A Hi/Lo Report
Dear Jaybook Friends, hello!
I have to confess, one of my favourite moments at a Dream in High Park performance is when the bats come out to circle frantically the darkening sky above the stage. It is one of those rituals of summer. As is attending the Dream itself with its challenge to the human body. Sitting on the cramped ground of the tiered hill becomes a little more difficult with every trip around the sun. And yet we do it — go Shakespeare!! This year during the third act my legs cramped so badly, but I could not find a position to release the tension. No matter: I grit my teeth and eventually it passed. And this year’s performance was worth it, a fascinating production of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Many clever things were done to introduce repetition and callback moments to enhanced the narrative, and the acting was superb. Horatio in particular stood out to me, doubling down on the fact that this role is intensely important: Horatio is the witness. And at the very end of the play Horatio used repetition in a way that not only turned the audience into a similar witness in a quiet fourth wall breaking way, but also placed us in the exact position Hamlet finds himself in at the beginning of the play. Very smart.
I also enjoyed special guest appearances by a red squirrel, who climbed the large oak tree stage right at a pivotal moment in the story, and a bunny who appeared before the stage as though emerging from the audience itself, watched the actors for a moment, then disappeared under the stage. Along with the bats, these were amazing cameos.
Friends, it has been an excellent week of hi/lo culture. In the background we have been following the Olympic Games in Paris. There is nothing like watching elite athletes perform impossible feats of strength and skill from the comfort of your living room couch. Pass the Doritos. A highlight was the opening ceremony, in particular French metal band Gojira’s performance, which caused a lot of chatter for a variety of short-sighted and/or small-minded reasons. Being a household of metal and metal-adjacent fans, we loved that they performed a 19th century French anthem on the old prison where Marie Antoinette was beheaded, and that they collaborated with mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti. Brilliant.
On Friday afternoon Hazel and I witnessed a preview of an incredible new dance piece by dancer and choreographer Jera Wolfe. The piece had been workshopped over the past three weeks, and author Natasha Kanapé Fontaine contributed texts that she read as part of the performance. Hazel and I were endlessly surprised by the choreography. Look for it to be performed publicly next year. This was immediately followed by taking in the new Deadpool and Wolverine flick in the evening — ridiculously fun. On Sunday Hazel and I woke in Stratford Ontario where we were visiting friends; because they were still sleeping we slipped out to sit in a cafe to drink coffee and eat croissants, reading books like the amazingly civilized people we aspire to be. In the afternoon we stopped in Elora for lunch and took a walk along the water in the gorge, and we were having such a lovely time in this beautiful place that I forgot to take any photos.
Sunday night Reid took me to see Born Innocent, a new documentary about a band I thought I didn’t know — Redd Kross — one of those acts who have been around forever, and pushed the envelope in enough ways for others to steal from them and become infinitely more famous. Not only was the documentary very good, but the band was present for a session after the screening — the McDonald brothers, Jeff and Steve, who are wonderfully deep music dorks that have been playing together since they were 11/14 years old when they formed a band and opened for Black Flag in a living room at a grade eight graduation party. The film is worth a watch. It was shocking to see who had opened for them over the years, and I was particularly impressed with the openness of their cultural taste; how fantastic that these young punk rockers loved The Partridge Family so much. Redd Kross happened to be in town for a show the next night at Lee’s Palace, performing with Dale Crover of The Melvins (Steve McDonald also plays with The Melvins), so Reid and I went to check it out. A great show during which they played from their new album as well as through their discography, including an encore of the earliest songs they ever wrote, and a cover of the first song that turned them on to being musicians when they were kids (a song I didn’t recognize and couldn’t place). I was a bit mesmerized by Steve, who is an incredible bass player. (Jeff and Steve can seen performing their new song “Stunt Queen” in the photo above.) The only curiosity was the person who appeared next to me about half way through the show, his presence announced by the sudden scent of a damp and overflowing ashtray. He was drinking from an open bottle of white wine that he had somehow managed to smuggle into the venue, and kept passing out on his feet, then would revive to gently mosh about on his own, bumping into everyone around him until he quieted down again. A miracle of human engineering. Walking home from the subway after, Reid texted to let me know where I would have encountered Redd Kross for sure: If I Were a Carpenter, the compilation of Carpenters cover songs I listened to a lot in the 90s, and seem to keep mentioning here at Jaybook. Redd Kross provided a nice rendition of “Yesterday Once More” on that album.
Tuesday night was the aforementioned Dream in High Park performance.
