Category Archives: Memoir

The Final Omnibus

Leave a reply

“As we all know, there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition.” — Jorge Luis Borges

Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having no steady job, and nothing particular to interest me in empirical reality, I thought I would begin writing reviews of everything I watched, read and listened to. It is a decision I have lived by relentlessly ever since.

Now it’s time to stop.

To the dozen or so of you who constitute my core audience, thank you. And don’t fret — there will be plenty more nonsense for you to read here on matthewjrparsons.com in the future. But the exhaustive reviewing project that’s currently called Omnibus (still known to its friends primarily as Omnireviewer) is over, as of this post.

But as longtime readers will attest, if Omnibus is to vanish it is only appropriate that it should vanish up its own ass. And so, I present the last missive of the Omnireviewer. Strap in. In all my years of blogging I have never been as self-indulgent as this.

One review.

Literature, etc.

Matthew Parsons: Omnireviewer/Omnibus — Some things are so self-explanatory that you can review them just by describing what they are. “A prog rock album with only one 44-minute long song,” for example. Or, “a graphic novel that intertwines a gay coming-of-age memoir with a character study of the author’s father by way of the literature that fascinates them both.” Some readers will look at these descriptions and say “yes, please,” and others are philistines. Regardless, the point is that these particular works are so obviously the thing that they are, which nothing else is, that to say more would be almost superfluous. Surely there has never been a clearer example of this than the present one: “A blogger writes reviews of everything he watches, reads, and listens to for nearly three years.” You’re no philistine if that premise makes you run for the hills. But even if it doesn’t, if you’ve spent any amount of time at all on the internet — better still, any amount of time at all around me — you know precisely what you are getting into. To say more would be pointless. STILL, I PERSIST.

Before we go any further, let’s dispense with the no-paragraph-breaks schtick. That’s a policy I instituted early on to prevent myself from writing too much. It never really worked.

So. Was Omnireviewer any good? No, not really. I believe it’s the home of some of my worst writing, in terms of the actual quality and readability of the prose. But assessing the quality of things was never quite the point of the enterprise, nor should it necessarily be the point of reviewing in general — except in cases so superlatively brilliant or awful that there’s little else to say. Generally, I prefer a more rhapsodic approach — drawing connections, parsing out meaning, converting subtext to text. And if in my explorations I should happen to touch on the success of a given thing, fine. Quality vs. success is a subtle but useful distinction. To me, the former implies that there’s an objective standard to which everything can be held. And while I do half-heartedly believe that, I don’t trust myself to be the arbiter of such things. Neither does anybody else.

But success is different. Success, to paraphrase the great British avant-gardist Cornelius Cardew, exists in relation to goals. To determine the success of a venture, you need to know something of the intention of the venturer.

So, if we’re going to establish whether Omnireviewer has been a success, we need to explore why I started writing it in the first place.

***

Of all the various magical accoutrements in the Harry Potter books, my favourite one as a kid was the Pensieve — Albus Dumbledore’s magical basin full of thoughts. “One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure,” Dumbledore explains in my nostalgic fave, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. “It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.” I have often described Omnireviewer as my Pensieve: the technique I use to evacuate my brain of all the swirling observations and analyses of trifling pop culture matters that threaten to crowd out what’s actually important. It’s an easily avoidable place where those observations and analyses can live permanently, so I don’t feel compelled to annoy my friends with them in bars. At least, not when they don’t ask me to.

All of this is true, and it is a large reason why I’ve continued to write Omnireviewer for nearly three years. But it isn’t the whole story. And the Pensieve isn’t the only valid pop culture analogue for this weird project. For a more honest one, we’ll have to look back a whole generation to another totemic childhood text:

Lucy_Blanket

Omnireviewer entered the world on November 1, 2015, but the context for it dates back more than a year prior to that. The circumstances that enabled this blog emerged in the summer of 2014. That summer, two extremely ordinary things happened. Firstly, I finished grad school, marking the end of twenty consecutive cycles of school/summer/school/summer etc. Suddenly, I was all too aware that my life was now FREE JAZZ — structure be damned. Exacerbating this anxiety was the small matter that I had graduated with a masters degree in journalism, and the universe was laughing at me. ONE SINGLE DAY after I turned in my thesis — in the form of a radio documentary — the Canadian Broadcasting Company cut 600 jobs. “Screw you, Parsons,” said the universe, “and everybody who shares your ludicrous ideas about how to make a living.” Just as all this was going on, a relationship I’d been in for seven years came to an end as well. Like every breakup, it seems inevitable in retrospect. But at the time it seemed impossible.

