Tag Archives: Canada

Max finale

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Cycling across Canada '94

Max has been part of my decision.  I want to get back to the same drive and focus I had back when I first received the hybrid bike my parents got me in 1992 after I graduated from Stelly’s.  Just like Max I had the big dream, but it was the crazy idea that I would ride that bike across the country.  Two years later I reached the shores of Halifax with the help of my parents who would meet me half way to refill my bottles and supply me with a muffin from Tim’s.

Now the dream is about the work I create.  My parents Jim and Joan have been extremely supportive of that as well (they are still together as well, unlike Max’s situation).  But the influence of family in the story was something I wanted.  The image I had of Max’s home was based on a mix of where we lived in Chilliwack, Langley and finally in Saanichton where they have been since 1988.  I know I am extremely lucky in this respect.  It has also been part of my drive to treat my work with the same “Sail, don’t drift” attitude they taught me.

I have the day job that I work hard at to pay bills.  Nothing new there for the aspiring writer and musician.  But one thing I have found with the Max project is that I really enjoy working with this WordPress writing platform as a chance to put my determination into action with daily writing along with my work with Jacobs Pogson Productions as a writer and Cookeilidh as a bassist.  It’s one of my opportunities like studying bass or reading that gives me a chance to stretch.  It’s like scales in thirds and it’s fun.

Much as I’ve loved creating the Max world which is still there for people to check out its time to wrap that up.  I am definitely looking forward to sharing the final wrap up episode!  Hope you’ll check that out early next week!

Click here for the Journal by Max blog story

Cheers,
Tom

Created by TomPogson.com

Writing prompt : the walls

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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

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     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

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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

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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/

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Listening to stories

Created by TomPogson.com

Celtic Bassist

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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

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The world of waiting

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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.

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Work in the arts.

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“There’s a job…there’s a gig here” Billy Joel

It’s probably one of the hardest things about a career path that’s already not the easiest choice.  If you do any other kind of work and let’s say you’ve just started and you’re not making that much coin people still respect it because it’s still considered “real work”.  In the arts though it’s seen strangely as not being given the same accolade unless you are one of us fortunate enough to have a creative field as their primary source of income.  But the trap here I think is that we run the risk of treating it like a pipe dream or a hobby.  Having a hobby is fine but for those of us who think of ourselves as artists we have to give our craft that same attention as any other tradesman who puts in forty hours a week.  Will this immediately pay off?  This I can’t say but there is certainly a pride in putting serious determination behind what you do and one thing I have found is that you never know where your creative road will take you, but the more work you do on your craft, the better armed to fight you will be when you get there. 
Our role is different from some trades as just hammering the same thing again and again can work against us so being creative you have to find ways of still focusing on your craft without making yourself bored (creative death here!)  As a writer I like to play with different forms or ideas like this or my other blogs, narrative experiments, prose, non-fiction, or a thing I sometimes do called morning stories.  In this one I do a thousand words (usually ends up being more) of something.  In the same way as a Artist Way morning page you just go with what pops in your head and roll or riff on that.  Writers probably have it the worst for practicing because there’s the natural assumption that everyone can write so it’s easy to get complacent.  The great thing about it is the portability though and I have so many of those little Hilroy 300 page books just full of material and even a little mini one that fits in my coat.  And just like a musician who listens and transcribes what they hear the more well read you are, naturally, the better.  Check out some of the books on writers and writing as well.  Try a new form like creative non fiction or poetry.  Poetry is not to be sniffed at as people think of folks in berets musing on the moon.  Taken to its highest level poems are the writing equivalent of making every shot count.  This fine art, and the origin of all writing in western civilization, is all about specific details and sense and particularity.  Trying to write in a non ambiguous way and connect with people at gut level is genius.  That’s one thing I found with well crafted (and you’ll laugh) country music.  You can’t be ambiguous in that form.  It’s from the hip and for a musician it’s usually written in a bright major key which makes it just that much harder to emote in a way that connects with listeners.  And that’s why some of that style can hurt.
Don’t shoot the country pianist.  He’s doing his best.
A good idea is to set up your work at a time when you know you are at your most alert and won’t be too distracted.  Set that as a daily habit that you don’t intend to break even if the building is burning down around you.  Ignore the fireman.  You’re working. 

So pour yourself a coffee, punch the clock and rock. 

Cheers,
Tom

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