I love this photo of Tim William, but I’m sorry I don’t know who took it.
It’s been a tough year for the arts community in my province of Alberta.
Maybe it’s to be expected with an ageing population — people will die, artists will die, friends will die. And yet at some level we never get used to it and it never gets any easier to say good bye.
Early in the year, I was invited up to Edmonton to speak at a memorial for the wonderful actor John Wright at Theatre Network. I was fortunate to have had John in five of my plays and we had become close to one another over the years. (We were just a couple of Saskatchewan boys, after all.)
It’s possible you would have to write plays yourself to understand the relationship between playwrights and the actors who perform in our plays, who go out there night after night armed only with our imperfect words. Say it’s special and leave it at that. I can’t find the words.
It was certainly a Who’s Who at the Zoo of the Edmonton theatre community on the stage at the Roxy Theatre that evening, along with this interloper from Calgary. The tributes were sincere and meaningful from those of us who congregated to honour John that evening. There was also some levity. A life in the theatre would have to include a certain degree of absurdity, after all.
There was an even deeper sense of loss to grapple with that evening in Edmonton. Beloved actor Julian Arnold had died only a few months earlier. More recently, the patriarch of the Edmonton theatre world (and beyond) Jim DeFelice had passed away, leaving a void that would seem impossible to fill. Julian and Jim had been in the same play of mine, Jim had been the dramaturge on another.
Three giants of the Edmonton community, gone within a few months of each other. In the midst of life, and all that jazz . . .
Meanwhile, back in Calgary where I live, we’ve had losses of our own to deal with this year.
In April, the elder statesman of the Calgary theatre community Grant Reddick passed away. It wasn’t entirely unexpected — Grant was in his 90s. But it still comes as a shock and our sorrow at his passing was no less profound. I was fortunate to have had Grant in one of my plays. What a beautiful artist he was. He was also a consummate gentleman. That was the word we heard the most at his high Anglican funeral at the cathedral: gentleman. That’s a high tribute in a world basically gone mad.
As usual, on hearing about his death I was saddened that I hadn’t made more room for him in my life, visited a little more often, or even picked up the phone now and again.
“Too late!” we say. And yet we learn nothing.
In June, another luminary from our theatre world Kathi Kerbes passed away quite unexpectedly — as I heard again and again, “Too soon.” The stories of Kathi’s stewardship of Shadow Theatre at her memorial were touching and inspirational and often funny. She had worked with so many members of the Calgary theatre community, always with great verve and humour, that her death touched a lot of people deeply.
Most recently, we lost the man pictured above, Tim Williams. Not since the tragic death of Michael Green ten years ago has a death in our community sent such shock waves. Tim was recognized as one of the preeminent blues artists in the world, so his death was felt deeply in the local music community and well beyond. But he was also a bona fide member of the theatre community, having performed on stage and off in a number of productions, and by being married to Johanne Deleeuw, a highly respected member of Calgary’s theatre world.
It was when Johanne was artistic director at Lunchbox Theatre and produced a few of my plays (and directed one) that I first got to know Tim. As I recall, I gave him a Harmon Kardon amp that he took great delight in. From that time twenty-five years ago or so I heard Tim perform countless times — for a while it was as easy for me as walking a block to Mikey’s bar where he was doing a kind of happy hour set. It always amazed me that I could sit and listen to someone as talented as Tim for the price of a beer. He wasn’t hard to find, he played a lot of sets throughout the city up to the very end.
To sit and listen to Tim was, beyond the sheer appreciation of the music, to be schooled in the history of the blues. “Encyclopedic knowledge” I read and again in countless tributes to Tim since he passed. Appreciation for Tim went well beyond social media. City Councillor D. J Kelly, spoke to the city council to honour Tim’s legacy, by attending one blues venue this month — a fitting tribute to Tim’s legacy.
As was the case of all the wonderful people I have mentioned here, beyond being a truly gifted artist and great performer, Tim was a really great guy, someone you were only too happy to spend some time with. The last time we had the chance to talk, I walked into the bar and saw him sitting there waiting to play a set and his eyes lit up when he saw me and we sat and had a beer together and got caught up. He was one of those rare people who could make you feel like you were the most important person in the entire world. His death has left a real void in the Calgary community.
