The Blog Cabin

42: The Meaning of Life for Musicians, Too.

2011-01-20T15:45:00.000-08:00

It’s been 42 years that I have been a professional musician. I started as a very young man – a tadpole really. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tells us that ‘42’ is the answer to the question “what is the meaning of life?” With that in mind I offer the world 42 bits of hard won knowledge and wisdom from my decades on stage.

1) Always take the money. Never say ‘Oh I’ll get it from you next week…’

2) Never bring more luggage than you can carry in one trip.

3) Never buy a bus. Equivalent purchases: Leaky old boat, house with termites, 9 year old PC, used underwear.

4) Always make tickets easy to purchase. One click, one phone call, no monkeying around.

5) Never set up the lighting so that it makes the audience squint and turn away. The light is meant to illuminate the band’s talent. It is not the talent.

6) Always smile indulgently when the sound engineer says ‘it will sound a lot better when there are people in here’. They are just saying this, because they, just as badly as you do, want sound-check to end.

7) Show / Soundcheck: Although everyone including you believes to the contrary, they are in no way related.

8) Rehearsal: An evil ploy to get you to play for free. Show up prepared and concentrate ferchrissakes. Eliminate the need for these evil, punitive tribulations.

9) Never expect the monitor tech to be of any help at all but be genuinely grateful if he is. It is your responsibility to know what you need to hear and learn how to ask for it. Set it and leave it.

10) Never leave your beer unattended in an unlocked dressing room. Any opening band worth its salt will sniff it out and abscond before the end of your first song.

11) It is only the rarest of guitarists who can reliably set a tempo.

12) There are three kinds of soundmen:

Type 1 – The pot freak.

Type 2 – The know it all, self-appointed super-genius producer of all sound on planet Earth, who persists in using the same goddamn Steely Dan CD during sound-check for decades and presumes to tell the band how they should play in order to achieve the ‘optimal audio result’. All the same he could not, not with a gun to his head, turn up a solo in a timely fashion even though its looming imminence has been telegraphed so obviously that quadrupeds on distant farms await it expectantly. Has the same hairdo that he had as a teenager. Considers sweatpants to be a legitimate all round garment for every imaginable purpose including the funerals of his other ‘sound guy’ buddies who spoke with disdainful officiousness once-too-often and then died of loneliness as a result. (May have played Bass in high school.)

Type 3 – The capable, efficient, self-reliant, resourceful professional who doesn’t gratingly steer every conversation towards delusions of his own grandeur. Generally he thinks ahead, pays attention, listens more than he talks, is dependable and organized, has engineering skills, owns a timepiece, and is actually, imagine this, musical.

(You want to hire Type 3.)

13) If you must share the drumkit make sure you’ve asked if the other drummer is a southpaw.

14) The keyboardist will nearly always be the neurotic one. If the neurotic one is not a keyboardist, then he missed his calling.

15) Never presume you are a qualified background vocalist just because you are willing to sing background vocals.

16) Don’t think that adding background vocals will make something sound BETTER. Sometimes you’re just compounding the misery…

17) The bassist will either be scary or a peacemaker. There is no middle ground for some inexplicable reason.

18) You cannot be taken seriously as a performer, artist or musician if you wear Birkenstocks or Crocs onstage. There are no exceptions. Don’t even try to offer one.

19) At no time should anyone other than a trained percussionist of the highest calibre be allowed to physically touch a tambourine for any reason.

20) While touring: Never scream on a train platform unless you’re on fire or are being cut in half by a locomotive. All other panicky shrieking is strictly prohibited. (Yes, there is a story that goes with this….)

21) When it sounds like the drummer is slowing down be sure you’ve double checked to see if it’s actually the piano player speeding up before you make an accusation.

22) Being late for lobby call, sound-check, gig, departure, flights -- is very bad. Being consistently late for these is clear grounds for summary dismissal. Don’t even argue it. Get your act together, or go find a real job and see how that goes…

23) The beautiful, delicate, sexy female lead vocalist can almost always out-drink her male band mates. She is often also highly talented at swearing. There is no scientific explanation for this.

24) Be exciting but not excited: If you are tense, nervous or unprepared your equipment will fail; there will be train-wrecks, screw-ups and other performance disasters. You may not be aware of it but you are totally in control of this phenomenon.

25) Beware the ‘artist’ who treats you like a band-member when there are sacrifices to be made but like a side-man when there are rewards to be shared.

26) The drummer will probably do you the favour of playing more quietly if you extend the courtesy of playing in time.

27) Don’t noodle between songs. Practice at home, you wanker.

28) “Nose picking”: Don’t be that guitarist….The one who says something into the mic, and then nervously strums his muted strings (“chunk-chunk”), and then says another phrase, and then nervously strums his muted strings (“chunk-chunk”), and then says the rest of the sentence and then nervously strums his muted strings (“chunk-chunk”)….You’d be aggravated by someone who picked his nose after every verbal phrase, wouldn’t you? How is this different? It may be common but it’s still Nose Picking.

29) In your career you want to interact with people who communicate in sentences and paragraphs. They are the ones who can visualize a year, a decade, a career. A dozen thumb-typed, acronym filled text messages do not a life depict. Industry types who try to describe to you their fave new band principally through vague hand motions and cutesy eye rolling are not to be taken seriously.

30) Contrary to what the bandleader protests, if you’re performing in a furniture store you are indeed no better than a jukebox.

31) Never, ever, ever trust anyone who stiffs you for the bar tab. This is one of the only permanently unforgivable, indelible and loutish missteps in the business.

32) If you have made a serious error, admit it, apologize without reservation, and cough up for pizza & beer.

33) If you change who you are, alter what you’re saying, or dilute what you stand for simply because someone might object, you are not a valid artist. To be an artist is to be a leader. Think deeply before you commit to a course, but then stay the course.

34) Don’t even fantasize that you’ll be able to maintain your vegetarianism if you are touring northern Saskatchewan in a van.

35) Your vegetarianism will not be taken seriously if you smoke.

36) You cannot, in fairness, make your band-mates suffer because you are a cigarette smoking, dietarily unfulfilled vegetarian on tour in northern Saskatchewan in a van.

37) How you play is how you fuck. Changing one changes the other.

38) Honour the music. There is a corner of beauty in every song -- even ‘Achy-Breaky Pancreas’. Find it and set up camp there.

39) Honour the audience. In nearly every crowd there is one fan who will never forget your honesty and commitment

40) You are either in-tune and in-time, or you are not. Opinions don’t count. No player is bigger than the rules of harmony or rhythm. Don’t misunderstand: You can be out-of-tune and out-of-time to excellent artistic effect. But we can only discern musical expression by measuring against common, predictable, agreed-upon parameters.

41) Don’t blame the equipment. Yes, you sound that bad. Let’s be honest…There is good equipment and bad equipment. Ultimately, though, the music is in your hands, your touch, your mind & heart – not in the gear you use.

42) Most important of all: What we do is sometimes misconstrued as merely a component of ‘entertainment product’ for ‘consumers’. Never, ever forget that it is always supposed to be, first and foremost, Music, by people, for people.

The Tunes of 2311

2011-01-18T14:06:00.000-08:00

by Vince R Ditrich
The sheer volume of musical ‘recording artists’ past and present represents an impressive catalogue of accomplishment by human society. The artistic achievements of the 20^th century might well go down as the zenith of western musical culture, should the 21^st century continue to merely re-hash and repackage as it currently is doing.

What will be the legacy of 20^th century music to people living 300 years hence – in the year 2311? Who will be remembered by future generations?

We might get a perspective on the future by looking back to the past, listing all the great composers that we love so dearly from the 1700s. Go ahead – list ‘em off. I’ll just pause here while you reel off the names.

You’ll instantly see my point….It’s the rare person indeed who can come up with more than two names and probably only a musician or an aficionado can dredge up the names of 4. Classically trained symphonic players will hopefully do a better job still, but there aren’t very many of them, comparatively, in a world of multiple billions of music listeners.

I bring to mind Mozart, first and foremost. Handel, Bach, Vivaldi, and at the end of the century, Beethoven. There are others of course, but only if I cheat and check their bios to make sure that they lived in the 1700s.

Most will be acquainted with Mozart and Bach, surely two of the most famous and important musical minds in human history. Handel and Vivaldi, both completely delightful, are not as widely known to the average listener, and are likely not as much on the radar. Although practically everyone on Earth has heard of Beethoven most will think he was born much later than was actually the case. (He was born in 1770 and died in 1826). Even though every royal court and every aristocrat supported the musical landscape of the era very little of it remains resonant to us today.

I think 20^th century music will be remembered in the distant future as principally American or powerfully influenced by American culture. It also seems fair to me that there’ll be several categories of historical figures to remember, not merely ‘famous composers’.

Recorded music will probably allow the performers or ‘artists’ to take top status as iconic historical figures, with crossover ‘entertainment’ figures (read: singers who became film stars) to retain second tier status – and though their faces might be more recognizable their musical performances will likely be reduced to a more limited selection of sound bites).

A distant third in this hierarchy, I feel, will be the actual composer or writers of the songs – songs which generally will be ‘Pop’ songs in the 2-5 minute format and less often taking the form of huge orchestral pieces with multiple movements and long durations.

If this is all correct then I suspect that the 20^th century’s list, for all its vast resources, will be reduced to a very, very small number of representatives.

I start my list with Louis Armstrong. Armstrong, in addition to being one of the most revered and characterful trumpeters in history almost singlehandedly propelled the early popularization of Jazz and turned it into a signal achievement for the thousands who followed in his footsteps and the millions of fans who listened. His lighthearted, almost throwaway singing style remains one of the most recognizable, influential and era-symbolic in music.

After Satchmo there is an historic lull. Jazz exploded like a bomb and was one of the most impressive artistic movements of all time but it seems clear that the next great peak did not arrive until the early 1960s when The Beatles collected the diaspora of Rock and Roll and redistributed it to everyone. Jazz was still kicking – Brubeck was establishing brilliant new frontiers when the Fab Four were just beginning to build upon earlier seminal American Rock and Roll, Country and Blues; but before the advent of The Beatles, the world had never seen anything like their powerful combination of high-achieving technical production mated to massive world-wide PR, built on the bedrock of solid talent and honest workmanship, quirky character and boyish accessibility.

In my second category of ‘entertainment’ crossover figures I can think of only two that fit the bill for all the ages – first and foremost being Sinatra, second being Elvis. Sinatra’s body of work and remarkable duration of career will stand out, and the margins will always contain notes about his live concerts, his legendarily tempestuous lifestyle, his success as an actor and his occasional second-rate sallies into dancing and ‘comedy’. He may well be highlighted as the quintessence of the century’s conception of a ‘star’ – the embodiment of celebrity as it was then known. His notoriety will be of greater importance than his musicality.

Presley, on the other hand, will be a light hearted footnote, focusing probably on banned hip swiveling footage, outrageous superman-like costumes, and a body of silly films consistently and sufficiently formulaic to be considered their own unique genre. It seems fair to guess that he will mostly represent the famous ironies and absurd excesses of his times. Imagine if you will a 24^th century remake of ‘Hound Dog’ by a Chinese, Indian or Indonesian vocalist, and you’ll be able to conjure up the time distorted, department store Santa Claus caricature that I envision for The King.

