Out of the snow and into the studio.

So now I have the little side studio at the Berton house set up as a portable studio. A Tascam usb audio/midi interface (US - 122L) with my laptop, a nice little Tascam condensor mic that came bundled with it (LD-74) and I'm wading my way through the details of Cubase (light). It's not the nicest little program in the world, some of the interface seems pretty outdated. However it will do fine: as far as mixing and recording with Cubase I'm doing basic stuff and I have Ableton 5 to do my musical work with. I also have the Shure replica 'elvis mic' which has a great specific boomy sound if the Tascam is too generic. The only thing I forgot to pack was a keyboard with a midi output: so I may have to do any midi work with the keyboard shortcuts... which is a pain in the ass. And I have a precious 30 or so gigabytes of samples that I've been carefully carrying around on a portable hard drive.

I'll have some songs up on a myspacemusic site in a week or so. Older tests that I was working on last year: playing around with jazz standards, trying to find out what throwing some new sounds underneath them gives to them - whether it opens them up or overwhelms them - but now I'm looking forward to having all this silence around us to give me some inspiration to fill it up. It's gonna be a fun couple 'a months...

A Whiter shade of

Walked along the river bed as far as the ice bridge that replaces the ferry boat. I caught it at about 3.30pm - sunset that lasts for an hour and a half. The montage above is from the beginning of walk, above the river. By the time I'd swung around in a complete circle and taken a dozen shots my camera froze (literally) and my hands were so cold I was in pain... I think it was around -30 before windchill. Later, walking down the river cradling my hands under my arms I thought about how cushioned I am. A great coat, layers of warm clothing, a warm hat and I'm so comfortable... but 20 seconds of my skin exposed to the cold and wind and I'm suddenly scared that I'll drop the camera or my gloves in the snow and be physically unable to pick them up...

The walk along the river bank is totally silent, the occasional car passing on the highway above the river - but there's almost no traffic at this time of year - and the occasional skidoo buzzing on the trail on the other side of the river. Just the crunching of snow underfoot and the sound of wind. In the sunset the colors are reds and blues and then, as the evening darkens, everything flattens in the twilight until I can't really see where I'm putting my feet in the mess of snow trampled by the skidoos and dog teams. I find myself stumbling around and I remember Susannes warning to stay in the tracks of the skidoos when I'm walking on the river - I don't think there's any danger this close to the edge, but I'm no longer really enjoying it so I head for the riverbank and on the way into town pass the little ferry that must replace the ice bridge in the summer. Wonder how they get that thing up on the river bank?

Blue Green

Just in from a walk down to the frozen river. I must be acclimatizing: it's -28C and I was thinking how nice it felt outside. Lisa's gone to bed but I'm waiting up for a bit in case the lights get even brighter. The Northern Lights are swirling overhead in a blue green streaks across the sky. They're all over the place, not just the north. At the end of our walk it almost seems like they were following the line of the river sweeping up the valley. On the way home both of our faces were crusted with ice crystals around our eyes and scarves, and the air was filled with the wood smoke from the houses and cabins around us. There's no wind, so the smoke is slowly settling across the town. It's extraordinarily beautiful.

"Should be an interesting flight......"

and as I walked across the dark and snowy tarmac to the 20 seater Hawker Sidley (that had seen slightly better days) the air steward leaned down and yelled to us: 'this is the first time we've flown this plane, should be an interesting flight....'. It was pitch dark at the Whitehorse airport and we were taking off for Dawson City, Old Crow and Inuvik and I guess he didn't know that part of my calm and pleasure about flying is saying to myself ' oh come on... they fly these things hundreds of times a month: for you it feels special but really this is just one more routine flight'. As we took off emergency lights flashed on and off, followed by slightly worried calls from the steward to the pilot warning them that something was odd, followed by the the lights going away, followed by them coming back on and staying on intermittently for a good piece of the flight... The steward settled back finally and enjoyed his cup of coffee, everyone around me went to sleep and I watched the white hills pass on by. Actually, my nerves disappeared pretty quickly- something about the sweep and the immensity of the landscape below just made jitters seem irrelevant.

