that Art should not appeal to the vulgar masses. How else does one make lots of money, but by appealing to lots of people? The intended audience of Art must be connoisseurs of art: other artists, intellectuals, scholars, critics and collectors.

So, Art is masterful, challenging human expression that is meant for smart people. Well, my friends, there is no imperial scale that judges the skill of an artist, nor the intellectual value, nor the IQ of the intended audience. That means that Art is subjective. SUBJECTIVE. Because it is subjective, "Art" is a completely useless term with which to judge human expression.

Everybody has varying levels of different types of intelligence and different amounts of experience with entertainment. One man's Art is, to others, either vulgar or incomprehensible. To some, a Fellini film is Art, while most Americans wouldn't understand it. For others, Fellini is vulgar merely because he is a filmmaker.


Another example: when I was ten years old, I watched the legendary wrestling match between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. Professional Wrestling is a form of entertainment of the most vulgar kind. No Art could possibly result from such spectacle. But there they were, two men feigning rage, pain and exaltation. Kinda like actors. There they were, using their bodies to express emotion. Kinda like dancers. When Hulk Hogan triumphed and held the title belt above his head, exhausted and elated, my ten-year-old mind was moved. I felt the ecstacy of victory, the thrill of hard-won triumph. I had never seen anything like it before and my developing mind was touched with the sublime. Yes, I was just a dumb kid. But to me, a WWF match was elevating. At the same age, I would have found a Mozart symphony boring.

What I am trying to say is that it is incorrect to declare any entertainment as "better" than another. Art and entertainment are the same thing. Each individual has opinions and a less harmful way of expressing them is to say "I like this" or "I don't like this".


Harmful? Yes. I say this to all who are reading who believe that Art is better than entertainment and have their egos wrapped in this fallacy: others can detect it. They see that because you know your Art, you think you are better than them on some level. It leeks through your personality and effects your behaviour. It makes people feel small. It makes them hate you. It perpetuates the view that artists are snobby and self-absorbed. It is one of the reasons why Stephen Harper declared that ordinary Canadians don't care about art.

I normally wouldn't mind that people believe in the existence of Art. It is, after all, only an opinion. However, from what I've experienced, art snobs populate high places: universities, arts funding boards, galleries, newspapers, scholarship committees, and friends-of societies. They pass judgment on other people's projects, using the bullshit-definition of Art as a standard. They indoctrinate young artists with a belief that is false and offensive. While film has just started to become recognized as an Art form, film composers are still ostracized by their peers. Sequential art and Video Games are ignored or mocked.

A gaping crevasse yawns between high-artists and the rest of the world. Ordinary folks resent artists for their snobbery and artists resent the hordes of philistines who marginalize them. This is unbelievable. Isn't art supposed to be about communication and expression? Shouldn't people trained to communicate be the best-understood people on the planet?

Artists, we must take the first step, because the rest of the world won't. We must get off our high-horses and stop being so damned smug about ourselves. We have to recognize that our worldview is not the only correct one. We have to respect the tastes of others and not take it personally if they would rather watch CSI. Lastly, and most importantly, we must remember that there are six billion people out there hungering to be entertained; if we can do that, they will love us.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

The Disaster that is Art

I'm sure this will be a long post. Grab your coffee and sit back for an epic.

In 1981 Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers released his album, "Northwest Passage". The title track was a hit and became a cornerstone of Canadian culture. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has admitted his own love for the song, saying that Northwest Passage is the closest thing Canada has to an unofficial national anthem.

And this is where things get hypocritical. In the last election, Stephen Harper, whilst on the campaign trail and defending his government's $45 million dollar cut to arts funding, said that (paraphrased) ordinary Canadians don't care about arts funding.

The hypocrisy? Stan Rogers was a Canada Council funding recipient. I think it's fair to say that without the Canada Council, the CBC and other forms of government arts patronage, Northwest Passage might never have happened. In short, Harper likes Canadian culture but doesn't want to pay for it. I would be more angry about his comments, but I'm not necessarily sure that he's wrong when he says that ordinary Canadians don't care about arts funding.

This blog post is not about my Prime Minister's hypocrisy. It is about what is wrong with art, music, writing, film and stage today in its execution, funding and the public's understanding of it. It's about why ordinary folks don't care. It's about how artists either starve or work jobs to which they are not suited and undervalued. It's about how our educational system and artists themselves are deepening the divide between art and its audience. It's about the cultural black hole that is being filled by American values. In short, the arts are in the toilet and nobody wants to fish them out.

