The Arkells are a great power pop 5-piece band from Hamilton, Ontario that I’ve heard live and enjoy very much. I last wrote about them in 2013 with these pics from that show, a shot of the band in action, and me with lead singer Max Kerman.
Today, I found a video they’ve recently done that casts the five bandmates with their fathers. It’s funny and kind of sweet. I hope you enjoy it as I have.
http://youtu.be/6OduBTKZ4OA
As I’d documented as recently as this past June, when I posted here about my visit to Toronto for the annual NXNE festival, the city has a fabulous music scene, with many great local bands and dozens of superb venues. I’m excited to see that now a coalition of artists, promoters, and civic officials have banded together to promote the cultivation of music as an economic driver in the city. View the video here or above: http://ow.ly/Ba3kh
In completing my coverage of NXNE, the Toronto music festival I attended June 17-24 as accredited press, I’ve used Storify, the platform that lets bloggers incorporate social media posts in with their own writing. Once a piece is published on Storify, you can grab a handy embed code and paste it in at your websites, where it populates precisely as you assembled it. The piece is titled “Great Music & Great Times in Toronto for NXNE 2014,” “a collection of illustrated social sharing culled from my timelines 6/17-6/24, w/commentary; links to bands & venues; plus content I’m borrowing with acknowledgement of & appreciation for other music fans who shared about NXNE, creating a visual diary of the festival.” Please click here to read it on Storify, or here on Honourary Canadian. I hope you enjoy reading the piece which includes travel and tourism info about Toronto, offering some notes on restaurants, bookstores, shopping, and architecture, along with my music coverage.
#FridayReads NAKED IMPERFECTION, @GillDeacon‘s engrossing memoir of cancer&learning to stop always being perfect. pic.twitter.com/Tk2N7uVQq0
— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) July 5, 2014
Naked Imperfection was my #FridayReads last weekend, and it gripped me straight through until early this week. Gill Deacon is the host of CBC Radio’s daily afternoon show from Toronto, Here and Now, with a voice that’s good company on the air, and which translates well in print. Prior to her broadcasting career, she was an environmental journalist and consumer health advocate. She lived consciously and consumed carefully, avoiding products that could harm her, her family, and her fellow denizens of the earth. She wrote an earlier book called There’s Lead in Your Lipstick. This made her all the more ill-prepared when she received a chilling diagnosis of breast cancer. She propels her narrative forward rapidly, in modified stream-of-consciousness style, with many of her paragraphs built of staccato sentences, like this one, after she’s had a mastectomy: “Tonight, as Grant and I move between the sheets in the blue-grey, pixelated, late-night bedroom light, I look down at my chest. A single orb of flesh presses up against my husband’s chest, its twin felled—an abandoned goddess, carrying on alone. Beside it, the graveyard of ribs. I am snatched by the escapist pleasure of my husband’s touch by the reminder of what had happened. Mourning the imperfect body I once had. I wish I still had two breasts. Sometimes the sadness surfaces like a beluga gasping for air. How can I be grateful for being misshapen.” The closing chapters were so well-crafted, I slowed my reading, lest I finish the book too quickly. I kept paging back to re-read passages I’d just read, so apt were they about living a full life, even if an imperfect one. After writing candidly about the prosthetic breast she got after her surgery, Deacon ends her book, some years in to the slow-motion crisis, with good news from her doctor, who “used the words cancer and gone in the same sentence. ‘Go out and live your life,’ she said with a smile. ‘You’re always going to have more doctor’s appointments than most of your friends, and technically it takes more than five years before the odds of you getting cancer drop down to match the general population, but for all intents and purposes your cancer is gone. Get back to whatever you were doing before this disease rang your bell.'”
