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Photo by Andy Dawson ReidWay back in the early 1990s (long before, of course, I had the slightest notion of even knowing anyone from the west coast of Canada, let alone of emigrating to this blessed spot) I came across a newly published and really quite extraordinary book – in the form of what I later came to know to be an epistolary novel – by artist, illustrator and writer, Nick Bantock.

Griffin & Sabine was the first in what evolved into a set of seven books which document the extraordinary correspondence between Griffin Moss – a London-based designer of postcards – and Sabine Strohem – a mysterious woman who resides on an island in the South Pacific. This communication commences with an exotic card from the southern seas.

Griffin

It’s good to get in touch with you at last. Could I have one of your fish postcards? I think you were right – the wine glass has more impact than the cup.

Sabine

But Griffin had never met a woman named Sabine. How did she know him? How did she know his artwork? Who is she?

The novels are exclusively in the form of exquisite and exotically illustrated postcards and of letters which are tucked into their envelopes affixed to the pages.

I think I was drawn to the original book not only by the sheer beauty of its design and artwork, but also by the magical and mysterious quality of its premise. I purchased a copy shortly after its publication, appreciated its allure and then tucked it away in one of my bookcases where it has languished ever since.

What I did not know then – or indeed discover until recently – was that though Nick Bantock grew up around London and in Kent, in the late 1980s he moved to Saltspring Island, British Columbia (scarcely a stone’s throw from our home on the Saanich peninsula) where he has lived ever since. I might not have discovered this fact even now had not Mr Bantock teamed up with Michael Shamata – the Artistic Director of The Belfry Theatre here in Victoria – to adapt the series of novels for the stage. On receiving The Belfry’s programme for the year and observing upon it notice of this premiere we naturally purchased tickets forthwith for the last show of the run, two days before Christmas.

With some difficulty (in the finding) I dug my copy of the book from our library. I was intrigued to know how this highly unusual graphical novel could possibly be adapted successfully for the stage. It is a challenge that I, frankly, would not myself have dared attempt (even had I the talent so to do!). I am therefore delighted to report that The Girl and I both found the production to be magical and moving and that it somehow managed to avoid all of the most obvious pitfalls that usually befall attempts at the marriage of two such wildly different forms. Let us hope that the production now travels further.

Bravo to Mr Bantock and to all concerned – say we!

 

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Homeward Bound, Albert Pinkham Ryder, c. 1893-1894, oil on canvas mounted on wood panel - Phillips CollectionThere came a moment – just over an hour and twenty minutes into the opening night of Paul Simon’s ‘Homeward Bound‘ farewell tour in Vancouver on Wednesday last – when the most excellent fifteen piece band brought an exuberant rendition of ‘You Can Call me Al‘ to a juddering close and the great man himself stepped forward to acknowledge and bask in the applause of the devoted crowd – when a sudden startled stir rippled through the arena. Was that it? Had a mere sixteen songs from Simon’s extraordinarily extensive back-catalogue been all that we would be left to remember him by?

It was not enough. Not by a long chalk…

Three extended encores (featuring ten further songs and lasting for a full fifty minutes) later we reluctantly let the man go. He is – after all – seventy five years of age and this was the first night of a long tour. Perhaps he was testing the water – investigating what was possible and seeing how far he could push a voice that – whilst it sounded a little tenuous at the start – warmed up more and more as the evening progressed.

Were we satisfied? Well – of course we were – though much of the talk afterwards was of classic tracks that had not been included. There was no ‘Kodachrome‘ – no ‘Train in the Distance‘ – no ‘Only Living Boy in New York‘…  but I guess that is the inevitable side-effect of having such a voluminous inventory of classic compositions from which to choose.

Simon ended alone on stage singing – along, it seemed, with the entire crowd – ‘The Sound of Silence‘. My view (widely shared of course) that the man is a complete genius was again borne out by the recognition anew that his music – even that dating from the mid-sixties – has really not aged at all – neither in its poetry nor its melodies. This is surely a true mark of the enduring legacy that this great artist has gifted to us. He makes us sing – he makes us happy – he makes us dance – he moves us to tears (at least three times during Wednesday night’s show).

More than this we cannot ask – though should his tease that he had only billed the tour as his farewell so as to be able to push up the ticket prices turn out to be true – I have no doubt at all that he would be welcomed back to the West Coast with open arms.

Genius! ‘Nuff said!

 

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By Walter Albertin - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3c14346.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30034723This post is the second in what will be a very occasional series (the first such having been contrived back in March 2014 on the subject of The Who’s ‘See Me, Feel Me‘!) on fleeting moments of musical genius.