I miss him. I miss all these good folks. Honestly, my world is diminished without them.
Here in Alberta, we manage to live with a sketchy government that no one will admit to having voted for. That’s just politics and governments come and go (some not quickly enough). But saying good bye to our artist friends is never easy, they have all touched us in their own unique and indelible way. Our world is a little duller, a little dimmer, a little sadder without them. They will be missed by many.
Imagine two somewhat soggy rugrats entering this grand establishment!
To end this reminiscence of early days in Regina . . .
At some point, I had to travel further south than Taylor Field.
It was on a late autumn evening in 1970 (possibly spring of ’71, on any account, long long ago!) which means I was 14 years old. I was sitting in the Copper Kettle coffee shop on Scarth Street smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and writing in my journal.
That used to be the real reason for going into a coffee shop on a rainy evening way back then, to have a comfortable and dry place to have a cigarette. How the world has changed during my brief time in it. Well, we have to adapt, I guess. Within reason.
(Christ almighty! That was 55 years ago! And here I sit in Caffe Beano, sans cigarette, still writing in my journal. Have I not evolved at all?!) (And more to the point, what was I doing in a downtown cafe all alone on a Friday night, smoking cigarettes of all things! At 14!!)
Anyway, tt was a dark and stormy night when into the Copper Kettle came a boy from my school. He was a grade ahead of me. He was from Edmonton, much more glamorous and interesting than I could ever hope to be. He spotted me and came directly over to my table which surprised me mightily — I didn’t even know that he knew who I was, or that I even existed.
He sat down at my table, ordered a coffee and we sat and smoked a couple of cigarettes. Then he asked me, “What are you doing tonight?” (As if sitting in a coffee shop downtown smoking cigarettes wasn’t enough! Could there be more?!)
I’d like to think I was worldly and erudite enough to say something like “You’re looking at it,” but probably not.
“You want to go on an adventure?” he asked.
“Sure, I guess,” I said, not sure at all.
We left the coffee shop and went out into the rain. In front of us, there was Victoria Park, and to the left, across Victoria Avenue, the beautiful Hotel Saskatchewan. I followed my new friend as we walked up to Victoria, then crossed Scarth until we were standing at the bottom of the small stairway leading into the hotel.
“Come on,” he said.
“We can’t go in there,” I said.
“Why not?” he asked.
“We’re not allowed,” I said.
He looked at me like I was insane. “Of course we’re allowed,” he said. “It’s a hotel.”
Seeing my hesitation, he said the words that would stay with me the rest of my life: “Just act like you belong and you’ll be ok. ”
And so I did. And I’ve been doing it ever since.
We passed the elegantly-dressed doorman into the lobby then went down the main corridor past the elevators, my friend walking ahead of me, me tagging along behind. Finally he turned off into a small. ornate salon: in the salon, a grant piano and a couple upholstered chairs.
He took his wet coat off and threw it over one of the chairs and then sat at the piano. I sat on anther chair with my soggy coat still on and listened in mute disbelief as he began to play. Although I’d grown up in a house with a piano and had taken lessons when I was younger, it was like I was hearing the instrument for the first time.
For the life of me, I can’t remember what he played but I do remember it was what is known as classical music. It may have been some Mozart, maybe some early Beethoven, maybe a little Bach. It hardly mattered. I sat enthralled.
He played for twenty minutes or so, lost in his own little world. He transported me somewhere I had never been before. I never wanted that moment to end. But of course it did. Finally he stood up abruptly and put on his coat and said, “We better get out of here before they kick us out.”
I recall that I basically ran home that night, down Victoria to Albert, under the subway to Dewdney, over to Cameron and then the last half block to my house. My mom and dad were in the living room, probably watching TV.
“Did you have a nice evening, dear?” my mom must have asked. How could she have known my world had been shaken, that everything had changed for me in the brief time I’d been away?
“It was fine,” I said, then asked, “Mom, would it be possible for me to take piano lessons again?”
