Tag Archives: British Columbia

The art versus the artist

Posted on by
image

Joy Division by Anton Corbijn

I could have just as easily put up a image of Robin Williams, Charles Dickens or Vincent Van Gogh.  Creativity doesn’t necessarily have to come from a dark place to be worthy of exposure.  Sometimes artists are in their best place when they create their best work.  An easy example of this would be A Kind of Blue by Miles Davis.  Miles and a group of incredible players went into the studio with only a few basic sketches of ideas and improvised what would soon be a classic.  I know for myself that being in a miserable intoxicated space doesn’t usually produce my best work (naturally I’m not going to place myself alongside these artists.  After watching Jaco Pastorius – Modern Electric Bass I always feel like the tribes least talented and clumsy Neanderthal.)  It is very likely that some of these struggling iconic figures were in their most lucid when they created their work. 

I don’t know if forms of mental illness create artistic genius.  I have known many extremely talented people who don’t have any visually crippling ailments (though not all ailments are as easily seen).  However there are plenty of examples you can find of genius residing in people with mental illnesses. 

image

Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain during World War 2 struggled with depression, coining the phrase of the “Black Dog” that would visit him.  This image immediately brings forth the sound of another great Englishman (me and U.K culture again, I know…)
Strange version of Nick Drake’s Black Eyed Dog
Maybe it boils down to what Anthony Robbins said that the two things that move people are either inspiration or desperation.  Some success stories come from things fallen in place from a love of something and some come from the push of pain.  I personally believe that the main source of talent is a love for what you do that makes you pursue it daily, vigorously with your full mind and spirit.  People who suffer from mental illness often have grown up with the concept of struggle being inherent to existence and so perhaps their persistence is only amplified.  Perhaps the pleasure from the what they do (which doesn’t have to be necessarily in the arts) helps these people escape from their black eyed dogs.

But in response to the postaday prompt which I read today, I personally don’t look for the struggle or think that it means the art is better or worse.  To me the art and the artist are separate things.  The art is the body of work like any job done by a master’s hand.  The artist is the fragile master behind it, the craftsman with calluses.  The work lives on in the stars.

Created by TomPogson.com

Morning person

Posted on by
image

taking time to review the possible

I am a morning person convert.  I have done years of late shifts and music related things that naturally swing the other way but these days I tend to start earlier without honestly getting that “you may not speak to me yet” thing which others seem to suffer from.  Something interesting happens.  I’m still productive but not in my usual ADHD way.  If I’m up and working first thing it’s as if that action alone actually has a soothing quality so I can put my plans in sequence.  It’s a bit like showing up a little extra early for work.  You can ease into full speed.  Giving yourself that little extra time before the day is the best thing possible for your stress level because it makes those necessary waits into something less frantic.
Early morning in Victoria is one of my favorite things as well.  On a day off, really treat yourself to it.  Go for a walk downtown in the early morning.  Stop by a cafe where you aren’t standing in a line up looking at the value deal options.  Wander about the cool of the streets strewn with shadow and sun down to the harbour where the sound of the water below the causeway is the loudest thing you hear.
Early mornings don’t have to be about work.  They can be meditative.  Maybe let’s use the word reflective.
Or just nice.
That’s it.
Mornings can be nice.

Tom

Created by TomPogson.com

Writing prompt : the walls

Posted on by

image

They sprinkle around the place, changing with the years like my life is marked by sections.  It’s an apartment in the morning before a shift.  I’m hardly a wealthy man but I’m less and less tolerant of posters.  I had one in a bathroom with a part torn for the light switch.  Far less acceptance of white walls then.  I accept them now.  The change in the sky colors against the bare slate of the bedroom above our heads.  It rumples soft peach over the folds of the strewn sheet.  It’s a good place to have coffee.  I need to go.  My cups almost empty.  Later today is laundry day.  I’ll have lots more to say about them, hung up like soft soldiers in the failing light.

