Leap In The Dark

Brethren, it's with a heavy heart and a leaden soul that you see me standing before you today. For my eyes have borne witness to the coming of that which is known as the beast; Beelzebub. Oh the signs have been building for a long time my friends, but they have been subtle and insidious. He and his many minions have wormed their way in amongst us with all the guile of their breed.

These succubae of spirit, these debasers of all things sacred and holy, harbingers of doom and destruction have been amongst us nigh on twenty years; twisting, tantalizing, taunting, and tormenting us until we can no longer tell right from wrong. They are a plague upon this land unlike any seen since the days of the Pharaohs.

Numbering less than the locusts of old, what they lack for in numbers they make up for in distribution. Ubiquitous! That's what they are. You can't escape their foul presence, not for one minute. No matter how hard you try and how far you travel, everywhere in this great land of ours they will have got there before you, waiting with their seductive ways to entice you, lure you, until finally they have you when you least expect it.

I'm sure you've seen their victims; those blank faced millions with their faces creased with simple smiles, their heads nodding vacantly, and their toes tapping incessantly. Those hapless, hopeless individuals who have been rendered incompetent from exposure to the beast and his minions can be seen everywhere. From all walks of life, all backgrounds; the beast knows no boundaries, cares nothing for sexual orientation, religion, creed, or colour. He just wants your soul!

My Brethren, we must face up to the truth of this matter, for it can no longer be denied, the time of the Anti-Hank is upon us. The forces of homogenization and cheap sentimentality are on the rise everywhere, threatening to swamp us in as flood of easy listening and "New Country".

With the halving of the Outlaws, only Willie and Kris survive; Jerry Jeff not seen or heard from in any number of years; George and Tammy finally separated by the only thing that could stop her from standing by him; and Kinky throwing his hat at politician's heads, we seem bereft of hope.

Who is there that we can turn to in our hour of need? Who will help us see the light and lead us back to our state of amazing grace? The circle has been broken, and needs to be re-forged. But, I hear you say, how can we do this, we are so few and they are so many? Well I say to you, all that is required is a willingness to go into unfamiliar territory.

The music is out there waiting for you, but nobody is going to bring it to you, you will have to go out and get it. Make the effort to find it and you will be amazed at who is waiting to help you loosen those fetters around your heart and soul. You might not hear them on your radio, but you can still buy a CD, and take them home with you.

Let me tell you about one such group of men who are fighting the good fight. J.B. Beverley & The Wayward Drifters. They have read the writing on the wall and are doing their best to bust that wall down with all the tools at their disposal.

Songs that sound like music written by a person not a marketing team are a good place to start if you're going to make a record that will reach into a body's heart and soul and shake them free of their saccharine induced comas. Dark Bar And A Jukebox, their first CD, is as far from WalMart music as a person can get and not leave the Americas.

Listen to the thrum of the stand up base, the plucking of the mandolin, the strumming of the guitar; there's nothing else but them. No gimmicks, no swelling strings, and best of all no stirring appeal to your emotions. Instead these are just raw works of true emotion that play your heartstrings without guile or manipulation.

How many years has it been since you've heard an honest to goodness train song written by anybody? The longing, the hope, and the dreams that trains and train travel represent sung about with reality and compassion? Not since our late brother Steve Goodman penned "City of New Orleans" or maybe that Canadian boy Murray McLaughlin's "Train Song" from around the same time period, have I heard ones as good as "Ghost of Old D.C." and J.B.'s "Train Song"

Now these boys being called the Wayward Drifters it should come as no surprise that so many of their songs deal with either travel or drifting. Drifting though isn't just your feet moving, it's also your mind and your spirit being cut adrift from the roots that we all need to keep us here and in one piece.

J.B. and the boys seem to have no problem understanding that. Their music is full of the yearning that made the Hank's music so transcendent. There's something better out there, their songs tell us, for everybody, than sitting in a bar hung over, or missing the one you love, if only we can just lay our hands on it.

Those may not be the lyrics to the songs, but through the voice and the music that message is delivered. It's when you hear that message in your heart, not your ears, that it rings the truest. A real country blues song is more than just the sum of its parts and crosses all boundaries without being "crossover".

J.B. Beverly & The Wayward Drifters sing and play with their hearts on their sleeves, not worrying about who's watching or listening. This is music for those who have been waiting and wanting heart and soul in their country music again and wondering if their was anyone left out there willing to take up arms against the minions of the beast.

Dark Bar And A Jukebox may not be able to defeat the Anti-Hank on its own, but as a declaration of independence from those who would have us all fit into the same square peg, this is a great opening salvo. We are at war Brothers and Sisters, and the enemy is a behemoth not unlike Goliath. Bands like J. B. Beverley & The Wayward Drifters are our David that will enable us to end the rule of the Philistine.

Listening to them will remind you of that better way awaiting; here not just in the sky.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:53 AM | Permalink

Billie Holliday, Nina Simone and Dinah Washington: three names that resonate because of their contributions as vocalists of power and distinction, yet each one was as different from the other as if they sang separate genres of music. In spite of their differences they are all three associated with Jazz and Blues and the casual observer would be left thinking that their work would be similar in style.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and all it takes is the simple expedient of watching the three women perform one after the other to dispel that erroneous impression. Such an opportunity is presented by a new DVD released by EFOR Films called simply Volume 1 Jazz Voice: The Ladies Sing Jazz. The three aforementioned ladies are featured over the course of an hour singing some of the songs they are best known for. Thrown in, as extras are one song by Ethel Waters and the Count Basie Orchestra and two numbers by the Gene Krupa Band featuring Anita O'Day on vocals.

Billie Holliday was probably the purest blues singer of the three. Although Jazz influences are present in her musical arrangements, it is in her interpretation and presentation of material that the designation of Blues singer is appropriate.

Perhaps because of her life, both before she was a vocalist, and during her career, full as it was of poverty, abuse, and drug addiction, she brought that bittersweet element that we associate with blues to all of her work. But whatever the reason, there was, and still is, something chillingly mournful about her plaintive sounding tone. This was only accented as her career continued and her voice became harsher from bad living and illness.

The eight clips of Billie Holliday that are contained in this disc are unfortunately of varying degrees of quality in regards to sound and video. But they are sufficient to give one an idea of the ups and downs in her life. Compare the thin cheeked, haggard looking woman who sings on track 2 through 4, with a strained voice (the camera even catches her clearing her throat before track 3 sounding as if she has pneumonia) to the full faced woman in the studio singing "Fine and Mellow" with confidence and smiles.

In the latter the familiar, almost childlike, voice is in beautiful form, while in the earlier three tracks she sounds rough and strained. While her phrasing and intonation are as impeccable as ever, it is an uncomfortable sight to see such a fine singer labouring with a voice that is not co-operating in all the ways she wants. I find it unfortunate that they couldn't find other material of her singing to include in this collection. Although historically accurate, it does not show Miss Holliday at her best.

In fact of the eight tracks used to represent Billie Holliday only track five, "Fine and Mellow" is good enough to give an accurate impression of her quality. There are three tracks included from what appears to be a television performance where the editing is so abrupt that the beginnings and ends of the songs are cut off. As an aside, one of the major drawbacks of this disc is the lack of any sort of information concerning where and when the performances of any of the artists took place. It's not essential information, but it would be nice to know who the members of the band are, and to have some sort of frame of reference in terms of where the artists were in their careers.

Nina Simone would probably have hated to be included in this collection. Not because she wouldn't have appreciated being in the company of people like Billie Holliday and Dinah Washington but because of her rejection of the term Jazz. "Jazz is a white term to define Black people. My music is Black classical music" are not the words of a woman who want to be pigeon holed by anyone.

Nina Simone, unlike the other two featured vocalists, was an accomplished instrumentalist as well. She had studied at the Julliard Academy for the arts in Piano until she was forced to withdraw because she lacked the money to continue. This meant of course that she was not content with standing behind the microphone and simply singing material that was chosen for her.

While her latter career might have expanded to include more popular genres like soul and pop music, she recorded covers of the Beatles song "Here Comes The Sun" and Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released", the tracks on this DVD focus on earlier, more Jazz influenced numbers. But even these tracks show her willingness to step beyond the boundaries of mainstream jazz through her singing of either music written by or influenced by African musicians.

"Zungo" is a song that she and her band were taught by the African musician Michael Olatunji, and is a chain gang song that sounds as if it could be of Zulu origins. On the unaccredited "There Is A Book Of Love" the African influences are just as pronounced, through the use of specific rhythms and the introduction of a solo tom drum player.

It is obvious from watching these clips of Nina Simone that she represented a new era of Black female vocalist, who was wanting to take charge of her own career, and push her music in the directions she was interested in. Her abilities as an instrumentalist, showcased in her own composition "Improvisation", gave her a freedom that her predecessors lacked.

Again her performances on this disc are hindered by poor sound quality, on the first four tracks her vocals are almost buried under the instruments to the point of it being hard to discern her lyrics. Being that her voice is in a lower register, in addition to being soft and melodious, makes it all the more difficult to discern. But the final two numbers are from a different source and provide a much better indication of her abilities.

Dinah Washington is the third of the featured ladies on this disc, and she again represents another side of the jazz/blues music scene. Although referred to in her day as the "Queen of the Blues" she was far more a pop singer than either Billie Holliday or Nina Simone.

Her sound was more big band swing than either of the other two women, and had a much wider commercial appeal. She started with the Lionel Hampton Band and that set the tone for her career. She recorded songs ranging from the standards, through to a cover of Hank Williams' "Cold, Cold Heart". She was also an accomplished gospel singer, but point blank refused to record that music insisting that it had no place in the secular world.

The six songs featuring Dinah on this DVD have probably the best sound quality for any of the three main performers, and give a very good indication of both the type of music she favoured and her big powerful voice. Like other singers with a gospel background, Aretha Franklin would be the best contemporary example, Dinah's voice was strong, passionate, and could wring a note for all its emotional worth.

Judging by the selections presented her control was such that she never once stepped over the line into the melodrama that so many of the current crop of torch song singers (Celine Dion anyone) confuse with emotion. Listening to her performance of "I Don't Hurt Anymore" is to hear a singer celebrate the joy of being released from the chains of a love gone bad.

There is a joy in all of her singing that is infectious, and goes a long way to explaining her widespread popularity. Even on tape you can feel her energy bursting through as she "sells" her material. She was definitely far more a show person than either Billie Holliday or Nina Simone, but that in no way diminishes her talent. She may have had more commercial appeal than either of the other woman, but she was no less exciting or entertaining for it.

Volume 1, Jazz Voice: The Ladies Sing Jazz may have some technical flaws with regards the sound and picture quality in certain places, but the compensation of having the opportunity to compare these three unique women in one sitting more than makes up for them. How often will Billy Holliday, Nina Simone, and Dinah Washington serenade you while you're sitting at home? That in itself makes this a great buy.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:40 AM | Permalink

If somebody had told me twelve years ago what I was letting myself in for I seriously wonder if I would have believed them. Of course that raises the question of whether or not I would have attempted what I've done if I had believed them? You see twelve years ago I made the decision to change my life from that of an addict to whatever it is I'm now.

I had plenty of excuses for being an addict, that's the great thing about being an addict you can always find a reason for your behaviour. It's usually someone else's fault that you're the way you are not your own. You never made that decision to take the first drink, smoke that first joint, or whatever.

Of course there are mitigating circumstances that can drive a person to try and hide from the pain of their existence by numbing themselves. Anaesthetic that comes from a bottle, a needle, a piece of blotter paper, or any of the other many a splendid means at your disposal, is the easiest route to take when you're thirteen, scared and alone.

As a teenager in the seventies it was far easier to obtain drugs than alcohol; no one is going to ask you for identification when you buy it and in those innocent days a nickel bag was actually five dollars. It wasn't until the American government, in a fit of moral outrage, starting spraying the Mexican pot crops with the pesticide Paraquat that pot prices jumped from twenty-five dollars an ounce to $120.00 for Columbian Gold. (Not to be confused with the Columbian white powders that was worth more than gold in the 1980s)

But whatever the price I seemed able to spend my high school years in a complete fog, and by the time I entered my second last year I made the jump to the big leagues and began chemical usage. Making use of the stuff that passed for L. S. D. in those days was always a risky proposition unless you knew the chemist. Potency, and contents were wildly divergent even within the same batch.

Still, it was inexpensive, at most $5.00 a hit and lasted a good long time. If you worked it right you could stay high all day long for as little as $20.00 and not even be too incapacitated to work. I spent six weeks in the summer of 1979 doing just basically that when I travelled out to Western Canada to work in a resort hotel in Banff Alberta.

As the legal drinking age in Alberta was eighteen at the time, unlike my native Ontario's nineteen, I was also able to begin drinking seriously at the same time. Now that's a pretty lethal combination, a steady diet of acid and booze does not do much for one's mental health. It's been known to have a detrimental effect on your cognitive abilities.

Thankfully I had enough sense to realize this and deciding a change of scene would be healthy, caught a red-eye flight back to Ontario after six weeks. Sitting on the plane, strung out and hung over, unable to sleep I looked out the cabin window to see the sun rising like a ball of red fire and momentarily thought a nuclear bomb had gone off somewhere in Northern Ontario.

I was so far gone that it took me almost five minutes to recognise what it was that I was seeing. Wiser men than me would have taken that as a sign that changes should be made. But unlike my contemporaries, who as university approached and the real world beckoned, began to change their habits, mine became more deeply entrenched.

For the next fourteen years I continued to work on keeping myself comfortably numb for as much of the time as possible. People who work in the arts are hard drinkers and livers anyway, so my behaviour didn't seem as outlandish as it would have in other circumstances. I had also learned how to make sure that the worst of my excesses weren't on public display.

If I was always slightly stoned it was no big deal because I was doing my work and getting things accomplished. But I was beginning to bottom out without realizing what was happening. Even after the summer of 1992 when my behaviour became so abhorrent that I lost all my friends it took my two more years to realize I had a problem of any sort.

My stroke of luck came about via circumstances most others would look upon as bad fortune. At other times I have written about having reconstructive knee surgery in 1992 that resulted in my contracting sympathetic dystrophy in the left leg. After two years of living on Tylenol three (30mg codeine tablets) and hashish to deaden the pain I reached the point where I was desperate for help.

From the knee down my left leg had turned grey as the circulation disintegrated. As a thirty-third birthday present a friend arranged for me to see an acupuncturist. Thankfully the woman who I went to see was extremely generous as well as gifted. My leg was going to require extensive work and would take weeks of sessions, time that I would not have been able to afford to pay for, so she didn't charge me for the treatments.

After the first treatment I began to have nightmares; after the second treatment they got worse; and after the third treatment I began to have flashbacks of my father raping me as a child. I thought I was losing my mind. Why did I wake up every morning believing I was five years old and that my father was raping me?

Somehow or other the treatments for my knee had freed up the memories. When I asked my acupuncturist about it she said that it was quite normal for deep nerve trauma like mine to have some emotional trauma associated with it. She also advised I seek counselling as soon as possible to help me recover, because that was beyond her capabilities.

She made one more suggestion, that I should consider stopping my use of street drugs, as they would only hinder my recovery. At the time that was not advice I was prepared to listen to, as they seemed to be one of the few things I could count on for a modicum of comfort. That the comfort was the ability to escape the emotional pain and anguish made it all the more difficult a habit to give up.

The therapist who I began seeing days worked with helping survivors of abuse, and other Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome recoveries, to correct their inappropriate coping mechanisms to healthy alternatives: Behaviour Modification in other words.

Our first sessions involved me just spilling out the traumas of the past week, flashbacks, memories, and other incidents that had left me reeling. As I gradually began to regain my footing in this, my new reality, we began to look at the variety of means that I employed to keep myself from remembering what had happened in my past.

By this time I had already begun to realize the negative impact that drugs and booze were having on my life. How, even though initially they might have seemed to be the ideal way of protecting myself from the horrors in my past, they had become the fount of many of my behavioural problems.

Resentment, anger, self-pity, and self –loathing were all lurking beneath the surface, ready to seep out like poison from a wound when the scab is torn away. It was a pretty ugly time, believe me, one that I wouldn't want to go through again, but am glad I did.

When you begin to feel like your making it, when you begin to feel free of the chains that had been binding you for years, the feelings of relief, and jubilation are extraordinary. This initial feeling of exultation can carry you quite a long way, but eventually it will wear off and you 're brought back to earth.

The real tricky part about being a recovering addict is not starting the activity again, drinking or drugs, because a craving can be recognised for what it is and dealt with. It's the long-term effects of feeling like the world revolves around you and the emotions that thrive in that atmosphere that become the real trial.

When you have no means of comparing what is right and what is wrong, you are like a young child again, learning to understand and control the feelings that rage and cry inside of you. It is easy to fall into the trap of feeling resentment and self-pity, which will than lead you into self-loathing because of your disappointment in yourself for the perceived failure.

