Bibliography XIII

“Strange Things Happen – A Life with The Police, Polo and Pygmies” – Stewart Copeland

An excerpt from my rock n’ roll journal, dated May 31, 2007:

“Strangely, perhaps because Sting has remained a pop icon and produced commercial hits since 1984, and perhaps because I’ve seen him 3 or 4 times already, I found myself more enthralled with Stewart Copeland’s masterful touch on drums and percussion. He was mesmerizing on all counts. Impossible to ignore, really. A phenomenal drummer, maybe the best I’ve seen. It was a privilege to hear him play live; if I’m glad of anything on this trip, that is it—getting to see him work his magic in sublime testament to Sting’s hilarious descriptions of him in Broken Music. The man is, as Terri said, a mad genius. Completely manic and wild, he ran laps around the stage a couple of times, like a lanky kid hyped on sugar. He actually out-did Sting himself ...”

* * *

Looking back, what I wrote about him that night pretty well describes Stewart Copeland, period, as indicated in his most excellent autobiography. Alas, though it was a Christmas present in 2009, I took almost a dozen years to read it. I say “alas” because it is easily one of the most entertaining books, and maybe the best of the autobiographies, I have ever read. 

It’s not so much the story of his life as it is a bunch of stories from his life, everything from scaling crumbled castle walls as a kid in Lebanon to playing polo against the Prince of Wales to touring with a posse of musicians during Notta della Taranta festivals in Italy to composing operas and writing film scores to judging singers on a BBC reality show to facing off against a pride of lions in Africa ... and I’m not finished reading the book! I have yet to embark on the final section, chronicling Copeland’s 2007 experience touring with Sting and Andy Summers, aka The Police.

These tales are written with such articulate hilarity that he has propelled me into areas (like opera and Africa) that hold no interest for me at all. If I felt lukewarm at the start of any such segment, I quickly learned to pay attention because the story is so brilliantly told I would regret missing it. His acuity is so outrageous that I must put the book down for spontaneous bouts of laughter—Terri asked me yesterday if I was okay because I was quaking on the couch with my hand over my eyes, and given the current health climate, she feared something was amiss. I responded by releasing the laughter I was hopelessly trying to suppress.

Aside from the Calvin and Hobbes treasuries, books that capable of assaulting my funny bone are so few as to be counted on one hand. Comedy is really hard to convey in writing, though the humour here is not in the least contrived. Copeland is genuinely funny.

I have also been disappointed by autobiographies over the years. One actress managed to make a potentially fascinating life into an appalling snoozefest, and some of my rock icons have relied on ghost writers to get their stories told—for which I’m grateful, else I’d not know the stories at all, but still. You want a sense of the artist’s self in any book about him/her. Well, Stewart Copeland’s voice is all his own: a brash, shoot from the hip, sharply witty voice that prevails alongside nuts and bolts detail about subjects too varied to name, including music itself, that few ghost writers could or would affect, and many artists, though outstanding in their fields, will not achieve no matter how expert their command of English.

In short, it’s a cracking good read that even eclipsed Sting’s!

First World Problems

my bangs need a trim ...

BC has been trying to flatten the COVID-19 curve for almost 6 weeks now. According to our provincial health officer, who’s become something of a folk hero out here, we’re actually succeeding at it—but we’re not out of the woods yet. This means the parameters put in place when all this started will remain in place until mid-May at least.

Rats.

On the other hand, it’s not without purpose that we are asked to stay home, that businesses have had to cut staff, that non-essential services are on temporarily hold. Ah. Non-essential services. Here’s where I recognize how incredibly fortunate we are to be more worried about getting our eyebrows done during a pandemic than we are about dying from it.

Not that I get my eyebrows done. I just know people who do. Still, after six weeks of “doing without”, I am beginning to miss some things.

My monthly chiropractic treatment, for instance. Working from home has certainly helped my structural precondition, but I know I’m out of alignment. My chiropractor had to self-isolate on his return from the States in early April, then I got a call cancelling all appointments until further notice. I’m sure he’s fine; it’s just the closing of (how do I say this?) “non-essential” medical services that’s put my maintenance on hold. Ter’s chiro has had to do the same thing. They’ll take an emergency call, of course, but neither she nor I will play that card unless we’re well and truly immobilized.

Almost worse is the root growth and fading colour in my hair. Maintenance on the mane is a major operation every two months, with drop in tweaks to keep the bangs trimmed and the pink vibrant. My stylist makes no real money on me anyway (she mostly likes to play with colour and I’m fearless about it), and I miss visiting with her while she works her magic in the salon.

And have I mentioned lingering over tea with my office buddies? I’m able to nab a tea break with Treena when I drop by the office for printing/scanning/supplies once a week, otherwise I’ve resorted to buying my Blenz favourite in bulk and drinking it at home on workdays.