Unemployment; breakup. I bring up these two extremely ordinary things only because they are the first two misfortunes in my life that I couldn’t just smile my way through. I’m not sure why. Unemployment and a breakup are empirically no worse than things I’d been through previously. Maybe there just comes a time in a person’s life when the emotional warp drive has to give out and you’ve got to rely on just a regular engine. I dunno. But prior to 2014, I always prided myself on my ability to be happy in spite of things. Losing that was like falling out of the sky.

What helped me was work. In the uncomfortable grey zone between graduation and the start of my first contract, some friends of mine tried to start a magazine. They brought me into the fold as a writer, and even though it wasn’t really my project, I contributed as much writing to its embryonic form as anybody. What else was I going to do with my time? The magazine never properly launched. But if nothing else, it kept me from going off the deep end during the worst few weeks of my life.

And since the experience of writing for that vapourizing magazine was such a lifesaver, I proceeded to try that method ONE HUNDRED MORE TIMES. Even when my work situation started to pick up, I had to be constantly doing things to distract myself from the swirly void. A friend proposed an epistolary project where we assigned each other albums to listen to. I eagerly accepted. I took up cooking with the vigor of Hannibal Lecter. I started running. At work, I built a huge interactive story about dead composers, cheerfully spending twice as many hours on it as I got paid for. (It has since vanished into the digital wastes, mourned by no one, least of all me.)

Over the next three years, I would start, and swiftly abandon, a history of progressive rock. I would write 20,000 words about Jethro Tull in a single week. I would put together, and never submit, a book proposal. I would take a class about writing for comics. I would begin and struggle to complete a set of annotations for Moby-Dick. I would make two comedy podcasts with one of the guys who started the vapourizing magazine. I would make podcasts on my own, which reside on my hard drive to this day, waiting for their moment.

Yeah, I’ve been busy.

But as of November, 2015, I was not busy enough. So I filled my time the way we all do. I watched TV. I went to movies. And since I’m me, I also read voraciously, listened attentively to my favourite records dozens of times in a row, and listened to 30 or 40 podcast episodes per week. And the more time I spent on that, the more aware I had to become of how little time I was spending in gainful employment or meaningful social exchange. So I made up a game to put it out of my mind. The game was Omnireviewer. Every Sunday since then, I have released a report on the game, with the week’s score tallied up at the top of the post. 17 reviews. 23 reviews. 35 reviews. Here was a game I could win.

linus

***

Since keeping score was always such a big part of what this blog has been about, let’s look at some final statistics:

Total instalments of Omnireviewer/Omnibus: 143

Total reviews: 2,822
Average reviews per week: 20
Largest number of reviews in a single week: 38

Total words: 441,637
Average words per week: 3,088
Highest word count in a single week: 8,493

A few notes on these numbers:

  • Bear in mind that I sometimes clumped together whole seasons of television in one review. A large number of the reviews I have written on this blog have been for more than one episode of a show or podcast. So, as impressive as the number 2,822 may look, it is still deflated somewhat.
  • A cursory Google indicated that novels tend to range from 60,000 to 100,000 words, on average. If we split the difference and go with 80,000, my reviewing habit has stretched to the length of five-and-a-half novels in less than three years’ time.
  • In spite of everything I’ve written here so far, I am intensely proud of both of these stats.

Speaking of pride, shall we move on to the set of statistics that make me the proudest of all?

Total page views: 2,146
Average page views per week: 15
Highest page views for a single post: 117
Lowest page views for a single post: 3

They say that if you do any one thing on the internet for long enough, you’ll eventually find an audience. I am just pleased as punch to have disproved that rule. The post that got 117 views — still paltry, by any reasonable standard — accidentally demonstrated the real way to find an audience on the internet. It only received such a substantially above average number of readers because I got retweeted by one of the post’s subjects, the food scientist and cookbook author J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.

By the way, the post that got only three views was 3,000 words long. That’s one reader per thousand words.

