tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13520896864811350652024-03-18T16:55:56.581-07:00meGeoffDispatches from the Crooked 9Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.comBlogger690125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-16443139498785402792024-03-18T16:54:00.000-07:002024-03-18T16:54:56.096-07:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Coming Up</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A flip gets switched. It happens over the day of a few courses. The subtles are sign.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The transformation always commences in the staging area off the kitchen by the back door. The knee-high snow boots vanish, their uppers stuffed with my Montreal Canadiens toque, my black fleece neck warmer and my snot-encrusted mitts. My outdoor work coat, Coca-Cola branded swag from a lifetime ago and which I’m not (and understandably so) permitted to wear beyond the property line of the Crooked 9, finds its summer hanger downstairs in the laundry room.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Up from the depths come Ann’s rubber gardening sabots – the two pairs come in two colours: yellow and red. This is the time of year when Ann can walk the line, actively plan her gardens rather than sketching them on January graph paper or strolling them in her February imagination before she falls asleep, no need to count sheep. Her concerns this year are our June travel plans and yet another season of drought with municipal and provincial water restrictions looming. The going’s getting weird; the wildfire season is already underway. We don’t care if the lawn is parched, but the established stuff, the trees (our lovely birches – two of the last few in the city), the shrubs, the perennials require a wet custodian with an unkinked garden hose. Perhaps the showier annuals, usually proud in their patio and porch pots, will remain unpurchased, wilted greenhouse inventory.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Spring. Possibly. Maybe. Very likely. I’ve put two of three shovels away, but I haven’t pulled out the rakes yet. Experience tells me I’m acting too hastily and maybe Ann and I are tempting fate by wondering about the near future. But, this time of year, God, we are compelled to stretch our spines and square our shoulders. If you’ve ever seen the Rolling Stones perform, watched a concert video or listened to a live album, you know Mick Jagger unfailingly asks you a deeply personal question: “Are you feeling good?” Yes, Mick. “Well, all right!”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">My unofficial spring anthem is “Fishin’ in the Dark” by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Ann knows all the words and unlike me she can carry a tune. Though “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds” I only played it four times in a row because one person’s giddy happiness may trigger a domestic incident. Now, “Fishin’ in the Dark” might be a little hillbilly, but at least it’s not a wretched sugary confection from fuckin’ ABBA and their avatars.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I feel good. Better than James Brown. I dropped the pen the other day on the second draft of a new work of fiction. It’s halfway toward completion now, the distant goal, somewhere around N between A and Z; 22 months of work to date. The December vinyl release of The Muster Point Project’s <i>5 KG</i> EP for which I wrote the lyrics received positive notices and continues to benefit from radio airplay. Selling better than my books, apparently. All of this upbeat stuff is necessarily tempered by my wariness of the ides of March – which can be brutal.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">There’s no portal to the afterlife. Fact is, it’s impossible for Him to let me in because there’s nowhere to go – should there be 1000 harps in Heaven, I hope Little Walter and Junior Wells are playing them. Still, these past few days, I must confess to a few “come to Jesus” moments.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I was outside on the front porch, early afternoon, basking in the spring sunshine, enjoying a cigarette, trying to bloom like some kind of Buddhist lotus. I imagined I could hear the snow seeping in to the earth. I imagined I could see its surface evaporating in the yellow heat. This time last year, the 300 Club jungle telegraph was alive. Membership in this Gang of Six is granted solely by friendships and constant, if intermittent, contact going back 50 years or more. We were talking about a proper reunion in Palm Springs, a full quorum since I can’t remember when. Ann said to me: “If you don’t do it now, the next time may be a funeral. You’ll be one down.” Somehow, it happened, came together. That trip’s first anniversary is coming up. Its countdown has been reduced to days. My God, I’m still trying to shake the desert sand from my shoes; I just got back to Edmonton last weekend. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“Those romantic young boys …” Later that same day’s night I was home alone swirling around in the YouTube vortex. I came across live, hi-def footage shot at the beginning of this month: Bruce Springsteen guesting on stage with John Mellencamp for a duet of “Pink Houses”. I thought, “Oh, man, if this had been broadcast maybe forty years ago on The Midnight Special or that PBS music show In Concert, my joy would’ve been transcendental.” And network television in those days, when both rockers were in their primes, one and done. I watched the YouTube clip three times. As I sat in front of the computer monitor, I thought, “Man, they’re getting on.” Mellencamp especially, pasty and doughy, like a too-long-retired elite athlete or maybe Alec Baldwin yesterday. Me? I haven’t changed a bit since, I don’t know, 1984.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">An envelope arrived in the post the next day. Something from Service Canada addressed to me. I jogged its contents before slitting its top with a letter opener. Canada Pension Plan registration forms sprang out. I thought, “Surely, this can’t be.” Because it’s tax season, I was able to bring the matter up during a meeting with our accountant. Should I receive CPP now or defer the benefit for a nominally larger monthly sum some five years hence? He said, “You’ve made the contributions. You can’t know how much time you have left. I suggest taking it now and enjoying it while you can.” I said, “Cigarette money.” He laughed: “There you go.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 </span><i style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site</i><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span><a href="http://www.megeoff.com" style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">www.megeoff.com</a><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span><i style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy</i><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> 5 KG, </span><i style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> Of Course You Did </span><i style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer</i><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">.</span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-45280491180896503252024-03-04T17:21:00.000-08:002024-03-04T17:21:10.863-08:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A FAN’S NOTES</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Brian Mulroney (1939-2024)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The death of a public figure who’s had an impact on my life, however remotely or intimately, usually precipitates a pause for reflection, at least for a moment or two. And those fleeting thoughts can encapsulate years. That – me and everything I was experiencing at the time – is always then, which is where it will always remain. Even if I was holding hands with Eddie Money or listening to his greatest hits, I can’t go back, I know, even if I’m feeling so much older. As a rule, recently deceased Canadian politicians rarely jiggle that particular VU meter needle.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“I voted for him.” Not reluctantly, but perhaps out of character. “Me too.” </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">This was the consensus on the 300 Club (five guys and me who’ve been friends since Methuselah smoked his first cigarette) instant messaging thread upon digesting the news last Thursday of the death of Brian Mulroney who served two terms as Canada’s 18th prime minister (1984-1993). I was two years out of university with an arts undergraduate degree and holding down a job I hated when Mulroney took power. I harboured no utopian illusions about real life. It wasn’t some sort of anti-social justice crime to vote “capital C” conservative back then. There wasn’t a whole lot of difference between the Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties. Canadian Tories were more pragmatic and more flexible than Reaganites and Thatcherites. Social issues weren’t on the table; Mulroney was all about growing a middling country’s middling economy. I wanted a better shot at making a decent living – as much as that depended on my own initiative and not the government’s. Still, things, all kinds of things, are easier to look after in a healthy, robust economy.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Reciprocity – free trade between Canada and the United States – was a liberal and Liberal goal dating back to Prime Minister Sir Wilfred Laurier, who declared the 20th century would belong to Canada. Things didn’t start shaking down that way until Mulroney flipped his party’s platform, forcing the liberal and Liberal establishment to repudiate its fundamental principle. It’s telling and damning that the legacy of our current prime minister, Liberal Justin Trudeau, will likely be the preservation of the deal Mulroney cut with the States and Mexico some forty years ago.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Mulroney also introduced the federal goods and services tax (GST). Nowadays that legislation would be described as a CLM, a career limiting move, albeit a courageous one. The GST is a fact of Canadian life now. At the time of its introduction, it replaced a hidden and regressive manufacturing tax which had to go if Canada was to be competitive as an international trader. Wealth creation across all strata of society is a noble goal, neither evil nor nefarious. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Since Canada was essentially granted sovereignty from the will of the British parliament with the Statute of Westminster in 1931, we’ve rarely punched above our weight in international affairs. Future prime minister Lester B. Pearson was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize because he was instrumental in the formation of the League of Nations. Prime Minister Jean Chretien refused to chip in to the Second Gulf War, pile on. Mulroney led the Commonwealth and the States in imposing severe sanctions (they used to work back then) on South Africa’s apartheid regime, paving the way for Nelson Mandela’s presidency. It’s still a bit of a head-shaker, a Conservative prime minister in tune with rockers like Little Steven, U2, Midnight Oil and Simple Minds. But his was the type of firm, modestly substantial voice that elucidated Canadian values, instilling a sort of soft pride in country that contrasted sharply with discontented disciple Stephen Harper’s (by this time the Progressive Conservative Party had devolved in to the Conservative Party of Canada following its amalgamation with the fringe Reform Party) government’s dog whistle, nationalistic spin on that glorious stalemate, 53 years before Confederation, the War of 1812. Action trumps revisionism; patriotism is not a propaganda product where I’m from.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Mulroney, like Chretien, always played up his less than modest rural Quebec roots. Friday’s and Saturday’s newspaper stories about him, whatever the section, emphasized his wit and charm. I’ve always imagined him as a Mordecai Richler character, striving from the sticks for the best house in Montreal. He got that mansion on the hill. Despite serving as part of the Cliche Commission, tasked to investigate corruption in Quebec’s construction industry (the Mafia pours deep sidewalks using low grade cement), while still a labour lawyer, whispers of his being on the take tended to follow him around in his political life. The tired rumours spumed in 2007 with the culmination of the Airbus affair. Mulroney allowed accepting $225,000 (possibly $300,000 – the amount is disputed by the lobbyist) in cash, stuffed in envelopes, was “a serious error in judgment” on his part. Not a crime, mind, just business. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project <i>or buy</i> 5 KG, <i>the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer</i>.</span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-36396220874068643862024-02-17T13:41:00.000-08:002024-02-18T13:46:09.514-08:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Codes</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">One of the carousels in the baggage collection area of Calgary’s international airport revolves around a diorama depicting a pack of velociraptors shredding suitcases and their contents. It never failed to make me smile. I was always reminded of the old Samsonite television commercial which cast gorillas as airline baggage handlers. Luggage takes a beating.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Before the pandemic hit Ann and I always flew with minimal carry-on. Our go-to was a maroon canvas shoulder bag which fit our books, the sandwiches we’d made the night before and incidental sundries. The sports bags we checked weren’t much larger, but neither one of us had the stomach to fight for overhead bin space. Who needs <i>High Noon</i> on a narrow cabin aisle – and, my God, what some people drag aboard: ratdogs on ropes. My delusional rationale was that our soft sports bags would be the last ones laded into the cargo bay and ergo, the first ones off.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I’ve always maintained a fee should be charged for carry-on and checked baggage should be gratis. Boarding a narrow tube missing a few critical bolts unencumbered sure would speed up the herding process. I suspect that day will come – or at least the additional charge segment, be it morning, afternoon or night; there will be no happy hour.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ann and I have changed our air travel habits post-pandemic. We are strictly carry-on only minimalists. Not because we’re avoiding the checked bag cash grab, but because our perception is that our checked bags and our destination are analogous to a fool and his money: parted like a Gillette “dry look” haircut.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Luggage is expensive. But provided you’re not forced to buy it in an airport, you should never have to pay full freight (let alone a premium). Ann and I recently booked late spring return flights to Amsterdam. We intend to ride the rails through the Low Countries and perhaps even venture into parts of France or Germany (Note to self: don’t mention the war). We agreed our carry-on totes required an upgrade. We needed sleeker, lighter, sturdier bags, more forgiving of sidewalks, curbs and escalators. So, we got a bargain on a couple of Samsonites, one burgundy one and one navy one. We were all set, but …</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">As we pulled our bags from their boxes (very different from squaring a circle), my imagination embraced the Temptations, running away with me: Ann and I had purchased a pair of MacGuffins; the three-digit combination locks by the latches tripped my love of intrigue. A MacGuffin is a thriller device, a plot driver. It could be anything although I always picture it as a briefcase, suitcase or gym bag. The reader or viewer need never know its contents; all that matters is that most every character in the story wants it desperately and will torture and kill for it. The classic stories involve an innocent protagonist, a guileless hero who somehow and inadvertently becomes involved in some very nasty business. The literary masters are Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. In film, the profile of Alfred Hitchcock shades everything backward and forward.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I began to consider three-digit sequences I hoped I could remember without having to write them down because, well, nobody locks the combination number inside the safe. Phone numbers before the introduction of local area codes might do. I can still recite a couple of primary exchange groupings from my days growing up in Montreal, 739 and 288. There is the Crooked 9’s landline of course, though Ann’s cell number is written on a folded piece of paper in my wallet because I always transpose two digits but never the same pair. The only other number I know by heart is my friend Stats Guy’s, he of the Tuesday Night Beer Club, because I’ve been telephoning him for more than thirty years and he has remained as stationary as a parking meter - I had to look it up in my address book the other day, drew a complete blank – luckily, I remembered his real name. Then the easy rhyming nines began playing in my head, telephone number songs: “Beechwood 4-5789” (Marvelettes), “634-5789” (Wilson Pickett) and “867-5309/Jenny” (Tommy Tutone). I cannot remember AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” number. 46201 is an Indianapolis zip code in Burton Cummings’s lovely “Sour Suite”, but I forever confuse it with the Spiegel Catalog’s Chicago 60609. Spiegel was a <i>Truth or Consequences</i> prize sponsor; there wasn’t much on television after school in the late sixties and early seventies, a two-channel, black and white universe.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">For simplicity’s sake and because my doddering days aren’t too far up the road, I narrowed the field to four songs with three digits in their titles. The first one I thought of (naturally) was “Flight 505” by the Stones, from <i>Aftermath</i> – the first of the five or six nearly flawless albums in their catalogue. I ain’t superstitious, but the trouble with airline flight numbers is that when they make the news it’s because said flight did not touchdown intact. Sort of what SpaceX might gloss over as “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“One After 909” is a throwaway on <i>Let It Be</i> (do I even have to type their name?). I can imagine Ann and I at the kitchen counter discussing the merit of this selection:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“909. We’ll both remember that one, right? It’s in the title.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“So is 910.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“But, 909 is spelled out in digits only.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“Yes, but if you do the arithmetic, you get 910. Not your strong point, I know. So, which one?”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“There’s no need to overly complicate this. Shall we move on to The Who?”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Pete Townshend’s writing returns to the same theme again and again, the nature of tribes (“Uniforms Corp d’esprit”). You can opt in like the disciples at the holiday camp in the parable of <i>Tommy</i> or opt out like the migrants going mobile through the wasteland in <i>Lifehouse</i> (released unrealized as <i>Who’s Next </i>and now known as <i>Life House</i>). <i>Quadrophenia</i> was much more down to earth, a story about teen gangs and their costumes and kit in post-war Britain, the mods and the rockers. Like Kinks music before they embarked on their American stadium era beginning with the release of <i>Sleepwalker</i>, <i>Quadrophenia</i> is veddy, veddy British. Very niche, an excessively loud addendum to the rousing Angry Young Movement in British literature, although maybe more new journalism than fiction: compare Ken Russell’s bombastic <i>Tommy</i> movie to <i>Quadrophenia</i>, one of those fantastic, low budget films cloaked in anonymity (Sting’s minor role as Ace Face aside) we’ve come to expect from British filmmakers. Suffice to say, “5:15”, recounting a stream-of-consciousness amphetamine-hyped train ride to join the rioting on the beach under the Brighton’s famous pier in the spring of 1964, rocks like a bastard son’s testosterone.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i>Mother was an incubator and father was the contents/of a test tube in an icebox/in the factory of birth</i>. “905” is the titular, fully grown, fully thawed hatchling in John Entwistle’s impossibly catchy, dys(co)topian sci-fi contribution to <i>Who Are You</i>. “The Ox” was writing about cloning, the AI of its day. Writers are of their time and it’s a fraught exercise to impose contemporary interpretations and mores on old words, but some forty years on, I can’t help but to hear a chatbot’s existential lament: <i>Every sentence in my head/someone else has said/and the end of my life is an open door.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ann and I will eventually arrive at some mutually acceptable code for our new carry-ons. I know this. And I know too if I’m asked to open our suitcases at a security check, I’m going to freeze because I’ve forgotten three simple digits. Those youthful popinjays in their uniforms with their epaulettes, flag badges and emblems will have to wait while I run the numbers from an old reel, the mixtape in my ever softening head. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project <i>or buy</i> 5 KG, <i>the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer</i>.