You've reached the LiveJournal of Rowan Lipkovits, renaissance man of letters about town. I don't maintain A Homepage (typically in its place leaving a link to a Google search of my unique name combination), but this LJ most likely is the closest I get.

Someone asked me recently in the Fall of 2006) "what I do" (with that weighty implied subtext for a living), and I had to take a few moments to ponder my various cultural (mis-)adventures, literary and musical, through inception, promotion, production, and performance. Finally, I remarked that while I do a number of things, their sum never seemed to quite pay the rent¹. "Ah, then you must be an artist." I don't know about that, but I'm certainly no businessman.

First and foremost these days, consider me a musician. It's been a long and winding road that's delivered me back here (video games -> ANSI art on BBSes -> poetry slams -> event production -> Britney Spears on the accordion) but if you see me about town, there's a good chance I'm heading to a rehearsal or gig of a) the Joey Only Outlaw Band, b) the Creaking Planks, or c) Trev's "Good Rockin' Tonite" for the '80s at 8. (Truth be known, the majority of my performances are solo guerrilla mindbombs on the accordion, but how tacky does it look to be hyping yourself on your journal? Hey guys, you've gotta come visit my website! It's ... uh, oh, you're already at it. Never mind, then.) My performance adventures have taken me to at least a hundred stages across five provinces, two states and the District of Columbia, and I've also recorded and performed in a backup capacity with Sight Unseen, the Devils With Blue Dresses On, Leah Abramson, Shane Koyczan's Dangling Participle (with Jaren and Jess Hill -- what a dream team!), That's My Brain... And You're Killing It!, da Bjorkman, Monsterdinosaur, Adriane Lake, David Roy Parsons, Bobby Richards, Peppersprey, Gunshae (... and informally with dozens more.) One of my medium-term goals (of admittedly mixed value) is to become personally synonymous with accordion use in Vancouver -- a stiff row to hoe in the home turf of Geoff Berner! (First step accomplished: now one half of the proud team behind the weekly Accordion Noir radio show, 2-3 am 9:30-10:30 pm Fridays on CO-OP 102.7 fm (or at your leisure via podcast!) Update! Now also the host of the Main Squeeze monthly accordion circle 2nd Tuesdays 1st Thursdays at the Little Mountain Studios the Salt Spring Coffee Co. at Main + 27th also Spartacus Books!!)

On the third Friday now Tuesday of every month I host the long-running unplugged "57 Varieties" open stage / variety show, 8-10 pm at Spartacus Books. (In addition to my various roles at the Butchershop (I like the title "mascot"), I also enjoyed a long stint as performer coordinator for the Living Closet. I spent a spell helping to run the Vancouver Song Slam at Cafe Deux Soleils with Trevor Spilchen, was the Vancouver agent for the Perpetual Motion Roadshow, and also helped to produce Jeff Younger's Alternative Worlds series of improvised music. I had hopes to get together some like-minded people and do more, more, much more in 2007. But 2008 may just have to do.)
I write, have written and will write, for among other places the Capilano Courier, Terminal City, Momentum Magazine, the Columbia Journal, everything2, MobyGames, and BeyondRobson. It started with poems but thank goodness seems to have settled into the self-indulgent (vestiges of the poetry background) essay style known as "creative non-fiction." (Most recently up 06-02-12: dig my cover story on the B:C:Clettes in the Dec/Jan issue of Momentum 07-01: review of Reading the Riot Act in the Columbia Journal!) 07-04-12: a survey of homelessness as played in videogames up at the Cultural Gutter!) 07-05-31: a history of speedrunning, also at the Gutter! (more to come from there) 07-06: Piece on UNARC's Tipping Point potlucks in the Tooth and Dagger to complement my T.Paul obit the previous issue! Not quite at my goal of a published piece per month, but I have a good chunk of the year to try to even out that disparity. Two more pieces just sitting in the queue! (And, it seems, stubbornly stuck in that hopper. So much for that resolution!)

I ride my bike most everywhere I can, and in the interest of being reachable by anyone who might want to find me (why hide from opportunity?), have similarly (all right, not so similarly) strewn the internet with half-completed profiles and half-baked presences on as many sites as I can -- Wikipedia, Flickr, MySpace, Friendster, Tribe.net, Orkut, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Last.fm, Nexopia, Tagged, Buzznet, Zaadz, Gazzag, hi5, Hyves, Bebo, Plaxo, CyWorld, FotoLog, Naymz, Tabber, Virb, the Impersonals, OKCupid, Upcoming.org, 43things, Deviantart, SITO... etc. The worryingly-named ex.plode.us seems to do a half-decent job of consolidating those furtive scatterings, if you're a lumper and not a splitter, or ProfileLinker or Mashable (or the equally-distressingly-titled Profilactic) if you prefer.

... and so, if you would like to, uh, connect to me in some fashion... please feel free to. (Stalkers... start your engines!) Historical nicknames include Cthulu, Pseudo_Intellectual, UnwashedMass, Rasputin and, well, a plethora of others. I was one of three charter members of the Work Less Party, and sit on the board (albeit nominally) of the Vancouver Poetry House! (mascot, again.)

(anything you need to know about this journal? the short answer is: heck no! It's all available to the public (this is what I mean by "extimacy") and you certainly don't need to justify your existence or qualify your appearance to me. You want to read what I have to say? Great: I want to talk to interested people.) (Doesn't hurt when they're interesting, too, but don't let your doubts hold you back -- I can judge that for myself well enough 8)

That'll have to do for now! (oh, "that's all")

(follow-up: the livejournal name and quote; then the potted bio explication.)

( Would you believe he's using footnotes now? )

In the meantime, we will comparison-test some flavours of free website traffic counters.

finalising preparations for the Van Accordion Festival Thurs (at Spartacus) and Fri (at the Railway) ... none too soon! Full info at http://ping.fm/xeFEo

that I mentioned that I was helping to produce a festival in association with my radio show.

