Instead of doing the work, I shall complain about it

I was just thinking about where I can register general complaints. I figure this is the place to do it!

I'm on spring 'break' now, but it seems I have the equivalent of three weeks worth of homework to do. I have to do some kind of project on human rights (obviously a relaxation-inducing topic), write as much poetry as possible, and do some journals. I ran out of journal topics before the end of grade ten - need to wade 300 words into a bunch of random topics, which is too much for an irrelevant topic, and far too little for anything that's actually worth thinking about. I also need to think about a model of the universe (this will probably wind up being an enlarged photo of my face in the end).

I also need to figure out the chords to The Best Of Jill Hives!

Hey guys!

I know, I know. You're all pretty mad at me. I was in charge of your sole source of entertainment, this blog, and I neglected it. But I'm certain you'll forgive me when you see what I'm posting for your benefit!

Scoping around craigslist, I found a local band called Thee Ahs looking for someone to open for them. So I checked out their myspace, and lo, I had a new favourite band. To imagine how a band can be this good - well, it's a waste of time. Obviously, bands like this just blink into existence. Argal, I give you:

http://www.myspace.com/theeahs

Enjoy!

Of course, I couldn't respond to the ad, as the night they were playing happened to be the night of the City School cabaret. Plus, I didn't have a band that could open for anything until the day before said cababret. And that still needs some hammering out, you understand.

Pile o' paint scrapers

So now my exams are completely done with (as of this morning). I have to pick up my report card from school on thursday between 10 am and noon, which sounds shifty. They might as well say "come to the back door and knock three times" as well.

Nils, Fab and I all rolled down to hear some ear-splitting noise at the Roundhouse last night. A cool $26 to see Evan Parker (tenor only, sadly), Barry Guy (baez and paintbrushes), Paul Lytton (drums and objects), and Agusti Fernandez (pianoforte and some kind of brick), plus The Thing with Ken Vandermark. The latter act I had never heard, so the whole event was more explosive than I could have imagined. This was my first 'free music' concert, and I couldn't believe how much better it was live!

When we sat down, Fab and I gathered round the Village Elder, Nils, and he told us many tales of the realm of free jazz. He was talking a lot about how one person might play something, then another will pick up on it/react to it, and it might just ricochet through the whole band. And when they came on, it didn't take much hard listening to notice this kind of thing; it was happening the entire time!

Paul Lytton's drum kit was surrounded on all sides by various objects on the floor, such as sticks, small cymbals, wooden frogs, paint scrapers, shells - anything that made sound. Which is everything. Most of the time he'd be reaching onto the floor to grab something new and putting it in the pile on top of his snare drum. It got full up there, so stuff was falling off constantly.

I find I like Barry Guy's playing best when he's on his own, but he wasn't without his highlights. The best part was when he had something that looked like a hairless bow shoved up under the strings, and whenever he touched it, it would rock back and forth, making a really cool sound.

Fernandez I hadn't heard more than about a minute of before. He looked conspicuous, because while the other three band members were wearing all black, he had on this lipstick-red shirt. He looked like Florian Schneider on the cover of The Man Machine. Anyhoot, he made fine use of harmonics on the piano throughout, and of course wasn't afraid to play using his elbows.

I wasn't familiar with anyone in The Thing or Ken Vandermark, but they were a treat. Interestingly, where the Evan Parker band would play in a sort of straight line, moving wherever they happened to move, The Thing tended to sort of build more. The two horn players, Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson, constantly played off each other; one might start a riff, and the other might either play lines over it or kind of expand it.

The ultimate treat with this band was, of course, getting to hear TWO baritone saxes at once!

Today is definately a blog day.

"One might think that this blog has died but alas, no."
-Nils on Goaded by Vices
Couldn't a put it better meese elf. But a lot of stuff happened today and in the last few days.

I was home from school the other day, sick, but by the mid-afternoon I was well enough to assist Ilsa in removing the trash from our CD shelves (the first and third Hole albums? Stinko!) and bringing it to the Audiopile. We got a cool $50 worth of credit, so we got a Liars EP, Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage, and a 2-CD live set of the Charles Mingus sextet with Eric Dolphy, with $17 left. I asked them to order a 2-disc Swans set for me, which I'm insanely excited for.

