A FAN’S NOTES

Hey! Ho! Rock ‘n’ Roll!

Little text and even less insight, but lots of pictures. The grocery store magazine rack 40-year history of rock ‘n’ roll gorgeously laid out in Life magazine’s December 1, 1992 issue ($3.95). The editors credited the birth of this as yet nameless jumpy hybrid of blues, country and electricity to a 1952 Cleveland teen-centric and radio-sponsored public event, the Moondog Coronation Ball.

In the spirit of pinpointing exactly what can never be exactly pinpointed, it follows that the Holy Trinity of this once uniquely American genre in the Life universe is Elvis, Dylan and Springsteen. These men do not crack camera lenses. The somewhat surprising successes of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocket Man, biopics of extravagant Brits, prompted Hollywood to zoom in on a trio of earthier local heroes.

Elvis traced the King’s career arc from discovery to the tragedy of unrealized salvation. Presley was ultimately trying to recapture the magic of Sun Studio again, those unforgettable sounds recorded at 706 Union Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee. You want to believe this speculative truth even though your back begins ache, as it will, on a long-haul economy flight about 130 minutes in. A Complete Unknown is a slice of His Bobness. New York City to Newport, Woody Guthrie to Les Paul, a vapour trail of precious folk scene pretensions shredded in his wake. Headed for Sun, in his way.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is a sliver. Nebraska is that dark space between The River and Born in the USA. A spare and haunting album with echoes of that room on Union Avenue. The phrase “deliver me from nowhere” is sung twice on the record, in “State Trooper” and “Open All Night” – a stream of consciousness song which presages “Radio Nowhere” from Magic. The title track and opening lyric, I saw her standing on her front lawn/Just a-twirlin’ her baton evokes Mary on her front porch in “Thunder Road”. In this instance though, the outcome, the promise, is a headlong drive into the American Nightmare.

The film opens with the finale of “Born to Run”, the last song of the last encore on the last date of a tour. “Hungry Heart” is all over the radio, Top Ten. We know what’s happened, we know where he’s been. The context of Nebraska is further clarified by a full E Street Band studio run-through of “Born in the USA”. We know what’s coming next and CBS is intent on riding that rocket.

Nebraska (number 226 on Rolling Stone’s list of the top 500 albums originally published in 2012 and since boosted to 150 in the 2020 revisionist update) was a Z-28 skid into left field and viewed by the corporate skyscraper powers that be in 1982 as commercial suicide. If you’re intent on ending something, best be sensible and choose career over life. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is not a raucous feel-good flick. It runs like a two-hour public service announcement detailing the crippling toll of clinical depression. But it rocks better than any official disease marketing awareness campaign.

People are wired differently. Brain chemistry is a factor. Emotional triggers and experience are something else. Why “Independence Day” from The River was not used in the film is a mystery, but there’s the source pretty much laid bare: Well, Papa, go to bed now, it’s getting late/Nothing we can do is gonna change anything now…

The near-tragedy depicted is not without humour. At one point a CBS executive says of Nebraska (paraphrasing): “It sounds like outtakes. Bruce would never release outtakes.” Snort! There’s an entire (and expensive) parallel career out there in record store land. The fun with films like Elvis, A Complete Unknown and this one is spotting the homage. You know a shot will be set up and framed just like an album cover or an overly familiar image from the music press. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere delivers.      

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still available. 

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Save Now! Pay Later!

Fifty-one thousand members of the Alberta Teachers’ Association (and it better know how to employ a plural apostrophe) walked off the job October 6. The action directly impacted 2500 schools (public, separate and francophone) across the province. The 700,000 students affected range from kindergarten level to grade 12. These kids will play truant until Halloween at the least. Alberta’s United Conservative government intends to pass back-to-work legislation October 27. Five million people live in Alberta.

Strikes (and lockouts) are always the result of frustration, months of fruitless negotiation. The issues no longer up for discussion won’t come as a shock to anyone who pays a modicum of attention to the provincial education system. The ATA’s litany of complaint is D, “all of the above” on a multiple-choice exam. Classrooms are overcrowded. The hard cap headcount is ever-rising as teachers’ resources and secondary supports diminish proportionally. There are money matters too. Nobody has ever held a job without hidden duties, mystery tasks unhighlighted by bullet points in its official description. Implicit in any labour contract is that unpaid work should amount to a mere fraction of salaried requirements. Should Alberta’s teachers be paying for their students’ school supplies from their own underfunded pockets?