I understand the concept of social distancing, but continue to misjudge it. Most people are better about skirting around me than I am about eluding them, though I’m not out and about as much as usual. Being an introvert, I’m quite content to stay home for days on end. I sure am snacking a lot more, though. I’ve heard the “19” in “COVID-19” is because the disease was named in 2019 … but I suspect it will actually come to mean the number of pounds I’ve gained before house arrest is over.

Stay safe, stay healthy, stay positive - we've got this.

With love,

Stuff It

I love single servings!

When I was a kid, the only time Mum cooked a turkey was at Christmas. That means we had stuffing once a year, and I’m here to tell you, though Mum cooked a beauty every time that I remember, the bird was not the star of the family holiday feast. Mum didn’t go in for the homemade sausage/cranberry/chestnut/kitchen sink dressing; for expediency’s sake she knocked out a box of Stove Top and we were fine with it.

“Stove Top or potatoes?” The answer was a no brainer in our house:

Both!

However, if forced at gunpoint to choose one over the other, my younger younger brother once said he’d be content with a bowl of stuffing and gravy—and I completely, heartily, vehemently agree. And while one might argue that a boxed stuffing mix is cheating, you can’t really call it substandard because the bread should be a little stale anyway and most of the herbs in a homemade version are as dry as they are in the commercial product. Fresh herbs just don’t pack the same punch; not in stuffing, anyway.

Mind you, my older sister made a batch from scratch at Thanksgiving a couple of years ago, and I would have devoured the whole pan except there were seven other people at the table and it would have been rude not to share.

So this weekend, Ter was debating about veggies to go with our Easter dinner. “You’re doing sprouts, right?” I asked, because we love Brussels sprouts and apparently can’t have them too often.

“Oh yeah,” she concurred, “but instead of carrot/turnip mash, I’ve got a couple of squash that I haven’t used, so maybe the acorn ...?”

That’s a lot of cooking and I try to spare her where I can. “I’ll forfeit the mashed potatoes for squash,” I said.

She knows I’ve never met a spud I haven’t liked, so she was sufficiently dubious. “Really?”

“Oh, yeah. Because it’s really all about the stuffing.”

Stuffing with gravy, sprouts, squash, and a side of turkey.

Happy Easter.

Uber Moon

While I’m yet feeling the effects of our most recent super moon, I recall the first time I heard a reference to something other than a regular, monthly run of the mill full moon.

The precise year escapes me, but it was a Saturday night because we were watching Hockey Night in Canada and the late game was coming from Calgary. During Ron MacLean’s preamble, he mentioned the full moon was in fact a rare super moon, so called as it would appear fourteen per cent larger due to its closer-than-usual proximity to Earth. The accompanying camera shot was of a huge golden disc hanging low over the city skyline. It was impressive, all right; and that was compared to any number of the robust harvest moons I’ve seen in my lifetime. I’d never heard of a super moon until that night.

Now it seems we get them all the time.

On hearing that this April’s full moon was a super one, I asked Ter, “Didn’t we just have one of those?”

She thought so but wasn’t wholly certain of when. “Was it in January?”

Maybe. The wolf moon? Wasn’t there a blue moon in January, too? A blue wolf super moon? There are so many anomalies that “anomaly” is now synonymous with “routine”.

April’s moon was extra-extra-special (not a typo) because it was not only a super moon (appearing seventeen per cent larger than usual, and a full three per cent larger than the HNIC super moon), it was a pink super moon. Not genuinely pink, the experts were quick to add lest a torrent of complaints flood social media when the hue failed to meet mass expectations of fuchsia, but pink because it coincided with the blooming of a particular spring flower whose name I don’t remember.

I actually thought it looked a tad rosier than usual, but I may have imagined it:

Anyway, it seems that almost every full moon has become a super one, which reminded me of an online survey I once took after making a purchase at a housewares and home décor shop. Through the course of the survey, the questions were geared toward elevating my experience beyond the mere purchase of sought-after goods. “What can we do to make your next visit a great experience?”

“You can’t,” I replied. “I got what I went for.”

After asking where the chain fit in my preferred shopping outlets (they were third), came the question: “How can we become your favourite source for housewares/home décor?”

“You can’t,” I replied, “unless you put more staff at the checkout and fewer staff on the floor. I was in the line up to pay for longer than it took to find my candles.”

Not that my comment had anything to do with it, but the chain’s local outlet is now closed, as is that of the second shop in my top three.

What has this to do with the super moon, you ask? Nothing ... except I am bewildered and slightly annoyed by the current era’s insistence on making everything bigger and brighter and shinier. Once “super” becomes the norm, it ceases to be a big deal.

Random Italics

I believe a good story can be made better if it’s well-written. On the flip side, a good story that’s badly written may still be good, but it certainly isn’t helped. And the tools in an author’s box of same can either add to a good story’s elevation or contribute to its mediocrity.

Case in point: my current bedtime read. It features an interesting premise, likeable (if not memorable) characters, and a standard storyline with a curious twist folded into the well-worn theme of religious nuts purifying the earth by killing off the monsters who are, in fact, less monstrous than the men who are killing them. The book is the first in a series I might consider in its entirety except for one truly annoying thing: overuse of italics.

