Sing from your heart

I have just watched a bunch of wonderful music videos of amazing BC talent and I am so proud, but...

Okay beautiful young people, lean in and listen well, for I was once one of you and pissed it away with self doubt and pretensions - lose ‘em! The pretensions I mean. Look it up if you don’t know the word. KISS, and not the rock band your parents knew and loved. Keep it simple schmoooes. Trim the beard precisely, forget the feathers unless you can prove First Nations heritage, and a short tight mini skirt as you sit on a bale of hay in the middle of a field is just not the thing chica!

Please be the you are and not the you that you think you should be. I know that is a tall order when in your twenties, I do. Everyone around you is in full court press trying to make you into what they want you to be. But take a deep breath, and ask someone older, in the biz, whom you admire, their opinion before adding tambourines or back-combing your hair or assigning your creative future to your current boyfriend.

Sing from your heart not your ego, and surround yourself with images that mean something to you. Don’t worry about giving us a narrative and god knows you should punt your producer’s narrative, unless he is paying you big bales of cash for the privilege, which I very much doubt. Seriously, I bet if you asked Jan Arden or Sarah McLachlan for 1/2 an hour of advice they’d be thrilled to give it.

Okay, that’s my outburst for the month. Please just know that you are beautiful and genius. After that, it’s just hard work. Don’t forget that either. Push yourselves. It is at the edges of our comfort zone that real magic happens.

The King of Pop is Dead

June 25, 2009

Just in case any of you are wondering, the path of least resistance leads to the outhouse. Trust me, I know, I’ve been wearing a groove in the turf for many a year.

So those of you reading this. Thinking you might play it safe for a bit. Stick with the people who pat you on the head and require about .04% of your effort to make them happy. Fuck off. This post is not for you. This blog is not for you and I am most certainly not for you. I apologize, really I do, if I led you to believe that this was going to be some rah-rah aren’t we all beautiful and shiny journey -- given my track record you may certainly be forgiven your mistake.

This me, this writer, this artist, has resolved to dispense with the platitudes, the niceties and the equivocations. I will still be kind and generous and loyal; but I will not be false. Not for me, not anymore, and not for you either if you can find the courage to hold my hand and walk with me where this path leads.

They tell me the King of Pop is dead. I know I should feel something about this. He as been, after all, a fixture of my life. Of your lives too if you are honest. Yet here we are at the hour of his death and I find him exactly balanced in the spotlight. One side brilliantly lit, the other in deep dark shadow. Irony, maybe, truth for me, certainly. For me his genius is balanced, perhaps unfairly, perhaps not, with his fall from grace and the controversy with which the last decade of his life has been lived.

Tonight I am angry. So there, I do feel something after all. I am angry at those who will take up the cry that genius dies young. This is something I absolutely deny. Those we revere in our generation who have died young and shy of their promise, the James Dean, River Phoenix, Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger – these are not genius, these are tragedies. Three generations will see them but Jeopardy questions. All of these arguably more pure of reputation than the King of Pop, and younger. But he will live with them for all that for we loved him once and then we didn’t. Tony Curtis, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Judy Dench, Anne Bancroft, Maggie Smith, Paul Newman, Mick Jagger, BBKing, Leonard Cohen and so many more that stayed the course that stayed with us and kept being who they are. I sympathize with the family and friends of Michael Jackson and of all those artists who died before their time, but you know what? It was their time. So instead, I do not lament. I thank them, deeply, profoundly for their art. Then I say goodnight. Rest in peace.

Enough then. I so have to stop pontificating. I am off to Montreal for a reunion with two friends of my heart, one of whom is marrying, and the other who will warm my bed and laugh at my jokes and sing for me…ain’t I lucky?