“Really don’t mind if you sit this one out.” — Jethro Tull

When I started this project, I started it for myself. I made it public only for the sake of accountability. The thing that makes me proudest of all is that I kept writing Omnireviewer for as long as I did in spite of the fact that nobody read it. The human mind is a cobweb ball of rationalizations and suppressed motives. I’ve never felt like I can be entirely sure when I’m just looking for attention. But surely, here is numerical proof that this project stayed true to its roots.

One final note on the statistics, that only slightly undercuts what I’ve said above: these numbers don’t account for the people who saw my reviews on the associated Tumblr account. In some cases, this was substantially more, but mostly it was not. The numbers also don’t account for the homepage, which got a significant bump on weeks when my site’s URL was read on the radio. In the interest of transparency, my homepage has been visited 7,163 times since I started Omnireviewer. What a pathetic number. I love it.

***

On the topic of the radio: the best thing to come out of this blog was a column that I’ve been doing on CBC Radio 1’s North by Northwest since June of last year. I pitched it as a recurring summer feature on the show, and it just never stopped. Since the beginning, that column has distilled the best of this blog into purposeful nuggets of meaning and connection. It is Omnireviewer at its most Pensieve-like.

In the written edition of Omnireviewer, anything might prompt a veiled exegesis on the disappointments and regrets of my life. The Beatles’ Help. Olivia Liang’s deeply relatable work of memoir-through-art-criticism The Lonely City. The death of Anthony Bourdain. Chris Gethard. Maria Bamford. In the written edition, the music of Brian Eno is not only ingenious, but kind and restorative. In the written edition, Alison Bechdel is a saint, because she confirms the value in reading your own life as literature, like I do — drawing connections, parsing out meaning, converting subtext to text.

But on the radio, it isn’t about me. It can’t be. A public radio audience requires you to put aside your self-indulgence in a way that a blog with 15 readers just doesn’t. And that made for a far superior version of this project. Many paragraphs ago, I asserted that Omnireviewer wasn’t very good. That’s true, at least of its original form. But its radio form is one of the things I’m proudest of in my entire career so far.

In my last radio column of 2017, I flirted more dangerously than usual with the masked confessional approach of the blog. But I’m glad I did. I finished it with a segment on Margo Price’s “Learning to Lose,” a heartbreaking duet with Willie Nelson that struck a chord with me immediately. I closed out my year in radio with the sentiment: “Maybe next year we’ll learn to win.” Three months later I got a job as the associate producer of North by Northwest. I ran around, waving my arms in the air and laughing like a maniac. The context for this blog collapsed in a heap.

***

To me, Charlie Brown is not the hero of the Peanuts comics. It’s Linus — the would-be philosopher who stays positive in spite of his insecurities, which are made manifest in the blanket he cannot be parted from. Omnireviewer was a security blanket I wove to shield myself from the emptiness of my life. But unlike Linus, I’m not stuck in time. I can outgrow my compulsions. I don’t need my blanket anymore. Life is good. More to the point — life is good in spite of the fact that lots of specific things about it are not. At last, we’re back to where we started.

“God keep me from ever completing anything.” — Herman Melville

In the months to come, I’ll work on other things in my spare time. But not because I need to for my sanity — because there are things I want to make that I think people might enjoy. I’ll keep posting fun nonsense to this blog. Notes on Moby-Dick will return. I’m thinking about writing more short fiction. Maybe I’ll rank all the tracks on ABBA Gold. And I’m going to make some tweaks to those podcasts I alluded to earlier, and hopefully get them out in the world before too long. That’s what I’m going to do with the time I would have spent on Omnibus. I’m not convinced I could bring myself to do any of it if not for this blog. I’ve learned so much from doing this. I’ve made connections I never would have made. I’ve learned about the conditions under which I do my best and worst work. I got a job that I probably wouldn’t have gotten if not for this blog and the radio spots it inspired. And I have kept my head above water. I have nothing but warm feelings for this weird-ass thing I’ve been doing these past few years.

And so it comes to this. Omnireviewer has fulfilled its purpose, and fulfilled it better than I could ever have foreseen. Time now to set it adrift in the obscure internet sea where it has always resided and always will.

Pick of the week.

toaster.gif

Bewitched, Bothered and Benighted

Leave a reply

Trip Report: Ha Ling Peak, Northeast face

ha-ling-aerial

We climbed the opposite side but there aren’t any pictures of it that are out of copyright.

