SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS–Fall Nationals The Horseshoe Tavern Toronto, ON. Night 7 of 13 (November 16, 2003).
This was the all ages Sunday afternoon 7th show of the Rheostatics 13 night Fall Nationals run at the Horseshoe. Rheostatics Live has recordings of nights 1, 3, 4, 5 and 7.
This is the final concert available on Rheostatics Live for the 2013 Fall Nationals. It was an all-ages show and as such was a bit more delicate than some of the other shows.
Hip Lingo opened the night. And then the band begins with a sweet mostly acoustic version of “Song of the Garden.” Then Tim says, “This song “Loving Arms” was written by Dot, our good friend.
Once again, during “Aliens,” at the “distraction” line, someone starts playing the guitar melody from “When Winter Comes” and it does serve as a kind of distraction–they flub the song a bit. Later, in the quiet part Tim starts playing the melody for “Artenings Made of Gold” on the bass.
“Tarleks” is described as the second in the Alien trilogy. Mike asks if Martin has another yet to come. Martin says, “I got a pack of em.” They miss the segue to the middle but just play one more measure and catch up.
Tim says “we brought some spongy earplugs down if anyone needs them.” (They’re so nice).
Dave has a question for the kids in the audience. “Ozzy Osbourne funny or scary?” Kids: funny. Martin: funny and sad. Dave says this is a song about the twilight of Ozzy’s career (Martin: and his awareness).
“King of the Past” is a quieter version. You can really hear Martin doing great backing vocals.
They acknowledge Maureen at the craft table–it’s make your own DVD night. Martin: She’ll give you a dirty look ’cause shes really mean.
A pretty “Northern Wish” and then a gentle “PIN.” After the song, Martin plays the riff to PIN one more time. Mike says: always time to practice. And then a lovely “Mumbletypeg.”
There’s some joking and then someone says, “By the end of this run we hope to have beautifully constructed spice rack. There’s one shot of Mike on the DVD where mike looks like this. We call it building the spice rack. When you can’t come up with any more intense ideas at the end of a song so you just end up pounding the wall.”
This is a song about a girl. “Claire.” Was she a girl or a hallucination? Or was she a really fast car?
For “Take Me In Your Hand,” it’s Mike and Martin singing gently with acoustic guitar.
During a pause Dave says, in case anyone is interested, Edmonton is beating Montreal 24-21 in the 3rd quarter of the Grey Cup. Good game, jeez, we should get this over with. Just kidding. Strangely here’s a song about the CFL [“Palomar”]. We’re trying to get Tim to stop writing songs about football but he can’t. It’s like a virus with him. It’s quiet with some great backing vocals especially at the end.
“Here’s a song about nutrition. More bands should write about nutrition. A song about nutrition with a political sensibility.” They start “Brea, Meat, Peas and Rice.” Dave gets excited: “Really. A clapping crowd, eh?”
He says Hi to his daughter Cecilia and then says “My dad is here. Do you wanna watch the Grey Cup? It’s on in the dressing room.” Mike says, “Supportive father, extra supportive son.”
Before the next song, Martin says, “This is the actual Fender Strat that Jimi Hendrix ate at Mariposa. See there’s the bandage. He used to put pastrami in his sweatband so he could get nourishment while he was playing.” It’s a beautiful “Here Comes the Image” with a special thanks to MPW on keys.
“Little Bird” starts very quietly with percussion in the form of “shhs” but it gets big by the middle.
Introducing “Stolen Car,” Martin says, “This is a song about stealing really expensive stuff… or dreaming about stealing it.”
Dave: “Sort of like The Bob Newhart show. It was all a dream.”
Martin: “Really? the last Bob Newhart? How old is Bob Newhart? He must be like 95 [he was 74!]. He’s been going forever. He looks the same. He was on the TV.”
Dave: “Wow he’s going places if he’s on that thing. Although I don’t think it will supplant the radio.”
Then Dave tells a story about his friend who had two interesting concepts:
what if the telephone followed the internet and people thought wow I can finally actually talk to someone!
But even better: what if when you farted it was colored. It would make life way more interesting–Stand at the top of the CN tower and watch all the colors. At night the CN Tower would be gorgeous.”
Martin says, “This is a very serious song.”
Dave: “It wouldn’t be very serious if you did it in Donald Duck voice. It would have a whole new feel.”
Martin: “I can’t do Donald Duck voice.”
Dave: “Ala George Jones. He talked in Donald Duck voice for a year. My friend saw him play in the States and he did five songs in Donald Duck voice and that was it. And they loved it.”
Martin: “Was he bitter or is he really funny?”
Dave: “I think he just liked the voice.”
Martin: “That’s a pretty high commitment.”
Even though the song is serious, when he sings he build a fence for all his friends, he throws in “all two of them.”
During the encore, Dave thanks everyone under 18 who came out.
Then comes “Harvest,” sung by Dave’s daughter or son (it sounds like he says Hi Sessi. She/he is adorable (four/six years old depending). She says “Harvest by Neil Young.” How’s it feel to be onstage? Good. She does a really good job. And then it’s over and she says over and over “I wanna do it again, Can I?” he starts crying a bit, Dave says, “We’ll do one next year a longer one next year. Your father needs to sing some now.” “NO!”
