We're In The Movies (High Rez)

Here.
So high, I can't even see it. Don't have the proper software. QuickTime 7. But you can, hopefully.
And here, if you don't have the software either.
And for those who have just arrived, I'm referring back to this.

Sheet Music

Click on each of the sheets and you'll get a larger image that you can make larger still with yet another click. The music is perhaps unnecessarily complicated. I didn't know how to simplify it. (A lesson in how complexity can sometimes indicate a dearth of skill...)
p.s. I should mention that this sheet music was first published, hard as that may be to believe, in This Magazine.

'Nuther Armstrong

The other was recent. This one is a portrait of me, from about 20 years ago...

We're In the Movies (low rez)

Here it is. A gift from Kat on my birthday. The compression leaves something to be desired, but we'll fix it later. And here's the stand-alone. A slightly better quality one will be up soon.

We shot this last winter. Kat found a dancing school that gave us permission to shoot their class.

I know, I'm such an effing greaseball in it (I'm almost glad the compression makes the quality poor - it's as grainy as a cheap porn movie, or I suppose I should say as digitized), but it was only meant to be a demo for a more sophisticated, shampooed and made-up short film, starring Michelle Girouard and E. J. Scott, a bunch of kids and summer, and some underwater ballet dancers - I wasn't even going to be in it at all (except my banjo, my banjo was going to be in it), but the Bravo Fact people took one look at our CVs (playwright/documentary filmmaker) and didn't even look at the demo. They returned our application virtually unopened. I suppose I can't blame them. Anyway, if they had looked at the demo, they might have been horrified by my Charles Manson hair.

The bass player who magically appears is James Thomson.

The song 'We're in the Movies' was written by a character named Priya in my play/novel The Girls who saw Everything, (soon to be published by a small press near you, or rather, near me) who is a girl in Montreal, part of an exclusive book club, who imagines an audience following her wherever she goes, and uses them as a spur to write her songs. The video was going to be about that.

This one, the demo, is more about the images in the song itself. It's nice enough, except the greasy, growly vocalist. The filmmaker is clearly a master, and I have at least one friend who has expressed horror that I've taken advantage of her to put my little song on video. What can I say though? The little demo was a Valentine's Day present, and now the online version is a birthday present. In case you can't make them out, here are the words:

No matter what we do we will always be young
like a book where you're always going back to page one
say we're chased by a killer high tail it and hide
he sees us he runs in he's gone

then the future creeps by with its executive.
but we know that to work is the death of to live
till a man comes along from...
builds a marquee up above um...

sets up a booth sells tickets to our youth
cause we're young
and we're young
and we're young!

but for me though it's much different from that
no matter what I do I will always be old
I might swim and win medals (always be old)
know the rules of resistance (always be old)
tread on the boards send letters of love
still old in a raincoat old on a bicycle
Riding past the marquee...
(With a film from the past two thousand BC)

And I'm young I'm 19 when I look at that screen
But I'm old
and I'm old
though I'm young!

At the end of the film there's so much to discuss
As we try to figure out just what happened to us
Did we win? Stay together? Did we cry? Did we pray?
Did we find we worked hard by the end of the day
Were we good? were we ill? in the movie, did we kill?
A conviction, an appeal, was it fake, was it real
Or maybe we just got one heck of a deal,
And if you want more well there's always to-
morrow and tomorrow (if to-
morrow comes tomorrow then to-
morrow can be borrowed for to-
day, that's our way), cause..

No matter what we do we will always be young
like a book where you're always going back to page one
cause a man came along from...
built a marquee up above um...

set up a booth sold tickets to our youth
cause we're young
and we're young
and we're young!

Albert Polman

It's my birthday and I'd like to pay tribute to my greatest teacher, Albert Polman, who died Tuesday evening of a heart attack on the couch of his Brantford home. I saw him this summer, visited him on a whim, with Kat, who tells me she could see how special he was in that one brief visit. I'm so glad I saw him. I'm glad he never had to vacate his art-filled kingdom, with it's vast lawn covered with trees and statues of little animals and icons of St. Francis.

And as fellow student Laurie Armstrong (whose image is reproduced above) wrote in her message to me about it,

Cheers to my fiesty, eccentric and ultimately lovable Sir!

Go visit the people that reminds you of.

p.s. when I visited him, he told me that in 92, a couple of years before he retired from teaching, he got very depressed. He was depressed for ten years. Then one morning, about 3 years ago, he woke up and it was over. He was full of the brio and zorba of life again. So the last three years were full of projects and his only regret was his age-old one that there just weren't enough hours in the day.

Megaphone

I just got one. On ebay. I was going to illustrate this post with a photo (because why would I not?) but, for some reason, my browsers won't let me upload or link photos anymore. Am I being punished? Have I been abusing the system? Did somebody rat on me to the Blogger gods?

When I told the head of the acting program about my new purchase, she wrote back,

You WHAT?!!!! Do you really want one for yourself? Of course, you'll be loud but that's OK - I don't intend to be next door! Let someone else suffer!!!

Funny, hey? Now I have a megaphone. What better singing teaching tool can there be than a megaphone? Just ask Tom Waits.

Conspiracy

I keep trying to say thank you to Kanye West too but my browser won't let me...