Well, now we're finally getting around to circulating press releases and promoting the sucker! <-- Please note, as it was already overlooked at least one: that is a link to the full details! Many if not most of you readers here are out-of-towners and hence won't be able to play too big a role in the upcoming weekend of fun, but I suppose this can at least serve as a reminder that the podcast is available wherever you are with your internet access (and that it doesn't have to be a strictly one-way exchange! Two of you on my LJ friends list (to say nothing of those of you lurking on Facebook -- hi, sharks!) have been guest DJs, and there's plenty of room for more as long as you can observe our show's sole criterion 8) ... If nothing else you get a heads-up that live cuts from the festival may turn up on future installments of the podcast. Cheers!

Should the singular form of "pierogi" be pierogus?

Deep, meaningful thoughts like this keep me up at night.

(or as I'd have put it when finding my way around everything.blockstackers.org, "always looking forwards, never looking up")

If memory serves correct, I brought this postcard back with me from a gallery after my pilgrimage to Assembly '99. I suppose the primacy of the future is preferable to the opposite.

I'd like to perform an autopsy on my notes and discuss the tour with you (now plus a bonus Tofino weekend, soon plus a Robson Valley festival stop, soon plus a handful of further dates on a second tour possibly leading directly into a visit to Portland!) but between catch-up and the hatching of schemes laid long ago there's just no time. I'm playing at the Railway Club tonight with the Planks (last, likely starting around midnight) and yet have you heard a peep out of me? No, the big news of the day is Geoff Berner (the man who revelatorily demonstrated the un-champagney possibilities of accordion music to me opening for a Dan Bern show in the Britannia High School auditorium) headlining the 1st annual Accordion Noir festival October 3rd at the Railway Club with Natasha Enquist, Amy Denio, and the Creaking Planks. Score! Consolidating the different realms of my life has always been a streamlining goal. Now I just need to get a poster together, turn the poster into a t-shirt, and come up with a Planks album to release at the show. No problem -- I have almost a month and a half!

Also: Manitoba.

LiveJournal, you are so scandalous and inappropriate the Internet terminal at the Nanton Public Library won't let you pass its filter. After a month on the road I've had just about enough excursioning, thank you very much, but more are coming up in the weeks (mostly weekends) ahead. First, some local business: a visit from a Roland V-Accordion rep at the squeezebox circle tomorrow, then the Planks play a smutty set at the Penthouse on Sunday!

I need to catch up with some of you, pronto, since you won't be around (town) for long, while I may still be puttering around the same projects this time next year that I was five years ago.

It's a bit disheartening to see how few and far between my missives here are when I'm not promoting events. (It's a bit disheartening to not have been promoting events! And now that my regular venue, Spartacus Books, is back in business at its new location -- 684 E. Hastings -- I'm disappearing for two months. Timing!)

I have excuses: I have been busy -- since I was disappearing for the rest of the summer, June was my last huzzah with the Creaking Planks for a while, so we milked every weekend as best we could. Big crowds, new audiences, old friends, new songs, prestige, and even a few dimes and quarters. Things have been going well with the CPs as we've all about figured out the ropes and found our groove; we should be doing a couple of shows in August during my cameo visits to town between festivals and steamrolling right along in August with a new album in the eaves!

I have more excuses: I've been sick. The day after May's piratey Velofusion party (let's see that poster one more time... new father Ivar remarked on TABNet, har har, "I swear I've seen that graphic before -- Don't you feel bad about using imagery stolen from another copyright owner?") I had a terrible sore throat and chalked it up to avoiding feedback at the Anza club by eschewing monitors. My whole ear, nose and throat region was in disarray anyhow due to my annual incapacitation through allergies (allergic to what? I get no more specific than "plants fornicating in my head") and it wasn't until some time later, when the weather ramped down and the vegetable orgy turned off that I realised that my sniffles and sneezes had been smokescreens for some sort of wretched coughing cold business the likes of which I typically only get after Greyhound trips to Portland. Just as I felt virtually over the cough the weather turned back up and the hot plant-on-plant action resumed... and there I've been for a lousy month, only realising too late that sickness is not a good condition to be in at the start of a two-month tour. I've taken to power-loading grapefruits and stifling coughing fits with diminishing daily doses of Neo-citran, but I still need a packet at the start of the day and one before bed to keep the hacking paroxysms at bay.

Then there's the typically delayed excuse (oh, that), flying under the radar: I've been seeing a new ladyfriend (I'm as shocked and surprised as you are) intensively since we get along like a house on fire (finally, I meet my musical Marxist match!) and I'm about to disappear on the road on tour for a duration approximately the precise length of our total acquaintance to date. She initially asked me not to mention her on my blog (to do which, I'd have to be writing here, period!)... maintaining a conspicuous omission here however would start to feel kind of like I had a kept woman or was conducting some sort of illicit liaison with a mistress, so I had to come clean. Now you know that any casual allusions to a female in the third person will no longer refer to my most recent ex (, who may have married in the interim, but I am pleased to report that she did not manage to carry a baby to term with her new husband in the time it took me to finally kiss someone else.) I probably will not be discussing Jennifer at great length here as I am told that her prurient mother will no doubt be lurking in the general vicinity of my LiveJournal updates through Facebook.

(Some beans she might rather I not spill are that we met through OKCupid, which I've been chastely a member of since the Pimpin' Cupid days back before it WAS OKCupid. After, gosh, nearly a decade there with one friend to show for it -- hi, rumi_fish! -- I took a radical step: I looked up the single local rated most compatible with me and suggested that we might get along were we to interact. Scandalous! Has it been this easy all along?)

So now that I've brought you up to speed I've got to head out for the return of the Vancouver Squeezebox Circle... I'm hoping to spearhead a small accordion festival in town in September (as with the ANSI art gallery exhibition, but that's grist for another post) and I desperately need to plant some seeds in some heads before I hit the road in two days. Tomorrow night I play with the Outlaw Band at the Royal Unicorn Cabaret, then we head for Calgary, Winnipeg and other such points east.

Update: immediately after hitting "send", as per its described modus operandi, I got hit by Project Upstream's Salmon Bot on AIM. The shit disturber in me likes the idea of TheGreatHatsby and its surreal-terrorism ilk, but I understand that it makes the internet a confusing place, so consider this note a public service announcement of sorts.