</span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-84741997797306291452024-02-11T10:31:00.000-08:002024-02-11T10:31:06.388-08:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">SAINTS PRESERVE US</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Mysteries to Me</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I’m not an officially recognized behavioural psychologist. I’ve no certificates, diplomas nor any other papers of frameable importance. While working in retail and advertising I actively manipulated human behaviour. As a scribbler I observe human behaviour; make notes, take what I need. Ergo, ipso facto, in vino veritas, I consider myself highly qualified to be utterly confounded by recent events in Alberta. Man, I can’t make it up anymore, let alone embellish it (I understand Harvard University is headhunting a new president? I digress).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Here's an example. CKUA is an Alberta public radio station whose existence predates the creation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation by five years or so. Its programming ranges from fantastic to annoying. Such is the nature of a traditional medium. It is donor supported. Engaged listeners can “subscribe” with monthly donations, kick in to the station’s two annual fundraising events or just give what they can when they can. Any donation in excess of $10 warrants an income tax receipt. A significant portion of any donation to a registered charity is tax deductible, but it’s math and I’m vague on the subject. Still, donate $100 to CKUA and maybe half is applied toward what you owe the government come tax time, or maybe even increases your refund. Everybody wins.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Lately CKUA has been staging 50/50 raffles, a popular method of fundraising. The ticket seller keeps half the jackpot and the winning ticket holder gets the other. It’s a game, a lottery, a form gambling. The odds of winning, which vary slightly depending on the number of tickets sold and the number you bought, aren’t good. But the hook is it could happen. It really could happen to you. The more you spend the more you get to play. It won’t, but it could. Really (When I was in Joshua Tree National Park last May I spritzed myself with Axe perfume and waited by the side of the highway under the big hot sun for the convertible muscle car crammed with supermodels, beer and cigarettes to approach out of the shimmering desert heat, pull over and offer me a ride. It didn’t happen, but it could’ve. I digress). It makes more financial sense to donate money to CKUA instead of buying their raffle tickets. Just does. Alas, dreams can’t come true as a modest entry on a tax form schedule.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The final week of January which lingered for a fortnight zapped the Capital Region, Edmonton and environs, with record low temperatures. People of a certain age didn’t have to bother converting Celsius to Fahrenheit. The electrical grid felt the strain because one generating station was offline for scheduled maintenance. Alternative and sustainable power sources were unreliable: wind turbines don’t rotate when they’re frozen solid and solar panels are useless in the freezing dark. This unnerving news was quickly followed by emergency water restrictions come February. A filtration plant went offline for unscheduled maintenance. The utility in both cases asked Albertans to change their usage habits, their behaviour, so as to prevent catastrophe. The people pitched in, they complied.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">These are the same people who believe that suggested public health measures such as vaccinations are an affront to personal liberty, the God-given right (albeit a human construct) to “body autonomy.” Vaccines are prophylactics. Jabs go a long way in stymieing the transmission of pathogens which can disfigure, cripple or kill you and those you sneeze at. The uptake in this province is low. With the onset of winter Alberta Health Services prepared its annual public service campaign, simply reminding citizens to get their shots. The United Conservative (UCP) government’s ministry of health dialed back the message for something more innocuous: nothing, silence, <i>omerta</i>. The butchered creative may’ve been posted on Facebook for maybe an hour.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Mumps, measles, polio, chicken pox, influenza, pneumonia, covid variants and fuck knows what else are other people’s raffle tickets. In a sense, this form of self-harm or neglect, has become something of a right-wing partisan, ideological affirmation UCP policy; an article of faith, similar to Jesus drying the supper dishes in my house. Overwhelmed hospital emergency rooms have become cuckoo nests, there are lunatics on gurneys in the corridors. Alberta’s health care system is the same as its criminal justice system, best not to be involved. Premier Danielle Smith, the Banshee of Invermectin, panders to her populist base by espousing non-scientific alternative therapies. She’s even mused about enshrining the right to be infected in Alberta’s Human Rights Act although it has proved tricky deciding which disease is a scourge and which is a privilege.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Body autonomy is not a universal principle in Alberta. It does not apply to all. Since the UCP government was reelected last May, it has floated some radically counter-intuitive policies conveniently omitted from its campaign platform. Plans for a potential Alberta Pension Plan surprised everybody. Proposed legislation intended to suppress the rights and privileges of sexual minorities in the province’s K-12 school system was next.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Gender identity politics is a minefield in the culture wars that taint contemporary civics. Growing up is hard enough without being dragged in to that mire, especially when you have no say on election day. Anatomy and faith mix like electricity and water. I can’t imagine what it must be like standing in front of the bathroom mirror and wondering if somehow a mistake was made in the cosmic nursery or whether it’s meant to be. Sometimes kids need someone else to talk to; a caring, objective adult, an expert or teacher – not mom or dad, not a religious figure - outside of their homes. And those conversations demand the confidentially of a journalist protecting her source or a lawyer acting on behalf of her client. In the UCP world, body autonomy is only superseded by imagined “parental rights” which pretty much align with the beliefs of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children or themselves.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Nothing makes sense to me in Alberta. And I should know better than to buy raffle tickets.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project <i>or buy</i> 5 KG, <i>the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.</i> </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-32178455764361731972024-01-21T10:54:00.000-08:002024-01-21T14:26:02.113-08:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">SAINTS PRESERVE US</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Big Running Shoes to Fill: Rachel Notley Stepping Back from Alberta Politics</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">When Brian Mulroney won the leadership of the federal Tories in 1983, my Nana (1893-1997) told me, “There are no statesmen anymore.” Her points of reference would’ve included Churchill, F.D.R., J.F.K. (despite being Catholic), Lester B. Pearson and possibly Pierre Trudeau (“Just watch me”), but Robert Stanfield (leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada 1967-1976) for sure. The death last week of former federal New Democratic Party leader (1975-1989) Ed Broadbent reminded me of my Nana’s lament. There was a time when the pursuit of power wasn’t motivated by its trappings so much as the candidate’s willingness to serve the public and advocate for the greater good.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">When my Nana objected to any particular platform or policy, she did not rail, she respectfully disagreed. Perhaps a bit prim, but always civil. And Nana, unlike the majority of today’s voters and an alarming number of career political hacks, understood civics; she knew how the various levels of government were supposed to function, tend their jurisdictions. Times have changed. Long before my brother moved to Edmonton from Montreal in the early seventies (I followed in 1990, a bit late to the party), the Moores had rural relatives farming near Penhold, just a bumpy and lengthy Model T drive from Red Deer. My father spent his Depression summers in Alberta. Had Nana had Alberta roots instead of Brighton’s Pier and had she lived way beyond 105 (maybe kale smoothies over the odd tipple of sherry), I believe Nana would’ve described Rachel Notley as a “statesman.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I am a cynic. When it comes to the body politic, there’s no better view than the backside of a spent politician (Hello, Justin). There are a couple of exceptions for a couple of reasons. As a somewhat engaged voter, I didn’t have time to get a handle on the two federal Conservative leaders who predeceased (pardon the pun) Pierre Poilievre because they couldn’t get a handle on their party. One election and done – note the dates for perennial losers Broadbent and Stanfield in the first paragraph. And then there’s someone like Rachel and I type that proper noun with the same affection Lou Reed says it at the fade of “Coney Island Baby” even though Alberta’s Rachel is not a drug addicted trans woman in need of a shave although our Rachel would look out for Lou’s Rachel.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Edmontonians grew accustomed to seeing their premier, Rachel, because that’s who she is, the most powerful politician in the province and maybe Western Canada, running through the city’s river valley and ravines or sitting on her tarp at a summer outdoor music festival. “Authentic” was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2023; since Rachel was first elected to Alberta’s legislature in 2008 as the New Democratic Party member for Edmonton-Strathcona, she’s neither strived nor contrived to be anyone but herself. Rachel has that trifecta magic that keeps the public eye glued to its subject: intellect, integrity and charisma.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Rachel succeeded Brian Mason as NDP leader in 2014. On her watch the party transformed from outlier to mainstream. Its growth and popularity reflected Alberta’s shifting demographics, younger, educated, urban. A pragmatist, she nudged the party’s ideology toward the centre of the political divide. I’m a centrist but not a fence sitter. My general inference is that no proper party leader, left or right, and sensibly enough, wants the lunatic fringe aboard (there are exceptions). My sense of Rachel has always been that if a decision was to be made with the fortunes of the party or the people’s hanging conflicted in the balance, she would opt for the latter.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Speaking of outliers… Since Alberta joined the Canadian federation in 1905 its internal politics have pretty much been defined by nationally anomalous serial autocracies. Believe it or not, the province’s first government was Liberal (1905-1921). That regime was followed in painfully slow succession by the United Farmers of Alberta (1921-1935), Social Credit (1935-1971) and then the Progressive Conservatives (1971-2015). All of the aforementioned parties either withered into insignificance or ceased to exist after losing power. No other Canadian province shares this history. The NDP under Rachel broke the mould in Alberta.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The party’s majority victory in 2015 was seismic, shocking. Forty-four years of Tory autocracy swept away by prairie socialists. Were they discussing policy at the Co-op? The only contemporary analogy I can think of is how good the new Stones album is. The aftermath on the other side of the political divide was for the schismatic right, righter and the rightest to grudgingly Christian mingle underneath the newly erected United Conservative Party big top circus tent. United we stand, but not too, too close together.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I am a realist. I am flawed. Other people are flawed. Our institutions are flawed. As a Canadian I expect “peace, order and good government.” It’s not a big ask. Still, sometimes I feel like a cat because “good government” seems as ignorantly idealistic as believing there must be more clement weather out the back door. Maybe out the front again. If the NDP’s lone term overseeing the fortunes Alberta wasn’t the Platonic ideal of “good government,” it was, an obvious breath of fresh air aside, decent enough.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Trans Mountain got done. According to previous administrations that stagnation of this project, an oil pipeline (pipelines are a federal jurisdiction) to tidewater threatened Alberta’s very existence. The NDP’s solution came with climate caveats and a carbon tax. This was the first indication to me that the party had the courage to plan beyond the next election cycle. The other was increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour. The argument against has merit, higher wages can drive inflation and strain small businesses. Essentially the NDP government worked to address the issues of the day and potential future ones. It did not grandstand; it did not create issues in order to distract and deceive the electorate.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Rachel lost the two subsequent provincial elections. I’m no political insider, but what struck me was there was nary a whisper of razor strops and whet stones, blade sharpening in the NDP’s backroom. There are just two parties in the legislature today. The UCP holds a ten-seat majority. The NDP is a formidable opposition and, crucially, experienced. As Dylan sings, “Things have changed.” Rachel transformed Alberta politics.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The animus many Albertans direct at politicians from Central Canada is almost genetic, like Huntington’s disease. There is talk of rebranding Alberta’s NDP in the hopes of eliminating the misconception that it’s merely the hayseed cousin of the federal NDP which is perceived here as a party of champagne socialists, hipsters in Toronto incapable of understanding Western Canada. Now’s the time to do it because with Rachel stepping back, the NDP immediately erases its cult of personality label. (That will be a fraught business. The Elections Alberta website teems with registered and unregistered political parties and all the good names are taken although Alberta Democratic Party might do the trick.) The other difficulty with the cult of personality model is that beyond Rachel the rest of the caucus is low profile and faceless. There’s no obvious <i>dauphin</i> waiting in the wings. She has said she won’t endorse any leadership candidate. I can see the party’s brains trust searching outside its ranks, looking to repeat the Rachel formula. Reestablish an identity in an instant. A couple of former big city mayors, Calgary’s Naheed Nenshi and Edmonton’s Don Iveson don’t seem to have much on the go at the moment. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project <i>or buy</i> 5 KG, t<i>he complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer</i>. </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-7936801117964109052024-01-17T16:20:00.000-08:002024-01-17T16:20:56.690-08:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Of Cigarettes and Polar Vortexes</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I’ve lived most of my life in less delicate times. Hypersensitivity was the result of an injury. Actual nerve damage. Real pain. School and work were unavoidable obligations unless my excuse involved severe physical trauma. A cold or flu merely meant switching to menthol cigarettes for a week or so. They seemed to work as well as cough drops. I’ve missed them from time to time since Health Canada banned them – I can’t remember when. I’ve always managed a cigarette whatever the conditions. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I imagine Canadian Hell to be so liquid nitrogen cold that sinners burn anyway. Last week Edmonton dipped beyond that closing time seductiveness when Celsius and Fahrenheit flirt about hooking up over a cold one at 40-below. I hope they don’t fall in love because a dirty weekend fling puts enough strain on the electrical grid. Besides, there’s no arguing with a child like El Nino whose ferret fingers also disrupt every other established climate pattern. It’s similar to toddler grandchildren messing with your audio equipment. Volume knobs are meant to be eaten because they taste better than Goldfish snack crackers which are meant to be spun around in a CD player. Not that I would know. A diminished jet stream cannot keep arctic weather in its place, neither contain nor filter its chill.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">It's still too soon to notice any change in the low light this new year side of the winter solstice up in Edmonton. The mornings are as black as my coffee, the ink of the newspaper, my prune lungs. Dawn arrives diamond blue, hard and clear. Distant cirrus clouds glow appliance filament orange. Freezing, still air is as good a conductor as any metal. The snap of my Zippo lighter’s lid could be the retort of a hunting rifle. The tobacco smoke, a hotter gas, congeals enough to cast its own shadow.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Savvy smokers understand that cigarettes can burn stuff: beds, housing, tracts of land; genitalia too, as multi-tasking on a toilet seat is best left to gathering one’s thoughts or perusing an out-of-date magazine. Live and learn, once bitten, twice shy. The discount cigarettes I buy burn like high school joints, unevenly. Their embers can be freakishly long and the paper turns brown. The seasonal mats I lay on the slate of the front porch of the Crooked 9 have burns in them. My seat cushion on the tete-a-tete has burns in it. My Neil Young flannel shirts and jackets which I layer on in extreme weather have burns in them. There are burns between the index and middle fingers of my winter gloves - both hands. Sometimes, I think none of this will end well.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Inclement weather cigarette burns whose frequency varies follow a relatively standard pattern. Once Fahrenheit and Celsius decide to conjugate my eyes and nose run like fugitives. Health Canada has yet to ban snot tipped cigarettes. There’s no such thing as a dry cold in my head. I do the wrist-to-elbow flannel wipe even as I lick my cracking lips. Saliva becomes Elmer’s Glue when a cigarette’s filter is involved. There’s no friction between slick insulated nylon gloves and smooth cigarette paper. The hot ash needs flicking. So begins the sticky-lipped slide to the orange ember. The fingers of my glove begin to smoulder and melt. I rip it off and then rip the cigarette from my mouth. Enough! Time to go back inside. My exposed palm is damp. I reach for the metal handle on the front door. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project <i>or buy</i> 5 KG, <i>the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.</i> </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-18069470818816119392023-12-31T17:12:00.000-08:002023-12-31T17:12:50.887-08:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">SAINTS PRESERVE US</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Gimme Some Truth</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">How long does an era last? This post-Obama one seems like eons. Endless oxymoronic days crammed with “fake news” and “alternative facts.” Both terms can be true or false, bad or good, depending on your point of view. Hell, they can even be mixed and matched like ideological bakery doughnuts. Whatever suits. So, it’s little wonder then that Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2023 is “authentic.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The dictionary publisher’s metric is based on online lookups (very different from online hookups) and prevalence of usage in contemporary culture, pop, corporate or otherwise. The primary definition of authentic in my Canadian Oxford is, “of undisputed origin: genuine; trustworthy, reliable.” Sort of a shame that people must remind themselves of the meaning of such a common and useful word, but, on the other hand, very encouraging too. Still…</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">As Keith Richards once said about cool (I’m paraphrasing): If you have to work at it, you’re not. Sort of like one of those third-rate countries with “Democratic” in its name: Voter beware! So, I bristle when an advertiser, politician or celebrity is compelled to tell me they’re authentic. I’m skeptical about restaurants who promise authentic cuisine because chances are I’ve never sampled the actual domestic cuisine in situ. Authentic shouldn’t be so fraught, but it’s so often misused and misapplied.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">We need all the qualities the word embodies and all the synonyms it implies more than ever. Tomorrow is “Game on!” for the US presidential election cycle. But certified and genuine authenticity has already had a few mortifying weeks of late. I was amused to learn that the president of Harvard University was resubmitting her doctoral thesis with, erm, “clarifications.” Speaking of plagiarism, I’m interested in the outcome of the federal lawsuit <i>The New York Times</i> has filed against Microsoft and Open AI for stealing its copyrighted content only to regurgitate it incorrectly. Once venerable <i>Sports Illustrated</i> has copped to online copy generated by chatbots presented under fake bylines complete with thumbnail “correspondent” portraits.