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