A beautiful day concluded with a wonderful concert, unhampered by any such qualifiers as "given the circumstances" or "despite our setbacks". I also get the supplementary glow of not only feeling like I delivered a good set as a performer but the producer's sense of holistic well-being for putting all the puzzle-pieces on the table and having them reveal a beautiful picture, interlocking effortlessly.

Though the sheer promotional power of Facebook remains unclear (as it is apparently full of bullshit artists -- but don't worry, we love you anyway despite your misleading lies regarding attendance; after all, it's unfair to take anything on the internet too seriously 8) we still managed to fill every chair in the building with a little bit of spillover on the floor! I often feel the Planks do ourselves a bit of a disservice giving it all away as often as we do, since we can really feel the draw from performers such as Eryn Holbrook when they only do one performance a year. (All the same, that music deserves to be heard by more people, so unless the single engagement is at Richard's on Richards, I ought to find a way to make more, if not larger, audiences available to her. That or find a way to turn her into an internet star. Again.)

Heather's suggestion of Ehren Salazar as an opener was an unmitigated stroke of genius, since we do so much work at that location with him on site anyhow. If you were conversing with Oscar Wilde in the room, wouldn't you invite him over to contribute a few bon mots? His improvisatory instincts for deadpan confabulation along with his gut timing of the slow reveal and the deft surprise interweaving of running gags combine to make him one of the great comic masterminds of our age. I should really get on him for a return to the Hidden Agenda performance series he hosted. (And then there's his none-too-shabby singing voice (and, uh, mouth trumpet) as well as sufficient skills on the gee-tar to get him where he's going, not that even he knows. And as if this embarrassment of skills wasn't already sufficiently humbling, the man can render a drawing to make Gustave Doré cry.) Another case of "if I don't book the man, how is the world supposed to revel in his genius?"

Eryn's set could not have been more different from Ehren's... we gave her the central set in a night of what was essentially well-executed musical comedy, and she swung us gently but firmly right on around to the very other end of the spectrum, where you have to listen carefully to every nuance because her serious work is both musically more challenging and rewarding than our little parlour tricks (well, and Travis' big parlour tricks 8) I can only frame it in terms of refreshing contrast, like hopping out of the sauna and rolling around in the snow; bracing, invigourating, and ultimately complementary... though not immediately apparent as being so. In the future I'd like to place her in a setting with more fitting musical peers (because come on, the CPs don't really fit anywhere... about the closest we've ever come is Thursday night at Radha, demonstrating a kind of intermediary evolutionary step between the consummate musicianship of Dyad and the bombastic spectacle of Hank & Lily) but that would mean a return to my earlier principled stand against nepotism (yeah, because it's not like Eryn and I are old cronies or anything) and a willingness to forego the Plankian draw of the most compelling stage presence at my disposal. (Gosh, I'd have to actually have faith in the acts and promote the show seriously!) Maybe I can compromise and resume restyling the Planks into a demented backup band of sorts for her come September. (And you thought Shawn Killaly made for a distracting background!)

Speaking of distraction, Travis has a great patter for his magic act, the rewarding stuff taking place while he's apparently just setting the trick up. I guess magic is all about manipulating where and when the attention is (and is not) focused, and must yield all sorts of revelatory insight for anyone who ever hopes to spend any time on a stage. A bit more direct light would have made the tricks a lot more impressive, but despite its sweet little stage (and lovely haunting Erik Lyon backdrops) it's obvious that the LMS was never designed to be a performance space. I also often wonder how we've managed to do so much work with him on the uke and steel guitar while so rarely dipping into his limitless reservoir of totally engrossing legerdemain. It's like finding out that you've assigned Frank Lloyd Wright to your brick-making crew. Maybe we can find a better use for your skills...

With guests and various recent prodigal sons, this was possibly the largest Planks turnout ever, trumping our small army at the corner of Broadway and Main at the Swarm funeral procession in September 2006, including some unprecedented fascinating rhythmic complexity c/o our un-pirate-named guest percussionist and setlist curator... with a full rhythm section filling us out (welcoming back Rumblebucket, falling back in line so effortlessly it was as though he hadn't missed months of practices) it can leave the vocalist feeling like a cyclist pursued by a semi truck, like I felt the first time I ever performed "Baby One More Time", at Daniel Maté's "Cover 2 Cover" event at Lugz, the house band backing me up in in such a tight lock-step I was unable to shake their groove in order to transition to the bridge and just had to bail out of the song halfway through.

I'd say that things went so well that this show would be difficult to improve on, but I suppose there are some obvious categories to work on: with that full rhythm section in effect plus booming bari sax, some amplification for the smaller-voiced instruments (and singers) becomes less optional; it would have been nice to squeeze more music out of Eryn (this beautiful poster is not enough!) but I suppose it would have been nice for both her and I to not be sick and have more game to give; it probably would have been a good idea to structure things so as to enable the collecting of some kind of cover charge from the audience members allowing the performers to get paid (what a thing to slip one's mind! You can tell you're dealing with a real professional here... all the same, anything we could have raised from that intimate crowd would have only been a drop in the bucket toward fair remuneration for the caliber of work presented)... and, oh yes, if next time I could not be quite so consumed with the production details and allow myself to casually interact with such old friends as may turn up (and thank you for doing so!), that would doubtlessly leave me feeling more like play and less like work. (Being this goofy is serious business, let me tell you!) Starting earlier (well, closer to the advertised time) would have been a bold coup; certainly it would have gone some distance toward leaving me feeling less stranded, abandoned by public transportation and wishing I'd cab fare in my pocket (see that earlier note about collecting money) at 1 am. Oh no! I forgot to eat pizza at Baru's!

Also, if I could have done things over again, I wouldn't have left my whole stack of charts sitting neatly by the front door while jumping into a surprise ride to open the venue, late. A little slip like that runs the risk of sinking the whole ship, and made for some unuseful pre-show stress however elegantly we recovered.

