Rss

ODY: Week 9. Weak, Overwhelm, Werner.

Posted by :James Howden On : October 26, 2006
0

Category: On Second Thought

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In the landscape of a week’s weak learning, it was flatlands all the way to a horizon that seemed impossibly far for an Old Dog. (All filled up with dreams of competence, not a tree or a fire hydrant of achievement in sight.) There wouldn’t have been much to say, except that two conversations stood out like lonesome grain elevators on Saskatchewan prairie, outposts of interest in a flat but faithful week of practice.

First, let me tell you about the plain. I’m more comfortable admitting that I’m learning to play guitar and letting Gordie take my fingers for a walk where someone might actually hear us. Chord changes still freeze me, though at least once this week I hit the C chord without looking or hesitating. Or thinking. (Not thinking comes nearly as hard for me as thinking clearly. That grey gunk inside my skull is always quivering madly off in all directions.) Nearly halfway through the week, lesson night with KW the Guitar Guy brought four new finger-picking patterns for songs that also added 5 or 6 more chords with complicated names. More chords?!?

We have one of the GG’s own pieces, “Study in E”. It suggests a pleasant little finger sequence – thumb on the low E, then fingers 1, 2 and 3 tickling down to the G string. T 1 2 3, T 1 2 3. Nice! I can do that! But the chords? They start easily enough with an E, but then we jump to an A 6-9 over E (a what?), then an E major 7th, then an E 7th, back to A 6-9/E, then to an A minor 6-9/E (are you kidding me?), back to a simple E and finish with something called an “E suspended 4th” (E sus 4). What the -? I scribbled down the chord diagrams that Kurt had chalked out for us, despairing that soon he’d be chalking my body outline on the floor. Then I breathed. Then I looked at the diagrams, and a dim bulb began to glow over my head. The dreaded A 6-9/E is the same basic shape as E, just spread out and a fret higher. The E major 7th that follows is precisely the same, except two more frets up. E7 and the doubly dreaded Am 6-9/E also have the same shape. And the last transition, from E to Esus4, is a one-fret finger-one adjustment. Hosanna! Weird and complex as they seem, they fit together more easily than I can go from G to C or A to D or, especially, B7 to or from friggin’ anything. (But I love the sound of B7, and can always tell when I’ve hit it right without checking my fingers. And when I get there, I don’t want to leave.) Not only that, but “Study in E” is written such that any picking pattern will sound good. You’ll be hearing it on your radio any day now.

So much for the lone prairie. The first silo, landmark number one, was a conversation with Pejman, who had just moved in to our part of the city. At a community meeting, he volunteered to put together a program for a holy day commemoration. (The birth of the Báb, if you’re keeping score at home.) Right away, he had a rough question for me. “So, who are the musicians in the room? I want some music for Thursday.” I thought, maybejustmaybe I could do some Travis picking as background to a reading, but those changes are so clumsy and it’s only three days away… Yikes. My answer? “Um, ah, well, you know about Daniel’s singing, and you heard Amir on the piano tonight, but other than that, well, can’t really think of anybody. Nope.” Well, I missed a perfect blushing opportunity there. Pej’s probing pulled Farzad and his guitar out of the bushes, though, and so Pachelbel’s “Canon” sweetened our celebration. (Can’t believe my Iranian brother beat me to the punch, but he is quite a way ahead of me. For now...) I was also abashed by young Sarah’s courage, wading through a difficult piece on an unfamiliar keyboard. Must. Embrace. Next. Chance.

Second conversational signpost? The Itinerant Artist, my number one son, phoned about mid-week, and the talk turned inevitably to the Old Dog Year of musical education. Change. Transformation. Transition. My struggles to get from one chord to another – and to resist making that change until I have the chord perfect – are obvious analogues to the bigger adjustments that you or I or anybody might be making. And so the IA had a suggestion. “Let me tell you about the triangle. Have I told you about the learning triangle? No? Well, it comes from Werner, and it goes like this. There are three aspects to mastering a song: being able to play it PERFECTLY, AT TEMPO and from BEGINNING TO END. The thing is, when you’re learning the thing, the best you can do is two out of three, and at first you probably can’t do any of them. So pick a section, and play it slowly ‘til it’s right. SLOWLY. This was a hard one for me to learn at McGill, but it’s so useful.” The IA was a jazz performance student at Montreal’s McGill University. Trombone. (He’s also a fine guitar and bass player, and a decent drummer.) He was referring to musical concepts in a book called Effortless Mastery by the great jazz pianist Kenny Werner. When the need is clear, the book will appear. Gotta get it.