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A recent poll conducted on behalf of <i>The Economist</i> found that one in five Bowiesque Americans, young people aged 18-29, believe the Holocaust to be a myth. Now, human society is the healthiest and wealthiest its ever been. Ever. And we’re collectively smarter too. For instance, we figured out that the Periodic Table contains more than four elements. We know Earth is an orb, a ball, a globe if you will and not a flat disc (well, most of us). We know these simple facts to be true (most of us). And yet, the president of the University of Pennsylvania explained to a congressional hearing that the rampant antisemitism on her campus, including calls to finish the job Hitler started, was “context-dependent.” It all smells and sounds like authentic bullshit. And a big shout out to Himmler before the homecoming game!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Happy New Year. Christ. I’m predicting “dread” as Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2024. I’m not mistruthing here. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project <i>or buy</i> 5 KG, <i>the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.</i> </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-54342213212505600722023-12-25T10:51:00.000-08:002023-12-25T10:51:21.604-08:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">HUMAN WRECKAGE</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Table Manners</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Eden has been paved over and is populated by coyotes, some of whom bet on the Maple Leafs. Indeed, <i>turn this crazy bird around</i> by any and all means necessary. That’s <i>meGeoff</i>’s Joni Mitchell 101 course description, her oeuvre as a thumbnail clipping inside a nutshell.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A song of hers that I’ve come to admire and appreciate in recent years is “The River”, which has become something of a holiday season standard: <i>It’s comin’ on Christmas and they’re cuttin’ down trees, puttin’ up reindeer</i>…. I imagine the narrator comfortably ensconced in the California warmth of Laurel Canyon, glad times. Still, depressed as almost always, she longs for a frozen river to skate away on. The imagery is disparate and sadly beautiful.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I’m sitting in the dining room at the head of the table. The view through the picture window behind me, which I took in for a moment before I sat down, was peculiar for Christmas Eve day. The only white I saw was on the trunks of the two birch trees in the front yard. Deciduous and particular, they’re the last of their kind in the neighbourhood, maybe the city too. The grass was green. There was an extra rock in the garden, a still hare doing its best impression of a stray patch of snow.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I’m expanding the table, twisting a gerry-built crank, a ratchet welded to a steel rod which in turn is welded to another steel rod to form a T-shaped tool. Leftie loosey. The original crank has been lost since nobody can really remember when. Imagine a more elegant tool of the type that would goose the engine of a motorcar or a bi-plane, ergonomic and efficient. It’s tedious work. My view is the primary colours of the kitchen backsplash tiles, yellow, red and blue and shades of the latter two.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">There are two leaves for the table, both warped. One is 14 inches wide, the other 15. They were originally labeled “left” and “right” which kind of makes sense for an oval although which side are you on and anyway, left and right is kind of a grey area for me - cursive writing excepted. I relabeled the leaves “kitchen” and “window” a few years ago: this one slots in here and that one goes there. Simple. But that was then, when I used to crank the table apart with my back to the kitchen while looking out the dining room window. Since then, the table has done a complete rotation. So now, the “kitchen” leaf goes toward the window and the “window” leaf goes toward the kitchen.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Sometimes, I believe I’d like to escape the needless complexity of this, the most commercial of seasons. My Christmases through the decades have run the gamut from low comedy to tragedy, lonely to chaotic and joyous, and more than one “Fuck me, I can’t believe that went well.” Just like yours. These days I tend to pre-worry about the dishes, the mess and the cleanup. I wish some of those crime scene biohazard restoration companies held Boxing Day sales.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Winter solstice has passed. The days are getting longer. In days like these, the times we live in, that’s sort of a mixed blessing. Christmas as a declaration of Christian faith is a one-sided deal, a bit like trying to redeem a lifetime warranty from a Sears or Eaton’s. Salvation as a corporate mission statement has proved false. No coincidence fervent believers are described as sheep. The terrible truth lies in advertising. Buy fulfilment in goods and services because Indulgences don't payoff like Trifectas. At least the Coca-Cola Santa said, “Enjoy!” Ice cold, of course.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I’ve always dwelled on that side of town, on the cynical side of the tracks. Christmas (and maybe Thanksgiving) is a big deal about the everyday. For the most part, all things considered, it’s pretty good to be alive most of the time. Some days I can’t believe my luck. And for the vast majority of us, circumstances can always be worse and I’m the type who figures it’s just a matter of time. I sweat the fates of others less fortunate than me and do the little I’m capable of for them as best I can. I’m not always kind to strangers, but I at least try to be polite. Maintaining and strengthening bonds with friends and relations sometimes takes a little work, some effort, although it’s never hard, backbreaking. I don’t need to be reminded of any of this one particular day in each passing year.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I suppose I resent Christmas a little bit. The annual hassle and expense of being reminded how to lead a daily life of modest decency. Still, I hope your day will be as merry as it can be. And I mean that. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy</i> 5 KG, <i>the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did i<i>n your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.</i></span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-1275282686253559082023-12-12T11:13:00.000-08:002023-12-12T11:17:25.755-08:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">THE MUSTER POINT PROJECT</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">TMPP4XMAS</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Vinyl! My collaboration with indie rock artist Kevin Franco aka The Muster Point Project just got all Olivia Newton-John - physical. Now you can listen to this modest body of work talk complete with ticks and pops. Good vibrations move air.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The music industry has always been subject to technological disruption. Sheet music publishers and instrument makers were not happy with the inventions of radio and the phonograph. Record companies were fine selling music fans new media so long as the formats remained exclusive. Home taping wasn’t killing the industry in the 80s so much as lousy albums, one hit and nine duds. Digitization and Napster were, however, real disasters, twinned at that, compressed MP3 files sounded terrible and nobody involved in the creation through to the distribution and sale of a song got paid. Only that venerated little tech prick Steve Jobs at Apple was able to monetize this disequilibrium. If malls, both downtown and suburban, and Amazon combined to kill “Main Street,” the iPod killed record pressing plants. The few that survive scrounge and scavenge replacement parts from the decrepit hulks or their sister factories. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">It's not easy for indie acts like TMPP to get vinyl to market in a timely manner. Get in line behind Taylor Swift and the Rolling Stones and don’t forget your cheque book. The production lag can be as long as a year. I submitted the lyrics for “I Got This” to Kevin last March. Shortly afterward we talked seriously about trying to write more songs together. Kevin said he envisioned an EP of maybe five cuts. Could I write ten more for him to sift through? I thought, “Oh. I can at least try.” He was obviously more confident than me because that’s when he would’ve had to book <i>5 KG</i>’s pressing. He never said a word, never pressured me.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I don’t stream music. I suppose iPods have their places, summertime picnic table docks. I confine my time in the YouTube vortex to a couple of hours one night a week. The hook is the video, my musical heroes were young and good looking at one time. And sometimes YouTube is no different than leafing through my old address book – everybody’s dead. I told Kevin, you know, should anything come from our project, a CD would be nice. He said, “They’re not cool enough.” I turned to the Stones (as I tend to do) – no expectations. Oh well. A memento on a shelf would’ve been a bonus.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Teenagers sleep a lot, for uninterrupted hours impervious to their bladders. If I wasn’t sleeping (or coping with my bed spinning like a top), I was seated on it, listening to music, propped against the wall, my pillow vertical for padding, my knees drawn up, the record jacket and its inner sleeve in my hands. Printed lyrics were always a godsend, not just to follow along, but because sometimes elocution and enunciation aren’t terribly rock ‘n’ roll. Their inclusion didn’t guarantee anything though. To this day I can’t be certain if Mary’s dress (clingy, mid-thigh length in my imagination) swayed with the movement of her hips or waved something like Marilyn Monroe’s subway grate white one in the draft of the slammed screen door.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Once my first novel was off press (<i>Murder Incorporated</i>, 2003) a box of author’s copies was delivered to me, not at home, but to the ad agency where I worked. I was not an efficient employee that afternoon. My Calgary publisher had contracted Kevin’s ad agency to design the cover. He did that particular job himself. Here we are together again: <i>5 KG</i> on vinyl. You see your first book for the first time or hear someone sing your words on the radio and, well, you’re in a parallel universe or dreaming in the darkness with a complacent, complicit, cooperative and uncomplaining bladder, because stuff like that can’t possibly happen in real life. It’s beyond surreal to put a record on the turntable and follow along to your own lyrics printed on the back of the sleeve – even if you already know all the words, what’s coming next.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">If you don’t or can’t shop bricks and mortar in Edmonton or Calgary, you can still buy <i>5 KG</i> on line. Go here <a href="http://tinyurl.com/TMPPMUSIC">right now</a>. But wait! There’s more! Cleverly concealed within this post is a discount promotional code worth an astounding 25-percent off! For even bigger savings, bundle <i>5 KG</i> with <i>What’s the Point?</i> - TMPP’s latest full-length CD! Oh by gosh, by jingle, hurry! Act now! Operators standing by. </span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy</i> 5 KG, <i>the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.</i> </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-75077832816478575092023-11-25T11:45:00.000-08:002023-11-25T12:02:12.019-08:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Stray Gators</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">JB has been a dear fiend of mine since we met in high school, 1974. I was one of his partners in crime and misdemeanors. We were guests at each other’s first weddings. His career in the hospitality industry has taken him halfway around the world and back the other way. JB is now the unappointed goodwill ambassador of New Orleans and possibly its unelected mayor. When I told JB Ann and I were contemplating a brief, self-indulgent holiday somewhere, one without obligations to anybody but ourselves, his off-season pitch rose to infomercial volume.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“You will shit your liver. Remember, you can bender twenty-four hours a day here.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">As tourists, Ann and I generally try to avoid touristy activities. We try to blend in. The exception to this rule is that when we travel in the States and we’re out and about wherever we are, I usually wear an unbleached cotton Royal Canadian Air Force ballcap – a gift from my big sister in honour of our dad, a veteran, who died on Remembrance Day in 2014. I’m fairly certain the red maple leaf inside the blue rondel is good mojo, ersatz Who or Mod pop art that screams “Don’t shoot! We’re Canadian!” Anyway, we generally dislike being herded around on other people’s schedules as we dislike other people in general. JB pre-arranged two excursions for Ann and me that, honestly, we wouldn’t have done otherwise, but we’re glad we did.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">There’s no sharp edge to the continent in a Louisiana swamp. They are quagmires of tidewater from the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi Delta river water. The waters mingle from different directions in sluggish channels called bayous. We skimmed over them in an airboat, a flat-bottomed craft with a giant, noisy fan at the stern that doesn’t invite one of Late Night’s “Stupid Human Tricks,” no stopping that gigantic machinery with your tongue. The area Ann and I toured was partially industrialized, dredging boats and barge piers. Once we veered off the main canal and were spirited away above the muck, the smell hit us: brackish water and rotting vegetation. The summertime smell, when the Spanish moss hangs from the cypress trees and the heat is on, must be awfully high. Blue herons and white egrets pranced atop the sopping marsh grasses and reeds. Alligators, perfectly camouflaged in this uniformly green environment, broke the waterline as subtly as a submarine periscope. If you’re like me, you like to stick your hand out of the window of a moving car to feel the air current or drape your arm over the gunwale of a rowboat, drag your fingers, make ripples. Very bad idea on a swamp tour. Jeepers, creepers, I’m aware I’m able to convey reaction and emotion with my baby blues. And I know I project that ability on other mammals, cuddly ones like seal pups and kittens. Anthropomorphism is a non-starter with cold-blooded reptiles. On the other hand (both safely on my lap inside the boat), I’ve worked with people who possess those dead, expressionless eyes and I recognize that blank, lethal look in the faces of too many figures who are in the public eye.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The drive to the swamp tour dock took about an hour. We crossed the Crescent City Bridge from downtown and got on the Westbank Expressway. I can’t tell you the compass coordinates, but we drove in the opposite direction from Lake Pontchartrain. The sightseeing was a succession of injury lawyer billboards: DON’T SETTLE! FIGHT BACK! MAKE THEM PAY! I noticed too that where there’s a Walgreens drugstore, there’s a rival CVS beside it or across road. Everywhere. Same on Canal Street too, across Bourbon from our hotel (Which reminds me, I must remind Mr Patel, our Edmonton pharmacist, to stock cigarettes and install a refrigerated “beer cave” in his shop). The next lengthy drive we took was also compliments of JB.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Those double-decker, open-top tour buses? Hop-on, hop-off! They’re always red wherever you go. Yeah, Ann and I cringe too. No point in advertising you’re a rube, a hayseed or otherwise unsophisticated type. A tourist. But a ninety-minute circuit provided us the lay of the below sea level land. We crossed the tram line routes and saw where they intersected. We got a sense of what we’d be interested in exploring and where it was. We were definitely in Fats Domino’s compact hometown, we could walk it, yes indeed.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The problem with our bus tour was the luck of the draw. Our amplified tour guide, not shy about the tip jar by the driver’s seat, was something of a genteel gentleman, all down home Southern smarm. Ann avoids blue language provided she’s not reading or watching the news of the day. Well, fuck me if she didn’t have a go while Billy recited his rote patter. “Gentleman, hide your wallets. This here’s the designer outlet mall on the Mississippi Riverwalk. Ladies, you know, if your man buys you a knock-off and saves a buck or two, nobody’s going to know the difference! Har-har.” “Now, if you look to your right through that brick archway, you can’t really see it, but that’s where Archie Manning’s restaurant is. Archie was one of the greatest Saints ever. You may’ve heard of his sons Peyton and Eli. There’s a third boy, he was a wide receiver in college, but he got injured, didn’t have a career. He’s a coach somewhere. If you go to Archie Manning’s, tell ‘em Billy sent ya and you’ll get looked after. Don’t forget to tip! Har-har.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The cash I burned through in New Orleans all went to tips. I was happy to grease JB’s concierge, but people like Billy and the swamp tour guide expect one too. My worst experiences were in the music clubs. These days my beer of choice is Michelob Ultra, low-carb, low alcohol, as watery as you’d imagine. The steel bladder of my youth is more crumpled tinfoil now and so when I break the seal, it’s never one and done. The Bourbon and Frenchmen toilets are tiny, revoltingly utilitarian. There’s a trough, and a ritzier place might have walls, maybe even a door, surrounding the bowl. See the Canadian with the stage fright. And yet, somehow, there’s still room for an old guy on a tripod stool brandishing a squirt bottle of liquid soap, a clean, strong, thick and absorbent sheet of Bounty or Hefty and optional grimy spritzers of Old Spice and Calvin Klein perfume – I guess men use cologne – I’ve an Axe to grind with scent. A dollar per squirt of clear piss because the attendant isn’t looking at faces or doing much of anything except staring at his phone: “Hi, baby, how’s work going?”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Our scheduled Friday afternoon arrival was Air Canada on time, about three hours late. JB had been in our hotel room before we checked in. Abita, a local red lager was on hand, as was bottled water, fruit juice and because over the course of a week’s stay in New Orleans there was bound to be a Maureen McGovern, a Poseidon misadventure, a morning after, a few tins of Diet Pepsi. Ann and I freshened up and then rode the elevator down to meet JB on Canal Street. He was on the red paving stone sidewalk chatting with the doorman and the bell captain. It took me a minute or so to realize that by not setting foot inside the lobby or coming up to our room he was signaling the staff that the general manager was off the clock; nothing to inspect here.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">JB escorted us through the madness of the mob on Bourbon Street before cutting a block over to Royal. I spotted a tiny little bar with French doors opened on to the sidewalk called Touché; the World Series was on, maybe game one. I needed a stool and a score. Touché became something of a base for Ann and me because there are more interesting places to hang around besides a hotel room. Liquor prices off Bourbon Street go down like a cold beer after proper exercise. Of course, everything’s served in plastic cups because the French Quarter street party genie is never going back in its bottle. There was a portrait of Donna the barmaid displayed atop a rack of upside-down, disused, decorative martini glasses. Beside it was one of those officious desk plaques which read: “Queen of Damn Near Everything.” She probably was and still might be. Donna called me “Baby.” Donna called Ann “Baby.” Donna calls everybody “Baby.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Our first evening in New Orleans wrapped up back on Canal Street, about a block from our hotel. JB took us to a diner he favoured called Zesty Creole. It’s a deep, narrow space with a short bar running alone one side. He’s become friends with the family who owns it. “This is a great place for my guests and my guests are great for their business.” Ann and I were to return frequently. On our final visit I cheekily requested our usual booth.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The hook for me was the catfish po’boy. Two breaded, fried (but not greasy) fillets on a fresh baguette. The gumbo was delicious and I was relieved to learn that two restaurants I prefer in Edmonton just because of their gumbo actually do a pretty good job. I took a risk with Zesty Creole’s menu too one evening when I passed on a po’boy, reluctantly making a decision whose ramifications could entail betrayal of Shakespearian proportions. I ordered jambalaya. Ann makes the best jambalaya. I never order it when we go out because I know it’s better at home. Then again, when Ann and I go out to eat in Edmonton or anyplace else we may be, we’re not in New Orleans. I had to know. So, I cheated but I didn’t have to lie about it; we’re still fine.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The thing about winter in Edmonton is that it’s a dry cold. Har-har. The thing about alligator, according to our two professional guides, airboat swamp guy and red bus sleazeball, is that it tastes like chicken. Har-har. The only real alligator information we were able to glean is when it’s improperly prepared it’s as rubbery as sports bar calamari. I had gator in my gumbo just once (which reminds me, check out “Yella Alligator” by Eddie 9V). For all I know the pellets in my soup could’ve been tofu.