live shows

Our new hair was the best thing about last night's show.

But first, before I write the meanest post I've probably ever written:

Matthew just got dinged with a huge bill from SOCAN. Misunderstanding and mistakes, but still, that bill.

He does great work over there. His writing is clear and entertaining, he works hard to bring music to Ottawa. It would be a damn crying shame if doing so bankrupted him. If you're a fan of indie music shows in Ottawa, even if you rarely go to see one of the shows Matthew puts on, or, say, go to one and hate both the bands you managed to see, think about wandering over to his site and shooting him a few dollars.

I just did, and I hope you do too.

Okay. Now I'll get my crank on.

J. and I lasted about 45 minutes at the show last night. Partially, this is because we're hitting our mid-thirties. Not only do we lack the stamina we once had to listen to loud music and get jostled by people and stand around on very hard surfaces for extended periods of time, we work all week. We're tired by Friday.

More important than those things, I think, is the fact that between us, we have probably seen hundreds of bands play, ranging from the sublime to the wretched. We're well practiced at sussing out the difference, and we can do it lightning quick.

We'd missed the first band, got there part way through Ketch Harbour Wolves' set. We were underwhelmed. They weren't terrible or anything. They could all play their instruments decently well, and the music didn't make me...

Well, it didn't make me anything.

It was nondescript, it was boring, it went on just a little too long, each song and the set itself. The lead singer's emoting was picking my ass something fierce. "You," I thought, "are someone's terrible boyfriend. You think you're very sensitive and you spend all your time telling your lover how sensitive you are and you never ask them how their damn day was."

That, I recognize, is super-harsh and very personal and quite likely I'm projecting. I've just known too many guys like that to have any patience at all with singers who cup the microphone in their hands and look purposefully soulful.

And then... "Oh jesus, it's a wind instrument," Jennifer poked me in the ribs. God save me from wind instruments in pop music. You cannot play one without making everything sounding like Sting. It's no good people, it's no good.

But the crowd liked them, Matthew loves them, so I will put my KHW crank down to being tired and old. Maybe I'm totally off base, and they're truly brilliant and moving instead of deadly boring. Listen for yourselves, please, don't take my word for it.

But Sun Jet? I'm not even going to link them. That was the worst song and a half I've seen live in longer than I can remember.

It started even before they got on the stage. We got catty about their instruments, their backwards baseball caps, their ill-fitting pants, the affected world weariness of the lead singer lolling about the stage with nothing to do but look like he was waiting to be so very important.

"But who knows," I said, "Maybe we're being too judgmental. Maybe they'll start and they'll blow us away."
"Yeah," Jennifer said, "yeah. Maybe so."

Not too long into the first song, after the lead singer had put on his sunglasses, fucks sake, the oh-so-tough-looking unlit cigarette dangling from his fingers, and I was in the middle of thinking are they all playing the same song? did they all start at different times? nobody should be allowed to wear headbands! is he *trying* to sound like jim morrison or is that just an unfortunate coincidence? this other guitar sound came out of fucking nowhere.

I don't really have music writing chops, so I will use my mild synaesthesia to describe it to you.

The mush of the rest of the instruments was small, fast, almost pointy-peaked waves way way up here, where you stretch your arm up and flap your hand from side to side. This other guitar sound, which they must have thought was a cleverly timed juxtaposition, you know, to highlight the god-knows-what of the other instruments, this other guitar sound was big fat round waves on your right side, hovering around waist height.

It was jarring enough that I stopped and looked around to see where in the hell it was coming from. The stage, I sadly concluded.

The song ended.

"That was not better than I thought it was going to be," I said.
"We don't have to stay," she said.
"Let's see how the next song-"

It started. We gave it about a minute, and then, "We're too old to be standing around listening to terrible bands. Too bad for you, Rah Rah." And poof, we were gone.

Though I guess it's not all bad. Without terrible shows like that, we probably wouldn't appreciate surprises like Winter Gloves as much.

Oh, and our hair. Our hair* was fabulous.

*I'll post a picture of mine when I don't have a honking cold sore.