Do a section as slowly as I need to do it well. Do it with a steady rhythm, even if it’s a laughably slow one. Do it until it’s right. Do it perfectly until it’s at a good tempo. Then do it together with the other chunks until I can complete the triangle: Perfectly. At tempo. Beginning to end. My whole life has been about learning, and now I’m learning more about how to learn. It’s all so new and all so familiar. 63 days and counting.

Hitting a Buck Sixty-Five

Posted by :James Howden On : October 26, 2006
0

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , ,

No, members of PETR (People for the Ethical Treatment of Rappers), I’m not talking about Nova Scotia’s baseball-lovin’ hip-hop poet. This is all about my stats, and I wouldn’t be publishing this number if it was my baseball batting average, which would be hitting so far below my weight as to make me cry. (Unless, maybe, it was for hitting against the Cardinals’ Chris Carpenter, in which case it wouldn’t be quite so hideous). But on this cool, world serious afternoon, I have just posted the 165th (generally overlong for web logs) entry on this cyberspace obsession in the past year. (And that doesn’t count all the backlogged ones written from May to July that, because of repeatedly being struck out by technical gremlins, I haven’t yet been able to post to the site.) So YAY, ME! I hope you’ll pardon my self-congratulation, but if not me, whom? If not now, whenever?

I also have a ferocious hitting streak going with my guitar, having banged on six strings for over 65 straight days. I’m well on my way to hitting three sixty-five, and you can tune in to this epic, this mid-life musical odyssey by going to my “On Second Thought” section. (You’ll be glad you did.) (I’m hopeful.)

Game Three TeeVee

Posted by :James Howden On : October 25, 2006
0

Category: All About Sports

Tags:, , , , , ,

I was disappointed when the Cardinals got smoked in Larry Walker’s last chance for a Series ring in 2004. My friend The Don has been a Cards fan at least since Tony LaRussa got there – he’s a fan of coaches more than of players, although he wants eligibility requirements rewritten so that Albert Pujols can go straight to the Hall of Fame this week. So as St. Louis is reborn after their Undead stagger to “winning” their division, it was time for me to actually watch a game. Regular readers will know that, for a guy who loves sport, I have an atrocious television. I depend on the kindness, well, not of strangers (though I have picked up a few games in restaurants), but of whatever friends I can impose myself upon.

I went over to the Sélégers’ place, where my Haitian-born buddy Fanfan required only slightly more basic education in baseball than his Canadian-born wife and brother-in-law. Mind you, he didn’t wander downstairs until about the sixth inning, so I wasn’t able to get too much wisdom in between pitches. He has the athletic eye, though. At first, he didn’t know how a pitcher even got a hitter out – or even know what “out” meant (or retrait in French) – but it didn’t take long before he realized that Chris Carpenter was dominating the Tigers. I don’t mind watching the game alone, but it was fun to help a new Canadian with one of the essential aspects of autumn living, not to mention his blissfully baseball-impaired family.

Good game. Baseball rocks. (Slowly, but it rocks.) Fox’s telecast is good, if a little too busy, and I love some of the inventive camera angles, especially the one embedded in the turf in front of home plate. I don’t have much patience left for commercial television, though. Maybe I take life too seriously, but when one of the major sponsors of an athletic event is a video-game maker, I draw a curmudgeonly line. Sure, there’s always been the irony of sporting excellence being underwritten by performance-decreasing substances (greasy foods, cigarettes in the bad ol’ days, beer forever). But something about sitting through an ad for a thumb-friendly entertainment called “Kill All Humans” made me feel dirty, and a little worried about the mental hygiene of some of my fellow viewers. What kind of audience are they aiming at? How did I get in? Not long after came another promo for a zombie chew-em-up game. Yecch. Makes me yearn for Skoal and Copenhagen commercials. At least there, the fantasy was of killing only yourself with style.

The Heart and the Congo

Posted by :James Howden On : October 24, 2006
0

Category: On Second Thought

Tags:, , , , , , ,

Until recently, the American novelist Barbara Kingsolver was best known to me for an article she wrote in Utne magazine, something to do with the virtues of off-grid, off-the-paved-and-beaten-track, off-beat living. Translation? Going rural. Growing your own. A willing ignorance of haste and celebrity and media and the quest for higher consumption. This is how I remember the piece, and it was a thoughtful and eloquent one. I was well aware, though, that this was the Poisonwood Bible woman, she of the large sales figures and the Oprah stamp of literary approval. This may account, along with my own embrace of slow literary living, for how long it took me to get around to the Bible. I should’ve gotten there faster.