We landed in Dawson City and Lisa was there to greet me and Barclay (the dog), and Susanne, who runs the Pierre Berton house up here, drove out to pick us up. They both had the immense pleasure of saying things like 'Cold!? Why this is only -25. It's a warm day up here!'... in fact, perhaps they met me at the airport just to have the pleasure of saying things like that. And now I'm tucked into the warmth and comfort of the Berton house.... oddly enough the house was recently redone by the a 'designer' TV show... so it's full of tasteful knicks and knacks.. honestly it's one of the most stylish places I've ever lived in: everything matches! There are beautiful prints on the walls, colorful Hudson Bay blankets thrown stylishly over comfy couches. I feel very swaddled in taste and comfort. More importantly it's surrounded by the calm and quiet of a small town living through a long beautiful winter, and I'm hoping it will be a place to regroup and reflect after a very busy year.

Toronto Pause.... and a new year...

And what a year it’s been…..

Just back in Toronto from the Floridian temperatures of the Gulf Coast: Sarasota…the beach with its glittering talcum powder sands, the pool, the hot tub… and family -- at one point we had 16 people and four generations crowded around the various tables. I think I’ve gained a hundred pounds….

The Gulf Coast is a new Florida for me: my Florida is one I remember from winter trips to the Keys in the ‘60’s. Dad would pack up the Dodge and we’d head out from NYC in the late afternoon. Mom would drive overnight and me and Louise would stretch out toe to toe in the back seat and sleep the night away. Or part of the night at least… I remember sitting up in back seat watching telephone polls sweep by against highway nightscapes. Then we’d spend almost a month camping on the sands of the keys and swimming and wandering through the tiny brightly colored gingerbreaded houses of the keys plucking limes and oranges from the trees in the streets….

My work on the show finished on Dec 20/21^st with two performances (I can call them work in progress shows now that we have plans to mount it again) at the Alchemy Theatre. In the final performance the actors began to really hit their mark and gather their emotional energy for the piece. It was a beautiful night of theatre… if I do say so myself. We managed to explore a lot of new media and ways of working that I’ve never had the chance to use on stage…. We found ourselves with an extraordinary team of people working on the show: Tyler Seguin and Emily Pearlman worked incredibly hard to make an emotional connection to this very poetic text. Craig Desson and Kit Pasold came up with beautiful images and sounds and struggled with all the technological problems of getting these material onstage. Sarah Miller Garvin and Sarah Brebner ran the show and made it work. Torben Beeg and Kit did amazing work to create the headlight and lighting effects that added so much to piece's atmosphere. And Lisa sat patiently while we struggled with her text and filled us in on what she was really thinking and adapted and tweaked the poetry to make it work on stage.

My discovery was that how much power the actors had over the ‘empty space’ and that the shift from a wide empty floor to props, images, sounds was unimaginably more delicate and powerful than I had imagined. I’ll put some video clips up soon… We’ll be applying to the Summerworks theatre festival and if that works out then we’ll be remounting it in the summer in Toronto and trying to redefine some of the loose ends. I felt incredibly lucky to have had the support of the Canada Council and the Toronto Arts Council for funding to do this initial work. It wouldn’t have happened without them.

I learnt a wonderful story while we were there: Simon Michelepis, the wonderful, generous owner of the Alchemy, told me that his theatre owes its existence to the attack on the World Trade Centre. Just after Sept 11^th 2001, the insurance company where he has his day job was hit by devastating claims from the loss of life, and to cope they had to pass on claims to their own insurance companies: which was Simon’s job. And in the face of all this work he demanded a raise… and with the raise he bought – the Alchemy. I have some intense memories of the period just after the attack: I had a flight in from London to NY on the day after. I was supposed to be doing some concerts and working on writing a play. I finally managed to get in on one of the first flights into the city on the 16^th. We did do one performance later in the month but mostly I roamed around the city and wrote and wrote: the devastation demanded a response and my first full length play came out of that writing. It is amazing to know that elsewhere strange parts of those shifting responsibilities and monies bubbled into creative events and desires… and that we got share it in some way last week.