The UCP excels at conjuring issues outside of its jurisdiction and then offering solutions as veiled threats to other levels of government. But extortion’s not an option on its own mismanaged turf. The big news of late is the government’s launch of a sort of sports bracket in which Albertans can pick their favourites from an array of new license plate designs. Participatory democracy with no petition required! Meanwhile, the health file languishes despite being overseen by four (FOUR!) ministers. As for the education ministry…

The fuse for this fiasco was sparked last summer when the education ministry issued a diktat listing 200 books it deemed unsuitable for tender, social media-addicted eyes. Margaret Atwood and Aldous Huxley, authors I read for courses when I was in high school, made the Fahrenheit 451 cut. What really set the ATA afire though was the supplementary demand that all teachers list the books at hand in their classrooms for official vetting. Documenting out-of-pocket supplies and resources in July sounds an awful lot like an unpaid make-work exercise. 

Strikes always come with ripples, whether direct or indirect. Canada Post is in the midst of yet another labour disruption. A few chronic magazine subscribers aside, nobody’s noticed. Or they didn’t in Edmonton and Calgary until the October 20 civic elections. No eligible voter intent on exercising their democratic privilege had an Edmonton Elections or Elections Calgary registration card. They were impossible to get because they were impossible to distribute. The lines in school gyms were long and snaky. Reams of paperwork for voters to fill out and who were never taught cursive. To be fair to the grossly mismanaged Crown taxpayer-funded sinkhole, delays were exacerbated by the UCP’s ministry of municipal affairs needless MAGA tinkering with the simple mechanics of an unbroken system. Alberta in all her embarrassing majesty.

The greatest resource of any society is its youth. Educated people are smarter than morons; for the most part, all things considered, that’s a logical sweeping generalization. Nothing else to infer here. There are students looking toward provincial exams (necessarily optional now), graduation and university admission. Their education path zigged and zagged during the pandemic. This additional weeks-long gap (and counting) is not insignificant.

Covid fostered the myth of remote work as an employee’s right. An imaginary labour code clause which most workers are unable to exercise. Younger students at loose ends require supervision. Across every sector of the economy, from doctors to retail clerks, people are staying away from their jobs. They’re at home trying to remember the rules of grammar and work out fractions the other three-eighths of the time.

The government of Alberta spends $5-million per annum supporting charter schools. Private institutions outside of the public system. They should fund themselves given their exorbitant fees. One example is Waldorf School where female teachers are obligated to wear modest clothing underneath a concealing apron. Apparently, graduates, or maybe just the valedictorians, could possibly possess the ability to walk through walls because everything is made of atoms. There’s a hockey-focused academy in town, but the rest are mostly Christian of that peculiar evangelical MAGA variety.

A percentage of the students affected by the impasse will be eligible voters in the next provincial election which is scheduled for 2027. Though public memory is notoriously short, perhaps the brighter ones have been taking notes during their downtime.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is languishing out there in the marketplace in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did, another utter commercial failure is still available.

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

A Railway Hotel

“Vertical integration” was not a business plan catchphrase for Canada’s nineteenth century railway builders even though the hotels they owned and operated were pretty much annexes to their stations. So conveniently located; we’ll take you there.

These grand castles speckle Canada’s urban geography, colossally distinctive picture postcard landmarks. Most of them opened for business before or shortly after the First World War. Out west, the Empress overlooks Victoria’s inner harbour; there’s the eponymous Banff Springs; the Palliser in Calgary which hosted my grandfather and father for a Great Depression night before they boarded a train back to Montreal (Dad spent an early teenage summer working on a relative’s farm near Penhold, AB). Up here in Edmonton, Ann and I enjoy a drink from time to time with the Fathers of Confederation at the Hotel Macdonald bar; their portrait, a stiff and formal painstaking reproduction, takes up almost half of one wall.