It’s a remarkable book, hugely ambitious and earnest and uneven. I found it thrilling and irritating, filled with gorgeous and poetic phrasing (especially in the interior monologues) alongside sometimes clangingly explanatory and unlikely dialogue, with characters both beautifully and cartoonishly drawn. It follows a Georgia missionary family, the Prices, that goes to the Congo in 1960, where it experiences brutal hardship of its own (mainly of its patriarch’s) making, but also that of the Congolese in general as they go from Belgian colony to “independence” under the brutal Mbutu regime. We follow the lives of the Price women, a mother and four daughters, and their mainly male-made problems. The rich characters are the women.

Men do not come off terribly well in The Poisonwood Bible, which when it errs does so on the side of the Nobly Suffering Woman archetype. (It also portrays the dignity of women under hardship in a heart-wrenching way, don’t mistake me.) The ultra-zealous preacher Nathan Price is a bully and a bad advertisement for Christianity, an extremist and even a sadist in his manic, ignorant spreading of a patronizing Word. He never quite feels real, though there are some belated attempts to explain the creation of this monster. (There is no attempt to explain the other bastards at all.) Meanwhile, the two benevolent male characters are upholders of a stainless, if eccentric, goodness. They never quite seem real, either, though they are sometimes interesting.

Reverend Price’s deeply oppressed wife, Orleanna, is a poetic voice of bitter hindsight, and the voices of two of her daughters are the narrative highs and lows of the book. The mute and brilliant Adah is a fascinating creation with strange, gripping perspectives on the occasionally comic but relentlessly painful events of the book. The lovely and skin-deep eldest daughter, Rachel, is the counterbalance to the female heroism mentioned above. She became increasingly annoying to me as the book went on, so unrelentingly vain and self-absorbed was she. My vain imagining is that Kingsolver just had too much fun skewering the vacuous cheerleader belles of her own high school days. (The malapropisms were amusing at first, but Rachel’s verbal mistakes get wearisome. Her comments about language students working on their French “congregations”, well, okay, but when she complains about someone not having the simple “confederation” to get drinks for everyone in the room? I’ve now forgotten the most irritating examples; suffice to say that they begin to smack of Kingsolver trying way too hard, or having too much fun, or not knowing when enough was enough. Let’s blame the editor.)

About midway through this 650-page saga, the bloom came off what had been a terribly thorny but breathtaking rose. There were too many points to be made, too many clumsy character assassinations, social criticisms and historical observations that burst out of their literary clothing and lay there naked on the page. I was actually angry, at a certain point, because so much of the book had been so movingly, compellingly done up to that point. The story just went on too long, tried to do too much. But once I relaxed enough to accept what Kingsolver had in mind, I was able to enjoy the weaker back end of the book, though not quite with the wonder and alarm of the first half. Okay, she’s indicting the entire enterprise of African exploitation, American ignorance and materialism, male weakness and chauvinism. Let’s go with that. So I did, and I learned lots of history and context and continued to find narrative brilliance in some of the several narrators. The conclusion moved me again, and I felt content with the ending.

And a funny thing. (This reviewing of literature, I must say, is a strange and troublesome effort. I’m being forcibly reminded of what the producers of Brick, a literary magazine, place in the front of each edition, a quote from Rilke: “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little appreciated as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.” There is a wonderful lot to love in The Poisonwood Bible. That sounds lame now. Well, and there’s this, too, which should undermine some of what I wrote above: Barbara Kingsolver is a fountain of good writing, and even with respect to novels, only part of her mighty flow, the score is BK 5, JH 0. So there.) So reading, thinking about books we read and remark on: you know what? Aside from its frequently stunning portrait of the colonial project, I may remember this novel most for something that precedes it. In Kingsolver’s introductory remarks, she ends in gratitude to Steven (her husband?) for his belief that “a spirit of adventure will usually suffice…” I love the brevity and punch of that line. Of course, it most spectacularly did not suffice in the individual mission of the crazed Nathan Price, nor of the European and American mission to get from Africa what they wanted. But for this pale adventurer, the words are branded on my brain. They’re beside my writing desk, too.

World Series? What World Are You Talking About?

Posted by :James Howden On : October 21, 2006
0

Category: All About Sports

Tags:, , ,

My buddy Fanfan didn’t have a clue. (Work on your French nasal “a-n” if you want to pronounce his name properly in your head.) Though he loves sport, and was my video connection, player biographer and technical guide to the World Cup last summer, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t. “Hé, Fanfan, tu es excité pour le début de la Série du Monde?” His face was delightfully blank. “La Série du Monde. World Series. Tu sais, le championnat de baseball?”  His growing grin said why do I need to know anything about that?

