Death Country, Chains, and Group Wonderment

To My Youngers,

I am in love.

Not with a person. That too normal, too plain. I am in love with six (or it it seven?) persons- though I suppose perhaps more accurately I am in love with their band...

I tend to get a little excited about music (understatement? yes. super-excited? more accurate). If you know me at all (or have, like, ever read this blog) you would not be at all surprised by that statement. You might, however, be surprised to know that, of my experiences of falling in love with bands, the sudden, immediate, 'holy crap who the hell is this?' ones are surprisingly few. Now I suppose this makes sense as you don't often go to see a band live unless you've at least hear of them, but the magic of music festivals lies exactly in creating such opportunities for discovery and love-falling-in. In seeing bands perform whom you've never heard of and would otherwise have never been exposed to. I've written before about the first time I saw Arcade Fire, the 'ummmmm who is this? because they kind of freakin rock... ' vibe and how that was the first and only time I've ever seen that happen to a whole field-full of people at exactly the same time... well that story must now be amended, for I have once again been privileged to be a part of a room-full (or in this case tent-full) of people simultaneously falling in love with a band. And that band is Graveyard Train.

They classify themselves as 'horror-country' (strikingly similar to the self-moniker of 'death-country' used by one of my all-time favourites Elliot Brood) and are a crazy-awesome mix of a tumble-weed-covered-frontier-town-saloon crossed with chain-gang-running-from-a-pack-of-zombies. K and I spent the weekend discussing the awesomeness of their man-choir voices and their amazing choice of instruments (steel guitar, slide guitar, banjo, stand-up bass and chains. yes chains. played with a hammer.) and going to see them as many times as possible (three times in three days was almost not enough!) but the part that stands out most for me was the first twenty seconds of the first song I ever heard them play.

At Hillside there are main-stage and side-stage performances, but there are also workshops where bands who have never met, and often never even heard of each other, get together and jam. The regular performances are usually pretty durn awesome,  but the jam sessions are where the unexpected, unprecedented, and totally magical become common place. We had just gone to see Karkwa who were amaaaazing (and will soon have their whole own blogpost I'm sure...) and they were playing a workshop later on that evening in one of the tents, so we headed on over. It turned out they were going to be jamming with a band from Australia (Australian meets Quebequois was to be a theme for the weekend) who looked like they had just stepped off of a wagon train. I was already pretty excited when I saw the banjo and the steel guitar, but nothing could have prepared me for the music...

They came on stage. They picked up their instruments ("Is that guy holding a chain!?!" "Which guy?" "The one in the dirty tank-top, suspenders, and work-pant cut-offs..."). The lead singer tipped his hat. They started singing. Holy. Shit.

We were hit by the wall of sound of five men (manly men. dirty men. men men) stretched out in a line across the stage, belting out harmonies the likes of which have not seen the light of day since 1879. We stood stunned. The whole tent stood stunned. There was a stunned silence, literally. (Well not quite literally as there was the music... but other than the music there was a stunned silence.) Eight seconds, nine seconds... I turned to K, she was looking back at me; "Who the fuck are these guys!?!" We looked around. Everyone looked around. We were all turning to the side and saying the exact same thing...

Twelve seconds... a murmur sweeps the tent...

Fifteen seconds... everyone's head starts to move up and down. shoulders shrugging in rhythm...

Eighteen seconds... feet tapping, hands clapping...

Twenty seconds... I am in love.

It got even better as the song went on. It got even better with each song. Karkwa joined in and it got even better and better. After they were finished I speed-walked to the merch tent and straight up to the table, picked up their CD and handed it to the girl behind the counter: "I need this one." I was sad when it was over, but super excited that I would get to watch them again the next day, and again the day after that... Even more excited when the same experience was repeated two more times, with the slight modification of a growing crowd at the front of those of us already-converted, and a diminishing crowd of first-timers sitting in-behind, wondering at why we were all so excited (until they experienced their own first-twenty-seconds and joined the ranks of the initiated).

Its a pretty magical thing to be a part of an amazing concert and even more so one where so many people are seeing a band for the first time and falling in love with them. Scratch that, its DAMN FINE. It a damn fine thing to have such a wonderful group experience- and to get to have it again and again three days in a row.

Thank you Hillside. Thank you Graveyard Train. Thank you tent-people with whom I got to share this! Now disperse and spread the word... music is a wonderful thing.

-E

Decisions, Decisions, Whims and Whimsy

To my elders,

Alex Day, aka Nerimon, posted a video earlier today about Brain Crack. What John Green of the vlogbrothers calls those ideas that you can't quite sort out just yet, so you think about them and think about them and think about them until they basically just become crack for your brain. Other people call this "obsession." But, you know, a rose by any other name and all that dead-white-guy-Shakespeare-stuff. John Green's solution is that if you put it out into the world.... I don't know, you'll obsess less? I've never seen any of the vlogbrothers brain crack videos, so I'm just trusting Alex Day on this one.

It got me thinking though, of what brain crack I have, as well as how I make decisions. Because my brain crack is, at times, about something concrete, but is more often about ideas and philosophies that come to dominate and inform my entire life and my entire view of the world. I know you know what I'm talking about E.