Now I have ten days in Toronto to research and prepare work on some new projects and then next stop – The Yukon!!

Nov Chills and Thrills

Hi All

Toronto in November! It's only the start of winter and it's crisp and clear (-2 already)...and I'm soooo delighted we were here for the last days of a spectacular fall season: the trees were exploding with color (I haven't seen a real fall for years) and we spent halloween with our two year old niece watching her hand out candy to witches and goblins of various sizes and ages... My Brother in Law (a film FX guy) had glued a third hand to the middle of his chest and painted a bullet hole on the middle of his wife's forehead: much to the delight of the trick or treaters... We finished the evening with the gory family watching a cozy screening of 'The Bride of Dracula'

Lisa and I are just settling down in TO after a fun filled week in Sarnia, Ontario..... OK.. it wasn't our first choice to spend a week in this particular small town, but this was the '06 site of the Ontario Theatre Conference - so we went where they were.. Lisa joined me straight from a mini tour of western Canada. She had done readings at Calgary Wordfest Literary Festival, then hung out for a few days being 'creative' at the Banff Centre and then met up with her agent in Vancouver. We threw ourselves on the 401 highway and headed west to spend our time schmoozing...

The theatre conference is a gathering of all the independent theatre bookers in Ontario looking for acts for the 07 - 08 season. I've been curious what these events are like and if I could make the move out of festivals and into regular theatre seasons with Whiskey Bars: the Kurt Weill show I've been doing for years. We were picked by the conference jury to present Whiskey Bars in performance and it went well... we ended up opening the showcases at the conference, and I was delighted to be told later by one of the jury members that Whiskey had been high up in the picks of the jury. Since the Jury has some amazing theatre creators and professionals on it, it was a fine compliment. Whether all of this will add up to bookings is another thing - every theatre has it's own mandate and size and season and we'll find out in the next months whether we'll fit into their needs - however the feedback on the show was pretty amazing and we were delighted to get that kind of response for a first time out... And finally Sarnia was surprisingly fine - incredibly friendly and great food (!?!) - Lulu's Lounge served us the best tiramisu I've ever had....

And now we're hunkering down in an apt on Church and Queen...and beginning work on the production of A Bad Year for Journalist that will be going up in Toronto at the end of December. I spent yesterday in a ginormous wreckers lot outside of Toronto wading around in immense mud puddles, avoiding wrecking machines and pulling auto parts out of cars for pieces for the set... so for the meantime we're sharing the apt with some rusting metal. We found a couple of wonderful actors in auditions last week and now have to choose between them... hard to do... weighing different physical types and timings against the character we're casting for... For those of you in Toronto or with friends here we're doing a first reading on the 7th of November and two shows at the Alchemy theatre on the 20/21st of December.

Toronto is already treating us well. There is theatre and performance and music everywhere we look and several new friends from the Theatre Conference are around town. As I write this our dog is careening from one end of the apt to the other playfighting with the dog we're looking... so the house certainly feels like an action packed exciting place to be... We'll be on this side of Yonge St. for the next month and then in December we'll be back to our friends house in Kensington Market and house sitting as they enjoy the month in their new home in Costa Rica (Costa Rica!!! Jealous... me?... not at all...no...not jealous at all). And after that... probably heading North for several months to an artist residence just below the arctic circle...

if you're in town or passing through in the next month or two then drop a line and say hi...

cheers
Brem

Stampin' at the Stampede

What a weird month July was... It was spent in the BAKING heat of the Calgary Stampede grounds: the Biggest Rodeo in the world. No joke, eh. Enough cowboy hats and daisy-dukes to... well... I'm not sure exactly what that many hats and short short cut-offs could do for the world... but they made one impressive sight.