Here’s an odd little sporting artefact of history and geography. Fanfan comes from Haiti. On his half of a small Caribbean island, le foot is everything. The other half is the Dominican Republic, an absolute assembly line (no wait, an open pit mine) for baseball players. (It is estimated that one in seven major leaguers, and an incredible thirty percent of minor league ballplayers in the U.S., come from this poor and tiny nation. For a politically charged view of this, take a trip to the edge of sports .) Fanfan was a bit surprised to learn how dominant the D.R. is in baseball, because “when we play them, we win 10-0, 15-0.” He was talking soccer, of course. Has anybody written the history of the island in sporting terms? Are there any geographical reasons for the ancestors of slaves to have talented feet in the west of Hispaniola and beautiful hands in the eastern half of the island? What colonial distinctions led to Haiti siding with the world’s athletic consensus, while the Dominican turned its sporting eyes to the great American pastime? (Am I the only one who thinks about stuff like this?)

Be that as it may, Fanfan couldn’t name a single baseball player, I don’t think, let alone know that the Detroit Tigers were facing the St. Louis Cardinals. (Small “World”!) He knew everything there was to know about the big game between Manchester United and Liverpool, mind you, and he could have given me a detailed breakdown of the title race in the German Bundesliga. But baseball? Who cares? Well, in the communities he’s involved with, there’s pretty much nobody except me. It’s funny: baseball is more international than it has ever been, with many Asian players alongside the majority of American and Latin American ones. (Also, there are more significant Canadian players than there may ever have been, even though the Cards lost Larry Walker to retirement.) But in an international city like Ottawa, there have probably not been pockets of apathy this deep about baseball since, oh, World War II.

I still have baseball dreams, though. I don’t follow it as avidly as I used to, but hey, it’s the World Series! I may not know the complete starting lineup of either team, but I do have a lot to teach my footy Haitian friend about the mysteries of bat and glove. Besides, he has a way better TV than me.

The Accidental Reader

Posted by :James Howden On : October 19, 2006
0

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , , , ,

When it comes to books, serendipity often trumps my usual fussy inclination toward list-making and order and the sternly beckoning Should-Reads. I’d heard about John Banville’s novel The Sea, because it won the Booker Prize for fiction in 2005. For English speakers other than Americans, the Booker is the pre-eminent literary prize in the world. (American writers aren’t eligible, and in any case they have their Pulitzer Prize, which I’ve heard carries a bit of heft in the excited States.) I hadn’t read a Booker winner since 2002’s Life of Pi (Yann Martel, one of two Canadians to win*) and 1998’s Amsterdam (Ian McEwan). The Sea jumped into my view as I passed the Express Read shelf of my fine local library (Only seven days ‘til $5 daily fines!).

Banville, an Irishman, has the reputation of being a writer’s writer, a maker of quiet but exquisitely told stories with craftsmanship abounding. Several of the blurbs of praise on the back cover testify that it is not a “page-turner”, that the admiring reader is compelled to read slowly, and often to re-read especially delicious phrases. It’s the “how did he do that?” factor, familiar to devotees of Michael Jordan or Stevie Ray Vaughan. As an avid student of writing, this factor has steadily slowed down my reading pace since my early twenties. (I’m trying to re-teach myself how to read quickly so I can get through sports pages and other journalism more efficiently.)

It took me some time to warm to Banville. It was clear immediately that he’s awfully good – he’s been Booker-nominated before, and I doubt he sells hugely – but I wasn’t swept into The Sea until about midway through. (Of course, this might have been due to my giving it only my tired moments, or to coming at it after an extended period of reading only non-fiction.) The narrator is not an awfully sympathetic character, at least not initially, and his story flips relentlessly from his elderly present to the recent past to one epochal adolescent summer. Banville also attempts the difficult feat of giving voice to a man who comes to self-awareness only late in life, and we realize things often at the same time as the narrator does. He’s diffident, often unsure, bitterly self-critical and even dismissive, and despite the beautiful turns of phrase he is often a hard guy to spend time with. But I found the challenges – including the experience of coming across entirely unfamiliar words in fiction (the narrator is an academic), which most of us don’t do much after the age of 19 or so – more than worth it. The book is less than two hundred pages long, and the first three quarters compellingly prepare the ground (but not the reader) for the revelations of the home stretch.

I want to read it again. I wanted to start right away, but the library was beckoning. If I am to follow the wisdom of the “read it before you own it” school of book buying, The Sea is a great candidate, besides containing writing that any writer is likely to want to experience again. On the other hand, I now have the complete list of the Booker short lists and winners since 1969, and there are many MUSTS included on that list. I’ll approach them systematically, at least until the next bout of accidentalism strikes.