Today I rose quite late, and consumed a mild breakfast. Ilsa and I then escorted Cookie to trout lake and fetched Slurpees. When we arrived home, I found a non-moving being on the bathroom floor on top of a towel. We have had many brief mouse sightings in the last month, so we found it bizarre to see him sitting still. We elected to bury the small creature. I lifted the edge of the towel, and whad du ya gno, the being moved. He scampered a foot or so, but then found himself cornered. He couldn't move very fast, and was limping slightly. We scooped him up in a paper towel and took him across to the park so that Cookie wouldn't bother us. We figured he would gain strength if we cared for him, so we put him in a large flower pot and put some things in there for him and put it in the bathtub. We decided we'd take him to trout lake and let him go tomorrow. About an hour later, we checked on him, and he looked ill. He convulsed a bit, and then he was dead. I'm glad we were at least there when it happened. We did wind up burying him.

I had to write a persuasive essay for English, and duly sat down to and completed my task within 2 hours. I will post this essay, Why everyone should learn an instrument, soon. It was good to get this thing over with - it was easy, but took the mental energy of coercing myself into doing it.

At about 4, I went to O'Brien's. He had had some enormous score at a garage sale earlier - some post-college students had out a box of CD's for two bucks apiece, and he vacuumed up a dozen or so of them - deluxe My aim is true, some John Cage, Charlie Hayden, Hatful of Hollow, Basement tapes, Talking Heads:77 and The name of this band is Talking Heads (a double-live set), Hounds of love, etc. Then there was the mutha lode: a small, highly portable guitar amp. I brought the Squire with me to test it, and wound up playing around with it for an hour. It yields some massive overdrive, which is very fine, but you can also get some good clean sounds out of it. Mr. O'brien obtained all these things at the garage sale for $30. We had some fud, then Ilsa swung by and we headed over to Fab's - we were getting a ride to see Fab's play, an abridged version of The Complete works of William Shakespeare abridged. Ilsa grabbed a bite before the show, and we got in for free because we brought in a man to threaten the usher. The play was very pleasing, especially Macbeth. Fab's part was much more voluminous than previous plays I've seen him in.

I am now going to venture to the room adjacent to this one, my bedroom. The reason I'm doing this is that my bed is located therein, and my bed is where I sleep. Oh yes, the Pixmeister is coming in just a week! I'm quite excited about it. But what I'm not excited about is that I recently found out my wisdom teeth are gonna be pulled in July. Yeow!

Mediums?

We had an English assignment in which we had to write a poem that had a lot of very strict rules. It wasn't a specific form, they were just arbitrary regulations. It had to be twenty-four lines long, and each line had to have some specific things - for example, line one had to have a noun, a number, and a colour. So I went to work on this, talked about a guy named Pauline playing a bass solo. When I had ten lines left, I thought, "Maybe I'll submit a bass solo with it!" I wrote the solo, then decided to just complete the assignment as usual, keeping the solo for something else. I was still interested in combining two media in one piece, though. I told the Cosmic Cop about it, and asked if she'd be instristed in cola-BO-rating on something. She agreed. Now, I've been working on some music for three days, and am going quite fast. When it's done, I'll record it and submit a cassette to the Cosmic Conundrum and she'll illustrate it. And it just might be the greatest piece of art of all time!

Short story

This is my first ever attempt at writing a short story - it was for skuule. Anyway, I kinda like it, so here it is.