My mom was a church organist and a fine musician. I think she stared to cry when I asked her that. The answer was never in doubt.
And so I began piano lessons a few weeks later at the Conservatory on College Avenue.
My world had changed.
“Act like you belong.”
Words to live by.
Thanks for reading.
PS. For anyone interested in learning more about the venerable Hotel Saskatchewan, my friend Jeff Itcush has a short video on Youtube titled Jeff Returns Home — to the hidden world of the Hotel Saskatchewan.
There was a sculptural quality to my bicycle today, I thought.
I live in western Canada and we don’t really expect to still be riding our bikes in mid November but the weather is still mild this year so I’m still out there.
You’ll notice my bike has no gears. If I flip the back wheel around I can ride it fixie but my old knees wouldn’t stand the strain, I’m afraid. Still, riding it as it is garners no small degree of admiration from the hipsters and bike couriers in my neighbourhood.
Have you ever read Henry Miller’s My Bicycle and Other Friends? It’s a lovely read if you can find it. There’s also a great photo of Miller on his bicycle which I found and am happy to share with you here.
Sometimes when I am riding my bike, I feel like I am 12 years old again, and that’s not a bad way to feel.
Sometime in the dark and mist-shrouded vistas of time past — 1946 rings a distant bell — my parents moved into a fine old house on the 1400 block of Cameron Street. It was a good working class neighborhood at the time, maybe even with respectable middle class pretenses.
With the horrors of the Great Depression and then World War ll behind them, they must have had a lot of hope and big dreams, if not a lot of money, at that time. If they had a little extra money left over at the end of the month, they might walk down the half block to Dewdney Avenue to the Utopia Cafe. At that time, it was a good family restaurant run by a Greek chap named George. I think my dad told me once that at that time they could both dine there for about a quarter but I may be making that up.
But then things got a little weird. George sold the place to a rather eccentric chap named Roger Ing, originally from Canton. At first, that was all we knew about him. He ran the place — featuring the above menu — throughout the ’70s and beyond. In the early days, most of his clientele were people from the neighborhood, like me. If Scott Collegiate, located a few blocks north and a few blocks west, had an official clubhouse, it was the Utopia, or U-Ball as it was sometimes referred to. There was a corner table at the front of the place that you could only sit at if you belonged. I was allowed to sit there, in certain circumstances. It was one of those unspoken things.
Roger’s English was never all that great, although it was rumoured he understood more than he let on. He wandered around the place in his own little world delivering cheeseburgers and orders of chips and gravy and topping up cups of coffee. Nothing out of the ordinary, I suppose, but for one day when I stopped in for a coffee en route to my piano lesson. I had my music books with me. Roger sat down at my table, transfixed by a Beethoven sonata I was working on. He opened the cover and looked at the music carefully. Then he took out a ball point pen and drew a perfect caricature of a bust of Beethoven on the cover. Under it he drew a staff of music and “Ludwig van Beethoven, 1770-1827.”
Beethoven, by Roger. I probably bought this along with a grilled cheese and coffee for ten bucks or so circa 1990.
Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather. What on earth did Roger know about Beethoven? How did he know how to draw like that? I’d known him for years but never suspected he knew anything about art or music. After that little episode, Roger treated me a little differently, I thought. If I had books with me, which I usually did, he would sit with me for a minute and leaf through them muttering to himself. If I bothered to ask him about his interest in these books, or his knowledge of Beethoven, I don’t remember now. Or if I did, maybe he didn’t answer me. As I say, his grasp of English was never all that strong.
Enter Art McKay — literally. Art was an artist of great renown in Regina and beyond, a member of the “Regina Five,” on faculty at the University of Regina’s Fine Art Department. As I was told the story, he just happened to wander into the Utopia early one evening for a cup of coffee. He immediately recognized Roger as a former student, a foreign student from Canton who had come to Regina to study art at the college (University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus at that time) in the 1950s. Roger obviously recognized his former professor. Soon enough a sketch pad materialized and they began trading drawings, just the two of them in the dim lights of the Utopia with the door locked to the outside world.
