Slippery City Shoes


There will be a time when I get it all down, she being bound to go, and all, but, 'til then, it's worth putting down a few Tyson memories in short form.

-- Dancing with Shelagh at the Howlin' Wolf. The band played Gallo, and we polka'd. Tyson signed my Martin guitar strap, and Shelagh's shirt.

-- My mom loved the line about the big stands of timber wait there just for fallin' in Summer Wages.

-- The high soaring hawk/The dark awkward crow was one of the only ways Michael, down the hall this moment crashing out a song from his electric guitar, would get to sleep as a baby.

-- Steady told the story about singing Tyson at a wedding in Florida with family from Newfoundland.

-- One summer we drove the long way home from Kananaskis so we could go through Longview. We went to the Navajo Mug.

-- I had great conversations about Tyson with Peter North when I worked at The Journal.

-- The autograph on the guitar strap faded, and Danny Baldassarre from ACCESS got it signed again.

-- Shelagh loves the line about weather's good there in the fall.

-- I love how Tyson captures how quickly time passes in M.C. Horses, and how art battles that waste of time in The Gift.

-- Sweet America comin' off the rails/That's what lies and money do


-- I spent some time feeling pretty alone, away from home, my first job. And I asked myself, what would Ian Tyson do? And you know, it was the damndest thing, but it kinda got me through.

-- We took the boys to see Tyson in Spruce Grove, and got an autographed CD after the show. The boys were the youngest ones there. This outfit's history.

-- I met him one day at CTV and told him which songs mean the most to me. He said: "You really know my stuff." He sat at my desk to do a phone interview. That makes that office a provincial historic resource.

-- We talked to Dave for an extra hour after shopping at Eddie's, after figuring out he was a cowboy, and Tyson, for him, is it.

-- We four sang Four Strong Winds at the end of the Edmonton Folk Music Festival, candles ablaze.

-- He could paint the light/On horsehide shinin'
Great passin' herds of the buffalo/
And a cow cold on a rainy morning/
And the twistin' wrist of the houlihan throw.


A cow camp cold. Perfect.

-- Goodnight Loving Trail's northern lights, hawk on the wing, spring, great divide, Camp Cookie.

-- Mikey read The Old Man And The Sea on his flight to Cuba, and Irving Berlin on the way home. "It's a good song."

-- Home

-- Voice

-- Sky

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 laughed ab
Read more

:)

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

On the way to and from Coffee Outside

Image
I have wondered about the the flight to artifice when natural beauty is encountered. Standing in front of a mountain vista, I will routinely offer some version of, wow, it looks like a painting! Or like a postcard. Or that is just out of a movie! This morning as I pedalled in the MacKinnon Ravine the April snow felt etched onto the limbs of the trees. I have often felt dissatisfied with this transposing of the beauty out there into the key of human making.  But, maybe, painting and photography and engraving and the rest of the human arts are as natural to us, as lovely, as nature itself. Or, maybe, so entwined that it is hard to tell nature and art apart. My bicycle has certainly transported me to feelings of freedom I would not have achieved were it not a piece of technology.  Who are we, really?                                                                           At the turn at the bottom of the ravine, a plastic orange fence encircles a soggy sink
Read more