As the years pass it gets easier, but I still have to be vigilant so that I don't fall back on the habits of old. Of course things aren't made any easier by the fact I'm still also dealing with residual effects of the abuse coming back to haunt me periodically as well. Perhaps once I have finally laid the demons to rest that caused me to look for an escape, I'll be able to put these feelings behind me as well

I do know that it is a damn good thing I was woefully ignorant about what I was letting myself in for when this all started. It would have seemed an insurmountable task. Rebuilding your life from the bottom up isn't easy, but even if I have to spend the rest of my days on it, it will have been worth it.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:53 AM | Permalink

Before there was J.K. Rowling and a certain bespectacled young wizard there was Susan Cooper and Will Stanton. On the surface Will looks like any other eleven – twelve year- old boy, but he exists in two separate worlds. He is the last of the Old Ones, a circle of magical men and women who exist throughout the ages of the world fighting a constant battle against the powers of the Dark

In the five books of her Dark Is Rising sequence Susan Cooper depicts a desperate battle being waged under our very noses against powers that would create a world of fear and hatred. Drawing heavily on British myth, tradition, and history; with heavy emphasis on Arthurian lore; Cooper's Old Ones make use of the magic that is buried in our past.

Traveling back and forth in time, observing such rituals as the hunting of the Wren, witnessing the invasion of Wales by the English (proving that the powers of the Dark can wear many faces) and observing the construction of a Roman amphitheatre in England, readers are given a history of the British Isles that is remarkable for its unconventionality. With both Herne the Hunter and Arthur Pendragon playing roles of vital importance in the fight against the Dark, Cooper makes it possible to believe in the existence of myth even amid the bustle of the twentieth century.

We first meet young Will in book two The Dark Is Rising (from which the sequence derives its title) on the eve of his 11th birthday. The seventh son of a seventh son his birthday on Mid Winter's day will not only signify another year passing for Will, but act as his birth into his heritage as an Old One, warriors for the forces of the Light in the constant struggle against the Dark.

Will is the last of the Old One's to be born, because it is in his time, the twentieth century, that the last great rising of the Dark has been foreseen. All through the ages of men there have been great risings, indeed there have been times when it would appear the Dark has been triumphant. (They weren't called The Dark Ages for nothing) But in order for them to obtain complete domination they have to win through in our modern times and complete their circle of power, just as the Old Ones must win through to join their circle of protection against the Dark throughout the ages.

Until Will's time the Old Ones have fought a holding action, keeping the Darkness at bay. Will's task is to gather things of power that the Light may use to finally drive the Dark from the world. He will not be alone in this task though. The first of the old ones (easily seen as Merlin) Merriam Lyon in our world, is there to teach and guide him as much as possible, but it's four other young people around his age that will have key roles in assisting him.

Barney, Jane and Simon Drew are regular children on holiday with their Great Uncle Merriam in the fishing town of Treswick in Cornwall England in the first book of the sequence, Over Sea, Under Stone and they recover the first thing of power. An ancient Celtic Chalice that is the key to deciphering a scroll that will provide the Light with vital information needed to help overcome the Dark.

The first time they and Will meet is in book three The Greenwitch where the four of them work with Merriam to recover both the Chalice and the lost scroll. Back in the same village of Treswick that everything started for the Drews in book one, Cooper incorporates one of the old fertility rites of the Cornish coast into the story line.

The Greenwitch of the title is a construct of Hawthorn and Rowan branches made into a giant figure, weighed down with rocks, and offered to the sea in the springtime as an offering to ensure to good fishing and crops. As the fishermen head out to sea, the women of the village gather on the headland to build the Greenwitch. When the men come home in the morning, safe and with their holds full of fish, they join the women on the headland and push the offering out to sea.

With the reluctant help of the Greewitch and the White Goddess of the Sea, Tethys, the Drews, Will, and Merriam are able to recover the Chalice, the scroll, and decipher the secret writing on the cup. The next stage of Will's journey will be in the oldest part of Great Britain: Wales.

The power of the Dark can't directly harm or kill an Old One, but it can use a variety of forces against them. At the beginning of The Grey King will is beset with a fever that comes close to killing him. Although he does recover in the end, he discovers that he's forgotten the instructions the Grail had given him for completing his task in Wales.

But when his mother suggests he visit an old family friend who lives in Wales he starts to remember snippets. It's in Wales that Will meets the last of those who will take a role in the fight against the Dark. Bran is an almost albino boy (Bran was the name of the white Raven in Welch) with a mysterious past. Abandoned by his mother into the care of a man not his birth father he's lived the life of an outcast with his only friend being his dog Cafall.

What neither Will nor Bran know is that Bran is the legitimate son of Arthur Pendragon brought forward in time by Merlin at Guinevere's request because she fears that Arthur will not believe the child to be his because of her affair with Lancelot. As the heir of Arthur Bran also inherits the mantle of leading the fight against the rising tide of darkness in his century.

As Will completes the circle that began with Merriam, Bran completes the circle of human champions that have stood for the Light in the battle for domination. His father was not able to completely defeat the Dark, only buy some time. In the Grey Kings Will not only has to awaken the mysterious Six Sleeping Kings who will be needed for the final battle against the dark he must awaken Bran to his true nature.

For in the final quest and battle depicted in Silver On The Tree Bran must be Arthur to Will's Merlin. In this, the final chapter, Barney, Jane, and Simon join them, and again have a role to play in ensuring the Lights success. It is Jane who is able to receive a vital message that sets Will and Bran off onto their final quest into the mysterious drowned world off the coast of Wales.

What makes these books so special, at least in my mind, is the obvious love that Susan Cooper has for her material. Not just for the story and characters she has created, which are both wonderful, but the historical and mythical material that is a vital element of this story. It shows in the manner in which she makes the information integral to the story, thus to the lives of contemporary people.

She makes legend and history come to life, and without cheapening or sensationalizing it, makes it something exciting. History isn't just something that happened long ago, according to her story, but is an ongoing adventure, only awaiting a reader's presence as an observer to come to life.

While other fantasy writers for young people might shy away from concepts and ideas, content simply with telling a story, Ms. Cooper plays around with the concept of time and space by having all events always happening at all times for the Old Ones. So that while Will and Bran are in battle with Dark in the 20th century, Arthur is fighting in his time, the Welsh king is fighting his losing battle against the English in his time. The past, present, and the future are always ongoing in this never-ending battle and there is always a part to be played, no matter how small, insignificant, or futile it might feel.

Susan Cooper is very careful not to ascribe one way of being; whether religion, lifestyle, or society, to either side in her conflict. It is a battle that transcends human belief systems and culture. By utilizing imagery and stories from our pre-Christian past, and tracing the roots of current beliefs back into the murky depths of time, she frees the battle against evil from being exclusive to any one people.

The Dark lives in our mistreatment of others out of prejudice and hatred. It lives in our willingness to not make an effort, or to sit back and say it's not my responsibility. In opposition, even a small act of kindness on one person's part can offset malicious intent; thus are the battle lines are drawn.

Over the course of the five books in The Dark Is Rising sequence Susan Cooper takes her readers, of all ages, on a journey into the mythic world of Great Britain and an exploration of human nature. That may sound overly ambitious for a fantasy series geared to young people, but she carries it off with grace and elegance. If you've never had the pleasure of reading these works before, than you have missed out on a great treat. They are well written and beautifully told, and are a perfect antidote to Harry Potter withdrawal and anticipation.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:10 AM | Permalink

I'm finished. After six months three weeks and two days I now have a completed manuscript for book one of a work tentatively called The Paths Life Takes. I hooked up my removable floppy disc drive to my ancient lap top and copied it onto disc, ready to take to the printers on a moments notice should the need arise.

My main reaction right now is one of relief. It was starting to feel like the proverbial albatross around my neck. Until I had finished editing, reformatting, and preparing it for printing I didn't feel able to continue on with part two of the story. With book one incomplete it didn't seem right that I let the characters continue on with their journey.

I think part of that was because of how fast I wrote the first draft. I didn't really feel like I had gotten to know my characters all that well because I hadn't spent a great deal of time with them yet. We had been introduced briefly, spent a small but intense time together, and hadn't talked since; sort of like someone you meet at a party whom you have a great conversation with but don't talk to again.

You know something about them, but only as it pertains to the topic of conversation that you had and no more. It was enough to let you know this person was interesting and it would be nice to get to know him or her better. It's not until you have a chance to meet the person in the cold light of day, away from the exhilarated atmosphere of a party, and whatever was feeding your exhilaration, that you begin to form a truer picture of their character.

That's the way I felt in regards to the people who were populating this world I had created. I had spent time with them under very specific circumstances – hell bent for leather to get a first draft done, but hadn't really gotten to know them yet. So much of what I had written during the first draft phase had been by instinct alone that I had no idea of what details I may or may not have included for each person.

What colour were their eyes? How old were they? What's their favourite food? What colour is their hair? Being their creator I can see each one of them in my mind's eye. As I was writing the story I was watching them carry out the actions I described them doing. But what kind of image had I painted for the reader?

I wasn't interested in having painted a completely realistic portrait where ten pages are spent describing each person in minute detail down to their preference in toenail length. But it was also important that enough information be provided that each reader would be able to form a picture of the person they were reading about in their head.

As I was reading through it again, editing and rewriting as needed, I realised the image a reader will create in his or her head may have actually quite little to do with any specific physical characteristics described by an author. Certainly they will form a framework for perceptions but it's these other details that will flesh out the creations.

Information comes out through their interpersonal relations with others, the ways other see them, and how they are described behaving in certain circumstances. People can change over the course of their lives, and characters in a novel are no different. So one has to keep that in mind while writing lest you end up with cardboard cut outs that simply parrot the words you put in their mouths without revealing anything of their soul.

I would think that ideally you'd not want to recognise the people you've created. When you re-read your draft they have grown so far beyond what you were thinking, although they are the same character you created, that they reveal themselves to be much more then you remember.

Konstantin Stanislavski has developed a less then stellar reputation among modern theatre people due to the wrongful belief that he is responsible for method acting. Lee Strasburg's "Method" was guilty of a glaring omission from what Stanislavski had created to assist actors in bringing honesty to their on stage creations.

While Stanislavski preached character development based on the information provided by the script, and an actor's imagination, thus removing the personality of the actor from the performance, Strasbourg skipped that part and focused solely on teaching his pupils how to recreate emotions on stage through sense memory. Instead of the actor creating a character who would express those emotions, Method actors would be themselves on stage emoting all over the place.

An actor with a fully developed character has no reason to wonder what his or her motivation is for doing something, the answer lies within easy reach simply by asking what would my character do in these circumstances. The Method actor, having nothing of substance to draw upon, will puzzle over the simple task of opening a door to get to the other side for hours. (Federico Fellini, the great Italian director was reported to have said that he hated working with American actors because they were constantly wondering what their motivation was to open a door.)

As an author I have to hope that the characters I've created are more in line with Stanislavski's idea, although instead of basing their creation around an already existing source of material, I have created them as part of the material. When I re-read what I have written I look for those things that were the hallmarks of a Stanislavski trained actor's creation: consistency in action and reaction.

Do they stay in character, and do what is logical for them given the circumstances. Are all their actions justified by the information that I have made available to the reader? Yes they can change, but have I given sufficient reason for that change to be affected? If they do something "out of character" do the circumstances justify their actions?

Maybe it's only because I was an actor and worked in theatre for 12 years that I took that perspective, I don't know. What I do know is that it seems to be what I did instinctively anyway. While plot and circumstances are important to the novel of course, the characters; their stories, their inter-relationships, their growth as people, and watching them in the various situations they are presented with is the major focus of the novel.

I seem to have created something that is the result of a union between the novel and a play. Combining the character driven narrative of a play with the neutral narration of the novel to hopefully incorporate the best of both worlds to facilitate the telling of the story.

If you were to ask me if that were my intent when I set out, in truth, I don't know. Honesty forces me to admit that I had no stylistic plan at all; hell I didn't even have an outline. It was more along the lines of one long improvisation. I gave myself circumstances, a location, and developed characters as needed and created as I went.

Each new chapter was a microcosm of the overall, as certain individuals would be given their situation and tasks to accomplish, than left to their own devices as to how that would happen. (As much as that's possible with me dictating the action) I had a visual concept of how I saw the scene developing, like seeing performers on a stage, and I attempted to accomplish that with the tools at my disposal.

Of course the risks inherent in this type of work are quite high. First you have to hope that the characters are interesting enough for the reader to care about what happens to them. Sure there is the suspense of the plot, but with the characters carrying the load of the narrative, if the reader loses interest in them they will quickly lose interest in the book.

The other major risk is that it will turn out to be crap. Improvisation is a highly tricky discipline, and without keeping a tight reign on the proceedings it's very easy to meander off in directions that bear no resemblance to what you had in mind happening in the first place.

Well as the saying goes the proof is in the pudding, so it wasn't until I began the process of reading and editing that I knew if I was able to start working on the second volume. If I were going to end up being forced to almost completely rewrite the majority of the novel to make it read truer than there was no point in even contemplating focusing on part two.

Like I said earlier I also needed to remind myself of who these people were again. For as they developed the plot, the plot and the story developed them. When dealing with that type of symbiotic relationship you can't just randomly pick up in the middle of nowhere and start again, you have to be sure of where and what you're dealing with.

So the process of re-writes and editing was not just an exercise in cleaning and polishing, it was a means of reintroducing myself to the characters I had created through writing the story. Now that I've gotten to know them again, I can pick up from where I left off, and walk with them to the end of their journey.

I just hope they know how they're getting there, because I know where they have to end up, but have no idea how that's going to happen. Should be a fun trip. I hope you'll want to come along for the ride.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:50 AM | Permalink

I seem to have become a reviewer, even, dare I say it a critic. I can't quite figure out how it happened, but looking over my out put for the last while a great deal of it has been in the form of either book or CD reviews, with the occasional DVD thrown in for good measure.

I have to admit that part of it can be laid at the feet of the kid in the candy store syndrome; all of a sudden being presented with so many goodies that you grab a little of each. Not only does one of the sites I write for, Blogcritics.org, make available to its writers a whole slew of material for review, I have started receiving requests from publicists to review their people, and I have developed the audacity to approach major publishing houses for review copies of books I am interested in. In any give week that means I could have as many as five posts being review material only.

At first this became a bit of cause for alarm in my head; how will writing so many similar type of articles affect me stylistically, creatively, and etc. etc. ad nausea. The usual insecure writer stuff that distinguishes the unpublished from those with by-lines and titles to their credit and that fuels late night, lying awake in bed, worry sessions.

Its nights like those when you start to remember all the nasty things you've ever heard said, or have said yourself, about reviewers and critics. "Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, review". Thoughts like that are not what I'd call conducive to feeling positive about my abilities.

I feed myself the standard argument that writing is writing, and anything you do is good practice. But, I rebut, there's only so much you can learn from doing the same type of thing over and over again until it becomes formulaic and stifling. But, I reply, isn't it the sign of a good writer that he or she can do things to make the familiar fresh? That's not the point, I argue back, it's the way it begins to shape your thinking process, which will confine your brain to thinking in terms of analysis only. What's that got to do with being a creative artist?

So now the truth comes out, it's the old argument of it's not art if it's not a work of literary fiction, or a work of pure, virgin inspiration. That's it isn't it? Idiot. Weren't you the one talking about how inspiring it was watching and listening to that Willy DeVille DVD, Live In The Lowlands. Aren't you the same guy who's written reviews praising people for making you want to pick up pen and paper and producing work?

I can keep this argument going indefinitely in my head, always finding a way to diminish the validity of critical analysis as a form of expression. When I'm in that sort of mood there's just no arguing with me. I just have to hope I'll come to my senses in a while, and listen to reason. You know what these folk with artistic pretensions can be like though; sometimes they can't see the damned woods for the trees.

For some reason I was just reminded of the Monty Python's move The Holy Grail. There's a character, a Prince, whose father is trying to marry him off, and he keeps saying, "But Father, I only want to sing". Practical, real world considerations have no place in his life, he's an artiste who shouldn't have to sully himself with life's dirty little messes.

You can make yourself quite the object of ridicule easily enough as it is without acting the pea brain in public or even in private. I can guarantee that during my 'But Father, I only want to sing' moments that I've completely forgotten what the purpose of writing is, and why I wanted to start writing in the first place.

Writing is simply a means of communication; ideas, emotions and anything else that we humans desire to express are fodder for the writer. Communication can be achieved through telling a story, composing a poem, writing an essay or research paper around an idea, or telling people your thoughts on a specific subject matter in an editorial piece.

The creativity comes into play via how you approach your means of expressing your theme or idea. Humans have been telling each other stories since we developed a language beyond grunts. In order to keep our audiences listening we've learned how to embellish basic facts like "I killed a big Mastodon on the hunt" To a blow by blow account which could include having to fight off a sabre tooth tiger for the carcass, how closely you came to being gored, and any number of other exciting bits of colour that would be guaranteed to keep folk interested.

Not much has changed except an increase in the variety of ways that we have of embellishing a story. It shouldn't matter whether we are writing a story, a review, or anything else, the only thing that confines creativity is our willingness to allow a preconceived notion of how something is supposed to be dictate what we do.

There is creativity involved in finding different ways to approach a task. As long as you are able to complete the objective of communicating the relevant information anything you write becomes an artistic creation.

When you are in the situation I'm in, writing because I want to and publishing to the Internet, the freedom is there to reinvent structure as you go. The only thing limiting me is a lack of imagination on my part created by old prejudices and forgetting my purpose.