My Mom's a painter ( www.barbaraduthie.ca ) and the last years has been painting her lifelong obsession: 'The West'. Cowboys, cowgirls, horses, the range, the rodeos: all with an extravagant use of color and an almost baroque attention to detail. Well, the Stampede isn't just bucking broncos and little fried donuts, there's also an immense hall of art devoted to the legends of the West: statues (we were flanked by a life size bronze of a rearing horse... scared me every time I came round the corner..), paintings, quilts... you name it... and my Mom was juried in to have a stand for four days. It's the first show she's had of this work and she needed a hand getting it all organized and heading over the mountains from Vancouver to Calgary. So, I flew to Vancouver, helped her and my Sister and Brother in Law to pack up a whole pile of cowboy paintings and 'en famille' we drove over the mountains to Calgary.

I'm not sure who was more nervous: my Mom or me. I was the one who had encouraged her to apply and to take the plunge to head over and show her work, and she wasn't sure of what kind of reaction she was going to get for it. One of her pieces had been chosen for the high-end 'invitation only' auction so she knew she would have to watch people bidding on her work as well as seeing their reactions face to face as they walked into the stand: so it would be really clear whether or not her worked clicked with the Stampede goers. The morning of the get-in got stressful: my sister had an emergency so couldn't get there in time with the frames, and when we loaded the work in at 6am we found that we were surrounded by hundreds of very, very serious paintings featuring Cowboys bringing in the herd, or riding bucking broncos, or doing very serious and dramatic cowboy sorts of things.... all super quality work... but Mom's never been one to paint dramatic profiles of noble looking, rugged working cowboys as they watch the setting sun over the great plains... So both of our hearts kind of fell and I ended up making a lot of encouraging and super-enthusiastic noises while feeling in my heart of hearts that we were doomed: and Mom just sat there and said things like 'we're doomed'..... it was all rather stressful.

The morning began slowly and folks started wandering in... very quiet at first... we were towards the back of the huge hall, so by the time they got to us they'd seen all of the stands. And at first I swear several actually recoiled as they turned the corner and saw the huge canvases and the dancing and smiling figures of Mom's paintings. And then first one, then a whole family, then pairs of women began to smile, and laugh and wander in and admire the work, picking up postcards and beginning to chat to Mom about how she'd come up with such a world of dancing cowboys. And so it continued for four days.... In a way we were perfectly positioned: by the time they reached the Stand they had seen hundreds of rugged cowboys and prairie landscapes and they were dying for something different. And it turned into this immense pleasure to sit at the Stand and watch face after face light up when they were confronted by her work.

I never got to see much of the Bucking Bronco part of the Rodeo... I got about as far as the friend donuts, and then had to head back to Cowboy Art... but maybe next year I'll take some time to experience more of the whole real Cowboy side of things...

The ides of what...

The end of September... no wait a minute... it's still just the middle of the month. It's racing by so quickly that I already feel like I'm over in October somewhere. We're having an indian summer here... warm days sweeping over the city and beautiful early sunsets. But, as usual, I'm seeing only part of it, since I'm spending most of my time in my basement rehearsal/recording space fussing with tracks, improvising around ideas for a new show and doing various maintenance work on the computer: ie. figuring out budgets on how to cover costs and rehearsal schedules.

Above is an expressionist painting from the Bruck museum in Berlin: an extraordinary little museum far out of the centre of the city. I was dragged out to it under protest, since my plan had been to sit in the middle of town and drink beer and people watch, but it was not to be.... It's housed in a little modernist building by a huge park and documents the beginning and the progression of the expressionist art movement by a small group of Berliners in the early part of the century. I'd never really known what expressionism meant: but the museum opened my eyes to what they were trying to do. I won't get into the artspeak of it all... just visit the site: http://www.bruecke-museum.de/english.htm It was amazing to watch the development of a new vision, or way to look at the world.... The painting above is my screensaver right now...

