Blog: Zoilus

Just kidding , but one week into the new Age of Nothing's Wrong (I say in fun, though Obama's al-Arabia interview yesterday almost had me believing it!), I happened today to read Carrie Brownstein's transition-day, beating-around-the-Bush-era post on the former Sleater-Kinney guitarist's NPR blog, Monitor Mix. She makes a fine list of songs of anger/angst/protest from the period. But then comes this summary, which hit home on first reading because Brownstein's such a convincing and clear writer: "In the last few years, the songs and struggles have [...]

Worst loss of the recession so far? I'm devastated to see that David Berman quietly announced the end of the Silver Jews this week: "I guess I am moving over to another category. Screenwriting or Muckraking. I've got to move on. Can't be like all the careerists doncha know. I'm forty two and I know what to do. I'm a writer, see? "Cassie is taking it the hardest. She's a fan and a player but she sees how happy i am with the decision. I always said we [...]

I don't want to add too much to the verbiage of the past day - I did enough of that on Facebook. Obama chose wisely by going short, recognizing that the potency of the lived moment was, to some degree, beyond words. He could have stuck with a haiku. ("Dad was refused lunch/ Now his son is president/ Childish things, farewell.") Musically, John Williams could have been far worse - there was dissonance! Yo Yo Ma looked so "Yo yo yo!" - and Aretha's artistry overcame the weakness of her aging instrument unforgettably. (I was nervous for her.) [...]

Toronto's own Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler win at Internet this week . (Not for the first time .) "Mina Loy is my Industrial Park. Lorine Niedecker had a metted wet squirrel in her apartment yesterday and was amazed at what a cheeky little pre-stew rodent it was and how hard it was to get it out! Theophile Gautier is mechanical vacuum fixit genius guy. And it works so much better when you actually plug it in after you fix it. Erich Maria Remarque is regretting those chicken wings." [...]

Mort Sahl , late 50s/early 60s, according to The New Yorker's recent piece about the Village Voice: "The beat generation is a coffeehouse full of people expectantly looking at their watches for the beat generation to come on." Sounds like a punchline from Cat & Girl . Note the mature refraining from comparisons to vague foreign threats, technological jitters and unspecified-hope-inspiring presidents of other decades.

I have a profile today on The Globe and Mail website (not in print) of Montreal blessed-and-cursed trio Land of Talk led by Ontario-born singer/guitarist Lizzie Powell, who's also been singing with Broken Social Scene the past year. I'll print the full transcript of our interview this weekend, but you can see them for the last time in a while tonight in Kingston, Ont. Key paragraphs: The oscillations between bright and dark spots in Land of Talk's career mirror its music, founded on the sour-and-sweet blend of Powell's spiky, [...]

Weird. In what I can only guess is The New Yorker's attempt to join in this month's spirit of hope, unity and a post-ideological politics of citizenship, this week it's published a poem that is at once from the avant-ish side of the aisle and not by John Ashbery or Charles Simic or some other safe grey eminence but in fact by a grad student . Or, put another way, a poem by a young poet that is not about mourning one's spouse by the slant of winter light on lobster bisque. Quick, someone [...]

Photo from Somewhere There by Girlchoochoo on Flickr. Passing this along for interested local musician readers from my favourite Toronto music venue (even though I don't go there nearly often enough), a place, as its slogan currently claims, "where everyone looks like a clarinet." Somewhere There is a venue for creative music in the Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto. The programming features the diverse membership of the Association of Improvising Musicians Toronto (AIMToronto) as well [...]

Kenneth Goldsmith from UbuWeb talks " outsider writing " at Mercer Union tonight at 7 pm. Shit, that's soon. In Eye this week, Dave Morris pens his final Totally Wired column after four years of providing this blog with fodder. And yes, Dave, we fell for it. Just as Somali-Canadian rapper K'naan prepares to release his new album, Troubadour (recorded at Tuff Gong studio in Jamaica), the American music press has [...]

Happy New Year , everybody, and welcome to the year of hope and change, I mean fear and austerity, I mean ... Anyway, the second half of '08 was a pretty inconsistent one for Zoilus postings, I know - my only resolution for the new year, or at least the only one that's any of your business, is to find my way back to a fairly regular posting schedule. Let's start slow: I saw Un conte de Noel (A Christmas Tale), the latest (and my first) Arnaud Desplechin film, with Catherine Deneuve [...]

