Three Things from Edmonton podcast - Episode 112: medium/message, curling, liner notes

 

From the maelstrom, here are three things that notched some gratitude and happiness this past week.

Three Things, episode 112: 
  

                   

1. Medium/message 

The day I realized that all the places I would like to travel to I won’t travel to because as I get older it will be harder to travel to, and that I might have <knock on world> another decade and a half to make tracks, get back to Tulsa, get back to Ottawa and Montréal, see the Maritimes, that day was an eye-opening, bucket-list-editing day. The quantity of time isn’t the same thing as the quality of time. Well, huh, didn’t quite grasp that at 25.

Same thing with all the things I would like to understand. It might be a smarter strategy to concentrate my dwindling resources on a few key teachings and then knuckle down and try to get a hold of them. For me, McLuhan’s maxim that the medium is the message is one of those elusive things. It has something to do with the unseen importance of the infrastructure that supports a message, and not just the message itself. Somehow, the truth is in the prepositions—the means by which—and not in just what is obviously and intentionally conveyed. Or something like that.

The reminder to think infrastructurally arrived unexpectedly last week in a link my friend Barry shared with me on Facebook. It was a clip from an interview with Sting, in which The Police frontman mused about the building blocks of songs—the bridge of a song, specifically. 

Sting explained that a song’s bridge, like a bridge out there in the real world, is a way out of a crisis. In a song’s bridge, a new viewpoint, underlined by a new chord or rhythm or voice, is acquired. The structure of the song is a kind of therapy. The structure, not just the words and notes, but the structure is the message. Huh!  Made me think. The famous bridge in Every Breath You Take now emerges as a kind of confession of intense wound that is quickly covered up again as the singer regains control of his sinister surveillance operation. But it is there, buried or not, and it changes the way I now hear the rest of that song from back in the Cold War.

2. Curling 

I am not sure why I tune into the Brier. The strategy of curling is impenetrable. The lexicon is  lorem ipsum. “If you play the outturn that looks easier,” one of the commentators said of an Ontario shot against Alberta, “there’s a short, angle raise for a guy that hits like Kennedy so they’re gonna go the other way, the tougher freeze but it’s a better result.” Fellow commentators did not flinch at such a routine observation. The shorthand the players use as they compose the next shot is also inscrutable. “You like the runs?” a skip yelled to a teammate. “Yep, yep,” came the enthusiastic response. There are flashes of hoped-for understanding, but the insight is typically premature. It turns out that I heard wrong. It’s a run double, not a rum double. Run with an “n,” not rum with a Coke. It remains a haaaaaaaard sport to comprehend.

Which makes it like pretty much everything else in this world that is seen imperfectly as if through a glass of dark rum. My task as a hack is to settle for a foothold, take from the broadcast what I can.  I enjoy the yelling. I like the sound of the rocks as they deflect off each other with low sonar pings. I like that there are more seed companies than betting apps paying for ads. I like the Canadiana. In a game between Yukon and Quebec, the Yukon skip, with his last shot, failed, as they say,  to hit and stick, scoring one point instead of two, which, by his morose look, must be pretty much the worst thing that can happen. Players are mic’d, so we heard what he said next as he explained the botched shot to a teammate. It was perfect.

 
“Sorry, buddy.”

Then again, I’m pretty sure I know why I watch curling.

3. Liner notes
 
Back in 1985 I forked over what would now be 120 bucks to buy Dylan’s Biograph box set from A&A Records on the upper floor of Londonderry Mall close to Woolco. Time is a movator—it moves too fast. I remember walking home across 137 Avenue feeling like a spy carrying a dossier. I know each note of those five records. I still have them, still play them, still have the liner notes booklet, still read it. Now that music is basically a utility that flows into the house like electricity, the experience of quietly reading liner notes has been replaced by, well, nothing. Dylan’s latest box set, called Fragments, protects the liner note tradition. There’s an essay by the U.S. Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. 

There’s an essay by Steven Hyden in which he quotes Dylan wondering why critics don’t let the music in. Of the reception given his 1997 album Time Out Of Mind, Dylan notes the critics were quick to point out the songs dealt with his, Dylan’s, mortality. “But I didn’t see one critic say: ‘It deals with my mortality’—you know, his own. As if he’s immune in some kind of way—like whoever’s writing about the record has got eternal life and the singer doesn’t.” 

Boom, as my friend Fitz would say. 

And boom again as I read a day later in Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy Of Modern Song, his reminder that it’s trivial if Sinatra’s I’m A Fool To Want You is about Ava Gardner or not.  It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life, Dylan says, that’s important. At some level I always knew this. I probably knew it better in 1985. Thanks to a new set of liner notes, I have my updated assignment. 

Thanks for being out there, friends.