SOUNDTRACK: MARTIN TIELLI-Horseshoe Tavern Toronto, ON (2002).
After the Rheostatics’ Night of the Shooting Stars album, the band took a few years before recording their final album. During that hiatus of sorts, Martin Tielli released his second solo album Operation Infinite Joy. But before getting that album out, he did a short tour in 2002. This is the second date of that tour (although, as with other bootlegs, I find it funny that the date is lost). Speaking of lost dates, there are no dates at all for Martin Tielli on Setlist.com. Shocking!
Anyhow, this show has great audio. It’s one of those recordings where you can hear the audience, but they are not louder than Martin himself.
As with many of the shows of this era, Martin opens the show on solo acoustic guitar—with some awesomely aggressive chord strokes. He just seems really into this set, with a great growling “ain’t necessary” line in “Double X” and one of the best versions of “She Said ‘We’re On Our Way Down’” that I’ve heard (better than the album).
Before Martin is joined by more musicians, someone asks him how old his jacket it. He says about 14 years old. Then Greg Smith joins him on bass for “My Sweet Relief”
When he switches back to the quiet “World in a Wall” it’s practically like a dramatic reading the way he performs it. He says he was living in a cruddy apartment when he wrote this song. As an opening for “Voices from the Wilderness” he says he used to criticize Dave Bidini for writing songs about music, but he finally embraced it and wrote this awesome song.
For “Farmer in the City,” he says they’re going to try something really quiet—and the audience is rapt. It’s pretty cool. Selina Martin plays crystal on this song (which I assume means glasses?)
When they get to the Nick Buzz song “Love Streams” it’s very quiet and you can hear someone in the audience loudly shot “Shut the fuck up.” He doesn’t acknowledge that but says that the band Nick Buzz was named after the cigarettes that he is now craving. After getting his smoke he introduces”That’s What You Get For Having Fun” by saying this is gonna be a gooood song.
He plays a quieter, more intimate version of “Shaved Head” with a lengthy outro. The track listing says “Stolen Car” is next but there is no “Stolen Car.” They play a rocking version of “Sgt Kraulis” with some fun mechanical voices over the end.
This is a great set that runs about an hour. The crowd I really into it and so is Martin.
[READ: October 19, 2015] Poems That Swim From My Brain Like Rats Leaving a Sinking Ship
I started reading Christian McPherson’s Cube Squared. And when I looked him up I saw that my library also had a few collections of his poetry. So I decided to check them out.
This was his first collection (after a collection of short stories). Most of his poems are fast paced and immediate (as the title suggests). There’s not a lot of reflection in them, they are more designed to get a point across.
And as such they work quite well.
I was especially taken with “Blood Work” in which a man covered in tattoos is giving blood–both he and the nurse know a lot about skin and needles. It’s a neat juxtaposition.
I also really enjoyed “Skeletons” which opens with the delightful stanza: “Knocked down / by a tidal wave of white bones / when I opened your closet door.”
The metaphor in “Canadian Girl” is interesting–both uniquely Canadian and kind of mundane at the same time.
And the directness of “Celery Sticks,” about a man who endlessly quotes authors at a party (and is assaulted for it) is funny and satisfying
But I felt that some of his poems that name check popular culture are a little obvious. “Depressed America” is a mashup of pop culture Americana, but it doesn’t really say anything. Similarly “Beating Capitalism” is pretty unsubtle. And “Scratch Off Cheese” features lines like “Jesus was crucified on golden arches”
“The Poetry Market” is an unsuaul poem, mocking the business of poetry with an ad during telephone hold music.
He also starts a lot of his poems with an -ing form of a verb, which I recall being told in college (when I did it) that it was not a powerful way to write a poem. Similarly, he has many poems that have a dozen or more lines in a row that begin with “and,” which certainly propels the story along, but which also seems kind of lazy.
So mostly you get the feeling that McPherson has a lot to say and can’t hold it back. It feels like a lot of his poetry isn’t so much art as it is passion, like the way the book ends:
and as you get older
you can see the fire
on the horizon
there is less time
to write it all downand soon everything
has been engulfed in flame
and even your pen
has begun to smolderwhen that fire is out
I hope you raged
with fiery passion
I hope you lived it well.
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