Created by TomPogson.com

“Quiet City” teaser

Posted on by

image

     The carriage pulled up at exactly nine am.  The polished black buggy with its springs like dull silver swayed lightly as the horseman pulled back on the twin tan and white horses that looked more like they belonged at the Sandown races than at work.

The owner of the carriage descended from the unmarked door, down the steps that one could pass right by without noticing,  his young moustached face vanished behind the carriage door.  No signal was needed as the driver in the tuxedo sprung the strong horses to action, following just behind a Government street trolley car.

On board a man with a newspaper tried not to notice.  He looked at his pocketwatch and made a note, tucking the pad and pen back into the tweed coat he originally bought in the Vauxhall high street.  It had served him for over twenty years that summer.

Now he had the new boy to consider.  One man had stumbled upon far too much and he would have undoubtedly left traces and questions behind for Mr. Baels, the junior clerk from Ottawa not to notice.  The passenger knew he could not be get off the street car until he reached the new Legislature. 

The car clicked onto the new road beside the grand hotel with the warmth of the harbor sun pouring through the windows.  The shadow-like carriage driving behind turned towards the Empress Hotel, driving up the immaculate lawns to the stone steps of the front door.  Outside a sturdy woman in white with bags waited by the door, two giants of men flanking her sides.

“Miss Penny has arrived,” he whispered to himself with his eyes just over the unkempt edge of the Colonist “God help us.”

–

Quiet City is one of the projects I’ve been working on set in Victoria, British Columbia in both modern times and in 1910.

Created by TomPogson.com

Little bit about coffee

Posted on by

image

This is one of those posts that I think was inevitable.  My day work is as a barista and has been with some exceptions like janitorial and university for some time.  Behind the counter is much like playing music.  You certainly don’t know it the first day and their isn’t any official training.  The more you’re standing behind the portafilters, steam wands and coffee sprinkled counters the more you pick up.

The challenge with coffee is the three factors, namely the product, the water and the equipment.  I like to think that the real drink of a barista would either be a light roast taken black or a single shot of well pulled espresso.  These drinks give you the inherent flavors of the source at its fullest and the wine like subtleties that are otherwise masked.  It’s sounds all fancy but it’s like anything else.  The more you drink the more you notice how bright or not, bitter or not, ect.  The coffee menus are actually simpler than they seem as well.  It is simply “how do you want your milk prepared?”  I won’t get into all of them but with a Latte it’s simply steamed milk over espresso.   A cappuccino is steamed milk and milk foam over espresso (with its name derived from the brown and white outfits of the Cappucine Monks).  Americano….just hot water…you add the milk.  Africano…half hot water and half steamed milk.  Then the other variables come in and yeah…you get those drinks that a barista needs to take a deep breath before announcing.  I can understand the fun of fine tuning like that.  The first coffee I had was at the age of 12, helping in the kitchen at church so I could get out of…well… church.  I remember taking lots of sugar and cream while I helped get ready.  There wasn’t actually much to do in that big square room of counter tops and fridges attached to the hall.  It was mostly about being outta the church sipping coffee.

Naturally your water source should be clean and filtered.  Your best bean choice is from a cafe or local roastery.  Supermarkets rarely throw out old beans and they do go stale eventually.  With the machine you want it to be as clean as you can possibly make it and one trick is to run a pot of water through first to heat the machine (like pot scalding with tea) and to improve the machines ability to extract flavor.  It is also common for people to use to much coffee in the ratio of coffee to water.  One teaspoon of beans per cup of water is perfect.  Your lighter roasts also have more caffeine as the roasting process extracts the caffeine and also gives it that shiny coffee oil look.  Lighter roasts also go better with savory and dark with pastries (sweet).  Chocolate is a great pairing, famously with the mocha which got its name from the port of Moka which traded beans around the world from places like the original source of coffee in the hills of Ethiopia.