For me to tell myself that I'm not being creative because I'm not writing fiction or poetry is as ridiculous saying I'm not sleeping because I'm laying on a couch instead of a bed. Someday I may even grow up enough to believe that.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:57 AM | Permalink

Every night across North America and probably around the world there are men and women who climb onto stages in dives, bars, honky-tonks, taverns, hotels, and anywhere else you can plug in an amplifier to play music. Some of them are just doing it for fun, and will soon fade away, not being able to stand the horrible hours, the bad money, and the inability to maintain stable relationships with any sort of ease.

Others will realize that this is as far as music will take them, that either from lack of talent or drive, they won't be escaping the bar circuit. They will either pack it in at that time, or they will continue to play weekend gigs for fun and because they still might hold on to a vestige of that dream that got them up on stage in the first place.

I'm not talking about dreams of fame and fortune, but something a lot simpler, but so much more complex as well. While the money and the material comforts that come (not to mention someone to carry your equipment for you) with celebrity would of course be welcome what's even more compelling is that chance at immortality: to be remembered. Not just by your family and friends remembered, but by the world at large for doing what you loved.

What does it take to achieve that immortality? Talent, certainly; luck, most definitely, but neither one will be enough on their own. It takes that spark of greatness; indefinable, intangible, and indispensable, to lift a player from the crowd of players into the spotlight. But even that can be insufficient, unless that spark is captured at the perfect moment in time it can flicker out as transient as a firefly on a summer's night.

The same ignition and fuel that fires that spark can lead to self-immolation if it burns unchecked and without respite. Such was the case for the talented and brilliant blues harmonica player William Clarke from Southern California. At the moment when his career was graduating from bars to venues his life was cut short in 1996 at the age of forty-five.

According to Will's late wife, Jeanette Clarke-Lodovici, he was already into the blues when they met and he was sixteen. He had started out as a drummer but had switched to harmonica and obviously felt he had found his passion.

(He) would practice for 8-10 hours a day locked in the bathroom. We were newlyweds and this was weird to me...I always thought he loved that harp more than me. I pretty much saw Bill evolve into a master on the harmonica. (Jeanette Clarke-Lodovici)

At this time it was the late sixties and in Los Angeles a lot of the old time blues and jazz musicians were still playing the clubs in the black ghettos where few white would go. Will went and would play and listen. Learning from some of the great musicians of the previous generation; Big Momma Thornton. Big Joe Turner, Pee Wee Crayton, and George Smith.

It was George who would have the most influence on Will in his early career. George had been a player in the Muddy Watters band and pretty much took Will under his wing in those early days. They played and recorded together during the seventies. Bill recorded his first album, Hittin' Heavy in 1978. This was followed by Blues From Los Angeles in 1980, Can’t You Hear Me Calling in 1983, Tip Of The Top (a tribute to George Smith who had died in 1983) 1987, and a live album Rockin' The Boat in 1988.

It wasn't until 1990 though that Will signed with a label, and his first album for Alligator Records Blowin' Like Hell was followed in 1992 by Serious Intentions, 1994 Groove Time and finally 1996's The Hard Way. By this time Bill was playing in front of more than just bar audiences, thousands of people at a time, but like so many other musicians before him, he was a terribly shy man. In order to get up on stage he was drinking a fifth of hard liquor a day.

From the description provided by Will's late wife Jeanette, it sounds that even though he was able to stop drinking after recording The Hard Way the damage may have already been done. He bled to death in hospital in Fresno California.

Fortunately, Will left a treasure trove of tapes and unreleased recordings that are only now being released. Live In Germany is the second CD that Jeanette has released for public consumption and it's musically a gem. Unfortunately there's no mention in the packaging of where or when it was recorded so you'll just have to live without those details; it might just be that this material came from a master with no concrete information except designating it was recorded in Germany.

Whatever the case maybe, if this disc is indicative of William Clarke's playing, he was most definitely a force to be reckoned with as a harmonica player. I have to admit up front that when it comes to technicalities and terminology about harmonica playing I'm totally at sea. I couldn't tell you cross harp playing from a hole in the ground.

But the harmonica is one of those instruments where that type of knowledge isn't needed to appreciate and assess the talent behind the instrument. Like its larger cousins in the woodwinds section, the saxophone, clarinet etc, the harmonica in the hands of a skilled player can open up a window into its player's soul.

The cry of the harmonica cutting through the chugging of the rhythms of a song should be able to reach out and grab you by the heart and pull you into the passion of the song. Many is the time I've seen players strut there stuff with a series of staccato huffs and puffs, bending notes and blowing hard, and have been left completely unmoved. Why? Because although their technique maybe great, they aren't willing to step off the edge and surrender control to their emotions.

From the first time you hear Will's harp on the track "Blowin' Like Hell" on the Live In Germany disc you know you're in for something special. Not only is his playing style unlike any blue's harpist I've ever heard before, there is a rawness and purity to its sound that sent shivers up my spine. Will was exploring territory technically and emotionally where paths hadn't been made yet.

The first thing you'll notice is the sound of the band; it's more what you'd expect from a jazz band than a blues group. The clean melodic guitar, swinging bass lines, and less aggressive attitude from the drummer all added up to a sound that is freer than one normally associate with the blues.

Instead of the formulaic quality that blues can generate, their sound left plenty of room for everybody to move around and improvise. Instead of the alto tenor sax of Charlie Parker putting a band through its paces, Will Clarke's harmonica led the way.

For those who want Chicago blues, don't worry that's here too, Will's song "Educated Fool" is as grand an example as any you'll ever hear. Listen to his solos and how he drives the beat, how it pulsates like a heart and turns the song into a living creature.

Will doesn't try to bludgeon you into submission with his harmonica by playing endless streams of notes at high speed. Instead he'd rather imbue one note with soul and have it transmit his message. It's on the more jazz influenced tunes that you'll understand by comparison how different and remarkable a player he truly is.

Will Clarke may never gain the renown of people like Muddy Watters or B. B. King, the market has changed too much, and his career was far too brief. But that doesn't mean he will be forgotten. Will Clarke deserves a share of the immortal brass ring that musicians strive for. Once you hear him play harmonica you won't soon forget him.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:21 AM | Permalink

This past weekend, on Mother's Day in fact, my wife was walking downtown when she saw a cardboard sign that had been affixed to someone's front porch. Roughly, the sign read as follows: "To the person who stole the flowers I had planted in memory of my grandmother, was it because you forgot it was Mother's Day?"

What worried my wife wasn't so much the sign, but the severity of her reaction to it. She said she felt sad, for the people who had their memorial stolen, angry at the bastards that did the stealing, and proud of the people for putting the sign up and not just sitting back and taking the abuse. The fact that the sign had almost reduced her to tears of both anger and sorrow made her feel like there was something wrong with her.

As a little background you should know that my wife has been diagnosed with an acute anxiety disorder and a persistent panic condition. Because of that she is continually worried about her emotional reactions. She continually wonders what a "normal" person's reactions would be in similar circumstances, whenever she has strong feelings about any incident.

Looking at that paragraph as I've just written it, I can't help but be reminded of a song from the early eighties by Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn (pronounced co-burn) called "The Trouble With Normal". The line in particular that sticks in my head is the following: "The trouble with normal is it always gets worse"

I've always interpreted that as meaning the way in which society becomes inured to events, and how that we now, while not necessarily deeming it acceptable behaviour, take it for granted that things like someone digging up flowers from another person's garden, are going to happen. Our desensitization is such that in general we require stronger and strong stimuli to elicit any sort of reaction on our parts.

If we can read in the papers about millions of people infected with AIDS virus, or starving to death, or dying in a civil war, without turning a hair, there's probably no reason to expect anyone to get upset because someone has had their flowers stolen. It probably seems pretty trivial to most people right; it's just some plants that can be replaced.

We used to have an asshole crack dealer/fence living across the street from us. What made it worse was how so many people on the block would actually buy stuff from the guy even though they knew it was stolen. A couple of summers ago, a whole bunch of plants, shrubs and even a small tree showed up outside their apartment.

The tree in particular caught my eye, as it looked exactly like one I had seen just being planted in the front yard of a house around the corner. I don't remember what it was called but it was ornamental and obviously quite expensive. On a hunch I went around the corner and noticed the tree was no longer in the same place. I knocked on the front door and asked the woman who answered if she had transplanted her tree.

She said no, it had gone missing sometime the previous day. She had gone out in the morning and come home in late afternoon to find it gone. Someone had dug the tree out of her front lawn in broad daylight and carried it away. I told her I knew where it was and would get it back for her.

I went home and found one of my idiot neighbours had bought it. She started to put up a fuss, even though she knew it was hot, she didn't want to return it. I threatened her with the police, picked it up (it still hadn't been replanted) and took it back to where it belonged. To me it seemed like no big deal, making sure that someone didn't get screwed over by assholes and creeps, but to the woman whose tree it was it was very important.

First there was the material worth of the tree, than of course the emotional investment, but what really amazed her was that anyone would care enough to help get it back for her. In turn I was amazed by her reaction. I was just doing what I considered normal. I saw something had been done wrong, there was a way to fix it, so I did. Big deal

But that's not normal. What's normal is to buy the stuff from the assholes even though you know it's hot and not think twice about whose it could have come from. Or it's normal to know about something and do nothing to correct the situation. It doesn't matter if it's a stolen tree or plant, neighbours selling crack to fourteen-year-old kids, or making enough noise all night long to keep the rest of the block awake; people just shrug and say what can you do, it's just the way things are.

So when my wife starts getting worried that her emotional reactions might not be "normal", I ask her if she really wants to be, or even cares what is, "normal". I look around and see for how many people the world ceases to exist beyond the tip of their nose. Not just because they are locked into their cell phone, or they have portable music wired into their brains. Even unplugged far too many have stopped considering that there might be other people sharing the same planet.

How else could you explain supposed adults in their thirties and forties lining three cars up in a residential neighbourhood and turning all three stereos on full blast and calling the person who tells them to turn them off an asshole? How else could you explain people able to walk by someone lying on the sidewalk bleeding, with out even using their cell phones to call 911?

If being normal means not stopping to enjoy the sound of bird song, getting pleasure from watching birds have dust baths or squirrels chasing each other around the trunks of trees, and not dancing in the rain for the sheer hell of it, I don't see much to recommend it. If being normal means ignoring the fact that there is a person standing beside you who might not like your groceries resting on their foot, or sitting in the elderly and handicapped seats on the bus and making a fuss when you're told to give the seat up to someone who needs it, the argument for abnormality just got stronger.

A while ago I wrote something where I said that given the conditions in today's world being on some sort of anti anxiety medication is probably a healthy sign. At least it means you care about the state of the world. I find it more unsettling that more of the population isn't medicated. That means far too many people think there's nothing wrong and every thing's normal.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 06:45 AM | Permalink

I still haven't quite got what all the fuss is about over The De Vinci Code, it's only a work of fiction. Heck it's not even that original an idea; Jesus Christ was a human being who had a wife and kids and died and the Vatican has conspired for two thousand years to cover up this truth. Ho Hum. Been there, read it, and almost bought the T-shirt.

I'm not even talking about the guys who wrote The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail either. That wasn't the first book to come down the pipe about the mystery surrounding the life and times of the carpenter from Nazareth who was cast into the role of saviour. It wasn't even the first one to incur the wrath of the Vatican and find itself on the proscribed list.

Nikos Kazantzakis only had to have Jesus be tempted while on the cross with giving up Godhood in exchange for married life to get himself in trouble. The irony of course is that Nikos was a devout Christian who believed in the divinity of the Christ. But he had Him be sorely tempted at the last moment to give it all up for the love of a good woman. (Is it just me or does it sound like there's a country song lurking in there somewhere)

But the first book I read which dealt with the thorny subject of "The Cover Up" was by American author Tom Robbins. His first novel, published in 1971, Another Roadside Attraction meandered into the catacombs of the Vatican and found out the deepest, darkest secret.

Amanda is a fortuneteller in a travelling circus of hippies and other exotica, when she meets Jazz musician/Film Maker/Magician John Paul Ziller and his baboon Mon Cul (who happens to be the only creature in existence who knows a word that rhymes with orange). Before you can say, "love at first sight" they have announced their marriage, and abandoned their itinerant ways to open another roadside attraction.

In their case this amounts to a hot dog stand and flea circus. They've only just settled in to raising their first born, when Marx Marvellous wanders into their lives (surprisingly not his real name, he created it on the theory that those two words together would be enough to set any decent red blooded American male's teeth on edge.) Marx ingratiates himself into their lives under false pretences. While pretending to be a fellow traveller on the road less travelled, he is actually a plant sent out by a think tank in Washington to discover what the younger generation is in an uproar about (remember this was written in 1971 and while the sixties were dieing, revolutionary fervour was still somewhat in the air).

The hot dog stand, by the time of Mark's appearance, had become sort of a lode stone for those who were following the advice of Tim Leary on "Turning On, Tuning In, and Dropping Out", so it seemed like the ideal place for Mark to take as his base of operations. So he spends his days working at the zoo, lusting after Amanda, and being educated in the mysteries of the Universe as understood by Amanda, John Paul, and Mon Cul.

But all good things, such as they are, must come to an end, and in this case the end appears in the shape of an old friend of John Paul's: L. Westminster "Plucky" Pursell. Plucky is a former college football star turned drug dealer/fixer/ and general all around black market operative. Aside from his prodigious appetite for members of the opposite sex, which often lands him in a heap of trouble, he's also highly skilled in the art of unarmed combat.

One of the drawbacks with work in his field is that it will occasionally require you to seek shelter from individuals who have decided they don't like your business practices. On this occasion Plucky had sought refuge in the deep woods of Minnesota. Exchanging identities with a monk, he beats a hasty retreat to a highly isolated monastery.

Well, as you've probably guessed, it turns out that said monastery is home to one of those nefarious secret establishments run by the Vatican, and chock full to bursting with assassin monks, spy monks, and all sorts of other monks doing un-monk like things. It turns out that the monk (isn't fiction great) that Plucky is impersonating has been sent to help train Vatican staff in the art of unarmed combat. The Swiss Guard may look impressive, with their pikes and all, but they need to be able to handle crowd control without impaling people. It wouldn't look good on camera to see a pilgrim's entrails spilled on the cobbles of St. Peter's square.

So Plucky ends up in the Vatican, where due to who he supposedly works for, he's given the run of the place. When he's not teaching the Swiss guard how to manhandle people with style, he spends his time poking his nose into places not to often poked around in. Being who he is, he is attracted to some of the deeper catacombs where the lewd and obscene materials have been collected.

One lazy afternoon, while perusing an illuminating illuminated manuscript, Plucky's reverie is shattered by an earthquake. As he's hurrying towards an exit, he notices that a catacomb door has been jarred open. How the fates hinge on such little things as deciding to look through an open doorway. Laid out like anybody's Mummy, and wrapped in the usual Mummy swathes of cloth, is the body of a person around 5'4".

What compelled Plucky, and what inner sense told him who this was, only the cosmos can answer; but Plucky picked up body, knowing full well that he had the bones of Jesus Christ slung over his shoulder. Stopping to remove an unconscious nun's habit and cowl, which he proceeded to disguise his companion with, he raced from the scene yelling for help: to all the world looking like a distraught priest looking to bring succour to one of the sisters.

It was probably the confusion that allowed the fact that Plucky had the body flung over one shoulder escape notice, and let him run right by all the medical help streaming onto the scene. Only upon reaching his apartment and laying down his burden, did the full implications of what he had done sink in. Having no idea how long it would take them to discover who was missing from both the living and dead, he decided to move fast. A casket and a dead aunt got him a flight back to America and a trip to a roadside zoo.

So Jesus came to America for the first time, second if you believe the Mormons, in the cargo hold of an airplane. He crossed the country and eventually became the latest inhabitant of a hot dog stand and roadside zoo.

The unfortunate thing about having an attraction is that sometimes you attract the wrong sort of attention. It didn't take long for the powers that be to put two and two together, put out a missing person's report which featured Plucky and his unspecified cargo and begin to descend on the diner. So Plucky, John Paul, and Mon Cul decided it was best to disappear with their guest. So they boarded a hot air balloon and quite literally vanished

Although I tend to find Tom Robbin's more recent books, probably everything since Still Life With A Woodpecker, poor imitations of his previous works Another Roadside Attraction was a wonderful read at the time when I first read it. Robbins was one of the few writers who was openly expressing and utilizing the ideals of the counterculture in ways that were not either exploitive or judgemental. While he may not have spoken for anybody in particular, at least he spoke in a voice most of us could understand when we read it.

Like Richard Farina in Been Down So Long writing about the early 1960's and the beginnings of the counter culture, Tom Robbins captured the spirit and the mood of the times by simply respecting and caring for his characters. The confusion of people like Marx Marvellous who were caught between admiring the freedoms this new lifestyle offered, but who couldn't quite bring themselves to commit to it wholeheartedly, is treated with sympathy and respect.

Mark is all of us who've yearned to be free but have been too scared to let go of the fetters that bind us to security. Freedom comes with a price, and for some people that price is a little too steep to pay. It means giving up long held beliefs and cherished ideals, which for some is almost impossible.

In a book that has as its centrepiece the mummified remains of the person who supposedly ascended to heaven; proven out by the fact his tomb was empty, one could expect a certain amount of cynicism towards religion. But there is a lightness of touch, a gentleness of spirit if you would, that pervades the book that refuses to allow the reader to become jaded and angry.