Back at work tomorrow, or at least, back at my desk, since technically, I was working for three of the days I was in Ireland. It felt like work too, sitting in the too hot or too cold rooms of the conference centre, trying to listen to scientists talk about stuff I didn't have a hope of understanding. But tomorrow, back to the same ol' same ol'.

I'm kind of dreading it. If travelling is at least in part a vacation from your regular self, then going back to work is the real end. I'm still riding on the fumes of having been away, still feeling a little detached, though less and less as the hours back pile into one another.

Been a reasonably busy weekend. More phone calls than I normally make, plans for catching up in person. A nice letter received, read, responded to. Movie watched. Emails written. Music listened. Much coffee drunk.

Man, one thing, I do not miss the shitty fucking coffee of Ireland. I couldn't live in a country where it's so hard to find a good coffee, which, Paul assures me, are actually available in Ireland. Just not anywhere I bought one. In desperation, I had a Tim Horton's coffee, just to have some shitty coffee that was at least familiarly shitty. It was the first of my undrinkable coffees that day. That's right, you read it. The one convenience store in Saggart, Ireland, sells Tim Horton's coffee. And it is even shittier than Tim's here, which is good coffee by Irish standards, so far as I can tell.

After reading all my complaints about the coffee, you might be surprised to know that I'm actually not all that picky about my coffee. If I'm on a road trip, or at a conference, I drink whatever's poured, I drink it black, and even if I can't say I always like it, I will almost always lump it.

My last day in Ireland pushed me over the edge. I threw out about half of three coffees, couldn't be bothered to finish them, just hoped the next place was better. It never was.

The coffee I drank last night at home (bodum, black) still felt like relief, even after a couple of days back. That and the late afternoon nap helped me get through Rock and Roll Friday with Jennifer, which, due to the jet lag, had been postponed to Saturday.

We went out to see Immaculate Machine, which was a huge disappointment.

It's no secret that I love a keyboard band. Or a band with keyboards. (And keyboard players, certainly not least, if listed last.) Well. IM has replaced their on-hiatus keyboard player not with another keyboard player, but with a bass player and a guitar player, and I am here to tell you, well, I will quote Jennifer, who leaned over to me and said "You know, I didn't think I cared about keyboards at all, but this is."

"Ugh. I know. "

All I could hear were the gaps where keyboards should be.

I should say that they weren't terrible, just not as good as I was expecting. If I hadn't seen them before, I probably would have thought they were good, though I still would have found the Burton Cummings hair and 'stash on the lead singer right distracting, giving all the songs a classic rock twinge I'd never noticed before.

Tonight has been a quiet night. Listening to Jennifer's excellent Razorcake podcast, family dinner with Shelley and Steve, drinking good German beer, feeling my sore core muscles from yoga this morning. The laundry put away, the litter cleaned, the garbage out, tomorrow's lunch defrosting in the fridge.

Back at it, then, here we go.

I fell apart on several people at the end of the night. I've done it on Mitch before; not Ariel, but we're that kind of friend, yknow, and I'd spent the last half hour standing beside her crying, so it probably wasn't that strange.

But James? Poor James. He's someone I know mostly from around, from running into each other in bars, on the street, a smattering of emails. We've had good conversations, whenever. Tonight, as I was snapping my coat shut and torturing myself by watching Mike's nimble fingers over the Rhodes, maybe the same Rhodes he was playing when I fell for him, remembering those fingers inside me, his smell, the way the back of his neck felt under my lips as I spooned him, all the broken promises, James walked by.

"How are you?"

My eyes were red, my face blotchy. I hadn't stopped crying since the Acorn took the stage.

The inflection in James' voice let me know he knew something was wrong.

I just shook my head.

He hugged me. My chest heaved, I buried my face in his shoulder, wrapped my fist in his lapel.

"I haven't seen him play in three years," I said, when I caught my breath.

"You didn't know he was in the Acorn?"

"No."

"He went down while they were touring with Calexico."

"I hadn't heard."

"I'm sorry."

"Me too."

