I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-Linwood Movie Theatre, Port Dover, ON (December 4, 1999)

This is the final concert on of the 20^th century on Rheostatics Live (and I’ll be taking a short break from the Rheos concerts after this one).  Even though the site doesn’t list the venue, in the previous show they say they are playing at the Linwood Movie Theater in Port Dover.  As with every other venue, I can’t find any information about this, so I’ll just accept it as true.

The last few shows were recorded from the soundboard, so this one is a little jarring to hear the audience so loudly.  But the sound is good and clean.

They say during the show that they are going to play songs from all 10 of their albums. And they do a pretty good job.  They miss playing something from Greatest Hits (which is kind of a surprise as everyone was shouting for “Wendell Clarke.”  Unsurprisingly they do not play anything off of Group of 7, and, in what I think of as a huge surprise—nothing off of Introducing Happiness—they almost always play something from that album anyway.

The set is comprised mostly of Harmeldia and Melville songs and it’s quite a good one.
“I Fab Thee” even invites audience participation.

This show also has one of the great dialogues between fans and band.  Someone asks if they have CDs available for sale.  Dave says, yes in the lobby.  She asks if they have them anywhere else and he replies “Is the lobby not convenient enough for you, ma’am?” to much laughter.

It’s a good show to end the millennium on. And I look forward to seeing what 2000 brings in their live shows.

[READ: March 6, 2014] “We Be Naked”

I have really enjoyed Gartner’s stories in the past but this one rubbed me the wrong way from the start.  I do not like stories where language is deliberated misused and not explained.  I am fine with dialect and I am fine with uneducated narrators, but when a narrator appears educated enough yet consistently gets something wrong and there is no explanation, that story has a massive strike against it.

So when the story starts

We be naked, not nude. Something to remember as the memory of us moves into the slipstream. Nude is in the eye of the beholder, naked a true enough fact.

I thought the “we be” part was an affectation of that first line.  The rest of the language is quite beautiful.  But no, the word “be” is used as the verb throughout the story.  In more and more irritating ways: “Or demands be modest.  We not be asking…”  Ugh. So what has caused the slip in the most basic verb use that English speakers have?  Especially when two sentences later we get this beautiful piece of prose:

And lay down your arms and pick up your instruments, music being the only true and beautiful man-made thing in this world.

Well, the story begins in April 2014 (which I liked) after the collapse of the Kyoto Protocol after the Pirate Party Bombings.  For almost two years since then they be chill.  Shudder.

The narrator is apparently one of the pirates (maybe that’s why he or she can’t conjugate?).  The pirates sent out a representative, but he was overcome by Mozart and the sweet life.  They were outraged because their demands were not unreasonable: “Clean air to breathe, clean water to drink.”

Then there seems to be a passage of time of about ten years.  Or maybe it’s 18 years?

The thing that bugged me about this story initially and even on a second read was that it was so unclear about so much.  I assume the narrator is a pirate, but maybe not.  He or she who talks about reading The Decameron and Generation X and other storytelling books.  So again, why do they say “We be,” when clearly they should know better.  There is a comment that the schools collapsed and there were no children for a decade.  But still no one would revert back to so quickly.

What’s even weirder is this confusing line in a late paragraph : “If there are explosions, there are lessons learned.”  Why the sudden change to being correct, if the narrator reverts back to “we be” a paragraph later?

So yes, I was far too distracted by language to really understand what was going on in this story.  It seems to be about contemporary society and blah blah blah, but even at one and half magazine pages I lost interest half way through both times that I read it.