Science journo @MilesOBrien suffered a severe injury&lost an arm while on a reporting trip. Here’s his moving account-http://t.co/lPoFzrVreB — Philip Turner (@philipsturner) June 13, 2014
Much of my recent reading and other cultural consumption has featured people who through accident or illness have endured the loss of parts of themselves, like Miles O’Brien, whom I tweeted about above. To his credit, he not only wrote in New York magazine about the frightening accident—when on a reporting trip to the Philippines last February he suffered an accident that led to the amputation of his left arm—he also reports on the neurological sources of phantom pain, and the design and engineering of high-tech prosthetics, a field that’s burgeoning due in part due to the return home of many wounded veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the growth of miniature electronics.
Relatedly, I later listened to a gripping episode of a new CBC radio series called Live Through This. It featured an account of Paul Templer, a wilderness guide in Zimbabwe who survived an attack by an aggressive hippo that nearly killed him, though he lost an arm in the melee, during which he was for some time in the gaping mouth of the animal. Templer healed and was fitted with a prosthetic arm. He later guided another trip down the Zambezi River, to raise money that will help victims of land mine explosions receive prosthetic devices of their own.
These incidents reminded me of what my longtime author Lt General Roméo Dallaire told me in 2006, when he was in New York City, promoting Carroll & Graf’s edition of his Canadian bestseller, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Reflecting on the PTSD he’s been afflicted with ever since, as commander of the under-manned UN Peacekeeping Force in Rwanda in 1993 he endured the searing experience of trying to prevent the genocide, he told me: “When I slip into depression, the medicines and therapy act like a prosthetic and keep me from falling.”
These were among the reflections stirred up in me while reading Gill Deacon’s astonishingly fine memoir, a superb first person narrative. I recommend it if you want to read a candid memoir, and if you, or a friend or relative, has been ill. There’s lots of hope and bright humor in this honest book.
N.B. Gill Deacon’s book is the second terrific memoir I’ve read by a female Canadian writer in the past few months, the earlier one having been Jan Wong’s Out of the Blue, which I made a #FridayReads last March 14 and wrote about again on March 21, after I’d finished it.
Toronto, North America’s fourth largest city, offers the traveler and occasional visitor a wealth of urban pleasures: pleasant walkable streets through leafy neighborhoods; useful public transit that supplements and extends pedestrian excursions; mid-priced lodging; and affordable restaurants that serve delicious food reflecting the polyglot make-up of arguably the continent’s most diverse city.
If the visitor happens also to be a fan of live music, particularly indie rock n’ roll, the pleasures of the city are doubled, and then some. One time of year when the pleasures of Toronto’s rock n’ roll tourism are at a peak is the annual North by Northeast Festival (NXNE) which marked its twentieth anniversary this June 13-22. This was the fourth time I’d attended NXNE, which I write about on my blogs The Great Gray Bridge and Honourary Canadian. While NXNE began as a music festival, a kind of northern cousin to SXSW, it now includes Film, Comedy, Interactive, and Art. I attend largely for the music, while taking in other events as time permits, such as comedian Marc Maron’s rousing keynote.
More than 800 artists played NXNE this year, appearing at more than 50 venues spread across the city over five days and nights. The line-ups skew predominantly Canadian, which is fine by me because as I’ve found the past five years I’ve been following the CAN-Rock scene, there are a ton of great bands stretching from St. John’s Newfoundland to Victoria, British Columbia; from Windsor, Ontario—a city that is actually more southern than Detroit—to Nunavit, in the Northwest Territory. For a country of 35 million people, roughly the population of California, this continent-wide country has a remarkably vibrant music scene. me, because it is the Canadian musicians that bring me back each year. Even with the geographic emphasis falling north of the 49th Parallel, NXNE brings in bands from abroad, such as Spoon from Austin, TX, who played a great live show, as did the Felice Brothers from upstate New York.