This is the story of the time my friend Phillip and I got stranded for seven dark, cold hours on a tiny ledge 820 feet up the face of a mountain with no camping gear and only one coat between us.

The previous day, I had MCed a wedding at the Calgary Zoo. Glenn and Gianna: old friends, wonderful people. I got through it with more grace than many who know me might expect. Throughout that weekend’s various rehearsals, preparations and ceremonies, I managed to scrounge up more charm than I’ve generally been able to summon for the past several years. And at the reception, where I actually mattered, I sufficed to such an extent that by the end of the evening, members of both families were buying me drinks.

So, by the time the celebrations drew to a close and the crowd began to file out, I was in a moderate state of euphoric disarray. Glenn’s mother, who I had only met the previous day, stage managed me out of the venue — the zoo’s lovely conservatory, with a room full of butterflies — and I taxied back to the hotel along with the newlyweds. Back in my room, I flopped down on the bed, bathing in the dopamine/adrenaline chemical bath brought on by the booze, the festivities and the exhilaration of public speaking.

I panic sobered immediately when I realised I’d left all of my shit at the zoo. My computer, my coat, my backpack, my suit bag — everything but what I had on my person.

It was 1:30 in the morning.

I high-tailed it back down to the lobby, darted outside, tore open the door of the first cab I saw, and slurred at the driver: “CAN YOU TAKE ME TO THE ZOO???” Then I noticed the (rather startled) couple who were still sitting in the backseat, paying for their ride. Sheepishly, I waited on the sidewalk for them to disembark, thinking about how this evening had taken a turn, and how I wished we could go back to twenty minutes ago.

I got in the cab with a very indulgent driver who drove me multiple times around the perimeter of the zoo while I scanned, drunkenly and in vain, for the security gate that I knew would let me in. Eventually, I threw in the towel and asked the driver to take me back to the hotel. Like a true gentleman, he offered to waive the fee, so I tipped him even more generously.

Back in my room once again, I texted Phillip. I knew he’d be up, because he works night shifts and is Batman. Our plan had been for him to drive from Edmonton to Calgary in the wee hours, pick me up at 6:00 AM and head to Canmore to climb a mountain: something that I had never done. But, since I’d need to get in touch with security at the zoo, determine whether my things were where I left them, determine whether I’d even left my things where I thought I had, and deal with who knows what other delays, we decided to push our departure from Calgary back until noon, which suited me fine. I had no desire to be up in four hours time.

Morning came; I felt about as good as you can expect. I called zoo security first thing when I woke up, and they found my things immediately. Blessed relief. On the other hand, now I was waiting for Phillip for no reason. I ate a slow, shitty breakfast at the bad Starbucks in the hotel lobby. Phillip arrived, and we retrieved my belongings from zoo security (which was very easy to find when sober) without any further hassle.

Off we went to Canmore.

Allow me a brief aside to tell you some things about Phillip. My friends in Vancouver have never met Phillip, and they love to joke that he isn’t real. He’s my imaginary friend, they say. My recurring, vivid hallucination. My tulpa. This is, of course, nonsense. But I can see why they would seize on this theme. If I were to imagine a human into existence, that human would be Phillip. He is a ridiculous person: less a human being than a fictional character who somehow metastasized into reality from a strange novel I wrote in my sleep.

Phillip and me at the foot of Ha Ling. Photoshop courtesy of a person trying to drive me out of my mind.

I first met Phillip in grade five, when he transferred to my school. The first words he ever said to me, just before recess on his first day, were “come with me, Matthew, and you’ll go far.” I have tended to heed that advice ever since. And while there have been occasional consequences, I’ve generally found that going along with Phillip’s schemes and stratagems leads to excellent stories.

Once in grade eight, Phillip suggested that I should curl up on a folding couch and allow him to fold me into it. So I did. And I got stuck in that couch. Phillip did his level best to haul me out, and eventually succeeded, but I was trapped and immobile inside a sofa for what felt like an hour. (It definitely wasn’t an hour.)