Apparently Ehren recorded the Planks set from the computer behind the counter, so some documentation of it may turn up. (Did anyone take any pictures?) We're only a week into June and following two multiple-show weekends I already feel like I'm done, thanks, see you in July. Rewarding but still draining nonetheless. (Well, let's see how I feel when I'm not sick anymore 8)

Playing a Creaking Planks show tonight at the LMS with hexalyn and Ehren Salazar (and our own Dr. Steelhand performing some magic tricks) and it should be an excellent culmination of great recent performances at Radha and Velofusion. I'm doing my part to cram great CP shows in to June since I'm just not going to be hardly in town at all for July and August. Gather ye rosebuds (and sing ye Beastie Boy shanties) while ye may. Thanks to those of you who've come out to our sets lately -- it's cool playing in a band full of interesting friends but it's also nice to have pals in the crowd because c'mon, we look like jerks laughing at our own jokes. (The opposite of "sex dwarf"? "Abstinence giant"!)

... experimenting with a way to post to some dozen status updates simultaneously rather than one at a time. Getting more nothing done, faster!

is not getting people out to shows but rather getting them to ask me after the fact how the shows went (it's harder to guilt my readership when they're so disproportionally living out of town), here's a bit of recap for you:

* My solo set at the Poetry Show Tuesday night was a lot of fun, a set unusually consisting of almost (barring a request or two) entirely original tunes from me, in a couple of cases also including original words. I don't know if I was any good or if the poetry crowd is just really easy to please (prompting outsiders to question whether everyone else present was high), but my peekaboo-inspired filthy, filthy pie-eating anthem was raucously received, presented for the first time audibly in its entirety. This journal was also of great use in helping me track my glacial development as songwriter, looking back to my 2006 Word on the Street appearance, "That's My Brain... And You're KILLING It!" in 2005, and the launch of the song slam even earlier. Perhaps this set will mark my graduation from purely considering myself an entertainer and begin a new self-conception as composer (because gosh, it's not like I ever wrote any music before.) I felt bad about skipping the audience-performed play (not least because completing such a work, "by the seat of our pants", for 57 Varieties in August 2004 was among my chiefest show-business creative satisfactions) but I had a ride that needed to be up early in the morning. ( And here, for posterity, is my crowd-acted play. Nothing special -- a little proof-of-concept. )
* Thursday night was, if memory serves correct, my first Outlaw Band performance since November. Fortunately, that small slice of its set that is not sleepwalkingly straightforward has been drilled deep into my reptilian cortex through weeks of repetition on the road. The Railway Club turnout marked one of our best Vancouver crowds ever, perhaps second only to our New Year's 2007 show at the Cambie Pub. (We'll see if we can't trump it with our album launch party at the Royal Unicorn July 4th.)

* The Bicycle Shed Ensemble opened for us Thursday night and surprised me by being a fortified version of Pat's long-forgotten country-folk tunes. Their fiddler especially was sufficiently charmingly convincing to inspire me to check out their set the following day at the Bike to Work Week wrap-up festivities down at the Science World gazebo. What? And I have to eat free food and watch the BC:Clettes while I'm there? Geez, twist my arm! Then up the hill to the Velofusion sound check at the ANZA Club. This show was a homecoming in a couple of regards; not only a hello to my old Critical Mass compatriots (having been off two wheels for some year-and-a-half) and the Work Less Party show-producers, but also a welcome-back-and-howdy-do to some Creaking Planks who had been all over hell's half-acre since we'd last played together (Alex piloted his boat into town from the Sunshine Coast to play with us; John was fresh back from Wyoming; Nathaniel's peregrinations were legendary and Paul was recently out of the hospital from acute appendicitis! And, well, it's always nice to see Heather and Travis also 8) We took a crack at a semi-piratical set largely devoid of our customary A-list material and I think (based on reports from the crowd after the fact) made a good run of things with it despite failing to engage everyone's boogie drive. No problem; the DJs certainly addressed that oversight. I, on the other hand, blew my voice with subdued monitors to avoid feedback, compounding with allergies to make for a very sore and grumpy Saturday. Helps me better appreciate Joey Only's diva-like vocal preservation tendencies on the road.

* Setting up for the Break Your Freak Cabaret brought back strong Living Closet memories of green room sound check stage managing concerns. It was hard to know what to expect (the MC acknowledging the name's ambiguities: break your freak IN? break your freak OUT? break your freak DOWN?) but certainly the crazy lady power behind all the stage performances delivered the goods; highlights included the horrified horny sanitizer, Naomi Steinberg's reverse-striptease puppet show (now I'm investigating the feasibility of "Leather" on squeezebox), the tap-dance rendition of "Dancing With Myself", the biomechanical silly string cocoon hatching, and the gorilla-tree swing dancing at the zoo while no one was watching. I also got to age another year for the second time in two nights (after Ifny passed me the note at VF explaining that the Mexican Wrestlers would be in effect; and that I would be providing music for them! In four, three, two...) when I took to the stage and found to my discomfort that my relief accordion refused to make the noises I expected it to. Fortunately Tarran the Tailor had one close at hand and the show was able to go on. I found myself diverted to the basement (free soup for performers! don't mind if I do...) on my way out, as the dance party upstairs kicked into full swing, and accidentally spurred on an acoustic jam for an hour or so courtesy of the upright piano down there. I can't expect to change people's worldviews by continuing to suck the marrow out of Britney Spears' bones with the accordion (sluuurp! wheeeeze!) but it turns out that if the audience has eaten enough drugs, that may well end up happening anyhow.

Three more Planks shows at the end of this week! Egad!

Seasonal shift really is more qualitative than quantitative; whole fields of activity (such as, ahem, corresponding and journal-writing) have completely fallen by the wayside (I get the feeling that may be one of my trademark phrases, like "the horror of existence") following some relatively minor environmental changes such as warmer weather and pollen allergies. Spartacus' move is throwing both 57 Varieties and the Accordion Circle into disarray, and I can't even muster enough gumption to avoid having intended Mobygames submissions from the most obscure armpits of MS-DOS gaming scooped by others with more enthusiasm for my nostalgia. So why am I smiling? Ask Mona.