Quebec City is archaic, the only walled city on the continent. Perched on a cliff, its skyline is dominated by the imposing Chateau Frontenac. I don’t see Parliament and the Clock Tower when I think of Ottawa. I see the grey Chateau Laurier looming over the Rideau Canal locks. The Laurier is home to the now infamous Karsh portrait of Churchill; the sort of place that just begs a caper or a heist. Railway hotels are monuments to nation-building, the stitching together of an impossibly big country with creosote and steel, or, conversely, hulking, ever-present reminders of the perceived failures of colonialism and capitalism. These stone establishments have hosted heads of state and royalty of both the rock and sovereign sort. No surprise then that some of them offer their guests ghost tours, peeks into their mustier attics, alcoves and crannies.

A hotel isn’t a destination. But one can cast a lure beyond a convenient location. When some weird retrovirus was just a rumour from Wuhan, two column inches on page five of our morning newspaper, Ann and I booked a stay in Toronto. We lined up baseball (Red Sox), theatre (Come From Away) and concert (John Hiatt with Lyle Lovett or vice versa) tickets. We booked the Royal York on Front Street across from the Beaux-Arts Union Station, itself a national historic site. All of our planned events would be within walking distance from our digs in a palatial railway hotel. That trip, like so many other plans I’ve made in my life, didn’t quite work out.

I’m intimate with a few Canadian cities and towns. And I’ve always felt comfortable in the less familiar ones. Local accents and slang can sometimes take some adjustment, a keener ear. Pace is a key variable; should I amble, mosey or stride to get in step? I know Toronto as a jigsaw, pieces. I used to enjoy the train ride from Montreal’s Gare Central to Union, anticipating hanging out with friends. Those activities were usually (un)focused. And there was a time when I could just turn up at Dorval Airport with a few hours’ pay in my pocket and board an hourly Rapidair flight to Toronto Island. On business trips later in my life I tried to get out and about as much as I was able, but time was always tight.

Comparisons are facile. Like internet listicles. Toronto is not Canada’s New York City. Toronto is what it is, best not to affix a label. There’s a frenetic dynamic on the reclaimed shore of Lake Ontario. Bay Street is undeniably the epicentre of Canadian commerce: lawyers, traders, CEOs. Skyscrapers and everything, all of which generates a fifth of Canada’s gross domestic product. Ridings throughout the Greater Toronto Area swing federal elections. Its eclectic arts and culture scene, amplified by the concentration of legacy and alternative media outlets in the city, have cast undue influence beyond the boundaries of the GTA while defying the casual perception of Toronto (and Ontario) as an uptight Protestant, Loyalist place.

Ann and I spent four nights at the Royal York in late September. We have friends there. Every Canadian knows somebody in Toronto. It’s a big town, but welcoming and walkable. And I needed a hit of Major League Baseball and there’s no fucking way we’re dipping south into the United States anytime soon.

The Royal York’s lobby was a perfect setting for my other life to frolic: 

I’m seated in a comfortable wingback chair, its positioning subtly reoriented to better observe the reception desk and the comings and goings at the Library Bar. The Library is a flash joint, Bay Street’s bolt hole, cocktails available for twice the minimum wage; financiers and lawyers toast each other’s backs. The hotel’s main entrance, situated between them, is beneath my line of vision. It’s twelve wide steps down to Front Street from my perch. Twelve steps. They never quite worked for me, up or down.  I’m wearing a fedora, the brim low enough to obscure my eyes. My suit is finely tailored, perhaps overtly shiny in places. The jacket’s bulky enough to hide the bulge of my snub-nose .38. I’m not quite down on my luck, but making a living is a boom or bust grind. My legs are crossed, knees not ankles. The straight razor in my scuffed blue suede shoe is close at hand. I appear to be reading a newspaper. I peer around it and over it as I turn a page. My cigarette burns down in the heavy brass ashtray stand. It marks the minutes as precisely as the lobby’s signature feature, the great circle of life ticking away. Time is a traveller’s essential commodity. We are all travellers. I’m staking out the joint, acting on an anonymous telephone tip. I was on a case, a fresh file with few leads and a tangle of disparate threads. Patiently on the trail of a phantom, doing the legwork. Killing time – and only time this time, I hoped, but you never know in this business. The morning’s baseball standings had blurred from simple statistics into chaos, Dixieland into Davis, when I clocked her. She rose like Venus from the sea on the arm of a uniformed doorman. A woman like her? I’d paint every perfectly proportioned inch and handmake reproductions. She just might be worth dying for. She shot a glance in the Library’s direction. The bar hadn’t reopened for happy hour yet. Well, well, well, it’s always about money when you get right down to it; greed for somebody else’s. And that cryptic phone call? The snitch had had more of a handle on the case than I did, but mine was getting awfully big.  I snuffed my cigarette and folded my paper. Time for room servicing.

