FORGERY LEAGUE

Wednesday 28 June 2006

Bows, bungosity and romantic traffic

Dream: I was working on a long-running TV show - for some reason I ended up minding two black horses that kept wandering in and out of the house set. Later, in the same building, I came upon a folk triio from Quebec who were busking and preparing for a stage performance. Several of their pieces consisted in large part of animal noises, especially frogs, produced with their fiddles and the leader’s double bass. I chatted with the leader about her playing and why her bow had a truss structure instead of a traditional light wooden shaft. The truss was heavier but gave her more oomph when playing, and was unusually bouncy if she used it the right way, which produced impressive frog-trills. (Compare earlier dreams about bass playing.)

New word, coined by Sean: bungus. First used to describe a book on marketing. A cross between “bogus”, “bung” and “fungus” - I like its connotation of something false and loathsome.

Moving immanent… We’ve given our notice at our current house. Time to start the purge of Stuff so there’s less to move on the day. We did manage to gather about three boxes’ worth of books last night to give away, and I’ve got a stack of CDs that need selling.

I’m much, much less particular about my CDs these days - before our last move a couple of years back, I had them all alphabetized, but that fell by the wayside once I got everything I listen to onto the computer. I like having the “hard copies” of some rare or important stuff, but mostly it just gathers dust on the shelf. Heck, aside from concerts and buskers, I haven’t bought an actual CD in ages.

Speaking of music… Really, I haven’t listened to much new music lately. For the past month, I’ve been absolutely obsessed with the music of the New Pornographers and their songwriter-in-chief AC Newman. Some of their stuff I’m not so big on (I confess Dan Bejar’s stuff has never clicked with me) but probably two dozen of my Favorite Songs Ever are theirs.

But today, thanks to shuffle mode, I have a new favorite song, and - heh! whaddya know, it’s from BC as well: Nomeansno’s “Hello / Goodbye”. The little riff over just those chords, plus the lovely soaring round of “you will not follow me”... yes, yes, yes.

Ooh! And, via the ever-awesome Spacing Wire, here’s the video for the Spoons’ 1984 hit Romantic Traffic. Ah, the Can-con memories! The old red subway cars! The crimped and fluffy hair!