I am a fairly logical person. I fully acknowledge my complete irrationalities when they do come up, but I generally don't get that worked up about things that apparently upset most people. This has lead A, on more than one occassion (thanks sis!), to call me a robot as a result. I kind of take pride in it. And yet, I have never actually made a decision based on a pro-con list. Don't get me wrong, I have made pro-con lists, but one option can be 4 times longer than the other on the pro side and I still may go with the other option. I make my best decisions on gut feeling whims. I suspect because it allows me to brush off a lot of self doubt with the idea that I did not, in fact, think something through very thoroughly, but it also, as my 5th grade teacher said, "[didn't] let [my] brain get in the way of [my] thinking." And I'm cool with that.

So while I made decisions like where to do my undergrad very dramatically, like fake television drama style, sitting on my bed at 11pm the night before my offer acceptance had to be sent off, both letters signed sitting there going "Ummmmmmm..... I think I'll go to that one. Just for fun." And then signed the letter and mailed it. And yet, I plan haircuts out months in advance. Not that I have done a strand test when dying my hair since I was 15 (it will be the colour it is, and there's no use cutting off a piece of your hair to find out 30 minutes sooner. You can always dye over it. Though this once led me to having pink hair... not that the outrageous colour was an issue, but I've never been a big pink fan...). I make a lot of arbitrary, unfounded, uninformed decisions. And I'm always pretty happy about them. Heck, I moved to a French speaking province for a change of scenery. It worked out. Thinking is stressful. O.o

But Brain Crack. Obsessing. Minor obsessing, not OCD obsessing. I am cracked (Yes, I have turned crack into a non-drug use verb. English is cool that way. You can make up words. Great lesson Shakespeare! You've been a big help today) about authenticity. Mostly a combination of Catcher in the Rye and Holden's obsession with phoniness and Jack Kerouac's Beat Generation preoccupation with, well, authenticity and honesty. Beat is about truth (small 't') and non-censorship. And I love that about 1950s outsider fiction. But I also love it about the 1950s post war Americana in general. I may have decided to read The Feminine Mystique because of the reference to it in 10 Things I Hate About You, but it became complete brain crack once I got about half way through. And started my being cracked about sociology type non-fiction books, too.

I am cracked about organic development of conversations, friendships, life, and don't believe in "forcing it" because of a line from a Green Day song ("You can't go forcing something if its just not right" from When I Come Around off Dookie). Which also makes me love archiving all the more, because the entire theoretical basis of archival arrangement is the organic development of records (more on this in my next post). But organic development also makes me a bit awkward at times, because even though I am analyzing everything that happens to me, I don't necessarily want to talk about it. I want to see where it goes, and maybe talk about it after the fact, but not necessarily.

I am cracked about maps and drawings of landscapes and floor plans and skylines. Probably because I have a very spatial memory and probably learned to read a map before I could, like, read English. Which makes it sound like I could read maps at age 4, but in reality I just couldn't read read until 3rd grade.

I am cracked about believing what I sing. Which sounds stupid. Story: in 9th grade I was in choir at my high school. There was this girl I was not particularly fond of in choir with me. We had to sing some super religious, biblically based song about some river in The Holy Land. Now, I'm fairly sure, looking back on it, that she was actually just too lazy to learn songs she didn't already know. But I am also fairly sure that her rational for not wanting to sing the bible river song has shaped far too much about how I view the world. She asked me why I would sing a song I didn't believe. As in, why would I sing along with a song that I didn't agree with, who's lyrics I did not buy, who's lyrics did not reflect my own world view? So did I seek out only songs that reflected my world view? No. Being the person I am, I unintentionally, and sometimes intentionally, decided I must agree with the lyrics I liked the most. As if I couldn't enjoy them or sing them as whole-heartedly if I did not agree with them. So I started agreeing. Which I think explains a lot of my posts regarding music. But it also means there are great lines in great songs I will never love, because I can't agree with them. Sam Roberts' "Stay true to your friends, 'cause they'll save you in the end..." is a completely great line that I just can't believe, so I can never love that song as much as someone who does believe it. Believing in organic development of friendships also means accepting that friendships come and go and are not constant. You can effectively replace your family with friends, but where does that really leave you?

But back to Brain Crack. Tattoos are an interesting release for Brain Crack. Each of my tattoos (and E's too) was once a subject of Brain Crack. Not just the idea of getting a tattoo, but the content / subject of said tattoos. Each of mine were things I could simply not escape. I would buy things because they contained these images (mostly owls. Going into Urban Outfitters was like a battle between my bank account and my brain crack). I drew them on everything, all the time. I would doodle them on scrap paper, notebooks, my skin... I would actually Google image search pictures of them. Just for fun. And after I had them tattooed on me, after they were permanent, it was like I didn't have to anymore. They weren't going anywhere. I wouldn't forget about them only to go crazy feeling like I'd lost something if I stopped thinking about them for a day. So while I may have once spent a summer telling my friend "T-shirts, not Tattoos!" tattooing brain crack, getting it out into the world, marking it with permanency, really does help cure the Brain Crack. Maybe John Green should get a tattoo.

-K