Today I am bringing you a blast from the past, and not one but two pieces of exciting news.  Said news involves my old pal Amber Albrecht.

Amber is an artist extraordinaire who hails from British Columbia, and has resided in Montreal for some time now.  If memory serves correctly, the first time I met her I was in town, visiting my then girlfriend (and Amber’s school colleague Katie Dutton whose work merits an article of its very own, which maybe I’ll write one of these days) to perform the exciting musical piece The Rideau Canal Skateway with a stripped down version of the famous United Empire Loyalist Orchestra.  She waved a cautious hello and disappeared.  She would make a good spy.  The show was, uh, great…  Everyone left the room.  Since then Amber and I got plenty acquainted, on camping trips, trips to Toronto, and innumerable hours spent settling Catan.  Once I bought her a new pair of glasses in exchange for seven homemade pies.  And she delivered in spades.  If you ever doubted her character let this set you straight.

It’s been enjoyable to watch Amber’s work evolve over these many years.  She might disagree with me, but I’d say that fundamentally her style has remained fairly consistent, but she has slowly but surely increased the complexity of her work.  And she’s done so successfully indeed, adding a wealth of colour, much more elaborate compositions, more flora, and using a good deal of intricate patterns, all the while never letting this complexity get the better of her stuff.  It works, and then some!  Don’t believe me?  Check this out!

The cover of Amber's new book!

Yes indeed folks, Drawn & Quarterly is publishing a book of Amber’s drawings and silkscreens in April.  Wow!  Read about it here (with a couple other pictures) and here.  This is awfully cool, and I highly suggest that each of you dear readers pick up a copy.  It’s going to be good.

I myself have been lucky enough to have benefited from Amber’s powers on a couple of occasions.  Most notably, Amber did the illustrations for the epic cover of Touching Earth Made Of Steel’s debut album: Occupational Hazards.  Listen to it here, it’s good.  Occupational Hazards is a concept album about various jobs.  Each of the twelve songs tells the tale of a particular vocation.  Amber illustrated each of said twelve occupations for the album art, lucky us!  And the drawings were so good that we couldn’t help but release not one but twelve different editions, each with a different cover.  Here they are:

The Occupational Hazards poster, illustrated by Amber Albrecht

Click on the image for a larger view.  You can also click on the band camp link wherein if you click on each song you’ll see the pictures and get to read the amazing lyrics.  This poster was made by yours truly and is already betraying its age badly.  Remember myspace?  And record stores?  Alas.  The trapper was always my favourite, but they’re all great.  The lifeguard and nuclear technician are other faves.  Argue about it in the comments!  The text beside each drawing explains what the respective song is about.

And it doesn’t end there!  Oh no!  Once upon a time a music blog invited Amber to illustrate the emotions that certain songs made her feel (or something like that).  Visit Said The Gramophone and check it out.  Or just look below and skip it, since I hijacked the pictures.

Oh, Captive Princess

Spirit, Come Back!

These lovely drawings are inspired by the songs Oh, Captive Princess and Spirit, Come Back!, respectively.  They are from a few years back, part of my epic, 13 part Dominion Singles Club.  Curious?  Ask nicely and I’ll tell you about it and post some examples.  Amber busted me hard for my love of commas here.  I have to stop using them so much, but it’s damned irresistible.  Personally I think Amber spoiled STG to the max.  These are awfully nice, especially the latter.  Obviously I accept all the credit.

Pretty great stuff, eh?  I bet you’re going to buy that book now!  Visit Amber’s website here for lots of other examples.  If you are a business magnate or other such important person you can pay her to make you stuff, and you should.  And don’t be cheap about it either, this is quality work we’re talking about.

Coincidentally enough, guess who is evidently a business magnate or otherwise important person?  Me.  Why?  Because I have recently reached an agreement with Amber to prepare for me a couple of illustrations for a special project.  I’ll post more details in this space soon enough.  You’ll like it.

*    *     *

And finally a word of thanks to my readers.  On this, the occasion of my 100th post, I’m feeling sentimental and very appreciative of all of you.  To the folks wondering if the Ultimate Warrior is dead:  he’s not.  To the weirdos who have turned one of my first articles into a meeting place for baby ape lovers: you have found your home.  To my mom and dad:  thank you for your weird/funny comments.  To Régine of Victoire: thanks for the traffic.  To Godo, Dave, Mike, Emily, and Paul:  my most prolific readers and commenters, I know you’ll always give stuff a read even if no one else will; thanks dudes.  To the degenerates looking for a rubdown:  don’t do it.  Go outside.  To my small but mighty band of subscribers:  thank you!  To the max!  To the surprising (albeit small) number of people who google me every week:  who are you? and what do you want?  And to everyone else:  thanks for stopping by.  I do enjoy operating this thing, and hopefully I’ll come up with 100 more interesting things for you to read.  If you’re new here read this.  It’s the best piece I’ve done, I think.