As far as composers are concerned there are a small handful that should be included to give us the sweep of the century. Speaking chronologically I will begin with Irving Berlin, who started his long career with ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ in 1911 and kept contributing massively to the American songbook for decades afterward. He wrote ‘God Bless America’ and ‘White Christmas’ among hundreds of others – those two songs alone practically guarantee his hallowed enshrinement in the annals of musical history.

George Gershwin was a contemporary of Berlin (as well as one of his admirers) and although at one point a song-plugger for Tin Pan Alley, he was also capable of composing some of the most interesting, representative and socially resonant orchestral works of his time. Gershwin’s first hit was the populist ‘Swanee’, but he is also responsible for the complex, passionate and sublime ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, so rich and musically metaphorical that one can almost see the environment in which it was composed.

Lennon & McCartney, as well as being among the most noted artists of all time, are responsible for the composition of many of the most popular songs to this point in history – They surely must be on this list. Theirs is a body of work that acts as the soundtrack to an entire generation of baby boomers, and is beloved by the children & grandchildren of these same boomers. The unifying effect of their global popularity and resulting paradigm shift attributed to them and their fellow Beatles was so profound that music is, in some ways, still stuck in the ruts of their deep pioneering tracks. This is an irony that they themselves may have sensed developing as their social and cultural influence peaked in the late 1960s, but which has yet to completely play itself out. Offhand I can think of no composer of more current vintage whose writing does not directly trace back to what Lennon & McCartney synthesized. They represent a major crossroads, where musical influences of ‘the past’ joined with the science, tech & business of ‘the future’. It was potent and has powerfully affected all who come afterward. Every big new Pop hit is like a re-imagined Beatles song. Every Country offering is like a watered down Beatles song. Every modern Pop songwriter understands, courtesy of John & Paul’s time tested template, the point of focus on the hook, the short and logical rising journey to the chorus, its payoff, and then, they hope a swimming pool and a limo at the end of it all. Lennon & McCartney compositions will certainly be loved as long as we value music, but awareness of their identities, personal contributions and social opinions may fade drastically when compared to timelessness of their melodies and lyrics.

I wanted to include Burt Bacharach in this list, but I don’t think his name will be on the tips of tongues in the 24^th century. He remains to my mind one of the cleverest of all writers but I am not positive that his work will stand the test of time, though it really ought to. I fear that the rhythmic shapes and harmonic themes that he employed were a victim of their own success. This is to say they were vastly and instantly popular, eagerly performed, greedily covered by all manner of artists, completely related to and emblematic of the times in which they were created, and so he will be, for these purposes at least, shipwrecked in the 1960s. But if there has ever been a writer who can more cohesively marry a melody to chord structure inside a perfectly shaped arrangement I have yet to discover him.

I think Michael Jackson will not do well in music’s memory – I hope at least he will be remembered as one of history’s great dancers, and a spectacular showman. But, as far as music crafted by the likes of diligent tunesmiths, performed by expressive instrumentalists, his contribution, when looked at honestly, actually harmed the art form as it had grown to be. With Jackson came a complete shift in focus away from the craftsmanship of songwriting and the synergy of group musical performance towards a more selfish obsession with the solo vocalist. His dance routines were generally far more important than the compositions themselves, and a new video-driven culture underscored a requirement for ‘tele-genics’. Jackson’s breadth of appeal was remarkable, no doubt aided by the fact that it his performances appeared self-contained: to sing and dance one requires nothing other than one’s own body. This cuts across all class and wealth strata. Combined with this was a corporate mass-marketing machine of unprecedented reach and vigour, pitching a carefully constructed culture of glitzy, dramatic, heroic iconography, designed for easy dissemination via the new conception of MTV. There is a direct line between Michael Jackson and children who type with their thumbs while staring at iPhone screens -- when they might rather be interacting with others. I don’t expect my children to long for a bumpy ride in a flivver while singing ‘In My Merry Oldsmobile’ any more than I expect kids in 2311 to sing and dance ‘Thriller’. But I know they’ll have their own Buck Rogers version of an iPhone... MJ’s effect was powerful to be sure, but I think ultimately it will prove to be not so much ‘artistic’ achievement as a triumph in the optimization of marketing.

The super-keener musicologists of the year 2311 will no doubt toss about the names of many brilliant and influential 20^th century artists – cutting edge types like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis or broadly popular stalwarts like Ella Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby, but I strongly suspect that they will not be known by the person in the street. Bird and Miles will be looked at through a lens of kitschy curiosity, having played musical instruments considered archaic, obsolete, about as relevant in that distant future as are Lute or Harpsichord today.

The list will contain no trombonists.

Hodge-Podge

2007-02-16T15:41:00.000-08:00

by Vince R. Ditrich

Hodge-Podge:

Pronunciation: 'häj-"päj

Function: noun

Etymology: alteration of hotchpotch: a heterogeneous mixture: Jumble

Hodge-Podge #1: Match the real-life, actual real-estate agent’s name with the smartass comment it elicits:

1) Janet Crapo ---------------a) Might I suggest a change in diet?
2) Dave Weiner --------------b) Chang Penis
3) Dick Belcher -------------- c) I hope that's a married name

4) Birdie Schmidt ------------d) Then he should take a bath
5) Lou Reeks ---------------- e) I swear to God her name was Birdie Schmidt!

Hodge-Podge #2: Most annoying mispronunciations I’ve heard used more than once in the last fortnight:

1)‘Fer-tog-er-fer’ -- instead of ‘photographer’
2)‘Farm-il-yer’ -- instead of ‘Familiar’
3)‘Irregardless’ -- instead of ‘Regardless’
4)‘New-kew-lar’ instead of -- ‘I’m the president of the United States nearing the end of my second term, and after having been briefed by aides thousands and thousands of times over the period of a decade about New-kew-lar power, New-kew-lar weaponry, New-kew-lar research, New-kew-lar submarines, New-kew-lar deterrents, New-kew-lar attacks, New-kew-lar test bans, New-kew-lar rogue states, New-kew-lar reactors, and New-kew-lar families, I still can’t pronounce the word like a bright 3rd grade student.

Hodge-Podge #3: Sign at a sandwich shop reading: “Now Hiring Great People”. Pierre Trudeau, the Sandwich Artist, with a rose pinned to his apron. Joan of Arc, at the gas grille, of course. Winston Churchill, resplendent in a purple visor, could take your order with a verbal flourish. “...We shall prepare your salad whatever the cost may be. We shall bite on the peaches, we shan’t bite on the coffee grounds, we shall bite on the meals and on the sweets. We shall bite to our fills. We shall never surrender…”

While we’re hodge-podging…Can anyone out there explain the rationale behind expensive toilet paper?

VRD

The Village

2007-02-14T13:12:00.000-08:00

by Vince R. Ditrich

(If you laugh it's a humour piece...If you don't it's a scathing indictment).

It appears that people actually follow blogs, because I get a lot of flak about not updating my own often enough. Although it shouldn’t, this surprises me; reading on the web is not like sitting down with a good book, and I refuse to believe anyone would put the two in the same category for satisfaction and fulfillment. I find that faithfully visiting a blog again and again requires more commitment than I can reasonably give; though I should be flattered, I'm actually taken aback at anyone spending their valuable time worrying about the lack of new material on mine. There are thousands, maybe millions of other blogs out there!

And precisely because of this fact, I find that I get overloaded quickly by the utter barrage of material available (and the pain-in-the-ass way it is often presented). The sillier the topic, it seems, the more crap there is to stagger through, too. You could spend a lifetime reading-up on 'Bigfoot' alone. I get impatient with stultifying repetition, I get depressed by clumsy attempts to analyze or critique things mundane & arcane, which no doubt start with good intentions but end up all to often looking like drunken transcriptions of Coles notes by a juvenile delinquent; bad spelling, no caps or punctuation, egregious factual inaccuracies (gotta keep those details straight when regurgitating preposterous Roswell Saucer Crash anecdotes), embarrassing misuses of homonyms, childlike, heart-woundingly pathetic attempts at summation…Very little ability to communicate through the written word.

But then I guess I’m a cranky old bastard. I couldn’t give a rat’s arse about, online ‘live votes’, those grating message boards, or even ‘man on the street’ interviews on TV, for that matter (if I tune in at all, it is for expert analysis). I don’t wish to be subjected to the faulty reasoning of near-illiterates.

Sound harsh? Maybe it is, but it seems clear to me that we need to rattle the cage. And I mean rattle it big-time, run our tin cups across the bars, shake the door, make some noisy protests -- before it's too late. Recently, in an attempt to be informative, the vaunted internet, the great hive-mind & hope of humanity, home to all news, websites, message boards, online votes and blogs, reported that the state of Kansas has finally, belatedly, it’s-about-bloody-time-ish-ly voted to repeal a Stone Age law which made it illegal to teach as conclusive based on all the evidence available today the basic tenets of Darwinian evolution in that state’s schools. But two years from now, in the next voting cycle, they might change their minds back.

A majority of voting Kansans, apparently unaware of what Darwin’s elegant theory actually says and equally in the dark about how science works had collectively convulsed in a hot-button intransigent theocratic spasm. They decided that they could dream up a more palatable homily for the development of Life on Earth, a 'truth' rather than facts, that three-year-olds could grasp immediately and uncritical Grandparents could repeat with gimlet-eyed, old-testament zeal, their fiery ardour diverting the questions that hovered into view as a result of lapses in their logic (which, at any rate, they had never been introduced to in their own childhood…God forgive them!) They then backed-up their fairy tale with a state law. The law basically says that ALL parents must allow, and ALL kids must respect the notion that Sunday School stories have just as great a likelihood of being scientifically valid as does science itself. In a new take on the American Constitution, Kansans had inched legislatively towards a joining of Church & State. Ouch. Clearly the democratic, universal, free self-education aspect of the internet is requiring an unusually long time to take hold in Kansas.

But of course science is not a fable, an opinion or political bullying; it is a method, and everyone can examine scientific theories for flaws, should examine theories for flaws, are requested to examine the whole schmeer, to test it, to challenge it, to try to find a mistake. Though it might not go down well in Kansas, I submit that even a NASCAR engine obeys the laws of physics (note to Kansans: Physics is the name given to one of the scientific disciplines). What I would love to read is that Kansas had passed a law insisting that everyone in their social-throwback, cave-hunkering, vacantly credulous superstition repository of a state be required to prove a capacity to think critically before their votes could be allowed to negatively affect other citizens. (They should also be required to learn the Heimlich Manoeuvre to assist victims, fellow Kansans, who were choking on the outlandish fantasies being shoved down their throats.) Does my 'fighting fire with fire' rant smack of Orwellian '1984' totalitarianism? Is that worse than 984 Dark-Ages-ism? Are next year's crop failures going to be blamed on Kansas City witches? Will blights and curses be tracked on government web sites?

