Entries tagged with "dream"
Wednesday 28 June 2006
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!
Monday 22 May 2006
Had another of those annoying dreams where you think of a great song, and write out lyrics for a whole verse and chorus… and then wake up and can only remember tiny bits of it. I scribbled down what I could, which was mostly the chorus.
I’m pretty damn sure I had words for a lot of it… though my sleeping mind may have exaggerated its utter brilliance. After all, “Molly In A Diner” came to me in a dream too.
Saturday 13 May 2006
Last night was a blast - great sets from Dave and Rich DeJonge and the David Hein Band. Each act did two sets, and for our second set we played as a quintet. Great three-part harmonies on “Gold Thieves”, and “Searchlights” finally came together live like it did on the CD. And we covered “Lucky” by Radiohead and “A Day In The Life”, which both benefitted enormously from having Lance and Ellen there. Hope we got a good recording.
Halfway through our breakneck rendition of “Idiot Grin”, I felt something sharp hit me in the back of the leg. I realized after a moment that it was part of one of Clark’s “hot rod” drumsticks. Hot Rods are essentially a slim bundle of narrow wooden sticks that are a little quieter than solid sticks, while still having a comfortable weight for playing, and Clark’s were disintegrating on the spot. Another piece of wood pinged off the back of my head during the bridge. After the show, Clark told me he’d bought them just when he joined Flickershow about a year and a half ago, and was curious to see how long they’d last. As it turned out… it was exactly long enough.
We’ll miss ya, Clark. Happy dadhood. :D
Clark lent me his DVDs of
The Beatles Anthology, which are fascinating viewing (though how the band ever put up with the screaming fans I will never know). I wasn’t as familiar with their early stuff, so I’ve just heard “I’ll Follow The Sun” for the first time. What a nifty melody, with that augmented fourth!
Dreams: lots of people I didn’t recognize, all living together in a big (sometimes small) house for a few days. Middle-aged… but were we on some kind of sports team? Looked briefly like my Grandma’s house (the setting of many of my dreams when I was young). There was a thunderstorm, and lightning struck an old dead tree out the back, about three times. I could see the electricity snaking across the yard and into the foundation of the house to ground itself.
I woke up speaking in the voice of a mysterious new character for my radio plays.
Saturday 21 January 2006
Lately a running theme in my dreams is ‘alternative ways of playing bass’. Like bowing it with the blade of an ice skate, a technique favoured by the devil in some sitcom. (I found myself on the show’s set between shows. The devil and the angel who shared the house along with an ordinary twenty-something guy, were hanging around, still in character.)
This morning I dreamt there were big lighted buttons of various shapes and colours all around the bridge of my bass like some sort of kid’s toy. Each button played a different tone. And I woke up going “Aww, you mean they’re not real?”
I once saw John Gzowski play guitar using some sort of little electronic noisemaker device which he placed over his pickups, sending the sounds direct to his amp. Maybe I should steal that idea.
Thursday 12 January 2006
I dreamt my housemates and I were at a restaurant. I was trying to take a picture of our cat, who was inexplicably about two inches long and happily rolling around on her back on top of M.’s slice of cheesecake.
Wednesday 28 May 2003
Sunday morning I dreamt I was writing a song. It was coming along so easily - I had something like two verses, a chorus and a bridge, with what seemed like pretty good lyrics - when I realized I was dreaming. I woke myself up and scrambled around for paper, and tried to get it all down in barely-legible pencil scratchings, working out chords in my head…
And then I woke up. Aw, dammit. I crept into the other room - inasmuch as we have another room in this loft, and found a tape recorder. Couldn’t find a blank cassette, though. Maddening. Bits of the song were fading, naturally enough - enough to make me start wondering if I actually had come up with a song, or just dreamt that I had the feeling of writing a cool song, when in reality it was all the neural equivalent of “lorem ipsum dolor sit amet"… meaningless and possibly completely derivative. Sean woke up at this point and came into the room, grumbling that the lights were waking him up.
I smiled at him, and noticed how beautiful he looked. And realized I was dreaming, and decided to see what I could do in that state - realizing on some level that this additional distraction would probably make me forget what little of the song I could still remember. And somehow I was floating above him, holding his face in my hands. And then it changed. He became, in turn, several different people, some male, some female, and of varying ethnicities… I was fascinated, because my dreams aren’t usually so vivid.
And then I woke up. At least I could get a bit of it down… one of the verses, maybe. I figured. Since I don’t actually own a working tape recorder, I tried to find my busted-up MiniDisc recorder and perhaps get some of the melody down rather than trying to write it on staff paper - something I’m not very good at.
And then I woke up. I grabbed the sketchbook I keep by the bed and a pen… but the only thing I could remember was completely unrelated idea I’d had along the way: a simple vocal line à la Stereolab ("Ca le le le, ca le le le,” it went). That was it.
But by now I was in a feverish state of wanting to write something. So I wrote for a few pages, fragments of lyrics or poems or whatever, turns of phrase and scattershot similes inspired by feelings or visual impressions I’d had along the way.
Maybe it’ll be useful in a song someday. I don’t frickin’ know. :D
Quoth a friend, when I told him this story:
Nested dreams??? Oh, I am never, ever, ever sleeping ever again.
Sunday 16 June 2002
The phone was ringing and I tried to answer it. The phone, a new cordless, would not pick up properly. (This is a normal occurrence for us. I have bad phone-answering juju, no matter what we have for a phone.) Fine. A bit later, my pager went off, showing a number I didn’t recognize.
I pick up the phone and try to call the number. Six digits in (we have big-city 10 digit dialling here), I hear a click and a friend’s voice mail kicks in. “Hi! This is Elizabeth...” then the connection turns staticky. I hang up and try again. Was that the right number? I start dialling. Again, before I’ve finished, it kicks over, and craps out before I can leave a message. I dial again, and again, and keys are rearranging themselves. What’s the 9 doing down there on the left? Argh! I hang up, try again, get as far as the 2 and it comes out as an exclamation point.
Now, this isn’t something our phone normally does. At this point I remember something I’ve read about dreaming: you can often tell you’re dreaming because machines malfunction in strange ways. Aha. I must be dreaming, I reason. I look at the phone, and think: I bet I could fit that in my mouth. And as it turns out, I can.
Moral: Even if you have a lucid dream, it doesn’t mean you’ll be in a frame of mind to think of anything worthwhile to do.
Saw Bullfrog and Medeski Martin & Wood last night. Phenomenal. :D The stage at Harbourfront Centre is a crap venue, particularly when it rains, but it was a fine, fine show.
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