Jazz Standards

I’ll say some things about this little track.  First off, I’ve had the idea of attempting to lay down some rhymes circulating in my head for some time.  However, I don’t actually like rap or hip hop that much (I know there’s a difference, I just don’t know what it is), owing primarily to the generally moronic and (worse) boring subject matter.  Maybe it’s old fashioned of me, but I can’t acclimatize myself to bitches and hos and all that.  Whither chivalry…  Anyways, I do like some rap – namely Public Enemy.  And maybe a few other things, but that’s about it.  That’s my frame of reference.  Nonetheless, I wanted to give it a try.

Chuck D - the baddest MC there ever was, according to me.

However, I wanted to use the vocal style, but not the attendant genre conventions, both in terms of the music and the subject matter at hand.  This meant trying to concoct something rap-able musically that still sort of sounded like me and most importantly using my own voice.  This is so damned difficult!  I don’t know why it is exactly, but my god is it ever hard to lay down some lyrics without:

• being aggressive for no reason
• boasting about oneself
• pretending to live in a world of drugs, street crime, prostitution, and other junk
• emphasizing every third beat in a 4/4 rhythm

And mostly it’s really really difficult to pull off without putting on a black voice while not then sounding like some elderly sitcom character spouting garbage like “My name is X and I’m here to say”.  You know what I mean.  So I set out to not do any of these things, and especially to use my own voice, which was not at all easy.  I think I succeeded.  That doesn’t mean that I succeeded overall, only that my experiment was a formal success.

Musically I was inspired by, of all things, Janelle Monae’s Tightrope.

Janelle Monae - sweet pipe, fancy feet, fellow concept album creator, and babe. What's not to like? Maybe she should drop me a line.

God damn that is a good little tune.  Of course Janelle is just a marginally better singer than me, maybe, but still…  I love the repetitive bass and simple beat that is pretty much relentless for the whole song (save for the key changes – really?  why do that? mea culpa: I hate key changes, maybe because I don’t understand music very well).  I wanted to try something similar, but without sampling somebody else, so I fired up the bass and sampled myself.  Sometimes you can hear little clicks when it repeats.  Nice editing job by me.  I also put together a drum kit that sounds kind of like it were sampled from an old record, and let it rip.

Naturally I couldn’t resist adding piano, strings, and weird digitally distorted guitars.  Come on, who could?  In comparing the two for writing this article I realized that my tune is really slow.  Wow!  I guess my usual plodding style held out.  Next time I’ll crank the BPM.

So there you have it.  Thoughts?

Here’s the Burger Kaiser logo.

And here is a vintage Burger Kaiser poster from 1911.

Look! The Kaiser is so hungry he's eating the world! He needs a Burger, doesn't he?

If you have a Twitter account then be sure to follow @BurgerKaiser.  If you don’t, sign up.  It will totally be worth it, right?  Right.  Also, you can follow me @thejeremylatta, or you can just look to your right slightly.  See that little box that says “Tweets”.  It contains my tweets.  Wow!

More than pretty much any medium comic covers are notoriously misleading – featuring things that absolutely do not occur in the issue – or downright nonsensical.  There are many that you might behold and think “I have no possible idea what this comic is about”.  Your next thought will be “what the hell, I’ll buy it”.  As it should be.

But of course things change, and the modern comic cover is far less everything than the good old days.  Alas.  Today’s covers are mostly accurate, mostly make sense, and are not half as cool as the ones from the 30s, 40s, and 50s.  There are many places online where one can find examples of the best old comic covers.  You know, the great art and crisp composition.  Sure.  Those places are definitely worth checking out.  Do a Google image search for old comic covers and voila.  In addition, Superdickery has an extensive gallery of hilarious covers and other scenes.  The original premise of the site is that Superman is often a dick, especially when it comes to treating Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen like garbage.  Way back when, D.C. Comics put out two titles, Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane and Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, every issue of which features something totally crazy happening to the titular characters or Superman doing something viciously cruel or creepy to them.  Like this:

Ladies: if your "friend" has a secret room, DON'T go in it!