Welp, some ventures are turning up roses (rather than pushing up daisies), resulting in a whole slew of interesting gigs of various kinds hitting my calendar in a slipshod and clumpy fashion, like the myth of God creating Greece by tossing the little giblets of clay left in His hand over His shoulder into the Aegean.

* The Memelab, run by friends Mirae and Jesse (formerly of the Butchershop) is transitioning on out following closing ceremonies on the 24th, where I get to provide some accordionic accompaniment to a dance piece -- an opportunity the likes of which I haven't had since that fateful and formative West Van experience (a swimming pool, a tennis court, /and/ a go-kart track?) at a Mascall Dance fundraiser back in what must have been 2004 or so. (Beastly enough sentence for you?) I aim to take the opportunity to write a song intending to explain the whole piece, and which will of course do no such thing. I really should get on my ansi art exhibition proposal for the successors at the space, as the 10th anniversary of the final Mistigris release is rapidly approaching.

* Tuesday May 27th I get a chance to do something I don't do much these days -- play a solo set to a poetry crowd. Trevor, Chris + co. have invited me to the Cottage Bistro, where we spent so many nights rehashing the '80s at 8, to feature at The Poetry Show, a revision of the Main Street Slam. (My sympathies still lie with the beavers, but I am perhaps predictable that way. And now, an unrelated quote from "Okie Noodling", on how to avoid being gnawed by a beaver while blindly groping for a catfish nibble: "I don't know of any fish that lives above water.") I think I'll put a focus on my original musical settings of poems by others. (fb)

* Thursday May 29th the Joey Only Outlaw Band gets to play its first gig together since, uhh, November? We're headlining an Under the Volcano benefit show at the Railway Club, which promises to be an excellent alignment of good people at a good place to benefit a good cause. (fb)

* Friday May 30th is a bittersweet triumph: the Creaking Planks get to realize our longstanding manifest destiny and play to some old friends (including each other -- some Planks have been wandering the world since early Spring) at the Velofusion Critical Mass afterparty at the ANZA hall, a good fit with pirate Free Geek. (Thanks to paint.net I'm making ugly posters again and lovin' it!) Bittersweet because we get Tarkin back on our radio show this night to promote their CD launch one week later and I won't be able to be there! (fb)

* Saturday May 31st I get to debut a new piece of Britneyalia (and possibly sub in for a harmonium) at the Break Your Freak Cabaret at the Ukrainian Hall down on Georgia + Hawks.

That's five totally different sets for five wholly different contexts over a period of a week, with ongoing rehearsals for a sixth! I get a bit of a breather over the course of the week and then it all rolls back into action:

* Thursday June 5th the Planks get to play a Music Waste show at Radha with Dyad, Hank + Lilly and Ora Cogan... (fb)

* just a warmup for our "6 7 8 - a night of musical numbers" the night of Saturday June 7th at the Little Mountain Studios, aka my penance for taking so long (years!) to put a show together for Eryn Holbrook that I pay it back with interest by getting one together every year! (fb) If that's what it takes to get a chance to hear her recent compositions, it's a worthwhile price to pay. (Next up: Adri!) Also featuring a rare feature set from improvisatory genius Ehren Salazar, briefly prompting us to consider seeking out performers named Aaron and Erin for a wholly homophonic slate. "Then we could advertise it in Xtra West!"

June will be full of further shenanigans, Car-Free Day not slightest among them, and if all goes according to plan by the end of it I may well be playing the rodeo in Williams Lake with the Outlaw Band, the festival season underway (huh, plus Stampede in Calgary and two weeks with Five Star Homeless to Winnipeg and back) that may keep us out of town for much of the following two months. (We'll be back long enough to play a CD launch July 4th at the Royal Unicorn... hm, and I need to get on getting Blackberry Wood on that bill.)

And who knows -- some of it may result in my earning some money! (Generally, however, only by accident.) What I want to know is: where am I going to find the time for picknicking? (The answer to which is, sadly, most likely on the roadside during prairie highway vehicular breakdown.)

At last week's practice, Orange-Eye Saber-tooth Skipper was demonstrating technique for rhythmic performance on the paper bag learned from a library DVD, as recommended by the Rev. Lucian Rumblebucket, followed by a DIY section on playing the hambone. Portland jugglers, please take note: superficially there seems to be a lot in common between your pursuit and this percussive one. You all have hams and you all have bones, and in toto what it suggests that all you really need for a hoedown is your you.

...

Yesterday, squeezing through the silly constrained sidewalk construction-hoardings between Granville businesses I'd never patronize and the new Pit of Ultimate Doom, formerly Granville street downtown (and soon to be the station extension of the new Canada Line running direct from downtown to a place already well-served by taxis and an express bus), I had to pass a man whose goofily-oversized umbrella was so malproportioned he was having a hard time wielding it in the narrow confines of the walkway, which was, after all, only the width of the entire sidewalk. As we approached each other, I decided to call shenanigans and exclaimed to him "That umbrella is ridiculously huge!" Excitedly, he gushed "It sure is!" Way to take the air out of my sarcasm with your childlike glee, you dry moron.

...

It doesn't matter for how long I've been a recluse; walking along Commercial Drive on a sunny afternoon means that everybody will know me and that I won't know anybody. More troublingly, a lack of context and the passage of time will result in my ongoing inability to even recognize former crushes and other such romantic prospects. (My look, on the other hand, is timeless... albeit slowly greying.)

Not entirely unrelatedly: girls girls girls are crawling out of the woodwork (eek, termites! oh no, wait... phew, just girls -- I got confused by the mounds) and talking to me. Does this happen every year (a little blip on the chart I like to refer to as "Spring") or is it more an April 2008 than a mere April phenomenon?

...

There are gigs where you get paid and no one listens, and gigs where everyone listens and you don't get paid. Once in a blue moon you get both ample financial recompense and rapt attention from the crowd, but really as long as it's not a gig where you get neither, you have no grounds to complain.