In the next mouse-click I’m informed with a pretty damn large headline about the Earth-shattering discovery that ‘afternoon naps’ appear to be ‘good for the health’. Although this has been common knowledge for millennia, even to quadrupeds and the Great Apes --before the advent of speech never mind written language, the internet’s voracious appetite for ‘content’ allows the story to be posted as if it were NEWS, a claim that even the most vapid, drone-like member of society wouldn’t buy. Hey!!! Stop the presses….Turns out salt might be bad for the health!! I would not at all be surprised to see a story posted warning that death is the biggest cause of funerals – except in Kansas where they’re currently attempting to enact ‘Mandatory Resurrection’ into law.

Oh, that Worldwide Web! Viruses abound out there in cyberspace. They are usually designed by meat-headed social menaces with the specific intent of wreaking some sort of havoc, as unchecked havoc is the most creative concept their addled noodles can output. The greater the havoc, the more proud these social morons feel. Back in ancient times (25 or more years ago) the malcontents who now inflict their viruses upon the world were the shiftless, slack-jawed vandals who busted shop windows and defaced bus stops with graffiti. In small towns and villages most folks had a pretty good idea who the shit-disturbers were, kept book on the worst of them, and occasionally a solid citizen or two, in righteous wrath, would rise up and unleash a can of whoop-ass on the truculent little bastards. In the big cities, sadly, the job was left to the police & the courts – and of course it seldom got done.

The internet is the biggest city of them all, and the vandals are getting away Scott free.

The internet is one great, huge, massive concatenation of potentialities. To use an artistic metaphor it’s a blank canvas. It’s pregnant with promise. Just think of the possibilities! But as it currently stands, it is like the main street of what could have been a beautiful town, but isn’t. The planning board let the forested boulevard be zoned for ramshackle used car lots, fast food joints, gas stations, tattoo parlours, and muddy lots gone to seed. Every now & then there squats an obese, joyless Wal-Mart. We could have a Mona Lisa on our hands, but instead we have a brick wall spray painted with bad depictions of genitalia.

McLuhan appears to have been correct. The medium and its sheer ubiquity have reduced us to wading through a tremendous amount of noise before we can dredge up the music. But the solution is so simple. Demand more --of yourself, and of others, on the internet. Think of if not as an amusement but as a new environment for improving not just your lot, but everyone’s lot in life. Let’s let the obvious state itself, let’s not assume that our right to hold an opinion is an imperative to constantly say it and re-say it again and again at high volume. Let’s think twice before we assert once. Let’s not conclude that quantity is quality. Let’s act on the internet like we would in our own village.

VRD

The Pigs of War

2006-07-20T21:58:00.000-07:00

The Pigs of War

Essay

By Vince R. Ditrich

There can be no grey areas when you wish to gird a nation for war. Affairs must be black and white, crystal clear, with the virtuous guardians of absolute Good facing the gluttonous gangsters of pure Evil, capitalized for metaphor’s sake, starkly defined, and copiously illustrated with anecdotes, attributions and historical analogues, whether or not they are apropos, accurate, graceful or even believable.

Interestingly, a politician’s lifeblood is his capacity to subtly shade and manipulate connotations and meanings of words and catch phrases; his sophistication comes from an ability to introduce new grey areas, where before we saw none, in order to re-brand flaccid old pissing contests and make them shiny, new, and winnable again. The politician splits hairs and makes a big scene dog-fighting over the tiniest detail. He usually chooses the battles that are tilted in his favour, no matter how picayune, but he generally publicizes his victories as if they were hard won and rooted in the very bedrock of his principles. In peacetime he makes much ado about nothing.

But it is the singular politician who can make the case for war.

The wartime politician has no grey-scale, and he thinks much the same no matter where he hails from, whether he is an MP, a Senator, an Ayatollah, a King or a General. When the time for war comes he looks only to information that supports the grand purpose of steering his nation towards it. He intones in flag-draped, patriotic generalities. He speaks of ‘family values’ as if his land alone values its families. He lumps together nations, concepts, events, causes and effects indiscriminately and throws them all into the same sack, like a huge garbage bag boldly emblazoned with the label “Evil”. Disparate events become linked in new-found conspiracies. Long-standing enmities can be turned on their head, spun around and re-named ‘secret alliances’, ‘cabals’, ‘encirclement’, ‘the work of provocateurs’, ‘covert groups’, perhaps even ‘Axis of -- Add Your Demonizing Abstract Noun Here --’. Nations, corporations, conglomerates, and opposition leaders capitalizing on geopolitical instability get labelled as part of a monolithic enemy hegemony and are thrown into the sack. After all, capitalization on a situation is only fair if the GOOD GUYS do it. Dictators, be they the tinpot variety or cagey old experts too savvy to any longer be kept onside get chucked into the sack, too. Suspicious connections are trumpeted loudly or manufactured quietly if necessary, co-incidence is dismissed as impossible, self-defence as a provocation. The sack bulges with all manner of things, taken from every quarter, that might be interpreted as resistance to the wartime politician’s cause, an impediment to his country’s progress, an insult to his national honour, a blasphemy upon what he holds holy, a threat to his safety. He ties the bag shut and tosses it at your feet. Task complete! Here is your proof. Believe or be suspected of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Sadly, these ratcheted-up, aggressively unbalanced methods, in former times let slip only in times of chaos & true crisis, are now nothing more than a technique; garden variety, business-as-usual politics. Practically everyone partakes in knee-jerk demonization. The bar is now set so low that those who are the most hysterical, shrill or combative in how they present their case are -- like a camera-ready Pop singer who sells a million CDs is suddenly a ‘superstar’-- blithely dubbed ‘Statesmen’.

There was a time when ‘Statesman’ was an honorific ascribed to only the most experienced, skilled, and subtle diplomatists and parliamentarians. Statesmen were the brightest, most able and best connected politicians of their times. Their word was an iron-clad bond by or for their countries, and they sometimes did not require elected office to make their influence felt. Though war has perennially been on the horizon, the real Statesman could often manoeuvre around it and still let his country’s interests still be served. He did not greedily grab for authority; it was his and he wielded it comfortably. His confidence buttressed well chosen words which illuminated his intellect, and gave continuity to the traditions that propelled his thinking. His statements were truly his, conceived by him, penned by him, and endorsed by the highest authority; he coined phrases that crystallized, encapsulated, or perhaps inspired: “Blood & Iron”, “Their Finest Hour”, "Walk Softly & Carry a Big Stick". He authored Plans, Doctrines, Agreements, Treaties, Policies. His words had weight and he delivered them knowing this. He had a breadth of vision and experience unknown by all but a few of his contemporaries. A true Statesman couldn’t get away with rudderless windbaggery like that of John Kerry or provocative, rash button pushing like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The British had Disraeli, Lloyd George, the mighty Churchill; the French had “The Tiger” Clemenceau -- even the intractable De Gaulle acted statesmanlike when it suited him. The German Empire had the very shrewd and careful von Bismarck. The USA has put forth wise, capable and sometimes even idealistic men such as Franklin, Wilson, Hopkins, Acheson, Marshall, men more of substance and intellect than botox and focus groups; even the highly controversial Henry Kissinger couldn’t be accused of lacking depth.

But something has shifted.

Nowadays Americans must look to people like Newt Gingrich for Statesman-like leadership. Gingrich, a retired conservative politician, former Speaker of the House (who by the US Constitution was once third in line to the Presidency) and Harvard Professor, would very much like to run an elegant thematic thread through any number of recent hostile acts; he tries mightily to do so. He is busy these day, on-camera, touring the e-hustings so to speak, trying to employ his verbal and intellectual skills to force an entire county towards the epiphany that, Wow!... It’s suddenly World War Three! Honest! – based purely on his word alone. More like a small town District Attorney trying a case filled with circumstantial evidence than a famous figure with national influence & geopolitical foresight, he reads-off his desultory list of accusations, links events, and sounds not ‘visionary’, ‘presidential’ or ‘statesmanlike’ but partisan and preachy, chucking rocks sullenly from the sideline. At least he doesn’t ululate and whack things with his sandal. His Harvard students will do well to jump to his dire conclusions, but the rest of us can look before we leap. Unfortunately most of the world’s leaders get their education at Harvard. But no matter what he claims, his all-inclusive survey of current events leaves him filling his metaphorical sack with oddments, like a JFK conspiracy nut run amok, dramatically proclaiming this bill of goods ‘the beginning of World War III’, thereby linking every bomb in every country with every ‘terrorist cell’, making them all a part of a huge, presumably organized Islamic umbrella group that is on its way to reaching critical mass. But the only critical mass that could possibly be achieved is the point where the American public is finally beaten down by endless scary prognostications and becomes willing to lash out and quiet all the disparate, anarchic voices at once.

During the Kennedy era “SIOP-62” (Single Integrated Operational Plan) for nuclear force retaliation was for a massive strike of USA’s ICBMs to be launched toward pre-selected targets throughout the Communist world. These targets were in the Soviet Union, Red China, North Korea, elsewhere…Regardless of who the aggressor was, or where the real enemy lay, no matter what the grievance or assault; the policy of the US government was to retaliate by wiping the entire Communist bloc off the face of the Earth. For obvious reasons John Kennedy changed this policy.

Given that World Wars I & II were huge, consciousness-altering conflagrations it’s hard to see how sporadic terrorist bombings, however shocking and infuriating, or yet another sortie by the Israeli Air Force could qualify to be ‘the beginning of WWIII’. We face serious trials ahead, but let's be realistic about what is actually going on. Cassandra-like warnings ring false and should beg the question why does Newt want all of us to think this is the beginning of the end?

I suppose WWIII would be a great television event if scripted properly, and heaven knows most of the western world receives its geopolitical education from CNN or the like. Mainstream TV’s watered down, absurdly over-simplified analysis, maudlin tone, colourful graphics and dramatic theme stingers, combined with the very nature of television – a medium gawked at endlessly by detached, disengaged and hypnotised viewers -- practically ensures big ratings and pseudo-intellectual parroting of Wolf Blitzer at the water cooler. That there wasn’t an outright, instant and total boycott of all frontline televised war news by the entire American nation when reporters were ‘embedded’ with US troops during the invasion of Iraq says it all. How could the coverage possibly have been anything other than sis-boom-bah? But the propagandized generally don’t realize they’re being had. The average far-removed & unthreatened citizen has to make a strenuous effort to break out of his or her daily pattern to give a shit about distant military adventures, and frankly, the isolated childlike news reports they are spoon-fed are meant mostly for morale; heartening shots of dusty, camouflaged homeboys sitting on a tank and waving at the camera or huge, impressive explosions from a safe distance, after which a reporter with an exotic accent and a fishing vest interprets the days events. The anchor tuts & clucks editorially and then throws to commercial. At any rate, balanced, researched and nuanced reportage would be completely meaningless to a viewer vague on historical background & context. But TV is not the culprit.

Critical thinking is what is missing. We need only look around to see that, as human beings, our inner world and much we base our lives upon is open to wide interpretation and is for all intents & purposes, fabricated by us, for our own comfort. Why, then, shouldn’t they simply bill terrorism as WWIII, give the people focus, motivate them, and make them believe? Many of them hold fast less believable and less tangible things. There are thousands (perhaps millions) who truly believe they’ve been abducted by UFOs. There are many more who can’t function without having their horoscope analyzed by ‘skilled professionals’; some of these very people have led great nations through trying times. Most of the world’s people believe in magical religious tenets that can never be proven, that go against all logic, common-sense, and the laws of science & nature; often-times these people admit as much, live with the conundrum, and still believe; and yet other people hold their beliefs so dear that they will murder and slaughter over slight interpretive differences in one or another holy scripture. And that brings us back to WWIII.