Short_story_Ridley_Budden

The colour of the overcast sky was matched by the concrete landscape surrounding the small coffee shop. Though the area was under constant construction, it was always eerily quiet. The grey attire of the ground and buildings were like the visual equivalent to a low drone - comforting in a way, but relentless - smothering. Walking into the establishment, it seemed to me that everyone tried to avoid sitting near the western wall of the place, where the largest window was, but it may just as well have been that no one wanted to get in the way of the man behind the counter. He had spilled something and was quietly shouting at the rag he was using to pick the mess up. Despite the clean-looking man’s antagonism towards his task, and the clientele’s lack of enthusiasm to interact with him, the interior of the coffee shop wasn’t as hostile as the outside. I recognized some of the people sitting down, but I wasn’t sure whether I’d actually met any of them before or not. I was taking a seat, having decided against getting anything until the man at the counter had calmed down, when by coincidence my friend, Leung, came out of the washroom and took his place at a table facing away from me. His bag and coffee were on the table already. He was dressed for summer weather, looked like he was getting ready to go on an adventure. Watching him take in his beverage was as enjoyable to me as consuming one myself. He held his cup and stared into empty space, and turned his head when the door opened and a man walked in. He was a close friend of Leung’s whom I’d only met once before in passing, and whose name I couldn’t remember, except that it sounded Irish. He was wearing a surgical mask, since he had just come in from outside. He said hello to Leung and nodded at me. “Hey,” I said. Leung heard me greet his friend and turned around, surprised because he hadn’t noticed me before. He said hi, then turned back to the Irish man, who was still standing just inside the door. He never sat down - he just lingered next to the door, as though he had a time limit. They talked for a moment while I stared at the wooden floor - Leung was congratulating the Irish man for something or another, while the latter just kind of sloughed it off. “To tell you the truth, I’m still a bit drunk,” he said. When I looked up, he had taken his mask off, so I could see his face. As he continued talking, there was nothing about his speech or movements that seemed off, but it was in his face - he had on a cartoonish expression, and parts of his beard looked almost like it had been drawn on with crayon. He was definitely intoxicated. He looked like a beatnik. “Well, I’d better head back to work,” he said after a few minutes, replacing his mask. As he turned to go, he took a sticker out of his pocket that said “I am red” - some kind of political slogan. He tried to stick it to the inside of the window, but had forgotten to remove the backing from it. It just didn’t seem right. I stood up and took it from his hand and said, “Get out of here, you’re drunk.” He left without a fight, and I placed the sticker in my own pocket. Leung had gone back to sipping his coffee and hadn’t noticed any of this commotion, and I decided to leave him in peace. I watched the Irish man disappear around the corner before I went outside myself. I had a horrible feeling about what he might do - he had seemed harmless enough at first, but that was inside. Even stable people could do weird things outside, brought on by the way their footsteps would echo inside their own bodies. I put on my own mask as I walked down the steps of the coffee shop.

It was rare to see a car in the area, but there was one parked outside a construction site right nearby. There were two workers talking next to it. They said nothing to me, but if they had, it obviously wouldn’t have been friendly. I got the impression that the workers didn’t like being there, noiselessly shading in the skeletons of future towers each day. They existed only to work hard and hate themselves. They were known to sometimes explode with their suppressed anger, with a force as powerful as a maternally enraged gorilla.

I was walking past the side of a tall building that was usually covered in posters, but that had recently been hosed down. Without looking, I removed the “I am red” sticker from my pocket and stuck it to the wall, very casually. I had nowhere else to put it, and it would get covered up by another poster soon anyway. Half a block on, the sidewalk ended abruptly at a brick wall. Every step I took towards it, I felt it impeding me more. I wanted to walk through it, and reached out to touch it, hoping it was possible. The cold, rough surface told me to stay out. Knowing I couldn’t just made me want to embed myself in the mortar all the more. I wanted to be very small and live where derangement couldn’t follow me. But I duly continued walking down the middle of the street, and saw the Irish man turn the corner just up ahead. I ran forward and peeked around the corner at him. When I was sure he wouldn’t notice me, I crossed quickly to the other corner. He turned his head just before I was out of his line of sight, but didn’t seem to care that I was there. I was relieved by this. He was heading in the direction of his workplace, so I felt secure that he wasn’t going to do anything in bad taste. Considering my chore complete, I headed up the street. It went up a slight incline, and ran alongside a park with a single enormous tree in it - the only green space in the area. The sun was beginning to come out, and so were the people. They seemed almost to bubble over the crest of the hill and into the park - their bodies would one day sink into the grass and fertilize it. I wondered whether the park would one day be engulfed by cement, or whether reeds would penetrate the surface of the streets over the years. I guessed it had to be one or the other.

It's great to get comments again!

Luckily, I had the option today of sleeping in, so I'm not sick anymore. The reason I had this option is because I had an orthodontist appointment this morning at ten - my last official orthodontist appointment, to be precise. I arrived fifteen minutes early, and they called me in twenty minutes late for my five-minute appointment. Contrary to what I would have thought, I still have to wear my retainer at night, two-to-three times a week. "...Ideally," he said, "if there was such an ideal, for the rest of your life." The page he handed me regarding this simply says to do it for as long as I'm willing to.

I went to the place where I usually catch the bus from the Fairmont medical building to downtown. After three non-downtown buses passed, I elected to ask a driver whether downtown buses even run along Broadway anymore. I was told to go to the other side of the street, as the #50 would turn down Willow street and take me to my destination. I had just missed it, so I waited fifteen minutes.

The bus stopped in front of some sort of housing complex near Granville island, and on hopped this fairly old lady who was obviously insanely cool. She greeted the bus driver very kindly, and just seemed very normal. A younger girl sat down next to her and they talked about the rainbow that was visible yesterday. Then this old man got on and sat next to me, and said, "Hello!" "Hello!" I echoed.