This morning, during the hailstorm (I'm still holding out for a May blizzard) I tried to work out a chord transition to It's Not Easy Being Green en route to Free Geek Vancouver's press conference celebrating their achievement of the Basel Action Network's e-Steward certification. Even though my groggy arrival time meant I didn't really even get to play (not that its absence would be conspicuous -- hey, there's no accordion at this press conference... what gives?), my mere presence still compelled strangers to adopt my accordionic cause. As I like to say about FGV's adoption of the Creaking Planks as their "house band", Free Geek likes to salvage and repurpose used-up and defunct old junk... plus apparently they recycle computers.

...

One hand is in my pocket, the other carrying three library books. Ever-hopeful, the free tabloid distributors at the SkyTrain station nonetheless boldly thrust their pulp at me. Was my body language ambiguous? Did they think I might have relieved them of their rag with my mouth? I briefly considered turning around and biting one out of their grasp.

...

One last tip: before you make fun of the presumedly-telemarketing stranger mangling your last name on the other end of the line, do pause for a moment to consider that they could be calling from your bank.

In conclusion, I seem to be a curmudgeon, albeit one whose daily Eat Poop You Cat quota has skyrocketed since the mention of its Facebook app in my last lj-post.

Supplemental: if the ice-cream truck (ah, the intersection of still-snowing in the morning and ice-cream vending in the atfernoon) is going to be drumming up business by playing Für Elise, I think the operators ought to be obligated to be dressed up like Beethoven. Just sayin'.

Less head-scratching about reservations, less rigid scheduling, less perplexity at fixed alien seatmates, less bill-splitting conundra... admittedly less mint-yogurt-beef soup also, but you can't win 'em all! And while no one was sitting on our floor, I was confident that in the event of attendance beyond seating capacity (an estimated, what, dozen?) such an option would be more sanely feasible than at perhaps any time here over the past five years. While no one will be reverse-engineering in our living room anytime soon, even now post-party I think it's arguably cleaner than before the great pre-party effort to inch slowly back to acceptable. Portions of our hardwood floor have been revealed that I'd long since given up on ever seeing again! I have to thank my two roommates for helping with labour and equipment to roll back the negative changes we three have rendered upon our little ecosystem here. (As for Rufous... thanks fer nuthin'!) Perhaps the greatest birthday gift of all (though I admittedly was able to put all the wine to pretty good use) is re-establishing the reality of entertaining company here socially. I've had a couple of little forays lately, but this hammers it home. Hey!

The games portion of the function was given a bit of short shrift, especially since its first hour was essentially me alone in the house responding to the first warm day of spring by finishing preparations for the winter comfort foods of sour cream coffee cake (( someone wanted the recipe? )) and borscht. And though Blank White Cards were brought, they were never prepared for gameplay and blankly anticipate the next games night. A round of Eat Poop You Cat was conducted successfully however (interrupted only by a romp in the park) to a new crowd (yielding among others the delightful progression (Revenge is a dish best served cold -> Knives should not stink -> I pick my nose and out come knives -> I keep sneezing knives -> Knife regurgitation) and I have high hopes for its re-emergence as a part of my regular diet of free association and cognitive dissonance. (That's actually one of my unspoken 2008 resolutions, believe it or not. I know, shoot for the stars. I was thinking, someone ought to make a Facebook application for it or something but, ... oh.)

The music angle was more successful than the gaming thanks to John's inspired invitation of Rick Keating back to my living room, which he singlehandedly filled in his trademark stomp+bellow style (a king of proto-Headwater, I'm sure), bizarrely compressing the non-musicking contingent, numerically superior, into the smaller room adjacent. Like a steam whistle had been pulled and a new shift was coming on the line, Planks and Outlaws alike magically appeared en masse around 9 pm (an overwhelming and hectic period during which I found myself trapped in the kitchen for 45 minutes clutching Heather's cookies, unable to eat them or drink the batch of sangria I'd thirstily mixed as my cup was left in the other room, events elsewhere in the party reported to me by runners like a hilltop general) and a perplexing profusion of musical instruments flourished all around. Some great tunes followed, including a mellow Outlaw finale backing up David Roy Parsons on his classic "Super Happy Fun Jamboree", Accordion Noir co-host Bruce Triggs bafflingly sharing some Eugene Chadbourne on an acoustic guitar of all things (Judas!), John Barbour leading us in a round of "Kansas City Star" and Jill Binder invoking the WordJam genie and pulling some live improvised musical accompaniment to a couple of poems. Jonathan Coulton's Re: Your Brains may not be a great jam song (better now that I've de-banjofied the chords in the bridge! thanks Brooke for the hot tip, however long it's taken us to act on it 8), but its chorus certainly works well enough for a sing-along. We never did compile the songbook ("Hot Socks" will just have to wait for next year) but we still made quite a racket, the banjo especially terrifying the cat.

At the end of things we seemed to have enough food but not too much, precious little left over (except ingredients for recipes I never got around to cooking!), though I think between me and the guests we consumed more soup (three varieties!) than everything else put together. The psychedelic cupcakes will be long-remembered, and then there were Zinger's "peanut-butter pretzel nuggets", their name a greater mouthful than themselves! I was too on the fence to experiment with Josh's barbecue in the backyard (huh, looks like we already had propane in the basement!) but my big experiment this time around was making use of the bottle of red wine Cassandra handed to me after the Dybbuk afterparty (and that I carried home in a dress shoe!) to improvise some sangria. A success I think, though nonetheless I think I may well have to try that one again. Practice makes perfect!

All the necessary conversational tangents were touched upon: at different points I participated in debates about Heavy Metal comix, installing VisiCalc on a Nintendo DS, and Richard Wagner jokes. Truly somewhere between those three axes, you find me. Toward the end of the night, Qous' creepy stickers were found and happily claimed by a successful translator, and once Bruce and I canned our squeezebox shop talk (mostly his) around 1 am, the whirlwind wound down and the house was finally as quiet as it had been some ten hours prior, only with more empties in the recycle and more RAM in my computer upstairs (thanks, Josh and FreeGeek!) I missed what must have been a gorgeous Greenbelt production at Trout Lake and the swell LC-alke Salo(o)n but I think I gained more than I missed out on.