It’d certainly be a way to sell things, be they the boogieman, products, services, heretofore unacceptably parochial social policies, reactionary theocratic political philosophies, or a new generation of holier than thou fire & brimstone ‘Statesmen’. One of the greatest economic booms in history happened to the U.S.A. during, and as a result of World War Two. Re-branding the 'product' to be an apocalyptic battle between religious systems could really be a marketing home run, with Newt and company there to rise like the elect to the Executive Pulpit. Bully for them. WWIII, especially if it were that in name only, might turn out to be the most useful of them all.

When you really think about it…If you can sell them ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’, surely you can put lipstick on the pig of war.

The Whipping Boy

2006-01-23T12:54:00.000-08:00

by Vince R. Ditrich

Part One

$2.85 an hour. That was the going wage when I was a 14 year-old working at the music store. Not just any music store, mind, but the best established and most reputable Mom & Pop shop in the whole region, the only one my Dad would ever give his patronage, the only one that, in his words, didn’t just sell “goddamn amplifiers for amateurs to make noise with their Rotten-Roll Hippie crap and smoke goddamn manure-a-hoona.” My Dad, you see, was a purist. If you couldn’t read it, you shouldn’t be allowed to play it. If you were a young guitarist, for example, and you couldn’t find B flat, or play a diminished chord, or finger A flat 7 add 9, (which you wouldn’t if you only knew 5 songs, all of them by Buck Owens) you were instantly exiled to his personal Siberia, labeled ‘an AMATEUR’ – the worst possible verdict that he could pass. No term in his lexicon was more pejorative. “Well yes, he’s an ax murderer, but at least he’s not an AMATEUR…” By the age of four I knew that if someone had been pronounced an ‘Amateur’ his days were done, at least as far approval from my Dad was concerned; his judgment was irrevocable. He was a man of unambiguous opinions. Oh, the hell he raised when the march of time and his pre-teen aged son (me) required he add ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ and ‘Knock Three Times’ to the set list. I recall he even did “My Sweet Lord”, but his face was always screwed up into a rictus of revulsion as he miserably honked through it on the Tenor sax. In retrospect I suppose he did try, at one point gamely plodding through a Tijuana Brass phase, even though he thought Herb Alpert was an abomination to man and beast alike. “Jaysus Kee-rist…He sucks on that goddamn horn like a schoolgirl…” As the time passed, he got more and more crotchety and his gun-shy sidemen fled to gigs where they could play current songs, sometimes even in the key of E, and not live in terror all night long. Work dried up and eventually Dad just hung it up for good.

I, his drummer, was left unemployed and with few prospects. Granted I was only 14, but when you’re a musician the child labour laws don’t apply. So I worked up the gumption to drop into a local music store to suggest that they keep me in mind should they ever need some help. To my surprise they called one Saturday morning.

I jumped on the city bus, fairly bursting with excitement, rode it downtown and presented myself for duty. Clearly my extensive musical background convinced them to call me. Wise of them! They’d be damn glad they’d hired me, I mused. Oh yes, I’d have the place running like a top in days! When I arrived the Boss looked me up and down over his reading glasses, said nothing intelligible but clucked and tutted with what I hoped was some form of approval and spun quickly on his heel, leaving me to be tasked by his wife. She bade me downstairs, to the deepest, darkest depths of the ‘stock room’. No ordinary storage area, this ancient, dank warren seemed to have been scraped out of the prairie hardpan as a refuge in case there were marauding Visigoths reported in the area.

It was McGee’s Closet, filled with hundreds, thousands – perhaps even millions of copies of sheet music. Books and pads and scribblers and texts and tablature and manuscript; it was piled as far as they eye could see in that dim light, looking as if it had been cargo abandoned by smugglers dumping and running, appearing for all the world like a heap of forbidden books ready for a Nazi bonfire.

“Organize this.” The Boss’s wife said, waving her hand vaguely at the squalor before me. “It’s really quite a mess.” She added, overstating obvious with pathos. Leaving me alone with my thoughts she climbed the steep, squeaky steps and went back to join the lucky above-ground elite. For a few moments I just stood there like a dunce as the realization sunk in that I was not to be the new manager of the drum department, nor a mighty sales representative. I would take out the trash, sweep floors, and categorize rubbish as either a) junk or, b) crap. I was a ‘gofer’. A ‘stock-boy’. And at $2.85 an hour I almost qualified to be a slave.

It was near the end of my very first day of work that my legend began to form. While vacuuming, I ineffectually pushed a peanut of packing foam around the rack of Al Martino records; I didn’t know I was being watched. My new co-workers were amusing themselves by wagering how long it’d be before I’d actually bend over and pick up the offending piece I appeared to be playing deck shuffleboard with. Finally the Boss’s daughter suggested that I really get aggressive with that cheap Hoover, throw it around a bit, persuade it to do its job. Throw it around I did, dutifully adhering to her injunction -- but of course I couldn’t know that this vacuum, utterly worn out and cheap in the first place, had been jury rigged countless times since its manufacture during the early part of the Protestant Reformation. The last repair had been done with scissors and scotch tape. The Hoover balked at my rough treatment and sent a few jolly shocking volts down the pipe directly into my arm. I danced a right pretty jig, sang a few Mexicano sounding ‘Aiaiaiaiaiai’ lyrics and then dropped it like a boiling spud. The high mirth exhibited at my expense by co-workers was galling, but being fourteen I mostly just got embarrassed and mumbled.

Luckily it was a family oriented kind of place where parents rented trumpets for school band or bought metronomes for their arrhythmic piano student children and not the kind of place the long-hairs frequented to buy a guitar just like Eric Clapton’s. A lady I knew worked at one of THOSE places, across town, mostly serving John Lennon hairstyle stunt-doubles back in the day when that kind of coiffure was a shocking thing to see. Her feet were firmly planted on the near side of the Generation Gap; she was well out of her depth. At one point while minding the shop alone a young man sidled up to the counter and said to her casually, “Hey lady…Can I take a peek at your fuzz box?” Her eyes widened in horror and she nearly fainted. Oh the depravity! What was the world coming to? Damn these Hippies and their loose morals! After a few moments she realized that the young man was pointing not at her unmentionables but at an electronic gadget inside the glass display case.

I was a very attentive young man, responsible, respectful, efficient, quick to learn and eager to please. Unfortunately I was also perilously ungainly, with Andre the Giant’s feet, a child’s body, and a teenager’s loins. The puberty that was underway cursed me with uncontrolled vocal yodeling, an uneven spackling of acne and a totally preposterous attempt at a moustache. I dropped things, I tripped over things, I broke things. I was St. Vitus at Dance Party USA. The Boss would just shake his head as I’d stumble by, wincing as I dumped coffee on someone’s brand new copy of Toccata and Fugue. I was an object, not of ridicule, but of fascination, a crash-to-be, erratically circling the airfield.

The store was long, narrow and high. The ceilings must have been 25 feet, leaving all sorts of room for displays on the office roofs. The Boss, in addition to bookkeeping, musical instrument repair, ordering, banking, sales, and schmoozing had also taken on the job of fitting and repairing hearing aids. He had a special office set up specifically to test the hearing of his customers, presumably the now deaf, washed-up electric guitarists that my Dad had sent packing. It was a room within a room, built in such a way that the roof was only timber cross-pieces. They always featured a drumkit up there, setting it gingerly on scrap pieces of wood that lay over the supports. It was eye-catching but out of the way.

I took it upon myself to clean up that display, the shiny drums having collected a thick coating of dust from sitting forlornly for several years. Ever so carefully I climbed up the ladder and tiptoed to the kit, moving it painstakingly from place to place, cautiously adjusting the wood ‘floor’ that I and the drums rested on. Like a cat I balanced on the beams, moving the cymbal here, the floor tom there. Confident now, not to mention out of space I brazenly balanced a cymbal stand on two of the joists. I turned back to my task but caught from the corner of my eye that it was tipping over. This cymbal on its stand, a twenty pound contraption with a razor sharp bronze edge, was headed to the floor twenty feet below, toward the head of a customer. Urgently I lunged for the falling object lest it decapitate the lady browsing the Beverly Sills LPs. And decapitate her it would have, in a split second. In the nick of time I nabbed it, preventing a messy tragedy, but my desperate lunge threw me off balance and I lost my footing.

I and the cymbal plunged through the ceiling below, my crotch bearing the full weight of the fall onto the 2 x 10 rafter. My legs dangled down into the hearing aid office and the floor below was littered with shattered acoustic tile. I was in agony, still clinging piteously to the cymbal, and balanced excruciatingly on what I was sure was an exploded scrotum. I peered down into the disaster I had caused and saw the BOSS. His bald head was sprinkled with dust. He gazed upward quizzically at the odd vision suddenly visited upon him, reading glasses as usual at the end of his nose. His eyebrows shot up for a second but all he said was, “Oh, Hi Vince.”

Banished to the basement again, I was assigned the horrible task of sorting through box after box of used screws, nuts and bolts and separating them by size. The Boss wanted it done; it’d been on his to do list for years, apparently. I was positive he just wanted to gain a measure of control over the halo of destruction surrounding me. It was said that completion of the task would be highly regarded, but the drudgery was unspeakable. I was sick with boredom. Presently I felt nature’s urge and excused myself for a few moments. I attended to my task, did up my trousers and flushed the bog. Abject horror washed over me as the toilet and its contents --formerly MY contents, backed up onto the floor and flooded everywhere. I mean everywhere. This was no garden variety malfunction of the john; it was a torrent, a cataract, a high pressure inundation. It sloshed out the door and spread inexorably. I came rushing out of the loo, waving my arms in the air in a terrible panic, frightening the customers, yelping incoherently, white as a ghost. I gesticulated wildly like a terror-stricken caveman. The ruinous stream forked in two directions, one rivulet languidly draining toward the sheet music, briefly pooling near the Puccini, and then flowing onward, perhaps drawn to Blood, Sweat & Tears by a sense of comradeship, eventually trickling all the way to the front door. The other cascaded down the stairs and through the floorboards, raining urine and huge gobs of turd on a stack of fancy, expensive clarinets. It dribbled down the wall and soaked a pegboard wall display which held thousands of spare parts in plastic bags, all of which were now filling with toilet contents: Bassoon springs, violin bow frogs, trumpet mouthpieces, flute keys, sax pads, microphones, ligatures, bass violin bridges, you name it. All were ruined. The shite came flowing down the stairs with menacing drama, in gratuitously graphic Peckinpah slo-mo, and oozed calamitously to the floor below. There was even a clump of excrement plopped malevolently on the Boss’s soldering iron. It was a fucking disaster.

