I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: DAVID BECKINGHAM-Live at Massey Hall (December 5, 2017).

I don’t know Beckingham or his main band Hey Ocean.

Beckingham says that he and Ashleigh Ball from the Hey Ocean started playing together in their early 20s.  They met Dave and formed Hey Ocean and it took off in a surprising way.

He’d always wanted to do something solo but felt he wasn’t ready and then they took time from Hey Ocean and worked on it.  But he never expected to play Massey Hall.

The show begins with “Explosion” which has a sweet vocal line and a very friendly sound with strings.  As he starts “Window Frame” they interrupt it with an interview in which he says that Hey Ocean is more around Ashleigh and her vocals while the solo stuff is more personal.  He feels a lot more exposed physically as well as with the material.

Adi’s Song is a quiet powerful ballad

Late in the evening
She starts to cry
She’d been down on her luck since summer now she’s stuck
In the longest ever winter of her life

She called the doctor
Asking for pills
To make it all seem far away like the stars in outer space
She says the feelings doesn’t hurt, she says it kills

And the salt in her tears carves a line down her cheeks
So when the drops reach her mouth, well you’ll almost believe she was smiling

Just when the light hits it right

During “Slowly” he gets the crowd to sing along “don’t it take the words from you sometimes.”

The final two songs are his biggest: “Soldier” and “Forest.”  His music is quite consistent–pretty and folkie without a lot of drama.  But these last two songs have something extra.  The bridge in “Soldier” bombs overhead / trying my best to find you / I was blind and deaf is really powerful with the strings.  “Forest” has a distinctive catchy melody up front, which a lot of these songs don’t.

He’s joined by Mike Rosen on the keyboards and a small string section Michelle Farhermann (cello) Rachael Cardiello (viola) and Kelly LeFaive (violin) and he thanks them for pulling this all together in a few days time.

[READ: January 7, 2017] “Stuff”

“Stuff” is a terrible name for a story.  But this story is pretty much full of stuff, so maybe it does work here.

I’m not really sure what happened to this story because it started out so linear and interesting (a little weird, yes, but interesting) and then it turned into something else–much more weird.

Henry was in the doctor’s office.  His own doctor was not there, so he was seeing a new doctor.  This new doctor told Henry that he had lung cancer and would die soon.

Henry talked about the cigarettes he smokes–called the work sticks because they help him write.

The doctor seems interested in his writing.  He says that he writes for the town paper called the Zephyr–he writes a column about the seasons.  There is another columnist Yolanda Piper who could be considered his peer.  She writes about at risk teens.  He felt the community depended on them for optimism and good words.

The doctor says, “you made it to 85–that should be a consolation.”  Henry says, “No, I’m not 85.” The doctor frowns and looks at the sheet.  It’s been misfiled “Sorry.  Those girls at the desk all they think about is getting laid.”

When he finds the proper sheet he says “You have lung cancer as well, a bit more advanced actually.  Sorry about he mix up.”

On the way home he thinks about his columns.  How he much prefers spring to Christmas time–which it is now.  He never knew what to write about at Christmas, so he decided to write about buying a Christmas tree.  He pulled into the lot across the street from him “as his fellow travelers fell in fury upon their horns.”

The trees were sold by Yolanda and her surly youths.  She seems dismissive of him and the youths don’t do a very good job of packing up his tree.

One of the youths has a tattoo on his arm. It is a verse of poetry from Housman, but the boy tells him to back off and will not engage.

When he got home–without a tree–he found men with a card table in his parking spot.  They were asking for signatures for a proposal to give a tax credit to households with guns.  They imagined that once the credit was passed, they would petition for the elimination of taxes altogether “because of the unfeasibility of collecting them when everyone had guns.”

So he decides to visit his mother in her home called Ambiance.   When he arrives, he notes the quiet at the front is from “the things corporations got away with…”

His mother was a celebrity at the home because her previous home has been destroyed in a flood.  When rescuers arrived a week later, she and some others were alive but dehydrated.

When he gets up to her room–planning to tell her about his diagnosis–he was puzzled by the clutter in her room–a dark credenza filled the room and there was nowhere else to sit.  There was also a photograph in a frame which had two blond children throwing bread to a peacock.

His mother is abusive saying she supposed he didn’t have any friends.  “When you were a boy, the other children would draw a circle around you in the playground and tell you you couldn’t break through it–and you couldn’t.”

She tells him the photo was brought in by someone else trying to convince his mother that she had forgotten her own children.

And then she starts talking philosophically and aggressively.  Visitors are just Gnostics to us.  The world is an illusion: Some consider Gnosticism flawed–an individualistic nihilistic escapist religion incapable of forging any kind of true moral community, but naturally we disagree with that assessment.”

Henry could not conceal his alarm.  He thinks back to his sister’s funeral when he was young.

The title comes in when Henry complains that there’s so much “stuff” in here.  His mother complains.   “What stuff Henry, for a writer, you do choose words that lack evocative distinction.”

Henry decides that the stuff can’t really be here–the credenza had been destroyed in the flood hadn’t it?  He wonders if he can make anything else appear in the room.

Eventually he tells his mother that he is going to die.  He reaction is what we might expect from a woman acting the way she is acting, but the details of it are astonishing.

What’s so weird about this whole story is that the opening news is pretty important and yet it seems like it’s all unbelievable. In fact everything in the story seems unbelievable.  Which is not really a good thing.