Taken in sum they are some of the strangest comics ever made.  Superdickery has a whole lot of funny covers and panels out of context.  Click on over and have a look.

But, good people!  Not until now has there ever been assembled an extensive, carefully curated collection of the downright craziest and weirdest comic covers ever.  My main man Dr. Fodden recently completed a long labour…  putting together a huge gallery of bizarro comic covers, for the enjoyment of all the world.  Check it out at: crazycomiccovers.com and you will have a good time, I assure you.  From the site’s introduction:

Comics were crazy in the 40s and 50s. For some reason, we tend to have a highly idealized image of the 40s and 50s, but there was as much crazy stuff going on then as there is now. Even though these decades somehow projected an outer veneer of cleanliness and sanity, the craziness crept out at the edges. I had always read that some comics at this time were very violent and inappropriate for children, but I was still a little shocked after seeing some of these covers. Their over-the-top gore and violence caused the introduction of the Comics Code Authority, which effectively sterilized comics for the next forty years.

The site features a couple hundred great and gonzo covers from the Golden Age of comics, organized into a few helpful categories: crime, monster and horror, romance, monkeys apes & primates, youth gone wild, and others!  The crime ones are probably my favourites, but every single category has a bunch of gems.  Holy crap are they ever funny and weird.  The good Doctor has done an outstanding job of combing through totally obscure titles to find some covers that only severe comic nerds have ever seen.  Care for a few examples?  Check it out:

I'm going insane!!!!!

One of my favourite lines of all time: "I'd rather kill it than live in the same world with it!!" what a nice guy. That's diversity in action.

So, so stupid.

And that’s just a tiny little sampler!  Every one is funnier and weirder than the next!  I can’t poke through it without laughing hysterically to myself, and I have a feeling you will have a similar experience.  And Brandon has even added some funny comments and observations for a lot of them, which make them even better.  Check it out!!  crazycomiccovers.com

Post your favourites in the comments and tell your friends.

Obviously this web log thing is an account of my personal comings and goings to some extent, but it’s about to get a little more personal.  I apologize, as I have no intention of making this space a confessional booth, but I have to provide a few details to set this entry up.  Last week I finally underwent a much delayed and many times postponed minor surgical procedure.  Don’t worry, I won’t post any pictures.  A talented surgeon repaired a mysterious blockage in my urinary tract.  Huzzah!  I’m fine, but as a result I have spent a week bedridden.  Moving hurts.  Standing hurts.  Sitting hurts.  Everything hurts!  But the most comfortable position by far is a sort of drunken slouch on my now all too familiar couch.

The view from here

Pictured above are pills, water, and a list my mom kept of all of the expired food she managed to either throw out or feed me.  Total tally:  55 items!  Yes, I am a hoarder.

Anyways, since I’ve had nothing to do, and have been partially doped up on painkillers I have spent almost all of my waking time watching TV on Netflix.  Hour after bloody hour.  This has afforded me an unprecedented opportunity to do some amateur anthropology, divining the nature of humanity through its cultural products.  Now obviously there is a huge selection bias, but nevermind that.  I have concluded that we as a species are utterly obsessed with murder to an astonishing degree.  Every single show features homicide in spades, so much so that I suggest that contemporary drama suffers from what we might call Moral Super Inflation.  Think of people buying loaves of bread with wheelbarrows full of dead bodies, or something like that…  Seriously, in your average TV show nothing of any significance is happening unless someone is killed.  The characters have their petty little problems, sure, but they are all dwarfed by the threat or reality of death.  Who really cares if this couple patches up their relationship when oh my god the husband has a gun to his head!  And so on and so on.  In a single week of watching TV nonstop I estimate that I have witnessed something on the order of 450 murders, give or take.  I see chalk outlines when I close my eyes.

Tune in next week for more of same

All of this death and destruction is ruining drama for me completely.  I find myself spending the time trying figure out who will get killed next, rather than giving a damn about what’s actually happening, and one’s evaluation of each show amounts to rating the daring of the writing staffs; I never thought they’d kill her.  Wow!  Rubbish.  It’s just so boring after a while.