Somebody awoke to the emergency and took us to panic stations; by some miracle we managed to mop it up – but the loathsome job of picking up the errant solid bits was left to me, the perpetrator, and a pair of pink rubber gloves. The clarinets at the top of the stack took the brunt of it and I cringe to this day at the thought of some poor bastard buying one and obliviously gumming on it for all these years; what a black irony that their brand name was “Buffet”…Ugh. But there was nothing we could do about the lazy, clinging pong of ancient musty broadloom mixed with wretched, nasty sewage save leave all the doors open and freeze our arses. They were all hoping that MY arse would actually freeze right off and fall into the gutter at that point. But when the Boss got back from lunch and got the awful, damning report he blinked once or twice, clucked a bit and then began to laugh and laugh and laugh. I could hear him laughing alone in his little office all day long. He laughed when he went for coffee. He laughed when he came back. He was laughing hours later when he locked up for the night. He may still be laughing today, wherever he may be, years after his passing.
It was hard to overcome that one. The plumber got me off the hook to some degree, discreetly explaining that the source of the blockage in the toilet was caused by an object that ‘couldn’t have been flushed by a man’ (it took me a bit to decipher that statement), but it didn’t really matter. I was the one whose crap had soiled the broadloom and imperiled the woodwinds. It was epic stuff.

End of Part One

1/06

The Movement

2006-01-06T08:33:00.000-08:00

Part One
by Vince R. Ditrich

I’ve always fantasized about having my own Pub. I suppose a lot of people think it might be nice; but I take it several orders of magnitude higher. I want it, badly. I wish for it, I beseech the heavens for it. I use corners of ketchup slathered napkins to make sketches of what it could look like. I scout around for the perfect location. I want it to overlook the sea, and have a cozy inglenook on one wall. It will be dimly lit, just enough light to see the Queen’s face on the money. I guess I’ll need oak benches – those would be for visitors -- but it would have just fabulous taps, a selection that’d make you weep with joy, and a couple of dogs curled up by the fire…I guess it’s a no-brainer to include a ploughman’s lunch that’d blow the mind out of the side of your head. No damn TVs. A special area, near the fireplace, overflowing with excellent books and a few soft, inviting armchairs, reserved especially for me and my guests. It would certainly have a bay window. Did I mention it’d be built overlooking the sea? Of course I did.

It’s not where I’d spend my retirement. It’s where I’d spend nearly every waking hour of the rest of my bloody life. Laugh if you will, but secretly in his heart, every man reading these words wants exactly the same thing and his wife is terrified that his wish might be granted.

My friends endorse my big dream, because they know if my ship comes in and its cargo is a big fat lottery win, they are going to be VIPs at my Pub. A Pub is pointless if there’s no one to share it with. In fact, it’d be OUR Pub, with free rounds and countless raucous choruses of “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight” until the Mounties have to be summoned. I imagine myself in front of a cheery fire on a rainy night reveling in the experience of sipping a pint and riffling through yellowed, dusty history books. History & beer: What a perfect combo. I once wrote that I loved them both so much that you might be tempted to conclude that I like nothing more than getting pissed up and then recounting past piss-ups.

Since most people’s lives are categorized by what they do, I guess you might file me under ‘artist’. This means I am fashionably unemployed, charmingly insolvent, and possessing of a radical chic that most folks suspect is more likely an undiagnosed medical problem. It also means I dream big.

The idea of my own Pub really took root one spring after a buddy lost his wife to cancer. She was far too young. She was suddenly and capriciously taken away from us.

For a while we stood around wringing our hands, wondering what in the hell we could do to help. What do you do in a case like this? Talk about the amount of rain in May? Pretend everything is hunky-dory? Have him and the kids over for a weenie roast and pretend it puts everything back into balance? Clearly this wasn’t going to cut the mustard.

Life, as they say, had to go on. We knew this man still needed a pint now and then so we began, occasionally, to traipse over to his house and put on little socials. We were pretty cautious about it at first but eventually one of the lads said, “For God’s sake! He’s Irish. Do you really think he minds visitors dropping by laden with Guinness?”

I had to admit he had a point.

It turned out that he didn’t mind at all. And at that moment it all took on a life of its own. This beat our regular local six ways from Sunday!

It wasn’t long before we all began departing after sunset just a little too often. We’d swagger out of the house dripping with machismo, weighed down by preposterous quantities of beer, cradling tastefully presented platters of manly appetizers, and roar off without a word, provocatively revving the Volvo a few too many times as we left, leaving suspicion in our wake. We’d had to cover our tracks.

Furtive phone calls would be exchanged. “Hello?”
“…Uhh…Yeah…Meeting Friday night…”
In the background, “Who is it honey?”
“Uhh…It’s for me, Hon.” Voice lowered again, “Yeah. Friday you say?”
“…Umm…Yeah…Just a few administrative issues to discuss…Won’t keep you long…”
“Great then, see you Friday…”
“Honey, what’s happening on Friday?” She’d invariably query.
“Oh, you know. Raising money for peace ‘n stuff…”
“Peace?” She’d ask doubtfully.
“Peace? No…No…I said, ahh…P.A.C”.
Long pause.
“The P.A.C? You joined the Parent’s Advisory Commitee?”
“Did I say, uhhh, P.A.C? Ah, heh, heh, heh…No, umm, G.A.C. Greening of Atrophied Confluencies. Yes, G.A.C…We call it GAC. Feed the trees, cut down the children, you know…Just doing my part.”

Oh yes, we were slick, savvy to the necessary double-talk. Never a peep about smoked salmon, tuna sashimi, homemade blackberry pies heisted straight out of the freezer at great personal risk, vats of the sacred golden nectar, wine marinated prawns (oh, those lucky, lucky prawns), cheeses from around the globe, chicken satay, lamb brochettes. No…We knew better than to speak en clair about our secret cabal. We were Bad Boys.

* * * * * * * *
The Movement. It wasn’t a club. It wasn’t a society. It wasn’t a lodge, though we did fancy the thought of antler bedecked leopard-spotted busbies as our ceremonial garb. I tried to find some and the best I could do were plastic fireman’s helmets, but they didn’t provide the requisite élan. What we were was the grass roots of a popular movement, a unified mass of like-minded, risk taking, iron-willed men. (Don’t tell our wives.) Oh sure, they would ask how the meetings went, make oblique references to our charitable work, trying to draw us out for details, maybe trip us up. One wife, perhaps with the hope she could sneak a peek later, suggested we take written minutes of our meetings, but she never really understood that when we left the house, we were warriors, eagles, mighty jungle cats. We don’ need no stinkin’ minutes…When I came home late, smelling of whisky and Stilton-stuffed Filo, I could just pass it off on one of the lads in the group…Say for example The Barrister. “…Terrible stories of environmental abuse…Greenhouse effect…Children starving! Biafra I think it was. The Barrister…Yes, The Barrister suggested a wee dram to deaden the pain. He is my legal council, after all…”

Organizationally we were like a sleeper cell. But politically, we were loosely knit. We decided that if push came to shove we were all president, simultaneously. There’d be no other officers. We also toyed with the thought that whoever was speaking at any given time would be president until he ran out of breath, and then the next guy got to be prez. This seemed to work too. We even tossed around the idea of giving out a live chicken as a door prize; the chicken could be president. Mostly we hovered around the snack table.

Eventually word got out. Tongues were wagging. “G.A.C. Movement, huh? Did you shave the whales last night, honey? That's not the kind of movement I've come to expect from you!” Titter-titter. I’d mumble moodily in response and turn away. Damn! Where did the leak come from? It was hard to know but these wives were resourceful, they talked to each other constantly, they could garner encyclopedic knowledge on any situation from a simple 30 second phone call; and, by God, they were putting our Movement in danger! Just a little clever application of their feminine wiles and the whole thing would blow wide open and we’d be reduced to early bedtimes, zero-tolerance snacking enforcement and a distressing booze prohibition (except perhaps for a miserable bottle or two of cheap-assed beer, by special dispensation at the wakes of former Members of the Movement who died from a broken heart.) My dream of a Pub was sinking, floundering, in danger of getting swamped. I sat there feeling like G. Gordon Liddy, sipping my morning coffee and brainstorming ways to send in The Plumbers.

As my paranoia about our need for secrecy began to crest something happened that made me pause and question the fear that my own wife was part of the conspiracy to derail the Movement. Could I have been prematurely jumping to conclusions? My doubts began after a party she took me to. One guest in particular was a wild card whose penchant for things ‘herbal’ drove him way, way out into left-field, well past the turnoff to the mystical village where elfin druids prance merrily around the Maypole. As the evening progressed he got loonier, increasingly cryptic. He was friendly enough alright, but I suspected that making friends with him would involve a lot of smoking the peace pipe; he appeared to have on hand quite an impressively stocked little kit for just such a purpose. Apparently I won the lotto and was asked to accompany him outdoors wherein I presumed we would exchange crab dip recipes and comment favourably upon the décor. Oh well, I thought, I’d just go out for a few minutes. When I got outdoors in the nippy winter air it wasn’t long before the wind hit my back and I needed to relieve myself. Having just stepped outdoors I didn’t want to go back in immediately so I looked around and found a hedge nearby. He looked at me and said, “Dude, good idea…I gotta go, too.” As I stood there, hoping that our host wouldn’t come out and see me watering his hedge, Dude approached but was unaware of a huge pile of lumber beside me. He ambled up, tripped on the pile and then like a human caricature went staggering backwards exclaiming, “Whooaaaaa!” His arms were flailing in circles, like Charlie Chaplin on roller-skates; he made a din & clatter and vanished from view. I tensed up for the fall that surely had to come realizing that I’d better zip up quickly and rush to the silly fool’s aid. No sooner had this thought flashed across my mind than he re-appeared back into my field of view, still flailing and now moaning, “Duuuuude!” He tripped once-and-for-all on the pile of lumber and fell, headlong, bulls-eye, absolutely spot-on, directly -- I swear this is true -- under my stream of pee. I stood there for a couple of heartbeats, peeing on his head, utterly dumfounded, unable to believe what my eyes were telling me. “My God, man!” I finally yelped. “Are you okay?” He got up onto his hands and knees, hair dripping with my steaming urine and said, “No worries, Dude…Just lost it for a sec”.

My wife appeared to accept this utterly bizarre incident with serenity, even amusement. I scratched my head . I fully expected her to recoil in horror and demand to leave at once. I was sure she would find some appropriately Olympian way to shrink me down to short-panted kindergarten size, affix and slather me with buckets of opprobrium (as if I should have known that peeing outdoors in the proximity of Dude would entail a clear risk of outlandish water-sport mishaps), and shake her head in that way that only wives know how to do. But she didn’t. She actually chuckled. I began to cogitate upon the matter…We’d never pee on each other at a meeting of the Movement. Not even if we drank so much beer that we stripped naked, held hands and wept while watching Terms of Endearment. Not even if Ashley MacIssac popped in for a pint. So, maybe, just maybe, this would all work, unhidden, out in the open.

I gently broached the subject with some of the other lads. One was going to bring an appetizer his wife had made especially for us; she was all for our meetings. Another said she might like to get a similar Movement afoot for the wives. I was Thunderstruck!

My dream was alive!

