Whispering Pines

Sometimes I lose CD's - I put them in the wrong cases, and then it takes months to find them again. Just a few days ago I located The Band's self-titled album which I'd only listened to a couple of times around Christmastime.

It's a great album, with roots in Americana but still influenced by what was going on musically in the late '60s, and with some slightly odd arrangements. The best known tracks are "Up On Cripple Creek" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", both by guitarist Robbie Robertson, who was becoming The Band's dominant songwriter. But my favourite is lesser known, and its music was composed (mostly) by the group's pianist, Richard Manuel, with words by Robertson. It's called "Whispering Pines":

If you find me in a gloom, or catch me in a dream

Inside my lonely room, there is no in between

Whispering pines, rising of the tide

If only one star shines

That's just enough to get inside

The lyrics are a perfect match for the haunting music, conveying melancholy, beauty and hope. A key change leads to these lines:

I will wait until it all goes 'round

With you in sight, the lost are found

Further lines such as "Let the waves rush in, let the seagulls cry/For if I live again, these hopes will never die" weave together images of natural beauty with both the melancholy of loneliness and hope for love as spiritual redemption.

Manuel had a distinctive musical voice within The Band. For one thing, he was a pianist. The haunting chord progression in this song would not come naturally to a guitarist. His singing could also be heartrendingly emotional, and it definately is in this song. Unfortunately, his demons would soon neutralize him as a creative force and eventually destroy him (he committed suicide in 1986). Some would say that knowing this adds poignancy to a song like this but all I can say is that the shivers that went down my spine on my first hearing of this song had nothing to do with Manuel's biography - well, except that his inner emotional landcape no doubt spilled out into compositions such as this.

Lyrics quoted from "Whispering Pines", by Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson

Happy Earth Day To You

What a wonderful weekend, the first weekend of summer. I got out my bicycle and went around the neighbourhood, and very much enjoyed walking too. On Saturday in particular I experienced something rather strange and wonderful which is called happiness. Joy in such quantity must be enjoyed while it is at hand.

Yesterday was Earth Day. The Earth can sometimes be difficult to love, such as when it comes at us with tsunamis and volcanoes and the like, but then, anything and anyone can be difficult to love, really. And compared to the other planets we know of (such as hellish Venus and frigid Mars) it offers a high quality of life. It is the quality of life the Earth offers us, rather than the Earth itself, that is now in play. What sort of Earth will this be a generation from now?

The Earth is an interlocking system of systems of which we are a part - a drama in which we are playing an expanding role. A bigger role is not always a better one. I remember English classes in which the teacher would teach Shakespeare plays, discussing the "tragic hero" whose hubris was the tragic flaw that would prove to be his undoing ("Hubris" is a sort of arrogent disdain for the limitations of existence).

But setting aside such foreboding for now, the Earth Day festivitities went to yesterday were realy quite festive. In fact, the party I went to at the co-op La Maison Verte in N.D.G. featured a rather rich and delicious chocolate cake.

Sigh...

So much for satire - the University of Western Ontario's student newspaper, The Gazette, bravely satirizes women who speak out against the fear of being sexually assaulted, specifically targeting women who have presumed to criticize the Gazette for earlier likeminded "satires" against women, gays and others who don't fit the white straight male "standard" of dominant humanity:

http://joshmanicus.blogspot.com/2007/04/culture-of-rape-and-how-uwo-gazette.html

Behold the courage of people who claim to engage in satire and then claim that are "just joking". What does it even mean to say that you are "just joking", especially when you are clearly targeting people? You may think you are joking, but you are not "just" joking. If putting together a bunch of worn out stereotypes about feminists and then adding a "joke" about teaching a woman's vagina "a lesson in a dark alley" is really the best "satirical" response these people can manage to feminist critiques of their paper, then feminists have nothing to fear from them on an intellectual or humourous level. Unfortunately, as the remark about the "lesson" in the dark alley reminds us, women sometimes have reason to fear other kinds of attacks simply because they are women.

I suffered for my art. Now it's your turn.

A friend of mine has said that she thinks she used to write better songs than she does now. The problem, she explained, is that she is now content. In the old days, it seems, her discontent made it easier to write good songs.

I haven't heard enough of her songs to judge - though the small sample I have heard seem really good to me, even if they don't have an obvious "edge" of turbulent intensity (though beneath the surface of some I feel some definate undercurrents...). I think sometimes such "edge" is overrated. It's great to have art with it, but just imagine for a moment if all songs and all other creative works had it. It would be too much to bear, really. Still, I understand where she's coming from. Creativity loves misery for company, or so it often seems. Certainly the works that come out of a context of emotional turbulence often seem more striking and resonant, packed with intensity. Consider Bob Dylan for a moment. In the mid-'60s, when he was doing a lot of drugs and otherwise seemingly on a course toward self-destruction, he wrote and recorded his most acclaimed and famed works at a prolific pace. By the end of the 1960's, he was apparently a contented family man, keeping well away from the intensity that had once threatened to completely engulf him, producing works that seemed forgettable compared to the stuff he'd done at his peak. But then around 1974, with his marriage seemingly in tatters, he came out with possibly his best album ever, Blood on the Tracks - featuring many a searing song about the pain of lives destined to come together and then come apart again. And many other artists too have created their best works in reaction to personal turbulence.

