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June 24th, 2008
George Carlin died yesterday. Sad news. My fondness for him began the first time I saw him on Ed Sullivan. I don’t remember his material for that show but I do remember the time he did the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman. “Forecast for this evening…increasing darkness tonight with light patches toward morning…” it was far and away my favourite Carlin character.
Still, not wanting to speak ill of the dead–although of course Carlin had no problem speaking ill-of, living or dead–but when George Carlin traded in comedy for caustic commentary, even though few could cut better, I dropped out.
His biting satire of all things may have gained him a new audience, but for me, he became just too much of a projectile. He showed no mercy. Well, admittedly, that’s his right, and as he saw it, his job as a comedian. As David Hinkley’s obit in the NY Daily relayed, “he always said his often-cynical satire simply reflected his real-life disdain for mankind’s greed, stupidity and inconsideration.”
But the comedy became wincing. For example, to wring a laugh out of the beheading of an Oklahoma corporate executive was satire that defeated itself. It was a sideways attack on greed perhaps, but Carlin was wilfully blind, or just blind, to his own special kind of inconsideration. 
With age, he became unfunny. Caustic satire, yes, fair game in context, but a steady stream without so much as an inward glance not only loses appeal, it gets boring. Carlin seemed to just have one track. When things got boring he just upped the outrageous-ante. I guess I still appreciate a self-deprecating comic. One who draws me in by pointing out her own mania and then with a few great lines implicates the lot of us. I think Carlin used to do this. But over the last number of years he just sounded angry and miserable.
The tributes are coming in, he’s being lauded for telling us the “harsh truth,” and I guess he did that. Although harsh truth about humanity is hardly revelatory. I suppose it’s my problem, but I never got the sense that he interrogated himself anywhere as close as he did his targets, and admittedly, not all of his targets were straw-men…he wasn’t a fool. It’s just that I’m left wondering how his comedy and voice may have evolved had he developed, along with his annihilating ability at piercing pretensions, an accompanying self-questioning stance.
Seems to me that’s the kind of broad quizzical standpoint Al Sleet, the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman would have taken. He had the insight to see an encompassing view. As he said in his final and definitive broadcast, “The weather will continue to change on and off for a long, long time.”
May 22nd, 2008
When the rain falls and the temp dips and you inexplicably slip into 1973, the first thing you’ll want to do is robe yourself with a button-up horse blanket. After all, you deserve comfort, and comfort comes in bolts of pucker-free, wrinkle-free, and fray-free fifty-weight nylon-satin-poly blend, yardered together using packing needles and worsted yarn.
Mind you, there’s a reason why none of our models are sitting down (well, almost, the one wearing the brush-fire has been rammed into position). A small oversight in the comfort department–Sears promises that the 74 model will include flex-tube at the places where people bend.
In the mean time, should you desire to lounge, just get someone to push you over; then, while your lying down, you’ll be able to surreptitiously observe everyone in the room without them knowing…because they’ll think you’re the couch.
May 20th, 2008
Memories lead their own lives and invest their own peculiar currency. My two earliest memories have to do with a tricycle. The first is an almost a pastoral scene. I am on my tricycle, in the natural depression between the house and the barn, watching the older kids–my brothers and sister and our cousins–play hide-and-seek. It’s early evening. the farm has settled down, the cows are out in the pasture and the red barn and the hayloft and the surrounding stretch of grassy ground has elevated itself into a source of intrigue and adventure. It’s a foreign land full of secrets. Arms folded, resting on the handlebars, I watch bodies creep and the stalk, and see the slow then sudden movements of human silhouettes in a growing twilight.
The second memory is seeing my tricycle roll slowly into the dugout, and me chasing after it. I had left it on its own for just a few moments and it betrayed me. I see its red frame and white-spoked wheels submerged and sinking and just before I head in after it my brother pulls me back to safety. I have a parallel memory to this one that has an older brother nudge it down the fine gravel slope to its watery decent. I have no idea why I have this memory. But this second memory lines up with another memory of my brothers teasing me by holding me over the well beside the dugout. But I’m not sure how accurate this memory is. It’s possible that a jest, a teasing threat (I do know that my brothers would do me no harm) has transformed itself into the vividness of an actuality. Which means of course, that threats of harm can be as effectual as an actual misdeed.
But of course I wasn’t dropped into the dark column of water and I was stopped from slipping under the surface of the dugout and my tricycle was fished out before it sank to an irretrievable depth. Had these things not happened my fears would no doubt be compounded, more complex than a simple fear of water–a fear I now manage with relative ease.
