Benjibopper

Here are my 11 favourite albums from 2009. Mind you, these didn't necessarily come out last year, that's just when I got a hold of them. The bolded ones are the best of the best:

1) Tracy Chapman, Our Bright Future - The first half of this album features some really new sounds from her, almost like folk-lounge music. The second half is a bit of a let down but the first half carries it.

2) K’naan, Troubador - On the flipside, the second half of this album is really innovative hip hop with brilliant storytelling. The first half is a lot slicker than his first offering, and a bit plain. But the second half is worth the wait.

3) Luke Doucet, Blood’s Too Rich - Took a few listens to get into, but Luke's a phenomenal guitar player and his music is a tonne of fun.

4) Joel Plaskett, Three - Oh man this guy has a gift for catchy riffs and hooks, and this is his magnum opus - a trilogy detailing his departure from, exodus away, and return to Nova Scotia. Amazing backup vocals from some of the province's finast female vocalists, sweet harmonic blend.

5) Bop Ensemble, Between Trains - Saw this "Canadian folk music super group" at Stanfest. I'd never heard of any of the members, but they are indeed super. I guess they literally recorded this between trains, so it's got a good jam feel, yet the songwriting and talent of the performers gives it polish.

6) Brett Dennen, Hope for the Hopeless - My favourite musical discovery of the year is California's Brett Dennen, lovechild of Bob Dylan, Bob Marley and Ron Sexsmith. Highly political lyrics with a folkish reggae backbeat.

7) Rolling Stones, Let it Bleed - One of those classic albums you think maybe you should own, and then you hear it and you wonder how you lived without it.

8) Martha Wainwright, I Know You’re Married but I’ve Got Feelings Too - Raunchy folk-signer who is way better than her more famous brother.

9) Mary Margaret O’Hara, Miss America - Another classic you should really, really own.

10) Metric, Fantasies - I was surprised by this album, how good it is, kind of transports me to a funkier universe while I type my missives.

11) Cat Power, Jukebox - Powerful sultry vocals covering some great but mostly lesser known American country/folk/blues numbers from the last half century.

Labels: best of

5) Che Part 1 - Documentary-style story of Cuban guerillas fighting their way to take the capital, led by Che Guevara as portrayed by Cannes best actor Benicio Del Toro. It has a similar feel to Battle of Algiers - raw realism without a lot of Hollywood drama, so despite its being a war movie the violence is sudden and shocking. A clear example of show-don't-tell. (Part II will likely be on next year's list.)


7) Pan's Labrynth - This movie creates a convincing world for the young protagonist to rejoice and suffer in, and to grow in ways she can't in the real world of the Franquist repression. Although it is a fantasy with a happy ending, it does honest justice to the hardships and cruelties of the real world, without any cheap preaching.




11) The Fantastic Mr. Fox - An animated adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's novel. The movie seems geared more to adults, but then Dahl tended to write pretty darkly, and with sophistication, for a children's author. The movie, to me, is a great allegory about the downside of civilization, how it has tamed us at the cost of our sense of place in the world, and our freedom.

Labels: best of

"Bhutan's sacramental attitude towards the natural world - that the world is literally alive and sentient - is the normal human view. It's shared by my Celtic ancestors, by virtually all ancient civilizations, by aboriginal peoples worldwide." -Silver Donald Cameron

Labels: quotations

Below is a list of the 11 best books I read in 2009. These books weren't necessarily published in 2009; that's just when I read them. These are in no particular order, but my top four are in bold text:

1) Nisa, the Life and Words of a !Kung Woman - by Marjorie Shastak; An engrossing antrhropological account of a group of !Kung San hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari desert, full of lessons that civilization continues to ignore.

2) Resistance - by Derrick Jensen; This is volume II of the two-volume Endgame, and it argues for the forceful dismantling of civilization. Needless to say it is provocative, if not an argument I've been able to get behind. Jensen is also a great writer of personal narrative.

3) The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith - by Peter Carey; Carey creates a convincing and telling slightly alternate universe and a great twist on the nerd done good genre, in which the plucky kid with immense physical challenge is also a hard-to-love know-nothing brat.

4) Lost Highway - by David Adams Richards; He has an unusual, rambling kind of writing style that goes to great lengths to rationalize the morally ambiguous, leaving you sympathetic to the most dastardly and confused as to what is right. This is my favourite by him so far, a work of art.

5) Dust From Our Eyes - by Joan Baxter; The straight truth on what rich countries have done to Africa, and the resilience and beauty of that continent, by a journalist who has spent much of her adult life reporting from there.

6) Through Black Spruce - by Joseph Boyden; Some of the best, tautest prose I've ever read, such beauty in a bleak tale. The best book I read last year.

7) Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - by Barbara Kingsolver; Fantastic personal narrative of a locavore family growing their own food, and the challenges and joys therein.

8) Nova Scotia: Visions of the Future - edited by Lesley Choyce; For full disclosure I had a chapter in this book, which I loved reading mainly because it revealed the depths of talent in this province, and the brilliant array of ideas. I hope all the newly elected officials read it, and the old bureaucrats too.

9) The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss - by Claire Nouvian; The gorgeous images of deep deep aquatic life in this book look alien because we are so unfamiliar with what lies beneath. Many of them can't be studied out of water because they explode when removed from the extreme pressure of the deeps. And there are countless more species down there yet to be seen, let alone understood. I felt like a kid again reading this book, full of the excitement of new discovery.