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ann and I ate that along with an expensive, albeit fine array of rich seafood appetizers one evening at Ralph Brennan’s Red Fish Grill which is across the street from, and not to be confused with, Dickie Brennan’s Bourbon House – you can guess the street. JB revealed that these two cousins are fierce competitors. There’s a rift in the Crescent City’s first family of food. There’s at least a third Brennan-branded establishment, simply called Brennan’s, operated by yet another member of the clan. Carla, JB’s efficient and gracious concierge, told us that making Brennan-related reservations is fraught as her guests always request one but really mean another.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I don’t eat a lot. I aim to approximate two squares a day. I don’t snack. I don’t have a sweet tooth. Ann is much more sensible about her diet, but then again, she’s much more sensible than me about most things. We’re not foodies. When it comes to “nice” restaurants, ones with tablecloths and everything, we generally encounter an inverse proportion: the more we pay, the less satisfying the meal. High prices set high expectations. The Palm Court Jazz Café proved our theorem. I was aware that she was picking at her food, some sort of Creole pasta dish. But I was picking at mine too. I ordered a crab cake, presented as an old baseball, perhaps a game-used one by the New Orleans Pelicans, a club formed in 1865, one year after the end of the Civil War. Unsurprisingly, every second forkful was full of shell fragments. A dessert of pecan pie saved Ann’s supper. I had another Abita. Actually, the band saved our supper. We were able to imagine a time ever so fleetingly when Louis Armstrong was new on the scene.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Do Cajuns tire of Cajun food? Sometimes you just want a hamburger. Alibi is a dive bar (proven by an award plaque from some obscure lad’s magazine) on Iberville, about a hundred steps off Bourbon – you don’t have to go far for prices to drop like endcap sign placards in a Walmart commercial. The toilet was revolting, fruit flies hovering over the trough. Dirty work for a would-be attendant. I said to Ann, “Hold it if you can, we’re not too far from the hotel. I wouldn’t even wash my hands in there.” The bartender was friendly enough, a Colorado transplant, one of those sloppy fat guys, hairy and poorly groomed. When he learned Ann and I were from Alberta, he was keen to talk hockey until the joint got busier. Our food was surprisingly good, although judging from the men’s room I could only imagine the state of the kitchen and the litany of health code violations. Paper plates, and plastic cups again.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">When we were university age, I remember moving JB out of his apartment in Montreal’s West End by heaving many of his belongings over the railing of his second storey balcony. No one lost an eye trying to catch a ski pole, so, really, it was all fun. How could we have known I’d be visiting him in his digs in New Orleans’s Garden District? He’s well situated for work downtown, not walkable but should he choose not to drive there’s the St. Charles tram or the number 20 Magazine Street bus. Ann and I toured the area with JB and then returned a few days later to poke around ourselves.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The district is famous for its working gaslights which are always on. The architecture is a mix of French, Spanish and, I suppose, antebellum – Queen Anne tweaked for heat, humidity and soft ground. Shotgun homes are suicide <i>feng shui,</i> the front and back doors align. Every room in the house opens off the same side of the hallway. With both doors open, the slightest breeze, a draft, provides ventilation and cooling. Heat rises so ceilings are unnaturally high to give it some place to go, alleviation by elevation.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ann and I cruised Magazine, a hip shopping strip reputedly favoured by locals, although the gift shops suggest a different story. Still, there were no ersatz voodoo stores which are rife in the French Quarter and there were no chain retailers like the ones populating the Riverwalk outlet mall by the convention centre where the paddle-wheelers dock. The most discombobulating and disturbing aspect of our entire stay in New Orleans was that whichever store Ann and I went in to at whatever time of day, Nickelback, the pride of Hanna, Alberta seemed to be playing over the audio system. I guess it’s now impossible to truly get away from it all.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Our respite from Magazine was a sports bar (Saints!) called Tracey’s. It’s a big space in a heritage building, treed with iron girders holding up an impossibly high tin ceiling. Food’s available in the back, served up from a canteen. The plastic cups of Michelob Ultra were almost free. A small moment of joy when I discovered the men’s toilet was as immaculate as the bartender was stoned. I said to Ann, “Best one yet. You may wish to avail yourself before we head back downtown.” She moseyed after she’d eaten her grilled cheese sandwich and fries. She was gone for quite a while. I ordered another Ultra, that took more time than it should’ve, competing as I was against an iPhone and Bob Marley. Then I began to worry. Ann is still the girl who habitually checked phone booths and Coke machines for stray dimes. While I idly contemplated the medical emergency phone number tucked away in my wallet, Ann was idly pressing random buttons on the vintage pinball machine outside the ladies’. I found her three free games in, her tilt-not-tilt misspent youth skills still sharp.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I will reluctantly join a line for a toilet because sometimes the prospect of relief outweighs the dreadful prospect of what those who used it before me have left behind. Life is nothing if not some evidence of legacy, some messy deposit of DNA. I suppose New Orleans food may be described as “in hot, out hot” (the shaker of Slap Ya Mama Cajun seasoning in my knapsack caused much consternation during our Louis Armstrong Airport security screening), the antidote must necessarily be sweet. Atop the pralines and pecan pie balances the beignet, a portion of fried dough dusted with icing sugar. They’re meant to be served warm and enjoyed immediately. The constant queue at Café du Monde by the Mississippi in the French Quarter suggests the culinary logistics border on the impossible. Anyway, appreciating rich food amid a congregation of downtrodden and homeless souls can be an awkward experience.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ann enjoyed the knock-offs served up at Café Beignet at the corner of Royal and Canal by our hotel. Once I’d completed the Visa transaction – which I had authorized by using my left index finger as a stylus on an Etch-A-Sketch screen - for counter service, a takeout order, the cashier demanded a tip. I said, very politely, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I handed him a twenty-dollar bill because I wasn’t going primitive electronic again, no way. I said, “Break that for me, give me a ten, a five and singles.” He had to call the manager. Cash money. Math. Confusion.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">An associate of JB’s set Ann and me straight. Café Beignet, she said, was just like the hotel, designed for visitors. Locals frequented French Truck next door. Prices were lower and line ups were infrequent. French Truck superseded Touché and Zesty Creole as our main go-to because the pod coffee maker in our room just wouldn’t do any morning at all. And God bless French Truck because by ordering “Just a Cup” from the menu I didn’t have to learn to speak “barista.” Ann thought each morning’s fresh pastries were adequate: “You can tell when it comes from a mix, you can taste the difference.” So, sort of handmade with operational efficiencies sifted in and fair enough, I mean, the guy across the street couldn’t count.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">We’d take our yellow cups onto Canal Street and smoke cigarettes (Marlboro Lights once our Canadian ones went up in smoke) by a litter bin, always careful to avoid the CVS CCTV and trigger its NO LOITERING admonishment. We watched the green and red tram cars come and go. We surveyed the damage and debris from the night before even as we watched a new day unfold as we planned our own.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“Are we supposed to meet JB tonight?”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“No, I think he’s going to the Pelicans game.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“Is that football?”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“No, basketball. Another cig before we clean up and go out and about? I’m in no hurry.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“Sure. Me neither.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“I like this coffee.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“It’s not bad, pretty good. I really like this city.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“Me too. Where do you want to go today?”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project <i>or buy</i> 5 KG, <i>the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.</i></span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-64939067931147265982023-11-13T13:58:00.000-08:002023-11-13T13:58:14.420-08:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Another Helping of Moody Food</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ann’s and my week in New Orleans, LA didn’t quite shake down as I’d hoped. The same thing happened in 2012 in Lethbridge, AB. We drove south that August to see His Bobness in a small capacity minor league hockey rink. My plan back then was to bump into him after his concert in the bar of the Ramada Inn where we were staying. Where he had to be staying provided the bastard just didn’t get back on his tour bus and beeline for the next night’s show in Creston, BC. My plan was to talk baseball with Dylan. I’d done my homework, boned up on the Minnesota Twins; poor bullpen and lack of timely hitting. Lots of runners left on base.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">My quarry last week was Aaron Neville. My intention was to thank him for “Struttin’ on Sunday,” a song that twice prevented my suicidal arithmetic of garage joist, orange electrical cord and flimsy Hunter green plastic patio chair. I was going to tell him how his covers of “Everybody Plays the Fool” and “Louisiana, 1927” transcended the originals, and Mr Neville, sir, what could I possibly say about your band of brothers? You guys blew my mind when I saw you in Calgary. Missed you by a delayed flight day at Montreal’s International Jazz Festival. He’d be a hard man to miss approaching Ann and me on the sidewalk, a tattooed giant, easy to spot in an urban population of less than 350,000 souls. The trouble with sidewalks in a sinking city is that they heave and the great ancient roots of magnolia and oak trees only exacerbate matters. For all of our walking, I mostly kept my head down, watching my feet and Ann’s. Treacherous going, missing paving stones, missing utility access lids. Our excursions were much like encountering Royal Jenny, an attractive and scantily clad blonde dominatrix, in our hotel’s elevator, look down, don’t look anywhere else and anyway, I’ve already had my balls busted – my doctor says my prostate doesn’t feel quite right. How would I know? I want to believe Ann and I saw the cuffs of Aaron Neville’s pants and shoes somewhere, maybe in Treme (the final ‘e’ should have an accent grave but I don’t know how to add one if Word doesn’t do it for me) or the Garden District. Could’ve happened.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Bourbon Street’s overture begins in the late afternoon. Incessant drumming, kids and tweens banging upturned five-gallon plastic job site pails. More beats arrive by bicycle, mobile deejays hauling Radio Flyer wagons of computer equipment. If you must butcher a gorgeous song like “Just My Imagination” do it like the Rolling Stones because, you know, the Funk Brothers nailed the low end the first time. Musicians set up on the narrow beds of pickup trucks; Ann and I never, ever, imagined we’d hear George Jones songs laid down by a guy with dreadlocks. The motorized music brigade roars up after dark. You can hear this subculture coming, ripping down Canal Street. Garish, low-slung three-wheeled Batmobiles blasting hip-hop to synchronized LED lights, bow-legging Harleys almost as big, competing with sound systems better than the stereo we have at home. Good God, y’all, the joyous noise is a ceaseless, a relentless full frontal lobe assault. It’s all life affirming: remember, some of that static you pick up twiddling between AM stations is the fading echo of the Big Bang, the universal one note.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ann and I locked in on the Soundstage, a club on Bourbon Street. We returned a few times to catch sets by Willie Lockett and The Blues Krewe (it pains me to type that particular proper noun). He’s a big man, as big as Howlin’ Wolf maybe and he’s got that growl. He performs seated, he needs a clawed cane to get around between sets. He’s missing a few front bottom teeth. Maybe he’s a local hero, we don’t know but he’s clearly paid his dues and his bona fides include his stint with Gatemouth Brown last century. When he called for requests from the stage, I froze. I should’ve yelled “Dust My Broom” (Elmore James) because Willie’s guitarist was a hot player, slick but all business, no paddlewheel showboating. When Willie was sitting alone at the bar, I was too shy to approach him. What do you say that’s not a cliché when you don’t know what to say? "Hello, Mouth, this is Foot." Maybe it would be like meeting Aaron Neville or Dylan and babbling off script, as squirmingly uncomfortable as a prostate exam conducted with a stiletto heel. Ann and I did our duty with dead presidents and the tip bucket.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Storyville is a fable. Those few Basin Street blocks of barrooms and bordellos are now the stuff of myth, legend. And I have to smile at what’s been lost because when I was a kid if Mom wasn’t crooning “Blue Moon” in the kitchen, she was belting out “Barrelhouse Bessie of Basin Street.” The neighbours used to knock on the common wall. Family lore has it that Mom’s brassy and frightfully bold embrace of the risqué led to her suspension from convent school. My taste runs more toward the “Basin Street Blues.” Frenchmen Street, a little hipper and a little less touristy than Bourbon Street, is in the vicinity, in that nether zone between the French Quarter and Treme. Neither Ann nor I can tell you that music is any more authentic, it’s just different performances of Dixieland, blues, funk and Billboard chart covers. Sounds like every musician trapped between the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico has chops. And doesn’t all that competition payout double at the window for listeners.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I saw Wolfman Washington back in the 80s. A free Montreal International Jazz Festival concert staged on rue Ste-Catherine by Place des Arts. I recall a very tall man whose stage costume was as red hot and flashy as his guitar technique. I never did learn much more about him in those days before Google and my music press habit rarely included Downbeat and so I was delighted to see that costume or something damn similar on display at the New Orleans Jazz Museum. I’d no idea he was a Crescent City product. Wolfman’s red patent leather loafers were big, scuba flippers on my feet. Fats Domino had big feet too, we saw a pair of his shoes, white bucks. And his sartorial flair, including a yacht captain’s cap purchased from Meyer the Hatter on St. Charles Avenue (Fats and me, man, we shop at the same store) and gaudy pastel floral sports coat buttoned up on one lucky mannikin, probably influenced Wolfman. You’ve got to look the part you play, just ask Royal Jenny.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The jazz museum which includes recording and performance space is housed in a lovely red brick building, solid and imposing, a decommissioned United States Mint dating from 1838. It’s serendipitously situated on Esplanade Avenue near the intersection of North Rampart Street, proximate to Louis Armstrong Park, again straddling Treme and the French Quarter, that magical area, a pleasant stroll from our hotel, yes, indeed. Drumsville: The Evolution of the New Orleans Beat is a history of percussion. There are washboards with bells and thimbles, branded metal buckets which once contained lard or oil. What staggers me is an innovation so fundamentally obvious it required a <i>Eureka!</i> moment, the bass drum foot pedal. Its introduction is responsible for the drum kit we all picture when we imagine our favourite bands, one musician but many skins to brush or bash. Hanging unobtrusively in the corner of one of the rooms is a frozen <i>Aww... </i>moment, an enlarged photograph of Charlie Watts, a three-quarter profile candid shot snapped in 2005 of Charlie on his beat quietly examining the relics of his trade.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ann spent 24 hours in New Orleans 25 or 30 years ago. There’s a souvenir magnet on the microwave shelf in the kitchen, its paper graphic of Bourbon Street jazzmen peeling at the edges (God help me, I bought a spooky black rubber update, voodoo Dixieland horn playing skeletons). Our trip was post-pandemic self-indulgence, a temperate place before winter blows in from not too far north, no commitments to be met once the jet wheels bounced on the Louis Armstrong International Airport tarmac. Our holiday together was squeezed however by local commitments and schedules. Ann is the first violinist and concert master of her orchestra. I too am a concert master, having insisted we buy tickets for the Doobie Brothers performance here in Edmonton in late October and ice it with the E Street Band in early November (since postponed to same Boss Time in 2024). Once we’d decided upon New Orleans as our getaway destination, I investigated berths or roomettes on <i>The City of New Orleans</i>, departing from Chicago, before it struck me that rubbernecking from a night train was as absurd as raking leaves on a blustery day. Anyway, Edmonton is a long way from many places and there are few direct flights to anywhere else and we didn’t have time for a 48-hour travel day.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">It's not easy to walk abreast in the narrow eighteenth and nineteenth century confines of the French Quarter whilst holding hands. I always had the sense that we were at the apex of a deep Montreal metro station escalator: stand to the right, but keep moving and watch your footing. “A Doobies album,” I said to Ann. Now what was I going on about? I pointed at the crooked sidewalk beneath our feet, the disturbed corner curb embedded with off-kilter white tiles imprinted with blue type: Toulouse Street. We were awake and alive in a pilgrim’s kind of place. I don’t know what part of Louisiana Johnny B. Goode left to get his kicks and see his name in lights, but I’m convinced he caught a train north from Union Passenger Terminal on Loyola Avenue to Chicago.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">It was coming on Christmas on Canal Street when Ann and I flipped our mindsets, suddenly sorry to have to leave but also anxious to get home. Green nylon pine needle garlands snaked around the ghost story lampposts, vampire blood red-ribboned wreaths higher up, just beneath the electric gaslights. We’d walked for miles and our feet were hurting, but we sure weren’t suffering a terminal case of the “Canal Street Blues.” We’d tripped through New Orleans with Dr John, the Meters and the Nevilles. </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">I realized we’d done it all before, starting a long time ago from a long way away, in concert in different provinces in a different country no less: brass bands, Satchmo and “Jambalaya” on our parents’ hi-fi systems; a Mardi Gras parade of strutting Cajun and Mississippi queens and riverboat gamblers on our older siblings’ transistor radios or tinny suitcase bedroom stereos. And music from our own collections had taken us to New Orleans long before we got there. </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">Déjà voodoo all over again.</span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site</i> www.megeoff.com <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project <i>or buy</i> 5 KG, <i>the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.</i></span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-36680450986666768872023-11-06T17:40:00.002-08:002023-11-06T17:40:51.040-08:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A Week of Halloween on Bourbon Street</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Friday night, the last weekend of October. When our taxi from Louis Armstrong International Airport dropped Ann and me off in front of our hotel at the corner of Canal and Bourbon Streets, we both had the sense that our lives, for the next week at least, were about to get weird. We’d touched down in the middle of a sybaritic bacchanal with costumes and everything.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The Astor Crowne Plaza was hosting DomCon, a convention of dominatrixes and their camp followers. Mary Reilly, Mary Reilly, I am my people-watching mother’s second son. I bear a strong resemblance to my father, but I got the rubber version of his visage, not the poker one. And it’s a constant, conscious effort to keep my unfiltered observations (Not judgments!) to Ann somewhere below Spinal Tap volume. Within the confines of an elevator, I figured the safest course of action was studying the tips of my blue Clarks shoes. But once our fellow guests leave the hotel and turn the corner onto Bourbon, they blend in with the crowd, and the crowd feels the pull of Larry Flynt’s sex shop and two Hustler-branded peeler palaces, one of which subtly differentiates itself from the other by guaranteeing BARELY LEGAL in red neon. You are free to be yourself in New Orleans. All it takes is what you’ve already got inside you, a little pride and a little self-esteem. Courage isn’t a required requisite here and shame need not apply because The Big Easy is that type of place.