Ian Hume Obituary In Today's Globe And Mail

My grandfather, Ian Hume, pictured above in fine form, is one of Canada's sports legends.

His obituary appears today in Canada's leading newspaper, The Globe and Mail.

See below for link to online version:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060531.OBHUME31/TPStory/

I also append, below, a poem I wrote about him and his pet crow (and other aspects of his life mentioned in the obituary), published in Stand magazine; I hope the editor's of that fine UK journal will permit its reuse in this digital format on this occasion.


A Good Person In Snow

A good person, does it do them good,
to go out, late, walking in the snow?
How best, for them, to do more good
than ill? Does their goodness have

anything to do with the winter chill?
I wish to walk so, along this narrow
trail, with you and her, who are both
the same person, observed either by

myself, or a farfetched crow, such as
my grandfather took everywhere on
his seven-mile government roads,
when wood was to hand. Back to her

and you, similar friends, with a scarf
encircling your fair head. Would
goodness keep me in its rose glow, if
my dear companion of the blizzard

was dead? How to behave, at this hour
in this light? A crow with cleverness,
who belonged to a boy and never
longed for the crowd, the murder,

as they say: applying humanity to
nature in a word. This black-eyed
quickness in the past is a memory bird
shouldered by Ian as he dies, though

we prayed in December; he survived.
Is this goodness, to go on being older?
Is all love this much whiteness in wilderness?
Or like those bare trees we cut to fix a fire?

Is it wrong to hold ever tighter as you disappear?
I walk into your furnace kindly to furnish
a dream-house with an ethics based on ice;
which is to say: it is hard until it has to go.

A shift in time is enough to ease their wintry finish,
so that a blue cold dagger skates a pond, a temple
of cubes steps down a pool. No one was more fond
of her, the crow, and the winter, than that good man.


poem by Todd Swift
published in Stand; also appears in the collection Rue du Regard (DC Books, Montreal)

Review: Scott Walker's The Drift

I have several reasons to find musical genius Scott Walker and his latest album, The Drift, of interest.

I live in Maida Vale, and he famously did, during perhaps his most creative period. Secondly, and more importantly, up until this new release, I though I had created the most densely-packed, poetic, Brechtian and challenging "modernist-cabaret" soundscape full-length CD. It turns out the CD I co-wrote and developed with award-winning Canadian composer/ musician Tom Walsh (entitled The Envelope, Please, see links below) is, compared to Mr. Walker's latest, about as accessible as a Looney Tunes reel.

The Drift is impossible to listen to, and impossible to turn away from - it has the impact of very bad news.

It does not need long for a critic to establish how strange and off-putting this is, when one considers that Walker proudly spliced in sounds of raw meat being violently punched, and one approximately ten-minute song minutely explores the agon of Mussolini's mistress being strung up like a pig in the public square beside Il Duce himself - the interminable-yet-riveting interior monologue both harrowing and weirdly moving.

Walker was always too much - that is what makes him an original, and important. His wild Expressionist acting out makes most performance art seem dull - he is, quite simply, the agent of what is most over-the-top in musical theatre. Imagine if an echo-chambered, tormented Jacques Brel (no doubt punching a raw steak) wrote and sang songs of sheer nihilistic dread... accompanied by elaborate compositions without any notably clear narrative or symphonic structure, plus strings from Psycho, prepared instruments from John Cage, with repeated phrases like "what happen in America" and "black cocaine" - chillingly poetic snippets mixed in with strange aphorisms ("I'll punch a donkey in the streets of Galway").

"I'm the only one left alive" croons a deranged Elvis mourning his twin brother who died in childbirth. Later, amidst the sounds of a braying ass being slaughtered, we hear Walker moan "Curare, Curare" - just after singing the praises of "the grossness of spring".

What is happening here? Walker has the sound of the last century in his "bloody head" and "lolls against the window" - gazing out in anguish and wanting to aesthetically transmogrify it all - excercised by the vulnerable body and nature's maggot-fed corruptions.

At times, the album sounds like it might break in to a punch-drunk musical from the 50s, like "The Most Happy Fella" - and then gets hijacked by a demented Bernard Hermann. Our age's extremes of taste - and mental states - seems one of the main themes of this drifting journey up Walker's sinuous flowing influences to the dark heart of things. Mistah Kurt Weill, he dead.

To be admired, and frankly, at times feared, The Drift is likely to be the goth-spiral-into-madness-soundtrack of choice for intensely pensive readers of 20th century German philosophy and early Eliot; for the rest, it simply remains the most daunting and persuasively conceived anti-pop-album of the 21st century - a work that resists any label but Art; one wants to add Brut, to that.

Art Brut then, with broken glass and scuttling rats.

Eyewear gives it 5 out of 5 specs.

http://www.4ad.com/scottwalker/

http://www.aelaq.org/mrb/article.php?issue=9&article=192&cat=3

http://wiredonwords.com/SwiftyLazarus.html

Northern Soul

I have an interview just up at Northern Poetry Review, the vital new online review from Toronto.

Do check it out:

http://www.northernpoetryreview.com/interviews/alex-boyd/todd-swift.html

This Charming Man

Tory leader David Cameron (pictured) appeared today on the classic (BBC) Radio 4 show, Desert Island Discs. Famously, Mr. Cameron is trying to revive the Conservatives by leading them away from the unfriendly opinions of their majority of "crusty old Majors" - into a land of hip, young families with windfarms on top of their affordable housing.

