Blog: Zoilus

Darcy James Argue's Secret Society North at the IAJE: Photo shoplifted from WBGO. My busy week (see below) unfortunately coincided with the big IAJE jazz educators (and musicians and labels and critics and promoters - the name's deceptive) conference in Toronto, so I wasn't able to attend much of the proceedings, which included the likes of Courtney Pine curating a UK jazz night, an appearance by Francois Houle, a big Oscar Peterson tribute show this afternoon, etc. (You can catch up on some [...]

Me with "Celine" (Laura Landauer) and, right, Final Fantasy playing "The Power of Love" last night at the very-Gladstone in Toronto. Photos by Chris Reed and If You Want to Sing Out . I can't begin to tell you how asskickingly last night's launch for the book went. Kay arr eh zee why! There was a zillion jillion people there (sorry to everybody who got turned away!); Laura Landauer took everybody to Celine-imitation college; [...]

The terrific trio who write my favourite mp3 blog, Said the Gramophone, are doing a series this week in response to Let's Talk About Love - they're doing a little bit of personal archaeology, examining the pre-history of their own tastes - taking up the notion of the "taste biography" that I propose early in LTAL. Dan started yesterday with a confession that his tastes began from the urge to explore the forbidden (parental-advisory stickers were his totems); today, by contrast, Sean gives a very honest and self-effacing account of his teenage addiction [...]

As I've mentioned more than once, this is an odd year-end for me, because I essentially checked out of the following-new-releases game in about May and didn't fully check back in until about a week ago. Funny thing is that writing a book that rails here and there against the year-end-list-centrism of music criticism actually had the result of making those year-end lists very useful to me in getting caught up ( some more than others ) (not that some blog lists aren't great, but the 'sphere is prey to the usual "why is The [...]

... Speaking of year-end, this may or may not be an actual new blog, rather than a randomly deployed blogspot page, but it's a place where you can read what a few T-dot notables were pouring into their earholes in ought-seven, among them the maker of my number-one record of the year , Sandro Perri, along with Wes Allen (Doing It To Death dj), Louis Calabro (Goin' Steady/End of the Internet), David Dacks (Abstract Index radioshow), Minesh Mandoda (Ghostlight), Andrew Zuckerman (Gastric Female Reflex), Craig Dunsmuir, Wolfgang Nessel (Blood Honey), etc. [...]

... but for me, many things remain the same, namely that I spend odd amounts of time discussing Celine Dion. So it's always nice when YouTube steps in to help. This was patched together by someone from the A New Day DVD, the five-hour document of her Las Vegas run, which is selling briskly. (In Canada, it almost instantly became the bestselling music DVD ever.) Meanwhile , I'll be on WNYC's Soundcheck tomorrow at around 2 pm (EST) to talk about Celine, criticism and taste, as a little [...]

CBC Radio 1 's Talking Books show will, I'm told, be having a roundtable discussion about my book (see left) this weekend, Saturday at 4:30 pm (5 pm in Newfoundland).

That Bee Gees song always seemed so mysterious, Syd Barrett-ish, with its talk of puppets and thrown stones. Take my holiday silence this week in that same spirit and indulge in grand speculations. I'll be back with some year-endish blather next week; I've sent in my Idolator poll ballot hastily and wish I could revise it -even when you don't believe in the list ritual quite so much, there's still a self-portrait self-consciousness to the exercise, and this year I think my lists simply portray a person who was otherwise preoccupied. I was tempted to Bayard [...]

Two recent Doonesbury strips:

Matt Collins of Ninja High School, with NHS followers rocking out at rear, at Sneaky Dee's last weekend. Photo by The CJM . Reviews of le livre (see left) are beginning to trickle in: a hefty one in New York magazine ("this book goes very deeply right") and one in the Gazette in Montreal (I love that they call it "a compulsively quotable book"). The Las Vegas Review-Journal also had a column about it this weekend, coinciding with the [...]