As a rule, I have no problem with italics. I use them myself, to emphasize a point or single out the title of someone else’s work, but if italics are meant to stress certain words while preserving the rhythm of a sentence, then English can’t be this author’s first language. She has sprinkled italicized words with gay abandon and apparently no thought to where they may land, and this practice consistently messes with the read. Worse, when I read a line a second time and ignore the italics, the sentence runs more smoothly. So why bother with the italics in the first place?

I know I’m not without sin. I have a debilitating fondness for the semi-colon*, but I have never encountered such flagrant use of “CTL+I” in my entire reading life. Which would be okay if it made sense or added to the mood of the scene.

But it doesn’t. It just creates a hiccup in the action; (*see?) a mental “huh?” that disrupts the cadence of the prose. Disappointing. Truly. And yet I must also wonder where the copy editor’s head was when reviewing the manuscript.

After all, genius doesn’t always extend to formatting and grammar.

The Heavy Entertainer

I’ve just read Chris Heath’s Reveal, a fly-on-the-wall biography of singer Robbie Williams during the years between 2011 and 2016. The author is clearly a friend of the artist, entrusted with access to friends, family and colleagues, yet expected to be truthful in the recounting and honest with his own opinions regarding whatever is happening at the time.

It’s a fascinating read, really well-written, though it helps that I’ve been a huge RW fan for years. The man is a complicated set of individuals for sure, but he is also uncannily self-aware. This makes him alternately brilliant, frustrating, scattered, single-minded, hilarious, enraged, thoughtful, reckless, remorseful, insecure, and astonishingly adept at channelling his inner neuroses into charismatic swagger on stage. He’s quick with a story (sometimes unwisely), but he is unfailingly honest. And people don’t know how to react when a public figure is so relentlessly, well, public. So you either love him or you hate him; it seems there’s no middle ground, and the man himself seems prone to one or the other extreme on any given day.

I don’t remember where I first heard of him; I think it was when his single Millenium was released in the 1990s. Back when MuchMusic actually played music videos, his clip for Feel appeared in the Daily Top 10 for weeks. What a wonderful, powerful song. When something so magical hits me, I tend to get obsessive about the artist. I loved it then and I love it now, though he has released countless tunes in its wake that are equally compelling in a variety of ways.

The guy can sing anything. His two swing albums are maybe my favourites, but there are no throwaways on The Heavy Entertainment Show—I guess you can call it a pop album, but there’s rock and soul on it as well. It’s loaded with irony, sarcasm, sincerity, love, hope, humour, catchy riffs, rhythmic hooks, and asks the question: why should he go away? A lot of people really dislike him, and yes, he’s courted animosity in the past, but really, is it fair to decry a talent so epic in scope? Only if one envies it, methinks.

It’s remarkable to me, reading this book and listening to these albums, that the man at the forefront is so different from the man behind the music. I recognize humility in so much of what he does, yet there are moments during his show when he struts as cockily as they come. And that’s the other remarkable thing: he hasn’t cracked America. He lives in LA, but I don’t think he’s toured the States. Truly, I haven’t investigated that far, but Chris Heath also wrote a book in 2004 called Feel which allegedly chronicles RW’s pursuit of fame in the promised land and it is most definitely next on my reading list.

One final note. The UK press seem to loathe him for being consistently successful (we can’t count Rudebox, and he doesn’t, either), as if pop stars are by law restricted to a limited shelf life. I am less inclined to consider Robbie Williams a pop star than he is an entertainer of the old school variety. He gives it everything he’s got and takes nothing for granted.

Good on you, Rob. And thank you.

Red Robin

Sometimes the best photo ops occur when I’m not expecting them.

I was on a flânerie during one of the first sunny days in March. I’d been out with the Canon, exploring the neighbourhood, following the bus route from the stop out front to the terminus at the top of the hill and back around to home again. My mission was primarily to take photos of the water from our new location, and one in particular to use with a blog post (see “View From Another Window”).

Mission accomplished, I’m walking toward the little church outside my building when I notice a lone robin hopping merrily around in the parking lot. At first it doesn’t register, but suddenly I decide the burnished red of its breast against the stone grey asphalt will make a good picture. So I stop. So does the robin. We eye each other for a second. I slowly reach for the camera and the robin, startled, hops away.

“Oh, no!” I exclaim in hushed alarm, “please, wait until I get a picture!”

Amazingly, the robin pauses. I raise the camera, hit the power button and take reckless aim, hoping the bird will be somewhere in the frame since I can always crop the photo later. Click! I lower the camera and the robin immediately bounces on its way.

Relieved, I offer a heartfelt thank you in its wake.

Only when I load the photos onto the computer do I realize the little guy did more for me than wait. He posed.

Did he hear my plea for him to linger?

You bet he did.