I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-The Horseshoe Tavern, Toronto, ON (November 08, 2001).

This is the final show for 2001 at the Rheostatics Live website.  This show is the second of eleven (11!) straight shows at The Horseshoe.  Since it was part of their Green Sprouts “week,” it is chock full of guests.

Kevin Hearn is playing this night (and a few others), but there’s also guest vocals from Sean Cullen and Gord Downie!

The recording is not quite two hours which I assume means that parts were cut off.  I mean, a Rheos show that’s under two hours during Green Sprouts week?  Unheard of.  Earlier that evening Bob Dylan was playing in town, so it seems like the early parts of the show were a bit quieter than usual.

The show stars with “Fat” which sounds like it may have been coming in from something else or that’s the intro music–hard to say exactly.  Then they play two new songs–“The Fire” (with a funny joke about someone’s folk apparatus (a harmonica)) and “We Went West.”  Then comes their first guest, Canadian comedian and songwriter Sean Cullen.  They play his Stompin’ Tom tribute/parody “I’ve Been Beaten All Over This Land.”

I love the version of “Junction Foil Ball” with th every amusing comment that a Globe and Mail reviewer described one part of the song as “a hippo jumping into a giant puddle of mud.”

There’s a very cool section that’s a Kevin special.  Songs from Group of 7 and Harmelodia: Boxcar Song, Landscape And Sky, The Blue Hysteria, Yellow Days Under A Lemon Sun, Easy To Be With You, Loving Arms and I Am Drumstein.

Then Gord Downie comes out–sadly his introduction is cut off, so we don’t get to hear what they say about him (or the fan reaction).  They start in the middle of his song “Chancellor” from Coke Machine Glow.  Then they play “Canada Geese.” And then Dave asks if they can sing one of the Rheos’ songs (“sure thing, Tim, uh, Dave”).  Ha.  And Gord sings “Take Me in Your Hand.”

There’s a great version of “Stolen Car” and they end the show with three songs from the then new album: “P.I.N.,” “Mumbletypeg” and “Satan is the Whistler.” It’s the best live version of “Satan” that I’ve heard so far–perfect whistling, and they don’t mess up the fast part at the end.

I’m sure the other ten nights were equally great.  But this is all we have to close out 2001.

[READ: May 12, 2015] “The Cafeteria”

I read this story because it was alluded to in David Albahari’s “Hitler in Chicago.”  In Albahari’s story, a character on a plane is reading Singer’s book and the person next to him asks if he knows Singer’s story about a woman seeing Hitler in New York.

Indeed, in this story, there is a woman who sees Hitler in New York, so it was a nice full circle, and I applaud Albahari for playing around with an extant story like that.

This story, translated from the Yiddish by Singer and Dorothy Straus, is set in Manhattan.  The narrator, Aaron, has lived there for nearly 30 years–about as long as he lived in Poland.  He has many friends who he meets up with in the cafeteria.  They speak Yiddish and talk about the Holocaust or the state of Israel.  He looks forward to talking with them but he is a busy many (writing novels or articles) so he can’t stay too long.

Most of the people he meets with are men, but one day a woman, who looked younger than the rest of them, appeared.  She spoke Polish, Russian and some Yiddish.  She had been in a prison camp in Russia.  The men hovered around her, listening to her every word–she was surprisingly upbeat.

She told the narrator that she had read his writing while she was in Poland.  And a few days later she invited him to her home to meet her father.  Her father had lost his legs in one of Stalin’s slave camps.  The father confides in Aaron that he wishes his daughter would marry the man who is interested in her–love be damned.

Although the woman, Esther is always on his mind, lots of time passes between them seeing each other.  He has to go to Israel and then he gets very busy.  But every time they reconnect they are pleased to talk some more.  They have fundamental differences of attitude, but this does not come between them.  He says, “Hope in itself is a proof that there is no death,” whereas she maintains that “For me, death is the only comfort.”

One day he goes to the cafeteria and sees that it has burned down.  He and his cohorts find a new place to go, but Esther never shows up at the new place.  Several months later the cafeteria has reopened and he sees Esther in there.  They resume their talks as if not much has happened.  But there are new people to talk to–with tales of Auschwitz.

A few weeks later, Esther calls him to tell him the story of how she saw Hitler in New York (I won’t spoil the details).  He doesn’t believe her and this upsets her.  And he spends some time puzzling out what she may have seen.

The story ends with a lot of questions unanswered and new ones Parisian–they are metaphysical questions that tie into reality, death, horror and how we go on.

For a story that seems very casual in tone, there’s a lot going on.