Slippery City Shoes 2


In the land of the long roads/
High lonesome prairie/
Dreaming of the springtime/
First crocus in the snow/
Coffee in a go cup/
He's heading for the old rigs/
Land of shining mountains/
Big Alberta sky.

Those 37 sculpted words from Ian Tyson's Land of Shining Mountains are attached to a stone wall near a C-Train station near 7th Ave. and 9th St. SW in Calgary. The words are raised, so they produce shadows.
Tyson's songs are great, and his best are the best, but they, when performed or listened to, they exist in time.

All around is motion and sound as trains stop and go, workers criss cross, jackhammers ring.

The tribute in text somehow seems still and pure.

Until you consider that words are not, in the end, visual, but have to be related somehow to the world of sound, the natural habitat of language, to yield their meaning. This is the Ong (Orality And Literacy, p. 8) in the song that is Tyson's language.

In a song devoted to visual Alberta (long roads, crocus, go cup, mountains, sky, Oldman, Castle, Red Deer, Battle, cities of the plains, etc), the bridge is turned over to the aural.
In the night, I have heard the thunder roll
And then the spoken word inside the song.
Like the cowboy said, "I wish I'd seen the buffalo/
"Maybe they'll come back again."
I left the Tyson monument with text in my eyes, music in my head. And a thought that the best way to fail in trying to freeze sound is to revert to text. Says Ong: "Sound exists only when it is going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent." (p. 32) 

It turns out that Ong, like Tyson, is fond of the buffalo and of sound.

Sound cannot be sounding without the use of power. A hunter can see a buffalo, smell, taste, and touch a buffalo when the buffalo is completely inert, even dead, but if he hears a buffalo, he had better watch out: something is going on. 


Buffalo head, Eddie's Menswear, Edmonton






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more