Jessie Stein of The Luyas, playing Wavelength 450 on Feb. 14. Wavelength 450 : February 12-15, 2009. It's always exciting when the lineup for the annual anniversary festival of Toronto's Wavelength music series is announced, and today turned out to be that day. This year Wavelength turns 9 with some lineups awesome enough to make me imagine I still like rock shows. All hype supplied by Wavelength, not me, but I would vouch for most of the descriptions. Thursday [...]

Agenda Item 1: Although it's officially past the deadline, you can probably still sneak in a bid on giving a presentation at this spring's 8th annual Pop Conference at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. This year's model? "Dance Music Sex Romance: Pop & The Body Politic." So far as a member of the programming committee, the paper I am most excited to have encouraged is one about sex sounds in music and how deeply unsexy that usually is. (Full exemption granted to Jane Birkin c. 1969, because. ) Send proposals of up to 250 [...]

I caught Sweden's Love Is All at the Horseshoe last night and was pleasantly surprised - the tracks I'd heard before seemed kind of smushily produced but live the band was very sharp and catchy: reminiscent at times, thanks to pixie-perfect lead singer Josephine Olausson, of the Sugarcubes in their heyday, but with No Wave saxophone, Ex-ish guitar slashes and maybe just a tad too much ska for my liking. Unfortunately due to an unavoidable proofreading incident, I missed the buzzed-about Crystal Stilts - I'd unfairly dismissed them for awhile because "crystal" was feeling like [...]

The original one-named diva , known as Odetta Holmes when she was born in Birmingham in 1930 and later by her married name as Odetta Gordon but most of her life simply as Odetta, died yesterday of heart failure in New York, after a couple of weeks in hospital and a couple of years of failing health. I missed her last time she came through Toronto, but saw her at Hugh's Room a couple of years ago, for the first time, and feel fortunate to have breathed the same air as those incredible lungs for a couple of hours as [...]

Fred Lonberg-Holm, in a photo borrowed from Peter Gannushkin . In a case of very inconvenient timing, there are two strong contenders for can't-miss avant-jazz events in Toronto tonight. At the Imperial Pub near Yonge-Dundas Square, from Chicago's fertile improv scene, the Valentine Trio led by cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and trombonist Jeb Bishop 's trio, both with Jason Roebke on bass and Frank Rosaly on drums. Anyone familiar with Ken Vandermark's various groups or with Peter Brotzmann's [...]

Sorry posting's been so light - I bet you're all busy this time of year too. I will try to redouble Zoilusian efforts. Just a quick note today of gratitude that my book (see left) was selected this weekend in The Globe and Mail's "Globe 100" selection of best books of the year. Because I work at the paper, feel free to be skeptical, but honestly the honour was unexpected - and a very nice boost for the book since most of its reviews and publicity came out at the very beginning of the year. [...]

In the NYT Magazine's "Screens" issue, coming this weekend, some prominent types name " Moments that Mattered " in their encounters with flat, candescent images of all sorts this year. Novelist Heather O'Neill picks the above YouTube video, titled "Dance Dance Revolutions Co.," and tells a touching story about it and her daughter. As she says, the song ("The End of Poverty") is by Toronto band Tomboyfriend (see the Zoilus entry about chief 'boyfriend Ryan Kamstra earlier this week). But she neglects to mention that the video itself was created by Toronto artist [...]

Germany moves closer to justice on sampling than most legal systems have so far, in a decision against Kraftwerk, who were suing a rap producer for using two seconds of their song "Metal on Metal" (from 1977's Trans-Europe Express ). The court errs in banning quotation from melodies - are German jazz soloists in trouble now? - and indeed I'd be curious what their definition of a "melody" is. Do they mean vocal melodies only? What about instrumental hooks? What about rhythmic hooks? I'm curious if the ruling includes any [...]

Madonna underdeveloped, underperforming underwater, untamed . . . deserted North America. There are Post-it notes in each drawer. Either my regime's been changed or else I colluded. My ass is missing. I really don't recall. Between hunger or adoring welter, another interior hunchbacking to another interior. The crucial updates only: There are a series of outstanding waiting lounges into which I'm now departed. A turntable made of only more but ever smaller dreams. Orange slums beyond metal cities. Cities barnacle the empire. No matter which floor, it's [...]

I've got a piece about Toronto writer-artist-performer-impres ario Darren O'Donnell, creator of Haircuts By Children along with much more, in the new issue of Toronto Life. It's a radically reduced version of my original but gets the job done as an introduction to O'Donnell and his take on participatory/relational/socia l art-theatre - which he charmingly reduces to an attempt to recapture the Sesame Street urban-community fantasies of his childhood in his real life in Toronto. Forget Allan Kaprow and the Internet, he hints - all this social-art stuff of the current generation might be traceable [...]