When I heard a short while back that Paul Simon was about to retire from touring at the conclusion of his current expedition I realised that – though I am an enormous fan of the man – I have never seen him perform live. I was, fortunately, able to acquire tickets for the Vancouver concert in May and thus to avail myself of an opportunity to rectify this anomaly before it is too late.

Now – few would deny that Simon is a songwriting genius. As I have pointed out previously, a lyricist who can use words such as ‘misconstrued’ and ‘pertains’ or phrases such as ‘doggedly determined’ and ‘arc of a love affair’ without coming over as precious, is quite clearly walking a considerably better walk than are the rest of us.

In this instance, however, the subject is not the lyrics. As was the case with The Who’s perfect palimpsest this post concerns a musical moment, one which occurs in that quintessential Paul Simon solo contribution to the ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water‘ album – ‘The Only Living Boy in New York‘ – a song written in reaction to Simon’s being left alone in New York on the occasion of Art Garfunkel’s trip to Mexico for his acting role in the filming of Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch-22‘.

The song is a magnificently wistful meditation on Simon’s solitary state, greatly enhanced by the gorgeously sinuous bass playing of the great Joe Osborn. Two verses in it hauls itself into the first of two vocal renditions of one of Simon’s brief but typically splendid tension-raising bridges. As it cascades back into the verse Simon’s solo voice is replaced with a distant ethereal choir which matches – wordlessly – the delicate acoustic guitar chords that give structure to the song. For the third line of the verse the ‘aaahs’ sweetly follow the descending bass figure, pausing momentarily before swelling into the final cadence with a heart-tugging “Here I am” that makes the hairs stand up on the back of this jaded hack’s neck.

The empyreal choir (actually Simon and Garfunkel themselves tracked a dozen or more times) reprises its verse twice more in the playout to the song – each time with a little greater intensity and drowning a little deeper in reverb. This delicious effect was achieved by recording the harmonies actually inside the echo chamber at Columbia’s LA studio.

For those who must know such things I believe that the harmonic progression for the phrase concerned can be annotated thus:

|Emaj7 Emaj9|B Abm7#5/E|

Pure magic!

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Image from Pixabay“I’m not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.”

Ray Bradbury

I have in anterior posts (of which this is but the most recent instance) attempted to shed some light on that most mysterious and wonderful process by which creative acts such as writing and composing are effected.

I say ‘attempted’ – of course – because beyond simply reporting anecdotally my own experiences I am no more able to explain the phenomenon than is anyone else. Should you doubt that any such examination is more than likely to fall short you might care to Google the phrase “How does the creative process work?“. You will discover – as did I – that the first page of results alone contains the following ‘definitive’ responses:

  • The four stages of creativity” – preparation, incubation, illumination, verification – (apparently!)
  • The five stages of the creative process” – preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, elaboration – (some crossover at least)
  • The creative process – six working phasesinspiration, clarification, distillation, perspiration, evaluation, and incubation – (hmmm!)
  • The ten stages of the creative process” – the hunch, talk about it, the sponge, build, confusion, just step away, the love sandwich(!), the premature breakthrough, revisit your notes, know when you’re done – (blimey! That’s…er… different!)

I stopped at this point for what are probably pretty obvious reasons.

And yet… and yet… None of these earnest theses comes close to elucidating an experience that I seem to encounter with increasing frequency – one in which I start out with a firm idea in my mind only to find that the act of creation takes on a life of its own and I end up with something almost entirely antithetical to that which I had originally intended. At the risk of boring the gentle reader I should like to share the latest such instance.

I am currently working on a couple of songs that are intended to complete a brief collection whose inspiration – or motivation, should you prefer – has been my recent exodus from the country of my birth. I had been making good progress on one such of these with the notion in the back of my head that it might turn out to be a gently whimsical look at the love of the island life – the which is of course shared both by many Brits and by those who live on Vancouver Island or in the Gulf Islands.

When it came time to concentrate on the lyric I turned – as is my habit – to the InterWebNet to pursue some lines of research of relevance to the subject. A busy day of chasing leads suggested that the following (amongst others) might be significant:

  • Shakespeare – ‘Richard II’,’The Tempest’
  • Tennyson – ‘Ulysses’
  • Rabbie Burns – ‘To a Louse’
  • Churchill – ‘The Island Race’

An article by Open University senior lecturer, Nigel Clark, entitled ‘An Island Race?‘ – chimed with my initial intention of focusing on the creative tension implicit in living on an island surrounded by the seas – the which afford both a powerful means of defence from attack but simultaneously the path by which such a nation might venture forth to explore (and mayhap  to ‘conquer’) the rest of the world.