The bus went all over the place. This group of about six kids got on, who were on their way to some snowboarding destination. One of them was looking for his ticket, failing to locate it, when the older lady offered him change. She had a British accent, it turned out, and the boy she was offering the change to also had one, it sounded like. Everyone on the bus was clearly in an excellent mood.

I took it one stop too far, and so I tried to figure out which bus to take to get to school from where I was. I figured out wrong, and went quite far in the exact opposite direction I needed to. So what I did, I just walked over to Georgia street and caught my usual bus. The guy who got on ahead of me was carrying a sax case. He sat in front of me - or rather, I sat behind him. He pulled out the Charlie Parker Omnibook and some music paper, and seemed to be trying to figure something out in his head - he was tapping his hand the same way I do when I'm trying to write some unfamiliar rhythm down. The bar he started at was still empty when I got off. I felt like saying, "Good luck!" I arrived at school just in time for lunch. Then there was math, and then I came home.

When I was sick yesterday, I wrote a blues in E major. I'll teach it to Fab soon so we can play it at the next Coffee House. My first jazz piece! I'm excited to play it.

My excuse

Well, I have bad news. Twango is an ass, and won't let me upload the video from the coffee house, because it's too large a file. Bastards! So there's my excuse.

In other news, I'm sick today, so I couldn't attend school. I missed Socials! Horrible! But for real, I'm not pleased to miss science. I got my report card for the first skuule term today. 100% in English! On that note, I should post some of my journals - I don't have an excuse to get out of that. I also got 99% in Socials, despite finding it deathly dull. And yes, I do have to say 'Deathly' instead of 'Deadly'. I could also talk about my mark in Planning, but why sabotage my bragging rights?

I think Nello is out of school this week, which is exciting. We get to listen to the Black & blue outtakes! He says he plans on feeding me an increasingly intense diet of free jazz, ending with Evan Parker. I have great expectations for this Parker fellow! Hope I can handle him. Nello says, "It'll be something to aspire to on yer sexyphone."

Post-Coffee House post

The Coffee House was a huge success! Above are the poster and the programme for the evening - I will soon post a video and some photos.

The RCTV IDS Club!

I'm writing this in the middle of a planning class, as I've paid all my debt.

The coffee house is fast approaching, two weeks from this thursday. We (Tamlyn and I) have drawn up our entire program and it's looking as though the whole thing will be close to three hours long. Alone, I'm playing one original guitar composition. The Fab and I will be playing Equinox, Little Sunflower, Cousin Mary and Misterioso. I'll also be playing an acoustic rendition of Frances Farmer will have her revenge on Seattle with a young man named Victor. Next block, we have to head to the office and make sure the room we need to use isn't double-booked.

On 'Day 2s,' Tamlyn, Claire and I are renovating the latter's treehouse for school (we were sick of drama). How are we being graded on this? We're inviting our teacher over for tea and crumpets! (O yeah, as Tamlyn just corrected me while she was rudely reading over my shoulder, we're also making a documentary about the process.) By the way, this project allows us to leave school like two-and-a-half hours early. I also get to practice the saxomophone every other day this way!

Nothing will stand in my way!!

Oh, and Eureka seveN is over in two weeks! I'm preparing for post-cartoon land depression.

Where am I?

Why have I not written ene-thing in two months, you may ask. Well, that's not a valid question, because I have been writing outside of this blog. I have a life outside of you demanding leeches!!

I have been attending a school in the west end, City School, which is located within the King George school building. I am actually taking classes for pretty much the first time ever, English among them. This is where my writing has been going. Each week we are required to write a journal, usually on a topic that is chosen for us. The best ones so far have been 'A social outcast' (which I wrote about Prickle from Gumby Adventures), 'Musical hooks' (my choice), and 'My imaginary friend.' I will post all of these here.

I'm listening to 'Midnite Vultures' by Beck. I discovered that there are two other fellow-fans of this album at City School among the thirty or so students in attendance.

For art class, or rather in place of it, I am organizing a Coffee House with my new business partner, Tamlyn. It will feature music, poetry reading and, of course, COFFEE! I am planning on performing solo guitar pieces, which I will have to write, and jazz. I actually wrote one the guitar pieces yesterday - the whole thing. This is like a miracle for me! I used a riff I created a few months ago, and the ending is quite Yes-ish. It will appear either here or on glissando as soon as it's recorded. I have already performed it for The Fab and Sarrah, who both enjoyed it, in all its mercurial glory.