I suppose it makes sense from an evolutionary biology perspective.  We are naturally endowed with an aversion to the killing of our own species.  It’s a pretty efficient mechanism to ensure our continuation (minus large catastrophic wars, I know), and so people being killed plays on the mind at some primordial level.  Hits you right between the amygdala and the hippocampus, sure.  But it’s just so lazy!  And the apparent big stakes horror of TV murder is completely undermined by the utterly callous reaction 99% of characters have to death.  Oh look, a bloody corpse.  Ho hum.  Let’s go!  And 44 minutes later everyone is fine again, and no one cares at all (except for maybe a sad, set to music mourning montage which concludes with no character development at all).  Honestly, I would really like to see TV writers try to create some sort of tension or conflict without people being killed or brutally abused.  I have to think that it’s possible.

Good readers, what TV dramas are out there which don’t rely overmuch on death or its constant threat?  What am I missing?

Dundonald Park gets a little rowdy

Whoever did this: nice job!  Want credit for your work?  Comment below!  Have a good Dundonald story?  Comment below!

*for our non-Ontario readers: yes, it’s true, there is a store called the Beer Store, which only sells beer, and is the only store (more or less) allowed to sell beer.  Only in Ontario could there be a booze-controlled duopoloy** on booze, to theoretically protect us from ourselves, and lower prices, and competition.  Thank goodness.

**for our Ontario readers: yes it’s true, the Beer Store is not operated by the government, like so many people mistakenly think it is.  Rather, it is owned by Labbatt and Molson-Coors (49% each), with the remaining 2% owned by Sleeman.  The proper name of the joint is Brewers Retail.  It constitutes a nice tidy duopoly for the controlling interests, who get to charge other brewers fees to have their products sold.  Slick!

Let us settle in for a test of wits!

I got into chess a few years ago.  I started playing casually, and getting my brains beat in.  Then I started reading a few books on how to improve.  I learned about pins, and skewers, and piece development, and endgame strategy, and backward pawns, all kinds of things.  I replayed the games of the great grandmasters and marvelled at their skill.  It’s pretty damned compelling stuff.  The average person will play over tea on a lazy afternoon, or to kill time on a train trip or something, but for Chess Players – the sorts I was reading about – everything revolves around tournaments.  Tournament play is a gruelling, intense physical and psychological battle, pitting dozens of players against each other in a brutal contest for survival.  The more I read about chess, the more tournament play kept coming up, and – being a hyper-competitive person anyways – I was powerless to resist.  I checked out the local chess scene, and it just so happens that we have regular tournaments here in town.  A friend and I signed up.  We would test our skills against Eastern Ontario’s best.  We had no idea what we were in for.

Tournament formats differ, but the local ones (and many others) are like this:  every player plays five games, one on friday night, and two each on saturday and sunday.  The games are timed, using a simple but clever system.  Each player gets 90 minutes to make all of his moves, but for each move you make you are given an additional ten seconds (theoretically, then, you can never run out of time if you move quickly enough).  If your clock runs out you lose.  No exceptions.  So the games last anywhere from three to four hours.  Thus in a weekend you might play 16-18 hours of chess.  !!  It’s like writing four or five university exams in two and a half days, which is to say incredibly psychologically punishing.  Sure you can get up from the table and stroll around a bit, but for almost all of those three hours you are staring at a chess board thinking frantically.  Calculating.  Guessing.  Testing ideas.  Rejecting ideas.  And if you have any competitive spirt, terrified of losing.  And maddeningly enough, everything you need to win the game is right there in front of you – you just have to see it.  Check it.  Check it again.

We showed up at the Ottawa RA Centre plenty nervous, and signed up.  The tournament was held in a long, modest room, with rows of card tables set up, each with plastic chess boards on them (boards are supplied, but players are to bring their own pieces and clocks).  At the very back of the room was a single table, with a nice board, separated from the rest of us by a string of caution tape.  I would later learn that this is where the tournament’s sole grandmaster (GM in chess speak) would play his games.  The GM was a stocky, rumpled looking guy, who stalked about with his eyes barely open during the game, deep in thought.  And in fact, almost everyone else there was a variation on this type.  Old and young, and in between, my competitors were benignly to poorly dressed, male, and not entirely the most socially adept cats you’d ever meet.  And the smell…  The room was, shall we say, ripe.  Yes.  Rather.

