Tim Der has put up some audio and video on his site. He says its, "...on oddstp.com, it's on the audio/visual section (click "more videos..." on
the bottom left hand corner) and on craig.oddstp.com, it's under video
(assorted craig videos) and under mp3s for the nv sample. just make sure you
don't have a pop-up blocker on for the moment.
I'll be taking part in the "Bluebird North" songwriter series at the Rowing Club tomorrow. Monday the 8th at the Rowing Club in Vancouver. 8pm. Simon Kendall is also on the bill. Hope I didn't blow it for some of you.
CN
Have you ever been to Bruce McCulloch's site? You should read what he writes. He is good at it.
brucio.com
Bob Kemmis' new site is up. Looks beautiful...hmmm...looks familiar. Congrats to Alistair Calder on another good looking site.
It’s quiet out. When I have nothing to say sometimes its because my radar is not turned on. I have not been sacrificing all proper human communication in the name of capturing a good idea. Usually, when someone important is telling me about their day, my mind is spinning off on a word I liked in something they said. I have left the here and now. The word becomes two or three and the picture in my head starts to take shape. I find out I have offended the person when my lack of knowledge of this previous discussion is brutally revealed by my behaviour. Appointments are missed. Relationships stall at the end of this dark alley. It has taken a lifetime to be able to turn the radar off. Flipping the switch takes all I have. A maximum effort is required to counteract the ego based creating mechanism. Once it is off I live in the world as if I actually belonged. This lasts a few hours or days. The radar starts to build up heat. The heat turns to panic. It is the panic that I have lost ideas that were true. I smell something burning. The aphorisms of life must be plucked from people’s shirt fronts, lapels and laps. Rescued from their lips. I panic at losing out on twisting everything I’ve seen, heard or smelled into some loud word statue. My own entertainment and growth depends on turning the radar back on…at all costs.
The road can jam your radar. Break your flow. The booze is a symptom of my surrender to repetition and to my fun loving nature. There are two sides to the selfish state of mind. “Radar on” is the positive side. The suspended animation of the road is the negative. You leave into a world where social development and the nodes of creativity are frozen by the task at hand. You return home where you left off. I have seen this with drug addiction. If one is an addict by sixteen and recovers by thirty-five then the clean and sober middle aged man may have the social development of the sixteen year old in many departments. I would argue that a lot of musicians linger in this zone from the effects of a road life compounded, in some cases, by its lifestyle flourishes. I have my radar on right now. I know when it happens. I can feel it like a warm tidal bore through to the tips of my molecules. I can feel the surrender and the guilty pride and the sense of identity. I took my radar out for its first walk into an evening without the sagging sump of a looming battle blimp sky. Its been pissing and sopping wet and in this rare hour the night seemed all cool bright and warm amber. -- hardly dark at all. You could smell the underbrush and the hiding places. All the dogs were aware but not sounding alarms. Not many were on the street. A man had a serious call to take out into his driveway on the cordless phone. His slippers had a purple fringe. A glint from the streetlight hit his wire rimmed galsses. He had an elegant bald spot in the yarmulke position. His wife came out onto the porch, with folded arms, not dressed for the outdoors, to listen in. She wheeled to go back inside and the screen door slammed. My inner voice followed it with, “Mary’s dress waves. Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays. Roy Orbison singin’ for the lonely. Girl it’s me and I want you only. Don’t turn me off again I just can’t seem to face the night alone again.” North Van was Jersey. I walked a few steps and my radar swept out of Thunder Road and stated the plain and obvious. It’s quiet out.
Here's the Northey Valenzuela cover
By the way I was directed by someone to review the entry "Weather Talk". It is a bit much in the floral language department. I won't go back and edit it because...that's against the rules. Its nice when I get called on my intentions but in the case of my journal its a place for me to have no real plan and no quality control....like my music.
I don't always have access to the technical ass end of my site but I can write these things and help out a bit. I don't have a "links" page but if I did I would send some of you with Odds questions to this site:
It has a pretty good FAQ section and a lot of comprehensive information about that band.
There is a Craig section too that I have just linked you to with my new hyperlink chops.
Thanks Tim
More like stalactites of cold kelp than an actual sky. Yawning drearily the mist lies back on top of these bristly trees. It won’t get up off you until you don’t care anymore. Part of the great cycle is "the knowing when to give up" part. Redeemed only by the hint of new life on its breath it leaves you bone cold. A photosynthetic aura is not always warm to the touch. I roll my eyes back into where the sun used to be and conjure the smell of California -- Jacaranda, >expensive German exhaust, khaki red dust, dry grass, warm ocean and shampooed hair. Under the mossy waterfall we dream of the dessert. Adaptation has slowed since I learned there were options.