The following day is starting to wind down, and it's perhaps time for me to get on taking on that mountain of dishes before catching Joey Only and Rae Spoon at the Railway.

Thanks to everyone who came by and paid regards, though I might not be able to muster all your names from memory. If you weren't able to make it (or for more of the same! uh, though likely lower-impact) you might consider joining the Creaking Planks to-Monday-morrow around 7 pm at the Little Mountain Studios (195 E. 26th, at the old Butchershop space) playing around with friends in town for Signal & Noise (though this function is resolutely unaffiliated) or at the "57 Varieties" 4th anniversary Tuesday night 8-10 pm at Spartacus (for -- gasp! -- the last time there!)

Bad things have a way of happening when I clean (-- clearly, I ought to stop doing it.) I remember on one occasion dislodging the bathroom sink while mopping; today, I re-threaded our tangled spaghetti of cables leading up (and back down) the stairs feeding phone and internet to both floors. The layout is considerably more elegant and less trippingly now, and a thick layer of dust bunnies have been removed from a few corners where I think they have gestated undisturbed continuously since we moved in; unfortunately, despite removing the layer of grime, the pipes now seem to be blocked. (This outcome may be unrelated and coincidental -- the block also had an electricity disruption for an hour or so.)

This is coming at you from my parents' basement, where I am visiting for supper. Certainly it is convenient to have fewer distractions for that party-cleaning business (less convenient for promoting 57 Varieties, admittedly) -- suffice it to say that if you need to reach me with questions, advice, RSVPs or verbal abuse, my home phone at 604-877-1829 is currently the best way of so doing. (But not until I emerge from my parents' basement.)

(Hum, and what with the power outage, my answering machine message may be a degraded signal indeed.)

6 hours later: happily, problems seem to have resolved themselves. It may be Aaron's plugging-things-back-in juju or some other genies in the air, but here I am. And really, what more could you ask for?

I started writing about other things, but... priorities! (and deadlines!)

I celebrated a birthday^* three days ago! I was too wrapped up in my nightly musical prophecizing of the extinguishing of European Jewry to conduct much of a celebration, but on the back burner a notion was simmering to host a function of sorts celebrating after the fact. (This is so totally not the first you have heard of this!) ( Some of you extended me happy birthday wishes. ) As I said over on Tabnet, many thanks to you all and also to those silent masses who I am sure are quietly cherishing my hopes and dreams in their hearts and prayers 8)

That said, you don't have to be quiet about it! You can come over here and make a ruckus and eat banana bread. We're throwing open the doors to my place (4481 Gladstone Street ( : where is that and how do I get there? )) Saturday, April 12th for a potluck open house of food, friends, games, and large groups of people singing through the afternoon, evening and night (staggered, hopefully, since if everyone turns up at once places to sit may be in short supply.) (We? I'm not speaking in terms of Rufoustanian residents or my surely prodigious collection of intestinal parasites, but rather making reference to Portlandian visitor (and recent regular) akatchoom, celebrating a birthday of her own on April 9th, and alien resident Wyoming Johnny, fiddler par excellence and the Creaking Planks' most accomplished linguist... celebrating a great and grand end to school. Forever! From this point on, knowledge will not be gained, only lost.)

A vague schedule of events has been proposed:

• gaming from 4-6 pm (it's been too long since eat poop you cat graced these halls, perhaps some chess or Scrabble or the like (hm, do we have the necessary equipment? must investigate!) and possibly even a grand return to The Game Of 1000 Blank White Cards);
• language from 6-8 pm (storytelling, word games, conversation... okay, you got me)
• and from 8 pm until, uh, we're done, we make music (and possibly associated movement)! We're considering taking a page (the "Snazzy Portland" page) from the Portland Party Book (a pretty authoritative tome) and soliciting partycipants to submit in advance lyric and chord sheets unlocking the secret world of the best everyone-sings-along-whether-they-know-the-song-or-not songs they can come up with ... to be compiled into a little songbook for partygoers to make reference to.

We're winding up the final few days of Planks being the in-house orchestra for nightly performances of A Dybbuk (through Saturday night!), and I have to say that performing in a theatrical context is a real change of pace from our typical living rooms and back yards; once our instruments have been measured by the set designers and we've been fitted for costumes, then we could begin actually learning the music. (Then, a couple of 13-hour tech rehearsals later, we can learn where to omit the music we'd just learned. Then put it back in. Then take it back out. Could we, perhaps, try shaking it all about?) All the same I will be sad to see it go -- it's a fascinating glimpse into a kind of ("hurry up and wait!") show business ecology, with set people, costuming people, lighting people, musicians and actors all occupying very different symbiotic niches. Perhaps in another couple of years we'll have some further chance to take to another proscenium as yet another klezmer wedding band! (In the meantime we have to get a game plan together for our private pirate wedding engagement in September!)

Due to the directorial decision to situate us physically on stage for the entire duration of the play (Planks present, if inconspicuously, for I think more cumulative time than all the other actors combined!) we are given a great vantage point from which to witness, process and digest all the matters of love, faith, religion and law presented by the play's script (hi, cupton!), as well as a critical inside line on the effectiveness of certain dramaturgical decisions made to emphasize those themes. Definitely puts us in mind of prior suggestions to step up and make the Planks stage show more theatrical. (Sometimes flashing LED pasties are somehow not enough!) I hope somehow we can get our hands on footage of the cast singing and dancing to our husidl. It's definitely one for the portfolio.