It was another article, however – “Is England too Good for the English?“, by Oxford University’s Austen Saunders – that changed the tenor of my song. Saunders exploration of the illustrious ‘John of Gaunt’ speech from ‘Richard II’ majors on John’s view that the English – as a result of Richard’s politicking and fiscal mismanagement – are no longer worthy of the “other Eden” that is ‘England’ itself. It is impossible not to recognise an immense resonance between this somewhat melancholy conclusion and the state in which the United Kingdom finds itself today. The song that eventually emerged from my subconscious thus turned out to be a lament for this sorry state of affairs rather than the amiable whimsy that I had intended.

Should the gentle reader be one of those who does not view the current situation in which Great Britain – and in particular, England – finds itself to be as dire as I have described – then I wish you well.

I hope that you still feel the same way in five year’s time…

 

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Image by Alana Elliott on Wikimedia CommonsBefore I came to Canada in 2015 I was entirely unaware of Stuart McLean, or indeed of the much loved weekly CBC Radio show – The Vinyl Café – that he hosted for more than twenty years.

I am absolutely certain that the Kickass Canada Girl – who has long been numbered amongst the humourist and storyteller’s many fans – had for my benefit at some point extolled his virtues long before we crossed the pond for keeps, but I am a bear of advancing years (as well as very little brain) and there has been such a lot to learn (this is called “getting your excuses in early”!).

Once in Canada, of course, and having had the opportunity to experience the show ‘in the flesh’ (so to speak) I rapidly became a convert too. It was therefore deeply saddening to hear the news this week that Stuart had succumbed to the melanoma that he had been battling for more than a year.

I am way too much of a Vinyl Café neophyte to be able to indite anything remotely apposite at this point. I urge the gentle reader instead simply to ‘Google’ “Stuart McLean” and to peruse some of the many tributes to the man. This page of twitter reactions gives a good idea as to just how deeply loved he was.

For myself all I would say is that there was something about his writing and on-air manner that reminded me of how radio used to be when I was growing up in the UK, where my earliest exposure to the outside world came exclusively from the BBC’s ‘Home Service’ (later Radio 4). That’s pretty much as good as it gets in my book.

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Well, well – who knew! Though this particular anniversary has crept up on me entirely unawares, it turns out that I have been posting to this blog now for five years.

Golly! That calls for a small celebration…

Since the first entry on January 26th 2012 I have submitted five hundred and twenty eight posts (including this one) and uploaded one thousand, four hundred and thirty six images – the great majority of them my own.

A great deal has happened throughout this apparently fleeting five year period, and not just in our lives alone. Much has changed in the world and I feel particularly blessed that life has been generous and kind to me and to those that I love. I can only wish that all else in this sadly troubled world could be likewise blessed. Any little that I can do to help I will, and I feel sure that for so many others the same applies.

It is a slightly odd fact that I probably wouldn’t have noticed that this humble journal had passed such a significant milestone had I not been looking at a completely different statistic. Every now and then I cast an eye over the logs for the site to see who is looking at what, from where and how often. I know! It is a bad habit – not unlike ‘Googling’ oneself (don’t do it!)… but it is none the less fascinating. Apart from those brave souls who are regular readers the logs reveal that the greatest number of hits on the blog by far are the result of a Google search for the string:

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

This is – of course – the title of the seventh chapter of Kenneth Graham’s “The Wind in the Willows“, concerning the strange history of which I composed this post in May 2012.

It is also – also ‘of course’ – the title of Pink Floyd’s debut album, which was itself named after the aforementioned chapter from “The Wind in the Willows“.

Now – if one were to take the time to ‘Google’ “The Piper… etc” one would observe that the massive majority of references returned are to the Floyd album, leading one to the conclusion that that must be the true object of any such search. Further investigation (of the sort that only the zealot would pursue) reveals that to uncover any reference to this blog one must plough through seven pages of search results before so doing. This would suggest that the considerable number of souls who make this search are indeed themselves fairly zealous in their endeavours (or they would not bother!) but also clearly that when they finally land on the reference concerned – which is quite clearly not about the Pink Floyd album – they are still prepared to give it at least a cursory look.

I have no idea what to make of this, but I am of course most grateful for even the most casual of visitors.

Good fortune and blessings to all!