Yes Tom Robbins is questioning the idea of Jesus Christ having literally ascended to heaven, but he does it in such a way that he does not condemn anybody. He's just asking people to consider the fact that other possibilities exist. That's pretty much what a lot of young people were doing at the time, considering what alternatives existed for them compared to how their parents had lived and the possibility for change.

Tom Robbins is by means the great writer some people have made him out to be, but all of his books have a gentleness of spirit and a genuine affection for their characters. One can't help liking the people who inhabit his pages no matter how strange they might be.

Another Roadside Attraction is a lot of fun and never takes itself or its plot all that seriously. The gentlemen who have come afterwards with their tales of the nefarious Catholic Church, secret societies, and conspiracy theories, would have done well to have emulated Mr. Robbins a little more and the X-Files and its ilk a little less. Paranoia and cynicism are a lot less palatable than gentleness and humour.

Another Roadside Attraction is almost an artefact of a more innocent time. When people considered change and alternative ideas out of a desire to expand their horizons. Our current fascination with sinister plots and conspiracy theories is as good an example as any of attitudes have changed. We'd rather find something out that confirms the corruption of things around us, then enjoying the enlightenment that can come with knowledge.

Call me naïve if you like, but I kind of miss that innocence.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 06:19 AM | Permalink

I guess since it's happened before, and it happens to people far more talented then I can ever hope to be, it shouldn't surprise me when it happens. But it still takes me by surprise and leaves me feeling a little shaken when I find myself in these circumstances.

I don't think there can be anything worse then getting lost when you’re an artist. By that I mean forgetting your focus; losing track of why it was you were doing what you do in the first place. To all of a sudden find that the reasons and motivation that drove you to become a writer, a musician, or a painter have mutated into something you don't like, I personally think it's the scariest thing that can happen to a creative person, no matter what medium they work in.

The scary part of losing track of your original intent is that, at least in my case, is not even noticing it happening. When it happens to me I'm convinced that everything is okay and that it's business as usual, until something or some things happen to show me otherwise. Of course, then it’s so stunningly obvious I wonder how I could have been so blind as not to see all the clues that were pointing to the problem. Twenty-twenty hindsight is a wonder isn't it?

For the past seven months I've been writing about my quest to take a novel from its inception, or conception if you wish, to birth. At first it was a blow-by-blow account of my participation in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWirMo) competition last November, where the idea was to write 50,000 words within the thirty days of that month.

Once the month was over, and I had made the decision to carry the work to completion, I wrote sporadic reports on my ongoing progress. This included what probably felt like some pointless naval gazing to some, but was all part of the process for me. Being able to think out loud like that was invaluable as it helped me to concentrate thoughts and keep focused on the intent of the whole project.

But there were others things going on at the same time while I was writing the story. I was continuing to write posts for my blog and the sites that I post at, Blogcritics.org and Desicritics.org. and ever so slightly began to get some recognition for my work. Whether in the form of appreciative comments from readers (or less than appreciative ones, notice is notice), approval from editors at the sites where I write, clients approaching me to review work for them, or having other sites approach me for permission to utilize my work it was a new experience for me and I had to learn how to deal with it.

There's part of me that has always had problems accepting compliments, so it took a while for me to catch on that people liked what they were reading, and that I might be good at what I do. But, in the end I had to believe it because enough people from enough places were saying positive things.

Now, show me someone who doesn't enjoy hearing their work complicated? No matter how much we protest to the contrary all of us need ego stroking now and than. It's all very well and good to say that you do something for the sake of doing it, but there is no denying the feeling of satisfaction that comes from knowing somebody else enjoyed it as well.

But there is a fine line that you have to be wary of, well more like a couple of them, but the key one for me is taking myself too seriously. Not that the compliments weren't meant sincerely, or that my work wasn't good, but it’s a matter of how I perceived myself within the context of writing.

Instead of writing because that's what I wanted to do and I loved doing it, I was considering myself a "Writer" and writing for those reasons. I was allowing myself to become more important than what I was doing.

Like I said all the signs were there; wanting to finish writing something and get it published and over with instead of enjoying the actual process of writing being the most obvious; but I was too wrapped up in myself to notice. It took two events last week for me to realize there was something wrong.

I had offered to review a book for a person whose writing I like. She had contributed to a collection of short stories, essays, and poems that an Internet writing group she belonged to had self published. I started reading the stories and looking at them with a critical eye, when I stopped and listened to myself.

I heard this pedantic voice I didn't recognise making sarcastic remarks in my head. I felt sick. Who was that asshole? What did it matter what I, or anyone else for that matter, thought about what these people had written. This was a labour of love by people who still wrote for the sake of writing. How dare I even think that I had the right to be an asshole and shit on them and their work?

What made me think that I was in anyway superior to them? We were all in the same position, supposedly, writing because we wanted to, for the enjoyment of putting words on paper and trying to make something happen. I very awkwardly sent an email off to the woman who'd sent me the book and tried to explain what I meant and ended up just making things worse, by being too inarticulate and not really understanding what it was I was trying to say.

It's all very well and good for somone to say, well they published it and they should be prepared to accept criticism. Well maybe, but not from me. This had nothing to do with the quality of their work, and everything to do with that awful, judgemental voice I heard in my head.

The second incident occurred when I was conducting a review this weekend. I spent a really wonderful two hours on the phone with Willy DeVille on Saturday talking about everything under the sun. Of course the primary focus was on his music and what kept him going. At one point we were talking about something or other, which led us into him talking about the way he and the band set themselves up on stage.

It was important that the band be able to communicate to each other, make eye contact on occasion, so that they could have fun. "If we're not having fun, how can we expect anyone else to?"

Not very profound is it, but at the same time it's the damn deepest truth that every artist should keep in mind. You can talk about the suffering artist all you want, but if ultimately, when you are in the midst of creation and you aren't enjoying the process, you really need to figure out exactly why it is you're doing what you're doing.

Obviously it's not going to be a laugh a minute, but if you don't do it with at least love or passion in your damn heart what does that make you? It ranks right up there with baking as the oldest profession in the world. You don't have to be paid to be a prostitute; there are all sorts of things you can sell yourself for aside from money.

I write because I want to write and I enjoy the act of writing. I like putting ideas down on paper and trying to express them in as logical a manner as possible. I love the potential that writing allows me for creativity and creation. I didn't set out to be a "Writer" as a career, but because I'm happiest when I'm writing.

All of a sudden though I found that I wasn't having fun doing the writing, I was enjoying being a Writer. Free copies of books and CDs to review, concert tickets, interviewing famous people; boy I must be somebody special. Even if I never said that aloud, it was there. In my attitudes towards others, towards their work, whatever, and it was all being reflected in my attitude towards my own work.

Hearing that awful voice in my head when I was reading a perfectly fine book of stories awoke me to the fact that there was a problem. Talking to Mr. DeVille on Saturday put the finger on the problem and told me what I had forgotten; what I had lost.

Perhaps some of you will think I'm making an issue out of nothing, that this is just more of the aforementioned naval gazing, and who knows you might be right. But we all need our own yardsticks with which to measure ourselves by and mine is the integrity of my intentions for doing something.

Maybe that's because in the past I've done things for the wrong reasons, I don't know. What I do know is that I've been wondering why the hell I've not finished rewriting the first draft of my novel, and why I haven't started working on its sequel. It's because I'd forgotten my original purpose in staring the project in the first place.

I had a story I wanted to tell, and I enjoy the process of telling stories, and somehow that got lost along the way. I don't know when the intentions behind my writing changed, or for how long it lasted, I'm just glad I finally noticed.

I don't know if anyone reading what I had written noticed anything, I hope not, but in some ways that's not even the point. It's all a matter of having to live with myself and ensuring that I don't disappoint the critic who matters the most to me: me. If I can keep him happy I have a really good chance of writing something others will enjoy.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:19 AM | Permalink

Hi there, I'd like to take a moment to introduce my wife and myself to you, Mr. and Mrs. Leech. Well to be perfectly formal and accurate that should be Mr. and Mrs. Leech Upon Society. Not quite as distinguished as other titles perhaps, but it still has a certain cachet, wouldn't you say?

Yep the wife and I happily suckle at the teat of society's benevolent tit, living the live of the idle rich. All you poor slobs are out there breaking your backs so your hard earned money can be taken away from you in the form of taxes to pay for our outrageously extravagant lifestyle.

Just like connoisseurs everywhere we have to choose between a selection of delectable options: do we pay our utility bill this month, or not buy groceries for a week. Hmmm, tricky, but heck the days are longer, winter is pretty much over, who needs electricity. That's the good thing about the warmer weather, you're options are ever so much better then they were in the winter.

Those of you who are Canadian will say, but didn't the government give you a rebate check for heating costs? No, they seem to have forgotten that people with zero income should be considered low income Canadians. Only those in receipt of the Child Tax Credit, and the Guaranteed Annual Income Supplement (GAINS) for seniors received that. They wanted to make sure that only those most deserving received it.

Well I can understand how you wouldn't want a disabled married couple to receive any extras to make their life any easier. You wouldn't want them forgetting that they're supposed to be suffering. I mean we're not well so we be used to it right?

It's not like we're a married couple with a single income of over $170,000 a year, and would really suffer if we didn't get that extra money to help with day care costs to allow who ever the stay at home parent is to attend to their social obligations. They're not used to any deprivations or feelings of low self-esteem, so they wouldn't be able to take any reduction of their income.

Now we disabled people, we're already used to suffering, so what's a little additional economic hardship? Heck if you're going to be disabled you have to expect pain. Isn't it better that those who are already experiencing troubles should have them compounded instead of loading any on to people who live a care free existence? Besides we shouldn't worry those who are actually making a contribution to society, now should we?

It's a funny thing though you know; Mrs. Leech and myself didn't plan this out when we got married. She's been a good little contributor to society, holding down jobs since she was in her teens and paying her taxes every year. I may not have been as good as contributor, being the lay about artistic type who never made all that much money in the first place, but I've had a few high paying jobs that resulted in paying some high tax bills.

In fact in the last two years before we got sick we were an ideal couple. We didn't have children as deductions, made a taxable income, and had built up a good debt load through our purchase of consumer goods. (Which also meant we had contributed 15 cents on quite a few dollars to the treasuries of both the provincial and federal governments)

When I had to leave work, and wait and see if I was deemed crippled enough to receive disability support from the government, not having any coverage through my job, our income was reduced so much that I was even able to increase my debt load substantially just so we could eat and pay rent.

Of course in the year prior to me stopping work I had only limited coverage to help pay for my medications which were costing around $3-$400 a month. The low-income drug program's deductible was still a sufficient chunk of change that I would have to pay for one full months medication each quarter before I received any help. So the debt kept pilling up.

Even after I was accepted onto the roles of those considered significantly disabled it took over three months for someone from the local office to phone me to ask if I still wanted to receive the money. Now it's true they paid me retroactively back to the date my application was received in their office in Toronto, and while it may have covered some of the principle of my debt, it did nothing to offset the interest that had accumulated.

Of course it did nothing to help offset the debt my illness had forced us to accumulate before it became obvious I wasn't going to be able to work again. There was also the matter that in the seven months it took them to process my application we hadn't been able to replace anything that might have worn out, like shoes and other luxury items of that ilk.

Now Mrs. Leech was trying to do her part. In spite of the fact that it was becoming increasingly obvious that she shouldn't be working, the government had turned down her initial application, she worked a part time job. You would think that would have been of some benefit for us, a little extra money coming in and so on, right.

But because of the arcane rules about how much a family member is allowed to earn while one person is receiving a disability pension, and the fact that she had to take a cab to and from work each day due to her inability to walk or cope with public transit, we were lucky to not lose money each month with her working. (They have since changed the system to make it much conducive for people to work while receiving either disability or Welfare in Ontario, which is a very positive step forward.)

Well finally it was recognised that Mrs. Leech wasn't able to work any more than I was, and so they changed the status of my disability check to being double disabled. What that meant was we got another $175.00 a month to live on. Yep Mrs. Leech is worth $175.00 a month to me now, which is actually better then most life insurance policies are offering, so I'll be keeping her around for a while longer I guess. (It works both ways; I'm worth that much to her as well-it's like those mutual non-aggression pacts of the past between nuclear powers where we will inflict too much damage on ourselves to make getting rid of the other worthwhile. That's a joke by the way.)

Anyway so here we sit with a debt load that we accumulated through no fault of our own, (oh all right we could have gone without eating, or been evicted, or froze to death but we didn't consider those viable options) dealing with illnesses that make getting through a day without stress a struggle, and faced with having to move because we can no longer afford to live in the slum we live in now.

We were able to buy some time by utilizing Mrs Leech's balance protection on her credit cards, but all that did was pay the minimum payments for a short while, still leaving us with the principle to contend with at the end of the day. We're so desperate that we've been taking new cards that offer lower interest rates on transfers, just so that we can a) reduce the principle on one card, and b) end up with a slightly smaller debt load by paying a larger proportion of money towards principle instead of interest.

We’ve cut so close to the bone as it is that we've started to whittle off some of the cartridge. Probably the only luxury we're not prepared to give up is the $20.00 a month we pay for dial up Internet service. Without that both my wife and I would go insane. Anyway it's one of the few things that haven't gone up in price.

It's stayed the same price for the last five years, $19.95 a month plus tax for unlimited Internet. It's too bad the same can't be said about the rest of the world. In the last year I've watch the price of a brick of cheese go from $4.99 to $6.70. Those of you who are mathematically inclined can figure that out as a percentage if you want, but I already know it's higher than any increase there's been in the disability pensions.

Back in the early nineties, (1990's not the 1890's), disability support payments had an annual cost of living increase of around 1%. It doesn't sound like much, but every little bit adds up. But from 1993 until 2005 disability and welfare payments were either frozen or cut by up to 20%. Even those programs whose payments weren't cut were seeing their purchasing power reduced at rate of around 2% per annum. (On average the annual cost of living increase)

That works out to be almost a 25% reduction in those twelve years. If you were to factor in the loss of the annual increase of 1% as well, the reduction increases to 36%, or more then a third of its value lost to cost of living increases. Now that's pretty bad in of itself, but there are other factors to consider as well.

In the mid to late 1990's the Ontario government revamped its rent control legislation giving landlords incredible freedom to charge whatever they liked for rental units. While it's true they couldn't increase the rent of an existing tenant by more then a certain amount, any time an apartment came available they could raise the rent on that unit by whatever amount they wanted.

The theory was that market forces would control the rents, preventing landlords from charging too much. But the reality is that people have to have a place to live, and you will pay what's necessary to keep you and your family off the street. When the vacancy rate is less then 1% a landlord is able to ask $800.00 per month for a one-room apartment, with a separate bathroom and kitchen if you are lucky, and find someone desperate enough to rent it.

Now Mrs. Leech and myself receive the maximum you can get for shelter as a couple because we are both disabled. To pay for our rent and utilities we receive $654.00 a month. Now that's going to leave us with a sizable shortfall when it comes to renting out somewhere to live don't you think?

What about geared to income housing? What about it; the waiting list is a minimum of five years, most of the units are built in isolated parts of town and have turned into havens for drug dealers or welfare ghettos. They are places filled with hopelessness and despair, perpetuating cycles of endless poverty.

They seem built for only one reason, to provide a place to hide the poor and disabled away from the rest of society's sight. There a sop to liberal consciences and it lets governments say they're doing something, but all they is deepen the divisions in society and provide people with excuses for failure.

Like I said earlier Mrs. Leech and myself didn't plan on getting sick and becoming incapacitated, it just happened. I'm incredibly grateful that there is some sort of system in place at all for assisting people like us who are in dire straits. The people who work in the offices do the best they can for us, in spite of having their hands tied by regulations that seem intent on making life difficult for their clients.

But being grateful does not prevent me from seeing how bad our situation is, and how the needs of disabled people in Ontario, and I assume elsewhere, are being neglected. Of course there are people who take advantage of the system, just as there are wealthy people who take advantage of te tax system so they can make millions of dollars a year and not pay a cent in income tax.

How often to you hear the government or the pundits talking about all the income they lose from those people? Why is it only the poor and sick that are blamed and made to pay for the economic woes of society? If we are Mr. and Mrs. Leech because we receive a monthly stipend that barely lets us make ends meet, why are they referred to as Captains of Industry for avoiding their responsibilities as citizens?

The next time a politician or pundit starts going on about welfare cheats spending your tax money on beer; ask him or her about tax evaders spending our tax money on champagne and caviar. I'd be interested in hearing their response.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:36 AM | Permalink

Back in February of this year I reviewed a triple disc set released by Document Records called Broadcasting The Blues: Black Music In The Segregation Era. Quite the mouthful for a record title actually, but it was an important distinction the producer/compiler Paul Oliver was trying to make.

You see the word broadcasting has an older, deeper, meaning than the one we currently associate with it:

…there was a time-honoured method of sowing seeds. The sowers carried wide-mouthed sacks filled with seeds… As they walked over the fertile soil of the newly tilled fields, they would dip their free hands into the sacks to scoop up a quantity of the contents. With a swing of their arms in a broad arc they would "scatter the good seeds on the land"—a technique which was called broadcasting… the term lives on in the transmission of sounds on the radio. (Oliver, Paul: Broadcasting The Blues Routledge, 2005 p vii)

Broadcasting means more than just getting airtime on the radio, it also means getting the word out there about the people and the music. During the segregation era in the States, especially in the South, it's not difficult to imagine how hard it was for black people to get their music out to a wider audience. Oh, sure there were the Jazz clubs in some cities, but that was only for a small minority of audience, music, and musicians.