It's not just a one-way steet though, for the demands of an art can contribute to such turbulence. I'm not a professional performer, but even the limited amount of performances I do can provoke sharp mood swings in me - the lines between terror, elation and despair are easily crossed in almost no time at all. Too easily the life of the performer is about getting certain fixes - of adulation, of drugs - as a substitute for the emotional intimacy (families, relationships) that must often be left behind for months on end by those performers who manage to really make a go of it.

In any case, the contribution of emotional havoc to creativity works only up to a point. The problem with heading down the road to self-destruction is that before too long you reach the destination - either you die or you are burned out, finished as a creative force. As for divorces, breakups and other personal disasters, you've got to get over them sometime, or you just end up wallowing in self-pity, which tends not to be a good place to be creatively (or in any other aspect of life for that matter). Believe me, I've been there. I remember at one point, having written a seemingly endless series of songs and other writings about the awful predicament I was in at that time, feeling utterly sick of writing because I was so sick of even thinking about the situation I was in and yet I seemed unable to write about anything else. It was awful - the worst kind of creative rut to be in.

Anyway, emotional intensity is only part of the equation. There's the craft too. And besides, there's plenty of room for strong feelings to be expressed that don't necessarily concern one's personal life. In his liner-notes to Blood and Chocolate (another great "breakup album"), Elvis Costello writes of a time when he attained a level of stability in his own life: "There were many things I wouldn't have to do again. Like messing up my life just so I could write stupid little songs about it."

Our Nationhood, Forged On the Anvil of Battle...

...or so many in the media would have us believe. For you see, we won the Battle of Vimy Ridge 70 years ago! Isn't that wonderful? Canada won a battle in a real war! Ah, those were the days when Canada could aspire to be a true warrior nation - a time when men were men, blowing each other to bits and pieces - before all this "peacekeeping" nonsense became ingrained in the Canadian psyche. And now in Afghanistan we have the chance to be a warrior nation once more, provided that those socialist sissies don't ruin everything by saying that we aren't just killing evildoers. Sssshh! O Canada! The True North Strong and Free! God bless Canada. God damn the enemy. Pass the ammunition.

"If you can't stand in front of our soldiers, at least get behind them", says Stephen Harper. Thousands of miles behind at last count, but as we all know, Stephen Harper is looking forward to leading his troops into an election campaign, not a military campaign against the Taliban. Yet in his own way, Harper is fighting his own war against capital E Evil, isn't he? I mean, of course, the Evils of the corrupt Liberals who play politics while he governs. Mind you, being in opposition, the Liberals are in no position to govern, but anyway, Harper proclaims that he is governing and is way above crassly Machievellian political machinations such as giving a "gift" budget to Quebecers in the middle of our election campaign and saying that more will come if we vote the right way. It must have been our imaginations.

This is a strange time... now that we're in the runup to Easter, I've been sort of exploring the religious side of things again - I've undergone a sort of immersion at St. John the Evangelist yesterday and today. They're on ceremony all the time, the people there. Evey word, every detail, every tone in the mass is scripted, although the meanings of all the little details are very often lost in the mists of time, and we can only speculate about them - and either hang on to them or let them slide. At St. John the Evangelist they gladly hold on to what most other people would gladly let slide. Some details almost seem to be perversely designed to elude meaning and to communicate nothing but the form of ceremony and decorum. The priests often have their backs to the congregation, and very often you can't make out what they're saying - they rattle on, declaiming at a high speed. There is still a lot of beauty in the whole thing, though there's an element of absurdity too - a weaving together of the sublime and the ridiculous. It's fascinating, really - if you're in the mood for this sort of thing, which I suspect a lot of people who may read this will never be. Oh well.

Munching on matzos – if you are what you eat, would eating Jewish food make me Jewish? Not quite…I imagine people eating curry do not become Indian, although they may come to appreciate the culinary genius of India.

'Greetings from the grey', I mutter in dismay - driving rain driving me around the bend with no end in sight today


There’s a certain uncertainty
Lurking inside of me,
An indeterminate number
of things up in the air,
of which I’m peripherally aware

They’re not so well defined
best not to pay them any mind
until they manifest more clearly,
who says this attitude’s foolhardy?

Though truly
You can feel quite free
Skating on uncertainty
But then what do you do
When the breakthrough joke’s on you?

The Best Anti War Sign

From One Female Canuck's blog - and I agree wholeheartedly.