Saturday night we took on some extra work and had a fuller complement of Creaking Planks deliver a set for the Panty Parade County Fair at the desperately-in-need-of-stage-management Secret Location. Things were kind of a gong show there, but they always are and it still delivered the goods -- the livestock-themed talent show / underwear fashion show was everything that one might have hoped (plus a latex tapeworm!) and following the breakdown of the pie-eating contest I can testify that all surfaces in the venue were covered in a very thin layer of pie. Beats playing to an empty room in yet another bar! At peekaboo's suggestion following the last 57 Varieties, I put on my doggerel hat and composed a rare song for the pie-eating contest -- good old-fashioned country fun that oh-so-sophisticated urbanites wouldn't necessarily look down their noses at. (Dybbuk preparations precluded any opportunities to take up her further tremendously valid country repertoire suggestions -- odds are good that you may see us pursue a more Asylum Street Spankers direction in the future.) I tried to do for competitive eating what Big Rude Jake did for nautical transportation in the Girl in the Pink Canoe because hey -- ( when else am I going to get a chance to tell radical lesbian feminists how to eat pie? ) I was hoping to make some vulgar hay from the phrase "country fair" but I was saddened to see that it was actually billed as the county fair. Alas, I'll just have to find some other way of being offensive. Had some fun catching up with Ole (no longer looking like an emancipator of the slaves), crazy Jane Panek of the upcoming Break Yr Freak show at the end of May and iffer, who has existed solely as a livejournal posting source to me for years now (and, oops, apparently not even that now! Or I have misremembered her nickname.)

When the Dybbuk wraps (in two weeks netting the Planks more than we made all last year! Still less than minimum wage, unfortunately) we have further plans unfolding, including capitalizing on the underemployed status of many of our principals by making a bold gambit for an official five-way busking license, so we can play for virtually nothing instead of for actually nothing. This month (Tuesday April 15th) is also the fourth anniversary of my 57 Varieties open stage series! Maybe I'll bake a cake. The spring membership drive is also underway down at Co-op radio, and we're trying to snag station members for Accordion Noir courtesy of upcoming specials -- we're especially proud of our Accordion Africa episode coming up on the 11th (though Bruce was too haunted to air our footage of Idi Amin squeezing the box) and are offering up snazzy buttons emblazoned with Herriman's Krazy Kat pumping a concertina to donors.

There's more to mention -- my birthday is in two days, but as I'm typically swamped I'm considering hosting some joint celebratory function here on Saturday April 12th (following likely a couple of days of intensive cleaning) and possibly folding a seed exchange into the mix -- but instead of continuing at this juncture I'm instead going to head to UBC an hour early and try to make good on my repeated attempts to capitalize on my needing to be there anyway by making use of our first nice day (what, you don't like hail?) to log a cameo appearance at Tower Beach.

Subscribers to vancouverarts (and, uh, the old Living Closet e-mail list) should now know, or at least have been reminded, that this month's 57 Varieties is coming up. (I felt weird pushing it here since so many of you are, uh, of the international persuasion.)

If you miss my words (heh, sorry about raising expectations for more with that "visiting girls at 2 am" false lead 8) much of my blogging efforts lately have been going toward the Creaking Planks website; the full account of our illustrious and storied past (ah, the gong show; ah, the McBarge; ah, the bike porn movie night; ah, Nina Hagen) may never be fully committed to the page, but I've been trying to at least give a good post for every major show we play and readers will find that my nostalgic bent ensures I take at least two steps back for every three I go forward.

Once the CPs finish a two-week run providing a live soundtrack to a UBC play (and earning more in two weeks than they made all last year!) I'm going to look at a) a last-ditch shot at seed exchange, for planters, and b) some sort of birthday potluck in the vein of my Dec. 27th people-I-play-music-with party... perhaps consolidated. Stay tuned for further information! Now however I have to dash off for a typical string of four unrelated engagements.

since I've had an opportunity to take a brisk frosty walk to visit a girl's house at two in the morning. Although that is precisely the sort of thing I'd had in mind when articulating my goal of the past half-decade or so (:"learning to say yes"), it's really been quite a long time since I'd had a chance to put it to the test with Leah, Hailey and of course Dominique. It may simply be the case that eventually women mature past their "inviting strange men to visit them in the middle of the night" phase and that all of the ladies in my social circle had simply grown beyond it (in the meantime since graduating to having fiances or at least hound dogs to remedy feelings of witching hour loneliness.)

In those days I would steal out of the house and glide through empty streets on two wheels like some (some I don't know what, my reflex penchant for grim tropes steer me towards "plague bird sailing over a neutron bomb test site") ... barring a week's loaner for June Critical Mass I haven't really been on a bike on a regular basis for well over a year (too short-term busy to undertake or commission the repairs needed to save me long-term commuting time), but just as well as I haven't particularly had anywhere to go once the busses stop, save home, and generally I can find my way back there on foot if I have to. (From Downtown please no, but I must have hoofed it from end-of-gig lights-up down near Clark + Hastings maybe four or five times over the past month alone!) Strangely, long walks seem to have been sparing my pants and shoes from wear and tear relative to pedal power (hiking and queuing for public transit also endowing me with more book-reading time also!) In conclusion, this was a post about keeping clothing in well-maintained condition, wasn't it? (I know, we have higher expectations of keeping closer to the thread at hand, but I'm not being elusive -- the visit was just a visit after all; it's just a quarter to six.)

Tuesday night's 57 Varieties turned out pretty delightfully courtesy of the crowd remaining from Wakefield Brewster's poetry master class; I decided to take last month's "literary salon" format and physicalise our casual "pass the cookies" analysis. I would just link to bring you up to speed, but for some reason the following write-up was purged into node heaven in the great iconoclastic e2 p_i beatdown (of what, 2003?):

pass the cookies (idea) rep: 8 2000-01-18 10:14:45

The cardinal rule [thank you, Pierre Coupey] of my first university-level writing class (even before the oft-cited "Show, don't tell") is as follows:

Any poem whose flow is irrevocably disturbed when the phrase "pass the cookies" is surreptitiously inserted into its lines takes itself too seriously and is too much a construction of artifice [... to pass for a poem written in a modern, contemporary and relevant voice].

Let us make a small test here:


Exhibit one: from 'Lullaby', by W.H. Auden:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
Pass the cookies;
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Prognosis: FAILED

Exhibit two: 'The Red Wheelbarrow' by William Carlos Williams:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

pass the
cookies

beside the white
chickens.

Prognosis: PASSED, with flying colours!

Please keep this hard-and-fast rule in mind next time you're worrying about your poetry coming across as overly pretentious. Keep writing, and keep looking up!