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Photo by Andy Dawson ReidWhen Bob Dylan set out in the latter part of 1965 on the American, Australia and European tour that would wind its way long into 1966 – having already that year shaken the American folk scene to its core with his first public amplified appearance at the Newport Folk Festival – he took on the road with him an electric band… the Hawks.

The Hawks – based in Arkansas – had been the backing outfit for rockabilly legend Ronnie Hawkins before striking out on their own in 1964. Following a recommendation from a friend they were hired by Dylan in 1965 to back him for the electric component of his upcoming world tour. The format of the shows comprised two parts – a solo acoustic set by Dylan followed by the more controversial amplified section.

For an outfit based in the deep south the Hawks had a strong Canadian component – at one point featuring four Canadians and one American. One of those Canadians – who had headed south on his own as a sixteen year old in 1959 to join the band – was Jaime Royal Robertson… better known now as Robbie Robertson.

The Hawks famously morphed into The Band. Robertson emerged as a major songwriter whose later history need hardly be catalogued here. Suffice it to say that the man who wrote “The night they drove old Dixie down” is a legend in his own right and I have recommended him before in these jottings with reference to his wonderful recording – Music for the Native Americans.

Robertson – now seventy three – has recently published a first volume of his autobiography – “Testimony” – and Victoria’s excellent Bolen Books invited him, somewhat speculatively, to come to the city for a reasonably rare public appearance. Roberston – never having visited Victoria – agreed and the ensuing event – at the University of Victoria’s Farquhar Auditorium – drew a crowd in excess of a thousand souls, each of whom received a signed hardback copy of the book as part of the package.

Needless to say I would have crawled over broken glass to attend the event. Our coming to Canada – and coincident attainment of a certain venerable stage of life – seems to be offering us opportunities to reconnect with those who have become our heroes and exemplars over the years. Given the tragic number of such who have passed beyond these shores during this strangest of years this is clearly an important and necessary experience.

Robertson described the effect on a fresh-faced twenty three year old of having to endure – night after night over a period of some nine months across three continents – the fury of Dylan’s acolytes at their hero’s adoption of the electric guitar and the accompanying band. The start of the second set was routinely met with boos, heckles, the throwing of objects onto the stage and – infamously at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall – the denunciation as ‘Judas‘ of the recent Nobel laureate.

If one can endure this sort of experience as a young man I guess one can endure just about anything.

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Image by David Bellot - Berkeley, CA, USAWell – who would have thought it?

It is to be hoped that the gentle reader might indulge me just a little if – with not the slightest intention of sounding my own shophar –  I express my astonishment at the relative longevity of this enterprise…

…by which I refer, of course, to this attractively eccentric almanac!

Yes – since I took my first faltering footsteps into the anarchic world of blogging on January 26th 2012 I have contrived to make additions to this agglomeration of arbitrary articles at roughly bi-weekly intervals. The end result of all of that tapping and scratching is (and I know that you have been keeping score!) that this is the five hundredth post since the imperceptibility of the immigrant was first imparted.

Very many humble thanks to all of those die-hards who have stuck with it.

I think a small celebration might be in order – and as that is something that is decidedly better done in the ‘real’ world rather than in the ‘virtual’, the Kickass Canada Girl and I will just have to do something appropriate here in BC! The reader may choose to take the opportunity to raise a glass for this (or indeed any other) reason at his or her own whim or fancy!

Cheers to all!

 

PS – Serious kudos to anyone who can glean the relevance to this post of the image thereto attached!

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imageIn the early days of these scribblings I ‘penned’ a piece on the mysteries of creativity. That I feel moved now to add something to that disquisition can only be seen as an indication of the continuing surprise and delight that the whole business affords me – as certainly must also be the case for anyone else who ventures into the realms of self-expression.

Thomas Edison famously declared that genius was “One percent inspiration, ninety nine percent perspiration” (though other accounts give the figures as ‘ten’ and ‘ninety’ percent respectively. I don’t suppose that it really matters much either way – the point is made!). The same could certainly be said of practically all forms of creativity.

A prominent playwright – sadly I forget which – opined that the art of writing might more properly be called ‘re-writing’. His point being, of course, that writing a play (or anything else for that matter) not only comprises the two basic elements (the inspirational phase in which ideas and musings are recorded as quickly as possible as they occur to the author/composer, and – following a suitable period of reflection – an extensive process of editing) but also – in order that the the piece might be rendered ready for ‘public’ appraisal – it will inevitably have gone through a considerable number of re-writes before anyone else is allowed to see it.