He kissed my cheek, hugged me hard. I said what I'd already said to Mitch one hundred times, what I'd say to Ariel moments later.

"I'm fine, it'll be fine."

And it will.

For those of you who read Jennifer's blog, I'll try to write this so it's not just a rehash. See, we've been spending a lot of time together, which she has documented, both amusingly and well.

Our time as neighbours is drawing to a close. Not any time soon, but it's out there. Eventually I'll get around to posting about one of the reasons. For now, you just have to trust me that it's no bad reason. But I'm sad about it.

++One

Last night we hopped all around the town. First dinner, Adam and J. and me. After, on our walk over to the Aloha, Jennifer said she'd been trying to come up with a team name for us. "I love that you were trying to do that," Adam said. "Yeah," J. said, "but all I came up with was Team Air Freshener Orphanage." And Adam made the sound of the air freshener that has become the metonymic touchpoint for our whole Osheaga trip. It was hilarious to us, but why it was wouldn't make much sense to anyone else. It was that kind of dinner.

After the Aloha was the RocknRoll Pizza Party, with a great band that gave Jennifer hope for a pop/punk scene in Ottawa. Today I ran into Luke Nuclear, RRPP mastermind, and he said the band had so much fun that their other band, music in the same vein, Statues, might just make us a visit. You will likely find us at that show.

This gave me enough time and bars to consume the appropriate amount of beer for seeing one's fairly recent ex-boyfriend; that is to say, enough to take the edge off the nervous, but not enough to hit weepy. I ran into James while the imbibing was taking place. He looked surprised when I mentioned going to a party at Eric's. "Yeah," I said. "I'm not sure if that's crazy or stupid." "A bit of both, maybe," he responded. True dat, but it felt like the right thing to do.

When people split up, it's easy to lose the other person, and all the friends you made through them, permanently. Sometimes, that's the right thing. I have exes I will never talk to again, sometimes because they treated me so badly they don't deserve it, sometimes because the connection was tenuous to begin with. Eric falls into neither of those categories, and I hope that someday we can be actual friends. Maybe not close friends, but real friends.

There was never any way around the fact that our first actual conversation was going to be hard. I figured a party, with lots of distractions, with lots of people I hadn't seen in a while, with the ability to make that beer a quick one, well, it was probably a pretty good start. I figured right. Almost everyone seemed happy to see me, Mark was pleased as punch with his birthday cookies, and Eric liked the map I gave him as much as I thought he would.

When J. and I got home, I did some late-night wind-down tidying in the kitchen. I could hear her doing the same: the cupboard doors opening and closing, some rattling around. The way I can hear the radio on for Shy Dog, the ghost of the CBC playing on my radio too. Or the way the laughter signals that Lesley or Adam or Michael is over for dinner. From anyone else those noises would be wallpaper at best, an annoyance at worst. Coming from Jennifer, they're insanely comforting.

++Two

Wednesday night's reading at Octopus, the inaugural evening of the Female First Fiction reading series, was fucking great.

For one, Jennifer read from her new novel-in-progress, about a 10 year old girl. If the excerpt is anything to go by, I'm gonna like it even more than Grrrl, which is saying something.

For two, Jessica Westhead read from Pulpy & Midge, a novel about a cowed office worker and his bully boss. It was a good reading and sounds like a good book. Even last night Adam and I were pretending to be Dan the Bully, punching our thighs and saying "Boys night!", trying to get the same combination of triumph and ferocity with which Westhead managed to infuse those words.

Afterwards, there was an impromptu panel during which our JWs talked about the process of getting published. It was adorable. So much nerdy girl excitement! Though I must admit, I was a little jealous. Not in a bad way, an eats-away-at-you way, but in an "I want to be up there talking about that, and I am going to have to reorganize my life and get off my ass and make that happen." kind of way. An inspired by wicked awesome ladies sort of way.

++Three

Tonight we're off to Zaphod's to see Immaculate Machine and Ladyhawk. I love the keyboardy pop of IM, and Ladyhawk is the right kind of dark fuzzy rock and roll. I expect it to be loud, I expect it to be fun.