An uncomfortable truth about artists is that they need patrons. When an artist begins the slow process of building his or her career, practicing their craft, building contacts and reputations and expanding their portfolio, only the very lucky make any money. Those that do make money do not make a living wage. Therein lies the problem. People like living. Generally, if given the choice between following a dream and survival, people choose the latter option.

Artists in this situation therefore must squander their talents and waste their lives working unskilled jobs. For many artists, this secondary career becomes their only career. Some get tired of never earning money with their art. Others are forced into their non-artistic job to afford housing or children.

Patronage feeds artists. It lets them use their talents. It lets them quit those jobs they never wanted to work anyway, providing employment for other people who also need feeding.

Many businesspeople and politicians don't seem to understand this. When viewed through the lens of the free market economics, it makes no sense to support the arts. To the economy, starving artists are starving because they are creating product with no demand. They deserve their fate. Why waste money on something nobody wants?

It's a disconnect from reality. The longer artists practice their craft, the greater the demand for their product. If they can't feed themselves and produce their art at the beginning of their careers, they will never create demand.

About 500 years ago in Italy, the greatest revolution in the history of art occurred. It was the Renaissance and its power was fueled by patronage. Obscenely wealthy noble families, such as the famous de Medicis, kept artists in business with their favours and commissions. They competed with each other to see who could patronize the most beautiful art. It was a societal priority. I could go on and on about the Renaissance, but to attempt to do so within the confines of a single paragraph would be a terrifying injustice.

Well, them days is gone. Yes, our society has obscenely rich people. Yes, many of those people are patrons of the arts. However, it's fair to say that art is no longer a societal priority. Our societal priority, and I challenge anybody to contradict me, is sports.

Don't believe me? We just spent $8 billion dollars for a two-week party in Vancouver called the Olympics. For that amount of money, Canada could have paid more than 100,000 artists full-time minimum wage to practice their craft for three years. Want more proof? Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, a city of 200,000 people can barely keep its Symphony orchestra afloat. By contrast, late 18th-Century Bonn, a city of 10,000 people, had two orchestras and produced Ludwig van Beethoven. Canada produces top-notch NHL players, not musical genius.

Where art is to be found, it's quick and dirty. As Capitalism has entrenched itself in North American society, it just doesn't make sense to produce anything that lasts or is of high quality when you can cut corners. Open the newspaper and look for illustrations. Chances are, you'll see quickly-drawn, highly-abstracted first-drafts drawn in ink. Take it from me, the newspapers of yesteryear put love and effort into their drawings. How is it that the primitive, sub-humans of medieval Europe managed to erect towering, beautiful cathedrals and castles with their low population and lack of machine tools? Because to them, the art of their construction had value. Today with our ballooning population and marvelous technology, there is no reason to make a beautiful, stone WalMart with gargoyles and ornate carvings that is meant to stand for a thousand years. It's just cheaper and easier to barf out tin boxes by the hundred with concrete floors and unfinished ceilings.

Shouldn't we be ashamed that tiny villages full of toothless, smelly, gruel-eating apes who believed in werewolves could make prettier buildings than us? Nope. Nobody cares.

However, there is one branch of art that our society truly treasures: film and television. It is the divine art of the modern age, combining visual art, film, music, writing and crafting into one marvelous spectacle that we take for granted. For Canadians, most film is an abstraction. It shows up on our screens from very far away, created by people we don't know, and often it is free. Unlike other art, film and television is big business and is profitable. It replaces our need for art on a local level by beaming in easy entertainment. Why go out to a concert when you don't have to leave the couch and be entertained for free?

It's all too easy to forget that this multi-billion dollar industry is the result of the efforts of many tiny little artists who had to claw their way to success. It's also a little scary to think about how many Canadians are working in Hollywood and New York because they couldn't make their film careers work in Canada.

Canada used to have a film industry in the 1980's. Not just a coastal-temperate area that American companies could film TV episodes for cheap. Not just an annual film festival in Toronto that American celebrities attend to look pretty. I'm talking an actual industry. Funding was high. Tax breaks allowed random companies to produce a movie in Canada just to save money at tax time. Compared to Hollywood, yes, it was chintzy. Yes, most of the movies that were made in this period were low-budget horror flicks of dubious quality. But Canadian artists were working. In Canada. It all stopped when governments cut their film incentives and funding. Now this place is a howling wasteland for film, dependent upon the low-value of the Canadian dollar for survival. Pathetic.

It's not just the amount of arts funding that is at issue here. It is the method of distribution. It's an old problem. English author Samuel Johnson, for instance, refers to a patron as, "one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help". Simply put, our system of government arts patronage gives the lion's share of money to people who have already established their careers.