From that point on, things began to change rapidly at the Utopia. Roger transformed the unused banquet room (from the days of George) at the back of the place into his studio. Paintings began to emerge from the studio — strange, wild, crazy, intelligent, ironic, weird and wonderful paintings that were grouped around a number of motifs, including UFOs, flying hamburgers, tigers, as in William Blake’s tygers, the Mona Lisa, the rodeo and bulls, delicate little birds on a branch and of special interest to me, portraits of Beethoven and Shakespeare and other artists of note from days gone by.
Roger scoured the second hand stores for paintings and prints and painted over top of these, spilling onto the frame, retaining and revealing some of the original work underneath. (Also, his friends and fellow artists brought him prints and paint-by-numbers they found at garage sales, frames and all.) His output was astonishing. The quality of the work was insanely uneven. So many experiments, some that worked, some that didn’t. It didn’t seem to matter to him. The paintings kept streaming out from the banquet room at a prodigious rate. (We regulars would peak in when we were at the back feeding our dimes into the pinball machines, The Queen of Hearts and Buckaroo!)
For all of this, Roger certainly had his time in the sun, his late in life more than fifteen minutes of fame, and deservedly so. There is a wealth of information about him and his art and the Utopia on the internet, including a very good documentary by Regina author and artist Judith Silverthorne, titled Roger Ing’s Utopia, among others.
My story ends on a personal note. I returned to Regina for a few years in the early 1990s after Roger had begun his ascent to fame and adulation. (From Regina, I moved to Calgary where my playwriting career took flight.) One day before I left, I went into the Utopia in the late morning and sat at the old corner table. It was a quiet morning and Roger brought me a coffee and sat down with me, just as he had twenty years earlier when he drew his little portrait of Beethoven on the cover of my sonata.
I explained to him that I was moving to Calgary, that it was a good opportunity at a good theatre. After a moment he looked at me and said, “You show them. Show them what the boys at the corner table can do.”
Ken Danby’s great painting, Roughriders. Everything has changed, yet the feeling remains. Timeless.
More nonsense, this time about football, as we try to erase the memory of the World Series from our Canadian minds!
I grew up only a few short blocks away from the setting of this painting, which was old Taylor Field. If the Riders are going towards the south end zone, then you could almost see my house between the QB and the running back on the left.
Growing up so close to the action, it was impossible not to become a life-long fan, which at times is both a blessing and a curse. We’ll see what happens this year!
Thanks for reading more stream-of-consciousness whatever it is!
we had a pee wee football and some nights we would play catch on dewdney avenue on the sidewalk in front of dewdney drugs and the doctor’s office on the corner and paramount cleaners and johnny the barber and the utopia cafe and gondola pizza and the little co-op store on the corner but this was a long time ago and I may be forgetting something anyway if you got good at it you could throw those little balls a long way and with any luck catch one that had been thrown a long way which is a good feeling maybe you know it and maybe it’s not all that surprising that we played with a football because taylor field where the roughriders played was only a block south of us so naturally football was very important to us sometimes we would cross elphinstone and walk over to the exhibition grounds and run around on the infield in front of the grandstand where they practiced and they had a machine that was a bright yellow frame with black arms of stiff rubber protruding from the inside of the frame which you had to run through if you could make it i guess those black rubber arms emulated the arms of the defensive linemen and linebackers and what made it special and even magical in a way to run through that thing was knowing that george reed himself would have been running through it a few hours earlier a brush with greatness unlike any other and we probably had the pee wee with us when we went there or maybe even a real football
In front of the Utopia Cafe on Dewdney Avenue, circa 1990.
My post about Aydon Charlton the other day brought to mind the neighborhood we grew up in, the old north end of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Aydon and I shared the pedigree of being Albert-Scott men, Albert Elementary School and Scott Collegiate. Kids from the south end of town would look down on us I guess, but we were proud to have graduated from both of those schools.
Fun Fact. I once read that more students who started at Albert School went to jail than graduated from high school. Or maybe I just dreamed that. It’s not too big a stretch to imagine that it’s true. Interesting times, interesting place, for sure.
