Hot Dog / Cold Dog

Hot Dog 
R&B

Most of my dear readers are not big R&B/ Hip Hop fans, this I know. So with that in mind, if you were to get only one R&B/Hip Hop album this year, I would suggest Miguel's Kaleidoscope Dream.

A lot of thought and care went into the song writing on this album. It's relatively short with most songs coming in under four minutes. The lyrics are smart and deal with everyday emotional concerns in plain unassuming language. There's no braggy millionaire playboy B.S. The production is excellent, surprising, fresh but always in service to the song and not just ear-catching novelty. What more do you want. Heavy rotation at Spindles Manor.

I know much has been said and typed about the R&B/ Hip hop - Rock innovation gap but let me just add a few words to the lament. I'm not going to say that no great Rock albums have been made in the last 15 years or so, or that nothing new, unexpected or innovative has been added to the Rock vocabulary, but I will say that one big difference is that when R&B artists push the edges out a bit and expand on what has come before, always looking for a new approach or method they also try to write hit songs. Not only has Miguel made something the critics can stroke to but the first single also went to number one.

In the late 70's/early 80's (78 to 83: The Golden Age) the so called "new wave" bands wanted to remake, remodel, and reform what Rock was and could do. They pushed the boundaries sonically, lyrically and even presented themselves in a whole new way. They had massive artistic ambition but even more importantly, they wanted to write hits. They wanted to follow their artistic path but that path had to lead to the top of the pop charts. Being a cult band is great but changing what everyone considers mainstream is an even more admirable accomplishment. They were being subversive but at the same time seduced everyone into loving them. How cool is that?

Since then, Rock (of any substance) has slowly ceded the charts to Hip Hop or R&B. When Rock did reach the mainstream (Cobain, Vedder, et al. whined endlessly how they never wanted anyone beyond cool kids in the know to like their music. Boo hoo!).

So here we are in 2012 and if you want to hear thrilling pop hits with some weight: Miguel!

Cold Dog 
Rockin' Pneumonia

It's been about two years since my asthma's gotten severe enough that I need a barrage of daily medicines to keep it under control. I think I'm finally recognizing the patterns, triggers and consequences of it and can maybe start trying to head things off or at least minimize the damage.

Apart from being allergic to every living creature, both animal and vegetable, dust seems to be my fiercest enemy. A more concerted effort to cut down on the amount of house dust is being made. As someone who has never been overly cleanly I need to constantly remind myself to vacuum. Actually, I don't even really have to vacuum as we have a robot slave that takes care of that for us but the dumb thing still can't get around well, so I at least have to clear the floors of detritus before setting him loose. It'd be nice to get that done once a week.

However, a big problem that I haven't found a solution to is chalk dust. Dust that rains down on me as I write on the blackboard, that coats everything I touch, that's on my skin, in my eyes and nose, which dries everything out but my lungs, which get busy making liters of phlegm.

Here's the pattern that's developed. I've mentioned the sand that blows off the desert in China and hangs over south-western Japan like mustard gas every spring and fall. That is the worst. So that gets the allergies going. After a few weeks I get a cold. It goes away and comes back as bronchitis. I get really sick but try to stick it out and eventually miss a couple of days of work. A few months later; repeat.

Late August/ early September, the cloud settled in. It was worse than usual and I was on heavy medication with plenty of side effects so that I could drag myself to work and then home and that's all. After a month or more the demon sand blew out of town and I inevitably caught a cold. I started coughing up the the most vile phlegm buy the bucket-load. I figured it was bronchitis and I could ride it out. Three days later I broke down and went to the doctor. He said bronchitis. Antibiotics and whatnot. I get worse and go back. I get I.V. antibiotics. My wife checks out my blood test results and says I have pneumonia. Three days later the doctor catches up and says it pneumonia. He basically orders me to take a day off work.

That's right. I have no vacations to take so I worked through the whole thing, potentially infecting hundreds of people. That's the way it works in a country with no sick days.

Until about a week ago, I was still very weak and pretty much came home after work and collapsed. I have to realize that this is the new norm and managing it has to be my approach. Winter is coming and that is a break from the allergies, at least the outdoor ones. It would be great to work somewhere where I wasn't exposed to hundreds of sniffing, coughing germ bags everyday. I'm a perfect example of someone who needs to do solitary work, preferably from inside a hermetically sealed plastic bubble.

