On Stage: The Tea Party @ Sound Academy

Back in May, I heard a radio ad that made me have to pull over and call AnCe immediately: The Tea Party will be performing at Sound Academy on July 21st.  Frantic message-leaving ensued; it sent something like this: "AnCe!  I know you're in NYC right now but I just HAD to call you and tell you that the TEA PARTY are playing on July 21st!  In some place called Sound Academy?  Anyway, you're the biggest Tea Party fan I know, so I thought I'd tell you!  Call me when you get back!  Sorry for the weird message.  I'm stoked!  Woohoo!"

Anyway, we're still friends and she was equally excited.  So we found ourselves, on the hottest day of the year (decade?) crammed into a standing-room only venue with about 1400 other crazies.  we were exhausted, dehydrated and surrounded by equally sticky people.  We didn't care.  When they took the stage, we were freaking out like we were seventeen-year-olds again!  Lost my voice somewhere between Save Me and Temptation.

When it was all over, my jelly legs barely made it to the parking lot.  Only later did I realise that there was no Babylon.  I think they may have been saving this for the second encore that never came.  it was hot; I can't really blame them.

The drive home took almost 2 hours though - the Gardiner on-ramps were ALL closed.  I think with the lack of water, the heat and and the ridiculous traffic at 1am, i may have wandered to the edge of madness - thankfully AnCe was there to keep me tethered.

Awesome night!

The Tea Party’s Setlist, July 21st:
1. Writing’s on the Wall
2. The Bazaar
3. Lullaby
4. Psychopomp
5. The Messenger
6. Fire in the Head
7. Correspondences
8. Heaven Coming Down
9. Sun’s Going Down
10. The Halcyon Days
11. Save Me / Last Goodbye
12. Release
13. Temptation
Encore:
14. Sister Awake / Paint It Black

burst

It was quite the long weekend (Victoria Day for my American friends). It shouldn't have been, since I get Mondays off every two weeks, but when everyone you know also has a Monday off, it becomes special.

Started it off with a digital showing of Star Trek. It was the 2140 show on its second weekend, so I didn't expect a line-up. Nevertheless, there were five of us watching it and I wanted us to be able to sit together. Jadek and I got there an hour before showtime and, much to my surprise, they let us go upstairs; further, upon getting to the theatre #10, there are people waiting. What? Anyway, we lined up dutifully, making snarky comments about nerdy trekkers and how early must they gotten there to be first in line on the second weekend. Some guy comes up behind us and asks if "this is the line for Angels and Demons" - oh yeah, I'd totally forgotten that opened this weekend. "Nope" I say at the same time as the guy in front of us says "yep." I go back downstairs to investigate and it turns out all those nerds in front of us weren't Trekkers after all; it also turns out they're all standing in the wrong line. Now, we are the first ones in line. Snarky comments can be heard from those who line up behind us. Good movie; great discussion about time travel and infinite loops and parallel universes follow over nachos and long island iced teas.

Saturday brings us to a party hosted by LilBro while the 'rentals are away. Woohoo! I felt old, trying to keep up with the younguns, but they were good kids. Except that one, but there's a douche at every party. Crawled into bed at 0430, but was disturbed and kept awake until 0600. Birds were clearly chirping and the sun fully risen by the time I got to sleep. I woke up fully expecting to cook breakfast only to find guests already left, sneaky devils. More sausage for me! Spent the day napping and watching snippets of TV. Finally woke up at 1845, drank two Red Bulls and started to get the plan together for that night - HYBRID @ neu+ral. Oh, how I love the Hybrid experience (great music + awesome DJ + cheap drink + fab peeps = fantastic night). Crawled into bed at 0500, after LilBro makes yumtastic breakie.

Monday was hard. Forced self out of bed by 1030. Packed, checked in with the 'rentals in NYC, cleaned up a bit and went home, where I had to cook for the week and do laundry and all those boring adult things. My plan to watch the Survivor finale was foiled by a very slow torrent. Instead, I bundled into a blanket, dragged a chair out on to my balcony, poured a glass of wine and got ready to watch some fireworks. I had expected to a couple. I got a spectacular show, from near and far. Facing northwest, I could see the big shows put on by neighbouring cities and villages which make up mine. I would like to send a special thanks to all the houses that line the 403 between Hurontario and Mavis - you people had some great pyrotechnics! And since I could watch hundreds of houses at once, it was like my own private show! At one point, there were literally dozens of flares happening at the same. It was like that ubiquitous "doomsday" image of many missile silos launching at once (which of course, I can't find anywhere right now - I watched T3 on the weekend, and it had one), except they were flares and chrysanthemums, spiders and kamuros - the entire horizon sparkled fro lose to two hours. It was one of those moments that reminded me just why I moved out.

Happy Vicky Day!

Mahler's Symphony No. 5

When I was four years old, I almost drowned. True story. I grew up in a little country off the Bay of Bengal. Every summer, we used to take weekend trips to the (in)famous Cox's Bazaar where the water was clear, the beaches were endless and the crustaceans left us plenty of souvenirs. It was just after monsoon season and we were basking in the sun which had reappeared after a three-week hiatus. My extended family (must have been at least forty of us) had commandeered an entire train (complete with engineers, cooks and ayahs) for the four-day adventure. When we got there, my cousin immediately scoped out the area and found an excellent sand bank a few hundred metres away, just past a hip-deep dip in the water. Of course, we all went out there. I remember it clearly: the sand was perfect for castle building; though the water kept eating up any of our progress, we just took it as a challenge to build faster. When that grew boring, I set about doing what I looked forward to doing every beach trip: collecting. This little bank was teeming with old conchs, tiny snails, sea shells, starfish and urchins. I filled my gunny sack to the brim.

