2007? But I was just getting used to 2006...

A strange year,
A year
of considerable promise,
as yet unfulfilled

Mind you,
it's true,
having a steady full-time job
has been a great change for me.

It's offered me structure and a steady income-
not things to be taken for granted
in 2006,
in 2007,
or at any time

Unfulfilled promise?
My creative stirrings promise so much,
but realizing these promises takes focus

and focus is too easily lost
Life gets in the way of living
Crisis management
trumps dream fulfillment
Dreams get in the way of dreams
and clash vividly in confusion

Things turn out to be not as advertised,
sweet things turn sour,
one could easily turn bitter

I could easily turn the venom upon myself
for being in the wrong place
at the wrong time
with the wrong people,
or maybe the right people
in the wrong place
at the wrong time
or something wrong anyway

But to learn
to be kinder to others
I had to learn
to be kinder to myself

It's been a tumultuous year
in which I relied on crises
to shake things up,
to finally
force me
to make needed changes

And the year ends
with positive steps and optimism

A good year
in spite of bad details,
and the promise is passed on
to 2007.

Music and Magic

I go to church mainly for the music now. In fact, the last four times I was in a church (during the runup to Christmas), three of them were for Christmas concerts (the other was for a retirement party- not mine).

To me, the church mass is all performance. All those rituals are a form of performance. The trouble is that the performance of rituals at Mass tends to leave me cold. I can enjoy doing scripture readings in church, but I then I just enjoy performing readings, and I feel a bit odd about that. I feel like an actor, not a worshipper. But music truly can be heavenly- especially if there's a choir and the voices blend together in weird and wonderful ways.

I'd like to join a choir again, I love to sing. It wasn't always thus. In fact, I remember not having a clue in the high school choir. I believe I was informed that I was tone deaf. But over the years, as I listened to music, I somehow learned to intuitively make sense of how it worked- how all the strands worked together. Then, when I was living on my own in New York, I started to sing more and more in order to cope with the anxiety attacks that had become part and parcel of New York life. It was around that time that I bought an audio primer in vocal harmony (at least in pop music)- the Good Vibrations box set by the Beach Boys.

I was already familar with the Beach Boys' big hits, like "Surfin' USA" and "California Girls". I was also familar with "Pet Sounds", which is actually rather differant from most of the other Beach Boys stuff- combining rather advanced Beach Boys harmonies with complex, nearly symphonic instrumental arrangements- it all sounds very romantic, actually, in a bittersweet way. But I'd always thought that the Beach Boys didn't do anything of interest after 1966. Not quite true. The Disc 2 of the set included about 20 minutes of the unreleased album "Smile", including sheer beauty in "Wonderful" and "Surf's Up", as well as otherwordliness in "Cabin-Essence" and in some of the "Heroes and Villains". Meanwhile the third disc showed that the band managed to eke out some creativity in the late '60s and early '70s- that was the time when they produced some of their most interesting work, actually.

The box set inspired me to start writing songs and trying to put together vocal arrangements, which was not easy since I was musically illiterate. Still, I have tapes of layered a cappela vocals from those days, including one song that has so many layers it reminds me of "Cabin-Essence", or even Heart of the Congos (a reggae album by the Congos and produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry, where the tape-on-tape layering of vocals was done so often that it often sounds like the backing vocals are filtering in from the outer cosmos). The chorus of that song expressed my yearning, uncertain spirituality:

"Somewhere in the distance, in that great expanse,
must be some kind of answer: I search for it, entranced."

Not such a green christmas after all?

A merry Christmas might be not so jolly for the environment, according to this report:
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2097768.ece

True, this report is from the UK, but I doubt if it's any better here.

I'm not anti-Christmas, but this is a bit much....

Dissatisfied with where they are, people start moving in search for something better. Flowing and joining together, they form streams, then a large river in search of a shining sea.

Golden voices from heaven tell of how this sea they flow toward is a perfect sea, pure in every way, so that even when the impure enter it, they are washed clean by waters that are not sullied by the impurities coming into them.

Someone rather tentatively expresses some mild reservations about one of the aspects of this story, and soon enough a screeching chorus swoops down from the exalted sky of ideological purity. "HERESY!", goes the scream. The scream becomes an explosion, tearing the heretical traitors to pieces. But the popular movement is itself torn and then scattered, and all that's left is for those who are left to look to the sky for deliverance- and with fear.

Goodbye, Hanukkah

How appropriate that the Jewish festival of light occurred this past week, as my body groaned with exhaustion for want of daylight.

A week ago tonight, I celebrated it, along with my new home, with friends. This in spite of my goyness. Oh, but my family did celebrate this holiday when I was in (Jewish) preschool. I even made a menorah at preschool, and although it was likely a very rough thing it would still be beyond my current craft skills- it's not all progression as you get older, you know. Skills do fall by the wayside. And we lit the menorah on the eight nights. But after preschool it was never the same- I went on to the then Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal- although my family was Catholic, I never went to Catholic school.