End of Part One

Nothing But the Tooth

2006-01-04T14:47:00.000-08:00

by Vince R. Ditrich

She was toothless. Well, actually, I think she had some teeth on the bottom; but on top there was nothing except a flapping lip. You don’t see flapping, toothless mouths too much anymore and it made me take note. The fact that the owner of this toothless mouth was the cashier at the airport cafeteria seemed significant to me. The food would be soft, I guessed, maybe pureed. Surely it’d have to come in a bowl.

It occurred to me that toothless cashiers in joyless airport cafeterias might be a new emblem for the 21st century. They are a visible reminder of how quickly times change. One day not long ago we were potential valuable customers all, where smiling, industrious (and often fully toothed) shop owners worked to win our business, looked us in the eye, thanked us for our custom, valued us so much that they’d really watch their Ps and Qs in our proximity, and maybe even dressed up a little when they came to work. Next thing I knew we needed membership cards to even set foot inside their establishments (an outrageous, surreal and completely insulting concept, but don’t get me raving) and like some new, slick, blister-packaged version of dangerously unlimited power (“Hey everybody! It’s 'Gestapo-Lite'!) we were expected to submit to inspections, questioning -- and probably even pat down searches if the evil spirit moved them, before we could leave their dismal, mass-marketed, herd-think sheep-pens (an alarming, offensive, dangerous development, but don’t get me raving).

So it went with the airlines. Oh, how they must have hated customers back in the good old days; it must have been a case of pure loathing, shuddering disgust. If we howled long enough they’d eventually have to give-in to nearly any of our insane demands – survival rations, Geneva Convention legroom and complimentary bulbs in the reading lamps. We could bankrupt them in a trice if we stuck to our guns. It was the fear of financial collapse that allowed us to keep the upper hand after the spate of hijackings to Cuba back in the 'Seventies. Flee TO Cuba? Even the airlines scratched their heads over that strategy. But after the deadly 9/11 terrorist attack they decided, like Rumsfeld salivating over a map of the Middle East, to make a clean sweep of the whole she-bang. Fix ALL the problems. No more box cutters, to be sure; but also no more 82 year-old ladies secreting nail files aboard. No more knives with your $9 snack (now you’ll have to overpower the aircrew with your spoon, goddammit.) No more complimentary pillows – you could easily smother the pilot with it, but you’re less likely to if you’ve had to pay a nominal fee. Luggage? Ha! Don’t even think of it, you stupid, worthless piece of dirt! Buy new stuff when you get to your destination. Everybody has to pay – Nobody git nuttin fer free! Exact change please, or you’ll be escorted off the aircraft by massive Mounties, stoked into a frenzy by sugary donuts and boredom. Necessity dictated we give the airlines a few inches and now they ruled. And we had their true measure; we felt their bite. Only the cashiers were toothless!

We, you and I, travelers, formerly the jet-setting customer who was always right, whose money would instantly buy comfort, convenience and glamorous adventure, who could take his business elsewhere if he didn’t like the treatment, has been reduced to zombified cattle, an inmate standing mutely in incessant lineups, mooing occasionally to pass the time, staring wall-eyed into the middle distance. We’re so far gone that we actually hope to see an automated check-in machine just so we don’t have to speak to one of THEM. A snaking chain of weary, luggage-laden passengers might only rate one attendant -- and any complaint about the situation might well result in your being clapped in irons. After all, making trouble in an airport is tantamount to Terrorism with a capital T, and that rhymes with G and that spells Dubya.

So, I distract myself by observing the slightly wobbly man in the lineup ahead with a 40-year-old piece of luggage; an aged, almost primeval, cavernous zip-up grip of tan vinyl so beaten-up and obsolete that upon seeing it farmyard animals would gladly sacrifice their own skins to save us all from having to gaze ever again upon such an eyesore. I note that, bizarrely, it has a ribbon tied to its handle to make it more obvious to its frail looking owner, who might mistake it amongst the thousands of bags which would look identical – would, that is, were he time-traveling back to the 1960s to smuggle toilet paper and bathtub plugs into the Soviet Union. I suspiciously eye the appalling toupee cocked oddly on the melon of this tremulous TJ Hooker wannabe and wonder if I’m being Punk’d.

Bored, I make a show, for my own amusement, of pawing through pockets for a breath mint. I am for a brief moment the Candy Columbo. I then amuse myself by imagining a huge American college marching band playing a jaunty up-tempo version of “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” at the Rose Bowl. Some sonofabitch would Die! Die, die, da-Die!!! Tom-Toms thunder in response. Trombones just a bit out of tune, but loud and proud nonetheless. Trumpet section does a Savardian Spin-o-Rama and the cheerleaders waggle their arses. (I imagine a number of arrangement and instrumentation options.) I try to come up with witty puns based on French language signage. I’m not very clever: ‘Hors Taxes’ has surely elicited snickering by English-speaking prats of countless generations. I calculate how long it might be before I get to the front of the line and then ask myself why in the hell I want to be next in line for the indignities to come. I look at the boarding pass really, really closely, yet again, and wonder why did the check-in attendant circle the space identifying the gate number when the space is blank? Do I just go to any old gate and hope for the best? Do I get a free sandwich on the plane if I guess right? The airline might institute such a ‘Guess for Grub’ policy to keep us all entertained and nourished! When I made this helpful suggestion the attendant gave me a flinty, glacial look and said, “Have a nice flight” with what I thought was a tone of veiled threat, as if she were mistress of a nefarious plan that had her submissive bee-atch boyfriend-pilot mischievously chanting Allahu Akbar over the intercom just before plunging into Immelman turns, reducing all the passengers into vomit spraying rag dolls, just for shits and giggles, of course. Meanwhile she’d be safely on the ground, polishing her long red fingernails and idly humming the Ride of the Valkyries with calm satisfaction. Do I really want to even go on this goddamn trip anyway?

I numbly await a nod or gesture, a brand, tattoo, stamp, firing of handguns into the air like the reckless revelry of a tinpot dictator – some signal of approval -- by the crack team of professional security screeners (read: former janitors) so that I can move along to the next queue -- where I publicly disrobe, am probed by electronic instruments, have my bags bombarded by strange rays (and, by the way, you mustn’t say ‘bombarded’ in security…It is too close to ‘bomb’, and we all know how much of a boo-boo speaking that word would be. Even Roger Ebert has to speak positively of ‘Deuce Bigalow European Gigolo’ in airport security.) But, if I have to take off my shoes and belt how come Shatner’s shaky stunt double doesn’t have to doff that inexcusable rug? It’s all so maddening. If I make it through this gauntlet, they will eventually herd me onto the aircraft.

A modern jet aircraft can routinely do things no one dared dream a hundred years ago. It’s nothing short of a technological miracle. Its seat belt, on the other hand, is not. Comparatively it’s only a little more complicated than the wooden club that cavemen mastered even before the advent of installment plan buying. From this historical perspective, standing on the shoulders of giants as it were, this plane-load of lap restraint Isaac Newtons all, I and my fellow passengers, grok the fucking ‘do-up-yer-belt concept’ already. Honestly. To a person. The 4' 10" Great-Grandmother two rows back, wearing the sari, who only speaks Hindi, can work the seatbelt flawlessly, too. She knows how to undo it, as well. I guarantee it. Brief us on the GPS system. Or the fly-by-wire technology. Or the servo-mechanisms which replaced hydraulics. Or the Heads-Up-Display. Or, here’s a good one…Brief us on Bernoulli’s Principle which explains why this big crate can achieve sufficient lift to get airborne -- once and forever banishing banal comments such as ‘I just don’t believe this thing actually gets off the ground’, as if it’s not physics but God’s Will that gets us to Heathrow. Hear me, I beg you, for all that is holy, with all the many aspects of a jet plane to choose from, the seat belt is the last one we need a briefing on. Yes, yes, like so many wanderers of our globe, we seek portals to higher realms of consciousness; ergo, we ought to be able to figure where the goddamn exit doors are. On an unrelated note, as I jackknife myself into the Herve Villechaize-sized mockery of a seat I have been assigned, I become acutely aware that I want to kick Robert Milton in the nuts as hard as possible. Be that as it may, it’s inconceivable that every adult on Earth can’t be given the benefit of the doubt on this safety briefing stuff. But we must sit through the bored-as-shit flight attendant’s perfunctory semaphore gesticulations. “…While standing on one foot, draw back the other leg and swing it forward rapidly, striking repeatedly the nuts of our CEO…” And now, une plus de fois en Français.

VRD
1/06

War of the Worlds

2005-07-11T20:58:00.000-07:00

Essay

War of the Worlds
By Vince R. Ditrich

A billion dollars a day. That’s a lot of money, no matter how you slice it. The United States spends even more than this on its military, whose current principal concern is the ‘War on Terror’. One would imagine that such expenditure would practically ensure success, save lives, eliminate any conceivable opposition, and clean things up once and for all.

A billion dollars a day is more than a trillion dollars every three years. This is an amount of money so huge that the human mind is at a loss to even imagine it. A thousand billion! Since 2001 the US Military has cost its taxpayers at least 1.87 TRILLION dollars. Yes…Trillion. The Apollo moon program cost $24 billion – From experimental rocket planes to walking on the moon over the period of a decade, with a price tag that, even converted to today’s dollars, was far less costly than a few months worth of policing the Axis of Evil. And the moon project succeeded.

It’s said that Generals are always preparing for the last war. They go to military colleges and soak up the lessons learned in the wars that their fathers fought. Even when clearly warned by their teachers and fellow officers of this flawed tendency in themselves they repeat the mistake, like a weak-willed dieter gorging on a piece of cake at midnight.

To be fair, western militaries have made efforts to avoid the same old trap by trying to use history as a window to the future. The United States, for example, has a military hierarchy that is well-educated; it is also sensitive to the public’s ultra-low threshold of tolerance to casualties and has at its fingertips the finest hardware and resources any military has ever enjoyed. Granted, it looks larger on paper than it truly is, but a little known truth ameliorates this apparent weakness…And that is this: There is no nation-state on the planet which can seriously challenge the US military as it currently stands constituted. American spending alone counts for an unbelievable 50% of the entire world’s defense spending. The US Forces have more of everything than the next several countries on the list combined. Their great ally Britain is responsible for only 5%. They have the strongest nuclear deterrent, they possess the greatest reach in intelligence gathering, have the biggest Navy, the largest and most effective Air Force, have the most overwhelming Army, the best equipped Reservists, have more combat and engineering specialists, a larger Medical Corp, a practically inexhaustible worldwide infrastructure of bases and assets, and of course have the most fascinating gadgets, manned, unmanned, secret or known. No sovereign country that wishes to survive the fight can take them on.