Besides that's not the music we're talking about here. Jazz had been given a veneer of acceptability due to the many mainstream white acts that were incorporating elements of it into popular music; the big band sound of the forties, the crooners like Frank Sinatra. All of their music and arrangements were lifted from Jazz.

No what we're talking about is the music of the back porches and the delta, the stuff that a white person wouldn't hear on their local radio show. If you were really brave you might sneak across the tracks into a "coloured persons" bar and listen in. But those people would have been few and far between with names like Elvis, Ronnie Hawkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis. They incorporated the music they heard in the black churches and clubs into their own country traditions and began "broadcasting" the music to white people.

Did you ever wonder why in the early sixties the British Invasion of rock bands happened? American music was Neil Sedaka, Paul Anka (I know he's Canadian but you can have him), and Pat Boone, and all of sudden these British kids show up playing this down and dirty blues from the American Deep South. Listen to early songs by the Animals, the Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, and Led Zeppelin and tell me you don't hear the Mississippi River lapping at their feet.

Unlike their American contemporaries they were listening to people like Lightening John Hopkins, Muddy Watters, and Howling Wolf. Of course some of the American musicians were listening as well but they postdated their British contemporaries by six or seven years. Remember, the Rolling Stones were playing music and doing their versions of Delta blues before they hit America. The blues were being broadcast in England, and Europe, ever since the twenties when American black musicians were finding a home in Paris France, on the radio and through sales of records in the shops.

Paul Oliver espouses the idea that perhaps because the music was removed from its social context and brought into a new environment it was allowed to be judged on its own merits, not by the colour of the performer's skin. What else could explain that in spite of there being radio stations broadcasting the blues in the 1950's in the United States (Blues Boy King had a very successful show at radio station WDIA in Memphis before his equally successful career as a blues performer under the name B.B. King) there wasn't the wide spread dissemination of the music like there was in England and Europe?

Paul Oliver, for lack of a better description, is a blues scholar. He describes how in the 1940's when he was living in Suffolk, England, he watched and listened to two Black American soldiers working on setting up a base, and singing the work songs of their field working ancestors. He was lucky enough to have a friend at the time that had a collection of old 78rpm recordings of the blues, many of which had been produced in England.

He was hooked. He began scouring Europe and England for old recordings in an attempt to listen to and learn more about this amazing music that he called, "the most strange and thrilling vocal sounds that I had ever heard". From this starting point in a field in England he began his one-person quest to "legitimize" the blues as a genre of music.

His initial broadcasts and publications were included as part of either Jazz radio shows or magazines, until he was able to convince others that Blues could and should be treated as a distinct form of music. While Jazz and Blues may have had some elements in common at birth, they quickly went their divergent ways, with the Blues holding on to its rural roots a lot more securely than Jazz ever did.

In his forty plus year of broadcasting Mr. Oliver travelled the world compiling tapes and information about the music he's so devoted to. From drum circles in Africa, old recording of field hollar's stashed away in dusty libraries; to the radio stations and back porches of the Deep South in the early sixties he was a man on a mission.

What he has done in both the book and the companion triple CD set with Broadcasting The Blues: Black Music In The Time Of Segregation is compile a collection of radio broadcasts from throughout his career to build a history of the blues. When scanning through the book you might notice that according to the dates of the broadcasts there seems to be particular order or sequence. How can something recorded in 1957 come after something recorded in 1967?

What is important is the content of the broadcast. Mr. Oliver has very successfully created an oral/musical history of blues music on both the CDs and the book. I know these things are written down in a book, but I can't help thinking of them as being read aloud with the music interspersed throughout the scripts.

Having heard the music before I read the book, it's been fascinating going back and reading the scripts that were written originally for the periods covered by the music. While Oliver's style is at times, by necessity more than anything else, academic and factual, when read I'm sure these scripts would have been more story then lecture.

Each of the first three sections of the book: "Before The Blues", "Blues, How Do You Do?", and "Meaning In The Blues" compiles radio broadcast which work within the theme under discussion. The fourth section, "Documenting The Blues" deals with the problems associated with assembling this material, and the misfortune of how much has been lost. So much of this music was never recorded because it was being performed in honky-tonks and juke joints where people with the kind of equipment necessary would never have dreamt of showing up.

Some of the music recorded or talked about in these broadcasts only exists today because Paul Oliver traveled through the South in the early 1960's (at great personal risk, being a white man wandering around the rural south, hanging out with black people was not look upon with great favour by others of the same race in the local population) recording as many people as he could find and preserve their music for posterity.

Broadcasting The Blues: Black Music In The Segregation Era whether in book form or in CD is an invaluable contribution to anybody's collection who has a passion for blues music. Throughout his career Paul Oliver has done his best to broadcast the blues in all meanings of the word. Lets hope that the seeds he's been distributing continue to grow and flourish.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:21 AM | Permalink

I want to tell you about an amazing experience that I had on Saturday May 13, 2006; I had a two-hour phone conversation with Willy DeVille. It was one of those things arranged by a publicist to be an interview. You know how they're supposed to go, me the interviewer ask him the interviewee questions about music, life etc, and he gives me answers to same.

Then I go and type them out as a question and answer session and everybody is happy. At least that's how it's gone for me in the past when I've done this sort of thing. It became pretty clear right from the start that this wasn't going to be a typical interview.

I had spent the last day downloading and figuring out how to set up and work a piece of software that would have allowed me to use my modem to record phone conversations. It was going to involve me using an extension other than the one running through the computer, so I had arranged for my wife to run the software while I talked to Willy on another phone.

Since she was going to have to co-ordinate the recording we decided she should answer the phone get his permission to record and explain what it was going to involve. For some reason I wasn't overly surprised when he requested that we didn't record our conversation because he felt it would take too much away from the moment.

He compared it to colour photography vs. black and white and how he preferred black and white because of the simplicity of the moment. Taking away from the moment too much would be lost. So he said to my wife: "so let's keep it black and white okay?"

Thinking about it afterward, and thinking of how our conversation went, I can see what he meant. If we had been conscious of being recorded we would have let that influence us in certain ways, and it would have affected any spontaneity our conversation would have had. We would have restricted ourselves to whatever typical information you normally hear in one of these interviews.

Occasionally I would remember to ask him a question and we would try and get back into an interview format, but we were soon off onto something else, or he'd answer in a way that was non-standard. Mainly we just talked about experiences we had in common, things that neither of us probably would tell others about and so I'm not going to talking about any of that stuff here.

Roughly our conversation could be divided into the early years, the middle part, and what's going on now, but we bounced around following no particular timeline. At one point near the end of our conversation he said, "It doesn't matter what age you are, as long as you're doing". Which sums up his whole career right there in a nut shell, Willy is always "doing" something to keep moving on musically, personally, and whatever else is needed for growth as an artist.

I don't use the word artist lightly ever; it's not some generic term used to refer to somebody who gets up on stage and performs. Talking to Willy for a couple of hours and listening to him talk about his approach, his feelings about his work, the almost spiritual way he described performing, and the obvious passion that came through his voice whenever we would talk music (plus having seen him perform on video recently) made it obvious to me that he has nothing in common with those who strive for mediocrity an are called artists by today's popular press.

So let's press on with this shall we, and I'll bring on the question and answers.

Me: "Where did it all start for you, you were born in New York right?

Willy: "No I was born in Stanford Connecticut (laughs) nobody's born in Manhattan. We moved there when I was thirteen or fourteen, but I had been coming into town since I was about twelve…I had fallen in love with the city.

Me: "The bright lights and all…"

Willy: " Nah, it was the musicians. Everywhere there was music it was amazing. But it was everything else too, you know, the smells of pizza…" (There was a pause at the other end of the line, as if he was remembering something) …" Somewhere else than where you are always looks better to you, and we all come from some little itty bitty place. I don't want this to sound like those, he came from a small town and made it big stories right, but it's more about having a dream and having the patience and the, oh I don't know what (me: "perseverance") yeah, to make it happen, you know, and that's what I feel like it's always been."

Me: "Why music, what was it about music that grabbed you?"

Willy: " Well according to my mom I was singing before I was talking right. I mean I don't even come from a musical family, but it just always seemed so natural to me. You know I grew up and I had older brothers, four and six years older, so there was always music around, on the radio at breakfast as we ate our corn flakes, or American Bandstand. I still remember listening to bands like the Drifters…It was like magic, there was drama and it would hypnotize me."

"Listening to the radio and the songs I would get you know like images of the story in my head, like reading a book and you imagine what's going on. I would see the music like that too, in my head while listening…."

"There's something that happens to me when I sing, (a slight hesitation as if he's unsure about talking about this, like how's this going to go over), this is going to sound weird right, but it's like I don't know where the voice comes from for different songs, but it's just there. I described this to a friend once and he said it sounds like voice shifting, where a masking spirit comes over people and sings through them…"

Me: " That sounds like what happens to Native singers when they sit around the big drum and are playing. They sing in this high falsetto, that nobody can talk in, and that they sure don’t talk in…

Willy: "Did you say native, like native American? Cause you know that I'm part native.."

Me: "Which part? no, no, I mean which nation, sorry. "

Willy: "Iroquois, I'm part Iroquois, part Basque, a little of this and a little of that. I real street dog."

Me: "Heinz 57"

Willy: (laughs) yeah right. I prefer street dog."

Me: Did you ever hear any of that stuff Robbie Robertson did with Red Road Ensemble about, I don't know a dozen years ago… He's an Iroquois.."

Willy: "That's right he's from up around near you isn't he."

Me: "Yeah Grand River Six Nations reserve"

Willy: " There was this album he made with John Hammond that changed my life"

Me: "Robbie made an album with Hammond"

Willy: Yeah him and Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, Lavon Helm, or Lee-von,( laughs) back in 1962, it was called So Many Roads It's still around on CD you've gotta to hear it, it's amazing."

Me: So how did it all start for you, what was your first band, was it Mink DeVille?

Willy: "Nah the first band was The Royal Pythons. Wanted it to be different from what everyone else was doing, electric this and strawberry that. But actually, you know I went over to London for a couple of years, real obvious American with my Pompadour hair. Kicked around until my money ran out than came back here.'

"I had only been back a bit when a buddy called me up, and they were out west in San Francisco, he'd had to leave town cause he'd gotten in trouble with the cops, and he said I should come out there it was really amazing, he'd already met Lighting Hopkins' drummer. So I bought a 57 Chevy Van and drove out."

"It was hard out there, just couldn't get anything happening, it was the early seventies, and, hell don't say I hated it, because that's not true, but it was hard. I conned the guys into believing that if we went back to New York I could get us work, cause I knew the city and the ropes of how stuff worked, which was stretching it."

Me: "How did you end up in CBGB ?"

Willy: "Well, I used to go over to "City Lights', you know Ferlinghetti's book store, and pick up a week old Village Voice. One day I saw this small, like one inch by one-inch ad, saying auditioning for live bands. Now New York in the early, mid seventies, there were hardly any places for live bands to play, maybe a Jazz bar. Everything had closed, so here was this ad saying auditioning for live bands."

"So I had convinced the guys that I could get them work, and we climbed in the van and drove back the other way. We got here and auditioned, along with hundreds of others, but they liked us and took us on. That was like 74-75, and we played there for three years. You know during that time we didn't get paid more than $50 bucks a night"

Me: "Each or the band"

Willy: "The band, shit that was barely enough for cigarettes. They keep asking me to come and play there for "old times sake" and you know that's not for me. That's for people who want to go there and say they saw me there, or Lou Reed in sunglasses or some such stuff. That's the past, not now."

"There was always some sort of shit that was going down there, cause there were all these managers with bands they had signed who they wanted to play there, so there was politics. All I wanted was to be a band that New York could be proud of; we wanted to play music that would make the glasses dance on the bar"

"Then there was this one night this guy named Ben Edmonds came in to the bar and saw us. He took us back up to his hotel room and asked us if we could make a record what would we put on it. I just said, the best damn music I could make."

"The next thing was they brought out Jack Nietzsche to talk with me. We got drunk for three days. Jack had done all those records with the Ronettes and groups like that."

Me: "He worked with Phil Spector?"

Willy: "Well it's hard to say who worked with who, right. You listen to that music and you hear those really high strings, and that percussion, and the castanets: that's all Jack's work. All that really cool stuff"

"Jack became like my first mentor in the business. Not to sound like some hippie or something, but it was like Karma you know for us to be together. There used to be some sort of Ladies auxiliary or something to our fan club, and they would send all these weird photos into us, like of tombstones and shit like that. Well one time one of them sent in this picture of a tombstone of Fredrick Nietzsche, who was Jack's great uncle, and I showed him the picture, saying Jack isn't this your great uncle and he said yeah."

"Jack wasn't very well and he was going downhill slowly, and I remember they were throwing me this birthday party, and I found out Jack had died that day. It was the same day his great uncle had gone, the same day as my birthday, August 25th."
"He was my first real professional friend, and I still feel like he's looking out for me"

Me: "I've got to know, how you'd come up with the name Mink DeVille"?

Willy: "Well we were sitting around talking of names, and some of them were really rude, and I was saying, guys we can't do that. Then one of the guys said how about Mink DeVille, there can't be anything cooler than a fur lined Cadillac can there?"

Me: "Cool so it's true, I couldn't remember if I had read that somewhere or not, or if it was some sort of urban legend."

Willy: "Nope it's true"

Me: "The sound you described that Jack was doing with the percussion and castanets for the Ronettes and other bands, is that where those sounds in your music came from, the Latin rhythms and stuff?"

Willy: "Well you had to have that sort of sound if you wanted any street credibility in the lower east side where I came from you know. Everybody listens to the great music of Tito Puente, I love the sound of that stuff too, the congas and great percussion. It was the congas that hooked me into New Orleans, that great drumming."

Me: "I used to really like the work of Tom Waits back in the late seventies and early eighties, that sort of trash can jazzy/blues, and I was thinking there were similarities in your music, maybe not style, but intent."

Willy: Yeah? Maybe it's something about the band and how we work together; when we set up on stage it's not with the audience in mind, but so that we can see each other, and look around and have fun…if we're not having fun, nobody else is going to have fun are they. So we want to be in contact with each other all the time."

"Tom's music is like that too, there's that quality of being really tight, but so tight that you're loose."

"I want to tell you something about Tom. Back in 1980 I was banned in Boston. I had done something or other foolish, and this guy, a booking agent who if you pissed off could guarantee you'd never work Boston, said 'Willy DeVille will never work Boston again'. Well Tom was playing in Cambridge Mass. and we were travelling with him. Tom refused to go on, not only if we weren’t allowed to play, but also if we didn't get equal billing. He really put his balls to the wall for us. This agent guy was making this huge fuss about it, but Tom just said 'Willy gets equal billing or I don't play'. So they gave us equal billing."

"Can you do me a favour, I want you to say thank you to Tom from me in what you're writing. I want that out there. A lot of people don't understand where Tom's coming from, with some of his stuff, but I think when you’re an artist you just aren't going to be satisfied with doing the same stuff over and over again. You want to do something new to surprise people with. Whether they like it or hate it…"

Me: "One of the first teachers I had always talked about making people have an opinion, you don't want anybody being ambivalent about your work"

Willy: "You had a good teacher"

Me: "The last thing you want to hear is that your work is 'nice' "

Willy: Yeah that's for sure. You know and that's what people have got to understand about anybody who's serious about this stuff, it may sound selfish, but we can't keep doing the same stuff over and over again. We need to keep trying different things."

Me: "The curse of originality"

Willy: Yeah (laughs) I'm a singer/songwriter, and the front man, so I have to deal with all these different facets, taking the flak and so on. It's hard to keep the passion going sometimes, and if you can't keep changing it up, it would be damn near impossible.

Me: Why did you leave New York for New Orleans?

Willy: "I was tired of being 'Willy DeVille'. Walking out of my building and having to be the guy who was up on stage all the time, even when I wasn't performing. I wanted to get away from that. So I got down there and it was this famous guy had come to town, and I didn't want that. So I decided to do an album with a bunch of the musicians from down there, the music of New Orleans."

"People like Dr, John, Eddie Bo, Champion Jack Dupuis and all sorts of others. Victory Mixture is still one of the albums I'm proudest of; I think its one of the best records I've ever done. And you know what, I don't think there's more than one or two originals on it. Its all old stuff, music from New Orleans

"I remember as a kid I used to go see these shows where there would be like four or five bands on a bill, and it was great, and I thought wouldn't that be a great thing to do. So I got in touch with all these guys I had made the record with and we did this great tour of Europe."

"The travel, buses, and planes; and the accommodations had to be some of the worst I've ever experienced, but the shows themselves were great. At the end of each show we'd throw Mardi-Gras rows out to the audience, you know strands of purple and gold beads, and they'd never seen anything like it and they loved it."

Me: "You do a lot over in Europe, what's the attraction?"

Willy: "Well I don't want to sound like one of those guys kvetching, but have you seen what's on the charts over here?"

Me: "Wait a moment I have gotten something written down, where is it, yeah, here: 'Striving for Mediocrity'."