Wednesday after work we had drinks with Jaybook Friend Stuart in the Junction, which was a lovely time — lots of talk about movies and music and books. And then we finished watching the new serial adaptation of Presumed Innocent. I’m not sure how I feel about how they rejigged the ending — I was surprised, given that I expected it to end as the novel and the original film starring Harrison Ford did. It even went there for a brief moment before going somewhere else entirely, somewhere way more disturbing.
And last night the Millars continued their summer concert series and went to see Green Day play through Dookie and American Idiot at the Skydome, supported by The Linda Lindas, Rancid, and The Smashing Pumpkins. What a great show, even if the sound was mostly garbage thanks to the cavernous venue. The Linda Lindas, an all-girl band from LA (who make an appearance in Born Innocent by the way), were delightful — the oldest member of the band is 19, the youngest, 13; they may have played to a mostly empty Skydome but they had the best time. Rancid was an odd band to see at 6PM. And the Smashing Pumpkins, a band I do love but have never enjoyed live because their wall of sound never seems to mix very well outside the studio, actually played some of their big hits. Kudos to Billy Corgan for living the line “the world is a vampire” to the fullest — he really is embracing the Nosferatu vibe.
Green Day is one of those staple bands in our household — Hazel and I loved them in the 90s when Dookie dropped, and our kids loved them too, spinning American Idiot a lot in the 00s, which Hazel and I also loved. Last night they played for two and a half hours straight, not even a break between albums, and I have to say, they still got it (whatever it is). Impressive to hear them play two albums that are quite different — and that helped to define two different decades. The first time we saw Green Day over ten years ago, it was around the same time I also saw Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. The aftermath resulted in something of an early mid-life crisis. I’m not having the same reaction this time around, maybe because it has finally finally dawned on me that Billie Joe, Mike, and Tré are all my age, and age, like everything else, is just a concept. And like I said, they still got it. I also loved how much Reid and Cole enjoyed the show — their experience hearing those two albums was as much about time and nostalgia as it was for me, but with their own unique takes. Reid in particular had a great time, since he was granted floor seats (I’m sure you can see him in the photo above, taken from my nosebleed seat) to the show after a chance run-in with Mike Dirnt in the coffee shop at 401 Richmond a few months back one morning before work. It was a morning after his own band had covered a deep Green Day cut at one of their shows. Which is pretty terrific.
In terms of these many cultural references I’ll let you decide what is hi and what is lo.
Meanwhile, I confess I’ve been pondering what Jaybook is, and what Jaybook might do, wondering if should be more than simply a recap of my week. Maybe it should be a bit more than I POST THEREFORE I AM. I’m thinking about it. This is likely because one of you lovely people actually paid for a subscription, which I forgot was something that could happen. This both surprised and delighted me, since it suddenly added a new layer of value to this whole enterprise. But it has also forced me to consider the notion of value from this end too. Of course, it also occurs to me that I should stop thinking that my life has no value.
FIRE SALE
Speaking of value, I’ve decided to have a bit of a fire sale of some of my books, copies of which were unearthed during our basement carpet fiasco. I will list them below with some anecdotes about each title. If there is anything here that you’d care to own, please message me directly and we will make it happen — while supplies last! I will even throw in a copy of some embarrassing piece of juvenilia, for nothing.
THE GHOSTS OF JAY MILLAR (Coach House Books, 1998). Trade Edition. My first collection of poetry, published by Coach House Books after Victor Coleman invited me to submit a manuscript. The book is admittedly very weird — full of youthful energy with a large cross section of influences. The book is broken up into five sections that have specific themes (trees, dreams, love, etc), and are written by five different imaginary poets — Conwenna Stokes, Alex Cayce, James Llar, H. Azel, and John Elliott. The date on the copyright page says 1998 but it took two years to publish the book due to the shifting ground at the publishing house at the time, and because the initial idea was to publish the entire text on line for free, and produce a limited edition artifact collectors could buy. Part of the shifting ground at CHB had to do with abandoning this model, which meant trying to get the book from its limited edition framework into a trade book. Which took two years. $10.00
THE GHOSTS OF JAY MILLAR (Coach House Books, 1998). Limited Boxed Edition. This of course is the original edition of the book, which was so hilariously expensive to produce it made little sense for a debut poet. Who would buy this thing by an unknown poet for $100? But a number of the boxes had been made, so a handful — maybe forty or fifty, were produced. The hand-made boxes have nothing on them, and neither do the covers of each of the booklets with the exception of a stamped figure at the lower right of the front cover. Looking at it from the outside with no context you could be looking at anything. Sometimes it looks to me like a computer manual. $30.00
