Ghost Pine #9: Bees (2005)
Table of Contents:
Stories:
1. Cigarettes
2. My War
Reviews:
1. ‘Some music for J.’ mixtape
2. Lucky Ron live at Chateau Lafayette
3. Sloan Twice Removed
4. Union of Uranus From this Bearer of Truth
5. Dishwashing
6. Pointe St. Charles (from an old notebook)
7. Stoned Movie Reviews with Simon
i) X2
ii) Winged Migration
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Excerpts:
Cigarettes
When my grandfather Harry Miller passed at the age of ninety-one I was living in a windowless room a block from the funeral home. The night he died I went to see his body at the hospital with my dad. Later Jon bought me a bottle of wine and we sat on the fire escape for a long time drinking and smoking cigarettes. It was May and the sun hung in the sky long into the evening.
The Hulse, Playfair & McGarry funeral home is so pristine that as a child I aspired to live there. Although it stands only one storey tall its operations extend deep into the soil, with two basements of embalming rooms and cold storage. The walls are thicker than those of any house I’ve ever been in, successfully muting the sound of chatting mourners.
For three evenings in a row my extended family gathered in one of the home’s parlours at 6:30 and chatted amongst ourselves as we awaited the throngs of callers. Our sorrow was surpassed by our bemusement at the strange custom in which we were participating. The script went like this: we, the bereaved, were to mill about making pleasant conversation with visitors who had come to pay their respects to the departed. They spoke in stage whispers, each one uncomfortable discussing the subject of death. Inevitably they took a peek at the corpse, signed the guest book and left discreetly. Nothing that took place inside the parlour’s beige walls had anything to do with death or life, it was a place outside of time.
The last time a relative had died I was fifteen and sullen. Rather than staying in the parlour I explored the rest of the funeral home. Eventually I found an empty lounge where I sat reading The Basketball Diaries for hours at a time.
By the time my grandfather’s death came around I had grown up enough to accept that it was my responsibility to suffer through the wake with the rest of my family. Most of the time we were tired and bored, waiting for the public display of grieving to be over with so we could finally go back home to our lives.
I had a secret that got me through those visitations. It was stuffed into the inside pocket of my thrift store suit. The night my grandfather died I bought my first, and only, pack of cigarettes. Every day on the short walk to the funeral parlour I would suck a few drags. As the cigarette burned, I imagined all my frustrations with the stage-managed grieving process and the old family animosities turning to smoke along with the tobacco. I felt sheer joy in knowing that with every puff I took I was a little closer to death.
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Review: Sloan Twice Removed (murderecords/ DGC, 1994)
As they approach the ninth or tenth grade white high school students are drawn magnetically to the pole of pop culture that is the Beatles. One day they find themselves in the basement looking through their parents record collection lodged in a particleboard bookshelf. There they inevitably find Red and Blue by the Beatles and become suddenly obsessed; buying posters, t-shirts, and countless books of Fab Four ephemera and being so smug that their favourite band is quantifiably THE best pop band ever, and aren’t the lyrics just so meaningful and let’s talk about it all the time.
Beatlemania hit my shitty friends in my shitty suburb thirty years late and I didn’t buy into it. Yeah, the songs were catchy and insanely orchestrated, but so what?
I grumbled when my friends Beatle’d out, but what did I have? I didn’t have shit– a Sex Pistols tape from the Music Mart discount bin was the only weapon in my arsenal and I didn’t even know what it meant. “God Save the Queen”? Were they were joking? Like the Queen? That woman that does nothing and who no one cares about is the target of your vitriol? Really?
The first day Twice Removed came out I walked to the mall, walkman hungry for a new tape. They were just a one hit wonder from Halifax in the age of grunge long since past due, but the Ottawa Citizen Entertainment section advised me this new record was pure sweet pop and an imperishable classic.
It was a step in the wrong direction. I wanted to be punk but I didn’t know how and I needed to listen to something in the meantime. Plus, I couldn’t get the single that played all the time on Much Music out of my head. It had this plaintive guitar line that was so melancholic and was such a perfect fit for mid-August when I hated my friends and school loomed on the horizon like an iceberg to my Titanic summer self.
Walking home through the rowhouses, the music washed over me. All these sad pop songs about funerals and brothers and snowsuits and pen-pals. It was a perfect slice of Canadiana moulded into pop and caught in the amber of magnetic tape read by my ear.
(A few months later at their show I nervously asked the drummer if I could interview him for the crappy zine I was making. I didn’t even have a tape recorder, just tried to write down the things he said on some bar napkins. He was nice and when he discovered I’d never heard the Descendents he heavily recommended I find a copy of Milo Goes to College. I did.)