Willy: (laughs) "Yeah, that's it. I mean over there they still talk about Eddie Cochran and all the great old stuff as if it's still alive. There's a passion that's missing too often over here."

Me: " You recorded Le Chat Bleu in Paris because of your liking for Edith Piaff, is that right?'

Willy: " Yeah partially, but it was for the chance to work with some incredible people as well. Charles Dumont who had written a lot of the music for Edith, and Doc Pomus. You know the first day I walked into the studio and they were working with an orchestra, and I heard the strings playing one of my songs. I had to go into the bathroom and shed a tear. Seeing these guys playing their instruments, with long white hair hanging down over their collars, looking like what classical musicians are supposed to look like, doing a song I wrote, really got to me.

"When I did this album I wanted to make music that would stand the test of time. I take what I do seriously, but at the same time I have fun making every album I do. If that's not there, if you're not enjoying the album how can you expect anyone else to? It may sound selfish but I'm playing the music I want to, and everyone else can kiss off as far as I'm concerned."

"On Le Chat Blue we had all these great people involved, you know, and we thought we had something great. I came back to America, and my label at that time said, 'well we think we should put it on the shelf for a while'. This was right before Christmas for God's sake when you know people are going to be buying stuff, so I asked them what the problem was?"

"They said they had never heard anything like it before and didn't know what to do with it. We had Charles Dumont, Elvis's goddamned rhythm section, and they say they've never heard anything like it. I was heartbroken and angry. Finally Maxine from my distributor in France phones and he says, Willy what's going on? So I told him."

"He said don't worry we'll release it over here. We did, and then it became a matter of not what are we going to do with Willy Deville, but who the hell let him get away. As an import it was wracking up great sales here. Capital finally went and released a copy of it, but never did too much work on it."

"I remembered what Nietzsche said, which was he never could understand why they had signed us in the first place. They were the Beatles and the Beach Boys, safe bands, and they hired a bunch of guys who looked like street toughs who looked like they were going to kill them." (He laughs)

Me: "I wanted to ask you about the album you made with Mark Knopfler, I can't remember its title ("Miracle" Willy supplied) how did that come about? Was he assigned to produce you by your label or did it come about some other way?"

Willy: "It was Mark's wife Lourdes who came up with the idea. She said to him that you don't sing like Willy and he doesn't play guitar like you (Me: "Nobody plays guitar like him. Willy: "That's for sure") but you really like his stuff so why don't you do an album together?"

"So I went over to London to do this album. It wasn't easy because we didn't want it to sound like a Dire Straits' album, and his guitar playing is so unique that it was hard to do. But nothing good is going to be easy. I know that I spent the whole time really trying to impress Mark, I wanted it to be good."

"But, yeah it was his wife Lourdes who was responsible more than anyone else for that album. She's a really great lady, really nice. I still really like that album, especially "Southern Politician"

Me: "In an interview with you on theLive In The Lowlands DVD you talked about Mark's reaction to the song "Storybook Love"…

Willy: "Oh yeah that was funny. I played him what I had and he looked at me and said how did you know about that. I said what, and he said that was working on a movie with Rob Reiner called the Princess Bride and I'd just written a song that told the story. He got on the phone and phoned Rob and told him, and Reiner said to get it out to him as soon as possible. So we did it up rough and sent it off and he loved it."

"The next thing I know I'm standing backstage and listening to Dudley Moore and Liza Manelli introduce me before going out to sing "Storybook Song" at the Oscars. There I was standing backstage with Tom Selleck and Karl Malden, waiting to onstage. It was weird…"

Me: "Yeah I saw that awards show, I think I watched it just to see you. I remember thinking wow, and to quote a line from the movie My Cousin Vinnie"Oh and you blend" (laughter)

Willy: "Yeah it was a really strange experience. But you know Tom Selleck was really nice. When I got off stage he leaned over and squeezed my knee and said 'you did great'. That was really nice of him you know. Malden was a little more standoffish. I went up to him afterwards to tell him how much I liked his work and he just kept saying, "That's so nice of you to say that". But I guess if you're always getting that, it must be tiring (pause) I wouldn't know" (laughter)

Me: "Well I guess I should be letting you go soon, but I wanted just to find out what you've got planned for the future. When I saw you in the DVD you were walking with a cane and in some pain, and I was hoping that's nothing permanent."

Willy: "No that was just temporary, I had to have hip replacement surgery, which is a bitch to recover from but now it's pretty much better. I got to tell you I'm in the best shape I think I've been in my entire life. You know I've got to keep exercising the leg to help it heal so I go for walks everyday, and, I bet you never thought you'd hear this coming out of Willy DeVille's mouth, I've been thinking of going to the "Y" to work out" (laughs)

"We've never been to Japan or Australia, so we want to do a tour of those countries. I've got a little sister who lives out in Australia who I haven't seen in ages, so I'd like to see her. There aren't many of the family left anymore so that would be a good thing. Anyway she's so proud of her big brother."

"Nina (his wife) and I can make a trip to Japan into our second Honeymoon. I've wanted to go out there before but the idea of the travel was just too much."

Me: "Yeah I just saw Arlo Guthrie in concert and he talked about his recent tour out to Australia. He said the trip was brutal. 15 hours stuck in a little cabin breathing bad air."

Willy: "Oh shit and I thought you were about to tell me it wasn't that bad."(Laughs) It doesn't matter. You know there are people there who want to see us, so I figure we owe it to them to come over and do our music for them" (Author's note: I've since learnt that it's an Australian record company, Raven, that's been responsible for re releasing a lot of Willy's older material, with all sorts of bonus features)

"I've also been working on a book. It's about all the people I've known who are no longer around, the ones that didn't make it for one reason or another. It's going to be funny, but it's also going to be dark at the same time. These were all friends of mine and they were great people, but well things happened. So I want to write about them, and tell their stories."

Me: "That reminds me about something else, you know I look at pictures of you now and they're so different from ones twenty years ago. You don't look as angry, more at peace."

Willy: "I'm more comfortable in my own skin now than I have ever been. So that could be it."

Me: Whatever it is, it hasn't diminished your passion. Where does that come from?"

Willy: "My passion comes from my music, which is an expression of the passion I feel from making music. There's this feeling you get of absolute silence when you know that the crowd are listening, and that silence is louder than anything else I've ever heard in my life. Those are my moments of absolute bliss. I feel sorry for people who can't feel those moments of euphoria. But in order to feel passion you have to be passionate about something in the first place. For me that's music."

Me: "Thanks Willy, this has been great"

Willy: "Thank you, I hope we can get up to Canada sometime"

Me: "Me too"

So, there it is, as best as I can piece it all together, two hours of conversation and thoughts with Willy DeVille on the telephone one Saturday afternoon in May. There's a lot of stuff that he asked I not talk about, and I had no problem with that, because it was just conversation between two people about stuff that had nothing to do with anybody else.

There were quite a few times where I wasn't making notes of any kind or even thinking about what I was doing as an "Interview". I was having a conversation with a very interesting, intelligent, and aware human being. Those are few and far between enough that I can appreciate them for just that. The truly hard part was remembering that on occasion I should be writing things down.

I've rearranged our conversation so that it works in a more uniform interview sense, so Willy if you end up ever reading this, that's why it seems different from how we talked on the phone. I've done my best to recreate what was said as exactly as possible, and I hope I got it right. Apologies if I didn't.

Thank you Willy DeVille for an incredible two hours. I don't know if something as two dimensional as words on a computer screen can capture someone as alive as Willy DeVille. But I hope that all of you who read this can experience at least a little of what I felt while talking to him.

Sign The Petition To Help Get Willy Inducted Into The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame At This Address.

NEW ADDITON: WILLY DeVILLE PHOTO GALLERY

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:44 AM | Permalink

There was a time in the mid to late eighties when any of us who worked in the arts starting losing friends and colleagues at an alarming rate. HIV/AIDS was taking its initial deadly harvest, and in those early days the gay community, who were well represented in the arts world, were being hit hardest.
Any one with half an eye and a willingness to face reality knew that it was only a matter of time before the illness spread beyond the one community into the larger world. Controlling a sexually transmitted disease without being willing to talk about preventative measures like condoms and other means of safe sex is nigh on impossible.

The attitude of, it's only a gay disease we don't have to worry, pretty much guaranteed the spread of HIV/AIDS to its pandemic levels of today. Even as the eighties were drawing to a close, and more and more people from all walks of life were testing positive, little or nothing was being done to educate people in practical protection. You can lecture on abstinence and just saying no all you want, but it's not going to stop people from having sex or shooting up.

Red Hot +Blue released in 1990 was the first major, high profile attempt to raise public awareness of the dangers and the reality of HIV/AIDS. Popular musicians were paired with innovative directors to create unique interpretations of the songs of Cole Porter. A CD of the music was compiled and released, including a few extra artists who had not recorded a video, while the videos themselves were given aired as a television special on ABC in the United States and channel 4 in the United Kingdom.

Interspersed among the videos were public service announcements by the artists involved and other public figures that provided bald, simple educational statements: use a condom, don't share needles, and you can't get HIV/AIDS by holding hands, kissing, or drinking from the same water fountain.

Proceeds from the sale of the CD were directed towards HIV/AIDS research with the disc selling over a million copies. Aside from the money that was raised the whole project was an ambitious attempt to try and increase people's sensitivity to the plight of those who were beset with the illness.

AIDS is a disease that knows no boundaries or borders. It rages on, transforming entire countries, even continents, into tragic zones of despair. Largely ignored by the media—and despite being almost entirely preventable—AIDS remains the worst medical and social crisis in human history… When I began doing press to promote Red Hot +Blue, everyone's favourite quote was that we are the only company in the world that wanted to go out of business. A decade and a half latter we still do. (John Carlin co-creator and director of red hot +blue)

Well, 15 years latter Shout Factory records have released a special two-disc package of the CD and, for the first time ever for sale, a DVD containing all the material from that original television show. All the original content has been retained including the messages from people like Richard Gere and John Malkovich; the animations between clips; and the short comedy sketches with their barbed points.

A Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop duet is something out of a Hollywood glamour agent's worst nightmare. Their version of "Well Did You Evah!", Porter's very gossipy, semi satirical take on the world of bored socialites, takes it to the extreme edge of reason. The world may be burning but it's far more important to talk about the parties you've gone to, or maybe should have gone to.

Taken within the context HIV/AIDS this song, and all the other Porter songs chosen take on deeper layers of meaning. The videos accompanying the songs either act as a stage for the performer; tell a story that furthers the change of the song's emphasis, or works as performance art that augments certain themes.

What I find most impressive is the attempts by the producers to be as international in flavour as possible, and diverse in the musical genres represented. Everything from the hard-core urban rap of The Jungle Brothers' version of "I Get A Kick Out Of You" to Lisa Stansfield's very straight jazzy approach has been used to try and reach as diverse an audience as possible.

One of the more poignant moments is the performance by African Salif Keita of "Begin The Beguine". When this recording was made there was no way of knowing that in the course of the next 15 years Africa would become the continent most severely effected by the disease. Our knowledge of today's circumstances only increases the implied irony of the song's title.

One of the great things about international compilation albums is hearing a group for the first time. Red Hot + Blue gave me my first introduction to Les Negresses Verte. Their music is infectious, fun, and has the slightly crazy air to it of good gypsy music. "I Love Paris" is turned into a funny, boisterous romp laced with a sensual leer that the original never contained. I was immensely saddened to read that their charismatic lead singer, Noël Rota, better known as Helno had died of a drug overdose only three years after this recording was made in 1993.

The most overtly political video on the disc comes from the band Erasure's version of "Too Darn Hot". The lyric Too Darn Hot is used through out the song as a means for introducing visual political statements. Sometimes news clips of demonstrations demanding funding, hand lettered signs listing statistics, (which are chillingly low in their estimations of the future), and denunciations of a system which prices lifesaving drugs out of the reach of those most in need.

I have to confess that I'm not much of a k.d. lang fan anymore. Ever since she switched over from her cow punk to Celine Dion type torch songs I've lost interest. But her rendition of "So In Love" was beautifully sung, and the video was heartbreaking. Watching her go through the simple motions of washing the clothes of a dying partner, wearing rubber gloves to minimise the risk of contact with bodily fluids, brought home the reality of those who are the primary care givers.

The more I see of Tom Waits from that period musically, and onwards, the less I find to admire in his work. When I first went to see him perform back in the late seventies I liked his down and out jazzy blues singing. But over the years he has developed into a caricature of himself, to the point of being completely unintelligible. Such was the case of his version "It's All Right With Me". What ever he was attempting to do or say has just been lost in what looks to be a sea of self-indulgence.

Aside from Tom's misguided attempt, and my own personal issues with U2's bombastic self-interest (we're very important and sincere, you can tell because we're always frowning and intense) the music on this CD and the videos on the DVD are wonderful. In very small print on the back cover there is a notice from the discs' distributor, Shout Factory, which states that all royalties they receive from the sales of the disc will go to existing U.S. organizations dedicated to fighting AIDS.

This is not an attempt to cash in on a project from the past for self-interest, but is a sincere effort to continue on with the work that the original project started. That gives you two very good reasons for buying this package; great music and helping to support the fight against HIV/AIDS.

You can preview the Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop video of "Well Did You Evah!" in both Small and Medium Windows Media format and Small and Medium Quick Time movie modes by following the individual links.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:09 AM | Permalink

It seemed only fitting that last night's concert by Arlo Guthrie in Kingston Ontario was held in a church. Aside from the fact that the current tour is a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the writing of the song "Alice's Restaurant" which features a church in a significant supporting role, ("Alice didn't live in the restaurant, she lives in the church near by") was the feeling of unity of purpose amongst the audience that one would normally associate with a congregation.

We had all come to see a man perform who has for the past forty plus years quietly sung songs that have expressed the concerns of socially conscious people for nearly the past hundred years. It's not just Arlo Guthrie's music that one hears during his concerts; one also hears the songs of the generations that preceded him that he learned at the knee of his father Woody and his contemporaries.

Attending an Arlo Guthrie concert is about more than listening to somebody sing songs; it's about becoming part of the process of keeping American folk culture alive. It's one thing for places like the Smithsonian Institute to create records of the music that has been sung by the people of that country, and another all together to have them performed by a flesh and blood performer.

It takes a special person to be able to get up on stage and perform a song that's over sixty years old and make the audience feel like it's never been performed before. Not only does it require a deep and abiding love for what you are doing, but it also necessitates the ability to involve your audience as more then mere observers to your passion.

With some performers you know that no matter what they do, they are always going to be on the other side of an invisible wall. When you go to an Arlo Guthrie concert not only does the wall come down, it never existed in the first place. If you can imagine somebody's living room seating a few hundred people, than you can understand how his concerts feel like you've just stopped off at a friend's house for a few hours and he's offered to play you some tunes. The conversation may be a little one sided, although you're free to chime in whenever you want, that doesn't stop it from being fun and friendly.

But knowing all this and experiencing it are two separate things. The only other time I've seen Arlo Guthrie in concert was in the summer of 1981 when he and Pete Seeger were doing one of their tours together. It was at an outdoor venue at Ontario Place in Toronto Canada, and the atmosphere wasn't that conducive to intimacy. So it wasn't until last night that I was truly able to understand the appeal Arlo Guthrie holds as a performer.

From the moment he and his band walked on stage, until he finished signing autographs and posing for pictures with people after the show almost three hours latter, he made everybody feel right at home and his special guest. It felt like he was constantly aware of each and everyone of us in the audience and that he knew without us this evening wouldn't have been possible, so we were as important as he was to the proceedings.

Half the fun of an Arlo Guthrie concert is the stories that he tells as introductions to the songs. Some of them are funny and some of them are serious, but they all increase our connection to both the man and the song.

He tells us of being at his parent's home in 1961 and this funny looking guy shows up at the door looking for his dad. Well Woody was in the hospital by then, he spent most of the last ten year of his life hospitalized with Huntington's disease, so Arlo invited him in and they hung out for a bit and played harmonica together before a young Bob Dylan went off to visit Woody.

He continued on to say that Bob visited his dad quite a bit for a while, and then four years latter: "We starting hearing these great songs we'd never heard the likes of before" pause "Maybe I should have visited my dad more often in the hospital" Then he and his band launched into "Mr. Tambourine Man".

It's been a long time since I've heard that song in its entirety, and because of the introduction I found myself paying close attention to it and let the sensations of the music and the lyrics working together affect me. I haven't taken recreational drugs in close to twelve years, so what I felt can't be put down to that. Arlo's personalization of the song allowed me to go inside it, travel with it as the lyrics say, and perhaps truly experience what Dylan had intended his audience to feel when he first wrote it.

So it went as the evening progressed. With each song's introduction revealing a little bit more about Arlo, allowing us to get to know him a little better, the songs became more and more personal messages from him to us. Songs like "Coming into Los Angles" become funnier and in some ways more poignant when he talks of being searched four times while walking through the airport terminal. Especially when he tries to explain to the security personnel that "I've never become the threat I hoped to".

Of course some things have changed in this world in the last forty years, and to prove it he recounted an incident where he and his son Abe were waiting in a departure lounge for a plane, and he noticed two very obvious Secret Service agents across the way. "Being a child of the sixties of course my first reaction upon seeing them was Oh, Oh."