Shortly after yet another cousin's castle tumbled into the water, a slight panic set in. The tide had risen around us without anyone really noticing, the sky getting darker and meaner. The hip-deep dip was now well over the head of my tallest uncle. The catch? Only two people in our entire party knew how to swim. Some background: the Bay of Bengal is known for its sudden storms and ferocious riptides. Hurricanes and tidal waves are a way of life for the coastal villagers that dot its shores. Its current easily swept away any but the strongest swimmers - and we had but two. My dad, thankfully, was (and is) a very capable swimmer. He made the decision to get the kids across first, then the adults. Being his only kid, I was the first to get hoisted to his shoulders, instructed to hold on - tightly now - to his still-long hair and told to not be scared. I wasn't scared. My papa was my hero.

I was wearing one of those bathing suits with a frivolous tutu around the waist. Wading through the water, I had thought it made me look like an underwater princess in a ballgown. Sitting on my dad's shoulders, with the waterline dancing about my knees, it suddenly looked much more like trailing seaweed. The silvery water, which had mere hours ago seemed like so much fun, was now dark and swirling, its clarity muddied by the sand my dad was kicking up in his wake. When we were about halfway, I felt my dad lose his footing - the dip was simply too deep for him to walk across. He told me we were going to play dolphin and that he would swim and I would ride him and wouldn't that be fun? and don't let go. I clutched his hair like a pair of reins. My dad began swimming.

There is no question that a riptide was in effect. I could feel it sucking at my legs and skirt, trying to separate me from my dolphin. I could see my dad swimming straight but moving diagonally. I could hear him using words he never used around me. Hold on, he kept saying, one arm grabbing at my leg, the other trying to pull us to shore. I was terrified of losing my grip but I was fascinated by this strange intense pull of water. It's a sensation I have striven to recapture ever since (the closest I've come is filling the bathtub with water and putting my fingers in the drain as it emptied - just enough to feel the pressure without blocking it entirely). I was giddy with excitement, fear and nerves - I think I may have been slipping into hysteria. It seemed like hours before my dad put his foot firmly on sand again - in reality, it was less than a minute. Within a few more minutes, my dad and my uncle had escorted everyone across and we went back to picnicking: we ate bhaji, biryani and chicken tandoori until we burst; I boiled my captured snails (gunny sack brought over courtesy of my cousin) in an empty cooking dish and later, we strung necklace after necklace as the sun set.

It was a day of great anticipation, of castles and hunting, of raucous screams. It was a night of campfire songs and full bellies, of stringing seashells by the seashore, of falling asleep safe in my mom's lap. But in between... in between was a murky, glittering interlude full of gravity and dark excitement, paralyzing fear and unexplainable yearning. In between was the tide which had threatened to sweep away all the happiness of the sand bank and the promise of the beach. In between I felt my father's strength and my mother's trepidation as though they were solid objects that willed me to keep a death grip on my dad's hair instead of giving into the temptation of drowning myself in the alluring world just beneath the surface. Just beneath.

Tonight, watching Benjamin Zander conduct the Toronto Symphony Orchestra through Mahler's heavily layered Symphony No. 5, it was as if I was reliving that day all over again. What a gift.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards

The Memory Keeper's Daughter (henceforth referred to as TMKD) surprised me. To be honest, I had no idea what this book was about before I picked it up - it was on sale at Chapter's, I needed something to read after giving up on Possession by A.S. Byatt and I began reading it without benefit of so much as a blurb.

First, a few words about Possession: I hated it. I really wanted to like it, but I just couldn't get past the slooooooow buildup. I find myself a patient reader (usually) and this tested even me. So, a hundred pages in and I put it down and went new-book-hunting. The straw that broke this particular book? All the bad poetry was written by a fake author! It's not even like I'm reading Wordsworth and thinking "God, this is bad; at least it contextualises other works." No! This was just... bad for artistic purposes only! Forget this.

TMKD: lovingly written. I actually cared about the characters and how they would end up. No saccharine sweet endings but no pessimistic wrist-slashing either. Just... life. Heartbreakingly normal; upliftingly mundane. Many books ask "what would you do?" - I like that this asks "what could you have done instead?" and "Now that you've done it, can you mitigate it?" It only took me 7-10 hours to read and it was worth every minute. I'll leave you with the quote that hooked me:

"'She's lovely,' Caroline said. Her hands were trembling. Because she was moved by his love and his sorrow, and because no one had ever loved her with that same passion. Because she was almost thirty years old, and yet if she died the next day there would be no one to mourn her like Rupert Dean still mourned his wife after more than twenty years. Surely she, Caroline Lorraine Gill, must be as unique and deserving of love as the woman in the old man's photo, and yet she had not found any way to reveal this, not through art or love or even through the fine high calling of her work."

I recommend it!

PS: have only recently stumbled upon a French band called "Air" - am in love. I haven't felt this way since first being exposed to Massive Attack. I heard a track on Veronica Mars and have youtubed them to death in the 24 hours since.