Good Friday

Woke at the crack of noon. Amazing to get that opportunity with little kids around.

When I woke, CBC was playing Bach’s “Passion of St. Matthew” and making great efforts to explain why this day, in multi-faith times, is a day off – it is, apparently, an example of faith to all the faithful. I don’t know if I buy this. Christmas has been commercialized beyond recognition and Easter is not far behind but Good Friday, the central day of the Christian faith, cannot be drawn in by marketers, the toy makers. You will, of course, note that I was not at morning service nor do I mark the hours of the passion throughout this day matching Christ’s steps to mine. But some do. Just as others mark their holy days untouched by the mall and a dinner. Should this be a day off or is it just a reminder of the past dominance of Christianity in Canadian society? We need to have another day off, for some other faith’s great moment – preferrable on the Friday before Easter.

Easter Monday I have no problem with. At university, lobbying to be excused due to religious observance was joined in by some claiming Easter Monday as a holy day but when asked what occured on the day, there was no answer. It is just Boxing Day in springtime.

Real

I don’t really know how (let alone why) I and others write this stuff – in that I wake up, have no clue, read some places I read every day and soon find myself a bit amazed how even a small review of the day in the life of a handful of people is so startling.  Compared to the seriousness of the news, the weight of things in life, and even the passage of a marker like Kurt’s suicide (not a biggie for me except as a parallel to Lennon’s murder the morning of my grade 11 Christmas English exam), this stuff should be fluff.   While it is not journalism despite how much some pretend, it still, however, has heft or connection.  

Take Ian, who I have praised here from time to time. I have followed him daily (then six times a week) through the writer’s life of thick and thin and now he’s apparently going through the junior apprentice TV writer program at Fox – the kind of thing we BA in English Lit. grads dreamed of (…err…I mean…”of which we dreamed.”) Craig’s in Australia…again…yawn. Rob1 posts an odd graphical representation of what the workplace appears to be like and then edits it but it still looks a lot like Alanis at the Junos. Shelly’s getting published and Mike is on the mend. Ben is looking for work in Georgia and Michael might be able to assist. Like Rob2, I am also following the playoffs and American Idol. I guess my gut feeling when I sit down to do this each morning before rushing out the door is that following the thoughts and experiences of ordinary folk like me must be dull. Then it isn’t.

What is the lesson?   The real news leaves you dislocated.    Heck, they even spend millions to put together Average Joe 2, hooks you in and then he goes and picks the wrong girl, the ditz. That was dull. Pretty much sent my week off on the wrong direction. Watching fake professional reality is nowhere near as satisfying as watching amateur reality. I hope Ian is paying attention.

Time Deprived

Like David, I am messed up this week with the clocks going forward last weekend. Losing one hour should not be so dramatic. I didn’t even lose sleep due to my dedication to nap therapy but coming come from work yesterday felt like leaving elementary school at 3:15 pm. Except no one was up for playing before supper. Something to do with the wearing of ties, I guess.

The Police

Early in the fall of my grade 11 year, 1979-80, I went out on a Friday night to find the house across town in Truro where Håken (that year’s exchange student from Sweden who played on my high-school soccer team with me) lived. We were meeting up to do some reasonable underage drinking and record listening. The nice lady he boarded with saw the “Support the Police” button my my army surplus coat and told me how nice it was that I was so civic minded. I explained it was a little different (as she would have if he had read the “White Dopes on Punk” one next to it) but didn’t get far into it when I quickly realized that, though 16 like us, what Håken had landed was an apartment of his own. Being European, he was very much up on his drinks and records and he was the best player we had on our soccer team (we won one game that first year) so he was good to know. Having his own apartment made him gold.

One of the groups we listened to the most was The Police who put out five albums before Sting went solo. Yesterday, when hunting out the CD for The Darkness, and also picking up the newSarah Harmer as well as the Robert Plant retrospective of his non-Zep work “Sixty-Six to Timbuktoo”, I picked up the first four Police albums on reissued 25 year anniversary CDs for nine bucks each. [I am, by the way, quite pleased with the 233 Princess Street Sunrise Recordslocation which always seems to have what I want for less than Amazon.]

So here I am, like Ian, thinking about what this music meant and means to me. For the most part, in terms of instrumentation, we were more interested in the guitar and syncopated drumming than Sting’s contribution. It was dubbed “white reggae” which was fair enough for the first two albums but starts to get wonky when you try to figure out Zenyatta Mondatta(released Oct. 1980) or Ghosts in the Machine (released October 1981).    I don’t know how many had the soundtrack to the 1983 movie Rumblefish – Amazon reviews here – by the drummer for the Police, Stewart Copland, but I did.   I also nicked the CKDU 45 of “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” for the not otherwise released b-side.  I guess I was a fan.   And why not?   The dual menace of nuclear war and impending computerization is pretty heavily layered in among all their work, Gorby was years off and Ronnie Ray Gun had the button.  Good stuff to dance to when you weren’t listening to “Da, Da, Da” or Falco.   When Sting went solo where was definitely a feeling he had done a bit of a post-Jam Paul Weller and the Style Council years – gone a bit soft, a bit recorded in the south of France.    Bruce bought those albums.    I never did.