Sure enough one of them marches over and stand towering over him and gruffly demands if he is "Guthrie". When Arlo confesses that yes, that's who he is, the agent stares at him and then: "Guthrie, are you bringing in a couple of keys?" and cracks a big smile. He'd grown up with the music and loved it. Bought some pins and a baseball cap.

There were two songs he played that I'd never heard before, one was a song he wrote during Katrina and the other was a song his father had written out lyrics for but had never had the chance to write the music to. (Arlo's sister has been spending the last ten years organizing and arranging for this material to be recorded. Billy Bragg recorded a whole album of them called Mermaid Avenue named for the street the Guthrie family lived on in New York City) It was probably one of the last songs Woody wrote, because it was shortly after that he had to be hospitalized, and he was already losing the ability to control his hands.

"My Peace" is only two verses long, but it's a beautiful song about the ability we all have to bring a little peace with us where ever we go, and what a wonderful gift it is to share it with others. While listening to this I couldn't help but get a mental image of Woody hunched over a scrap of paper (according to Arlo you'd have not wanted his dad as a house guest, unless you wanted to wake up in the morning and find every surface in your house not moving covered in song lyrics) with his hand curled around a pen forcing it to write out the words to the song in his head.

Musically Arlo took us on a journey, jumping backwards and forwards in time. From Cisco Huston's "St. James Infirmary", an instrumental honky-tonk tune he learnt from the stack of 78 rpm records his father kept in the basement, Steve Goodman's "City Of New Orleans", the previously mentioned recent song about watching Katrina on television, and a tune called (I don't know if you're familiar with it or not) "Alice's Restaurant"

He only plays it every ten years now, when he goes on these special anniversary tours, and probably a good portion of the crowd were there just to be able to say that they saw him perform it live and in person. I don't think anyone was disappointed. Somehow he was able to make the song as funny and important as it was the first time I ever heard it.

At one point in my life I had been able to recite the damn thing word for word, and have heard countless versions of it on record. Hearing it last night, long after the Viet Nam war has been over, I realized it still was topical; obviously not for the references to the war, but for its observations about the inanity of the system and its sheer irreverence.

In some ways it's quintessential Arlo, as he takes an event that happened in his life and invests it with meanings that are universal to all of us. Who hasn't experienced a moment of irony like that of officer Obie's carefully collected "27 8x10 colour glossy photographs with circles on the front and a paragraph on the back of each one" being rendered useless because the judge is blind? All of us can relate to his breaking down in tears at this example of "American blind justice".

Something that often gets lost in the shuffle about Arlo is the fact that he is an accomplished guitar player. You're not aware of it on his records, and if you haven't seen him play in a while it's easy to lump him in amongst three chord folk singers. But last night watching him lay down beautiful leads on songs like "St. James Infirmary" and "Coming Into Los Angeles" I was reminded yet again that he's no slouch whether he's playing either one of his twelve or six string guitars or is parked behind the keys of electric piano.

His whole band delivered exemplary performances, but of special note was Gordon Titcomb on mandolin, banjo, and pedal steel guitar. Pedal steel guitar is such an easy instrument to make sound horrible, or completely out of place, but Gordon Titcomb was masterful in making it work on all the songs it was used.

After the concert I promised Gordon that I would do my best not to call him Brent in the review. Brent Titcomb is a highly gifted Canadian folk musician, and Gordon said that ever since he and Brent had met up at the Ottawa folk festival, they've been trying to work out how they are related. They just figure that anyone with that last name in common just have to be cousins of some kind.

The fact that I felt comfortable enough after the concert, as did many other people, to go up and talk to Arlo and the other musicians as the were packing up and getting ready to leave is an indication of the atmosphere that had been created over the evening. Musically impeccable, emotionally uplifting, and warm and friendly, it was an evening that I'll not soon forget.

He may only sing "Alice's Restaurant" every ten years, but he has so much more to offer than just that one song. Don't wait for the fiftieth anniversary to go and see him. You'll be doing yourself a great disservice.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:03 AM | Permalink

It always amazes me how easy it is to form associations between an artist and a genre based on work he or she has done outside of their own area of expertise. Most often this will occur in the case of musicians who take leave of their solo careers to focus on movie soundtracks. Even if they have only produced the music, not actually composed it or performed it, in our minds they become synonymous with that genre.

This was brought home for me forcibly upon listening to T Bone Burnett's first solo album in 14 years, The True False Identity. In the minds of a lot of people, myself included, no other name has been more closely associated with the revival of interest in early Americana music. From his work with Cohen brothers in movies such as O Brother Where Art Thou and The Ladykillers, his behind the scenes work on albums by Allison Krause, Counting Crows, Gillian Welsh, and his composing of soundtracks for Walk The Line and The Big Lebowski Burnett became associated in a lot of people's minds with that style of music.

In this classic example of your only remembered for what you've done most recently, this material drove out of people's minds the memory of songs like "Heffner and Disney" and "When The Night Falls" from his days as a solo artist. Emotionally searing and socially aware, songs like those were musically as night to day the tracks from the majority of the projects mentioned above.

"After the last record (1992's The Criminal Under My Own Hat), I felt I could write some new songs and go around the track again, but I didn't feel that I would get anywhere. The road had become too difficult. Music had come completely apart for me. But more importantly, I didn't have anything I wanted to say. It all seemed pointless, so I decided to explore some of the other ideas that were coming my way. I needed freedom. I needed time to find another way into playing music again." T Bone Burnett

The True False Identity sees T Bone coming back with a vengeance. If you thought his music packed an emotional wallop before, well suffice to say that this disc makes anything that came before it seem minimalist in comparison. His years in the control booth seem to have opened his mind and ears to how he could match the emotional impact of his lyrics musically.

The songs on True False Identity are beyond the realm of popular music, and have wandered into the area of sound compositions or aural paintings. Each song on the disc has its own unique layers of emotional texture that he manages to evoke with the variety of sounds that are possible to generate with instruments.

I know that sounds pretentious as hell, but it's the simple truth. If there is any commonality to be found between the music that T Bone has created for this disc and the stuff he'd been working on for the last fourteen years, it's the fact that they share an emotional honesty that is scarce in most of today's plastic packaged product that passes for music.

But where in traditional roots music the simplicity of the musical accompaniment accentuates the emotional truths in the performers voice and lyrics, in this music the voice and music work together to provide emotional resonance. Opera arias work in a similar manner, while the lyrics are telling the story, the voice that's singing becomes another instrument.

In Burnett's work it's almost like the opposite effect is accomplished. Instead of the vocals, and thus the lyrics, blending in to be a part of an emotional soundscape, the music becomes another voice articulating the themes of the song.

"I have been working on this sound for a long time. We had done a great deal of experimentation in the studio and getting the sound was not something that could be gotten to quickly… I wanted to put listeners in the middle of this new sound, to experience it almost in 3D. I told the band to imagine we were playing in an auditorium, and to imagine that auditorium as a giant maraca, and that we wanted to shake the audience as if they were beads inside the maraca." T Bone Burnett

Lyrically T Bone is as funny, ironic, and truthful as ever. The True False Identity is divided into two parts; part one is titled "Art Of The State" and it contains songs that are primarily concerned with observations on society. "Poems Of The Evening", part two of the disc, puts a more personal perspective on display, while still keeping an eye on the world.

From indictments of society's willingness to be sheep in part one's "Zombieland" to the insecurities of modern relationships on part two's "Baby Don't You Say You Love Me" T Bone Burnett isn't afraid to talk about subjects that other's wouldn't touch with a ten foot poll. Even those areas that others might touch upon, Burnett's approach is so unique and emotionally honest, it can sometimes sound like nobody has ever written about this subject before.

This is a disc that can't be easily classified as "good" or "bad". You may not personally like the music, or you may adore it, but those aren't grounds for judgement on the quality of The True False Identity. I personally think it's a work of pop music genius as it pushes the boundaries of the genre in directions that nobody has dared to in years.

It's not a disc I am ever going to throw on for light background listening, nor is it one I will put on without careful consideration beforehand. The very elements that make it so brilliant, raw emotional truths, intelligent lyrics, and music that reflects all of that, also make it difficult to listen to if you are not prepared to pay attention.

Like any work of art, different people will perceive different things from their experience listening to this disc. To me is the best recommendation I could ever offer for anything.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:21 AM | Permalink

If there is anything uglier than humans at war, it's when the Gods get involved and try to manipulate events. Or even worse, the Gods at war amongst themselves, making use of whatever and whoever comes to hand, can make human Machiavellian manoeuvrings look as simple as playground hi-jinx.

Triple-double crosses are standard as old rivalries are remembered and new hatreds are kindled. What can mere mortals do in the face of such intricacies? Is it wisest just to keep your head down and try not to attract attention, or do you get in the game and try to out wit them? They're only Gods after all whose existence actually depends on whether or not somebody believes in them.

Of course either course is easier said then done. You may want to stay out of the way and still end up holding the fate of the world literally in your hands; or you can plan and plot with the best of them and end up being a spectator with no say in the final matter. It all, of course, ends up being in the hands of the Gods, and unfortunately there are times you just can't trust them any further than you can throw them.

This is the scenario that the characters of Steven Erikson's astounding Tales From The Malazan Book Of The Fallen find themselves facing in book six The Bonehunters. Plots swirl around them, catching them up and tossing them around like a farm house caught in an Oklahoma twister, while they desperately try to keep themselves pointed in the right direction and carry on with what they assume are their own destinies and lives.

Mortal wars centring on the expansion and internal strife of the Malazan Empire have flowed back and forth over two continents. On the surface it seems like the 14th army is simply tying to finish putting down a horrible rebellion on the Seven Cities continent but there are currents running beneath this war, that can be felt throughout the Malazan Empire and beyond.

The Crippled God, a malignant presence pulled from another domain thousands of years ago and chained by the other Gods, has begun an attack on the rest of the pantheon. His twisted fingers have inched their way around the world and have been pulling strings behind the scenes for a while.

His marionettes are just now starting to come into the open; whether the Goddess of disease Poliel spreading plague throughout the Seven Cities continent in order to supply the God with properly deformed acolytes, (and in the process destroying the Malazan armies) or the Empire of the Tiste Edur, rising from a long forgotten past and the shadows that they worship, to serve as his means of conquering both the mortal and immortal realms on the fields of battle.

Fort those who have read books one through five of Tales From The Malazan Book Of The Fallen you will be pleased to see that most of the characters from all the previous books make an appearance; Fiddler, Kalam, Quick Ben, Ganoses Paran, Apsalar, and Crokus (now Cutter) from the Bridgeburners and their associates. The usual assorted mixture of Gods and Goddesses but in particular Cotillion, Patron of Assassins and his associate Shadowthrone (who as the first Malazan Emperor had arranged for his and Cotillion's ascension to Godhood under the guise of being assassinated by his successor.) play leading roles, as they are the ones directly under assault by the Crippled God and the Tiste Edur.

We also pick up the trail of other old friends; Karsa Orlong, the giant warrior exploring the strange world of civilization; Icarium, the cursed warrior and his companion Mappo; Trull Sengar, the renegade brother of the Emperor of the Tiste Edur and his un-dead, T'lan Imass warrior friend Onrack the Broken; and Heboric, the former priest of Fener God of War.

Each of them have been drawn into the conflict between the Gods whether they like it or not, and each of them have choices to make that could affect the outcome of the entire battle. As in the previous books Steven Erikson proves himself masterful at handling each one of the characters and their individual story lines.

His characterizations are so masterful that each one of them are so distinct that he doesn't even need to identify them by name for us to know who the action is revolving around in a given circumstance. The nature of their thoughts, and the manner in which they process information, has become as familiar to us as any close friend.

Even amidst the turmoil that Erikson has created, his characters are more than just cutouts and stereotypes. These are three-dimensional beings that have their own ideas about what's going on in their world. From the sergeant in the army to the God on his throne they have doubts and insecurities, show amazing fortitude and strength, and flaws in judgement and weaknesses of character, that make them oh so human

Erickson has an uncanny ability for writing battle sequences, whether one on one fights between Assassins, or armies in the thousands battling over a piece of land or the rights to a city. Soldiers piss their pants, and stumble into battle confused and terrified. Others fight with the grim determination of those who mean to stay alive no matter what. Some of them wouldn't be above sticking a knife in an officer's back if it was thought he would lead them into unnecessary danger.

There is nothing glorious about these battles, but Erickson recognises true individual heroism, and how a group of soldiers can be something more than the sum of their parts. They may cry, curse, moan, bitch and complain, but if they have been together a certain length of time in a shared experience, a bonding occurs which unites them in a way that no training ever could.

What makes these soldiers so compelling and heroic is their complete lack of heroism. They are the anti thesis of the romantic ideal of the noble warrior, which lends genuine nobility to everything they do. To create that atmosphere and those characters with out once descending into mawkish sentimentality, or clichés, requires more than just skill on the part of the author. He has to have developed almost a love for all of his characters for this to be successful.

If you've not read any of the previous books in this series than some of what I've been talking about must be a little confusing to you. If you are going to read Erickson, than you really need to start with Book One and progress forward, and begin to enter into the atmosphere of the world.

What Erickson has accomplished with hisMalazon Book Of The Fallen series is nothing short of remarkable. The world he has created is a marvel whose history is as complex and real as our own. Reading these books is not only a pleasure, but a means with which to study our own preconceived notions of societies and how they work.

The Bonehunters is a book resplendent with action, ideas, and emotion, and is a joy to read. The only problem with a Steven Erickson book is that it ends. Thankfully there are four more books yet to come from the Malazon Book Of The Fallen.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 06:32 AM | Permalink

Can you believe those socialist weenies at the United Nations? Do they have some nerve or what? Imagine them criticizing us for our record on the way we treat the poor, the homeless, natives and the disabled. Sure we are signatories to some stupid covenant that deals with the Social, Economic, and Cultural rights, but wasn't that just for judging other guys, not people like us?

Who do they think we are, some despotic dictatorship that ignores the plight of its people where only a small minority control most of the wealth? That we live in the type of country where the poor keep getting poorer and the rich keep getting richer? We're Canada for goodness sakes, we're the good guys.

We don't round up people and put them in jail without giving them reasons or letting them stand trial, too often. We get other people to do our torturing for us, and we've been out of the cultural genocide business for at least a few decades now. So where do they get off telling us that we have the same problems we had the last time they checked in 1998, and in fact some of them have gotten worse.

Oh what, so we've got more homeless people nowadays than we did before, and income support programs for people in need has not only decreased in real spending power due to inflation, but been cut by as much as 20%, tenants in rental units have little security, and any benefits for children are continually clawed back (means they are counted as income by social programs and deducted from assistance checks, instead of being the extra money for necessities for children that it was designed to be).

Well at least they get something. There's a lot of countries in the world where people would be grateful for the kind of benefits we give our citizens, yet all these guys at the U.N. can do is find fault.

They have the nerve to say that our governments aren't doing anything for people with disabilities. In Ontario they just increased disability support payments by three per cent after only a 13 year freeze and they increased the fine for illegally parking in a handicapped zone up to $5,000.

The government spokesperson at these hearings, Allan Kessel a legal advisor to the Foreign Affairs Ministry, pointed out to those do–gooders on this committee that most Canadians "have access to housing of acceptable size and quality at affordable prices.” I mean goodness; it's only $800.00 a month for a one-room apartment in Toronto. Only a malcontent would make a fuss over the fact that a single person only receives $540.00 a month on welfare.

Look at all the geared to income housing units we have in the province of Ontario alone for these people on welfare and disability support payments. It's only on average a five-year wait for one of those apartments and after that you're set for life. A couple gets a 750 square foot one bedroom apartment in a low rise complex filled with other couples and families just like them. It's a regular community.

Mr. Kessel said Canada was “proud of its record of achievement in the promotion of economic, social and cultural rights.” and has been at the forefront of promoting human rights both internationally and domestically. Just look at our new policy for day care as an example of economic and social rights. A couple with only one person working and whose income is over $175,000 a year can claim a $1200.00 tax credit at the end of the year. Of course the less money you make the less of a credit you get because you don't need to deduct as much from your taxable income now do you?

Of course we are proud of our record regarding human rights domestically. Just look at the wonderful work we are doing with our native populations. Twice in the last two months we have successfully airlifted whole communities off their reserves when the water systems have failed and they were threatened with e-coli infestations. They all got to have a nice trip out of town at government expense and nobody got sick.

Oh sure there has been some belly aching because the new government hasn't honoured the Kelowna Accord's commitments for funding housing, education, and employment, but they still got $1.5 million dollars this year. They didn't really think they would get the $8 million that all the provinces and the previous government agreed to, now did they?

What does the United Nations expect us to do; give them opportunities we don't give others to get back on their feet? If we give the Natives proper housing, medical attention, and education, the first thing you know is that everybody in the country is going to expect it. It would set a dangerous precedent.

I used to have respect for the United Nations, back in the days when they were ranking Canada as one of the top ten countries in the world to live in. Now though, they've become a bunch of interfering old so-and-sos sticking their noses in where they don't belong.