The first act I saw on my first night out was Shawn William Clarke at a new venue for me, Baltic Avenue (perhaps named for a deed in Monopoly?). I liked Clarke’s self-aware lyrics, and learned that he’s making an album with longtime Ohbijou drummer James Brunton as producer. during the festival was a slow sThe acts I heard this year: Amos the Transparent (“Says the Spark) ; Shawn William Clarke; NQ Arbuckle, Lee Harvey Osmond, the alter-ego of Blackie and the Rodeo Kings member Tom Wilson, who performed with his son’s band, Harlan Pepper, and had Lindi Ortega sing several songs with them; Whitehorse, w/Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland, with whom they continued the father & son theme, performing with veteran member of Blue Rodeo Jim Cuddy, and the Devin Cuddy Band;
On June 4th Kyle and I went to hear one of my favorite NY bands, Brain Cloud, a six-piece outfit that plays Western swing and '40s standards, and some originals, making it all sound new and fresh. I wrote about the show at The Great Gray Bridge, and then heard this today from frontman Dennis Lichtman:
“We're playing Ottawa Jazz Festival on Saturday, 6/28 and Sunday, 6/29 on the Laurier Ave. stage, 4:00pm each day. Thanks for letting folks know!”
The late Scott Young, Neil’s dad, was a distinguished Canadian journalist and prolific author, a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame, for his years of columns on the sport. He died in 2005 at age 87, having published more than 35 books—novels and nonfiction, some for young readers. His NEIL AND ME (1984) is illuminating on the family’s break-up, when he left his wife Rassy, and Neil, and brother Bob. The chapters about Neil’s music and performing are very enlightening. The elder Young was a very good writer, no less writing about his famous son. An essential book for understanding Neil, it bespeaks all that is heartfelt and sincere about Neil’s songs and career. Especially valuable when read alongside Jimmy McDonough’s Shaky (2002). For other coverage of mine about Neil Young, you may read a post I wrote when Patti Smith interviewed Neil at BEA in 2012.
Like a big pot of soup you can feed on for days and days, HAVE NOT BEEN THE SAME: The CanRock Renaissance, 1985-1995 (2001) is a rich broth of a book, with great stories and characters spanning four decades of Canadian rock n’ roll. The 10th Anniversary Edition, published in 2011, was released simultaneously with a CD release that had younger artists covering songs by their musical forbears, bands that had been in the first edition of the book, it was a cool project that I bought and enjoy from the Canadian indie music seller zunior.com. So good you can open it at the start of any new chapter, and just begin reading and enjoying. Kudos to Michael Barclay and his co-authors Ian A.D. Jack and Jason Schneider.
Like the memorable book about the 1960s art scene that swirled around Andy Warhol, EDIE: American Girl by Jean Stein, with a Foreword by George Plimpton, Dave Bidini’s ON A COLD ROAD: Tales of Adventure in Canadian Rock n’ Roll (1998), is a multi-voiced oral history of verbatim recollections by dozens of Canadian musicians, shaped by Bidini who toured for years as part of the Rheostatics. There are many colons (e.g., : ) in this book followed by paragraphs of rich memories. Bidini’s arranged it kinetically, so you feel like you’re bouncing around on the bus, too, as you read funny, outrageous evocations of epic touring traversing the continent-wide country. Full of humor and pathos, it made me laugh, and nearly cry, for the sincere efforts of so many hard-working, hard-partying, hard-striving artists. Bidini is also prodigiously prolific, with twelve books published, including 2011’s WRITING GORDON LIGHTFOOT: The Man, the Music, the World, in 1972. And then there’s his musical career, which now has him fronting Bidiniband. I also enjoy reading him on Twitter @hockeyesque.
This forthcoming book was announced in PublishersMarketplace.com’s daily deal newsletter today:
Anna McGarrigle and Jane McGarrigle’s story of the McGarrigle sisters, the Canadian singer-songwriters who became famous during the folk music revival of the 1960s (the other half of the duo, Kate, passed away in 2010), recounting their family story, idiosyncratic upbringing, and musical influences, to Amanda Lewis at Random House Canada, for publication in October 2015 (world rights).
As a tribute to these great musical sisters from Montreal, here’s a video of them performing their achingly beautiful song, “Heart Like a Wheel,” with a group that includes Linda Ronstadt and Maria Muldaur. Note: Kate is playing piano, while Anna is standing, second from the left, next to Linda Ronstadt. I wonder if there will be a US edition, or just distributed copies of the Canadian edition in the States?