Mr. Cameron almost has my vote, after he selected several of my favourite songs as his favourite songs too...

A live version of "Tangled Up in Blue", The Smith's "This Charming Man", Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees", something by REM so obscure it must have been suggested by a spin-doctor, and a rousing anthem from the hot new Mormon-led band, The Killers.

He isn't much of a reader, though, as he selected a cook book for his one read (he already has Shakespeare and The BIble, though) - and his luxury, booze. Perhaps he should have selected The Collected Works of Rachel Carson, and a recycling bin, to really win us over.

Todd's Miscellany

A few odd things noted in the papers the last few days....

Firstly, two infamous British egg collectors have died in separate incidents this week while climbing trees that hold nests of rare birds - it is illegal to "blow" the yolk from golden eagles and so on. Tragically, these and other men suffer a rare condition which psychiatrists have described as an "obsessional neurosis" that drives them to paradoxically become bird experts, then risk their lives to collect the eggs that sustain these endangered creatures; it's a condition that sounds dangerously close to all art.

Secondly, no less a man than Jon Bon Jovi has given the final word on marriage. Asked why he doesn't engage in wild sex with anyone but his wife of 17 years, despite being a rock star he said: "I can't. Whatcha gonna do? That's the trade-off. That's OK. I can live with that. I got a good deal." Amen to that.

And finally, when George Bush was asked what he'd miss most about Tony Blair, he mumbled, "his ties." Not exactly a relationship on Bon Jovian intensity, I'd wager.

Poem by Lisa Pasold

Eyewear is very glad to welcome Lisa Pasold (pictured here in a brasserie in Nantes) to its pages this Friday. She has become one of the core poets in the new 21st century Paris expat literary scene, along with Jennifer K Dick and Michelle Noteboom.

It was good to meet her when I lived in that city for several years, in 2001-2003. Indeed, I was so taken with her poetry, I included it in my survey of 20 younger Canadian poets published in the 2005 issue of New American Writing. One of the things I like about her writing is how she gets so much of the world in to it, without ever easing up on innovative practice - while retaining humour and perspective - making fast-paced avant-garde work with a voice behind it, mixing narrative and more opaque strategies in a new blend.

Pasold is nothing if not active and travelled - she's been thrown off a train in Belarus, been fed the world’s best pigeon pie in Marrakech, mushed huskies in the Yukon, and been cheated in the Venetian gambling halls of Ca’ Vendramin Calergi.

She grew up in Montreal (as did I - we debated against each other in high school then promptly forgot each other for nearly 20 years) which gave her the necessary jaywalking skills to survive as a journalist and guidebook writer.

Her first book of poetry, Weave, appeared in 2004 and was nominated for an Alberta Book Award. She currently lives in Paris and teaches creative writing at the American University in Paris. Her new book of poetry, A Bad Year for Journalists, came out this April.


what’s possible

“Hidden agendas: How journalists influence the news”
she reads. that’s just fan-tas-tic, I knew they’d get
to blaming us one of these days.

it’s a simple job, “radicalizing the pain of others.” Or selling it.

because she's there to make money off their situation. at least,
they think she is.

can you sell this?

so they throw shit at the car. their own shit. towards her.
splatter the windshield.

(if she worked, say, for FOX, she could skip
this, make it up as she went along. like whistling a tune.)

where’s her handy pith helmet and guidebook? in the Strand once
she came across Directions for Englishmen
Going to India. 19th century binding opened in her hand
to page 41. Bodoni Book font, smudged advice:

"Stand still and wave a white handkerchief. This should
confuse the elephant."

there was no illustration.

but the handkerchief remains, the elephant pauses
to decipher meaning

—truce? surrender? you're
about to blow your nose?—the elephant’s hesitation
an opportunity:

Run. Run away.

Keep driving, she says now from the passenger seat.
Just keep driving.


poem by Lisa Pasold
from A Bad Year for Journalists, www.frontenachouse.com

Desmond Dekker Is Dead, The Music Lives On

Ska comes in waves.

My brother, Jordan, who turns 35 today, was one of the key players in the Canadian ska/mod revival of the early 90s, and co-founded Stomp Records, which celebrated the 2-tone style, that most upbeat of music, with several important compilations. His band, The Kingpins, went on to release several great albums (and in a new incarnation just toured China).

But the presiding spirits for his generation extended well beyond the brilliant, eccentric Bobby Beaton and Me Mom & Morgentaler, back, of course, to the original ska/mod revival of 1980 (The Second Wave) when The Specials, The Selecter, The Beat, and Madness, made ska the sincere rocksteady sound of Thatcher's bleak streets.

But one of the presiding reggae spirits for their generation was Desmond Dekker.

Rather than the visionary Bob Marley, whose fame sadly came to eclipse Dekker's, it was Desmond's "Rude Boy" persona - prefiguring almost every stance and trope in gangsta rap today - that helped tp set the world skanking in the 60s - perhaps reaching its height of zeitgeist greatness with hits like "007" and "Israelites".

Sadly, this musical innovator, this genius, has died suddenly in the UK.

Bibliography:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5018910.stm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-perl/music/muze/index.pl?site=music&action=biography&artist_id=8003

http://www.answers.com/topic/kingpins-2

http://www.theselecter.net/

http://www.thespecials.com/

http://www.twistandcrawl.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ska