Tuesday 26 March 2013

New shows, cool shows and crazy politics

So I’m kind of a crazy busy guy. I’ve had this urge to blog often over the past few weeks. Either it was some move on the part of Stephen Harper, our own Nanaimo City council, cool shows I’ve gone to see or cool stuff to talk about, the urge to write has been large!! Unfortunately in trying to keep balance in my life, everything seems to take a little longer than I expected including getting back to the blog.  Let’s start with some music before I rant on about local, provincial  and federal politics. Something I said I would avoid in the new blog, but sometimes you just have to raise your voice in case someone is listening or at least get it off your chest.

As to the music, I have been quite occupied with several projects at once! One of the projects has been to expand my rehearsal space from a modest 150 square feet to about the 260 / 270 square feet. That included fresh flooring, carpet and laminate, as well as a double, double window and a door to the shop / storage area. I have been rehearsing a with a few different line ups including a four piece rock cover band where my main duty is to play harmonica. Big fun for me as I don’t get to do much of that in the BoodAbooM band. The way things were, I had to either take out the back wall or blow out the front window with sound pressure. A little engineering to supply bearing supports and we got it done. Smacked my Canadian salute fingertip with a hammer which made practising tough for a while. It was also hard to show anyone my injury without looking like I was flipping them the bird.
Expanded music room, note the modern hillbilly motif.

Progress on the BoodAbooM album / project is moving along. The protective digital fingerprint is in place, the distribution selection is narrowing down and a release is not far off. Work on the art, images and layout for the CD are now in progress. The first official BoodAbooM performance will take place in Port Alberni on April 19th at Char’s Landing, a super cool all ages venue where the first show is an acoustic duo. Marisha Devion is back on Canadian soil and as much as she is a sought after bassist, Marisha will be joining me for this and coming BoodAbooM performances. Since returning to Canada after performing internationally, she has been adding her talents to the theatre performance “Patsy Cline’s a closer walk”, as well as several other well known acts and recording engagements. I’m looking forward to sharing music with folks from my old hometown and the opportunity to perform with Marisha.

Before that happens, March 30th will see myself and Dean Doyle banging out a night of party tunes and covers at the Landlubber Pub in Nanaimo. Dean and I have performed at a variety of shows together from the theatre performance “A luncheon of Leonard” which was a Leonard Cohen tribute performance, to concerts, private functions and various fundraisers. This will be our first “pub” performance as a duo. In this case the duo consists of myself and Dean on drums, kind of like the Black Keys or White Stripes. I will play a few of the original tunes for those who are fans of my music, but the focus will be on a rockier selection of favourite covers. We will be playing tunes from Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty, Bob Marley to current stuff like yes, The Black Keys. No cover charge and great deals on meals, so be sure to mark your calendar for a fun night and join us.

Managed to take in a couple of cool musical shows, “Diggin’ Roots”. I went to “Diggin’ Roots” show with my buddy the mountain man, Paul Jay. “Diggin’ Roots” is a Juno Award winning musical act centered around Raven Kanantakta and his wife Shoshona Kish. The couple hail from northern Quebec and lay down a funky mix of styles on a blues rock foundation. Very entertaining indeed. My friend Paul had to leave his camera at home for this one, so no images. On the subject of Paul Jay, A.K.A. “The Mountain Man”, he is responsible for most of the images captured and displayed on my web sites. I also attended a show my friend Fiona Stuart did where she was joined by bassist / instrumentalist Kenny Brault (Sgt. Helmet Fender), Jeffery Randle on percussion and Maxime Alarie on didgeridoo. I always enjoy Fiona’s performances. She has interesting renditions of covers like the classic “Killing Me Softly”, great original songs and also performs traditional Yiddish songs. Very cool and an entertaining show. This beautiful young jewish woman knows how to command a stage and engage her audience.

I was please to see that the little island I call home yielded 9 Juno nominations for 2013, Diana Krall, Helen Austin, Carly Rae Jepsen, Alex Cuba, Hey Ocean, Nelly Furtado, The Tenors, Japandroids and Ian McDougal all have Vancouver Island connections and roots. Not bad for an island of fewer than 900,000 people.

Ok, what’s been crawling under my skin? Well, let’s start local and work our way up to the federal. The Nanaimo Port Authority has decided to hand over our boat basin to Pacific Northwest Marina Group, an American firm with a questionable reputation. The crazy part of this deal is that the NPA is willing to hand over the taxpayer owned working harbour, on a 30 year lease with only 5 year projections / commitments in return. Furthermore the American company plans to change the boat basin from a working harbour where private and commercial vessels share the facility into a high end yacht only marine destination. This is not what the people of Nanaimo and area want. Most enjoy the boat basin work what it is. Sure there is room for improvements, but we all love buying fresh fish directly from the fishing boats. Sitting with a hot espresso and a good friend along the existing venues watching the boats is a wonderful experience. You can watch this short video to understand and see it for yourself. The folks living on Protection Island which is part of our inner harbour would see their access to downtown Nanaimo cut off which will affect their property values and life stlye. Nanaimo city councilman Fred Pattje asked the city to stand by it’s citizens with this issue, but mayor John Ruttan said there was little he could do. Former mayor Gary Korpan disagrees and publicly criticized mayor Ruttan’s position.

Provincially, Christy Clark and her crew crawled under my skin with a story about the Liberal party spending 64 million dollars on an advertising campaign that more or less says, “look how well we manage your money”. Ah, I find that rather paradoxical.

On the Federal level we have Stephen Harper. Some of these links are to stories about how he is muzzling scientist who are bringing forth information that he doesn’t want made public. I once heard a group of political analyst on CBC call Harper “an affront to democracy”. These links add testimony to their view. If I got into all the details, I’d be here a long time before the blog would be posted. Beside that, when it comes to the matter of how Stephen is running Canada, I could write a book.

Well I’m jumping over my 1200 word limit, so there is no time to talk about the 105 year old Zen teacher who likes boobies, facebook’s evil plan for world domination or the whole Tesla vs Edison thingy. If you’re interested, check out the links above.

Until next time, remember that it serves us well to be kind and loving to other. Do your best to be aware and mindful.

Brother T

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