I missed this Freakytrigger post when it first appeared last week. It brings up the most cogent criticism yet of the premise or placement of my book. Tom writes: "The utopian part of me wishes it was coming out as its own thing, not as a 33 1/3 publication. ... [The] choice of this book for this series queers the pitch, creates a structural divide between Dion and all other music covered in the series. These other acts get their albums written about lovingly by fans, Celine's is written about by a non-fan trying to convert themselves [...]

Since the book (see left margin) comes out this week, I'll be busy doing a heavy round of media. I'm on today's edition of Fair Game with Faith Salie (a PRI show that airs at various times on various NPR stations ) - it looks like you'll be able to listen in their on-line archive later in the week. Faith is a very charming interviewer. I'm also going to be on the Bryant Park Project morning show on Wednesday (probably between 8 and 9 am EST), and on Q with Jian [...]

The Horseshoe on Queen St, Toronto, as it looked back in the Stompin' Tom/early-punk era. The Guardian's "Readers Recommend..." Friday feature of themed song playlists is always a pleasure, and for me today's "... Songs About Other Songs" is crystal meta, although I think they miss a beat by naming "Sweet Home Alabama" itself (more answer song than song-about-a-song) when they could mention the Drive-By Truckers' " Ronnie and Neil ," or nearly anything else off of Southern Rock Opera , which is [...]

A friend today pointed out that I've been remiss in not publicizing the launch party for that there book over there in the left margin yet. The event takes place Wed., Jan. 9, at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, starting at 7:30 pm, as part of the This Is Not A Reading Series (TiNaRS for the cognoscenti). It features performances of Celine Dion songs and other aesthetic curiosities by 2006 Polaris Prize winner Final Fantasy , Laura Barrett and [...]

The site for the independent-bookselling juggernaut Powells.com has been hosting a series of posts by authors from the 33 1/3 series , and mine went up a couple of days ago. It's called " In Praise of Distraction ," and it's partly a reflection on writing the Celine book for 33 1/3 and partly about the notion that "Being interested in music ... really means being interested in almost everything." If you're a U.S. reader, in particular, you might be interested in Powell's buy-2-get-1-free sale on the 33 1/3 series.

I seldom mention on Zoilus the stories I work on as an editor of The Globe and Mail's Focus section, but I feel compelled to let those of you who've missed it know about the series "The Boy in the Moon" by my colleague and friend Ian Brown, which began this past weekend and continues the next two. It's the story of Ian's life with his son, Walker, who has a rare genetic syndrome called CFC that makes him disabled in a dozen different ways. But it is a tough, curious, humorous and philosophical take on the [...]

Also this weekend, tonight, tomorrow night and in conversation on Monday evening, we're lucky to have baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett from the St. Louis area (best known as a member of the World Saxophone Quartet) and percussionist Kahil El'Zabar from Chicago (leader of the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble) to play the Trane Studio . If you missed David Dacks' article on Bluiett in Eye this week, go check it out , and as a supplement, here's a piece (halfway down the post) that I wrote several years ago about El'Zabar.

This weekend , Toronto's lucky to be graced with the presence of Susan Howe , the New England writer whose work since the early 1970s has helped push the intellectual and formal bounds of poetry. Howe's poetry is a notoriously spare and rigorous one, layered with historical and literary allusions, but in a reading yesterday at Ryerson University, hearing her speak it for the first time, the humour and sensuality of it was much clearer - or, to put it in relevant terms for this weekend's events, the music. In a conversation after the reading, Howe noted that she's [...]

Exclaim has a little item about my book in its new issue, and in that item is a link to a longer interview, and in that interview I seem unable to speak in anything but Russian-doll-style chains of embedded subclauses. It was taped pre- Halifax Scandal , so we don't get into that.

Best-of-year time is upon us , it seems, perhaps having crept even another week back in the calendar compared to last year's record-early-and-overdone list season. Because I spent half the year mainly listening to one album released 10 years ago and in the process imagining a world without words like best and worst , I'm not going to play the game this year, at least not in the sense of making a big footnoted list (I'll still play this game ; glad they have had second thoughts on the name, though from [...]