My first match was against a dude from Toronto.  He’d travelled all this way and made arrangements to stay the weekend just to play chess!  Uh oh, I thought…

The game started okay.  I had black (second to move, and typically the defensive player in the early going).  A queen pawn opening (where the game is based around the pawns in front of the queen) and I was already out of my league.  I always play king pawn openings and am much more comfortable with them as a result.  Nonetheless I thought hard.  I answered each of his moves correctly.  I felt incredibly besieged from the outset, but somehow I managed to survive.  And then?  The tide turned!  I trapped him into taking a piece of mine which he shouldn’t have and suddenly went on the offensive.  By sheer miracle I had a passed pawn – this is when a pawn gets past the opponent’s pawns, making it much more likely that he will make it to the other end of the board and turn into a queen.  I pushed the pawn.  Two squares to go.  Victory.  His shoulders slumped and he pulled at his hair, while I tried extra hard to project confidence.  My plan was simple: make him quit.  And he almost did.  Until I blew it.  The thing is, I have no idea how to defend or advance passed pawns, and I threw the thing away completely.  Then I combusted and fell apart.  My advantages disappeared and I ultimately lost.  Damnit!  Something interesting about chess: being “ahead” doesn’t mean anything if you can’t turn your lead into a win.  Quite unlike most games, a single false can undermine your entire position and undo all of your hard work.  They say that he who wins a chess game is he who makes the second last mistake.

I bought the guy a drink at the bar afterward, which I later learned is very odd in chess land.  Most of the other people I played shook hands robotically and slouched off to get a diet pepsi.  It was a fun, if humiliating intro to tournament chess.  I went home, dreamed of alternating white and black squares, and got ready for the next day.  Two games.  Time to get my dignity back.

*     *     *

Saturday broke and I arose sluggishly.  I put some tea in a thermos, packed a banana, and set out for round two.  I felt like an athlete, sort of.  When you arrive at the tournament room there is a board with the latest tournament results on it.  The players, especially the younger players, crowd around it and marvel at who beat who, and discuss who they want or don’t want to play next.  Most of them seemed to know each other.  Marc and I made small talk and got psyched up.  Finally the tournament director came around with some paper and tape, and pasted up the matchups, while the players jostled each other to get a peek.  There I was:

Table 29.  White:  J. Latta / Black:  V. Amirshadova

No.  No.  No!  Anything but that!  What did I do to deserve such a fate?  My second ever game would be against some ruthless, institutionally trained Russian.  Great.  I pretended to be nonchalant about it all, located table 29, and sat down.  At a chess tournament you are assigned a table, and all the games of a round start at a set time.  Players mill about, find their tables, set up their pieces and clocks, and wait.  Then the tournament director gives the signal and everyone starts.  If for some reason your opponent isn’t there you start their clock and wait.  I guess if you were insane and wanted some psychological edge you could purposely show up late, but look totally cool about it, to make your opponent think that you don’t give a damn about anything at all.  But you’d have to be pretty good to pull it off.  So I sat down and waited, and fidgeted nervously, wondering what I would do if my opponent no-showed.  I stared at the sweatshirts and pube staches and inch thick glasses and wondered who Vladimir Amirshadova might be.  Time ticked past.

My focus was disrupted by a tiny little doe-eyed girl.  She was walking past and stopped at my table, staring right through me the way children can.  I smiled nervously at her, wondering if she’d lost her parents or something.  She lingered for a second, stared at me some more, and sat down with her little scorebook.  Victoria Amirshadova.  My opponent was Russian.  And a girl.  And a child.  God damn!  The thought of being emasculated by some calculating slavic prodigy nearly incapacitated me.  No way.  Not today.  I resolved to do anything to win.  Anything.

Now stop for a second and think about it…  In what other part of your life have you ever competed on an even footing against an eight year old?  Maybe video games, okay, but losing to a kid at video games is probably good rather than bad.  But otherwise, can you think of a scenario where you as an adult have tried your absolute best to defeat a child, and had a very high probability of failure?  Another great argument in favour of the game of kings.  It’s some kind of equalizer.

I looked hard into little Victoria’s eyes.  I betrayed no emotion or sentimentality whatsoever.  You cannot defeat me, I thought.  Child prodigies lead horrible, mixed up lives as adults, I told myself.  I’ve already won.  The game began and I played 1.e4 (moving the king’s pawn forward two squares).  She mirrored my move.  Fine.  Then I moved a knight out, and a bishop.  And then I was taken by a profoundly bad idea: I would risk everything to trick and defeat this adorable little girl.  I would play the Evans Gambit.