So, we're packing up the house in preparation for several months away. All very confusing at the moment since we're not sure whether we'll be away for two months, or five - a writer's retreat has offered Lisa a three month residency, however we still don't have the official confirmation, so we're heading off prepared for both. Lisa heads to Calgary for Wordfest and then does a series of readings and we meet up in Toronto before going on to the Ontario Theatre Conference to present Whiskey Bars for the assembled theatre professionals. Ayieee... every booker and agent in eastern Canada watching me wander around in my underwear... and here's me still with my Burgundy stomach still hanging around... it's going to be a month of diets and sit-ups...

The Return

September is the 'Rentree' in Paris: everyone returns from their long summer holidays tanned and relaxed and ready to launch themselves into a new season. And I think perhaps it's a good time to get restarted recording the ups and downs of what's up and down with me.

For us..,the summer never seems to be the long holiday at the Beach that it appears to be for most of the French population... I've been working on a new show, re-recording tracks in my home studio, doing work on the house. However I did manage to get almost two weeks of that work done at our Barn in Burgundy (from whence comes the name of my company 'Big Empty Barn Productions'. See above...)

I feel like I'm racing to keep up with the plans for the fall and early spring. I'm presenting my one-man show 'Whiskey Bars', based around the songs of Kurt Weill, at the Ontario Theatre Conference. Then I'll be staying in Toronto for a while to begin work on an adaptation of Lisa Pasold's award winning book 'A Bad Year for Journalists'. I probably won't be back in Paris till the beginning of January. However, in mid-october I'll be doing a first concert of the jazz and pop standards that I've been working on for a while and then in February doing a recording of the same pieces.

So... I'm either glued to the computer (editing music and working on ideas for this adaptation), or I'm glued into a rehearsal space (trying to get the new show together), or I'm on the metro travelling around Paris to see or rehearse with musicians. Days speed by in a blur of different interior spaces. The musicians are proving a problem (don't they always...) and it's a typical problem... those that are good are busy... and those that aren't good... well, I don't want to work with them. It's finding the thin line of people who are great players and can communicate what they want, while listening to what I want... and are probably just at a stage in their careers where they have some time to devote to a new project. I'm sure if I had the budget of a big label I could just pay the most expensive players to turn up and work... but I don't.. so I have to pay people decent wages to turn up and do a great job... It's all a bit of a juggling match.

If I'm not in those interior spaces then I'm at the Gym trying to get rid of my Burgundy stomach... At the town nearest to our Barn there is a bakery that serves what I will swear is the best french bread I have ever tasted... they bake it fresh three times a day, so you can normally pick it up still warm, plus, there is a local butter that is simply ambrosia, plus there is a local dark organic honey that tastes like nothing I've ever eaten before... Put those all together and there goes my morning and there goes my waistline... However, every single pound was worth it and even if there is now a few hundred thousand sit-ups to do... well... damn it.. it was still worth it...

Under the Boardwalk...

February 1st and recovering from six weeks underground in the basement studio working on a set of new songs....I'd descend in the morning and reappear in the early evening realizing I'd just missed daylight... But today I sang through 19 songs for a small invited crowd and I got the thumbs up for 14, a question mark for 4, and a thumbs down for only one... which I think is pretty good.

I've been trying to find some new ways into old songs. Swopping back and forth between a mic and recording and arranging software... trying new sounds, new tempos, new orchestrations...singing them, playing with them, trying to make them work.... I'm not sure if I can say I've found new ways, maybe I've found my own way into them. Standards. What a strange name for a set of extraordinary songs. Standard.

from Websters:

CRITERION, GAUGE, YARDSTICK, TOUCHSTONE ; a means of determining what a thing should be. STANDARD applies to any definite rule, principle, or measure established by authority <standards of behavior>: something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example :

but if you go the etymology it makes a bit of sense:
Etymology: Middle English, from Old French estandard rallying point, standard, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English standan to stand and to Old English ord point -- more at ODD
1 : a conspicuous object (as a banner) formerly carried at the top of a pole and used to mark a rallying point especially in battle or to serve as an emblem