A pile like the Royal York warrants half an hour’s exploration, investigation. I grew fond of the Reign bar. The canned music was brutal, careening between post-war crooners and insipid modern pop, but there was a fine local pilsener on tap. I’m never alone in a hotel bar. I usually have a Hilroy exercise book to scribble in. The act of writing also deters random interaction with other drinkers. I needn’t have worried at the Reign: phones. No material for me, I can’t overhear a scroll or a text. Ann and I were in the Reign one night winding down our day. Ann ordered a starter, two sliders to share. The manager decided its delivery was nine or twelve minutes too tardy. He charged us for the food but waived our beverages. We know where the margins are in hospitality; his gracious illogic mystified and pleased us. Perhaps we were written off as spillage.

On one occasion I left the Reign for a cigarette in the company of pariah smokers booked on luxury motorcoach tours and the lost and crazy souls on Front Street. The Royal York’s main entrance features two heavy revolving doors. Manual, large brass PUSH plates, quarter wedges, two in, two out, counterclockwise. A fellow exited into the foyer just as I arrived. I was to the left of the door. I hesitated. I assumed the person behind him would close the window on my slot and, anyway, I’d obstruct their exit. The door stopped turning. The circle was broken. The person behind him was a young Asian woman, face in her phone, working it with both thumbs. She was somewhat stunned to encounter an immobile sheet of thick plate glass. She, like, totally dropped her arms, just, like, totally WTF!? I should’ve been gallant. I should’ve done my part, a push from my open segment to ease this poor woman on through. I didn’t. I guffawed instead, House of Windsor horse teeth. I circumvented my filter. I raised my voice: “C’mon! You can do it! It’s not so hard.” Fucking self-absorbed retard. Noses always appear overly bulbous in selfies anyway.

For the record, Ann and I did depart the Royal York for longer than it takes to smoke a single cigarette or double down on a second; for hours at a time. Honest.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still available.

A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Road Trip Bandwagon Rider

My first published short story (1984) was baseball themed. When my past decides to present itself in my head, I do enough cringing and cursing without having to reread The Rites of Spring; its very title a wretched cliché. I remain enamored with baseball. The numbers and statistics the sport generates don’t grab me so much as the idea of it and the wonderfully written ruminations the game’s inspired.

The last major league games I attended were in Chicago. I saw the Indians once and Oakland twice. White Sox, a southside weekend. The Indians are now the Guardians and the A’s are headed for Las Vegas (although they’ve only made it out to Needles – or somewhere so far). It’s been a while.

When Stats Guy and I convene the Tuesday Night Beer Club we always talk baseball. We remember the AAA Pacific Coast League Trappers and the subsequent CrackerCats, Capitals and Prospects. We enjoy Edmonton’s current baseball iteration, the short season, collegiate level West Coast League Riverhawks who play in our fine little ballpark beneath downtown’s bluffs on the flood-prone flats of the North Saskatchewan River. Baseball is a live sport. The second-best experience is radio, picturesque.

My dream game would be the Cubs hosting the Cardinals, a sunny afternoon at Wrigley and none of those dumb looking City Connect marketed merchandise uniforms. I’d like to see the Red Sox at Fenway against an established American League team, a club with some history like the Tigers. Stats Guy and I have been planning a baseball road trip together for more than a decade. Maybe we just book Denver or Minneapolis? Direct flights; although when I conjure the Twin Cities, I don’t imagine baseball, no, more Mary Tyler Moore, Prince, the Replacements and Soul Asylum. Maybe we should go see the ex-Expos in DC and catch the Orioles too? Maybe …

Ann knows I’ve been itching for seats at The Show. We’ve talked about a long weekend in Seattle. A place where we don’t know anybody else and our only obligation would be the time on our game tickets. But for Ann and me (Stats Guy too), travelling to the unravelling republic south of the Medicine Line strikes us as a form of implicit endorsement. That just won’t do. I mean, the clown car administration running my province of Alberta is embarrassing enough, but we’re just one Canadian province. The American clown car is a massive, huge duct taped wreck; it’s bad, it’s nationwide. Ann said, “Our only viable option for the next few years at the least is Toronto.”