In chess a gambit is when you sacrifice a piece or some other thing (though it’s almost always material) for some other kind of advantage.  Usually you are forcing your opponent into an awkward position, or getting your pieces into position faster by getting rid of your pawns hemming them in.  There are tonnes of gambits out there, and they are irresistibly seductive to any enterprising or even moderately aggressive player.  A successful gambit effectively announces to your opponent that you think you can beat him with fewer pieces than he has.  It says “I have a plan; just try and stop me”.  They rarely ever work, at least if you’re a patzer (crappy player in chess speak) like me who can’t remember the line, and doesn’t know how to execute the gambit fully.  Gambits are especially seductive because they have cool names:

• The Wild Muzio Gambit
• The Hallowe’en Gambit
• The Anti-Moscow Gambit

And so on!  There are scores and scores of them, and they all sound pretty cool.  Every beginning player thinks that he can learn a few exciting gambits and tear the house down.  This is extreme folly of course, but impossible to resist.  Me, I was captivated by the Evans Gambit.  It is a very active opening named after a Captain William Davies Evans in the early 1800s.  The basic idea is this (thanks to GM Boris Alterman, from whom I jacked the picture):

The Evans Gambit

White’s plan is to throw away his pawns so that he can move his two bishops, and maybe his queen, into that lower left quadrant, and thereby threaten black’s king along the diagonals at f7 and f8.  It’s really fun to play, but very easy to screw up.  The first move of the gambit is to move that b pawn noted with the yellow arrow into position to be taken for free by black’s bishop.  I couldn’t help myself, and I pushed the pawn.  Victoria looked at me, giving nothing away, and took it.  Okay, here we go…

The next few moves unfolded according to Hoyle.  I played, she responded.  I played, she responded accurately.  She knew the damned line.  She’d probably been studying it since the age of four.  I was completely screwed, since I had no backup plan.  I kept going, suicidally, since I was without alternative at that point.  Finally, I moved my queen out to b3, stacked behind the bishop.  It was an easy one, she just had to move her knight to protect her king, and then she’d trounce me.  But she didn’t.  Instead she stared at me.  And stared at the board.  The lights buzzed.  Other players shifted their weight and thought about their second moves.  And finally she stared at me like I was out of my mind.  She didn’t know the line after all.  She pushed her little pawn forward, earning a queen, and couldn’t repress a satisfied smile.  I balked, wondering if I’d blown everything.  No, I hadn’t.  Bxf7#.  Bishop takes the pawn at f7, checkmate.  Game over.  I won.  Her body slackened and she looked utterly crushed.  I shook her hand and felt about a foot tall.  The game had been a whopping ten minutes.  I packed up the pieces quietly and left the room.  Some of the other players poked their heads up, wondering who could possibly have lost a game in ten minutes.  They probably thought I had lost, and in a way I had.

I went into the hall with Victoria, and her mother glanced at us from her magazine, surprised to say the least.  ”What happened?” she asked, but the answer was obvious from the little girl’s body language.

“I tricked her” I said sheepishly.  ”I played a trick opening and caught her, she just didn’t know it that’s all, I’m sorry”.  Some first victory.  I felt awful, showed her how the gambit worked, and then offered to play her again in the next room, just for fun.  Of course I threw the game.  I taunted her, and pretended to be flummoxed by her moves, and had her laughing at my dumb jokes and dumber moves.  Midway through my penance match she asked her mom for a piece of chocolate.  ”No!  I want to see a checkmate!”.  I quickly allowed myself to be mated so she could have her chocolate.

I played valiantly the rest of the tournament, but ultimately got waxed.  Victoria, if you’re reading this I’m up for a rematch any time.  You’ll probably whip me.