* The other was Margaret Atwood for The Blind Assassin, one of her four nominations. You can collect your prize at any good bookstore.

ODY: Week 8 (56/365). The Whole Fam-Damily.

Posted by :James Howden On : October 16, 2006
0

Category: On Second Thought

Tags:, , , , ,

I began the week with reflections on a family reunion. We’d booked a room in the seniors’ home where my sweetly declining Mum is glowing out her days. I made a grander-than-usual entrance because I was carrying a guitar case, which got the attention of the nieces and nephews. Lots of questions. (Mine: “What, you’re not reading my site?! You obviously need to get rid of your life – of course I’m playing the guitar!”) And yes, eventually, flushed of face and nervous as a 16-year-old knocking at the door with a corsage in hand, I played a little where people I know and love could actually hear me. I played clumsily and it didn’t matter a bit.

There was never live music at family gatherings when I was a kid. There wasn’t music, period. Neither our parents nor any of the five kids played at all. The next generation has done better. My children are the fathers of this man’s music-making. My sister married a quiet and stubborn man who taught himself to play guitar, and their girls play piano and more. Now there’s a son-in-law in the mix, a live-wire entrepreneur, guitarist and sometime recording engineer, and Jer was all over me. (He was like Dave the TVPI, my son and first teacher, except with Mediterranean hairiness and more manic energy.) He was very encouraging, and had WAY too much stuff he wanted to show me. (I hadn’t known how well he played.) This all let me off the hook of actually having to play for him, which was way too fine with me, but I did learn some interesting little twists on the G and D chords, as well as other stuff that may resurface sometime down the road. (I’ve already forgotten. Indigestion of the mental kind.) I have so much to learn, and it was fun to learn with a newly-minted nephew.

Quietly, in the background as he so often is, was Silent Paul, my brother-in-law. It has sometimes seemed that we didn’t have a lot in common. Our professional collars are of a different colour and our world-views sometimes far apart. If I am words and ideas, he is hands and things. But as the years pass, we find each other more and more when the clan gathers. (I admit that he annoys me mightily with that flat belly of his, but he has good qualities, too.) Later that day, he sidled up to me as we were about to hit the homeward road. “Keep pickin’ and grinnin’,” he said. A noble, quiet man says a lot with a little, and among all the reasons for enjoying playing the guitar, here’s another. It’s sweet to share a common cause with a brother. We sometimes run together when I’m down home, and now we have another avenue of DOING that we can share. Paul’s friendly and kind, but not much for sitting around and talking. He runs a huge crane in a steel mill. He works on his own car, restores antiques, installs his own hardwood floors. He envies my letter-writing, but I would like to have built a house and home like he has. Now we have a new thing that we can do together. It’ll be fun to learn with him, too, and I have another motivational deadline. I want to be a lot better by the next family gathering.

Back home, my next lesson was a slap in the head. I felt out of it. I couldn’t keep up with the chord changes that every one of my eight fellow bumblers seemed to be doing far better than me. Guru Kurt said the kindest thing: “Chord changes are the WORST. Nothing will bring out the I SUCK! in you better than them.” The whole week was a real plateau time where I couldn’t see much sign of progress. Some of this, my occasionally rational mind tells me, is because of Kurt’s method, or at least my response to it. I’m trying to learn many chords and techniques and note reading and rhythm reading all at the same time. He says that he wants to give us, in this eight-week group lesson, everything that we need to know to teach ourselves the guitar. He gives us a lot, assuming that we won’t be able to absorb it or quite keep up, but the plan is that we’ll have habits and a strong set of materials to keep on plucking after the course is done. Beyond that, though, I also have to hammer away at the repetitive strain of going from G to C, C to D, D to A (and on and on) over and over and over again. (“But play songs! Make up stuff! Have fun!” insists the TVPI by phone. There’s a balance.)

My final family lesson of the week came from the six-year-old. Sam has adopted the old broken-necked Dégas as his own. He keeps it simple. He started by holding it upside-down and playing left-handed; I might’ve left him that way, but he’s very clearly a right-dominant boy. I showed him how to hold a pick, and where his left hand might go (he didn’t care for much detail), and then he whaled (and wailed) away. I listened furtively while he composed his first song, strumming the same non-chord and singing the same flat and sweet little melody for every line, no matter how long it was. I’m a Dad. I found it brilliant:


I was alive since 2000 / I was alive since 2000 / Most of my friends weren’t even born / Thomas wasn’t born ‘til October / But I was born on April 6th / And I didn’t know them when I was a baby / But I didn’t even care if they were babies in their mommies’ tummies / ‘Cause I didn’t even have friends yet / But we lived next door to McDonald’s / And we were pretty close to a play structure…”

The next song in his repertoire involved more aggressive punching of the strings, while the lyrics came from the latest number-one-with-a-bullet grade 1 schoolyard song. (The part I don’t get is that he goes to a French school. As Ottawa’s francophone parents say, we have to promote and protect le français. In a city like ours, even kids who speak only French at home can pick up English like they do a cold.) And here’s how it goes. It starts off with an echo of Queen’s ever-present “We Will Rock You”, and then wanders into the ancient rhythms of nearly all the chants that every kid learns on every playground.


