A pre-debut release of Connor’s new video.

Also, check out the story at Connor’s new website.

In the last few weeks, friends, fans and a couple of people on the street have brought up the ‘Raise a Little Hell’ Cracker commercial. Some have congratulated me. Others have joked about lifetime supplies of saltines. Others, knowing that I don’t watch TV, simply wanted to be sure that I’d heard about it.

As it turns out, I found out about it the way they did. I heard the familiar ‘A’ chord ring out from the living room as I worked at my computer here in the den. I jumped up, and Debbie and I watched, fascinated, as the slow motion crackers dropped into the waiting bowls of exploding tomato soup.
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My Dad, a brilliant sculptor, used to tell people that he simply carved away everything that didn’t look like what he’d set out to create. Watching him work, you’d swear he did just that – uncovering animals and people that had been waiting in the wood for his chisel to free them.

I joked with Monty on Saturday night that I was hoping to use Dad’s approach to finish my submission for this year’s Three-Minute Film Festival. My rough cut had timed in at over an hour. I simply needed to carve away all but three minutes of that.

Monty laughed, but I could see the look of concern in his eyes.
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From the Amy Wallace story:

The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”

Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.

UPDATE: FactCheck.org article: “Inoculation Misinformation - Claims that the “swine flu” vaccine is dangerous range from seriously overblown to flat-out false.”

I’ve just received an email warning about the dangers of the H1N1 Vaccine. You may have received it too. That’s why I’m writing this.

I urge you all to take the time to read this story in the current Wired Magazine called “ An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All”

It’s a well-reasoned and heavily researched story about vaccines in general and the H1N1 vaccine in particular. Usually I’d say that folks should make their own choices and not care what those choices are  -  but this story has convinced me that in this case it really can’t work that way. If enough people refuse to take the H1N1 vaccine – it will put everyone else in their community at risk.

Here’s one of many key quotes from the Wired article:

The frightening implications of this kind of anecdote were illustrated by a 2002 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.

By contrast, here’s the Wiki page on Russell Blaylock, who wrote the H1N1 email that was forwarded to me. And here’s an excerpt from that page:

Blaylock has asserted, among other things, that behind the US drug problem was a “nefarious program created in the former Soviet Union that exceeds even the far-reaching imaginations of Hollywood writers”. The drug problem, he writes, would weaken the resistance of Western Society to Soviet invasion, undermine religion (which he calls ‘the foundation of Western stability and morality’), target schools, harm the work force and work ethic, make the youth “unable to resist collectivism”, and create a “totalitarian mindset within the United States government”. He implicates Fidel Castro, Nikita Kruschev, Leonid Brezhnev, organized crime syndicates, and their American “leftist accomplices” in the formation of US drug culture.

Blaylock implies that the Soviet program was linked to crack-cocaine, fentanyl, ecstasy and methamphetamine, and that it was responsible for “an epidemic of hepatitis, AIDS, venereal diseases and highly resistant tuberculosis”. He accuses the US media and the US government of knowing about the Soviet plot, but failing to expose it. As part of his evidence, he quotes from the “Communist Manual of Instructions of Psychological Warfare”, purportedly by Lavrenti Beria. However, many people have doubted the authenticity and authorship of the work, including the FBI.

The Wired story is not as short and exciting as the anti-vaccine email that I received tonight, but it should be required reading for us all.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”

~ Marcello Truzzi

Just because I’ve never heard of ‘The Dishes’ shouldn’t automatically disqualify them from a place in a documentary about Canadian popular music. An album by a band called ‘Simply Saucer’ beat out Trooper in Bob Mersereau’s ‘Top 100 Canadian Albums’ book (they were #36 we were #60) and I’d never heard of them either. And despite the fact that I remember ‘Martha and the Muffins’ as a one-hit-wonder, their web site currently lists a total of 10 albums. So, really, what do I know?

I have great sympathy for the producers of the two-part CBC documentary ‘This Beat Goes On’. A truly comprehensive history of Canada’s pop music would require several full days to present. The two episodes of TBGO, covering the 1970’s, clocked in at two hours, minus commercials.

And, like Roy MacGregor said about our job as judges for the CBC’s ‘Seven Wonders of Canada’ program – beyond all other considerations, a show of this nature needs to be “geographically correct”. Considering writer Nicholas Jennings also wrote the astonishingly Toronto-centric ‘Before the Goldrush’ about the supposed genesis of the Canadian music scene, I was surprised and happy to see so much western-Canadian content. I was particularly impressed with the time and attention lavished on me, and my band.

Nonetheless, I’m still strangely unsatisfied with what will now stand as trusted documentation of the crazy Canadian music scene.

For one thing, I want you to know that the seventies Canadian music scene was a lot of fun. With only a few exceptions, I didn’t get that sense from the show. It was low-key, scholarly and, forgive me Jian et al, a bit dull.