Trevor : What Went Wrong #1

Like millions and millions of other middle class white kids who grew up in the eighties, I was in a band. We recorded a few times, committing about 15 or so songs to tape and I have boxes full of cassettes I recorded alone on a four track. I am pretty proud of some songs we did and at least not embarrassed by any of the songs I wrote. We never managed to rise above being extremely marginal in the Montreal music scene of the early nineties. I've been looking into digitizing some old cassettes of music I/ we made before they are lost to the sands of time and it got me thinking about my foray into music making. I thought that being well over ten years removed from it all it might be interesting to write a sort of post-mortem on what I'll call (with great reservation and frantic air-quoting) my music career. 

Our band was called Trevor, which is neither a great name nor a terrible name. Much like, let's say Pavement, it falls well into that blurry zone between brilliant and stupid. If Pavement sucked it would be a pretty stupid band name. They ended up being a very good band so no one really gives the name a seconds thought. It just is. The other day I was talking to my wife about Nirvana, and being younger and Japanese, she wasn't really aware of them. She asked" Is that from Buddhism?" I said yes. She said " That's a stupid name for a band." And she's right.

So in no real order here are some key things that made it so we had absolutely no success, rather than the very minute success we deserved.

The Voice

I am not a very good singer. There are quite a few bands fronted by guys who could be described as "not good singers" but the difference is that they found what was good about their voice and just F***ed the rest. I often sang the wrong notes and could be a bit hard to listen to for the more delicate audience members but I feel confident saying that I had an "interesting" voice. By that I mean a voice with a good tone that conveyed emotion in an engaging and idiosyncratic way. When I had the confidence to let my voice out in the way I thought I should, it was sometimes, at the very least, not dull. Arguably, people may have left in disgust but never out of boredom. I have met many people who have been blessed with good singing voices and the ability to hit the right notes who were not gifted with an idea of how to deliver those notes in an engaging way. They never rose above competent or pleasant. I was not blessed with this ability and even on the best night out rarely did I sing "well", I never rose to the level of competence nor pleasantness. I did have an idea of how to deliver a song, however. I think my shortcomings as a singer (honestly some shows I was just tone deaf and must have been torture to listen too) turned off a lot of spectators.

The biggest problems about my voice arose when we recorded. Whoever was in charge of the the session would always point out which notes went wrong and get me to redo them, punch me in, and ultimately lose the whole feel of the performance. My confidence was easily shaken and the final result would be my usual barely on key singing but with the added downside of a very nervous and tentative performance. The best vocal recordings I ever did were either done in one take straight through or at most cut in half and done in two consecutive takes. I remember my friend Dan sat in on a session once and, after our bass player who was engineering the recording had made me stop and redo a few times, said "That's how he sings! Let him do it. It's what's good about the song." Confidence back, I tore through in one take and it came out quite well.

I'm not sure why I was the singer. My older brother, Mike, and I started the band. He played drums and I played guitar. I wrote the songs which included lyrics and melody. No one else was around and I obviously knew how the songs were supposed to go so… That makes sense but how I remained the singer is another question. I'm pretty sure I always thought that a stand alone singer (who doesn't play an instrument) was not cool, and what kind of person does that anyway? But getting another guitarist/ singer would mean that someone else would surely be writing songs which would cut into my songs and that person would slowly take over the creative direction of the band. Performing my own songs was why I wanted to be in a band (I still don't particularly enjoy playing guitar. It's a means to an end.) so I wasn't interested in sharing. That's probably why we stayed a three piece for most of our existence, even a second guitarist was too much of a threat to grab the reigns. 

I was in a band a few years earlier where I played bass (poorly). It was my first real band and my first major undertaking after moving to the big city. I had formed it (along with Mike) with the idea that I would write the songs. I found a guitarist who didn't have any song writing ambitions. Then we found a singer. The singer brought in a guitarist who started bringing in his songs (which were fucking awful). My brother left the band, a new drummer came in. Next thing I know, it's not my band anymore. I missed a recording session (don't remember why, most likely alcohol related) and got booted from the band. I never forgot. I switched to guitar because bass players can't be band leaders and I swore that would never happen again.