They are 'rallying points': where the army gathers their forces and says 'we stand here' in support of this belief, this king, this faith. Then, for me, the word works better... as I see it: sheet music was the money maker in the first part of the 20th Century, and songs and ditties - comical/ballad/dance numbers/ethnic/'race' songs etc etc etc - were churned out by the thousands and thousands.... people like Gershwin got their start sitting in music shops and playing through the new compositions: they were called song pluggers.... and so we have this incredible legacy of smart, sad, funny, witty, good, terrible songs and somehow, after years of winnowing, we've all reached some kind of concensus that these one hundred, or five hundred or one thousand songs have something more, something worth re-interpreting time and time again... so they're standards... they're places we've decided are worth revisiting and redefending time and again..

The funny thing about singing these songs is that I'm realizing how hard it is 'do your own thing' with them. These songs are tough. They were made to withstand a battered piano and a tone deaf singer in small town America in 1932.... in some way, they know what they want, and they know how they're supposed to be sung. You kind of have to sneak up on them, and take a word or a phrase by surprise to see if you can pull some new sense out of the song... and then they realize what you've done and push you back to singing them they way they want to be sung... they way they're 'supposed to be sung'...

I'm trying to discover what my 'standards' are. I'm singing the Chemical Brothers side by side with Gershwin, and Ron Sexsmith beside Cole Porter... and I'm not sure what defines one from the other. There's a harmonic depth that the older songs have that is totally lacking from the basic chords of a pop song. The older songs are filled with puns and double entendres and complicated rhythmic grammer that is a joy to decipher... But, nevertheless, a great pop song can have a totally different power that the early standards don't. Sometimes, great pop lyrics have the beauty that is the flatness of everyday speech put to music... a sort of joyous, cynical lack of art..... and the hook... the sweet pleasure of the hook of a pop song, that blend of slurs of speech with a simple melodic jab that can pull your heart out of your chest.... whether it's Frankie Goes to Hollywood, The Drifters or Brittany Spears... There is something magically powerful and beautiful and empty about great, great pop songs...

"Pop is a means to perfect liberation from meaning...anyone who believed differently, who believed that rock n’ roll could support concepts more complex than yes or no, or tell stories more intricate than ‘I want’ or ‘leave me alone’ would be destroyed by the form itself -- punished for betraying it. You might get a hit, he said, and then take the response to the sound you made as proof you had something to say, but it isn’t true. and anyone who believed otherwise would end up as a shabby old man with a a tin whistle standing in the rain trying to make himself heard, to get someone to listen, to get one more hit."

from the great book: Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, by Greil Marcus

a new year end

January 1st, 2006,

Nice number 2006... The year of the Dog.

The New Years party was at our place, and it finished at midnight with everyone burning their lists of regrets for 2005 and resolutions for 2006 in an impromptu fire in our back yard. We're thinking of using the ashes to pot a plant on... wonder what kind of fertilizer that will be? Now, the morning after, the house is littered with champagne bottles and even the dog has a hangover.

It was a good year. The fall featured Lisa working intensely on a novel and finishing the final drafts for her poetry book that will be launched in the spring in Calgary and Toronto. She's also considering doing a theatrical adaptation of it with a wonderful canadian actress Emily Pearlman. My Jaques Brel went very well. I certainly had a great time and the audience...well, they seemed to love it, and besides: it took place on a little theatre built on a barge floating right beside Notre Dame Cathedral, there were windows looking onto the river and the buttresses of Notre Dame, so I imagine if anyone wasn't into the show, they couldn't complain about the view... The final night I had the immense honor of having Leslie Caron come to the last show and meeting her afterwards... If you didn't grow up with a Mom obsessed with music theatre (Mom only likes movies with happy endings and music theatre generally guarantees that) then she's the woman who's the female lead of an American In Paris, dancing around the city with Gene Kelly, I thought she was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen when I was 12. And at 77 or so, she's still pretty beautiful... Ironically, the dance scene that's always stayed in my head, one of my first ever movie memories and also basically the only thing I knew about the city before I washed up here, is set on the Quai of the Seine, by a set of steps leading down to the River, and those steps are just a few hundred feet from where the barge was moored.... Some kind of synchronicity involved here..

