I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: CELTIC GALES-“Sittin’ on Top of the World” (Moose: The Compilation, 1991).

Back in the 1990s, it was common to buy a compilation or soundtrack or even a band’s album based on one song.  Only to then find that you didn’t really like anything else on it.

Maybe that single sounded like nothing else on the album.  Maybe the movie was almost entirely one genre, but they had that one song that you liked over the credits.  Or maybe the compilation was for something but a song you really wanted was on it, too.

With streaming music that need not happen anymore.  Except in this case.

I bought this compilation, used, recently exclusively for one song, Rheostatics’ “Woodstuck.”  It’s a goofy song and this is the only place you can get the studio version.  The actual compilation was not well documented, so I didn’t know what the other bands on it might sound like.  It turns out to be a compilation for Ontario based Moose Records which specialized in Rock, Folk, World & Country.  They put out another compilation in 1992 and that’s all I can find out about them.

Celtic Gales was, apparently, a trio of Audrey, Linda and Wanda Vanderstoop.  I can’t find anything else about them.

This is a traditional song with some nice guitar work from Scott Rogers.  I rather enjoyed the introductory guitar playing and rather hoped it would be an instrumental.  Their vocals (even if the three part harmonies are lovely) are a little too country for my liking.  There’s the addition of a kona as an instrument on this song but I can’t tell what it is doing

[READ: July 1, 2019] “Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos”

The July/August issue of The Walrus is the Summer Reading issue. This year’s issue had two short stories, a memoir, three poems and a fifteen year reflection about a novel as special features.

This poem addresses several images. The first is Max Liebermann’s “The Flax Barn at Laren.”

He described it very powerfully.

He then mentions a photo of Walter Benjamin:

age four perched on a  beach donkey as a Trassenheide resort.

He concludes this section by writing

Weirdly
if you look for the photo
online, it come always twinned with one
of Kafka at six, in a studio
holding the reins

of a toy-horse-slash-sheep, deeply aware of his
ears in light, ferns, fake
spruce staged on board planks arranged to mean
wilderness

The end of the poems refernces the 106 digital images of Jack and Rosie, “the animals my son would not ride.”  They were “blanketed donkeys with eyes like misted bitumen.”

His son has no memory of even being there.