But the Terrorists aren’t a sovereign country. The problem the US faces is that the terrorists of the world – groups, incidentally with very little to lose, have shrewdly stolen and taken to heart a tactical concept made famous by American soldiers from another generation: “Hit ‘em where they ain’t”. Attack your enemy not where they are strong and prepared; no, the point is to find their weakness and capitalize upon it through imagination and surprise. Ironically, this concept, proved repeatedly in WW2 by the US and its British ally, was merely an adaptation of the clever guerrilla tactics deployed by early American Colonists against the British during the American War of Independence… And, presumably, before that, by underdogs throughout history

The terrible killing fields of World War One, where General Haig disposed his British troops based on the belief that direct frontal assault upon strong-points would eventually crush the enemy by destroying his morale as well as reducing his materiel and manpower only helped to provide the world with its first man-made military cataclysm. This attritional holocaust was dubbed ‘The Sausage Grinder’ by friend and foe alike. Clearly, Haig was not the only one who espoused such barbaric methodology, but he certainly defended it most famously. His disastrous strategic concept was discredited, but only after the flower of European manhood was destroyed, and an entire generation sat stunned, wounded & scarred. The social response in the lands of the victors to the unmitigated butchery of the Great War was revulsion, isolationism, neglect and avoidance, appeasement, all of which richly fed both Fascism & Nazism, and sadly hastened the next, even greater world cataclysm which followed only 20 years later -- a trial that the west survived only by the skin of its teeth.

The horrible lessons of static warfare however were learned by the military men of WW2, particularly the Nazis. Even Hitler in his darkest spasms of Wagnerian nihilism couldn’t abide the thought of yet more gore-soaked trenches misted over by corrosive clouds of mustard gas. Speed, stealth, flexibility, intelligence were now the watchwords. Strategies developed wherein smaller and more mobile groupings of shock troops, re-enforced by tanks and air support, launched themselves upon a weak point, infiltrated, encircled, and broke up the defense into small, easier to handle pockets of resistance.

The Terrorists, in a sense, have adapted this flexibility of thinking to their own needs. The battlefield is now a large city; the targets are the hearts and minds of its populace. For the Terrorists civilian deaths are merely icing on the cake. The more dead, the happier they probably are, but the real point is to keep everyone in a constant state of fear. They wait, wait, wait, then slip in, do their dastardly deed (to their minds it is a glorious one) and leave their victims to do the remaining damage to themselves.

The Terrorists would like to goad the West into becoming what it fears the most. This tactic is unfortunately bearing fruit. Curtailed civil liberties willingly sacrificed to combat terrorism will do much harm to the very precepts that western democracies are founded upon; martial law can be effective, but only for days or weeks, not years and decades. The thought of surveillance cameras on every street corner was pure over-the-top Orwell only 5 years ago but now Britain is liberally covered in them. Great Grandmothers are now routinely being forced to remove their belts, shoes and outer garments at airports, facilities that have now been reduced to nothing more than joyless transportation hubs crawling with machine gun toting, bullet proof attack-dog wielding troops. The public will temporarily submit to this but will vacillate between fear and rage eventually lashing out at the indignity, the inconveniences, and the grating feeling that they’re being played. They will seek an eye for an eye.

Politicians will try to placate with new offensives, commitment and re-commitment of troops to yet longer but less stable occupations, and will be repaid for their efforts with more dead soldiers and civilians, heated protest at home, and the cold shoulder abroad.

However, for all the terrible cost we will never truly fight fire with fire, militarily or emotionally. We’re bound to our history, traditions, technologies, morals and our laws. The regular citizens of the western democracies won’t countenance repaying the terrorists in kind. Gitmo, Abu Ghraib – these are attempts to circumvent law and ‘hit ’em where they live’, but in truth very few support the existence of these places or the acts performed there. The response to reports has been horrified disbelief. Abuse? Neglect? Torture? From our side? Even without the perversion of secretly supported enclaves of illegal vigilantes, there are countless opportunities for combat troops, always wobbling at the edge of the Geneva convention anyway, to put one toe over the line, thereby pouring gasoline on the fiery resentments of the citizens of the countries they occupy -- and delighting the leaders of their manipulative resident guerrilla factions. The public is fighting the last war, too.

If British or American public support for invasions and occupations should wane, there will be yet another attack, and another, and another. Now that the armies are there, the Terrorists will stop at nothing to keep them there.

If their presence is so hated, then, why would the Terrorists be desperate to drag it on ad nauseum?

Here is where the fiendishly clever aspect of their strategy reveals itself. They certainly know -- even a child realizes -- that they cannot do more than pinprick the west. How possibly could sporadic bombing make any true and permanent material dent? But in their travels the Terrorists have stumbled upon a Grand Irony. These men, at best fringe dwellers hunkering in caves, culturally clinging to the last vestiges of the Stone Age, hoping to revive it, still manage to see clearly what we in the sophisticated, educated, wealthy west do not.

What they see is simple arithmetic. At a more than a billion dollars a day for US forces alone, it won’t be long before the west has spent every cent it has, and every cent it’s likely to earn for several generations. The western democracies will be broke; in the world where we have for so long decided the rules we will no longer do so. We will be powerless. Exhausted, it will be possible to knock us over with a feather. The Terrorists’ rope-a-dope will have succeeded.

So, unless we awake to the trap we’ve entered and try to find a way out it is conceivable that we, the mighty, will fall, to our own utter shock and disbelief like HG Wells’ Martians who, though marching to within a hairsbreadth of total victory are suddenly and unexpectedly laid low by mere microbes.

VRD
7/05

Motorhomes I Have Known

2005-03-26T17:09:00.000-08:00

by Vince R. Ditrich

Enter the sleek iconic tour-bus, peopled by a rich and successful band. In it are televisions, Nintendo games, DVD players, lounges, bunks, kitchenettes, and of course a bathroom. The lighting is muted, the surroundings comfortable, the beer chilled and the prestige of having such a rolling palace very high indeed. But with the luxury comes the cost of such a bus. They suck up as much cash as they do fuel and so only groups who are doing very well can afford them. For the rest of the musical world, out there somewhere engaged in troubadorial toiling, there is the car, the van, the school bus, or sometimes ‘The Motorhome’.

Spend five minutes on the phone to find a ‘rental motorhome’, though, and you’ll realize that these beasts are unique among rental vehicles. You don’t simply ring up Budget and say, ‘Yo, we want a motor home, nice interior, lotsa power, and we want it red with white trim’. Rental motorhomes in this country are (as I discovered) nearly all owned by middle-aged German couples who only use them when they vacation in Canada, every two or three years. The rest of the time, rather than simply sit idle, they are rented out to other less investment savvy middle aged Germans for similar ‘kampfing’ trips in our great land. The rental of these road beasts is coordinated by small Mom & Pop firms who specialize in hooking up owners with prospective renters. Presumably they charge a small fee for the service and take care of the storage, upkeep and cleaning. Mom & Pop make everyone happy, supply Herr Tourist with maps and directions, sprechen a little Deutsch to make him comfortable, take a credit card impression (a mere formality) and then watch Herr & Frau Tourist drive off into the sunset, serene in the knowledge that anything rented to a middle-aged German couple is guaranteed to come back in better condition than it left. Mom & Pop have had little cause to interact with bands. .

On one occasion, however, Mom & Pop were surprised by a phone call from Spirit of the West. Arrangements were made, bookings secured, and soon a motorhome arrived ready to take on Spirit of the West band, crew, gear and luggage. It was late winter and the weather was wet. Within three minutes the entirety of the heretofore Germanically clean floor was an inch deep in mud and sludge. We hadn’t even left yet, and so begins my tale.

It is five hours into the journey now, and the few square feet of floor space that had not been taken up with guitar cases or luggage is liberally sprinkled with Tim Horton’s cups, donut wrappers, cling film, crisp packets, sand, pebbles and various rubbish. The first order of business upon arrival at the destination is, of course, to unload. Everything comes out except the trash and the mud, which is now blended into a depressing miasma on the linoleum and carpet. Play the gig, pack up and move along to the next location. More Timmy’s cups, crisp packets, half eaten muffins, this time adding newspapers and lots of beer bottles to the mix. The Globe & Mail is belatedly employed as a floor mat in the vain hope that some of the sluicing muck might magically be absorbed into it. Round a sharp curve and a few of the beer bottles upset, spilling their flat dregs beneath the booted feet of the Spirits. This sludge shortly becomes a powerful adhesive, particularly good for attaching the Sports section to the sole of a Dr. Marten’s. Eventually the papers shred and turn the floor into a gerbil cage.

We are now on a high mountain road, loaded to the gunnels, and fighting weather and traffic. The road is uneven and very bumpy. Our precious coffee pot falls off the shuddering stovetop and smashes to the floor. Uh oh, now there’s broken glass down there, and no longer does the weight of the pot hold down the burner which has begun to clatter violently. Someone grabs the whole stovetop, rips it from its flimsy moorings and tosses it into the sitz-bath shower stall (which is currently full of drums and empties). The noise subsides but a sharp swerve shortly thereafter sends Geoffrey Kelly, who had been standing, sprawling onto the aft bed. He reaches out to break his fall but his hands find nothing but a flimsy privacy curtain, anchored delicately by a couple of screws to the interior’s mock wood. The curtain and all its moorings tear from the ceiling, and Geoffrey further destroys it in trying to extricate from the mess. We all laugh.

Another gig, another load-in, more trash. The microwave oven is discovered to be functional, and it will replace the noisy stovetop which has gone missing anyway, possibly left behind on a loading dock or stuffed in with the drum equipment. Someone decides that soup, being comfort food, is in order for this long arduous journey. The broth is put in the microwave, set for perhaps two hours, and is totally forgotten. Sometime later a desperately exploded and rotting mass is found inside the previously useful oven. We now abandon our backup cooking apparatus.

Tour goes on. There are muddy footprints on the ceiling. Perhaps Hugh McMillan left them while Astral Traveling but the size of the print doesn’t seem to match. At any rate no one gives a shite any longer. Home stretch – we organize the off-loading of equipment and personnel and by some strange ‘co-incidence’ it is I who must return what has now been dubbed ‘The Odour Home” to Mom & Pop. I reluctantly admit that my home is closest to the depot and submit to the duty. I am admonished to return it full of gas and pull in to the service centre to attend to this need. While waiting for the bottomless tank to fill I take the opportunity to throw out a couple of metric tonnes of garbage, a bail of newspapers, a sheaf of Subway wrappers, and about $65 dollars worth of empty beer bottles. I look around and say, “My, that looks a LOT better. Isn’t it something what a little tidy up can do…?” I drive to Mom & Pop’s shop, park the vehicle and blithely stroll in with the keys. ‘Here it is thanks a lot see you later’ I blurt at high speed, hoping to beat a hasty retreat. But I must wait while they do a quick ‘walk around’. I wait, now tense, expecting to be confronted with our catalogue of fiendish motorhome crimes and misdemeanours. I review the events of the last few days, knowing full well that this motorhome, the precious vacation investment of some anonymous middle-aged German couple, has been nearly demolished. Almost nothing inside of it is clean or functional. Every appliance is a shambles, the upholstery is utterly ruined. The carpet is fouled beyond recovery. The curtains, tables and beds are torn, missing, or up-ended Presently Mom staggers into the shop, white as a ghost, looking as if she’d just witnessed a murder. Suddenly palsied, steadying herself lest she faint, Mom shrilly screams for Pop. With all the survival-acting skill I possess I feign surprise and ask if something is wrong. Agape, she stares at me as if I’m from an alternate universe, her jaw slack and flapping soundlessly. Pop comes rushing in, concerned; Mom just stabs a finger toward the motorhome in the parking lot, her eyes brimming with horror. A moment later Pop staggers back in, as if struck over the head with a hammer. Mom & Pop stare at each other, quite literally beside themselves, stammering nonsensically. I again ask if something is wrong, hoping my mock innocence might soften the wicked blows, or at least deflect part of the maelstrom, all the while steeling myself for the blast of angry vitriol that is sure to come. Mom finally composes herself sufficiently to speak. She stutters, she stammers; I tense and prepare for a tsunami of abuse. Finally, choked with emotion her words come….”W-w-w-well… The GAS CAP is missing…” I shake my head and clean out my ear with a finger. The gas cap? All in a rush my mind flashes to tours of Germany where we discovered that husbands wash their cars on Saturday, even if it’s completely unnecessary on an automobile already perfectly clean, sterilized, garaged and hermetically sealed, just so the neighbours don’t thing he’s a lout. I realize that a missing gas cap is a severe irregularity to Mom & Pop, an egregious, shocking lapse.