Another time, in grade twelve, Phillip and I were scrambling up a cliff on the banks of the Athabasca River in our hometown of Fort McMurray. This was not proper climbing and involved no equipment. Nothing like what we were about to undertake in Canmore. But it was certainly risky because that cliff on the Athabasca was essentially made of tar sand. We’d climbed up and down this cliff many times before without incident. But this time, Phillip suggested a steeper, alternate route. He led, I followed, he slipped on the silt, and I caught the debris. As I fell, I fractured a bone in my left hand. That is both my favourite story from high school and the reason I am not an acclaimed concert pianist today. (I say that with maximum facetiousness, but I did end up studying the trumpet rather than the piano in university because of that injury. Roads not taken.)

But, aside from being a Puckish agent of chaos in my otherwise sedate existence, Phillip is also probably a genius. A mutual friend of ours once suggested that he may have the highest IQ of anybody we grew up with. When he takes an interest in something, he obsesses over it, and he possesses an extraordinary ability to learn manual skills. He started building model ships in his early teens, and has since progressed to building them from scratch, with each beam constructed of the same wood as in the ship he’s replicating. One year, he placed in the top 20 of nearly 2,000 cyclists in a 100km race. Some of the riders who placed above him were Olympians. He has become a reasonable homebrewer, with an entire shelf of books on malts, hops, yeasts and brewing techniques. These days, his reigning obsession is photography, a field in which he has professional aspirations. And not just digital photography, like any old hack. Phillip shoots on black and white film, often with a large-format camera — you know, the old-school ones that look like accordions — and he does his own developing.

And he’s been climbing for years. The only topic that overwhelms beer on Phillip’s bookshelf is mountaineering. And since I’m one of relatively few old friends that he’s been unable to alienate with his social eccentricities and extremely high standards for other people’s behaviour, he’s been trying to make me into a climbing partner for nearly as long as he’s been doing it. At last, I relented.

We reached the base of Ha Ling Peak around 3:00 that day. We’d be climbing its steep northeastern face. Phillip told me a fun fact about the peak: it was referred to as “Chinaman’s Peak” until it was changed, shockingly recently, in 1997. Wikipedia tells me that it was first named in honour of a Chinese man named Ha Ling who hiked the southern face in record time. The fact that the locals picked “Chinaman” over the guy’s actual name and it stayed that way for a century says absolutely nothing good about white people.

We schlepped to the base of the climbing route — “the approach,” as the lingo would have it — through the woods that cover the lower part of Mount Lawrence Grassi: the mountain of which Ha Ling is a subsidiary peak. It’s worth noting that Lawrence Grassi, like Ha Ling, was an immigrant to Canada who worked on the railroad and climbed on his days off. However, Mount Lawrence Grassi was never referred to as Mount [insert slur for Italian people], as far as I know.

The northeastern face of Ha Ling Peak is not a difficult climb. Experienced climbers can summit in four hours. So, given that this was the peak of summer and the weather was beautiful, Phillip figured we could be up and down the mountain in time to grab a pint at the local brewpub, catch a few hours’ sleep in the car and head off to the Icefields Parkway for more climbing the next day.

Retrospectively, the mind reels. The northeastern face of Ha Ling Peak is not a difficult climb, but it is still very much a mountain. And when I say I’d never climbed before, I mean I really hadn’t. Not in a climbing gym; not on the smaller rock faces in Whistler, near where I live. Phillip taught me the basics of climbing at the foot of the mountain face. Prior to that moment, I did not know what a belay device was, much less how to use one.

But Phillip was an indulgent teacher and as I scaled the mountain face behind him, gingerly and with immense anxiety, he waited patiently. “People climb at their own pace,” he would occasionally say. But I suspect he was just saying what he needed to say to ensure that this wasn’t the last time I ever climbed. My ego can be delicate. Phillip knows this as well as anybody.

You think that the frightening thing about climbing a mountain will be the height. It isn’t. Honestly, you’re so focused on the rock face directly in front of you that you don’t think too much about the open air behind and below. The frightening thing is the precarity of the footholds. More often than not, you’ve got to make your next step onto a tiny, one-inch strip of rock and just pray that your miserable upper-body strength can keep you stable until your foot reaches a friendlier protrusion, and hope against hope that the chunk of rock you’re holding onto doesn’t come loose in your hand. My snail’s pace was more the result of me trying to psyche myself up to move than any physical tiredness.