I understand the thought-process that goes into it. Why waste money on an unproven artist? What makes an artist? If we start handing money out to nobodies who call themselves artists, surely fakers and layabouts will emerge to take advantage of our generosity. However, it is undeniable fact that starving, unknown artists, the people who need the money most, are being denied funding and offered a pittance when others are receiving large amounts of money they don't need. What's the point?

But you know, it's not just clueless politicians, bureaucrats and apathetic citizens that are causing all this misery in the art community. In many ways, the artists and educators that teach it are bringing it upon themselves. The sad fact is that art education is in horrible shambles.

I took art classes every year in high school. Not once was I taught to render on paper or in clay that most basic of artistic expressions, the human form. I had to buy a book called, "How to Draw Super Heroes and Heroines" to learn its value. I also took Creative Writing courses throughout high school and University, yet nowhere was I taught classical story structure: I had to learn that from screenwriting books after University. The education system taught me English but not how to use it to influence the hearts of humans. Similarly, I took a music degree in University and between my Theory classes and my Orchestration classes, I learned the bare bones of music composition, yet a basic element was denied me. No instructor was willing to tell me the meaning of those chords to the human ear and their emotional effect on "ordinary folks".

Unbelievable. Artists are being trained without the basic tools that will make them successful. I've been submitting short stories to a mutual review site lately and almost nobody knows anything about classical story structure and are shocked when I let them in on what seems to be this huge secret! Why is this happening? As you might have guessed, I have a theory.

You see, in the last century, the "modern" era began, followed by the difficult-to-define "post-modern" era. In these eras, guided by odd notions about "progress" as applied to art, artists started trying to be different than each other. They came up with genres that were at first reactions against the rigid forms and styles of the previous centuries, and then tried to invent new languages and modes of understanding. Abstract art, twelve-tone scales and nonsense versions of English were produced. The score of one piece of music, for instance, contained no musical notes: merely the phrase, "Crawl inside the vagina of a living whale." Some performance artist took snapshots of his self-inflicted castration. Recently, some students were arrested for skinning a cat alive and calling it art.

Honestly, is it any wonder that there is little demand for this product? As the artists of the modern eras invented their new languages, they left their audiences behind. Stuck on traditional ideas of art, "ordinary folks" paid for new artistic forms that weren't quite so radical: Hollywood movies, graphic novels, jazz and rock music. All these forms were ones that did not completely shun the lessons of the past.

Meanwhile, the lame-duck grade schools were at work. Somewhere along the way, it became "uncool" to constrain kids with artistic rules. It was during this era that the "personal essay" became the highest form of pubescent writing. In art rooms, children were encouraged to "do their own thing".

The post-modern high-art snobs who are entrenched in universities and the hippie grade-school educators are very different but they seem to have one thing in common: they don't believe in creative limitation. They expect that artists young and old should do their own thing and create their own artistic language from scratch.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with creative limitation, here it is. Apparently, the human brain finds it easier to be creative if it has a set of rules to work with or against. By removing the lessons of the past from curriculae, the education system has made being creative actually more difficult for students.

Some people may be reading this and thinking that I'm an artistic conservative. I'm not. If you like post-modern art, it's not my place to criticize you. It's not my place to say what I like is better than what you like. My point is that by leaving important information out of the curriculum, Canadian artists are being denied a critical part of their education which will help them connect with their audience. Wouldn't it be better to teach students the rules of their art as society understands them, then give them the choice later whether they wish to transcend them?

Rest assured, friends, art is not as mysterious as some persons would have you believe. Part of it is craft and can be learned. Many of my teachers in the past had me thinking that creativity is this elusive thing that descends upon you like luck, cannot be controlled, that certain persons are born with. That's partly true, some people have more talent than others. But all art involves learning how to use a tool and using your brain in conjunction with it. It takes practice and it takes proper training. Why would we send our poor artists alone into the world without that training?

So here we are. Ordinary folks don't care about art and those of us that do can't define it. For most people it's a mystery. People love music but have no idea how it's created. Abstract art hangs on gallery walls that is valued either for the artist's reputation, the overlong explanations that justify them, or their shock value. Post-modern music rattles in crumbling concert halls, played by under-funded orchestras, tolerated by audience members who when asked what they thought of it are obligated to say, "It was interesting". American television beams into our homes, each reality TV show slowly crowding Northwest Passage from our collective memory. New schools are being constructed without music rooms. If Mozart was alive today, he might just be serving you coffee.

So what the fuck are you going to do about it? Do you even care?

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