There’s a bunch to consider.  Coffee’s almost done.

Cheers,
Tom

Created by TomPogson.com

Living Languages

Posted on by
image

Cece Sawyer exploring interactive exhibits

History is like a rising sun.  As our world gets closer and interacts the stories pour out from every corner.  The light floods every alley, every crag, every paper strewn gutter.  History is the great equalizer in a way.  It’s like a secondary version of glory or not.  What we do now ripples out into the galaxy.
My girlfriend and I went to the Royal British Columbia Museum as she hadn’t been there since she was little and I wanted to do some research into First Nations mythology, especially the section with the masks.  It’s best to do that on a weekday I found out as the section was crowded and hard to get notes.

But what was exciting was when we got off the escalator onto the 3rd floor.  There is now a permanent exhibition on First Nations language and stories called Living Languages.

Situated in the entrance to the 3rd floor in what was previously an empty space is a beautifully designed vibrant display of how the language that was nearly silenced is on the rise.  Films created in part by contributors from our community and across the province showcase the language, it’s importance and how it is still being taught despite the years of the schools attempt to suppress it. 

It reminds me of my own Catholic faith which I argue with all the time but I’m sure when the chips are down I will ask for last rights.   The Romans originally tried to silence us (lions played a part here) because they thought we were cannibals with the “body and blood of Christ” bit.

As the sun continues to rise the darkness washes away.  Our schools now explain the story of the residential school system which never happened at my age.  I am glad to see this happen as it has to.

Faith while debated should always be respected as should culture.  It is the lush fabric of our beautiful world.

Tom

Check out the exhibit now at…
http://royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/our-living-languages/

image

Listening to stories

Created by TomPogson.com

Story idea one.

Posted on by

12619905254_5aed6e1ab2

I remember nothing.

It is early morning and I am wrapped in the cradle of the lapping waves and the woodland surrounding the beach.  Tracks lead from clearing in the bush, pushed back by what I can only assume is my own frame.  I don’t remember pushing through them.  I don’t remember the night before or who I was I was when I came here so determined.

The smell of the water is the first sense I have as my eyes open to face the side of a fallen tree, my fists clenching firmly packed sand.  I slept next to the side of a single piece of driftwood, it’s shape slashing diagonally across from last tufts of grass near the rise of the woodland to the constant motion of the waterline.  The waterline is moving slowly and uncertainly as it pulls out, its rhythm too gentle to be the open ocean.  I seem to have such basic understandings of things.  But I have no idea where they came from, what this place is or how I came to be in the clothes I wear.  I remember nothing.

The clothes I see on me are ragged, tattered in all likelihood from whatever brought me to this strange sheltering place.  Black dress pants.  Long sleeve shirt.  An old beige coat with rippled stretchable fabric at the wrists and waist.  The coat is torn in a single slit on the left elbow.

Standing up and discovering the soreness in my legs and that left elbow I walk to the waterline.  My sand filled black dress shoes reach the hissing sunbaked edge of the tide.

I knee down, peering into the shifting light of cold water.  I manage a reflection between the shimmer of the sunlight and twists of hair-like kelp.

I learn little.  I notice a hint of blue and look down to see a blue metal nametag that says “Charlie”.  I’m in my mid thirties somewhere.  My hair is rumpled, unkempt and chestnut.  I see nothing else that would set me apart from another man at this age.  I’m unshaved and my name is Charlie.  Or that is what the tag says.

Looking into my reflection the sound of the helicopter blades grows until the ripples of waves are static across the view.

(Started playing around with this idea as a morning writing exercise.  I don’t know if I will keep up the odd present tense but I like the idea of someone who has to start things over from zero like this.  Let me know any constructive ideas.  Cheers!

Tom)

Celtic Bassist

Posted on by
image

Victoria Celebrates Canada Day

Everything can just happen with one phone call.  This is how it all started for me almost ten years ago now.  That was the start of frankly the longest running work I have had to date…my beginning with Cookeilidh.