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">New Orleans isn’t floating exactly, but it’s best not to dig too deeply. The city’s dead are interred above ground in mossy mausoleums: miniature cities populated with the dearly departed proximate to their lost brethren, the living desperate, wasting away in tents under the elevated cement channels of the Portchartrain Expressway and the I-10. Halloween summons the skeletons. My informal black t-shirt survey suggests the psychobilly Misfits are the biggest band in the world, their skull logo travels well. There’s voodoo Baron Samedi with his top hat from Meyer the Hatter on St. Charles (just off Canal and very close to our hotel) and his walking stick, grinning like a Misfits fan who’s never actually heard them. Thanks to novelist Anne Rice (Let's chat, Lestat!) all the vampires are Hollywood hunky or Vogue pale junkie elegant-no Nosferatu rat creatures in this port city except for the crazy ones who couldn’t be scrubbed clean with a firehose. The costumes that confused Ann and me were the referee zebra stripes worn by packs of frat boys. There’s some post-baby boomer generational joke with a mysterious setup and obscure punchline that we don’t get.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Halloween has transfigured in to something resembling a Boxing Day sale in Canada in that it lasts a week. This commercial, consumer pop culture shallowness is apparent on Bourbon Street, there are too many Darth Vaders on too many nights. The time of the season dictates there can be no <i>Star Wars </i>good guys though Jesus is all right. He manifests as His idealized Catholic version in this carnival of chaos, white and well groomed, possibly some beard oil. But the Son of God has always hung around the French Quarter, a Vatican spectre of European colonialism: “Touchdown Jesus,” His trick of light silhouette cast on the white board rear of St. Louis Cathedral towers benevolently, referee arms raised in supplication, over Bourbon Street sinners and the city’s football Saints. We also encountered a bald man wearing white Nikes under an ankle-length saffron robe. Great costume. Turns out he was a genuine Hari Krishna or some kind of inscrutably Zen monk. No bracelet beads, thanks.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ann and I spent maybe a little too much time loitering in front of our hotel, doubling down on our nicotine intake. We’re not anthropologists but we understand the importance of empirical field work. While we discarded our butts in a solar activated trash bin, Ann and I were uncomfortably aware at times that the downtown streetsweepers in their tennis ball green uniform tops really, really earn their salaries. Like Bourbon Street, the red paving stone sidewalk in front of our hotel is power washed every morning because life’s rich pageant in New Orleans never ceases. Masquerades make messes: Mary Reilly, Mary Reilly, the human detritus. Tourists here have the world at their feet, dropped, tossed, previously digested or not so gently worn. My musical head mashes up Lou Reed’s “Halloween Parade” and “All Day and All of the Night” by the Kinks.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">To reenter our hotel after dark (and the night’s last cigarette) Ann or I flash one of our room key cards to the armed sheriff. She seems a bit bulky, almost unfit for her job until we realize she’s wearing a bulletproof vest under her uniform jacket which is the same olive drab as the St. Charles tram car. After Halloween, once the DomCon participants have tied up their loose ends, the costume party reel keeps rolling beside the Mississippi as busloads of orange and navy festooned Chicago Bears fans blitz the Crowne Plaza for another weekend. I have never before seen a woman in elegantly cut couture patterned with a football team’s primary and secondary logos.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The first Saturday of November, departure day doesn’t have time to dawn. The alarm on Ann’s iPhone is synched with the relentless thrum from Bourbon Street. Rhythm. The white and gold, almost gaudy, Crowne Plaza lobby gleams pristinely at five a.m., mercifully empty and silent. There’s no sheriff, no bell captain. The two night clerks behind the front desk and their computer screens are chipper and cheery, efficient. The four of us are up and at it before the city’s sanitation department. The recessed main entry of the hotel is something of a swamp. Ann and I guess vomit and blood although it could maybe be takeout Mexican food- definitely not fried chicken. We gingerly tiptoe around the muck, careful to lift our carry-on suitcases. Wheels up! </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project <i>or buy</i> 5 KG, <i>the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.</i> </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-91944818726487285652023-10-26T17:06:00.000-07:002023-10-26T17:06:19.888-07:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A FAN’S NOTES</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A New Stones Album</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Sometimes, you know, I must remind myself to remember Gordon Lightfoot’s admonishment to a lover as advice for me: “Baby, step back.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I was gearing up to write a SAINTS PRESERVE US post eviscerating Monique LaGrange, another in a long line of Albertan hot messes, a Catholic School Board trustee in the central city of Red Deer. She, overcome by a visit from the Holy Spirit who told her to “Go for it!” posted an internet meme (because internet memes pass as intellectual discourse) equating LGBTQ clubs in schools to the Hitler Youth. Bit of a reach. My scalpel was sharp, but I wasn’t sure where to make the first of a thousand cuts.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">And so, I turned to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, the Banshee of Invermectin, whose government is now actively pursuing withdrawing Alberta from the national Canada Pension Plan, key webbing in a liberal democracy’s social safety net. This “Pay less! Get more!” scheme was not even a plank in her platform when the provincial election was held just five months ago. This calculated deceit, possibly a ploy to keep her party’s lunatic fringe in line (see above), suggests the absolute apex of cynical governance: It is in her party’s best interests to create new issues rather than solving existing ones. I have the unsettling hunch that this folly will snowball in to an avalanche. There’s no stopping the momentum of bad policy, admitting a mistake doesn’t poll well.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Beyond the myopia of my provincialism is the morass of national and foreign affairs, and the quagmire of international events. I was at the liquor store the other day, needing a box of beer. En route to the walk-in cooler in the back I paused before the shelves of Irish whisky. The bottle of Writer’s Tears I bought in 2020 is down to its last few fingers. These times we live in insist I stock up. Why can’t everybody just shut up, calm down and fuck off? Please and thank you. A dram of escape to remain mindful of Lightfoot “Baby, step back” and to apply the philosophy of Tim Curry: “Ideology is too much responsibility for me/I do the ‘Rock’ myself, when I can get it!”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Well, I did just that last Friday when <i>Hackney Diamonds</i> hit the record shops. Saturday and Sunday too. And I did it again on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday. I’m a keen student! The new Stones album is shockingly good. My expectations were less than zero. No surprise really. <i>Crossfire Hurricane</i> is a fine authorized documentary of the band, released sometime between its fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries. Tellingly, it wraps with the conclusion of the 1982 European tour. Thoroughly researched or scholarly histories of the Stones, no matter how well written, tend to revert to bullet point prose following the release of <i>Tattoo You</i> in 1981. The message is clear: nineteen or twenty years in they were spent as a cultural force. Fashionably irrelevant. Fair enough.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The novel on my night table is <i>The Last Chairlift</i>, John Irving’s latest. It’s a hefty hardcover, something of a strain on my arthritic wrists. It’s a work in the tradition of Dickens, a writer Irving greatly admires, filled with social commentary. The story ticks every box of the Irving oeuvre. Every device, trick, theme or trope Irving has employed since <i>Setting Free the Bears</i> was published in 1968 appears in this novel which can make paragraphs of it read like excerpts from an anthology of his selected writings. But it’s all new material and very good at that, and in the blink of my bedside lamp, I find myself some four hundred pages in. Hooked.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Should K-Tel have been the record label issuing <i>Hackney Diamonds</i>, it would’ve been called <i>The Sounds of the 70s</i>. You can picture the type font. I’m hearing fragments from <i>Sticky Fingers</i> to <i>Some Girls</i> and everything in between. I swear I’ve even picked up on the boogie-woogie piano riff of “Short and Curlies” somewhere within its grooves. But it’s all new Stones and very Stonesy at that. A shard of the glinting attraction of <i>Hackney Diamonds</i> is its traditional vinyl length, about twenty minutes of music per side. This was how things used to be done when song sequencing mattered. When this old band decides play to its strengths in whatever configuration, a fan realizes Mick and Keith et al are pretty good at what they do.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">When the Stones were inducted in to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Jagger quoted French artiste Jean Cocteau from the podium: “First you shock them and then they put you in a museum.” That venerable, institutional slide commenced in 1983 with <i>Undercover</i>. I will always argue the merit of that album, underrated, overlooked and left to languish without a supporting tour. Writing as a hopelessly corrupted lapsed Catholic, I can tell you I’ve learned more about the nature of faith as a completist, sad sack Stones fan than I ever did reading Soren Kierkegaard. I always took the leap with their subsequent sporadic, scattershot releases. Even during the worst of times there were always a few gems on a Stones album, they just took a little more time to dig. The semi-comic nadir reached its acme with the release of <i>Honk</i> in 2019. This particular compilation included “hits” previously available only on two previous hit compilations, <i>Forty Licks</i> and <i>Grrr</i>. In my defense, the <i>Honk</i> bonus disc featured a random assortment of live tracks. And further, just for the record, I don’t consider myself one of those unhealthily obsessed and creepy Stones fans; I can talk about other things.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i>Hackney Diamonds</i> fades away with divine inspiration. The sparse acoustic cover of the Muddy Waters classic “Rolling Stone Blues” (sleeve spelling, too many other variants to list) is at once celebratory and elegiac. Back in 2016 I assumed <i>Blue and Lonesome</i> was goodbye. A fine album of covers made by two old mates who’d grown up together in a suburb of London seemed to close the circle. It could’ve been waxed and released in 1963 when Jagger-Richards was still an aspirational songwriting credit. The well had run dry and there was nothing left to say; I almost heard them sigh. <i>Blue and Lonesome</i> wasn’t exactly a sweeping exit but it sure sounded like a fine denouement. I was wrong.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 i<i>s celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project <i>or buy</i> 5 KG, <i>the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer. </i></span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-72736115270428711342023-10-19T12:19:00.014-07:002023-10-19T16:14:45.515-07:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">HUMAN WRECKAGE</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ew! Ick! <i>THAT</i> Smell</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Olfactory time travel. I know I can never fast-forward just as surely as I can never know what will take me back.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">There was a time in Canada’s major cities when “downtown” really was as magical as Petula Clark’s song. Perhaps only because I was just a boy back then. Neon signs, cinemas, nightclubs, musical traffic and swanky department stores - Eaton’s was one of the latter in Montreal. My first properly documented paying job, requiring a social insurance number and everything, was toiling in the kitchen of Eaton’s Tea Room, a gorgeous and narrow art deco space beneath a soaring curved ceiling up on the ninth floor of the downtown flagship store. (The only comparable room I’ve ever seen since is the bar of the Oxford Hotel in Denver, CO.) It was Montreal’s Olympic summer, 1976. I was 16; I was paid $3.55 an hour, significant cents above minimum wage.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Your grandmother enjoyed high tea there twice a month with the members of her bridge club. Your mother took your sister there on a special occasion for a special treat. The waiters and busboys wore black pants, white shirts, red vests, black bowties and white boater hats with red and white striped bands. I wore a khaki uniform and a disposable white paper hat. I stacked dishes, wheeling steel carts of searingly hot clean crockery into the main kitchen where the chefs worked plating meals. I sorted dirty dishes and cutlery into trays to be run through the dishwasher. I scrubbed French onion soup bowls clean by hand. Mostly I busied myself decrypting Mick Jagger’s enunciation: Was it “Marching, charging feet, boy” or “Marching, charging people (pee-pull)?” “Tumbling Dice” became something of a passion project. The ladies I worked beside on the line, as attractively adorned as I was but with hairnets, fetching Eaton’s couture, yelled at me in machine gun <i>joual</i> for working too fast. A non-union shop with union sentiments, prolong drudgery, stretch it out.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">What looks large from a distance…In my memory the dishwasher was a massive silver dynamo, ten yards long. Compared to the relatively new Bosch in the kitchen of the Crooked 9, I’m talking IBM mainframe to an Apple iPad. Walter was one of its two operators. He seemed ancient to me and his first and only language might have been Polish. The other guy was Danny, a big guy, a couple of years older than me from a less affluent and much tougher neighbourhood than the one I’d grown up in. He was perfectly bilingual and so I’ve no idea what language he spoke at home. One of the waiters, a thin grey man, skin and hair, displayed an unnatural interest in my bare flesh. He liked watching me change into my uniform. He was overly curious about the growth pattern of my pubic hair. Danny had a quiet chat with him at high volume. (Should I ever experience the misfortune of being sentenced to hard time, I shall require an advocate and bodyguard like Danny. I hope life shook down favourably for him.) Neither Walter nor Danny worked Saturdays and so that’s when I got to run the great machine. It was a prime gig, almost fun, no sorting or stacking dishes, no scrubbing pots. The drawback was closing time for the Tea Room and the store, I had to clean the goddamn thing.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The kitchen in your home must be configured like Ann’s and mine. There are two main work areas. There’s the stovetop and the oven, and probably a smaller microwave-convection unit. Then there’s my turf, the sink with the dishwasher hard by, and the bins in the cupboard under the sink, garbage and compost. All very ergonomic. Ann and I usually host family dinners Sunday evenings, three generations around the table. You can eat off the floor here Monday mornings but not in a good way. A few weeks ago, we served a larger than usual crew, visiting relatives, invited friends. Chicken and salads and a delightful feta cheese and spinach dish – more brownie cake than spanakopita – and I can’t remember what else. The menu took a lot of planning and work. And clean up. Our party days are over, adults dislike staying up too late on a school night and, anyway, the toddlers must be put to bed. Guests began to drift away around the time when I start thinking about maybe eating my own supper. There’s a Crooked 9 family compact: Ann cooks and I clean.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“I got this.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The kitchen garbage bin was stuffed with juicy chicken unrecyclable Stryofoam trays. I scraped the dirty plates into the green food scraps bin. I rinsed the dishes and loaded the dishwasher. I filled it, so I ran it. I washed the indelicate IKEA wine glasses by hand. I work to rule and so I took a collective bargaining agreed break on the front porch with a cigarette and a beer before shaking out the dining room table’s cloth and power washing the highchair and carrying both down to the basement.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">By this time our dishwasher, a miraculous pandemic purchase because it was not only on sale but in stock, had just completed its cycle. It’s an incredibly efficient machine. Works fast at a high temperature. When I opened the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink, the smell of overheated, almost steamed, garbage and food scraps overwhelmed. That awful smell, not like somebody else’s vomit or shit, or rotten potatoes, but near enough, tripped my gag reflex down memory lane. Rancid organic waste.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Eaton’s industrial dishwasher incorporated a system of traps to catch debris as the water drained. They were steel baskets that could’ve done double duty in a deep fryer. Maybe they did. They were almost but not quite too hot to handle; my hands had toughened up over the course of the summer. What plopped out of them was revolting, the entire Tea Room menu compacted into perfectly formed ziggurats. These stinking, steaming clumps were generally a tinned pea or seasick green. They went straight into the garbage bins which already stank.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The only waste separation I ever saw in the kitchen of Eaton’s Tea Room had to do with untouched bread rolls. If the busboys weren’t “in the juice” they’d take a couple of extra moments to compete, lobbing elegant arcs of white or whole wheat in to the garbage from five, ten feet away, underhand and overhand. Swish! One less task for me. Laughter and banter. Well, didn’t the manager walk in on one game, an impromptu inspection. Maybe her blue hair was curled, waved and sprayed a little too tightly that day. She lost that prim, formal composure that was supposed to be maintained and constrained by her cream hued dress decorated with a brooch, a flower or an insect, pinned above one spinster breast. I didn’t know where to look while she screamed at the busboys to fish the perfectly good buns from the bins for replating. She was a close friend of my aunt’s, a fellow Anglican church lady, glasses of Heinz tomato juice and a ring of Jell-O shrimp salad for a family dinner, praise Saint Peter for Miracle Whip and Velveeta, which was how I got the job. I really didn’t know where to look, up, down, left, right, behind? To this day, I will not eat complimentary rolls in a restaurant, but I will puncture their crusts with my thumb. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project <i>or buy</i> 5 KG, t<i>he complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.</i> </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-83916512353743566912023-10-16T18:28:00.001-07:002023-10-16T18:28:31.756-07:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">THE MUSTER POINT PROJECT</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Take a Load Off Kevin</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The Muster Point Project is the musical alter ego of my friend Kevin Franco. The multi-instrumentalist writes songs and sings them. His latest release, now available for purchase in its entirety from Apple (not that Corps), is an EP called <i>5 KG</i>: five new songs with a creative twist, lyrics written by me. <i>5 KG</i>: Kevin, Geoff – get it? And you should get it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Together through “I Got This,” “Grub Street,” “I Love that Song,” “I Did What I Did” and “The Little Things” we tell stories. Online music press (is there any other kind anymore?) notices from sites around the globe have been positive, almost enthusiastic. It’s gratifying to be described as an “acclaimed” novelist. Please. I’m also Kevin’s front man according to some, his lead singer. Apparently, I’m still supple enough to perform all the bathroom mirror Jagger moves I perfected in high school. Now that is gratification.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I’ve been working on the first draft of a sequel to my novella <i>Of Course You Did </i>for these past 17 months. I took a welcome six weeks off from my manuscript last spring (I was stuck and contemplating setting it aside) to write a dozen pages of lyrics for Kevin; all on spec following a casual electronic conversation: some were dreadful, some didn’t suit him, some obviously inspired him. My work on <i>5 KG</i> was a distraction for me and its potential cost to Kevin was modest, a percentage of our publishing agreement.