It sounds to me that we signed that treaty under false pretences. We probably assumed it was for us to sit in judgement on some tin pot countries in the third world. There is no way we could have expected some self-righteous prig of a United Nations bureaucrat having the nerve to tell us that we have problems. I'm beginning to think the Americans have the right attitude towards the world authority, ignore them unless they agree with you.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:20 AM | Permalink

I am beginning to have less and less patience with people who want to lay the troubles of the world at the feet of someone else. It's all George Bush's fault; it's all the fault of Muslims; it's all the rich people's fault; or those bums on welfare are to blame. Sure some of those individuals or groups who we point fingers of accusation at have things to answer for, but how long can we continue to use them as an excuse for our own inaction in the areas that we can control?

How many times have you heard people complain about the homogenization of the world? Everywhere you look there's a MacDonald's Restaurant or other such evil example of the spread of American culture. It's the end of the world as we know it, cry the defenders of civilization.

Or the ones who decry the lack of spiritual focus in the world today brought about by the crass consumerism of our society. The very same people also seem to have the money to afford to go on retreats costing thousands of dollars to pay someone to help them find their own personal guardian angel, or listen to some faux guru tell them how to achieve enlightenment through the lightening of their wallets.

Both groups point their fingers pretty much in the same direction, away from themselves. Now to be fair there is validity in their criticism, outposts of the North American consumer society are this generation's Hudson Bay trading centres. Although instead of selling the natives cheap whisky and pox infested blankets for furs, they are selling them cheap carbohydrates and the fast buck, high stress world of the quick profit.

For some countries, barely recovered from years of colonial oppression, it must feel like they've only just begun to reclaim some of the ground they'd lost, when a new threat to their identity has appeared. But others, whose hands are not clean when it comes to a colonial past, and are the most vociferous when it comes to complaints, have no such history to overcome.

What do nations who have been around for thousands of years as the dominant culture from the Atlantic Ocean to as far East as Hong Kong, and as far South to the atolls of the South Pacific have to fear from a few MacDonald's stands and movies? It's their own damn fault anyway, if they hadn't been so hell bent on destroying the existent cultures of the lands they travelled to, perhaps they never would have created the "monster" that plagues them today.

The colonies of North America were mainly established by men seeking to make fortunes, for themselves and for their country. They were also seeking to spread the word of civilization and God to all those who were so obviously lost. Sound familiar to anyone?

The so called American Dream of making good, is merely an extension of the old explorers motivation to find new worlds to plunder and secure one's fortune. In a continent where settlement and expansion were dictated by men's desire for money is it any wonder that North America's values are still dictated by consumerism?

Learn to read between the lines of your history textbooks and you'll see that economic forces drove expansion and exploration on the part of the European nations. From India to North America, it was all about taking what you wanted, and ensuring the least amount of interference from the locals.

The end result was the destruction of some cultures, sucking the core out of others, and a dominant culture that existed for the pursuit of individual fortunes. As the colonial powers withdrew, from the mid twentieth century mark onward, they left behind arbitrarily defined borders based on where their territories had existed, ignorant of past tribal and cultural differences.

The cost of this carelessness, and of their attempts to obliterate unique cultural identities, is still being paid today. Whether in the form of genocides like those of Biafra and Rwanda; the need for people to reclaim their identities out of the mists of time; or even the feelings of spiritual angst experienced by some people in the West; all are legacies of the old expansionist, colonial mindset.

There are no easy solutions to any of these problems. You can't solve generations of racial and ethnic hatreds, give people back their languages and observances that have been lost, or fill an emptiness in people's lives, overnight. There are no twelve-step programs towards this type of recovery.

The Indian author Ashok Banker uses the term cultural archaeologist to describe what he's attempting to do by retelling the old stories of India for a modern audience. Digging into the past and uncovering the living relics that were buried alive by an occupying culture that tried to superimpose themselves over what had existed for thousands of years.

Unfortunately it is far easier to destroy than rebuild, and it is made even more difficult because of all the false trails and misleading information that is now being generated by those wishing to cash in on people's quest for identities. Nobody seems to want to know about where they came from, it's nowhere near as exotic as learning the secrets of the ten shamanist chants to enlightenment, or how to invoke 25 angels and 15 ascendant masters through your navel.

The real answers to identity could probably be found in some old, dusty, boring, history book that deals with pre-Christian Europe. Or even better pick up a book on archaeology, a book of traditional stories, and an atlas. It's amazing what you can learn about your ancestors that way. It just takes a little effort on your part.

Don't cheapen somebody else's beliefs by thinking you are learning how to be like them by reading a teach yourself ritual book that you picked up in the New Age section of your bookstore. Most of those cultures are still desperately trying to rebuild on their own and don't need anybody taking a free ride on their beliefs. Unless you are willing to do the work involved in dedicating yourself to a belief system, don't pretend to be something your not.

Human culture does not grow like a bacterial culture for yoghurt. It takes more than a couple of weeks in a sealed container for it to mature. We in the west are spoiled in that we can pick and choose from a variety of cultures that we want to sample and decide whether we like it or not.

Do you ever stop to think how this type of grazing could be insulting to the people's beliefs you are toying with? Instead of looking away for your answers why not look inward and ask some questions. Why are you dissatisfied and what are you looking for would be good ones to start with.

Be your own personal cultural archaeologist; dig and sift through the past of your race and see what you can find there. Look for the answers to your questions within yourself. We of European descent have no reason to blame anyone but ourselves for cultural and spiritual woes. It a simple matter of doing something about it yourself for a change instead of looking for an easy answer elsewhere.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:29 AM | Permalink

The author who writes a trilogy is a lot like a juggler, but instead of bowling pins being kept aloft, she or he must keep the variety of story lines and characters created constantly in motion. The key to being a successful juggler is to never look directly at what you're tossing, but at some middle distance where the object in motion will end up.

A good juggler is able to keep all of her objects in motion at an equal speed without any discernable effort. No running around under them in a desperate effort to keep them all airborne for the professional; just a seemingly seamless circle of moving objects without a beginning or an end. Suddenly the action stops and all the objects come to rest simultaneously and in the hands of the one responsible for their being set in motion in the first place.

Needless to say the more objects that come into play increases the level of difficulty, while at the same time making the final result that much more impressive. The juggler who is able to incorporate items that are of differing size and weight increases the level of difficulty involved in keeping the desired uniformity and increase the chances of a sloppy ending.

Knowing when to stop adding to the mix and simply focusing on maintaining what's been started is the key to being a successful juggler. Sometimes it can be more impressive to have three highly disparate objects in play, then twenty similar ones flying around your head. Being able to add a twist into a familiar pattern, eating the apple you're juggling but not the eggs is a good one, makes for an interesting diversion while the routine is in play; but everything still must come down to how well it all ends up fitting together.

By the time the third book of a trilogy rolls around the author has been keeping her objects in motion for some time now, and has to begin the process of winding the action down until it reaches a conclusion. Final judgement on how successful his project has been rests on her ability to come to the same seamless finale that her counterpart juggler strives for.

Is there a mad scramble at the end in a bid to resolve everything that had been put in motion, or do all the elements come to rest with the same certainty they showed upon being set into motion. If the author has managed to keep her focus on the neutral ground of the ending there should be no problem. But if he has become more immersed in the play of the individual items than the overall picture, it can lead to the sensation that the story was rushed to an end for the sake of having a conclusion.

Not only does this make for unsatisfying story telling but it usually leaves far too many unresolved and partially resolved issues. Except in the cases where this is a deliberate effort on the part of the author, and made abundantly clear that it was the intent, books that end like that look sloppy and diminish whatever fine work may or may not have preceded it.

A sure sign that an author has let things go to long before starting the resolution, is when events start to be effected by elements that had no previous mention in the story. The introduction of new characters at the last moment, unpredicted natural disasters, or any other "Hand of God" device is a sure sign that the author hasn't given enough thought to what to do with each element.

Jude Fisher's Rose Of The World, book three of her Fools Gold series, could be a primer on how to do things properly. In fact the whole trilogy could be a template for novice authors to follow in terms of structure and pacing. Books one and two, Sorcery Rising and Wild Magic respectively, have set the stage through their development of characters and plot to ensure that the author only need tie all the ends together to finish off the story.

One of the really nice techniques she uses is to incorporate elements from one story line into another in order to ensure that circumstances play out the way she wants, without looking like she is forcing the issue. In order for Aron Aronson to be able to set out on his journey to Sanctuary in Wild Magic he had kidnapped the finest shipwright in Eyran.

When the Istria decide to invade Eyran to they need a shipwright, because they have not the knowledge to build the ships that can survive an ocean voyage. When it is discovered that the best one in Eyran is at Aron's settlement, with only women to protect him, a raider party sets out to kidnap him, and take as many women prisoner as they can to sell at the slave markets.

Which is how at the beginning of The Rose Of The World we find Aron's daughter Katla being shipped to Istria where she is needed for the continuation of the story. It is just one example of how every step of the way Ms. Fisher is not only juggling her separate plot lines successfully but managing to ensure that all elements for the ending end up in place seamlessly.

Whether it's reuniting characters who have not seen each other since Sorcery Rising in order for them to garner much needed information, or the bringing together of those who had not previously met, but need to for the final resolution to occur, there is never the feeling of an issue being forced. Although there is an occasional stretching of credibility, the strange old hermit woman in Katla's home village just happening to be the wife of the Wizard who resides in Sanctuary, they can be forgiven because the character in that circumstance is very believable.

Sometimes the crazy old hermit woman that all the children refer to as a witch really is one, and that's the case in this instance. By utilizing that old familiar concept of the scary old woman on the edge of town, Ms. Fisher is able to offset any awkwardness that could cause enough disbelief to send her juggling balls off course.

As The Rose Of The World progresses bits and pieces of information that has come out in the prior two books are explained and made clear to both us and the characters in the book. Instead of an event in book three looking like it sprang out of nowhere, it can be traced back along a trail of information to a point in Sorcery Rising.

When we first met all of our characters they were all converging at the site of the Allfair in Istria. Here it was that Katla ran afoul of the authorities for being in a place where women were not allowed. Aron Aronson had purchased the map that would lead him to Sanctuary from the former wizard's apprentice Virelai.

Saro Vingo had innocently wandered into the Nomad's encampment of the fair and stumbled upon the items that would govern his life and received his first glimpse of Katla. It is at the fair that Rosa Eldi makes her escape from Virelai and using her power bewitches the King of Eyran into selected her as his wife, inciting the passions that recreate the enmity that has only lain dormant between the peoples of Eyran and Isria, which in turn is the cause of all the ensuing destruction over the course of the trilogy.

Through adept juggling Ms. Fisher is able to come full circle and bring her entire cast of characters back to where everything began and bring the series to its conclusion. Any of the strings that she leaves untied are ones that are suitable in character for those involved. Katla has all along claimed she will not take a wife, so to have no resolution in sight as far as her relationship with Saro goes, makes perfect sense.

The Rose Of The World is a successful conclusion to a well-structured and crafted trilogy that shows off the author's ability to juggle the myriad of elements that allow for maximum reader enjoyment. While never overly complex, she manages to introduce enough elements to keep interest alive throughout the three novels.

There is nothing earth shattering about these books, by no means are they high art or feats of intellectual daring do. But you're not going to be reading the majority of fantasy for those reason anyhow. This is a well-written and interesting story by a skilled craftsperson that knows all the tricks of her trade. It's nice to know that there are still authors out there who care enough to have made the effort to learn how to juggle properly.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:52 AM | Permalink

Everyone's heard of what's known as Middle Child syndrome, where a child who has both a younger and older sibling often feels less important in the eyes of his or her parents. No longer the centre of attention by being the youngest who needs more high maintenance, but also lacking the freedoms that usually come with age, they feel hard done by and neglected.

How about the sophomore jinx? The problems an athlete, or anything will have for that matter, following up on an opening success. The rookie hockey player who scores a hundred points only to see his totals halved in his second season is the usual scenario. It leads people to question the abilities or the talent of the person in question. Were they just a flash in the pan, or will they be able to overcome a few set backs and regain the form of their first year?

Well I'd like to add a new phrase into that mix for your contemplation: "The Middle Book Lull". How often have you found the second book of any trilogy to be the weakest? It can't live up to the interest generated by the introduction of characters, plot, and background that happens in book one, and has none of the climatic excitement of the finale that occurs in book three.

The problem being is that simple exposition, or story telling, without any resolution at the end is probably the most difficult thing for an author to carry off successfully. There's no real beginning to capture a readers attention or ending to hold their interest. It's a nebulous middle ground that would test any author's mettle.

Even in a single volume novel the meat of the story is what makes or breaks an author's work; do they have the talent to take their idea and breath enough life into it to sustain the reader's interest? In the case of a trilogy those circumstances are even more obvious because any deficiencies on the part of the author in that area will become glaringly obvious.

But it's not just their own skill that an author must contend with, but a reader's expectations of what a book should be. It's hard to rid oneself of the desire for a beginning, middle, and end to be contained within the covers of any book. A reader, and a critic, has to change their means of assessment when it comes to the middle book in a trilogy. It has to be judged within the context of how well it does its job within the context of the trilogy.

That being said it is still up to the author to convince us to keep reading, and to keep our interest in the story kindled sufficiently to care enough about the characters and the plot to want to read the conclusion. They were the one, after all who made the choice to embellish the story to the extent that it required three books. The challenge they face is to prove that there really is sufficient story to warrant the amount of pages they have written (Being the perverse sort of creature I am, sometimes when I'm in doubt about a series or an author I will deliberately read the second book first. If it is able to capture my attention than I figure it's worth reading.)

Wild Magic is book two in Jude Fisher's Fool's Gold trilogy and to her credit she manages to continue to develop and elaborate on all the elements she introduced in book one, Sorecery Rising. As a matter of a fact she manages to make book two in some ways even more intriguing than its predecessor.

It's as if now that's she free of the obligation of introducing us to the cast of characters and the plots lines, she has let her imagination loose upon them, to great effect. After bringing everybody together in book one at the Allfair in Istria she's scattered them out into the world to begin their own quests.

The Aranson clan have returned to their land in Eyra where Katla must recuperate from her injuries sustained when the Istria attempted to burn her at the stake. Her father Aron's obsession with taking ship to find the mysterious island of Sanctuary continues to grow and colours every decision he makes.

When if looks as if Katla will surely never be able to regain the use of one hand her grandmother calls in the local equivalent of a sorcerer to attempt a healing. The seither realizes that somehow the old magic that has long lain dormant has been reawakened within Katla and she has the potential for great power.

Meanwhile young Saro Vingo in Istria is beginning to discover the full horror of being attuned to the feelings of others. In Sorcery Rising he had received an amulet known as a modestone from one of the Wanderers. When the man was accidentally killed in frot of Saro he also passed on his ability to sense the thoughts of others simply through physical contact.

The modestone is unfortunately not just a pretty trinket. Saro discovers that it seems to be able to increase his abilities to such an extent that, even though he has no recollection of it happening, he has literally absorbed the souls of three men. It seems that the more emotional and violent the environment, the stronger the pull of the stone, and the further he recedes from awareness.

Even when the environment is relatively calm his sensitivity gradually increases to the extent that even inanimate objects now give off the emotions of all who have touched them previously. Wearing gloves helps him to an extent, but even that only mutes the experience.

When Virelai, the former wizard's apprentice who fled the island of Sanctuary for the wonders of the world, has a chance encounter with Saro in the capital of Istria, he recognizes the stone from descriptions in some of the wizard's diaries he'd stolen. He discovers that the stone if wielded in a certain manner could be used as a kind of ultimate weapon that would destroy all life.

Why, after two hundred years of quiet, has the magic awoken with such virulence? Whose is the mysterious voice that speaks as if from the very bones of the earth to both Saro and Katla when they are in the almost trance like state which they slip into when their connection to the power becomes strong.

More and more the answers look to lie with the mysterious woman that the King of Erya has married, Rosa Eldi, the one that Virelai stole out of Sanctuary when he made his escape. Not only has she the power to beguile a man on sight, which is how she came to be chosen by the King as his bride, other powers are slowly coming to light.

It as frightening to her, as it would be to anyone else if they knew, that she can do things like will plants to grow and bear fruit in the middle of winter. She has no idea who she is or where any of these powers came from, but is beginning to have memories of herself and another place.

Only one person understands who she is; the same seither who had been called into heal Katla, had been sent for by the King's mother to dispose of this harlot who had stolen the heart of her son. But although the seither recognises who the Rosa is, she cannot tell her, for fear that the knowledge will do her damage. All she can do is aid her in he recovery of her memories.

But the path back for the old magic is convoluted, and won't be easy. Too many forces are arrayed against it and the men of both countries have allowed themselves to be corrupted by their own greed and pride. If Rosa is somehow connected to the rebirth or sorcery, and both Saro and Katla are tied into it what do the fates have in store for them?

What about Aron and his mad quest to find Sanctuary? Will whatever he finds there be worth the incredible sacrifices it's taken for him to make the journey? Can the world they all live in survive long enough to even find out the answers?

Jude Fisher has deftly kept the action flowing and the suspense building in Wild Magic. Instead of being satisfied with merely continuing the story started in Sorcery Rising she has managed to build upon her foundation an intricate adventure of mystery, intrigue, and magic.

As Wild Magic draws to a close the answers to some questions are close to being resolved, but that only gives rise to deeper and more puzzling riddles. There is no sophomore jinx at work in this book. Our appetites our whetted superbly for the conclusion of Fool's Gold by this well written and intricate novel