Nowadays they call it the core or North-Central. What had been a good working class neighborhood when I grew up there has fallen on a hard times. Macleans magazine called it the worst neighborhood in Canada, worse even than Vancouver’s infamous East Hastings area.
I knew the hood had fallen into hard times since I left back in the 1980s. (My parents stayed on in the house on Cameron Street until they, like most of their old neighbours, sold for what they could get and moved to the south end.) But I never thought it was that bad.
Last summer my wife Belina and I traveled back to my homeland. She came directly to Calgary from the Philippines and had never been to Saskatchewan. (Imagine!) We stayed at a hotel in the south end. (Where I ran into my high school art teacher, one of my favourite teachers of all time, still going strong!) We had tickets for the Rough Rider game, thanks to my friend Scooter. (Yes, I have a friend named Scooter.)
We planned to spend one morning touring around my old neighbourhood. I was afraid of what I’d find there, and I wasn’t sure how Belina would react if it was really as bad as Macleans made it out to be. We set out on a beautiful morning in June. We went into a Tim Hortons for some coffee and donuts. The woman working there was from the same province in the Philippines as Belina. Off to a good start.
We drove past my old house on Cameron Street. The front veranda was gone but otherwise the house and yard were in good shape. The lovely old elm trees arched high above the street, dappling the light of the early summer sun. The street seemed tranquil, hardly the ravaged war zone I had been expecting. All in all, the old neighbourhood looked pretty good that morning. I’m not sure I’d want to live there again. I’m not sure I’d be comfortable walking around there at night like I did as a kid. All in all, we had a nice day, seeing the sites of my younger years.
I thought it might be worthwhile to attempt some stream-of-consciousness sketches of the neighborhood I grew up in. Stream of what? Just my little way of making sure I’ll never make a million dollars from this blog of mine. (Sorry Belina!)
Here you go . . . .
these streets we walked along in broken down sneakers and jeans cuffs scraped down to hanging threads under the canopy of lofty branches verdant and dark and cool in summer, black and skeletal and sketched against a stark white sky and the crunching of footsteps on the snow (still in sneakers despite our mothers’ pleas to wear the boots they paid good money for) back and forth along the avenues past the library and David’s confectionery past the school we went where the recess battles were lost and won further along to the playground its pool empty and derelict in winter blue and shiny under the glow of distant street lights in summer when despite the tall chain-link fence we were drawn to climb over and go skinny dipping (only once for me thank you) although the water was cold and the prairie nights cool and it never lasted long enough to feel it was worth the effort unless of course there were girls involved but unlike the movies there were never girls involved and if we would cross the playground to the south side we would discover the foundation of the jail they kept Louis Riel in before they hanged him although we didn’t learn anything about that in school so what did we know anyway more likely we would turn north and walk the two blocks to our high school if we had any reason to be there, basketball in the winter, baseball in the summer and fall, bit just as likely we’d go back home and see what was on the two channels we got on tv back then
Where to begin, eh? Sometimes the simple things become utterly complex on account of the interrelated nature of events and memory and friendship and even where we came from.
Let me start by saying that my friend Aydon Charlton passed away last week. Aydon was a family friend, as we might say, and yet more than that. His parents and my parents were good friends back in the day, in the old north end of Regina,Saskatchewan. He was older than me by perhaps a decade or so, more of a friend to my older brother Tom than to me. Yet through our family connection and our church, St. Peter’s Anglican (since desanctified) we knew each other.
When I arrived at the University of Regina English Department, Aydon was very much present, completing his MA. I may not be remembering this correctly but I believe his thesis was on Wilkie Collins, which was unusual enough to be memorable even all these decades later. (You know doubt remember, dear reader, that Wilkie was Charles Dickens’ great companion, and the author of a very fine novel, The Woman in White.) (Among others.)
We were part of the same cohort, acolytes of an eccentric, charismatic prof, my namesake Eugene Dawson, as well as his colleague, Ray Mise. They were Americans, exotic to us Saskatchewan boys, I guess. They were hard drinkers and so we learned to be too along with learning a few things about literature and literary criticism. I think I can say that Gene had more influence on my development than any of my other teachers. Aydon probably would have said the same of Gene, but maybe including Ray as well. It was an interesting and profound introduction to the world of arts and letters, to say the least
You can say what you like about Facebook, and it would probably be true, but it brought Aydon and I together years later and we had some good conversations over the last few years. He was fond of sharing photos of his parents, and I would be sure to comment as I remembered them fondly.