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I’m one of those left-handed scribblers who drags his hand over the medium point ink. Most lefties avoid that by using an awkward, palsied technique, curling their wrists over the last line, trying to keep ahead of their smeary selves. Once I’d finished my job for Kevin, I just washed my hands – the Governor of Judea would’ve loved the pandemic. Over the course of the summer, I began to appreciate the scope of this particular Muster Point Project. Kevin is something of a force and so the velocity didn’t surprise me, but there were so many elements flying around at once it was a perfect ponder why they didn’t collide.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The opportunity cost of creativity is time spent on more practical endeavours or elegantly wasted. The digital revolution has reduced expenses for independent artists, but still. Kevin needed time to compose music and lay down demos. Kevin needed to hire a studio, a producer and guest musicians. While he conceives and directs TMPP videos, there are post-production costs. Marketing and promotion take time and money. Minor concerns are constant, such as ensuring his band’s thumbnail streaming identity, its visual consistency, across multiple platforms and past TMPP releases.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Kevin’s music lends itself to more ears than my prose does to eyes. He sends me spreadsheets from time to time, screen captures. His audience numbers, modest in a disrupted industry, are of a quantity I’m too much a of a realist to even fantasize about for my own stuff. But all those streams, those penny fractions don’t add up to much more than one red cent. Indie artists, those not groomed as cash cows by Svengalis or corporations, stake their claims in culture knowing the odds are against them, the game is fixed. Kevin doesn’t make music for money. Kevin makes music because he must. The key to TMPP sound is that it’s true to its creator, it’s not on trend, it’s not piggybacking on hashtags, it’s real. His only calculating is composition. If you’ve added a few of his songs to your playlists or watched the TMPP YouTube videos a couple of times – “Grub Street” set to Depression-era, colourized footage of My Man Godfrey is genius – you may wish to buy the <i>5 KG</i> EP complete as an iTunes download. Consider that. Kevin’s just looking to break even so he can afford to make more music. There’s a link to purchase at my other site and all that pertinent information is immediately, directly below this sentence. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 i<i>s celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project <i>or buy</i> 5 KG, <i>the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.</i> </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-78363960196507331932023-10-09T15:20:00.003-07:002023-10-09T15:20:48.010-07:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">EAT ME</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The Commodore Café</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The Commodore Café has existed as a family-run business on Jasper Avenue since 1942. It’s beside Audreys Books and near the old CKUA studios. It’s something of an institution by virtue of its age. And it’s become something of a hipster destination too, perhaps because it’s evocative of a different era, a time when every main street in every prairie town featured a working man’s café specializing in CHINESE and WESTERN FOOD: fried egg sandwiches or chicken fried rice and egg rolls.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The Commodore is one of those places Ann and I have been meaning to get to. It’s closed on Mondays and otherwise shut after the lunch trade has dwindled. Its hours rarely coincide with our visits to Audreys. We finally got to the Commodore last Thursday with half an hour to spare. It occupies a narrow space, one surprisingly as long as my memory.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">We selected a table near the entrance, against the wall with a view of the lunch counter and the working space behind it. Gum, breath mints and antacid pills were displayed on glass shelves in an enclosed case supporting the cash register. The wall opposite us green, olive drab. There were two empty wall-mounted display refrigerators, a line of Campbell’s soup tins atop one of them, and between them an erasable board with the day’s specials. The waitress had immediate access to a four-slice toaster, a milkshake mixer, a Bunn coffee machine and cans of chilled soft drinks. The lunch counter was split in two, a through passage to the tables. The top was brown Formica (possibly Arborite, a competing Canadian layered, laminated and wipeable product) with a darker wood grain pattern. The shiny silver stools were affixed to the floor. The colour of the seat coverings was designer plastic Band-Aid. Perhaps they exuded a rosier hue in a different age; I couldn’t remember.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I said to Ann, “I’ve been here before.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“Really? When?”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">When I moved to Edmonton in 1990, I found an apartment on 113 Street, steps, or the length of one strip mall and its parking lot, away from Jasper. I lived across the street from the Moto-rant, fine dining, and the Gas Pump, fine drinking. Still, I got around a little bit, I would’ve blown past the Commodore hundreds of times because dingy and sketchy didn’t constitute curb appeal.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“Nineteen seventy-five,” I said.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Or maybe 1974. Those were the summers when my divorced parents flew me west from Montreal at my big brother’s behest. Bob was nine years’ my senior. I know now that his intent was to provide me the sort of parental guidance my father, now living in Ottawa, could not; no one ever asked me if I’d prefer to live with my father or my mother. I landed my first real summer job in Montreal in 1976. After that my trips to Edmonton became shorter and less frequent (this pattern repeated itself with Ottawa weekend bus rides to visit my father). Bob died in 2012. It still hurts my heart knowing I’m now older than Bob ever was; we had a friendship like no other I’ve ever known, combustible, comedic and true. Blood, and mine without cancer markers. Christ.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Those first couple of summers Bob lived in a high-rise situated about halfway between the North Saskatchewan River flats and downtown up on the ridge. He went to work every day but tried to ensure I wasn’t entirely an instrument of the Devil. I attended a baseball camp at the creaky wooden ballpark (the current retro brick field on the same site wasn’t even a dream yet) beside the Rossdale Power Station down by the river. The camp was run by a couple of Edmonton Tigers, Class D players whose names I still can recall (they never made the Show) - American boys who roomed across the street from Bob’s one-bedroom where I bunked in the living room and who seemed much older and more worldly than me although, in retrospect, our age gap was less than the one separating me from my brother. Sometimes I’d see the Tigers instructors lounging in the sun outside their less palatial digs sipping A&W soda from orange and brown quart cartons. Even though they’d been teaching me fundamentals that morning, base running, cutoff throws, I never worked up the nerve to cross the street and say hello. And I often rode shotgun in a delivery truck driven by a teammate of Bob’s (hockey or softball, possibly flag football), delivering wholesale fruits and vegetables to places like the Commodore Café. Of course, I was frequently left to my own devices.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I walked uphill to downtown, passing the Ambassador Inn on my way to the main drag, Jasper Avenue. I generally turned right at the corner, following the descending street numbers. I had a route (this pattern repeated itself with Montreal’s downtown record stores). My first stop was Mike’s News to browse or buy music or sports magazines. The porn section was certainly eye opening. And I’d never seen so many newspapers from so many other places all in one place before. Beyond Mike’s was a bookshop whose name escapes me. I remember buying a novel there called <i>Cross of Iron</i> by Willi Heinrich. The film by Sam Peckinpah starring James Coburn and Maximilian Schell would make its cinematic debut in 1977. Heinrich’s prose would eventually direct me to H.H. Hirst, author of the Gunner Asch stories and <i>Night of the Generals</i>. There was a restaurant called the Carousel where I enjoyed the hamburgers. Its red and yellow sign suggested a graphic carnival ride. One of its neighbours was The Silk Hat whose name indicated every item on its menu was sure to be fifty cents too rich for my budget. Classy joint, ritzy. My U-turn point was Edmonton Centre, a newish downtown mall two blocks off Jasper, anchored by a Woodward’s, a now defunct department store chain from British Columbia that never expanded eastward beyond Alberta. Very exotic. Like all department stores in those days Woodward’s had a record department and that’s where I bought my first “current” Bob Dylan album, the <i>Before the Flood</i> double live set featuring The Band, his lone Asylum Records release.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I infrequently turned left on Jasper after leaving Bob’s apartment. That direction on the strip struck me as much less interesting to explore. Part of the reason for that impression was the railway bridge traversing the avenue’s dip at 109 Street. The elevated black steel band (not too long gone, by the way) barred the way, visually and psychologically. An A&W Drive-in (not a drive-thru) was just on the other side. I knew that’s where the ballplayers went, but it seemed a block too far – I love this, bear with me: Around the time of my Jasper wanderings to the left, Ann’s big brother Jim, closer to Bob’s age than mine, used to hang out at that A&W weekend nights, not for the burgers and root beer so much as skidding out of its pea gravel parking lot. Whoo!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">There was never much to eat in Bob’s apartment. I don’t remember ever going grocery shopping although we must’ve visited Woodward’s Food Floor on occasion. One day, after having turned left on Jasper and being hungry I stopped in a café that promised CHINESE and WESTERN FOOD. I took a silver seat, maybe its covering was red, a stool away from the gap in the brown lunch counter marbled with fake wood grain. I was facing a dull green wall. I ordered a hot dog. Five minutes later I was presented with a perfectly grilled wiener quartered on a toasted hamburger bun. No ketchup, thank God, the lone condiment was sweet relish. I was too taken aback and too young to complain about the utter wrongness of my hot dog, the likes of which I’d never seen anywhere, not back home in Montreal the day before Mom’s shopping day, not even at Bob’s where we’d recently spooned egg salad out of a cereal bowl because there was no bread. I ate it. Tasted fine.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ann ordered the traditional special, chicken fried rice, sweet and sour chicken balls and, a modern twist, spring rolls. Her meal came with tomato rice soup as a starter and butterscotch pudding for dessert. I contemplated the hot dog, but finally opted for a Denver on toasted rye with a side of house-made potato salad. It was good, all of it. And we ate the old-fashioned way in the Commodore Café, without pretence. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project. <i>Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer</i>. </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-70160678396567174972023-09-30T17:21:00.001-07:002023-09-30T17:21:55.500-07:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">SAINTS PRESERVE US</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Oh</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The House of Commons has 338 seats up for grabs each federal election. You hope that the winners chosen by their fellow Canadians to serve their fellow Canadians view their roles as something of a calling rather than a well-paying job with great perks and benefits. You hope that your member of parliament will think a little beyond their pet projects and pet peeves, be up on current affairs even if they’re beyond their caucus remit. And you hope your MP might read a little history because that subject has a marked propensity to influence or even become a current affair. History can be a tricky subject because it will be reinterpreted, misinterpreted or just plain spun.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Consider this recent and very simple example. The Rolling Stones and Major League Baseball (MLB) together announced this week that <i>Hackney Diamonds</i>, the band’s new album, will be released in 30 different special editions featuring stitched togues in the primary colours of your favourite team and “baseball” white vinyl. I’d probably buy one if the Montreal Expos still existed because the Stones played the Stade Olympique two nights in 1989. MLB and the Stones go way back. This tenuous link is spin, absurd cross-marketing.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week delivered a joint address to Parliament. His country, the non-aggressor, is at war with Russia. His counterpart, a former KGB operative who can’t decide if he’s Peter the Great or Josef Stalin, will sustain the folly which has turned into a protracted grind. Winter is coming to the region. Zelensky sought moral support but mostly money and materiel while in Canada. This country which hosts a significant Ukrainian diaspora is a laggard in its North American and NATO defense commitments, but it’s doing what it can to reluctantly fight the good fight.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">So. The Speaker of the House of Commons (since resigned) Anthony Rota had to grandstand for Zelensky, trot out a mascot, a Ukrainian Second World War veteran who fought against the Russians in those years, now a frail ghost in the public gallery, as a symbol of contemporary Canadian solidarity. A bit of a stretch, but hey, simple, inaccurate and feel-good PR that’ll play well on video. Trouble is, Ukraine, one of the world’s great breadbaskets, whether as a region of an occupying power or an independent country, has, like most of Eastern Europe, an awfully complicated history.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A few years ago, when the vandalization of public statues and monuments was all the inarticulate rage, Rota, like most Canadians, would’ve been surprised to learn that Ukrainian social societies in Edmonton, Alberta and Oakville, Ontario had erected stone tributes to the Waffen-SS Galicia division. Now, Rota may not be a history buff, but these SS monuments were a hot topic in current affairs. An engaged MP might want to do some digging. Or have an aide do it for them. Why do they exist?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The majority of Canadians have been relatively lucky. We may share a bed with the elephant south of 49 but we’ve never lived between a rock and a hard place. The Holodomor was Stalin’s systematic attempt to starve the people of Ukraine, the very people who grew grain for the Soviet Union. The western portion of the region, known as Galicia and where Rota’s token patriot (my freedom fighter is your terrorist) was from, was Polish turf. Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Stalin invaded from the other side intent on securing Galicia. When Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, its invasion of Russia, Stalin switched sides, joined the Allies. Hitler’s National Socialist Party created ideologically driven services which unfortunately thrived alongside those of the German state. The Party oversaw its own military, police and foreign intelligence services, among others. The SS was formed originally as Hitler’s bodyguard – and bastards like him need one.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” We all know that one. And we all know those temporary hook-ups of convenience tend not to end well – the Taliban was a great group of guys when Russia invaded Afghanistan. Rota’s war hero was a boy in a wasteland pitted with the open graves of atrocities. This boy made a decision to bear arms for an undefined political or racial homeland amid an international shitshow. Who hasn’t taken advantage of a situation? Tried to leverage it. This boy was motivated to volunteer for the Waffen-SS (the organization’s military arm) rather than the ragtag Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA) which was too choosey about whom it would ally itself with, or fighting as a partisan.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Rota’s old man was not ready for his close up, but maybe in his mind he was. Anyway, all of this could have been easily avoided if somebody had just been paying attention. Did a little research. A stray lyric from 1994 “I was a pitcher down in a slump” certainly, at least to me, verifies the Stones’ long and loving relationship with professional baseball (I didn’t have to look the line up, I know my stuff). And that connection rings about as true as Putin’s limited de-Nazification military operation in Ukraine. Rota’s gaffe was a gift to Russian propagandists; I can hear the sustained standing ovation he's receiving in the Kremlin all the way from Edmonton.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The Stones grandstanding with MLB is like a Nancy Sinatra song, kinda stupid, kinda fun. Surface stuff, entertainment acts. But I don’t appreciate that lack of depth, that vacuous shallowness, those hollow talking points, those staged Instagram moments coming down from Parliament Hill in regard to national and foreign affairs, mainly because there’s a big library there and MPs, people like the former Speaker of the House of Commons, should utilize all of its resources. Books, periodicals and records can provide context and nuance, background. Genuine information. Perhaps Rota would’ve paused in the stacks to reconsider an ill-considered, gushing upstaging of Zelensky. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project. <i>Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.</i> </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-14486146356356075252023-09-25T09:37:00.000-07:002023-09-25T09:37:06.714-07:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Visitations</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Anticipation. It’s more than just Carly Simon longing for a splurch of ketchup.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">My experience as a traveller isn’t terribly extensive, but I’ve been around a little bit. I’ve learned enough to view a journey in one of three ways. The first is obligatory, personal or professional business. The second is a revisit, I’m familiar with where I’m heading and I have a pretty good idea of what I’m in for. The third is the most adventurous, an unfamiliar destination. A goodly portion of the fun provided by a trip like that unfolds long before “wheels up.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Since the covid pandemic kind of went away, Ann and I had been passing the puck back and forth in our own end, speculating about that selfish third destination, some place new to gawp at. We were all over the map, Memphis and Nashville, Dublin, Paris… Certain close personal friends who know me a little too well understand that I can sometimes be a little persnickety. Chaos is disruptive and the world is so full of it. If everything’s not in its place, it’s askew and that is aggravating. I’m not uptight, I’m just a bit particular. Beach holidays are fine for half an hour, but, man, the sand gets everywhere.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Potential destinations are akin to radio chart busters, hooks required. Every place in the world has a history and I’m always intrigued to learn about it, but if its history has already been a source of intrigue to me, so much the better. The arts in whatever form and in whatever tense are always a lure. If they don’t define a culture, they frame it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ann and I identified a fall window, a short one between the Doobie Brothers and Bruce Springsteen complete with a respite from standing commitments, a prime time to flee before winter locks us down. Edmonton is a long way from many places. A flight from its international airport is generally a short leg to somewhere else, the first baby step of an actual, proper journey. The opportunity cost associated with all travel is obvious: no hassle and no money spent. When Ann and I plan trips - our post-pandemic skills are rusty, we try to expedite the expediency of our expedition, attempt to alleviate our anxious, abject acquiescence to all ensuing annoyances. It is what it is and so we do what we must.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ultimately, we elected to head down the Mississippi toward the Gulf of Mexico. What could possibly go wrong in a port city situated below sea level at the tail end of the hurricane season over Halloween? Once Ann and I have dealt with the devilish details involved with any trip and before we research our destination, I review my preconceptions of the place – whatever the source of them.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Back in the early seventies about when my age first hit double digits, my older brother bought me a subscription to <i>Sports Illustrated</i>, one of those gifts of tacit reciprocity: We’ll both enjoy it. My introduction to New Orleans then was hosted by Saints quarterback Archie Manning who begat Colt Peyton and Giant Eli. The football team’s nickname was musical, like hockey’s St. Louis Blues, an American standard. The theme was perpetuated by the jazz funeral opening sequence of <i>Live and Let Die</i>. “Brown Sugar” was a salacious sketch of the Confederate States of America’s major metropolis, an electrified time warped piece of travel writing, but I couldn’t decipher the slurred lyrics garbled through a cheap AM transistor radio speaker back then. That song has since been condemned by pearl clutching revisionists, but history demands relativism because it never flatters its subject.