10) Amphibian - by Carla Gunn; Nine-year-old Phin Walsh is the narrator, and he's all wound up in knots over the destruction of the earth. Despite the adults' best efforts to reassure him, his logic is indisputable. How I wished I could stamp his earnest, honest lack of cynacism on every adult.

11) Imani's Music - by Sheron Williams; This is the first kid's book I've ever put on a best of list, but then I probably read more kids books last year than anything else. The writing is superb and the tale is complex, weaving in the transatlantic slave trade in a way kids can understand (as well as anyone can) without being trite, and exploring the immense power of music, culture and tradition.

Labels: 2009, best of

As usual I head-down rushed

into overextended darkness

singing Dylan Cowboy Junkies

U2 Paul Simon Tweedy

everything I knew or half-knew

flashlight dim-dying

keeping those predators at play

far away from me

except owls bats and flying things

unruffled by my bad notes

until I stumbled upon their vacating wings.

Three hours of forest-singing darkness

that forest the biggest and best

I’ve ever seen

those trees each a major miracle

before my eyes

that had never registered such distances

up and 50-feet around.

Lushness mile-stretching

ready for a fight versus winds

since the chainsaw

for now has been subdued.

But the next day the NSA

full-forest pressed me with wet

so I soaked out at the halfway hostel

and with my MEC sewing kit

reattached re-moveable thumbs,

they having been reclaimed

from the bus on a blustery day.

At the tree museum is a free fresh look

at Native American cultural artifacts

some older than civilization.

"And here we dwell on Yurok land,

forgetting how we got it

and what these people once were

or even what they now are.

It is rarely mentioned that Jefferson learned

the concept of democracy

from the truest and best

democratic system in history,

that of the many Native American Nations."

For fence-guard capitalists

those tree museum girls

sure tasted sweet

with their hot chocolate hospitality

on the house and southern smiled

feeding the fireplace

while I aristocrat sat

reading about GW Bush

and the boys and I felt

like a real American Boy myself.

Labels: 2001, Poetry, Travel, west coast

Nurse Anna was beautiful in more than just a fuck-me kind of way. She introduced herself that way, "Hi, I’m Nurse Anna." The mix of formal and informal turned me on too much to make my usual sponge bath joke, which I even made for the bull-dyke who looked ready to tear my hands off and use them to punch me in my dirty balls.

"Nurse Anna," was all I could think to say. I swallowed my 'you're pretty' follow-up.

"Hi Steve," she said. "I was told to watch out for you and your sweet-talk. So what, I’m not sweet-talk worthy?"

I shook my head so hard something cracked. I winced back tears. Vehemence and whiplash don’t mix. Nurse Anna steadied my head and dabbed my eyes. "It's okay," she said. "Maybe you're not up to flirting today."

"But I have an erection," I blurted.

She hit me with a pained smiled. I couldn’t tell if she was stifling laughter or vomit.

"Sorry," I said. "That came out wrong."

She smiled again. "I hope so," she laughed. She looked down at her clipboard and her smile flattened. "I think I see what your problem is," she said.

"Whiplash?" I ventured.

"Cars," she said.

"Oh, like the root of my problem," I said.

"No, that would be your whole lifestyle," she said.

My erection was getting worse.

I finally screwed up the courage to ask her out when I was discharged a few days later. "I don’t think I can," she said.

"But I'm not your patient anymore."

"You will be," she said.

I don’t know why I loved this kind of treatment. Masochism I guess. "You gonna sick Nurse Miller on me?" I asked.

"You’re awful," she said. "I can’t date someone who says things like that about Nurse Miller - she’s an inspiring woman. And I definitely can’t date someone who lives like you."

"How do I live?"

Here’s how she said I lived: on a diet of drugs and fat, in a hyper-sedentary high-stress environment, on too little sleep, surrounded by resource-devouring consumer products designed to make bearable my otherwise mechanized, suicidal existence. I couldn’t deny it.

"Who doesn’t live that way?" I asked.

"I don’t," she said.

Here’s how she said she lived: on a chemical-free, mostly local vegan homemade diet, balancing a challenging job she loved with active modes of transportation and regular yoga, ample sleep, in a communal housing arrangement, with minimal possessions.

"I can live like that," I said.

"You can?"

"You'll see."

Labels: 2009, Fiction, nova scotia, short story

Waves slapping rock, slapping rock.
Me riding the biggest one -
a world prince baby,
and it’s cold at the lonely up here,
but beautiful blue-white waters.

California’s sun
and those 1,200 year-old 300-foot beauties
at the tree museum
($15 just to see ‘em
except I found an extra exit,
a forest being a frightful tough thing
to fence in).

Paul Bunyon:
"The Greatest Tree-Jacker in history!"
proudly overseeing that half-fenced forest,
his display speakers speaking the legend:

"The Indians refused to walk in these woods
because they thought they were filled
with powerful spirits.
Heh-heh, who knows?
Maybe they were right."

Kooky Indians
got me thinking back
of when she said,
"I wish he would stop drifting
and settle down somewhere."

Chirping crows caw to the slapping waves,
breeze blows me in the middle
of sweet solitude lonely lost
but awake and hungry alive on arrival,
barely once again.

If she could see this now she’d know why.

Labels: 2001, Poetry, Travel, west coast