They play a boppy version of “Home Again,” in which Martin mutters something about “living in the ass of an uncaring god.” And they end with a romping version of “Legal Age Life at Variety Store”
[READ: February 10, 2017] Self-Control
Did I pick up this book by Stig Sæterbakken because his name is Stig and his last name has a character I can’t pronounce? Yes. But also because I had heard about Stig from Karl Ove, my favorite Norwegian writer. He had raved about Stig (and is blurbed on this book).
This book is evidently the second book in the “S” trilogy. Although as I understand it they are only loosely connected–same characters but the stories aren’t directly sequential.
Andreas Feldt is a conflicted man–primarily internally conflicted. I’m not sure if book one tells us about this, but as this book opens we learn that Andreas hasn’t seen his adult daughters in many years–talked to one of them, but not seen her. He is meeting her for lunch.
The talk is awkward, certainly, and eventually he blurts out “Your mother and I are getting a divorce.” Her reaction is fairly flat. And later we learn that it is not even true–he just said it.
After the lunch, Andreas heads to work. He works in some kind of factory–unclear if I would be able to tell what kind if I lived in Norway, but it’s fairly vague. At one point he goes up to his boss’ office and lays into him. Basically calls him a worthless piece of shit–the boss having said practically nothing. But instead of getting fired, he finds that the boss responds to him. The boss tells him about the pressure he’s under and how his wife has cancer. The whole tone of the book changes.
Then it is Sunday evening and Andreas and his wife Helene are entertaining. They have invited over their oldest friends Elise and Hans-Jacob. And boy how much Andreas hates Hans-Jacob. He has been putting up with his vacuous stupidity for years and he just wants to be done with the guy. But instead, they sit through a lengthy diner and after-diner conversation. While Helene and Elise are talking Hans-Jacob keeps repeating a phrase at Andreas: “Yes, I like a place inhabited by chatty women who voice opinions raucously, Andreas.” Andreas just stares at him, what the fuck is this guy talking about. After repeating it several times, Andreas can think of nothing else to do but say Yes Yes Yes. And then Hans-Jacob makes a strange peep: “pi!” And Andreas can only say Yes Yes Yes and this goes back ad forth Pi, yes yes yes. Until finally Hans-Jacob explains that the sentence is a mnemonic device for remembering the digits of pi.
He says that other languages have created such sentence, but never the Norwegians. It’s at this point that I have to really praise Sean Kinsella for translating this. I don’t know what the original sentence said or what it translated into, but Kinsella was able to keep the number of letters in each word so that this mnemonic device actually works!
After all of that Andreas say he thinks it stupid and hard to remember.
When the party is over, they go to bed. We never meet Helene, rather, we stay inside Andreas’ dark and disturbed head. He lies in bed thinking about what he told his daughter and then he realizes that its implausible that he and Helene would get divorced:
I became increasingly dejected at the thought of how implausible it must have seemed. I tried to think of a possible reason for us to want to leave each other, Helene and I, but couldn’t come up with any, not one that sprang immediately to mind, anyway. Christ, I thought, was there really nothing about my life or Helene’s life or rather our life together…which could make such a breakup probable?
Then there’s a crazy sequence where Andreas, getting so angry at himself, strikes out and hits Helen on the hip while she is sleeping. He hits her so hard that she wakes up but he feigns sleep and convinces her that he is asleep.
The next day is Monday and he is back at work. He believes that everyone is looking at him pretty much the whole day. He thinks that they think he is spending too much time in the bathroom among other weird fears. The whole day seems to be going a little haywire for him. And when his shift is over things get even stranger.
His sister is standing outside and she is inconsolable. He is pretty useless at this sort of thing but he seems to say things that make her feel better. And then he realizes that it is quite late and Helene will have been expecting him. And that’s when he begins letting the universe decide things for him:
If a taxi drives by then I’ll call…if not, I won’t. Right after than a tram went rumbling by…I hung the receiver back in place….I must have taken it for granted that it was a taxi that would come.
And from there, Andreas has a night to himself. He looks in shop windows, goes to the pub–where he thinks horrible thoughts about everyone there. He takes kindly to the waitress though and he gives her a very big tip. She thinks he stiffed her and chases after him. Then she harangues him for several pages about how much better he thinks he is than her. And then she winds up taking him on a surreal behind the kitchen scene that is like something out of a nightmare.
He finally manages to escape and winds up going in to the CINEMA (the word itself had something menacing about it). He goes in to see a comedy and finds himself laughing so hard that he is practically in tears and falling off of his seat.
It was still fairly early when he leaves the movies so he decides to go to bar. He orders a drink and when he comes back from the bathroom, two young women are sitting at his table, seemingly oblivious to his coat draped on the chair. He winds up talking to them–to the likable one and the unlikable one, as he calls them. Finally the unlikable one leaves and he is with the likable one for a pretty long time. He wonders if she wants to go home with him.
The last line of the book is detaining. I have to wonder if the first book in the trilogy addressing his wife and children at all–if we know anything about why they are estranged. The end of the book hints at something but the hint is so general that one could pull out so many different possibilities from it.
This whole book is a marvel of being inside one man’s head. A man whose mid seems off kilter. He has some very sane thoughts–even some horrible thoughts that I’m sure everyone has thought but not acted on–but he also seems to feel greatly persecuted–and we don’t know if that’s real or not.
It’s a fascinating look at a man’s mind. And it works pretty well as a standalone book–there are dozens of unanswered questions, however. I do have to wonder if the other two books address any of the things that went on here. I look forward to finding out.
I Just Read About That... 
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