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">My high school Canadian history courses glossed over Britain’s deportation of the Acadians from its Atlantic provinces. I learned more about that paranoid policy listening to The Band’s “Acadian Driftwood.” The dispossessed regrouped in French Louisiana of which New Orleans was the capital. The French colony became a Spanish possession before flipping back to the French who sold it to the United States in 1803. I know this because a favoured restaurant in Edmonton was Louisiana Purchase and that ersatz Cajun establishment has either moved from its downtown premises or closed; I’ve no idea. And for some inexplicable reason, Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans” was a loudspeaker staple at the ballpark when Edmonton was home to the Triple A Trappers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">How could I not buy a book called <i>In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead</i>? The Antebellum South pulses like an overripe abscess in the crime fiction of James Lee Burke. <i>Americana</i>, a memoir written by Ray Davies of the Kinks dealt with his stay in New Orleans. Mostly, he got shot, painfully aware while recuperating that in Elysian Fields and other city cemeteries the dead are necessarily buried above ground.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i>A Streetcar Named Desire</i>, the drama by Tennessee Williams is set in the French Quarter. The play’s something like Mardi Gras, I’ve never seen it performed. The “Hey, Stella!” celluloid snippet we’ve all seen is probably the only line of dialogue Brando never mumbled. When I was still living in Montreal and cable TV was fettered access to American border stations, <i>60 Minutes</i> broadcast a piece alleging the New Orleans heat was the most corrupt police force in the United States. Wages were paltry and ethics, like sewage, flowed downhill from there. <i>The Big Easy</i>, a noir film starring Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin played on the documented sleaze a few years after Clint Eastwood got kinky in <i>Tightrope</i>, the French Quarter again.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Contemporary history, the news of the day, is frequently presented as unprecedented and as such could precipitate an existential crisis: “Today the (insert noun) changed forever.” Climaxes are soon folded into a narrative that’s been unfolding for centuries, worthy of a paragraph or perhaps a full chapter. Hurricane Katrina was two and a half presidential administrations ago; pundits don’t speak of pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans anymore, just as they no longer view Louisiana state politics through the fiction lens of Robert Penn Warren.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Underpinning our anticipation, my impressions and Ann’s impressions (and hers are different), is the music, which has lasted longer than some of the levees which protect the city from being swamped: Dixieland, zydeco, blues, funk, soul and barrelhouse rock’n’roll and whatever else may be stewing in the gumbo. I feel like we’re going to a place I already know pretty well. I cannot wait to stay out late listening to music and finding out just how wrong I am. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>is celebrating ten years as your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project. <i>Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer</i>. </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-72421041539082294702023-09-07T17:32:00.000-07:002023-09-07T17:32:04.209-07:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A FAN’S NOTES</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i>Hackney Diamonds</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Oh, how the years fly by. Time passed is now so imprecise, fluid, receding and sometimes indistinct. I would have to consult my records in the family bible to tell you what year my mother Annette died. It was a New Year’s Day; I know that much. When I think about her now, I frequently summon that night in Montreal when I was visiting from Calgary sometime in the oughts and Mom and I went stepping out. We had a real good time together.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Perception isn’t everything so much as a reel of time reversing from fast-forward and sometimes becoming snarled in a creaky mechanism. The Montreal Canadiens play their home games in the Bell Centre. I have to remind myself that their “new” rink was inaugurated something like twenty-five years ago. When I escorted Annette there to see the Nashville Predators on a weeknight, the rink was even newer.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">It was a big night for us. Annette had her hair done in the morning. Her fur coat came out of its storage bag in the closet. That shade of red lipstick I remembered as a kid kissed the Kleenex – mercifully, she didn’t spit on it afterward to wipe my face, Jesus, I was in my late forties or early fifties, after all. Mom wanted a hot dog and beer before we found our seats. God, she hadn’t seen the Habs skate since the seventies. My stepfather had had season’s tickets, great ones, down low in the reds in the old Montreal Forum; winter Saturday nights there were their happy social obligation. Annette’s mother, Marie, my Nana, had been a fanatic, a worshipper of Rocket Richard. Nana took me to my first professional hockey game in February of 1968, the Los Angeles Kings were in town.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">My Nana and my Mom, and LA and Nashville both in garish yellow, synchronicity. When the Canadiens took the ice in those uniforms that predate the formation of the National Hockey League in 1917, I got a pleasant little chill up my spine even though I could only name three or four players on the club’s roster and was unsure of their sweater numbers. I watched Annette absently dab at her lips with a napkin: beer foam, lipstick and mustard. I understood Mom was back in 1975, ’76, ’77 or ’78 and enjoying the visit, all done up and hooked on a different man’s arm. Her favourite player back then was Yvon Lambert, as a scout Mom rated rugged good looks over skill.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The Canadiens were scarily good during those years and had been since the early sixties. So were the Rolling Stones. These are two heritage brands who excel at evoking their glory days, whether by elaborate pregame ceremonies or enhanced reissues of seminal albums. They are and will remain cultural phenomena, straddling both high and low, topics of heated debate in pubs and ivory towers. It’s hard to remember a time when the Stones released a really sticky, classic single and the Canadiens weren’t mediocre.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">There was a time when the Canadiens held first dibs on every prospect skating in Quebec. Then came expansion and with it the draft and then the draft lottery. Rock music was once a legitimate countercultural force before it withered into an aged sub-genre of popular music. Industry business models for sports organizations and rock bands have been radically reconfigured since the seventies. Times have changed but the essence remains: the Canadiens still play hockey albeit with a lot less elan and the Stones, at their heart, are as Paul McCartney recently said, “a good little blues band” with an undeniable knack for Barnum and Bailey big top self-promotion. The 2023 corporate tongue is a jigsaw of glass shards, not liquified or blown up this time around and around. Buy the merch; buy the good old days.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Yesterday I told my neighbour Ted over the fence that the new Stones single “Angry” had just dropped mere hours ago. He said, “I didn’t know that.” I replied, “Why would you? You have a life.” Yeah, I still get that old, familiar new Stones tingle and I’m grateful for it although, admittedly, that feeling has diminished exponentially as I’ve aged. The “Angry” video is essentially a three-minute shopping channel ad for their back catalogue. The song is decent enough, a lot like the Habs not deploying the neutral zone trap, refreshing riffology. It bodes well for the rest of <i>Hackney Diamonds</i> because to me a main ingredient in the Stones heady brew is what young people today refer to as deep cuts, the rest of the album. “Recent” examples would include “Back of My Hand” from <i>A Bigger Bang</i>, “Always Suffering” from <i>Bridges to Babylon</i> and, oh heck, let’s go all the way back to “Baby Break It Down” from 1994’s <i>Voodoo Lounge</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I hope <i>Hackney Diamonds</i> will not be hackneyed. I don’t consider myself a sad sack completist with a dauber ready to play “their best since…” bingo, but I suppose I am what I am. Still, Dylan’s <i>Rough and Rowdy Ways</i>, Springsteen’s <i>Letter to You</i> and the Who’s <i>WHO</i> were all fine late career releases. And I’ve enjoyed each one at least a few times. They’re never my first, second nor third choices when I’m in the mood to listen to those artists. Those albums are musical Yvon Lamberts, that is to say, just good enough to be in chronological order alongside the greats. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project. <i>Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.</i></span> </p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-41822746762808035492023-08-30T17:43:00.000-07:002023-08-30T17:43:55.741-07:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">THE MUSTER POINT PROJECT</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“Grub Street”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">There is a three-block stretch of Calgary’s Centre Street, just up the slight rise from the Chinook C-Train station, on which every hot tub dealer in town has an outlet. You are familiar with artists’ colonies and other hives of like-minded businesses or individuals. Some sort of congressional black hole gravitational force always seems to be at play. Some two hundred and fifty years ago London’s hacks, freelance writers who for a fee provided content for what would become and what we now perceive as mass media, tended to gather in the taverns along a long since disappeared street called Grub Street.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">At the close of the nineteenth century George Gissing published a novel called <i>New Grub Street</i>, a story about two competing writers, one of whom has no scruples. Fifty years later Joyce Carey published <i>The Horse’s Mouth</i>, a novel about a talented, wildly erratic and eccentric painter named Gulley Jimson (the movie stars Alec Guinness). The books’ common theme is integrity as self-sabotage, or like the 10cc single, “Art for Art’s Sake.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I read both books in my first semester at university. A Brit Lit course explored the gap between the Edwardian era and the “Angry Young Man” movement. My professor’s name was Tobias. She sported a purple ‘do with a Bride of Frankenstein nicotine streak. She was tenured long past her best before date, but during those lectures when she could summon the energy to inflate her withered passion, man, she knew her stuff.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Around this time, I used to spend a lot of time with a newish friend of mine named Glen. I’d dated his sister, Susan, and he and I remained in touch after she and I split up. Our apartments were in the same Montreal neighbourhood; he was closer to Guy Street and I was a little farther west, closer to the Montreal Forum, ambling distance. He could’ve taught <i>The Horse’s Mouth</i>; and you’ve got to read <i>City of Night</i> – that line from “L.A. Woman” – and Hubert Selby and Tom McGuane and this, and that. Oh! And this too! Glen made his way out west from Montreal about ten years before I did, so, maybe forty years ago. We lost touch.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Susan and I had bonded over music; we were both in our college’s creative arts program. She hosted a show on the campus radio station; I wrote album reviews for the newspaper. About fifteen years ago when I was still working for a Calgary ad agency, sometimes as a hack, Susan came to town for a media conference. We caught up over happy hour drinks. I asked after Glen and asked Susan to please pass on my regards.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Social media did not exist when George Harrison released “Devil’s Radio” in 1987. My footprint in the global village’s town square is minimal, I’ve had a Facebook account for a decade. The platform doesn’t even cross my mind should I be seeking hard news or an informed opinion while wasting time online (and I prefer to pull the appropriate reference book from the shelf rather than use Google). My feed is music, books, baseball and a sprinkling of my hometown and its hockey team. I’ve also been able to reconnect with a number of people I cared about all those years ago. So, Glen and I, actual friends, a little long-lost, are also twenty-first century electric friends.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Glen sent me a note a few months back not knowing I was busy working on song lyrics for Kevin Franco’s Muster Point Project, remarking on a picture of me I’d posted on my Facebook wall. He said I looked like Gulley Jimson. I thought, “Oh, great, grey haired and grizzled.” I laughed, and in that moment, I was inspired to frame the lyrics for “Grub Street.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I remembered all those books Glen and I used to talk about. I remembered the elegiac chain-smoking wreck that was Professor Tobias, sadly beautiful in a Replacements sort of way. And, dear me, Don Henley’s “The Heart of the Matter” (Graham Greene, 1948; <i>The Horse’s Mouth</i> was published in 1946). It took me two cigarettes on the front porch to conclude that “Grub Street” would make a great song chorus, lyric hook or title. The link between George Gissing and Gulley Jimson wasn’t too tenuous, an author and another author’s character, although separated by contemporary literary convention and two world wars, were addressing the same dilemma, essentially talking the same language. The proper nouns together could combine to create a memorable line. And, God help me, I know Kevin sometimes sweats singing so many sequential “S” sounds for some reason. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to the songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project. <i>Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.</i> </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-13041939693415098782023-08-18T13:58:00.000-07:002023-08-18T13:58:35.932-07:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">HUMAN WRECKAGE</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Oh, Brother, I Can’t Afford a Smith-Corona</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">It’s not so easy to be me.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">For the past fifteen years or more I’ve done virtually all of my writing (exclusive of medium ballpoints inside Hilroy exercise books or on pads of graph paper) on a second-hand Toshiba laptop. The machine was stripped down to its Windows XP operating system and a version of Microsoft’s WordPerfect. Nothing else on it except for my files. It was a sturdy unit, packing some weight and its large black keys withstood my hunt-and-pound typing technique. It was a utilitarian device that did its job.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">One morning in late June I went downstairs to my writing area, seven bookshelves, a desk, a round table with a Cold War globe, three dictionaries and three style books, two notepads and a bulletin board, and pressed the Toshiba’s power button. Brian Eno’s (Roxy Music) Microsoft “sound” sounded. As usual. The screen did not illuminate. I could just make out my background image of Stonehenge on a sunny day but it was more midnight than noon. The cursor was invisible.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">You will recall those instances in your life, and I dearly hope there haven’t been many, when something very bad for whatever reason has happened and your stomach, a sac, twists itself into a dagger and knifes through your small and large intestines seeking the most expedient exit?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">My hi-tech troubleshooting skills are sharp, razor strop honed. I turned the machine off and walked away. Like faulty home appliances and required home repairs, sometimes problems just fix themselves. Faith is a powerful tool when wielded by the ignorant. The reboot manifested a miracle. I was blind, now I could see. I was savvy enough to back everything up on one of those little (although surprisingly large) memory sticks I never fail to insert incorrectly first try. I transferred all the current files to the Crooked 9’s big Mac upstairs in the den.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The Province of Alberta deregulated its electricity market late last century. Free market theory dictated that competition among providers would lower its consumer cost. We live in weird times and the market never fails to move in mysterious ways. Twice a year, when it’s time to change the clock, I’m reminded every appliance in the house is on, all the time. The coffee maker has to be reset. This constant low, slow drain of energy irks me; and modern appliances are difficult or near impossible to repair, designed to be replaced. My Toshiba workhorse could not be turned off, let alone recycled, before I was up and running on something else.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">So, I put the word out: I need a new typewriter. Oh, and a mouse, I guess, because I’m a spaz with touch pads. Also, for reasons I can’t rationally explain, the “feel” of the keyboard is of importance. I don’t care about the brand or the machine’s features. Any recommendations?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">My secret fret was whether new laptop cords came with two or three pronged plugs because the outlets and their various extension cords in this old house could be, but maybe not, one or the other. And my writing area, like my fiction, isn’t going anywhere.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">My nephew Harry said he had an old MacBook Air that might suit me, gratis. I was intrigued. My friend Jim, an author at work on another book, had told me that’s what he does his work on. Harry said the machine had been too sluggish when he had too many windows open on screen. He’s a doctor and so I could imagine a mishmash of medical literature, original research papers, billing spreadsheets and knowing him as I do, a Jays or English football game running in the background. My typewriter application would not unduly distress the circuitry designed in California and assembled in China.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">And I think we both thought that was that.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“Do you know how to set it up?”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“Set it up? Can’t I just turn it on and go? I just want to type on it.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“Oh, Uncle Geoff.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">God bless Harry. I wasted hours of his life, but this machine, stripped down and lean as Apple will allow, is up and running. And if its second life rivals my used Toshiba’s, it should see me out. Its connection to its power source isn’t as discreet as I’d like, but I can turn the device off and even unplug it. Anyway, I’m not prepared to empty and shift three bookshelves to run a new, hidden extension cord; life’s too short. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project. <i>Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>in your preferred format from your e-retailer. </i></span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-65108499192544196802023-08-12T12:05:00.001-07:002023-08-12T12:05:26.201-07:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A FAN’S NOTES</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">This Just In: The 70s Are Ending</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Should the rain ever stop, my law of twelve lawn mows between Victoria Day and Thanksgiving remains applicable, mushrooms sprouting like dandelions, not withstanding. West Coast League short season baseball wrapped here Sunday afternoon. August arrives in Edmonton with a slightly crisper air of gentle denouement. Ann’s remarked that the angle of the sun’s light, provided we can actually gauge it through the rain or the wildfire haze, has dulled a degree or three. Our al fresco newspaper morning coffees require an extra layer of clothing. Anyway, Ann, a retired music teacher, still considers Labour Day New Year’s Eve.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">This awareness of time passing pervades and prevails. Next week’s looking pretty good except for the funeral to kick it off. The mixology of our attendance is genuine affection for the deceased diluted by obligation and diplomacy and I’m not anticipating lingering long enough to rate the sandwiches following a full Catholic service. Tuesday promises to be a fine night out, sort of a Mobius strip déjà vu, a show postponed from about this time last year, and what would’ve been an epic double bill forty years ago: Rod Stewart with Cheap Trick. I haven’t caught either act since I was in my early twenties. Ann loves Sir Rod’s good old stuff as much as I do, but she’s never seen him perform and, dear me, it’s getting awfully late in the day to debate with which album he really began to misdirect his incredible talent. As for Cheap Trick, I’ve reassured Ann she’ll know every song. As for me, I’m hoping the opening slot and perhaps something like arthritis will curtail the duration of Rick Nielsen’s power pop guitar pyrotechnics.