After the fringe it was a real pleasure to have a gig where I just turn up and do my thing and someone else worries about all that production/money/profit/organization thing... Although, also after the fringe, I'm constantly having to stop myself from getting involved or giving 'advice' (wanted or not)... been practising not getting involved as I watch various panic attacks hit various people on the production end.. though I did have the pleasure of getting to act like a Diva when an inexperienced house manager tried to throw out Lisa because the house was overbooked, (he came down ten minutes before the show and told me she couldn't have the seats that had been reserved for her since he needed them for a larger group and he'd maybe let her stand at the back) To give me credit, before telling him I wouldn't go on if she didn't have the seats, I did spend five minutes trying to talk rationally to him... (she got the seats...)

I replaced a sick friend for four days at Disney, so I got my taste of the Magic Kingdom... I'm thinking of it as an innoculation against ever working there again (unless they pay me way, way, waaaaaaay more money). The people involved are all quite wonderful, but the disney worldview gets me down.....very, very down. I still go down on weekends with a friend and sing opera arias in a beautiful renaissance square in the middle of Paris (Place des Vosges). I'll never sing these things professionally again so it's a pleasure to have the chance to get up and exercise my voice in that style that I spent so much time training in. A while ago I had one of those moments that makes me so love France: my friend got bored of the usual Opera favourites, so she pulled out her backing track of Schubert songs that she had using earlier to give lessons with. Within minutes she had a crowd around her and people smiling and nodding their heads (and throwing money in the hat). Where in North America could you walk out on the street and start singing Schubert and have dozens of people recognize it and love it. And it's not like a knowledge of schubert implies any sort of superiority ... it was just so nice to see that some people aren't only, only familiar with pure pop culture...

Oh yeah, the new dog... we now have a muppet for a dog... a ragamuffin cross breed of a french hunting dog (a Griffon) and something... she's a raggedy assed enthusiastic 8 month old with a shaggy silly head that we got from the pound this weekend. She looks like a close realtive of Animal from Sesame St. She's kind of timid and hand shy so we think she was beaten around a bit, but she seems to be quickly gaining confidence...

2006... a very even and calm number.... we'll see what kind of irony that plays with..

Throwing myself at Brel

Four songs solo. Amsterdam, Fanette, Next (Au Suivant) and Statue. Amsterdam is the star... it's a simple song, but yet, not... like many of Brel's songs, it's a combination of a certain poetry with a simple chordal structure that drives the songs: repetition and rhythm and accelleration. At the end of the song you throw yourself over this cliff and you're left with.... with what? Perhaps as a listener you're left with the sense of a long silence as they fall into the next song.

Been watching DVD's of the man himself (mostly his goodbye performance at the Olympia). Brel in performance is fascinating. I've never seen a singer like him. Apart from a great voice and the belief in the song he also created these extravagant gestures to illustrate the songs. Normally I avoid any representation... if the song is good, if the words and music succeed in meaning something, then the song is going to work by itself: I shouldn't need to point out the stars when I'm singing about the night sky. However Brel's gesture's are grand, theatrical movements. Even with the sound turned off he's fabulous to watch. OK, sometimes (the DVD had a whole bunch of TV appearances that were less successful) I found myself thinking 'just sing the bloody song', but that was mostly under strange 'live' studio conditions when he seems less inspired.

We have two shows left and then we'll see what happens with the producers in the new year. Hopefully we'll be performing into the spring....

thanks John

Just returned from a tiny cafe poetry reading by John Giorno. Must have been fewer then 20 people in the audience to see this giant of performance poetry. Thank you John Giorno. I go on stage tomorrow night and sometimes I wonder if what believe about performing is shared ... is somehow on the right road...that you have to give and give and give, and you have to take chances, and you have to expose yourself, and you have to be there, all your faults and attributes making you what you are... that generosity and daring count and technique is the smallest portion. And there was John Giorno, who I remember from his Giorno Poetry Systems record: "Sugar, Alcohol and Meat" with Kathy Acker, Ginsberg, Burroughs... and I lay in the dark and played it over and over and wanted to be some kind of artist of words and ideas.... and there was John Giorno, older, silver haired, pot bellied, handsome, strange, eyes closed, eyes shining, dancing as he sang and spoke his way through his poems and texts. Believing. Being there.