In a few of those exchanges, Aydon told me the story of his father turning an unassisted triple play at the St. Peter’s annual church picnic. Remembering some of the congregation of the time, choristers and lay readers and the like, that didn’t seem like that big a deal to me, but in Aydon’s mind it was one of the great athletic feats of the Twentieth Century. It was obviously important to him, he told me that story at least three times. Who was I to argue?
This picture is of me in my Senators Little League uniform. It was a good team year in and year old, coached by the legendary Joe Resch whose son Glen played goalie for the New York Islanders and the Colorado Rockies. During one of my seasons with the team, I fell into a miserable hitting slump. There didn’t seem to be any hope to get out of it. I began dreading our games.
One evening, Aydon’s dad Phil came over to our house, not to visit with my dad, but to see me. He had with him a Sports Illustrated magazine with an article on hitting by the great Ted Williams. A little research tells me that it was likely the July 8, 1968 issue featuring “Ted Williams on the Science of Hitting” on the cover. Phil gave me the magazine, saying “I hear you’ve been in a bit of a slump. Maybe this will help.”
I read it. Did it help? I’ll say! I distinctly remember the next game coming to bat in one of the later innings when Joe Resch turned to the guys in the dugout and said, “Here comes Stickland again. He’s 5 for 5 tonight! Man oh man!” The power of the written word, friends.
When Aydon told me the story of Phil turning the triple play, I countered with the Ted Williams story. It was a funny kind of bonding, later in our lives. All the more poignant now that he’s gone. Aydon was a good man with a brilliant sense of humour. Requiescat in pace.
A tribute to the Blue Jays and their return to the World Series. And to remember and honour Aydon and his dad, Phil.
There is of course the physical voice created in the throat of the individual which may be pleasant or otherwise. There is also the authorial voice,that of the writer which although silent, through the words on the page insinuates itself in your mind. That’s what we’re going to talk about today.
The reason the man with the screechy voice (see yesterday’s post) and I were talking in the first place was on account of the Portugese author Jose Saramago, in particular this book, Skylight. Mr. S.V. and I share a love of Saramago and his work which is enough to override any concerns I might have with his vocal production.
It might shock you (maybe you should sit down!) that Saramago’s novel All The Names is my favourite novel, period. Don’t ask me why — it just is and that’s all there is to it.
Yet I don’t recommend you rush out and buy it. It’s not an easy book to read, in fact none of his books are, with sentences that run on for hundreds and hundreds of words and paragraphs that go on for pages and pages. It can be a little intimidating. Most of us prefer to see a lot of white space on the page and Saramago doesn’t give you very much of that. Still, for serious readers, All The Names is, in my humble opinion, well worth the effort.
I’ll say this for Mr. S.V. He’s a reader. He’s one of the few people I know who has read Saramago and can have a serious conversation about him. AND SO IT CAME TO PASS that the other day we ran into each other at the coffee shop and fell into talking about literature and JS from P and I asked him if he was aware of the book pictured above, Skylight. He was not familiar with it and so I gave him the down and dirty as I will do for you now, dear reader, to reward your patience for having read this post for the last three hours or however long it’s taken you to get this far.
Skylight is actually the first novel Saramago wrote. He was in his early 30s when he completed it. He sent it to a publisher in 1953. The publisher lost the manuscript. It was only found in 1989 when they changed offices. They said, “It would our great honour for us to publish this manuscript,” to which Saramago replied. “Thank you, no.” He was already famous by that time, although still a few years away from being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998.
According to Pilar del Rio in his introduction to the novel, “Being ignored by that publishing house had plunged him into a painful, indelible silence that lasted decades.”
During his lifetime, he never approved the publication of Skylight, but kept it on his desk for years and years. His explanation for this, from later in the introduction: “No one has an obligation to love anyone else, but we are all under an obligation to respect one another.”