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Thanksgiving in Edmonton is a confusing and peculiar time of year. I know I won’t have cut the lawn again, but the array of hand tools by the Crooked 9’s back door is schizo: leaf rakes and snow shovels; I just don’t know, I never can tell. Our October will run out with the Doobie Brothers who surely must be down to the last green tinged roach in the teacup saucer ashtray after more than fifty years of road work. One hook was tickets selling for twentieth century prices and the second was, as I assured Ann, “We’ll know every song.”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">My high school social whirl was more often than not time well wasted in friends’ basements. There were popular albums I never bought because everybody else already had. And some, like the Doobies’ <i>The Captain and Me</i>, could only exist in a collective context; they would never sound as good to me alone in my bedroom. Following my graduation the Doobies created the template for rock band as rock brand and no one since has done it with such elegant ease: <i>Takin’ It to the Streets</i> (an absolute knock out title track) featured both group founder and vocalist Tom Johnston who was preparing to step away from active duty for health reasons and his dauphin Michael McDonald. The reconfigured band’s next album, <i>Minute by Minute</i>, was one of those mainstream commercial juggernauts that, like <i>Let’s Dance</i>, <i>Freeze Frame</i>, <i>Brothers in Arms</i> and <i>Born in the USA</i>, may’ve proved more yoke than windfall. Anyway, both singers are back with the Doobies for this apparent final lap around the concert circuit and, anyway, you know, despite commercial radio’s best efforts, I’ve never tired of the breathless gossip concerning the preacher and the teacher in that sleepy little Texas town.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i>It’s a long night and tell me what else were you gonna do?</i> Everything dies in Edmonton in November, baby, and that’s a fact. So, man, Ann and I want those E Street sparks to fly before Remembrance Day. Of the aforementioned rockers, only Bruce Springsteen remains relevant, two of his last three albums were worthy of his back catalogue and the other was Friday night fun, drop the needle and sway, but this tour cries elegy, a sweeping exit from the world’s biggest stages. My sense with Springsteen is that if he feels he’s incapable of living up to his live legacy, his prisoner of rock ‘n’ roll shtick, he’ll step back, ratchet things down.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Winter’s coming everywhere and to everything; there’s no stopping it. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Dispatches from the Crooked 9 <i>has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion</i> <i>site</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>has been refreshed, revamped, revitalized and otherwise reinvigorated. Watch and listen to songs I co-wrote with</i> The Muster Point Project. <i>Of course, you can still purchase my latest book</i> Of Course You Did <i>from various retailers in your preferred format</i>. </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-50960206515424681762023-07-31T18:10:00.000-07:002023-07-31T18:10:06.311-07:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">THE MUSTER POINT PROJECT</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Another Song on the Radio</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">And the hits just keep on coming.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The Muster Point Project’s latest single “I Love That Song” is not to be confused with “That Song” by Big Wreck or Joe Jackson’s lovely “A Slow Song.” As was the case with “I Got This” I wrote the lyrics for TMPP aka Kevin Franco on a sheet of graph paper, block printing in blue medium ballpoint. That’s my job done. If Kevin decides to work with my words he comes up with a title, composes the music, works out his vocals and plays all instruments (at least on the demos). To me it’s reminiscent of that church rummage sale fishing game where the kid casts a line over a barrier painted like an underwater scene, smiling doe-eyed Disney fish, and always hooks something good.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I wish “Honky Tonk Women” (“Woman” on my <i>Hot Rocks</i> compilation) was twenty minutes long. A modicum of its magic is its brevity, three and out: Play it again. There are a few other songs which insist on immediate repeat when I’m in charge of the stereo, any Joe Cocker take on John Sebastian’s “Darling Be Home Soon,” Neil mewing “Helpless,” Van Morrison contemplating “Saint Dominic’s Preview” and for reasons I can’t explain, John Mellencamp’s “Key West Intermezzo (I Saw You First)” – maybe it’s the <i>loud Cuban band crucifying John Lennon</i>. There are others of course, God knows there are others: <i>Those were days of roses, poetry and prose and Martha all I had was you and all you had was me</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Determined not to give Kevin the obvious rhyme of “song” and “gone,” I imagined the chorus of “I Love That Song” as a simplistic nostalgic celebration with maybe an allusion to the Saturday Night Live sketch featuring John Belushi as the party guest who never leaves: I’m just going to flip through your albums again….Guilty!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The verses, scribbled in my Hilroy exercise book, came out very differently when printed on my pad of graph paper. Growing up is very confusing. Adults tell you things but they don’t explain them. I couldn’t figure out why the nuns and priests revered an angry and jealous god who loved everybody unconditionally, but with conditions or else. It didn’t make any sense to me. “I Love That Song” is about coming of age, about dropping others’ tired suppositions and impositions. Rock music and hormones grease the process, that green, almost premature awakening. It’s liberating to climb out of an established doctrinal rut in to one of your own making. But “coming of age” should never, ever be a phase or a phrase followed by a full stop….A rut is a rut is a rut is a rut, right in the nuts, a narrow channel by another name.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Kevin spends a lot of his time down Santiago way. I read a recent interview with him in which he said the music he composed for “I Love That Song” had an absorbed Latin influence, Chile by osmosis. I can’t tell a tango from Santana, mainly because I can’t stand Santana. What I did pick up on Kevin’s initial demo was the “Gimmie (<i>Let It Bleed</i> sleeve; see “Women” vs. “Woman”) Shelter” clicking, whirring noise. I believe this sound is made by a percussive instrument known as a guiro. In both songs it imparts dread, suggesting the internal workings of a clock, toothy sprockets rotating, and time inexorably ticking down toward a grim finality.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The Muster Point Project’s official lyric video of “I Love That Song” is easily found on YouTube. You can also stream “I Love That Song” on all the usual channels; it’s everywhere and on the radio too. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">meGeoff h<i>as been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of shameless self-promotion since 2013. The novella</i> Of Course You Did <i>is my latest book. Visit</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>for links to purchase it from assorted retailers in your preferred format.</i> </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-71296445996311392592023-07-16T10:40:00.010-07:002023-07-16T10:49:12.869-07:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">THE MUSTER POINT PROJECT</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">A Song on the Radio</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Early one weekday in August, 2003 I was strolling along Calgary’s Stephen Avenue; my morning mass transit respite, a welcome one block stroll between a crowded bus and a crowded train car. As I passed the book shop I saw my name in the window, a poster promoting my first-ever book launch a couple of evenings hence. I took a seat on a public bench beside a trash can and lit a cigarette. My work at the advertising agency could wait for another six or seven minutes; I was usually an hour early to the shop anyway.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I remembered the typed letter I’d received from <i>Quarry Magazine</i> sometime during the winter of 1983. It would publish my short story “The Rites of Spring,” baseball and death, in the spring 1984 prose issue. The quarterly would pay me $5 per page plus five complimentary copies. And twenty years later, here was the publication of my first novel. Eventually I get around to things.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">That was some kind of rush that particular morning. I knew my publisher was small time and I knew that was to be my fate too (that window poster hangs in the Crooked 9's furnace room so I'm able to recall that glorious evening each time I change the filter), but here was a middle finger to all those literary agents who’d rejected my manuscript telling me I was very good for a nobody writer, a pretend scribbler because I didn’t live in Toronto. And hadn’t my career path zagged from zigging: army man, hockey player, archeologist, historian, rock ‘n’ roll star, dishwasher, busboy, grocery clerk and freelance writer all the way to <i>God, there’s got to be a better way</i>. Who the fuck was I?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Didn’t I experience that same rush just this last Tuesday morning?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“I Got This” is the latest single by the Muster Point Project. The Muster Point Project is the musical alter ego of my friend Kevin Franco whom I’ve known for more than thirty years. We like the same bands although Kevin’s much more tuned in to contemporary music than I am.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I wrote the song’s lyrics. I tried to write a Chuck Berry song, a story with an O. Henry twist. Something like “No Particular Place to Go” in which the horny and frustrated narrator is parked on lovers’ lane with his girlfriend on the eve of seduction yet stymied “by a safety belt that wouldn’t budge.” Seatbelts were not standard features of American cars back in the fifties and so there’s a whole knotty bunch of allusion, euphemism and metaphor buried in those seemingly slight, comic lyrics. Chuck Berry’s style is not easy to emulate (and I’ve been told my fiction tends to lose the plot because there isn’t one). But I did manage to write a chorus whose meaning can be taken in two ways, so as Kevin sings the verses a boast becomes a lament.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Kevin composed and arranged infectiously up-tempo music, one of the hooks is the horns. What really makes “I Got This” touch all the bases as a single for me is his vocal delivery. Above and beyond the recording and production there’s a genuine sense that the singer is getting a kick out of telling his story. Kevin’s having fun at work. I picture comedian Billy Connolly giggling while still a digressive minute away from his punchline. The song’s sole spoken word, the doctor’s “Yep” diagnosis is delivered with deadpan schadenfreude.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Full disclosure: I may, maybe, you know, have a vested interest, but I believe “I Got This” has chartbuster written all over it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Kevin told me he was pleased with his streaming numbers and YouTube viewership of the official animated lyric video. I thought it would be cool for Kevin (and me) to get the Muster Point Project on traditional radio. “I Got This” was worthy. The only realistic avenue for that was CKUA, Alberta’s public station. As a former ad man I know my self-promotion skills are laughably inept; but promoting a “third” party like MPP didn’t strike me as quite so crass (and rejection would be more impersonal).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">One of CKUA’s charms is the variety of its programming. So, much like an ad campaign or manuscript submission, I selected likely targets. I prepared a couple of emails with attached links and files. The logical CKUA host didn’t respond; fuck him. The weekday mid-morning man did, saying he’d check out “I Got This.” A week of radio silence passed. I confess to mounting feelings of agitation and annoyance and suggested to Ann we turn the Crooked 9’s dial over to CBC. I followed up: I reiterated “I Got This” was this summer’s catchiest indie single. Nothing. I fumed.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Tuesday morning I was running late. I was naked in our bathroom running the shower and restocking the toilet paper, multitasking. The door was closed. Ann started shouting from the kitchen. Our house must've been on fire; goddamn cigarettes.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">“He just mentioned your name! Kevin’s on the radio! They’re playing your song!”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">And I ran down the hall and I stood there grinning in the kitchen in all my glory. I didn’t care that the blinds were up. Thanks to a whole lot of help from my friend Kevin, my words were reaching more people all at once than ever before, more than my combined book sales. Way more. Sure, I once had a weekly readership of over two million when I was writing copy for Safeway grocery flyers, but those were different times.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The cleverly animated official lyric video for MPP’s “I Got This” is up on YouTube. This summer’s smash hit single is also available from all the usual streaming suspects. And, man, it sounds incredible transmitted over airwaves. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">meGeoff <i>has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of embarrassing and awkwardly inept self-promotion since 2013. The novella</i> Of Course You Did <i>is my latest book. Visit</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>for links to purchase it in your preferred format from assorted retailers.</i></span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1352089686481135065.post-22889806553201081592023-07-09T17:28:00.000-07:002023-07-09T17:28:03.424-07:00<p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">SAINTS PRESERVE US</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I’m Not Buying It</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">One of the liquor stores I pop into from time to time has a bitcoin machine situated by the cash register. It looks like a standard ATM. I don’t know if the user buys an entire bitcoin or a fraction of one. I don’t understand how cryptocurrency leaps from an ATM in to the buyer’s wallet. I’ve no idea where and how people can spend bitcoin. I can’t grasp bitcoin mining and blockchain technology. A standalone machine in a low rent liquor store in no way suggests a safe investment vehicle nor a secure and documented transaction to me.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">But I know what I know and I know advertising and marketing. A classic ploy is the celebrity endorsement. The immediate payoff is the newsworthiness of the publicity and subsequent hype: Keith Richards is hawking Louis Vuitton luggage. The long term payoff is more of an ethereal gamble. Ideally, the target market will impose its perception of the celebrity’s attributes onto the brand and product: Keith Richards, cooler than thou, understands the legendary high quality of Louis Vuitton.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Signing up a brand ambassador is risky business because real people tend not to behave like tame mascots. Traditionally, if things went sideways there was mutually assured destruction, both parties, the celebrity and the brand, losing that “itness,” that incalculable cachet. A recent example is the nasty breakup of Adidas and hip-hopper Kanye West (aka Yeezus, Yeezy and Ye). Fashion is a huge component of popular music. Why not partner with one of the world’s biggest stars if he wants to design his own sneaker? Look what Michael Jordan did for Nike! Now, Jordan got old and maybe a little distracted by baseball but he didn’t become completely unhinged. Adidas now has a stock issue: millions of dollars’ worth of unsold Kanye runners and a share price not much higher than a rubber sole.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">While no single condition can define a society, we live currently in hyper-sensitive times. Everybody’s been victimized and everybody’s outraged. Consequently, contemporary circumstances create scenarios for celebrity corporate mouthpieces to damage their reputations with little or no blowback on their paymasters’. Hockey players Connor McDavid and Wayne Gretzky endorse BetMGM, a sportsbook. What gaming syndicate wouldn’t want to be associated with great players, winners? It’s a perfect fit, a marketer’s dream, synergistic attributes. The rut in the ice is that many Canadians inexplicably insist on viewing professional hockey through the sepia tones of rose-coloured glasses. So, McDavid and Gretzky shilling a societal scourge is anathema. Think of the children! Gordie Howe never did that! Gordie Howe was never presented with that particular attractive financial opportunity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The invention and subsequent sales and marketing of cyrptocurrencies have since dug a third pitfall or perhaps, pratfall, for celebrity parrots. Cyrptocurrency is a speculative form of universal money-like stuff whose value cannot be guaranteed by the assets of any national central bank in existence. Also, should you ever need to launder actual cash money… </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Last fall the FTX cryptocurrency exchange opened its ledger book right to America’s Chapter 11. Its founder Sam Bankman-Fried now faces more criminal fraud charges than there are ones and zeros in a string of code. But Bankman-Fried understood the power of celebrity. Perhaps that’s all he aspired to be no matter the means. Then again, maybe he understood the sway of the spotlight, the lure of the pitch, on a gullible, ordinary average guy who feels entitled to his share of the big time. Bankman-Fried’s brand ambassador was Tom Brady, a football player and arguably one of the greatest quarterbacks to line up under centre ever. Brady is now being sued by stiffed and busted FTX investors because they listened to him (and there’s no one left to go after). They believed a man who played a violent sport for decades was also Milton Friedman. And, anyway, what could be more “blue chip” than bitcoin and ethereum?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">In for a bit, in for a byte: America’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last October fined uber C-lister Kim Kardashian’s implants $1.26-million for being a… well, a token or two short of integrity or, essentially, what passes the sniff test for cryptocurrency manipulation on social media. The SEC in March charged (among others) noted financial guru and Warren Buffet acolyte Lindsay Lohan, such a nice stable girl, with illegally promoting crypto assets. Would you buy anything, anything at all on these people’s paid carny barking recommendation? Would you!? God, it’s like Paris Hilton promoting Super 8. Check that, she would if the money was right; I’m not sure if she’s under investigation for her own celebrity crypto gig yet.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Let me now return to Keith Richards and Louis Vuitton, the story of a very wealthy, nomadic musician and very expensive designer label luggage. I am not Keith Richards; I cannot afford Louis Vuitton duffle bags. Keith hasn’t hauled his own luggage since, I don’t know, 1965. Considering some of his documented habits, his luggage probably could never be connected to him anywhere in any way. But he’s travelled the globe enough times to at least have an association with suitcases and carry-ons. Louis Vuitton does not manufacture guitar cases. Still, neither party went, in that cringe inducing public relations phrase, “off brand” in this instance especially as the model’s appearance fee was paid directly to a charity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Years ago Detroit rocker Bob Seger was accused of selling out for allowing “Like a Rock” to be used in a long running Chevrolet advertising campaign. He said if his song helped General Motors sell more vehicles assembled in his hometown (and by his audience), he was fine with that. His campaign royalties were funneled to the auto workers union. That is “on brand.” The ad campaign was revived in the oughts to the tune of “Our Country,” a song by John Mellencamp. He cited the same rustbelt, heartland motivation as Seger, adding that since his career had ended with <i>The Lonesome Jubilee</i> in the ears of commercial radio, he needed an alternative avenue to reach his audience. That honesty, no bullshit, no spin, is on brand.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">I was about to use “truth,” “trust” and “advertising” in a positive context in the same sentence. No, it can’t be done, there’s no blue moon on July’s kitchen calendar page. Just assume every celebrity mouthpiece doesn’t know, understand or care what they’re talking about; it doesn’t matter if you’re buying or hiring, be wary, be aware. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">meGeoff <i>has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of gushing celebrity coverage since 2013. The novella</i> Of Course You Did <i>is my latest book. Visit</i> <a href="http://www.megeoff.com">www.megeoff.com</a> <i>for links to purchase it in your preferred format from assorted retailer</i>s. </span></p>Geoff Moorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14366788540316093423noreply@blogger.com0