Dave Cook and I had jammed before in other projects but at that time I was just working, writing, busking on government and playing the occasional open stage gig.  I kick myself for this but I had sold off alot of my extra gear so I just had a fretless Peavey Axecellorator Bass, my acoustic guitar and my multitracking equipment for making songs.  It’s sounds fancy but there was way more stuff back in the day and this is why the early days is all pictures of me playing that off-gold badly beaten fretless.  It is all that existed.  Even my guitar bag was multipurpose and hung so low that if I wasn’t careful the bass would hit any curb I stepped over (part reason for its battered look). 
Anyways Dave and Kim had just started trying celtic just for fun on the gorge as his wife Kim had gotten into it and people were already liking it (they weren’t busking…just playing for fun)  I met up with Dave in a James Bay coffee shop and he gave me a tape.  Yeah a tape.  It was back in those days.  The more we talked about the project the more interesting it sounded.  It was a whole world of music I was just being exposed to and playing to that tape became something I did daily just for fun as well as listening to all the celtic music I could find.  I use digital recordings on my laptop now to practice to but I still haven’t really stopped since that first cassette that started with Dave strumming some sustain chords and stating “Ok this is Mairi’s Wedding.”
Naturally my role is a little unusual being the bassist in a trad celtic band but for almost ten years now it has worked.  There is alot of learning to fill the holes up between the instruments and not crowd them.  Some listening to celtic piano helped back in the day as I’m almost just a bigger badder version of a left hand.  Mostly joking there but so much is just taking what songs we do and finding how my instrument can enhance it. 
It’s like they say about drummers. 
It’s good when you don’t notice them.  That sounds bad but it isn’t.   And now and again we backup guys get our moment. 
And when it’s good it’s just priceless!

Got to go practice soon 🙂
Cheers,
Tom

Posted from WordPress for Android

Thirty years of British Comedy

Posted on by
image

Cook Street Village...Home of Pic a Flic Video

                    “Here we come…”

     British Comedy and the even broader subject of British culture started for me with the Monkeeys.   And it was a long fun journey since then.

     I do have some heritage from the U.K. so that probably helps but it basically started from growing up with the Monkeeys on television which I would try to never miss (along with the usual collection of Saturday morning cartoons where I would use the TV Guide to map my morning from 7 am to noon like Faramir reviewing a map of Mordor.)

     I was especially a fan of Davey to the point where I was playing Tambourine at church and incorporating as best I could the dance that also became known as the “Axl Shuffle” of Axl Rose.  Almost wonder if he’s a British Comedy fan?  He was mentioned in Depeche Mode 101 where not only was he slammed with a fan exclaiming “guns and posers” but he went to the premier with Dave Gahan trying to distract him when the  cheeky line appeared on film.  Anyways. ..

     The next stage in my britishizing was when I accidentally turned on public television and came across someone who looked and sounded much like Davey Jones minus the red suit and tambourine.  It was Hywel Bennett and the show was Shelley.

image

Shelley and Mrs. H.

    It wasn’t Davey.  He didn’t do Daydream Believer.  There wasn’t a decent tambourine in sight.  But it made me laugh.  And most importantly…it made me curious.

     Shelley was smart, fast talking and talked about things I’d never heard of.  There were obagines, the foreign office and the dhss, and Chinese take-aways whatever that was.  Naturally these were all the British equivalent to talking about eggplant, welfare and ordering Chinese food and picking it up.  But for me at eleven it was this whole new world where people talked different about mysterious probably cool grown up things I had no idea about. 

     The next step was a classic.  I watched a number of Fawlty Towers episodes in a row with my Dad and Grandfather.   Well.  Enough said there.