It was finally brought into print in 2014, after he had passed away in 2010. In Saramago’s words, it was “the book lost and found in time.”
In my mind it’s a fascinating story of how one of the world’s great authors was silenced for so long by what may well have been a clerical error.
Mr. SV was intrigued by my description of the book’s history. I offered to lend it to him and even found it and carried it around for a few days before I saw him again. In the meanwhile, he had ordered it from somewhere and read it. As I mentioned, he’s a great reader.
At the height of my fame (notoriety?) I appeared on the Google Earth image of Caffe Beano in Southwest Calgary. You could say I was hanging out there quite a bit at the time.
I’m not sure if I’m alone in this, but I have always been very sensitive to the tonal qualities (or lack of) of the human voice. It is said that beauty is only skin deep, but in my experience, it has more to do with the quality of a person’s voice than the quality of their skin.
Someone wrote a critique of a piece by, I believe, Beethoven saying it sounded like a cat’s claws on a window pane. I can’t remember the exact reference. It’s probably in Diana Rigg’s great compendium No Turn Unstoned. (Great book if you can find it, a collection of incredibly negative reviews of great works of art, particularly theatre. Yes, the same Diana Rigg who starred in The Avengers.)
Well, that’s just a variation of the tired old “nails on a blackboard” saying which probably doesn’t resonate as much now that we have whiteboards and colourful markers instead of blackboards and not so colourful chalk.
A horrid, terrible, irritating voice. If I hear that I run the other way. It makes me wonder, are such people aware of how grating and offensive their voices are to others? Do they never think of doing something about it? Voice lessons, for example? It’s a problem that can be fixed. I know these things. I studied with the great voice coach David Smuckler at York University in Toronto. Many moons ago now, Johnny. (Or whomever.)
(Where are we going with this, Eugene? Focus, man, focus!)
This is all by of saying that I know a man whom I see at Caffe Beano from time to time with a high screechy voice. It’s so pronounced I was describing him to a fellow patron (trying, after years of knowing him) to learn his name. I mentioned the voice and the fellow patron (whose name I don’t know) knew right away the person I was talking about.
I was looking for him because I had a book for him. That book will be the subject of Vox Humana 2 so stay tuned!
Meanwhile, I had written in my journal a description of the voice that became so, shall we say, fluid that I believe it may qualify as a literary conceit, along with Mr. Eliot’s etherized patient. This description longed to be freed from the pages of my journal and was really the impulse for writing this post in the first place. So here it is —
He has a voice like a rusty gate swinging open in the late afternoon of a cloudy day in autumn with the wind and swirling leaves. Someone in a long black cloth coat has pushed the gate open. We can’t be sure if he’s coming or going. Presumably there is an old house beyond the gate but whether our friend in the long black coat is returning, say from work, or heading out, perhaps to the library, we will never know.
Remember to check for part two of this fascinating discussion of whatever it is.
When I decided to resume this blog of mine, my wife who is from the Philippines got very excited. She had seen something on Facebook about a Filipino who was making millions of dollars from his blog. Lots of flashy cars and beautiful beaches, attractive people in various states of undress. You get the idea.
I had to explain to her that my blog isn’t like that. “So what’s it about?” she asked. “Art, experimental art at that, writing, the writing process, steam of consciousness, photography, that kind of thing –” Beyond that I didn’t know what to say. “How are you going to make any money doing that?” she asked. “Well, as usual, I’m not,” I replied, somewhat defiantly. I think she understood.
Maybe I don’t know exactly what this is, this blog of mine. I’m OK with that. The one thing I know for sure is that I’m not about to make a million dollars from it.
The more I think of it, having come back to it again after a fairly lengthy hiatus, maybe it’s something of a scrapbook. Remember those? Fragments, ideas, photos, images, ramblings, musings, sketches, not complete but perhaps leading somewhere, perhaps not.
I like that. Let’s go with that for now and see where it leads us, if anywhere.
“Oh, do not ask ‘What is it?’ Let us go and make our visit . . .”
eugene stickland 