Three Things from Edmonton podcast -- Episode 135 (the folk fest episode): tarps, food, Darlingside

In the words of Darlingside, you can't live in the past, but the only way to go is to go back. This week's Three Things goes back to the Edmonton Folk Music Festival.

Three Things, episode 135:

                         

1. Tarps 

It’s Saturday morning, we are in a line of festival goers that snakes down the multi-use path on Connors Road next to the dormant LRT tracks. We are waiting for the gates at the top of the hill to open. The wail of bagpipes means it won’t be long. The pipes are leading tarp holders who had been in the pen since whatever o’clock AM to their preferred seating locations at the base of Gallagher Park—where it’s flat, where you’re not fighting a slow but relentless rearguard action against gravity. The rest of us, those who preferred a decent night’s sleep, will scurry to a patch of earth on the slope of the amphitheatre, throw our tarps down and stake our claim when the gates open. But not yet. Now, we wait. 

The guy just ahead of us in line is reading the hardcover 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari. The book has a blue-ink word stamp on the leaf of the fore edge. It’s a library book. It’s blooming with coloured sticky notes scratched with the reader’s handwritten thoughts, bits of dialogue with the author. Apparently, this reader is not comfortable tagging the page margin with his thoughts. That would be graffiti. Dog-earing would be vandalism. He sees me reading him. I identify as a fellow sticky note reader.

“And then you’ll take that sticky—” I say. “Yeah, and then I’ll just kind of go through later and, what was the point here and if I find he made this point on a further page, even better,” he says.

I question him about storage of the actual stickies. They are precious. The stickies are indexes of a reader’s thoughts, observations, footnotes, connections to other passages in the book, to other passages in other books, to the same word used elsewhere that illuminates its meaning here, and so on. The stuff of the sticky notes is what the reader writes into the living process of reading printed words. It’s stuff you want to remember. But what do you do with all sticky notes when it’s time for the library book to be returned? That’s been my challenge with the library books I have lived with, and part of the reason I end up buying too many books. I feel more comfortable making pencil notes in books not on loan. The line starts to move. I don’t get a complete answer about sticky note storage from the fellow reader. I thank him for his example. In a couple of minutes, the tarps on the hill will remind me of sticky notes.

2. Food 

The South Pacific coconut chicken from the Filistix food truck at the base of Stage 3 is a performance of its own. I recommend it without reservation. So is and so do I the saumon fumé avec avcoat eggs benny at Café Bicyclette. At this year’s folk fest we did both. On Friday evening we went to Filistix, got a couple of dishes, sat down at a picnic table and met folks who came by with a version of the same question: that looks great, where did you get that? Filistix, Shelagh pointed.

That was where Shelagh spotted Mr. Milan. He was the boys’ high school music teacher at Mac. We said thanks for introducing them to Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis and Chick Corea—not the lineup of authorities you might expect at a Catholic high school. But if you accept the proposition that you can’t live without music, then who are the real benefactors in a student’s life? I’m saying the music teachers. 

And the chefs. There’s no life without good food, a fact not lost on the hungry who lined up all the way to Stage 4 to get food and drink from Filistix. On Saturday, facing that line, we hacked a new solution for lunch. We left the site, grabbed a couple of Lime scooters and cruised to Bicyclette for the eggs benny, a table, a bit of indoor shade from the baking sun, perhaps the best Americano I have ever had, and indoor plumbing. It was a chance to practise my French and to sit on a chair not slipping imperceptibly downhill. It was a place to regroup before heading back to hear Darlingside’s late afternoon concert on Stage 3. We had each taken a Lime on the way there, but found only one for the return trip. We duetted back to the hill.

3. Darlingside 

October I lose my mind/
Crossover Wisconsin line/
Apple cider signs

That was Darlingside live on Stage 3 as they brought us into the second verse of their song White Horses. When I hear those autumn words, I can smell burning straw in the farm fields of fall, not far away now. It’s the smell, too, of words reduced in a crucible, the smell of poetry. Double lines of three syllables and then four

<One, two, three/
One, two, three, four>
that  resolve with a line of five 
<One, two, three, four, five>

under the apple cider signs lyric. Is apple cider an adjective describing signs? Or is apple cider an active subject? That is, is it transmitting signs? Is it conveying a symbolic gesture of its presence? Does the sung apple cider have being? These are the borderlines you find yourself crossing listening to Darlingside at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival.

Thanks, Terry Wickham, thanks volunteers and musicians and sponsors for the folk fest. Thanks for being out there, friends.