I am now doubly frightened because I am pretty sure, based on the gas cap response, that they haven’t yet looked inside the motorhome! Holy shit! Once they witness the destruction within I may have serious troubles on my hands. Putting on my best poker face I tut and cluck with mock concern about this terrible turn of events, blame the missing gas cap on Geoffrey or John or perhaps Satan himself, spin on my heel and flee like a scalded cat.

Though the plan is to ask Mom & Pop to call me a taxi, I realize it is wisest to run as if the devil Wendigo himself is on my heels, and run I do, about a mile down the road to a phone booth. There, I pull a hat and sunglasses out of my pocket, turn my coat inside out and wait for a taxi. As it arrives, I can hear in the distance a wailing ambulance advancing toward me.

I have absolutely no doubt where it is headed.

VRD

Video Schmideo

2005-03-02T13:24:00.000-08:00

by Vince R. Ditrich

I suppose music videos are as common as dirt nowadays. Everyone does them, every group shoots one, every artist has one in the press kit. When Spirit of the West started out, in the Pleistocene Era, they were a very big deal indeed. Expensive, complicated, mysterious, labour intensive, they were often alienating to the very band they were meant to represent.

Today, my children use our little DV camera to do ‘videos’ with excellent and sometimes hilarious results. I shake my head when I compare this to the baskets full of money Spirit of the West wasted on music videos through the years...

Fans of the band will know all too well that appearances have always been a little lower on our list of priorities than say, Cher, for example, witnessed by exhibitions such as Hugh McMillan performing in a kilt and moccasins. The music, we would intone imperiously, is more important than the visuals.

Though this may be indeed be true, our stubborn 'music-first' ethic has left a legacy of remarkably pukey music videos.

I hearken back to my first video experience with the band where, because of our far-too-tight schedules, we had to jam the entirety of the filming into a day-trip to nearby Salt Spring Island. After arrival we stood around in Hugh's yard and asked, 'what's the concept'? If there was a concept on-the-go, and if I had been briefed upon it at that time, I have no accurate recollection. I know that at one point we were filmed shooting darts in a Pub. Geoffrey & I were far more interested in the taps at the bar. John was hovering around the barman, too, and I seem to recall that they were giving us pints for free. Soon afterward someone came up with the brilliant idea that we should be filmed chopping firewood. Being quite pissed-up by then we all dutifully lined up and hacked away for the camera. I recall then, through the haze, that Hugh McMillan (not drunk) realized that for a change he could make use of his sobriety and manipulated events so that we could be filmed in a ‘planting bee’ of his vegetable garden. After a few minutes of this I began to suspect that we were merely being hornswoggled into doing all his yard-work -- and that in no conceivable context could this footage be used in a proper, creditable music video!

I had been correct.

During another video shoot, one that was being done by a bustling crew of people we didn't know who referred to us collectively and somewhat disdainfully as 'the talent', we were left completely in the dark as to what was to happen next, what the plan was, what was expected of us. The director flitted about, fey and detached, concentrating apparently on all sorts of abstruse matters that lil ol’ Spirit of the West would NEVER be able to fathom. So he completely ignored us. I remember asking him, with mounting frustration as the shoot wore on, for some sort of direction. Finally, after I pestered him for what must have been the tenth time, he deigned to speak and dismissively said, with a wave of the hand, “Just do whatever it is you do…” I remember instantly clouding up in full-on rage and bellowing angrily at the little prick at the top of my lungs. I wanted to tear him a new arsehole right then and there!

Then there was the time, just before I came onboard, that the band was featured in makeup that made them look exactly like corpses. The promised production technique of full candy-red lips was either overlooked or someone misappropriated that part of the budget on Burger King runs. The lads recount this disappointment often, but I say, better to look dead than be caught on camera, drunk, planting Hugh’s vegetables…

There is one music video that we made which I can’t remember. I do know, for example, that the damn thing likely cost us a fortune, that this expense probably still haunts us in some diabolical manner, and that other people tell me they’ve seen it (and that it sucks). My memory lapse, I suspect, is a form of self-preservation, my id having chatted with my ego and deciding that I’d actually die of embarrassment if I were to have total recall of the miserable event. Yes, I suspect that it was that weak an effort…And this from someone who once gigged in a ladies tank top, brilliant blue in colour, with spaghetti straps and some delightful lace filligree at the collar, accented by heavy woolen jodhpurs...By the show's end the shirt's blue dye had badly run and I was left looking like some sweaty, demented Druid. But I digress. Mysteriously all I recall of the ‘Memory Gap Video’ is one ‘Extra’ on the set who was quite a hottie, clearly not impressed with my mammoth beer-gut, and who ignored me at the craft services table where I was lingering around the chocolate glazed donuts.

It has been some time since we put out a video but I suspect there’d be plenty of renewed interest if and when we do offer another. First, there’d be the kind of fascination shown by the kind of people who gawk at bloody car wrecks…”Hey Vern…Another Spirit video…I betcha 5 bucks it’s even worse than the last one…” And then there’d be the fans from the old days, slack-jawed in disbelief that we’re still making vids, and with no walkers or colostomy bags in sight!! There is also the family contingent; we have enough children to qualify as a demographic in itself. And then there are the tried and true fans who realize that, in the end, it has never really been about Geoff Kelly’s pongy North Van Canucks jersey…It has always been about the songs.

VRD

Peeves of the Week

2005-02-09T13:54:00.000-08:00

by Vince R. Ditrich

This week’s short list of thing I would eradicate if only I didn’t have even greater annoyances to deal with…

1/ I would love to have something done about the automated Directory Assistance voice that asks the trick question, “What WAS the name of the person you’re looking for?” First time I heard this I was totally flummoxed and went a-tangent, saying, “Huh? Is this a quiz? Are you going to ask me my quest and my favourite colour next? I have no idea what this person’s name WAS. I only know what it is NOW. I even have a good idea of the spelling of this person’s name NOW. And why, pray tell, would it be anyone’s business what his name USED TO BE? I pay the phone company massive amounts of money. They repay me and all the millions like me by laying-off employees, some of them our grammatically accurate friends & neighbours who used to do this very computer’s job… “ The computer was unresponsive to my comments.

2/ Can we put a stop to people who say ‘WE’ when they really mean ‘I’? At the department store just today the attendant suggested I spend extra money to buy a little pump nozzle for the skin moisturizer I was picking up for my wife. She said, “We really recommend it…” There she was, at 9 o’clock in the morning, made up thick enough to walk directly into a music video, telling me that ‘we’ (an elite group of persons unknown, but the implication is that they have some expertise regarding the pumping of emollients and salves) recommend this important contrivance for successful moisturizing. I had visions of this woman, and half a dozen others like her, sitting around a large conference table, having a serious back-and-forth over the issue. I looked at her blankly, pretending to be a Directory Assistance computer.

3/ I really feel the need to do something, quickly, about the scourge of Teen ‘Inconsonance’. This is a term I have coined to describe speech patterns of male teenagers. You’ll notice that, for some unknown reason, they speak using only vowel sounds. “Uhhhohhhhh” is “Hello” and this sullen grunt will rumble through your telephone receiver when calling many homes. I have a son who has just reached ‘pre-teen’ status. He is, much to my dismay, showing signs of early-Inconsonance, however at time of writing he is still understandable occasionally, even though every statement he makes is accompanied by a look of complete impatience with his way too uncool and apparently deaf Dad. I suppose I can only battle this situation directly through my own children, but by God I wish I could do something about Teen Inconsonants who work at the take out window…

I have never experienced Teen Inconsonance in another country, but I wonder if it exists? Are there resentful Afghani teens who gutturally moose-call in response to their Dad’s requests for assistance in the back yard to remove an unexploded bomb? Do Inuit kids who live north of 60 turn 13 and suddenly stop clicking? Or is this perplexing fad limited to us, here where the weather is great and the conditions ideal?

VRD

Bedtime

2005-01-16T20:42:00.000-08:00

by Vince R. Ditrich

I have just put my children to bed. It took a very long time tonight. This is a list of what I had to take out of their bunk-beds in order to make enough room for them:

1/ Shortwave radio.
2/ 1 pair of miserable looking gonch, powder blue, with a half-eaten Werther's stuck to them
3/ Hallowe'en candy wrappers (yes, Hallowe'en). See above.
4/ Discman and three non-functioning pairs of headphones.
5/ Annoying, battery powered video soccer game that makes sounds so grating that I will throw it in the yard as soon as they're asleep.
6/ Sponge Bob pyjamas, covered in something sticky. Don't ask.
7/ 7 extra blankets, in a twisted mound.
8/ A cuff link.
9/ The entire Harry Potter collection.
10/ My ancient and heretofore missing Sgt. Rock comics, which smell bad.
11/ One of my work socks.
12/ A large rock. Probably igneous.
13/ 1 Olympic sized soccer medalion.
14/ A smorgasbord of plastic firearms, a small Klingon dagger and some Nanchuks that look suspiciously like the legs to the couch.
15/ Mom's slippers.
16/ Etch-a-sketch.
17/ A bugle. Really.

Vince

Goodbye David

2004-12-01T18:11:00.000-08:00

by Vince R. Ditrich

My friend David Grierson, well-loved CBC journalist and broadcaster, died recently. He was only 49.

I was completely gobsmacked by his passing. He was too young, yet so very vital, bright and consistently in the thick of things. He was the kind of person who always owned the room and very often did so unintentionally, by virtue of the fact that he was making a genuine effort to shine the limelight on someone else. He was one of those very rare people who brought out the best in everyone that he touched, energized the best parts of us, and made us feel important, legitmate, worthy of greater attention and interest. He understood.

He was not unaware of his intellectual gifts or his huge charisma. But he channelled it, shared it, focused it, and sometimes simply gave it away. He was generous.

And it's no secret to all that knew him as I did that he had a wicked, ribald, famously clever sense of humor, wedded to a silken, diplomat's tongue. His humour was a great leveler, delivered with a twinkle and a broadcaster's practiced cadence...Even those of us occasionally barbed by his humour had to salute his facile mind. My thoughts are full of his clever and often profound comments.

I have been given the very great honour of acting as the Musical Director for a concert in David's honour this month. Please check back here for venue, date, time and other details. I hope that some of you can attend to say goodbye to the memory of a good friend.

Vince