Time is tight so I'm using my creative energies to make more music for you folks and some breakfasts and lunches for my kids and animals. If you'll notice I'm trying harder to hyperlink things so you can do that crazy thing all you people do...what is it? Surf? Everytime I type in code I feel a pocket protector slide ever closer to my shirt pocket. Will I need glasses soon.
If anybody has a REALLY good satellite my pal Jyrki Lumme is doing the colour commentary on Finnish television for the World Cup game against the USA. He has a dry, gray, quick wit in English so I can imagine he's doubly funny in Finnish. If you can tape a bit for me I'll trade you something for it.
Speaking of taping and trading...my thanks go out to Guy Tino who sent me recordings of the Odds/Zevon shows in Seattle WA & Boulder CO. I've been misty eyed ever since I put them on. Don't ask me for them because, in the really legal world, they don't actually exist and I don't know where to get them. Apparently there are people on this thing called the internet who are fans and they trade these things without asking for money and they love the artists involved? Weird.
I love this idea and I thought you would too. the new Black Spot sneaker
OCTOBER 26TH 2004 -- the debut NORTHEY VALENZUELA CD will be in stores and online through MapleNationwide/Universal Music. You will then find it at MapleMusic.com and in the finest of record shops.
It's my sweet Grandad Francis W. Harvie's birthday on that day
Dear all,
My cousin Mike is doing a production for the Vancouver Fringe. I will be his guest on opening night Sept 10th. See poster in "Recent..." gallery in "multimedia" section.
On The Fringe, with Michael P Northey
The Vancouver Fringe's first ever late night talk show. Michael (Suburbia, This Fringe Venue Is Now Being Held Hostage) plays host to a variety of the Vancouver Fringe performers and talents. Co-hosted by Jason (Lucky Eights) Bryden, with Kristina Agosti, Pierce Visser, Kaela Aryn and Jennifer Mawhinney. At the New Revue Stage on Granville Island. Weekdays at 10pm, Fridays and Saturdays at 12am.
The swift conceptual cut and paste mind of my friend Paul Myers has invented the diary form prose "remix". He's taken one of my entries from this journal and cut it into song form. lately he's been experimenting with combining two songs by two artists into one strangely exotic piece. I mean ,,,using the real tracks. It sounds like when chocolate and peanut butter came together. It must be illegal. I will speak no more of it. This is his "remix" is of my entry on: July 30 2004
Season of heat, Season Of Joy (Paul Myers paraphrases Craig Northey)
Plenty has changed since I last came around
Now I wrestle the big cats of life to the ground.
Life raises hurdles up notch by notch
Clearing them hurts when bar meets your crotch
But this season of heat and fire
and burns and beer.
Will soon give way
to a season of joy
Brain sends faxes pact with fiction
Truth and facts erupt from friction
Christian live in calm compliance
God's creature comforts drop their science
Where darker thoughts may bloom and dwell
And enter through the fontanelle.
The softest spot is paper thin
Science bores its way back in
And through thoughts gates so boldy go
A flood of what we cannot know
The facts that float so ceaselessly
Like acorns on a murky sea.
Beneath that sea these tidefalls give
The reasons that we choose to live.
But this season of heat and fire
and burns and beer.
Will soon give way
to a season of joy
As this entry takes on magazine form I will ask you please to read this article:
It will explain my feelings as I tried to watch the barest snippets of the republican convention.
There are some new pictures in the "Most Recent Things Gallery" including one of Nigel the Cat in his current elegant shape (see Aug 22, 2004)
I was in Kingston Ontario writing with my friend Rob Baker of the Tragically Hip. I will quietly say that "we are working on something" that may surface some time later. I will also say that it is a lot of fun and very musically rewarding. He is a great musician and I've rationalized that its OK to exploit his talents for my personal entertainment.
In other news: Bob Kemmis has just recorded his new song "I Adore You" in London's famed Abbey Road studios on a mic used many times by John Lennon. I wasn't there but I wll be mixing it this week. i dont' know what he'll do with it. Perhaps he'll just put it on a chair in front of him in a quiet room and stare at it ... smiling for days and days.
The Northey Valenzuala record EXISTS. I have a box of them here! NO! You can't have them until I sort it all out with MapleMusic and everyone can then have one of their own. Shant be long.
