Five Enemies
Friday, October 13 2000
Posted by brockp
Tonight, the lure of being able to instantly post my opinions for the entire world of web denizens is overriding my desire to maintain this blog space with moderation and restraint. Chalk another victory up for Mara at 4:18 am. Mara appears in the Pali Canon as the personification of negativity, and is sometimes even pictured in devil type outfit, horns and all. Unfortunately, Mara tends to be somewhat subtler than that and is more easily understood as a name for negative mental states. I think the top 5 usually are listed as greed, hatred, sloth & torpor (laziness), agitation/restlessness, and my all time favourite, viccikiccha. That one Pali word covers everything from fear to self-doubt and if you bundle it up with uddaccakukkuccha (agitation) you can account for all that wonderful anxiety as well. These two can make a really great loop which is very difficult to get out of, and are my very good friends, really !

I was going to rant about the review of my record which appeared in this month's Exclaim! magazine when I began tonight's (or should I say this morning's) blog, but somehow now, the pleasure of ranting seems kinda pale. It actually was not a bad review, except that John K, my old bandmate, will prolly not enjoy being referred to as "mangy maned", and Bob Williams was mistakenly reported to be a veteran of Big Drill Car, a notion which he would probably enjoy. The closing remark the reviewer made was the real doozy though - he commented that the only flaw with the record was that it sometimes sounded like it was made on a porta-studio and that if I had only had a little more time in a "real" studio...

OK I did it even after all that talk about Mara, but you know, I feel better. After all, everyone knows you can't make a decent sounding record for fifteen grand right ?

Bionic is on a Mission
Monday, October 9 2000
Posted by brockp
Mission,the latest video from Jonathan Cummins powerful new group Bionic was released this past week in Canada. You can help the band out tremendously by requesting it from Muchmusic or Musiqueplus: send email to wedge@muchmusic.com and 123punk@musiqueplus.com respectively.

Dr. Seuss and Mr. Spot
Sunday, October 1 2000
Posted by brockp
About time for some more blogging. Its almost 5am and one might wonder what the hell I am doing writing in this particular way. I am probably putting back some layers of ignorance on top of the very raw engagement with dukkha of being a 2 year old this evening.

Coming home from the Mr. Spot's gig this evening around 11pm (left early to drive Clemmie home), Heather picked up a voce mail from a close friend who is about 35 weeks pregnant. She had started having contractions earlier today, and we were both concerned that her too brief message was an indication that things were not all well. Following on her intuiton, Heather tracked the midwife down and learned that her friend had been sent to Providence for some drug that would arrest the onsetting labour. For those of you not too hip to baby having, a full term baby is 40-42 weeks (although lots of savage med doctors will try and induce you at 40) which means a baby born at 35 weeks is not such a great thing. The lungs are one of the last things to develop, which is why in the old days doctors would smack a baby on the butt after the poor thing had just squeezed through the birth canal in order to see if the kid could breathe properly.

So Heather took off for the hospital to be a support (she will be serving as a doula for this birth) and Clem and I settled down to some Dr. Seuss and sleepy time. After "da Sam-I-Am book" (Green Eggs and Ham), The Lorax, "da Big Elephant Book", some crying, some rocking chair and some Celtic harp music, Clem and I eventually found sleep.

At about 3:15 am Clemmie woke up looking for a breast and, finding only me, was pretty upset. We found the rocking chair again and listened to Handel's water music for a while until he fell back asleep, only to be awakened by his mama coming in. Needless to say he was not that upset to be awakened this time and headed off for some "milk inna bed".

Tonight's performance at Mr.Spot's also had a moment or two which I can comment on first hand now, having a web diary of my own. The first comment is that performing seems to be like becoming invisible or moving out of the way of something. I would like to stick around to enjoy the show but there is not much room for the "me" who wants to do that - kind of like being very very skinny. The next comment is that having your eyes open while performing is a good thing. My experience of this from the stage is one thing but from the audience, even moreso. Its no fun to look at someone staring off at some distant corner of the ceiling. The third comment is that I think cover tunes should be tunes that the performer has some connection or strong feeling about. This may seem self evident to some, but I had the experience tonight of watching String Theory perform Vulcanization and the players all looking like they were hard at work in the middle of a Final Exam or something. Now I know where the term "math rock" came from. By contrast, a few minutes later they were covering a CGTrio piece and music was about.

The SGC in trio form tonight were also quite good, and I wish they would do more of this sort of thing. There's something just more intimate about hearing Bob & Jax with Curt as opposed to the machine like precision factor of all six players with right hands going up and down simultaneously. Call me a heretic, but I like human-ness. Oddly enough, Greg Sundberg told me tonight that what I'd just played was the most "human" he'd heard the guitar craft tuning sound in a long time. Thanks for the kind words, Greg.