Looking Through

I don't even want to think about the amount of time I spend sitting at a desk, staring at a computer two feet from my face. But once in a while, my eyes beg to focus on something more than an arms length away. I often walk over to a window in the hall just outside the teachers' office and stare off into the distance. There's a hill with a new neighbourhood of houses all built in the last 5 years or so that are just behind where I used to live. The other day I seemed to notice for the first time how many different things I was looking through to look at this far of hillside. There must be five or six "layers" of varying distances that I have to look beyond to enjoy the view. I remember seeing a TV show when I was a kid (that Sunday night Disney show, whatever it was called) and they showed how they made the old Disney cartoons by painting the various parts of a scene on glass plates, arranging them according to location in space and filming through them, thus creating the illusion of depth. Everything I look at here is behind so many layers. It's so different from back home where things are spaced out and often stand alone and are not stacked one on top of the other.


Most of the looking I do in Nagasaki is through, beyond, over, and past something else. There are fences, buildings, trees and most of all electrical wires (which are not buried anywhere in Japan, for some unknown reason). I remember being surprised when I looked at some pictures I took on a trip to Kyoto. I hadn't noticed when I was standing looking at some historic temples that they were hidden behind jumbles of electrical wires. It wasn't until I got the photos developed that I saw every scene was marred with black lines. It's something that's been coming out in my paintings these days. First, rather accidentally but I've been more conscious of it recently.

(standard)INTERVIEW

There is a blog called (standard)INTERVIEW which I like to read from time to time. The blogger always asks the same set of questions. They are simple questions but strike me as what a painter would ask a fellow painter. All the artists chosen are abstract painters of varying degrees of renown. The answers are generally straight forward and stick to practical concerns. I especially like to hear about how other painters spend their time in their studio. Reading how many of them work around full time jobs and still produce good stuff is encouraging as well.

As I am completely unworthy of being selected as an interview subject but am dying to answer the questions, I thought I'd (standard) interview myself. Hey me, go easy on me.

Can you briefly describe what you do?

I make abstract paintings and drawings pulled from my everyday surroundings and put through a long digestive process. I mostly use acrylic paint on canvas but I've been doing a lot of watercolor paintings and ink drawings in the last year. I've also been combining paintings on paper with computer generated images printed using my home inkjet printer.

What drives you to make work?

I would say there are two main things that compel me to create. Since I was a child, I've always felt the need to externalize my reactions to my surroundings. I've found that visual art is the best and most satisfying way to express what I need to express. Also, the control it gives me is something I don't get in any other aspect of my life. In my studio, I am not only able to decide what the solutions should be I am also the one who decides what problems need solving.

Can you tell me something of your day-to-day working practices?

I teach full time so I am relegated to working nights and weekends. I try to go to my studio at least four times a week, mental and physical health permitting. I like to jump back and forth between works that are slower and necessitate pauses, reflection, and a lot of looking and (usually) smaller works that are more spontaneous and immediate so I can turn my brain off and just go. I have quite a bit of down time at my job so I spend time looking at, reading about, and sometimes writing about art via the internet. I live in a small city in Japan and am physically far removed from the contemporary art world so the internet is a viyal link for me. I find after spending all day think about what I'm going to do once I get into my studio it's best to get a few things out of my system as quickly as possible. Sometimes they end up being good works but often it's just a way to get some bad ideas out of the way.

How long have you been working in that way?

Since leaving school and having a workspace of my own. I have always tried to balance the more primal, intuitive work and the more contemplative work. Although, I must admit the results are often better when I don't think too much during the actual making. Maybe I should rethink my approach.

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

I've always admired the playfulness of Paul Klee. Although it's hard to see in my work Ellswoth Kelly is an important influence on the way I think about turning mundane observations into deeper abstract meaning. I had a teacher when I first became interested in art named Michael Smith. He was a huge influence on the way I approach painting and still is. I think we share a lot of natural tendencies toward making art. I was very lucky to have had him as my first painting teacher.

What, outside of visual art, informs your practice?

The three main things, outside of visual art, that occupy my waking thoughts are music, clothes, and sports (boxing, hockey) in that order. They all come to bear on my work. Oh and sex, but that goes without saying, right?

How would you like people to engage with your work?

I would like them to recognize something familiar; something from their personal experience expressed in a surprising way. And to give me money.

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

I went to Art Fair Tokyo and saw almost nothing memorable. Then I went to the Yamatane museum and saw drawings on paper of cherry trees in bloom by Hayami Gyoshu done in the 1920's. Stunning!

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

 I am going to Florida in May with my wife.