The Smoking Hot Girl may be joining us in our indie rock adventure. Who knows what will happen after the show, but I will keep a neighbourly thought in mind about the ease with which sound travels from one kitchen to another.

Alright, Tuesday night, you've called my bluff.

Sure, I talked a good game - "Oh yeah, after work and yoga and more work and giving a workshop at venus envy, I'll just dash home, slurp up a bit of soup and head back out to babylon for the Xiu Xiu show. I'll totally have enough energy, even after only getting 5 hours sleep. Totally." - talked it all day.

And I think I had you fooled, at least a while. But you knew, didn't you, you knew as soon as I put my hand on the door to my apartment. The look on my face said it all. You hold the cards: warmth, solitude, a warm bed, the little death.

What I will probably not do ever again is go see hip hop in a theatre. Or see Tegan and Sara, period.

Shelley and I scooted over to the Bronson Centre last night to see Northern State open for Tegan and Sara. The sound was awful. Having known a few sound people, I have sympathy - they would have only gotten access to the place that afternoon, and the equipment was probably all rental. You just can't know the quirks of a room or gear on such short notice. And maybe it was where we were standing, right near the speakers at first, and then for T&S, deep in a pocket of bass vibration that drowned nearly everything else out. But while I have sympathy, it also fucking sucked for the purposes of musical enjoyment.

I didn't have a great time, you can probably tell.

Hip hop and cushy-seat theatres do not go well together. The gals of Northern State were putting their hearts into it* and the audience was mostly just standing there. Appreciating the show with only their ears, and not their cans. An audience like that is hard to perform to.

Tegan and Sara are much more enjoyable when they're talking than when they're playing. Musically, there were a couple of interesting things - the drummer pulled out a double kick pedal for a couple of songs, which is unusual in indie rock and was used effectively, they have a couple of songs that are oddly and nicely structured (Walking With a Ghost is my favourite), their voices work really well together and there were some nice keyboard touches. But man, maybe they could slip some of the self-awareness and irony of their banter into their songs. And if three people on stage are playing guitars, maybe they could be playing different parts. Or hey, maybe one of those guitarists could be playing one of the four keyboards on stage.

We were sitting there, shifting around a lot and kind of grumbling back and forth to each other. Then T&S played Walking With a Ghost, a good version of it, and I had heard what I wanted to hear. We stayed a song or two longer and then Shelley leaned over and said "Is it beer time yet?" We cut out early and went home to drink Guinness and watch fish.

*Though they were a bit sulky about the sound, which I cannot abide. I get that mic and monitor problems are a huge deal, but fuck me, it's an occupational hazard. So suck it up and do your best job instead of being a big damn baby.

And both about to bike off again soon. To Andrea's CD release party, in this instance.

It was a fabulously well-organized event, which I always appreciate very much. And man oh man, does Andrea have a beautiful voice. And well-written lyrics. Those are two other things that I appreciate very much.

I agree entirely with Jennifer's prediction that we will be able to say I knew her when. Besides the good musicianship, Andrea knows how to work a crowd, and I mean that in a very nice way. I've been in front of a crowd often enough to know how hard won that apparent ease is.

The funniest part of the evening for me was a conversation I had with J. The singer of the first band* was introducing the other members of his band, one of whom had just come up on stage.

"And if you're wondering who just came up on stage, his name is David Ger[????]."

I did a double take and leaned over to whisper in Jennifer's ear. "Did you hear what that guy's last name was?"

She shrugged.

"'Cause it sounded like 'Gerbilly.'"

She threw her head back and laughed, and then rocked forward again when the mouthful of beer she'd just taken threatened to choke her.

"And on the drums, David's brother..."

We leaned forward expectantly.

"...Paul Ross."

"What?!" Jennifer said, "They don't even have the same last name!"

If my last name were Gerbilly, I might change it too.

*Okay, singer of first band, some hard love. Back off the mic. Just an inch. When you make love to the mic with your lips, your quite nice voice distorts and isn't quite so nice as when you are teasing the microphone by being two fingers away from it.