But as the afternoon wore on, Phillip began to drop the indulgent facade. “Start making your way up, man. We’re losing light.” I looked around. It was getting a tad dusky. Neither of us had a phone or a watch, so we had no idea what time it was or how long it was taking us to progress. But by the time we reached a small ledge about three-quarters of the way up, the rock around us was beginning to look concerningly featureless in the dimming light. Phillip began making his way up, now wearing the one headlamp we’d thought to bring. I fed the rope through the belay device as he climbed, and I watched him carefully. His face was not a confident face. And when he whispered “fuck” under his breath, he was still close enough for me to hear him, and realise that there was a problem.

“Yeah, I’m not sure I’m cool with climbing this in the dark,” he said, after a rather pregnant pause. You and me, both, I thought.

So. What were our options. There were three of them, according to Phillip. One was that we swallow our doubts and risk it. But even if we did make it to the summit before we lost all the dusk we had — which in retrospect we absolutely could not have managed — we’d still have to contend with the hike down the other side, which involved woods and therefore possibly bears.

So, essentially, we had two options. One was that we could rappel back down the mountain the way we’d come. But that would involve me learning to rappel. And Phillip happened to mention that he didn’t love rappelling in the dark. I sure as hell didn’t want to learn a new skill in a setting where the guy teaching it to me wasn’t even comfortable doing it himself.

So, essentially, we had one option. And that was to park ourselves right there on the ledge where I was standing, and wait out the night. Be it resolved, etc. And then, with an expression of genuine mirth the like of which only Phillip could muster in a situation like this, he exclaimed: “We just got benighted!”

Everything you need to know about Phillip is encapsulated in that moment.

It’s only been a few weeks since all of this happened, but the size and shape of the ledge where we spent the night is already starting to stretch and skew in my memory. When I think about what it felt like to be sitting there, staring down the cliff below, it seems like it couldn’t have been any larger than the desk where I’m writing this. But that’s clearly not true. It was large enough to comfortably take a couple of steps. But it was small enough that in pictures of Ha Ling Peak, it’s an imperceptible speck. Certainly, it was the only place on the mountain where we could have spent the night in (very) relative comfort. I’m awfully glad we got stuck specifically where we did.

Phillip tightened up the ropes, which were firmly affixed to a bolt on the mountainside, leaving just enough slack for us to sit down. I found a stable, trustworthy sitting rock. Phillip is comfortable enough on mountains that he could shift around a bit for comfort. I am not. I sat on that trustworthy rock all night and did not budge. As I sat, watching the sky become dark and feeling my ass become numb, I thought about Glenn and Gianna’s vows. Both had written them independently of the other, and they turned out to be adorably similar. Both sets of vows included the phrase “you are my rock.” I have now experienced the literal iteration of that figurative expression. I recommend sticking with the figurative.

I turned to Phillip as we settled in and commented that none of this would have happened if I hadn’t forgotten my shit at the Calgary Zoo. Funny how things converge.

Seven hours stuck on a mountain ledge probably sounds like a miserable experience. And, there were elements of it that certainly meet that expectation. But before you write it off completely, let me describe what we spent the night looking at. From that ledge, we could see Canmore, straight from one edge of the town to the other. It is no grand metropolis, but seen from that height in the darkness, it twinkles, quaintly. On the other side of the town, directly opposite us, rose another phalanx of grand mountains. We watched trains pass by along the CP Rail that our peak’s namesake had helped to construct. We watched fireworks from 1,000 feet above them. We saw the stars absent of any light pollution at all, and we saw a dozen meteors.

Now the negatives. As the night grew darker, the cliff face below us lost all definition and became a vast, shadowy abyss. For the first couple hours of our stay, every time I glanced down at it I’d feel like it was sucking me in. I gradually acclimated, but it never quite stopped freaking me out. Also, there were two clusters of houses just by the banks of the Bow River whose lights made them look like scary evil eyes. At some point, the night became a staring contest between me and an unblinking light demon.

And most crucially, it was cold. We found out the next day that the overnight temperature was hovering between three and five degrees all night, and like a chump, I hadn’t packed my coat. So, we found a way to spread the one coat we had across the both of us, and we found out what it means to literally have to huddle together for warmth. I have never willed the sun to come up harder than those moments when the wind picked up on that ledge.