MYCOLOGICAL STUDIES (Coach House Books, 2002). This is my contribution to conceptual writing, but rather than choose a more mathematical or formal procedure, I landed on something organic. For thirty years I had a strange job collecting data on white-footed mice for a population biologist. And one day in the woods, there were suddenly mushrooms everywhere, prompting, as mushrooms can, a certain curiosity. Mycological Studies uses concepts from the biology of mushrooms as its compositional framework. Fun fact: I read a section of this book at the Scream in High Park, a now somewhat forgotten literary festival that took place on the Dream in High Park stage back when the hill was just a hill in front of a stage — I was the final reader of the night and I like to think that I induced something of an hallucinatory state among the few hundred people in attendance (I know I experienced it myself). Another fun fact: No mushrooms were harmed in the writing of this book. $10.00
THE SMALL BLUE (Snare Books, 2007). If confessional poetry is just journal writing with line breaks, this was an experiment in that arena. Using a notebook of blank pages I kept jot notes randomly that were eventually shaped into a series of numbered lyric poems. When the sequence was finished I read it through and removed the poems that I felt didn’t “have it,” but left the numbers in sequence. The editor at Snare demanded poems under those numbers lest the world (the whole world?) think he did something wrong, so I wrote poems by googling The Small Blue (a badly translated line from a poem by Apollinaire, by the way — le petit bleu) and using the results to shape poems a la flarf (if you don’t know flarf poetry loom it up, it’s hilarious). In doing so I discovered that the small blue refers to a small butterfly, but also to a cluster of stars. I will never read the flarf poems out loud. $10.00
ESP: ACCUMULATION SONNETS (Book*hug Press, 2007). Thanks to Ted Berrigan, I love a sonnet that isn’t a sonnet. This is another notebook project, using a cheap coiled notebook (the same kind I used when collecting mouse data) that had 15 lines on each page. I gathered language that I received through my days, accumulating each poem out of scraps and their echos. I decided that a sonnet is in fact a fifteen line poem if you include the title — my sonnets simply don’t make a classist division between their heads and their bodies. The final book has four sections of 13 poems, because 13 is a powerful number and four 13s makes up a full alphabet, lowercase and capital. After the book was (self) published, I was invited to read from it in NYC by another publisher who claimed to have publisher’s envy for the collection. $10.00
FALSE MAPS FOR OTHER CREATURES (Nightwood Editions, 2005). After two books with Coach House, I published this collection of “twenty-first century nature poems” with Nightwood Editions. This was meaningful to me because Nightwood is what became of Blewointment Press, a publishing enterprise run in the 60s and 70s by bill bissett. Bill was recently awarded the Order of Canada — he is a national treasure. I had met bill in London Ontario in the early 90s, and doing so had a profound effect; he was my gateway drug into poetry and publishing, which for me started simultaneously. False Maps is the first issue from Nightwood’s blewointment imprint, which they began in order to pay homage to their own history. I thought was so lovely to be the first out the gate, given my own history. $10.00
OTHER POEMS (Nightwood Editions, 2010). This is a grab bag of occasional poems, some of which had been published as micropress editions over the years. Other Poems is perhaps so occasional I sometimes forget this book exists! Which is a terrible thing to say as an author. It is something of a miscellany, described as a box of photographs in a thrift store. But it definitely has some classic jams in it. It also has some super weird artwork by my old friend Rob Lemon that help to set the atmosphere. $10.00
TIMELY IRREVERENCE (Nightwood Editions, 2013). If Other Poems is an unstructured grab bag, Timely Irreverence was an overly complicated manuscript. Because of ESP, I became aware of the poem’s title as a thing — there was something contained in it, and the reader then had to make a leap over a little chasm to discover its purpose. I also loved a little anecdote I’d read about Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett trading notebooks with titles they had written at the tops of pages for each other to compose poems under, something I had also done with another poet in the 90s. So I stole ten titles from poetry collections on my shelf (titles are not under copyright) and placed them at the tops of pages, and wrote poems under them. Sometimes I worked with the title, sometimes against it. When I had the ten poems done I stole lines from each of those poems to title the next ten. And kept going until I had 100 poems. It took a while. And when I sent the manuscript to my publisher he asked me why I’d sent him three books. He tore the manuscript apart and re-ordered things, creating a much shorter manuscript that became Timely Irreverence. Echos of that original structure still remain, which I love. $10.00
And finally, I still have some copies of Offline available, a small book that took me about three years to write. Filled with wisdom and nonsense (mostly wisdom). In the end, they are simply more thoughts in a world filled with thoughts. $10.00
Thanks for reading! You’re terrific. And I hope you have a fantastic weekend.