Once upon a time,
these
friends
loved
each other
very much,
and they made a vow
to stay together
until they all
attained
Enlightenment,
and lifetime
after lifetime,
and endless
re-births,
and doing practice,
they all realized
the absolute
empty
true nature
of mind.
They were so
happy
and overjoyed,
they started
dancing,
and dancing,
and danced
and danced,
they were so happy,
in the shocked
recognition
of emptiness
and compassion,
they kept
on dancing,
dancing
and dancing,
and they danced away
all their flesh
and skin,
until there was
nothing
left
but their bones,
and they kept dancing
in their bones,
dancing
skeltons
dancing skeltons.

John Giorno

Cooool

It's cold! Thank god. I've been waiting for the fall to arrive since I had my first tantalising touch of cool at the end of August in Edmonton (where I now notice the weather is going down to -1 this week) and I've been dying for it arrive ever since... and now there are storms and rain and cold forcast for later this week so finally we can break out fall sweaters... There's no real winter in Paris, just months of cool, grey wet weather, but for a taste of cold I'll head down to Burgundy where it drops to -12 regularly. And since I haven't yet insulated the living room I'm often treated to the odd sensation of a cool snowfall sneaking through the roof tiles and falling on my back while the front of me is facing the roaring fire..

I have my head deep in music for both the Brel show coming up in three weeks and for the Standards that I'm working on for early december. The Brel is coming along now, everyone is over the mid rehearsal panic attack ("Ahhhhh! It'll never be ready on time!!!" "How can anyone move and sing at the same time!!!" Ahhhh!") and now we're drifting into getting things into place. The songs are only growing on me... apart from the ever maudlin 'Fanette'.... For the jazz material I'm redeveloping all my calluses after years of being away from the Guitar. It's a great pleasure to be away from working with playback on the tour this summer. It was a necessity from all the travel, but it has nothing to do with real music.

Trying not to read too much of the news right now... which actually means that I'm fixated on the damn news: Deadly pandemics, rogue nuclear arsenals, terrorists under every rock and behind every tree.... at least Canada and France pushed the Cultural Diversity resolution through the UN... perhaps it'll bear fruit in a few years with a little less Jennifer Aniston in the world... and a few more local heroes

Mid October in Paris. Gorgeous late warm days.

We're into the final weeks of rehearsals with the Brel and to be honest we're struggling a bit with some of the choreography that Tracy's giving us: it's not that it's particularly hard, just that the levels of dance training are pretty varied in the cast and Tracy gives very detailed moves. A lot of word painting with gestures and subtle shifts of moves for every verse of a song. I think it will all come together, however we need to run the pieces over and over and over and there's not a lot of rehearsal time left where the whole company is there....

I'm more and more impressed with the solos that I'm singing.... OK, with most of them.... as usual the songs like Amsterdam ( a Tom Waits like text of the bawdy, drinking, dying, whoring Sailors in Amsterdam) or Next (a young soldier losing his virginity in an Army Whorehouse - "it is his voice that I will forever hear, Next! Next! It is a voice of whiskey and of corpses. It is the voice of nations, it is the thick voice of blood"), those songs I find amazing... the songs like Fanette (boy loves pretty girl on beach... girl falls in love with someone else... boy can't get over it) I honestly find pretty dull... I'm sure they will start to grow on me, but at the moment I'm kind of wading through them...

I just came back from some time at the house in Burgundy. The quince tree was ripe so now a box of incredibly fragrant quinces are sitting in the living room and perfuming the whole house. Bizarre and delicious fruits...