For the first couple of days after Eric arrived in the 'fax, he and I had a running conversation about which one of us was on vacation and which one was on holiday. It went a little something like this:

"Nice to be on vacation, eh?"
"Or holiday."
"True." I paused to absorb the possible thesauratic implications of this. "Wait. Holiday?"
"Yeah. We're on different kinds of trips."
"Ah. Gotcha."

But you know, I didn't gotcha. I mulled it over. The next day:

"So okay. Which one of us is on holiday and which one of us is on vacation, then?"
"Well, you can't have a working holiday, but you can have a working vacation. You did the pride booth and you're doing a reading. So you're on vacation and I'm on holiday, because I'm not doing anything at all like work."

Right.

Conversations like that are one of the many reasons I feel unbelievably lucky to have found Eric.

Another couple days later, about 10 hours into our 36 Hours of Food Poisoning No Fun, I wandered into our bedroom from the living room, where I had been alternately reading the shittiest mystery ever, passing out, worrying that I might puke again, and feeling very very sorry for myself. Exhausted from the 15 foot trip, I sat heavily on the side of the bed. He woke up.

"Hi baby. How are you."
He blinked an owly gravol blink at me. It wasn't a real question anyway.
"So. Is this a holiday or a vacation?"
That got me a smile.
"This is a vacation from our holiday."

Neither of us had ever had food poisoning before. And even now, we're not sure. We spent a lot of time walking around out in the sun without hats and not drinking very much water. Because we're, you know, bright like that.

The trip actually ended up being quite a few firsts, the big ones being our first long trip together and the first sick together. Considering the fact that I miss him terribly after spending 6 nights and days with him in a fairly small room, I think we did alright.

The start of our Romantic Food Poisoning was Wednesday. Wednesday night was going to be a really fun night for Eric, Shelley, Steve, Aurèle and A's brother Phil. We were gonna see rock and roll on the high seas. Or, more precisely, the Maynards on the tall ship Silva.

Early in the evening, Shelley made us a delicious dinner of tofu and greens and rice, and then Eric and I wandered downtown for drinks with A. and P. We ended up at the Split Crow for power hour - a buck a beer from 9 to 10.

(This picture is the closest I will ever get to looking like a beer commercial girl. That is A. to my left, looking blurrily bemused.)

Ah! I can hear you saying, Megan! Sweetie! When you drink too much buck-a-beer beer, you don't get *food* poisoning.

But my response is ready: I was about to go on a boat and take gravol. So I drank only about a third of a glass to be polite, and then sat there, waiting to get anxious about being late for the ship.

We weren't late. In fact, we spent quite a bit of time waiting on the pier, where to pass the time I took a few picture of the stomach ache that was starting to get quite poky.

Apparently, the show was quite good. Nausea felled me early on and I missed it all. I did spend about 10 minutes of one band above deck, but I was shaking so badly that Steve lent me his hoodie to put on top of the sexy little t-shirt, 2 sweaters, jacket number I was already sporting, and A. gave me a fistful of ice. I stared stupidly at my fingers gripping it as my arm went numb. "It always makes me feel better," A. said, shrugging. The fact that it didn't totally give me the creeps meant that it felt pretty good.

Then I ran downstairs because I thought I was going to throw up. Eric came down not long after and stroked my hair and showed me the pictures he was taking of the actual party. I could hear the bands really well, so it was almost like being on deck. Shelley and Steve kept coming down for very nice visits too, taking care of me and keeping me company, even though the gravol had taken away most of my sentences. Though I do believe it is one of the few times in my life I have muttered "Yes, I would like to put my head in your lap," without the slightest whiff of salaciousness.

I worried for quite a while that I was wrecking people's fun, because E. and S. and S. kept having to come downstairs to visit me. But then, even in the haze, I realized that if I had said no I can't go, none of us likely would have been anywhere near the music. So this, really, was a happy medium.

That everyone was so nice to me is one of the many reasons I feel unbelievably lucky to have found my friends.

Okay, so a lot more went on in Halifax than sickness and sentiment. But it's late and I'm still a little dragged out from being sick. Tomorrow, more.