ANSWERS….  SPOILER ALERT…

1. The last space shuttle flight

2. V for Vendetta

3. North Korea

4. Obama, Biden, and Clinton watching Osama get taken down

5. The Royal Wedding

6. Arnold’s bastard son

7. A tornado

8. Japan

9. Muammar Gaddafi

10. The end of the world

11. September 11th (10 year anniversary)

12. Amy Winehouse

13. Becky Black

14. He is the man who set himself on fire in Tunisia, instigating the Arab Spring

15. Planking

16. This moose got drunk on fermented apples and wound up in a tree

17. Norway

18. Cheering Osama’s demise

19. The helicopter the US lost on the Osama raid

20. Tahir Square, Cairo

21. Water polo

Maintaining this here blog has been a shocking 180 degree turn from my previous stance with respect to public relations; now I’m a one man minstrel show, utterly dead inside!  No, not really…  But this recent turnabout, coupled with my usual quantity over quality productivity means that I have a whole lot of good stuff in the archives that has sat covered in obscurity’s dust for some time.  Indulge me, then, as these things see daylight.  Today I have for you perhaps my favourite thing I’ve ever been involved in making:  The Carl Wilson Lake Mystery by Touching Earth Made Of Steel.  Of all the stuff I’ve done, it just might be that of which I am most proud (and usually the cruel passage of time leaves me cringing at older stuff, for what it’s worth).  I’ve recently uploaded it to my Bandcamp site, so you can listen to it in its glorious entirety for free, or buy it for stupidly cheap.  I hope you give it a listen.  My favourites are Haunted Lake, Advice From Plants And Animals, Guide To Edible Flora, Wendigo, and Left Behind, but really I like them all a whole bunch.  The Bandcamp site has the story, and also features the lyrics, for those interested.

The cover

Touching Earth Made Of Steel is my “band”.  It features me, Andy Cant and Brian Martin.  Andy programs the drums and sings, and plays the odd instrument.  Brian plays the bass and most of the guitars, and unwittingly writes the better part of the songs.  ”Brian, we’re pressing record in five seconds, come up with a part”.  ”Okay”.  They’re the best possible musical collaborators one could conjure.  Why?  Because they come up with and say yes to every stupid idea, and then they make those stupid ideas awesome.  Isn’t that all we really want of our associates, in every sphere of life?  I think so.  Say yes, damnit.  Here’s the gang:

TEMOS getting down at Raw Sugar (L-R Martin, Cant, Latta). Session players Saso and Deline not pictured.

We put together an album called Occupational Hazards a few years ago.  I’ll write about that some time, if you like.  We needed a killer follow-up album, and found inspiration in one of the best places on this planet: Algonquin Provincial Park.  Brian and I took a punishing canoe trip there one summer.  We pushed it, hard, and the park damned near broke us.  The water was low.  We dragged a canoe through an endless, cold, shallow stream.  We carried a canoe straight up into the evergreen mist.  We burned every scrap of tinder on hand.  Something happened to us out there…

If you’ve never been you have no option but to arrange to visit at the next opportunity.  Trust me.  Something might happen to you too.  We came back half destroyed but filled with some kind of north woods mystical energy, and so we were all but compelled to put together the album in question.  What is it?  It’s a concept album.  Okay.  It’s a concept album about a couple who disappeared in Algonquin in the 1970s.  They were never seen again.  Each song tells a little piece of their story, some based entirely on speculation.  Here are some of the promo materials we made, which will fill you in:

Highly effective poster

And here are some popular mini posters:

We went all out with this one, goddamn.  Oh yes we did.  See how those promo materials are building a narrative?  Yeah, that’s right.  We even bought a record of field recordings from the Park, and laid it underneath/between all of the songs, to establish a little ambience.  And musically this sucker is pretty awesome, in my humble opinion.  Hard rocking.  Banjo crooning.  A cappella weirdness.  Crazy effects.  Understated sadness.  Synthesizers galore.  Nutso drumming.  It’s got it all!  And yet (and maybe this is what I’m still so pleased with) in spite of it being completely all over the place, it hangs together beautifully.  Or at least I think so.  And I’m pretty much completely unbiased.

I was convinced that we had concocted something special, and secretly hoped that this would be the one.  The thing that got noticed out there in the world, somehow.  Yes, I entertained that particularly mid-aughts fantasy of just putting something out into the ether and letting its evident greatness speak for itself.  And so I cannot lie and I must confess that I was pretty happy when we improbably managed to get reviewed in a couple of places, and really good reviews!  It seemed like finally our rather unique vision had found its time.  It could only go up from there.  But it didn’t.  Because we didn’t know how to do anything with our three glowing music blog reviews except retire (note: bad strategy).  Don’t get me wrong here, faithful friends, I’m not griping.  Maybe lamenting my own self promoting incompetence, but not griping.  Naw, it’s just bugged me that this thing we made peeked its head out from shadowy obscurity and then disappeared almost completely.  Why?  I guess it feels like this album, above everything else, might speak to somebody, or make them smile, or wonder, or something, and it seems a shame that it’s been sitting around for a couple of years.

So here it is.  Again.  If you have never heard it, give it a shot.  Or tell a friend.  Or leave a comment telling me how much you hated it.