But when I was in preschool, I learned that oil figured prominantly in the story of Hanukkah. It's a liberation story, not as fundamental as the Exodus one but telling all the same. Actually, it involves "freedom fighters" (the Maccabees) lauching a guerilla war against the great imperial power of the time- and winning! In those days, political power and religion were almost the same thing, so part of the oppression of the Jews (though they were likely not known as "Jews" at the time, they were the people now known as such) had been the desecration of their Temple by shrines to other gods. So the victorious Maccabees cleaned up the Temple, but then had difficulty finding oil to light all the candles. Miraculously, the small amount of oil they did find provided sufficient to light all the candles.

So it is that part of the celebration involves eating foods cooked in oil. Hence, potato latkes, which are basically potato pancakes fried in oil. I made sweet potato lakes- a slight variation. What I didn't know was the other popular treat used to celebrate the holiday, until a friend of mine came over, fresh from her own celebration, bearing donuts! Oh, right, they're made in oil too...She says they're more popular than latkes in Israel.

So anyway, that's it for Hanukkah. Stay tuned for Christmas....

Headline on a magazine cover:

Your Best Body Ever!

Hmm....how many other bodies is one supposed to have had?

Winter Solstice

So....I managed to drag myself over the finish line. Work is over for 2006! I was worried there for a bit- a couple of days this week I just felt so depleted, all I wanted to do was sleep. I'm like that the last two weeks of the year.

Not that my "to do" list is empty. Now I have a day for buying gifts, hopefully without going insane. And then there's a couple of creative projects I told myself I'd work on over the vacation. Hopefully it won't be too much like work. I want to see if I can do home recording on my computer, and if so, if I can multitrack vocals, thus building up layers of interlocking harmonies. I want to practice guitar. AND, I want to work on a sort of theatre variety thing that will be a sort of musical too, that will be about activism and what that means, anyway. Is it worth it trying to save the world? Who do we think we are, trying to save the world? Do we need to deny ourselves or can we have fun trying to change things? And so on and so forth....

Oh yes, and doing some cooking at home is sounding good too...

Harper says he doesn't know what the Quebecois nation is, exactly-
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/12/19/harper-motion.html - yet he boasts about having "recognized" it. Whatever that means.

Yup, our Prime Minister is a clever lad, isn't he?

Hmmm.....

I had an unusually vivid dream last night. In it, I was a Soviet citizen (probably someone fairly high up in the Communist Party) who had somehow run afoul of Josef Stalin, and was painfully aware that I could be "liquidated" at any moment, and there I was, trying to live in a positive way facing that. Beyond that, the details are rather sketchy. I was relieved when I awoke, although it wasn't a nightmare in the usual sense. In fact, I remember there was a positive feeling running though tremendous tension.

No such drama in my waking dream today. Laziness abounds in me.

A sad anniversary today.

Perhaps it's a bit more personally resonant to me now than it was before, given the events at Dawson last September. During the whole thing the Polytechnique massacre of December 1989 was very much on my mind. One major difference was that at Dawson a massacre was averted by timely police action. Another major differance, though, was that in the Polytechnique massacre the gunman was targeting young women who were getting into the traditionally male dominated field of engineering.

I was in high school when it happened, and I thought of my female classmates who I really respected and who seemed to be destined to the sciences, and it really showed me that the attainment of equality between the sexes was not a neat historical process, but a dangerous struggle for those engaged in it- dangerous because those feeling threatened by that struggle could strike back with violence. I already
sort of knew that from my reading of history, but this was not the reading of history, it was the real thing, and it was messy and dangerous- and deadly. Though not to me. Ever noticed how the threat of violence means different things to men
and women? Even now, the threats are differant in a way that can curtail women's freedoms.

People can argue that this is attaching too much social and political significance to the massacre. The gunman was crazy, they may say. But what is that saying? You could argue that Hitler was crazy, but you wouldn't then say that his murder of the Jews was just the expression of a form of personal insanity that had nothing to with the anti-Semitism that the Jews had had to endure for centuries. Sometimes we say that someone's actions are insane when we don't want to acknowledge the pervasive context of which they are an extreme example.

December 6, 1989 also affected my father, who taught physics in CEGEP. He dedicated all subsequent publications of his textbook to those killed in the massacre.

New Home

I'm still recovering from my Moving Day which was- you guessed it- December 1: last Friday, when the rain came down to freeze the ground, often accompanied by driving ice pellets. So this is why July 1 is more popular. The move's done anyway, and I'm glad because while I don't wish to dislike anybody, it's sometimes easier to avoid disliking them if you don't have to live or work with them.

Still, on Saturday evening I found myself nodding off during a party, and it wasn't out of boredom. The odd thing was, I went to another one afterwards that evening. I want to at least make the effort to be sociable and demonstrate that I care about and appreciate the people in my life. But I only stayed at the second party for half an hour.

So I've got a new home now, and though I'm still getting settled in I rather like the feel of it and of the neighbourhood- the eastern Plateau, just off of Mont-Royal Street, and a block away from a large park.