I didn’t sleep at all. Phillip did, for maybe ten minutes. There were times, during this longest night of my life, when my brain got caught in a loop, thinking of what the unexpected eventuality might be that would worsen our lot and kill me right there. When the sun finally came up over the mountains across from us, I swear to god I heard Wagner.

It took us less than an hour to climb the rest of the way up the mountain. It took us less time still to hike down. But if we’d attempted to finish our climb the previous night, it may well have been catastrophic, what with my skills being what they were, and bears being what they are. I’ve told this story to a few people since it happened, and many have tried to make me aware of how close I came to death. But frankly, much as I felt like I was going to die on that mountain, my rational side believes that Phillip’s expertise kept us well out of danger. If he’d been truly hubristic or reckless about my lack of experience, he would have hauled me up to the peak that night, and maybe killed me. But, as it stands, we were never really anything more than enormously inconvenienced.

I can’t say for sure whether or not I’ll climb again. But if Phillip has an especially enticing idea, I’ll probably say yes. “Come with me, Matthew, and you’ll go far,” he said.

He does keep his promises.

First posted on Medium.

I ran, I fell – OR – Why my hands were bleeding at the Kronos concert

Leave a reply

The word “injury” can elicit tremors of terror amongst musicians, and with reason.

I have known two trumpet players whose careers have been interrupted by a malaise of the muscles around the mouth. One was able to retrain his chops to behave like they did before, but it was a painstaking process that took months of delicate practice. The other needed surgery to reconstruct his embouchure.

I once spoke to a violist whose hand contracted into a fist inexplicably, and didn’t come undone for several months.

Singers may develop polyps on their vocal folds, making their jobs rather painful for a while.

And those are the lucky ones. Musicians are vulnerable. An injury that most people could easily adapt to can mean never playing music professionally ever again. Snap. There goes that career.

However, I count myself unique amongst these cases, as I am the only person I know to have suffered an injury as a member of the audience. This is the story of the night when the universe confirmed that I was never meant to be a musician.

***

On the evening of October 19, 2013, I attended the Kronos Quartet’s 40th anniversary concert at the Chan Centre on the UBC campus. I reviewed it for Vancouver Weekly. I had just emerged from the hall after an (intermittently) interesting pre-concert Q&A with Philip Glass, whose sixth string quartet was to be premiered that night. I was excited.

I realize now that I may have been spared a great deal of inconvenience and physical discomfort if my press credentials hadn’t garnered me such an excellent seat at the concert, so near the front of the hall. Had I been closer to the door, I might have been among the first to make it to the washroom after the Q&A ended, but no. By the time I reached the lobby, the line was firmly in place and not getting any shorter.

I have a natural aversion to public toilets, but I can normally get past it. Also, I’m not usually opposed to waiting in lines. But before I will commit to placing myself in such close proximity to people I don’t know, I need to be reasonably certain that those people will not attempt to make social contact with me. Call it what you like: it’s how I am on all but my best days.

Situations in which people have been stimulated en masse are always high-risk for awkward conversation. Minutes prior, the Chan Centre audience had been in the presence of a legend: an (intermittently) interesting experience that required unpacking. My fear was that whoever I lined up behind would feel the need to unload his analysis upon me, obligating me to offer up an original, creative thought in response. And I damn well wasn’t going to be coming up with any of those until I settled down to write. I don’t think well on my feet.

So, I figured I’d just dart over to the nearby journalism school, which I attend by day, and to which I conveniently have 24-hour access. The building has two men’s washrooms that I’ve come to trust (and a third one that I still feel weird about).

I don’t know why I decided to run there. I had plenty of time. A leisurely stroll would have been entirely adequate. The concert didn’t start for a half-hour. And frankly, running is not a thing that I do. (That’s partially because it makes me look ridiculous. I run with my torso plank-straight, arms flailing about. It looks stupid, but there’s nothing I can do about it.) I’ve been known to walk quickly when under stress, but for the most part, I’m a stubbornly slow-moving individual. In high school, it drove my phys-ed teachers nuts.

Anyway, between the Chan Centre and the J-school, there’s a slight downhill grade. So the crucial point is that once I’d started, I only kept running because I was too lazy to forcibly decelerate. And then there were stairs.