We will, we will, you know what? Kick your butt!
All the way to Pizza Hut!
I don’t care if you dare,
But don’t forget your underwear!

 

Words to live by, and an I can do it spirit to learn by, too. Thanks, little buddy.

ODY: Week 7. Of Dogs and Six-Strings.

Posted by :James Howden On : October 10, 2006
0

Category: On Second Thought

Tags:, , , , , , , , , ,

It’s a fun stage in the Old Dog Year, having now spent a first full week with my new guitar. The chords that have sounded so discouragingly now ring, when I can get my fingers organized, with an undeniable sweetness. When I bought the Walden, I also asked about how to get hold of the guru, KW. I’d missed the second lesson, and wanted to know what I should work on. Guitar Guy just laughed. “You can’t get hold of Kurt.” Oh. The Guy had some good words, too. The advice: repetition, repetition, repetition. “When you’re watching TV, listening to radio, talking to people, just play simple stuff. Over and over. Brainless. Just let your fingers learn by doing it over and over. That’s it.”

My old boss has a book out, and in it she talks about a life-long affection for opera. Radio 2 had an interview with her the next day, where the talk was all music. So I took up the Guy on his suggestion, flipped on my bedside radio, grabbed the Walden and played A Blues Riff and Travis Picking and a few quiet chords, which is how I found myself accompanying Maria Callas from a 1951 recording of La Traviata, as well as a really swell tenor (I forget) doing an aria from La Bohème. (I don’t understand the lyrics, but I was flushed with pride that I actually recognized the aria. Yay, me!) Then Cohen. Then Lightfoot. My noodling had sounded better beside operatic singing than it did as an accompaniment to Gordon’s guitar. Sigh.

Then the next day, in the midst of a long conversation with The Big Guy (son number 2, on a surprise visit, not to be confused with the Guy), I called time-out, thought Where’s Walden?, grabbed my new best friend from the basement, and noodled some more while we yacked and yacked. Who says I can’t multi-task? Normally, I can’t keep doing dishes while talking on the phone. I can’t eat and think at the same time. But this seemed to work okay. Gotta listen when young men decide it’s time to talk.

On lesson night, KW the guitar guru showed up with his left hand encased in plaster, having severed a finger tendon doing home repair. The anaesthetic was wearing off, the painkillers were kicking in, but he was there. His eyes were crossed by the end, but his humour was intact. His planned lesson was a little frayed around the edges, though. He has eyes and a mouth painted over the curved end where cast holds the fingers, so his left hand can gesture and cajole like a ventriloquist’s dummy. It can’t do chord changes, of course, but neither can THIS dummy. I felt lost. I am no star in this group of beginners. (Fabulous. Another vain imagining cast aside.) Most of the rest have music experience – piano, sax, trumpet – and so the theory and the reading must be as boring for them as it is nervous-making for me.

My musical education came largely in Mr. Danton’s class on rotary in grades 5 and 6. I didn’t pay much attention, though my eyes got wide when he played “Sweet Georgia Brown” on the piano. He was a painfully shy man, but his mild, Clark Kent exterior sprung holes when he got at the keyboard. (He tried to contain himself, but really couldn’t. Loved that.). Oh, yes, and there was a month, way back when, with a grade 1 piano book. One lonely year of renewed bachelorhood, I lived in a small apartment off my sister’s house, where there was a grandmother’s piano and a bench full of conservatory books. I attacked it solo. I played for nobody. I lasted for a hardworking while, and so staffs and clefs and quarter notes look vaguely familiar to me. But I have so much to (re)learn. Chord changes. Chord changes. Cripes, I’ve always been a bit resistant to change, but this is ridiculous. I tend to labour away at one chord ‘til it’s clean. Then I stop. Then I do it again, on that or another chord. The transition between them, though, is so friggin’ awkward and muddy. I hate that pause, that waiting zone, “for people just waiting”, as Dr. Seuss (Ted Geisel) once wrote. 