Instruments

For next Tuesday's start, I have two harmonicas, three tin whistles, a wooden flute, two glockenspeils (of sorts), a drum, a broken lute, a mandolin that you can strum but not fret, a flute, a clarinet, my banjola, my banjo, (the glockenspeils are mine too), um, a recorder, a very crude fretless banjo made from a gas can (my personal favourite of the borroweds), a child's violin (my personal second-favourite of the borroweds), um, a small set of pan pipes. Several poetry books including the Oxford Book of Ballads and the collected works of E.E. Cummings, sorry, e.e. cummings, and a small selection of small poems from Arab Andalusia. As well as two or three books of poems by Jan Zwicky, Michael Ondaatje, Michael Redhill, and some others. Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Louis Riel, D'Arcy McGee, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva. Poem-books are musical instruments too. You know.
Still looking for an electric megaphone. Apparently there are ukuleles and a piano and some keyboards at the school.
So maybe it's going to be okay. Pretty funny though that that manolin is in such bad shape. When I first strung it you could play it below the fifth fret. Now you can't play it at all. Ah well. I'm going to have a mighty orchestra. And a childn't (what happened there? childn't?) child's violin is far less intimidating than an adult violin. Esp since the bow is broke, so I've just got the instrument itself. "Teaching is just improvising on the theme of truth." I wonder if that's still true with a broken mandolin.

Answers to Recent Banjo Banjar Mysteries

Just found out who the Girl Banjo photo was of. Though I can't seem to open her own web page. Ooops. Just did it. Can't find any banjo on the audio stream. But I do like the song The Golden Dream. The photo is from the back cover of a 2000 CD called Distillation apparently. Still doesn't explain how she got those fluevogs. I have the exact same pair, but mine are plain black with some white thread to subtley indicate the pattern. I wanted to get the colourful kind, like the ones she's got, but I got talked down by the person who accompanied me to the Fluevog store in Vancouver in September 1999. If you're out there and you know who you are, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.

No. It was my own fault for being impressionable. The Malleable Personality. That was, as it turns out, the subject of my Trampoline Hall lecture. As opposed to Banjos and frogs.

(oops. I've been accused on my Banjos and frogs post of being a

It's interesting, considering the image that I stole was actually stolen by them first - since I have the original image of that frog playing that banjo in beautiful print from this book, for Hance Brothers and White throat lozenges - from the 19th Century. The print is a photo of a 3-dimensional window-display ad. Let me see if I can find the picture. Oh. here it is. My favourite pic of a frog and a banjo.)

But back to Fluevog, I'm wondering if the shoemaker himself is still asking people to write 500 word essays called 'How I saved Mister Fluevog from the clutches of the devil', or some such thing, in exchange for fluevogs for life. These shoes, such as what Erin McKeown and I have (mine more conservative and hers less) are called 'Angel shoes.' It's because they have the image of 19 angels on the sole of each shoe, if you can believe it. Treading on angels. Or at least treading with the moral support of angels. That's what M. Fluevog would have us do...

Banjo to the Pole

Hussey's banjo recitals were a feature in the swift raising of spirits: 'Had a go at the old Banjo. The Boss came in, he looked very old & grey - & pleased to hear the music & songs'. And although a glance in a mirror gives the usually optimistic Hussey pause for thought ('I do look a tramp!'), from only a few days after its gloomy beginning the journal manifests the extraordinary confidence and belief that characterised the expedition's survival: 'We're all very cheerful & contented'.

One of Shackleton's men on his expedition. I had no idea. His diary was up for auction I guess.



And more from this site:

James, in Shackleton's tent, "did some physics trying to recall some of my theory work," but soon tired of it. The occupants of Wild's tent had to shift their sleeping bags because the heat from their bodies was melting the snow, robbing them of this last bit of comfort offered by a dry place to sleep. Even Hussey's banjo lost its appeal for some. McNeish complained: "Hussey is at present tormenting [us] with his six known tunes on his banjo."

Another One More

And thus I have cleared the backlog in my image file for the 'jar.

One More

Monkey Banjo

Girl Banjo

Boy Banjo

The Painterly Arts

Patent Art

Teaching

I was recently expressing fret and worry to my old friend Jan Zwicky about the fact that I'm coming up to a semester of teaching for the first time ever, that I don't feel exactly qualified about what I'm going to teach and that I don't know how to organize the program. She wrote back:

"Teaching is just improvising on the theme of truth. You'll do great."

Gravity's Banjo

It has been suggested that I adapt Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as an opera, since Laurie Anderson cannot accept Pynchon's limitation that it be composed for solo banjo.

Since I wish it to be no secret that I am a lifelong fan of Ms. Anderson's oeuvre, I'd like to submit, in support of her desire to expand the musical palette, that we make a counterproposal to the effect that Gravity's Rainbow be composed for banjo and fiddle, a sibling match if there ever was one.

Speaking of sibling matches, those two look related, don't you think? Look at those eyes! Look at those noses! Look at all those beautiful shoulders! Thomas Pynchon! Have you got an illegitimate daughter? Is this the nature of your challenge? Sew a cambric shirt? Seed an acre between the salt water and the sea strand? Compose an opera for solo banjo? Reunite the daughter and the father? What are you afraid of, Mr. Pynchon? From whom are you hiding?

It's time to stop running, step out of the shadows and declare your paternity.