Thing is, memories possess an elasticity. They aren’t so much in the past as they are ahead of us, divining our paths and directing our actions. For years I had a powerful desire to become a detective. Perhaps the intrigues I saw while sitting on my tricycle in the farm yard was the seed for this urge. This is a light and somewhat amusing example. On the other end, memories can at times protect us from a reality and at other times compel us to move in and deal with reality. In other words, memories can be unwelcome gifts.
Technorati Tags:
Memory,
memoir
April 27th, 2008
Even driving by at 100 km/hr, you can easily count the slouching clapboard houses of Kandahar. On the east side of the hamlet there is a large boxy building as well, that I believe was once a school. From the highway you can see that all the windows have been broken out, like teeth. And the faded brown siding, having lost all desire, has been sliding off for years.
But Kandahar was once famous for its steakhouse. I remember because The Kandahar Steak House always got mentioned 70 miles east, down the Yellowhead, at Yorkton’s CKOS. At that distance I knew it had to be special. Those were the juicy tender years. An earlier time when I didn’t know businesses had to pay for getting mentioned on the television. I thought that places just had to be good to get advertising.
I remember the Sunday my parents went for a drive with their friends with the express purpose of going to for a steak. They may have gone more than once but I remember that day, because I was instantly envious and vowed that one day I would do the same. And I did…one weekend, some ten years later, while driving back from Saskatoon where I was enrolled in an Agriculture diploma program at the University.
It was early evening when I drove up the gravel drive to the steakhouse. I stepped through a paint blistered door into a red-carpeted room. There was no one else in the restaurant. I found a table and sat down.
A thin, wrinkled, Chinese man came and asked me what I’d like. I asked for a menu and he obliged. Was he annoyed or surprised? My steak was tough, quite tough. A mistake perhaps? Perhaps not. Perhaps they had been tough for some time. I ate in dim silence. Years of anticipation spattered and burned off like bits of marbled fat. It was a gristly, uncomfortable and ultimately lonely meal. In less than a year, after my only visit, the windows would be boarded up and eventually, I suppose, the building pushed in and hauled away. There isn’t a trace of the place today.
Today, even though I suspect that some of its 15 houses are occupied, Kandahar, Saskatchewan couldn’t feel much more desolate or unfortunate. And naturally, one wonders about that name, a name–bestowed upon the settlement by C.P.R. at the turn of the century–meant to honour the British victory in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the 1880s.
Still, I can hear the engaging voice of Linus Westburg on CKOS, and see the large sign atop the burgundy restaurant at the entrance of town, and then the presentation of red place-mat, silver steak knife, and the black-brown cross-grilled T-bone on a white plate. A meat-eater’s Shangri-la.
March 13th, 2008
Oh, delightful, a cartoon for me and Rene. Check it out here. Thanks Len.
February 24th, 2008
Here, a far more relaxed, far less political Che Guevara, (a.k.a. Phil M.) dances with my wife. What can I say, the man’s a charmer.
Yes, Grow Mercy is in Cuba for a wee holiday…see you in eight days. (I’ll bring you some Montecristo No. 4’s.)
January 7th, 2008
From my loft downtown I see two flags, a Canadian flag just above an Alberta flag. Both reach then hesitate, then sag and sputter in an uncertain breeze. This is the way of flags animated by breezes confused by tall buildings. This too, it seems, is the way of memory. Through a scene, a smell, a piece of music, a taste, a long ago moment unfurls and then retreats.
Twenty years ago, the blue Alberta flag on the court house in Mayerthorpe was periodically extending itself in a wavering air current. Framed by my office window in the grain elevator I can still see the flag and the brown foreground. I see grass lodged, fallen like a skirt at the feet of naked shrubs. And I see the train track, with its creosote soaked timber-ties embedded in gravel and two straight lines of grey steel running far north. Above it all was a brilliant blue sky with a wisp of white cloud left over from the previous day’s canopy.
Why this flag inspired memory? Twenty years ago I was dreaming about making an exit. After 12 years working for the Alberta Wheat Pool I was fit and ready for a change.
Perhaps it’s this early stage of the year that has me wondering about change. Or, perhaps it’s deeper. Either way it’s not like change is an option. To refuse to change is to age at a rapid pace. The only option, it seems to me, is cooperation with one or more particular possibilities, out there on the horizon of change.
December 2nd, 2007
On a summer evening in 1971 I walked out of Yorkton Saskatchewan’s Tower theatre crossed the street and disappeared into myself. I reemerged a conjugate of Joe Cocker and Leon Russell and for months to come inhabited that blended persona. To this day, in spite of myself, I still carry the ghost of that warm summer evening. Not that I mimic the spasms of a young Joe Cocker (although I’ve tried this) or imitate the hazy-glare-under-hooded-lids, of a Leon Russell (although, rather comically, I’ve done this as well), instead I inhabit something of the message and intent of all those physical and mental mannerisms.