After my lesson, I was down to the International Writers Festival, where the last session of the evening featured three songwriters, playing and talking and laughing about their work. (Jim Bryson is an odd, interesting and very witty performer I’d never heard of; Lynn Miles has a dark and soulful groove that she mines; and oh my, Oh Susanna  – not her real name – was a revelation to me, a great big voice and a quirky but substantial way of writing. I had fun.) I watch musicians a little differently now that I have a little clearer idea of what a guitarist does. Afterward, there was a particular treat.

I’d heard of Six String Nation  before. It’s one man’s quest to unite his country through the instrumentality of a guitar built from sea to sea to sea. Actually, it was built in Nova Scotia, but its materials come from a representative sample of the Canadian dream. Its wood comes from a Haida-Gwaii albino spruce, a Wayne Gretzky hockey stick and the schooner Bluenose. It contains copper from the roof of Parliament, a piece of Rocket Richard’s 1956 Stanley Cup ring, and a chunk of mammoth ivory, 60 bits of our history and geography. Jowi Taylor, the crazy guy behind this sweetly insane idea, has toured all over with the (as yet unnamed) Six String Nation guitar, and it has been played by all the great Canucks – Colin James, Bryan Adams, dozens of others. It has now also had a silly little blues line played more than awkwardly by Yours Truly. (I’ve never played standing up before.) A bunch of us lined up after the songwriters’ show to be photographed with this lovely little machine, and to make our suggestions for its name. (I’ve selected the archetypal Canadian name GORDON: think Gordie Howe, yes, but especially think Gordon Lightfoot, and maybe Gord Downie from The Tragically Hip, or even the name of the Barenaked Ladies’ breakout album, but don’t think about that goofy beaver in the Bell ads. GORDON isn’t as bicultural as I’d like, but it ain’t bad.). I got home very late, but I felt inspired to play ‘til much later in my own wee six-string neighbourhood.)

I began to notice, over the next couple of nights, that the Walden was wildly out of tune, but I couldn’t be bothered learning how to use my new electronic tuner because I was getting to the practice chair so darned late at night, and the Old Dog needs more beauty rest than you can imagine. The E and G chords were especially bad because my remarkable ear had begun to register that the low E string was brutally off. Travis Picking sounded terrible, but the movement and the rhythm are coming along. Nice!

On the road for weekend family visits, I released Wally from captivity in the forenoon. (It may be a “morning guitar”. And after my earlier vaguely erotic writing about my first moments with “her”, it may turn out to be a guy. Oops!) Looking out over a perfect little lake at Mother Margery’s, I figured out first how to use the tuner. (It works best with the batteries in it.) I twisted my very own machine heads for the first time! (Machine Head. Wasn’t that the name of a testosterone-friendly band in the 70s? Gosh, men are funny. What, didja think we were gonna call ourselves The Tuning Knobs?!) And MAN did the chords sound sweet. Read some rhythms (need to spend lots of time on the reading), played for over an hour. This is what I need this is what I need this is what I need… 49 days in a row. Only 316 to go in the daily company of my as-yet unnamed friend. Um, Walden? Waldo? Wally? (Wanda?) Or maybe even Gordon…

Small Town Sunday Morning

Posted by :James Howden On : October 8, 2006
0

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , , , , ,

Extracted sinfully early – no, at a blessèd hour – from my bed by a small herd of eager critters, I walked out into the world to see a new sun, an old moon, and a heavy dew. My bride and big sister (we’re staying at the Hotel Pamela) had won the sleep-in lottery, so I was accompanied on the morning walk by a three-year-old, black-and-white border collie, and six- and eight-year-old puppies of the blonde, tongue-wagging human variety. It was hard to say who had the most frisky fun, but I wouldn’t bet against the boys.

I’m a city guy now, but these down-home trips always make me wistful for open fields, big yards and giant skies, and for the friendly waves from people I’ve never met. I miss that in Ottawa. After wandering with the puppies down to the edge of town, I left the human ones at the arena, where they could peak in on some Sunday-morning hockey-men while I grabbed some cash at the bank. The CIBC’s promotional posters, complete with a couple of happy Indo-Canadian mortgage holders, look almost exotic in a pure laine Caucasian village like this one. I wondered about what the young farm fella ahead of me in line would think about that. It’s so easy to assume narrow racial attitudes in a place like this, and so unfair. What he did do, once he had his cash, was to say, “’Mornin’. Is that a border collie? Nice dog. My aunt has one a lot like that.”