     Eventually I started watching for the two back to back Britcoms that would be on the station from Seattle from 10 to 11 pm (I didn’t use a VCR because that would be wrong.  The record feature is meant for…meant for…uh…nevermind…)

   These included the classic but new to me…ok…deep breath…Butterflies, Red Dwarf, Never the Twain, The Manor Born, Yes Minister, Yes Prime Minister, Good Neighbours, Monty Python (naturally), Are You Being Served, Blackadder, Mr. Bean (eventually though that came to us first via CBC), and more Fawlty Towers.

     With the mixture of YouTube and the British Section of Pic a Flic pictured above I discovered an army more of titles which would be silly to start listing and discovered the world behind many of the shows like Only Fools and Horses (huge in the U.K. but strangely lesser known here) The Young Ones (born of the comedy club beginnings of The Comic Strip Presents…its name taken from its proximity to a strip club) which like many comedy projects began as two person acts such as Fry and Laurie, French and Saunders, and Rik and Abe.  One of my most favored movies “The Tall Guy” with Jeff Goldblum is based on the partnership of Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis.  It also featured “Must be Love” by Madness.

     Which brings me to my strange equal fascination with British Music.  Beyond one of my favorite first bands having a British singer (Davey) and the next being Queen I have no idea.  I do know that in the case of bands like Embrace and Elvis Costello I would like their music first and then find out they were from the United Kingdom afterwards.

     I would like to go there someday but I almost wonder if the mystery is more intact we me over here.  To me they’re still that cool, strange place of Factory Records (New Order), Mute (Depeche), Black Books, Adam and Joe, and (saving the best for last) these three gentlemen who turned the idea I had of writing a sitcom myself into a huge, huge obsession with the idea.

image

Stephen Merchant, Ricky Gervais, Karl Pilkington

Cheers,
Tom

Posted from WordPress for Android

The world of waiting

Posted on by

image

I like the quote that Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode used to talk about the years he had already worked in the music business.   He got the quote from Keith Richards originally but I don’t think it’s only true for rock stars…

“It’s five years of work and the rest is waiting.”

We wait so much of our lives and you just know for a fact that there is…oh lots more to go.  As I write this (originally) I’m early for work and so I’m simply waiting as well.  Some folks naturally don’t like to wait.  I probably don’t much of the time as well as there is lots of things to do with creative work where it’s not one event after another.  So much of what I do is scheduling (as my many employers can understandably talk about) and that naturally leads to those in between times when you are simply waiting on the green light to get going.  But since we know that the waiting is going to happen I think that it’s almost empowering.
I mean, we now have these sometimes leash like mobile devices and if you “do social media” that is certainly one way to use up that time when we line up for a ticket, a coffee, purchasing a new shirt but there also just that opportunity to be more present in the moment.

This is one thing that is great about kids.  They are utterly self aware and in the moment.  They notice everything, and as we know, they are only too ready to tell you about it.  Ok, this shouldn’t be confused with patience as spending any time at a religious (or otherwise) service can tell you but that’s just because they have been told to quell their natural exuberance.  But as a busker, kids are awesome because they will often halt their parents who are cannoning from one very important thing to the next very important thing to pull at mom’s coat and exclaim…

“Mommy!  Look!  Guitar!”

I owe their union a lot of money for this.  It’s about being relaxed that things will work out and just setting off early so you’re not late.  Don’t line up if you can’t.   Don’t take on more than you can.  You don’t need to be perfect.  You’ll have plenty of time to wait tomorrow too.

But then I’m probably just an early bird.  Victoria is wonderful first thing in the early morning.  Give yourself the time to enjoy those little details of her city because there is lots of them.  That’s actually one thing I’ve really enjoyed about working on my own twitter and my project accounts…when reaching out to the city to tell everybody that we are here I’ve learned how much is really going on that you can get involved in.  This city was founded on a Gold Rush and a sudden influx of people from all over the globe.  With a background like that set on the Pacific Coast there is always another thing to see.  So step out of your own blinders when you have no option but to wait.  You could be surprised to find out where your really standing.

Posted from WordPress for Android