I pulled up the Blue Jays’ late September schedule near the end of August. The most attractive game to me was September 25, the Thursday night finale of a three-game series against the Red Sox. The Friday game against Tampa did not appeal because the Jays would be decked out in their dreadful black City Connect uniforms. I want to see teams in their proper laundry. And who cares about Tampa unless the club relocates to Montreal to Ouija board the Expos? The Rays were out of the mix anyway, but the Jays and Bosox weren’t. That game would matter.

Me, a native Montrealer, I never hated Toronto’s baseball team as much as I hated (and still hate) its hockey team. The Expos and the Jays played in separate leagues. There was no interleague mix and match back then. I saw the Jays twice (Twins, Tigers) at the old Exhibition Stadium on Toronto’s windy summer fairgrounds. It was Twilight Zone baseball: unfamiliar rules (the designated hitter) and strange teams.

Rogers Centre is a hangover from a different era, a multipurpose, multisport stadium. A bit like Phil Collins, huge in the 80s. I watched a football game there once, the 2007 Grey Cup championship; I can’t remember who was playing. Maybe Winnipeg? The Jays organization has since poured millions of dollars into the concrete pile. Its guts have been transformed into a baseball-only venue, with more renovations to come. They’ve done a great job to date. The illusion was real, Ann and I were in a major league ballpark. Should be at least another five years before the Jays begin snuffling around the public trough seeking cash for a new stadium.

Pro sport is an industry, a sector of the entertainment industry. The ultimate marketing strategy is winning. When a club is a contender, in the mix as playoffs loom, it becomes the face a city presents to the rest of the continent. There’s a palpable energy throughout town – even the batshit crazy street people pick up on the vibe. The parade of secondary revenue stream passing our hotel on Front Street was credit card manic: every conceivable iteration and design of Jays caps, hats, t-shirts and jerseys. Where did you get those baby blues? 

I went with the flow. I bought a solid blue cotton ’47 Brand logo hat. I like them, they fit and fade well. The Jays are not the Expos. I must confess to a few minutes of moral consternation. Poor Ann in the store, tapping her foot and staring up at the ceiling as if she was reclined in her dentist’s chair. But how can you betray the dead, the defunct? Some righteous snot will preach about memory, but the truth is the departed won’t ever know and no longer care.

The visitors wore traditional grey road uniforms. The Boston Red Sox looked like the Boston Red Sox even if I couldn’t identify a single player. The Jays have inflicted some horrible logo and uniform aberrations on their hometown fans since their inception, but they got their costumes right this particular night, white pants, blue tops. The ceiling cracked before the first pitch. The stadium’s roof opened. The downpour didn’t hit until we were leaving Rogers Centre afterward. And that was okay, my new hat needed a workout, a working in.

Newspapers don’t publish box scores anymore. Through the first three or four innings of the game I figured the tell-tale sign of a Jays loss would be LOB – runners left on base. The game changed in the bottom of the sixth. Toronto loaded the bases the way good and lucky teams do: an infield error (an errant throw to first) and a walk followed by a HBP – hit by pitch. The next hitter may as well have been crime novelist Dennis Lehane: Gone, Baby, Gone (1998). A grand slam.

Aristotle posited that theatre, comedy, tragedy, what have you, requests and requires those in the odea to suspend their sense of disbelief. When that two-strike pitch went up and over, I forgot I’d paid too much money to watch a corporate asset. I forgot that the players in the game were making more money for one night’s work than I ever netted in a single tax year. I forgot that I’ll never have instant access to a doctor who will fussily attend to a blister on my finger. I forgot too how much the Jays were charging me for each tin of mass-produced domestic beer.

This blog post is running long, a baker’s dozen or so beyond 1200 words. Your lab rat social media-eroded attention span is scratching at the walls of the maze. There are no distractions with a Crooked 9 dispatch, no advertising, no sound, no pictures, no animation. Taking in the scene at Rogers Centre, I realized baseball lacks the confidence to sell itself, the game’s intricacies and nuances. The night was all about the “in-game experience”: the relentless high-definition scoreboard assault, the disc jockey and her dance troupe. Place a wager in real time. Somehow the Jays managed to squeeze in a game.

I’m mildly appalled by how much Ann and I enjoyed ourselves.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still available.