Just as we all wandered into the parking lot at Tim’s – there are only two stoplights, but 24-hour access to coffee and crullers is a modern necessity even in a place like this – three more sleepy-looking Young White Males pulled in and shuffled out of their eccentrically parked ride. They’d pulled on whatever jeans and rumpled jackets were nearest to hand, and their ball caps had fraying bills, faded colours and illegible logos. This part of the YWM uniform was not, as it often is, the latest bit of pro sports merchandise. These were hats that had actually seen long service on farms or ball fields. (Or maybe just every Tim’s and every Beer Store in southern Ontario.) They could’ve been on a run for coffee after an all-night bush party, but it could be that they were fuelling up to take the soybeans off or hunt some wild turkeys. (Or to go tailgating at a football game. It was a great day for football today.) And then a certain small luxury occurred to me: I like lots of YWMs that look just like these guys did. They would’ve been only a few years removed from the English classrooms that I tried to make tolerable for young men.

Meanwhile, for a lot of Canadians, especially of the female and/or non-white persuasion, the approach of this trio might’ve inspired a little unease, maybe even outright fear. Not so much at a coffee shop on a misty Sunday morning, of course, but I imagined a Friday night down the street from a strip mall bar. Guys like this might be shocked to know that anyone could be afraid of them. Guys like me, though, with a certain size and breadth of shoulder and, especially, a certain kind of complexion, are mainly free from that sort of hovering anxiety. (Yes, I know, unless I’m wandering the dark streets of neighbourhood X in city Y.) That is a small but significant privilege. And yes, this may feel like an awfully sombre little cloud on the edges of a beautiful blue sky, I guess, but it spoiled nothing. It was just something I saw.

Mostly, though, after my last few years of city living, I notice all the strangers in these small towns who nod from their passing cars, and the teenaged girls at the doughnut counter who aren’t afraid to smile at Sunday morning patrons. I smile back at the old fellow by the door as we leave, who grins at me and the border collie. “Who’s gettin’ more exercise, I wonder?” he chuckles. And after all these friendly, anonymous collisions, a van pulled up beside me this morning and a gruff voice barked out. “What’re you doing here?” It was Coach Woody, a resident of this town, probably headed over to the church to set up. He was my son’s high school football coach. In the previous century, he was my high school football coach, too. And what could be better? A little game of catch-up like that is a beautiful thing on a cool fall morning. Everything we threw was a spiral. We shrugged and smiled as the puppies dragged me on to the next tiny thrill.

High Points for LitWits

Posted by :James Howden On : October 6, 2006
0

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , , , , , , ,

Just a few more (lately logged) comments on the Ottawa International Writers Festival, among which will not appear a re-opening of the debate about whether there should be an apostrophe at the end of “Writers” (except to say that it’s an adjective, not necessarily a possessive one, and with the ridiculous littering of apostrophes where they ought not to be, leaning toward exclusion where it can safely be justified is fine by me, so there!) (Was there ever a debate?)

• Especially for those who remember well the Air India disaster, and the Canadian implications in other explosions of religious extremism, Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call will be very interesting reading. It dances between Indo-Canadian communities and the murderous background of Sikhs versus Hindus in the Punjab. Sounds good.

• High school English teachers can having a writing life. Brent Leo Robillard (Houdini’s Shadow) has proved it. (Unsure whether to praise or curse him.)

• English professors can write with humour, irreverence and sauce. Randy Boyagoda’s Governor of the Northern Province skewers several Canadian complacencies, institutions and sloppily held ideals.

• While I am impatient with the partisanship and constant posturing that is built in to our governing system, I do have time for the characters in the play. Found Eddy Goldenberg (How It Works) and his discussion of his decades as “back-room boy” to former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien interesting. He tells a funny story of Mr. Chrétien’s first social visit with George Bush, where the President’s attempt at small talk (okay, do I know any Canadians?) began with his admiring view of Conrad Black, sworn antagonist to the PM who wouldn’t agree to a Canuck being allowed entry into the British House of Lords. There were several Bush anecdotes, at least one of which is getting some play in Washington (his reference to stringing the source of government leaks up by the thumbs, “just like we do at Guantanamo Bay”.) Interesting from an insider point of view, and also for the sake of humanizing a government process that can seem foggy and far away.

• I had known of Michael Redhill as the editor of Brick, a literary magazine, and as a playwright, but my knowledge of theatre is pathetic. Hearing him read from his latest novel, Consolation, has put a new entry on my must read list. (This may not be a compliment these days, but he reminded me of Mel Gibson a few months after firing his personal trainer.) I enjoyed his turn of phrase as a writer, and found his comments incisive and intelligent. And a bit of a caution: “All writers have diseased egos – and in awards season, it metastasizes”; and “Why publish? I find myself quite perplexed about why I do this.” This is someone I’d like to know.