More important to me though is the fact that Canadian-made music is not the only music we Canadians listen to! Isolating Canadian hits from the mosaic of American and British music of the day is akin to presenting Van Halen’s brown M&Ms as a full pack of candy. The constantly buzzing interaction of Canadian writers and performers with the outstanding music coming at us from the US and England was part of the unfolding thrill of what was happening here. Our music did not take seed and grow in the cultural vacuum that the documentary suggests by it’s omissions. My song, “Two For the Show” only reached number two on the Canadian charts because a Paul McCartney song held on stubbornly at number one. That was the world we Canadian artists came up in.

I also have two petty quibbles:

I understand and applaud the doc’s nod to the Quebec music scene but do not understand the omission of Montreal’s Michel Pagliaro – the first Canadian artist to score top 40 hits on both the anglophone and francophone pop charts in Canada. (Last year Pag received the ‘Governor General’s Performing Arts Award’, Canada’s most prestigious artistic honour). His “What the Hell I Got” was one of my favourite songs in 1975, and still stands up well: (please forgive the total uselessness of this video)

And finally, regarding the story that Randy Bachman tells on the show about the pizza boy playing the piano part on “Takin’ Care of Business”: it’s not true. I was there. The piano part was played by Seattle’s Norman Durkee – a professional musician who deserves the credit for his deftly performed and rollicking track.

I might never have known about Jonah Smith if we hadn’t walked into that square behind the church in Barcelona in September 2007. We assumed, not unreasonably, that the band sound-checking on the large outdoor stage was from Spain, and it took some time to realize that the words being sung were in English. The band was tight and the singer, playing a groovin’ Rhodes piano, was great. Before we left I asked the sound guy who it was.

“Jonah Smith from Brooklyn New York” he said.

Jonah hits on pretty much all of the qualities that I think a great songwriter and singer needs. And his band is one of the most empathetic I’ve seen – leaving lots of space for the best parts.

Here’s a live vid of Jonah playing my current favourite song, “Little Black Angels”. This is not the original arrangement, which I also recommend. I couldn’t find a vid of “Stay a While”, which is another favourite, but your instructions for today are to go and buy both of these tracks, now, on iTunes.

Here’s a clip of the song they were playing at soundcheck:

The Roxy is on Granville street in the heart of Vancouver. Jordan is also the singer for Cozy Bones, one of my (and Connor’s) favourite Canadian bands.

I was just reading about Iran again. I realized that, in response to an email from Dik Silver yesterday, I could almost spell Ahmadinejad and Khamenei without checking Huffington Post, where I still spend an inordinate amount of time. I have said the name “Ahmadinejad” out loud several times and think I pronounce it correctly. I am reading “Infinite Jest”, mostly because John Gruber of Daring Fireball said it was his “favorite novel ever”, and I’m trying to not think about the fact that its author, David Foster Wallace, recently hung himself after suffering from severe depression. The book is 1078 pages long and I’m currently on page 71 – so there will be another 1007 pages of slight discomfort with Wallace’s often black humor. It also trips me up a bit that he says “like” all the time. As in: “He uses the word “like”, like, inappropriately”. He also doesn’t use paragraphs which makes for large, intense, blocks of text. I listened to Merlin Mann’s talk on doing creative work this morning. He’s a funny guy but his only real points were that I should get started and not be afraid to suck. Good advice. I didn’t start then though. First I paid a bill. Fedex charged me a $10.50 “Advancement Fee” for paying $3.38 to Canada Customs for taxes on a $25.00 guitar pick order. That’s what the lady told me when I phoned to ask what the $10.50 was for. And I don’t have the time (or inclination) to write about the US audio/video company that wouldn’t take my Canadian VISA and didn’t like my PayPal and eventually cancelled my headphone amplifier order. Also this morning. I wrote to Paul Tobin thanking him for his CD and called the lady that had called Red Robinson who had called me because the lady knew another lady who wanted to give me a portrait that my Dad had done of me in the seventies. She was very nice and particularly understanding. I also called the roofer who put plywood where my skylights were about a month ago. I called last week and his wife told me she picked them up a week before that. This morning I said something about maybe getting the new, opening, skylights sometime before the end of summer. She agreed that would be a good idea. I forwarded off a couple of pieces of email for clarification after discovering there is, apparently, a new person who seems to be representing us in some manner at our booking agency. I made some notes containing what I know will seem like stupid questions and saved them to my desktop, from where I’ll retrieve them at a later date when seeking further enlightenment. I had to re-calk the sink in our upstairs bathroom this morning because the DAP Kitchen and Bathroom sealant didn’t seal when I did it last week. Today I used a new product that jammed-up in the tube two-thirds of the way around the sink and refused to extrude any further caulk. I probed it with a 2″ finishing nail and forced small blobs onto my finger, which I then applied piecemeal to the seam. I also finished, laying on my stomach on the bathroom floor, the tile caulk replacement job in a spot that I had missed down under the cupboards. My Trooper email didn’t work this morning, but before I could ask about it, our Webmeister had already jumped in and taken care of it. Our lighting Director sent an email about flight scheduling and holiday time that made my eyes glaze over and my head start to ache and I was only slightly relieved that his questions were not directed to me, since I will be asked to weigh in with my opinion at some point. Probably after my holiday is over.