Great to know your pacemaker has a ten year warranty...

I was down in Guelph today visiting with my dear father, who is 85 and just had a pacemaker installed. He was pleased to inform me that the pacemaker comes with a ten year warranty.

Let's think about this. Your pacemaker has a ten year warranty, but it quits after two years...

What are you gonna do?

Well, most likely you're gonna do nothing because if your pacemaker fails you're most likely gonna be dead! Shit, they might as well give it a fifty year warranty... who's coming back to claim the warranty after their pacemaker stops?

But it was a lovely visit. He's looking great. Getting a pacemaker used to be a big deal but today you're in and out in a few hours.

Nice opportunity to catch up on the family news. Nephew Sam has found a college course the curriculum of which runs from whitewater rafting to mountaineering.

I know! That used to be shit you did for fun in your spare time!

Now it's a college program? If they'd had that in my day I might have stuck around a bit longer.

And his brother Parker has been accepted at Trent.

I don't mind Trent at all. My daughter spent a couple of years there. In fact, I once delivered her from her Mom's house in Guelph to her dorm at Trent in a minute under two hours. Considering that mere mortals more often than not require over two hours just to traverse the City of Toronto West to East I found that a remarkable accomplishment.

I think they've still got Michael Neumann on staff. I've never met Michael but we've exchanged emails over political stuff. Here's why he should have the undying respect of anyone who cares about truth and justice.

That alone is a good reason to choose Trent.

After getting caught up on family news I had lunch with my dear son Jake. Sometimes I worry about him. He's a bit of a character. Takes after his old man a bit too much for my liking, although he's at least a hundred times more talented than me.

So he finally gives up the straight skinny on what really happened when his band got the slot at the Hillside Festival.

I was there. I knew what happened.

But it was nice to hear it from him.

Four dorkshit wannabee rockstars get a chance to play Hillside!

On hearing this great news they immediately proceed to halve their practice time and double their party time!

Ketamine, MDA, acid, and of course lots of pot and beer for the next two months... they're rock stars now, don't you know?!


Ya, I know. I saw the show. At the time I thought you idiots just blew the chance of a lifetime.

Good to hear Jake concur.

He did offer a post-script, though. He'd set up a web-site for future bookings. By the time he got around to checking it two months later the five bookings they'd garnered as a result of their Hillside show were all in the past.


Lesson for aspiring rock stars; keep your wits about you.

Get in on the ground floor with this outrageously talented new recording artist

Ya OK, he's my kid... that doesn't mean he's not outrageously talented.

Although I will admit to a spot of parental bias.

I remember taking him and his gear to a gig at the Anzac club in Toronto when he was sixteen years old. What bent my mind was when my kid took the stage people stopped talking and paid attention.

The trouble with Jake is he doesn't make nearly enough effort to get his shit out there.

He should do an Anzac every week and he'd be playing Massey Hall before you know it.

But as much as I wish him every success, that's gotta be his deal.

Not mine.

Hats off for Pirsig

In the seventies I made half a dozen trips to the west coast and back, ostensibly to find Fame and Fortune, both of whom, for better or worse, successfully eluded me.

On one of those trips I hitch-hiked through Washington, Idaho, Montana, and North Dakota. When I happened upon Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a couple of years later I realized that I'd travelled many of the roads that Robert Pirsig and his son had explored on the motorcycle trip documented in the book.

Coincidence? Sure, but at the time I thought not. Instead, I felt it gave me a certain mystical affinity with Pirsig.

I subsequently read and re-read Zen every few years. Pirsig mastered the trick of convincing the reader that something could be and not be at the same time. This was years before the Derrida crowd enshrined absence as the highest form of presence, and I truly believed he was onto something. Can't say I ever figured out what it was, but...

Zen is one of the books you have to read if you want to get a handle on the American zeitgeist circa those two or three post WWII decades before the great unravelling of America began in earnest. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Keysey, Burroughs, and McLuhan would pretty much round out your required reading on that file. Ya, they're all dead white guys now, but they were very much "happening" then.

From the first time I read the book I knew some day I'd want to carve those roads on a motorcycle trip with my own son. He's a man now and will have to supply his own motorcycle, but I'm still good to go.

What do you think, dude?

We'd have Robert M. Pirsig watching over us.

Please join me in wishing Juniour a very happy 26th birthday

He's got his shit more together at 26 than I had mine at 46.

He's gonna be OK.

And he's still stitching together some great tunes!

Love ya, buddy!

Happy happy,

dad

Video Stars

As the regular readers will know, my dear son Jake is a bit of an undiscovered musical genius. I suppose it's a good thing he's undiscovered, because if he were ever to be discovered, uncovered, recovered, or rediscovered, it could seriously impact his budding career as a prep chef.