Much of this process is – of course – ‘craft’, and relatively few are sufficiently competent at it to be able to make a living therefrom. Inspiration is something else and the mysteries thereof are still not readily understood – especially by me!

The story of Paul McCartney waking one morning with the score for ‘Yesterday’ fully formed in his head might be thought apocryphal, were it not that it is attested to by the great man himself. Anyone who has experienced anything remotely similar will identify with McCartney as he – believing at first that he must have heard the song elsewhere – quizzed friends and colleagues as to what it might be.

My own recent experience was considerably more prosaic.

A few posts back I referred to a brief wave of melancholy that passed over me during the first few days of March, brought on by recollections of my Mother whose birthday would have been around that time. I felt moved to compose a song in an appropriately thoughtful vein. My Mother had slipped into dementia in the last year of her life and I felt the need to try to capture something of that elegiac mood. Sitting at the keyboard I rapidly found an interesting harmonic progression around which I started to experiment. An image came to mind – of a bonfire on a dark night. The dying embers swirling up into the night sky before fading into the blackness seemed to offer a possible metaphor for a mind slowly floating apart and a personality fading away.

It was at this point – however – that the subconscious part of the imagination took over. The more I worked the theme the more it seemed determined to evolve into something else entirely. I ended up with something that sounded more celebratory than melancholy. There is only one thing to do in such circumstances – and that is to give the imagination its head. Within a couple of days I had recorded all of the components of what had turned out to be a rather uplifting piece. Further – the image of the fire in the darkness had remained but had itself evolved and become a beacon fire lit on a hilltop to celebrate the end of winter. The song had changed from a lament over something lost to a celebration of something gained – in this case my recent recognition of my significance here.

That such a creative act is possible – and in such a brief period of time (a song can take me months to complete!) – is to me a thing of wonder and amazement and I am massively grateful that such occurrences still take place. Those of a spiritual or metaphysical bent might muse that perhaps this was a gift to me from my Mother. Maybe so.

I am content simply to enjoy the mystery.

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Free image from PexelsThose familiar with my oeuvre may perhaps be accustomed to my occasion panegyrics in praise of one or other of the BBC’s splendid drama productions – ‘Parade’s End‘ back in 2012 for example – or the more recent ‘River‘ of last year. Should you be one such you may be wondering (if you have nothing considerably better to do with your time) why I have not likewise registered my approval of the wondrous adaptation of John Le Carré’s ‘The Night Manager‘ which approaches its culmination this Easter weekend on BBC1.

I has indeed been remiss of me not so to do.

It would be fair to say that the show is in need of no such puffery from me or – apparently – from anyone else. Viewing figures started high and went up from there. This is one of those occasions on which both the BBC and the viewing public get it splendidly right. This is one classy production – based on a typically strong Le Carré novel but given an update and polish that not only takes nothing away (something of a rarity in itself) but in fact adds quite considerably.

Money has clearly been spent on this Anglo/American co-production – and spent in a way that makes this viewer at any rate purr with pleasure. The writing is precise and spare, the direction and camerawork would not be out of place on the big screen and the acting is sublime.

There is no getting away from the fact that the English public school thespist ‘mafia’ – out here yet again in force in the shape of not one but two Old Etonians – currently appears to pretty much have the monopoly on the cream of the TV and film roles going. Many commentators see Tom Hiddleston’s expertly judged performance as the brooding hero Jonathan Pine as nothing less than a Bond audition. He is – however – given a serious run for his money by Hugh Laurie’s ‘worst man in the world’ – Richard Onslow Roper – from whom it is difficult to drag one’s gaze. Add the wonderful Tom Hollander and Olivia Coleman to the mix and one is blessed with a heady brew of a cast.

It can only be a sad indictment of the failure to invest adequately in the state secondary education sector in the UK – not to mention the ideological interference in the running thereof – that so many of the new breed of actors have as their backgrounds the rarefied atmosphere of the public (UK sense here) schools. Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Harry Lloyd, Rory Kinnear, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Damian Lewis, Dominic West, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rosamund Pike, Rebecca Hall, Emily Blunt… the list goes on. Of course these schools have wonderful facilities and can recruit teaching staff from the top drawer, but there is more to it than that. Whatever the reason, the top independent schools in the UK (as most likely in Canada and elsewhere also) ascribe an importance to the arts that is no longer the case in other parts of the ‘system’.

Flame off!

Anyway – though it may seem a little late to be recommending ‘The Night Manager‘ at this juncture do remember that it is an Anglo/American production that has to date been only seen in the UK. It will doubtless be appearing on a streaming service near you ere long.

Don’t miss it!

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