The impression that “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” had upon me was so strong that to this day I catch myself dreaming of its seedy glamour, its skewering of domesticity and seemingly wild and free flight for the sake of music and life. Right. Well, I was impressionable, at an impressionable age, living just a wink past Woodstock. I was a follower and I had about me the sponginess of youth.
But I’ve grown up. The eager mimicry of my late adolescence now behind me, I see myself as in control of what impresses me and able to choose what I will imitate, or rather, incorporate. Yet, at particular moments, almost always while in the presence of someone close to me, I see that I’ve left nothing of this behind. I mean, I’m still impressionable, still a follower, still a sponge. In other words, still dependent on receiving myself through the reception or rejection of others. 
And now I discover that all of this has a basis in biology. It turns out that in that theatre as I sat gazing up, groups of mirror neurons were brightly firing inside my premotor cortex. These mirror(ing) neurons not only allowed me to mentally imitate the physical gyrations but also to ingest the complexity of intent, motives, goals, in other words, to mentalize the state of mind of my subject.
For this ability that we take for granted, there should be inexhaustible wonder. It is how social units and cultures are begotten. For good or bad, mirror neurons are the “welcoming gateway (JA)” through which your “I” is reproduced within me and through which my “self” is constituted by you.
October 16th, 2007
Yesterday I helped plan a funeral with the person whose funeral it will be.
We talked. I was in a hospital chair wondering why hospital chairs, indistinguishable from a million other chairs, take on a hospital feel. My friend lay above and in front of me, tubed-up. One tube drained waste fluid through his nose into a glass jug on the floor and another piped clear liquid from three plastic bags into his arm. “Everything you need to live on,” he said. “You could live on that stuff for years.”
But years are not what he has. Yesterday it was hours, today things are looking up, days perhaps, maybe weeks and maybe strength enough for another gig he promised to play for. A Patsy Cline tribute.
I asked him what it was like to talk about his funeral. Was it hard? He said no, that in fact it was almost comforting. He felt he was somehow fortunate to have the chance. I asked him if he was afraid of dying. He said no and I wondered if he was being straight with me and then he said really if you think of it, if there’s nothing after this I will never know and if there is I’m sure it will be better than this. Looking at him, smaller now, distended stomach, all kinds of frozen cancerous blocks keeping him from finding any Northwest passage out of here, it was hard to refute the logic.
He said he had a faith. It was his own. He believed in Jesus but left the field open for other possibilities. Nothing wrong in trying to cover all the bases.
He expressed being amazed by all the love that was coming through door. He wanted me to say something about this in my eulogy.
He wanted me to talk about his music, his love, his accomplishments, he wanted to leave a footprint. I knew for example, that after a generation of playing rock, country, jazz, he took up classical guitar and on the Royal Conservatory grade five exam he received the highest marks in Alberta. Music mattered, was a force in his life. But he was also aware of what it cost him and we talked about regrets for a while.
He talked about the life lessons he learned and wondered why they only came at the end of life. We talked about that being as good an argument as any other, for something interesting ahead.
When I left he hung on to my hand for a long time.
Technorati Tags:
Music,
Love,
Death,
Funeral
July 20th, 2007
The valency of comfort plus fashion has finally come to the sport of competitive eating.
Marcy and Margo may not be in the league of Korea’s Kobayashi or America’s Joey Chestnut (66 hotdogs in 12 minutes) but when it comes to gastro-fashion they have no peers.
The stunning voluminous Emu sweater, pregnant with judge-appealing pattern, will ensure every bulge stays hidden. At the same time, while every drop of blood races to your gastrointestinal tract, the warmth of Emu wool will keep the hypothermic death-chills at bay.
Subtly complementing the Emu top, but making it all work, are the stretch pants. Made of a blend of Lycra for flex, and fiberglass for strength, they hug without the personal-space-constricting ways of your annoying uncle.
The secret is in the waistband which is anchored to your breastbone by a super-strength polymer adhesive. Comfortably positioned halfway between crotch and nape, the waistband, with inflatable option, absolutely ensures no embarrassing pant slippage during actual gorging, while minimizing the chances of regurgitation.
Not a gastric gladiator? No matter. The Emu sweater and stretch pants ensemble looks good and feels even better at every and any BBQ.
Enjoy the dogs, and have a lovely weekend.
Previous Posts
George Carlin died yesterday. Sad news. My fondness for him began the first time I saw him on Ed Sullivan. I don’t remember his material for that show but I do remember the time he did the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman. “Forecast for this evening…increasing darkness tonight with light patches toward morning…” it was far and away my favourite Carlin character.
The Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