But he, like hundreds of millions of others, has been mourning David Bowie recently, and that shines through in his latest creation.

Nice work, kid.

Junior's musical journey

My son Jake decided at age 12 he was gonna be a rock star. I found him a big old electric bass and an amp in the classifieds and figured he was off to the races.

Not so. False alarm. That musical career waned faster than it blew in. He'd come up to my place for weekends, maybe spend twenty minutes fooling with that instrument, but leave it there when he went home. That's what originally led me to pick it up, which is another story (see Gay Baptists on Heroin World Tour 2002).

Six months later something had changed. He was into it. Not only was he playing that bass, he soon branched off into drums, guitar, and saxophone. By the time he was 15 he was all about two things; smoking weed and making music... three actually; he was determined to read everything that Eric Arthur Blair ever wrote in his life.

All of which probably explains the absence of any credits on his high-school transcript.

But he did have his moments during his high school career.



Here he is with my Charvel. He's always had a nasty habit of "borrowing" my shit and forgetting to bring it back. Like my first edition Nevermind the Bullocks pressing...

As his talents developed he had a very Waitesian thing going on, which I quite enjoyed. He was also messing around with putting found video to music he created. I think his Nicotine Run is fucking brilliant!

Alas, and I don't know where I went wrong as a parent, but somehow he fell in with the wrong crowd and started making something called "electronic music." There's a couple of thousand different sub-genres of this so-called electronic music, and Jake could explain every one of them to you. Not only that, but he's probably made several examples of every genre that are out there on the Eternal Web of Shame that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

But he seems to be coming out of this dark period. All he wanted for Christmas this year was a Glenn Gould disc... WTF?

But I got him one, and a couple of days later I get Jake's latest music.

HALLELUJAH!!!

The "electronic music" phase is over!

Things that break a father's heart

For well over the first year of his life, I walked Junior to sleep every night to the Supertramp LP Crime of the Century.

By his early teens I was driving him to gigs here and there. By then he was showing some promise as a guitarist. By the time he was 16 or 17 he could howl out blues standards that sounded like they came from the belly of a 75 year old Delta lifer...

Then it all went to hell. Electronic music. Future funk. Vaporwave. I have no clue what any of that means.

But if you're anything as a parent, you don't give up on your kid just because he joins a cult or a gang or gets mixed up with electronic music. As painful as it is, you can never give up.

So we keep in touch.

The other day he tells me he's been doing a remix for some guy named Jack Stanton.

Who's that?

Oh some guy who went to Oxford for art.

After five minutes on the Google-ator I realize he's talking about Jack Stanton who just won the Saatchi New Sensations award!

OK, so I still don't get electronic music, but if he's working with guys like this, he must be pretty good at what he does.

Now if I could only get him back to rock and blues...

Junior turning Japanese

Let this be a lesson of hope to despairing parents everywhere. Junior is a brilliant guitarist, singer, and all-round music guy. I used to thrill to his Tom Waites covers.

Then he crossed over to the dark side. Electronic music...  I don't get it and I don't like it and I don't understand why anyone with real talent would go there.

But he seems to be coming out the other side!

This ain't Tom Waites anymore, but I like it:

https://soundcloud.com/shadowmaskmusic/necorobo-tsumiki-shadowmask

Nice salute to Kraftwerk

https://soundcloud.com/jakeneumann/automatische

Still have to say I preferred his Waitesian phase, but this one kinda grows on you.

Serenading Armageddon

Had to watch this a couple of times before I figured out "the girl with the iron nose."  The incongruity of all those happy folks partying their way into oblivion is bracing, but then again I'm watching the Grammys as I write this...

Junior shocks me again with plunge into electro-pop

I don't know where I went wrong. For the first year of this lad's life I walked him to sleep every night to Supertramp's Crime of the Century.

When it became obvious that he had chops that went considerably beyond anything ever exhibited by either of his parents, and his musical influences were the pantheon of classic British rock and the American blues masters, I thought maybe I had the next Jack White in the house.

For my money, I preferred those rip-snorting Tom Waites rip-offs he used to do.

And it was my money. Wasn't a Christmas or a birthday went by without him needing another weapon for his arsenal. A saxophone here, a bigger amplifier there, another guitar... I don't hear any of that stuff on his latest masterpiece.

But I do hear a young man who is maturing both as a musician and a songwriter.

Nice work Jake!

Junior finds his mojo

I've mentioned in passing that my dear son Jake is a serious musician.

Here's a link to some of his latest stuff.

I think you'll hear that von Trapp DNA loud and clear.