Archive for the 'adventures' category

A turn for the (questionably) lucid

Aug 12 2008 Published by under adventures, author's notes

I was at the Edmonton Folk Fest on the weekend. Which was a thrill-ride of musical experiences. Aimee Mann, Cat Power, Bellowhead, Martyn Joseph, Dar Williams, John Bottomley, Jon Brooks, Colin Hay, Broken Social Scene, Luke Doucet, Catherine MacLellan, Chris Isaak, Ryan Shaw, Peatbog Faeries (to name a few of my new and old favourites). Pieces of me are still there. Spindly copper connector wires to a series of heartbeats that sound more and more like a kick drum pumping crunchy guitar licks through my veins (this is not your typical folk, folks). I’m barefoot, dawdling back.

Because I’m hoping that I won’t make it back to this pedestrian existence before I leave again. I’m going back to Nova Scotia soon. Where I’ve only lived three weeks of my life. But Halifax doesn’t let a girl go, even when her home is a bump in the middle of the prairies. The ocean takes pieces of your skin and cycles them back again, but never quite the same. So I’m going to a home that was never my home and will always be home in the ways that it is. I will search for whales and puffins, hike through the Cape Breton Highlands, swim in the ocean, wander along the waterfront with my husband, drink coffee from The Mudroom, and spend time with dear friends.

So I’m not here today. I don’t plan to do much more than touch down briefly and fly away again.

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Door to Door (Three Stage Journey)

Jul 03 2008 Published by under adventures, these small moments

1.
The heat hits the way heat hits when you walk out of an air conditioned building. All the hours inside peel away in this borrowed-desert wind. Carrying old lilacs and crisping grass. Weaving around and between my fingers, slippery and dry like flaxseed pouring cross-ways over my hands. This is the escape or the release. Shimmers of heat absorbing whoever I was five minutes ago. Nothing in the heavy rushing air reflects my image.

2.
Inside the bus. We are not crammed uncomfortably to the gills. Limbs brush unavoidably and we are lazily, solidly one mass of transit in a dusty bright day. Everyone smells clean and summery despite the end of the day and the increasing damp of our collective exhalations. Girls with melting wax lip gloss scented smiles. Boys in their early twenties with loose cotton shirts (sparingly buttoned) and blue eyes snapping for a fraction of a second while I smile brief appreciation. Me tucked in a corner reading and pretending to read. Submerged and perspiring. Experiential dialysis collecting peripheral movement within my skin.

3.
The urge to walk barefoot down the hill is irresistible. So I don’t resist. Hot dogs and mustard waft down from some unidentifiable balcony (maybe several). My feet remember running down gravel alleys and stretch along the smooth concrete and black-hot gravely asphalt. A man jogs past leaving baked-clean sweat and cocoa butter in the air. I follow him to the sloughy lakes and sticky candy of childhood heat waves. Until my feet hit grass. Where a sprinkler is running feebly, uselessly early. And the only thing that keeps me running through full-tilt is the man who wishes I was walking on the street. Instead of finding these fifty steps of springy earth and green between my toes.

One response so far

Cahones

Oct 19 2007 Published by under adventures, author's notes

It is a gutsy move to take a group of middle-aged, down-to-earth, practical engineers to a performance featuring modern dance/creative movement, live post-modern classical music with a rock edge, aerialists and a man obsessed with rubber ducks. Yet that is what I orchestrated for this evening.

The trick is to have them ferried around in a limo and feed them an incredible meal beforehand.

Also, don’t tell them anything about what they are about to experience.

It received exactly the mixed reaction I expected. I am pleased that I went out on that limb. But I might not be put in charge of things next year.

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The Importance Of

Oct 11 2007 Published by under adventures

There are some musicians/lyricists that take you outside of time. Into all your memories of the places you fell in love with them. One line of a song or a sequence of chords. I can pinpoint the very bend in the road that coincided with the lyric that sealed my devotion to The Weakerthans. John K. Samson pieces words together in ways I wish I could emulate. I even (don’t tell) steal tricks from him – the extensive description of metaphors to the point of literal interpretation, for one. He writes of my Canada, love, loneliness, the oddities of disconnection and patriotism with images that are universally intimate.

They played in Edmonton tonight. My first opportunity to enjoy them in a theatre setting, sitting down. No one flirting, drinking, chatting, dancing. A room of listening. And I was inside the music. Completely. Inside memories of old emotions. Laughable regrets. In the middle of cavernous me staring around at the cracks in the walls and the crust of plaque in the corners. Things that can be observed with detachment when the lyrics are the flavour of that exciting malbec I forgot to get the name of.

It is important that I was there. To be reminded about buried things that should have been tossed away many heartbeats ago. To remember how to follow a rhythm wherever it goes. Leave all that distance at the door.

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