My recollection of what happened next is a little hazy. What I remember can be summed up into these points:

  1. I made it down the stairs without incident.
  2. There was a truck turning the corner as I dismounted.
  3. Upon reaching the bottom of the staircase, I botched the landing.
  4. The person in the truck began to roll down the window while I lay on the ground, moaning.
  5. I was deeply embarrassed about what had just occurred.
  6. I managed to get back on my feet and I ran into the school before the person in the truck had the chance to say anything. There was no way I was going to speak to a human being about the astonishing lack of equilibrium that I had just demonstrated.

Thus it was that I incurred my injury in the most prosaic fashion imaginable: I ran, I fell.

***

The second floor of UBC’s journalism school is arranged in a ring. If you’re so inclined, you can walk past three or four professors’ offices, through the reading room, past the stairs, end up back where you started, and do it all over again. This is especially convenient when you suspect you’ve broken your hand in an embarrassing “running and falling” incident, and you need to walk it off.

I suspected that my hand was broken, or at least fractured, because it had felt this way before. Six years prior, when I was in high school back in Fort McMurray, I had fallen down a cliff on the banks of the Athabasca River. I fractured the fourth metacarpal in my left hand, and was in a cast for several weeks. At the time, I aspired to become a professional pianist of some kind.

Snap. There goes that career.

But, never mind. At some point, my singular lack of talent and commitment would have scuppered me anyway, so it doesn’t upset me too much. I earned a degree in the trumpet instead. It wasn’t for me. And here we are.

In the J-school washroom, I started running my hands under cold water and I realized that my right was probably not going to stop bleeding for a while. My fall onto rough concrete had left my hands not only internally injured, but displaying some semblance of road rash.

I gingerly put my coat back on and headed back to the Chan Centre. My hands were both becoming sorer by the minute, but I had a concert to review, and I’d be damned if I was going to miss the premiere of a Philip Glass string quartet.

***

I didn’t make a good impression on the guy sitting next to me. In retrospect, I suppose “I’d shake your hand, but mine won’t stop bleeding,” isn’t the best way to introduce oneself, but what else was I meant to say? Mercifully, the concert started right away.

It’s a strange thing, hearing live music when you’re in pain. Sometimes it seems so immediate, so present: the perfect distraction. But sometimes you find yourself drifting.* You start thinking things like “Should I leave and go to the hospital?” Or, “Man, it’s hard to clap.” But three things kept me in my seat:

  1. This was history. A new work by Philip Glass is a big deal.
  2. I had a job to do. I said I would review this concert, and I was damn well going to.
  3. The Kronos Quartet is extremely awesome. Sometimes, they were so good I forgot I even had hands.

So I stayed at the Chan Centre, soaking in the music, hands bleeding into my lap.

***

My hand wasn’t broken, just sprained. I left the hospital at 3:00 AM that same night. By that time, the pain was (intermittently) much more manageable, and the road rash had scabbed over. The only problem was, I couldn’t move the fingers on my left hand. For the next week, it was difficult to do dishes, put on clothes, shampoo my hair, and pour things. Writing was okay. (Well, kind of.)

But, if I were a musician, my entire life would have ground to a halt that week. No practicing, no rehearsals, no concerts. If any of the members of Kronos had run and fallen on October 19, Philip Glass’s sixth string quartet might still not have premiered.

But they didn’t, and that’s the key. See, playing an instrument isn’t all about what’s in your brain. It took me a long time to realize that. Playing an instrument requires a connection to your body that I just don’t possess, and never have.** Ask my old phys-ed teachers. Ask anybody who has ever witnessed the ridiculous spectacle of me running.

So, I’m very happy to live in brainland now, with the intricate physical skills of music-making far behind me. I have a cliff on a riverbank to thank for that, and a concrete staircase to remind me that my life is good.

_____

*In my VanWeekly review, I proclaimed that “String Quartet No. 6 lacks the immediacy of Glass’ previous chamber music, but one gets the feeling that repeated listening will yield rewards.” Avid classical music fans will recognize this statement as a euphemism for “I sat through the concert but I can’t remember how the damned music sounds.” It’s a common problem when you’re hearing a piece for the first time. I would normally have reservations about admitting this, but given that my hand was quickly swelling up and becoming immobile, I think I deserve a break.

**Don’t get me wrong, there are many other crucial traits that I feel I lack: natural musicality, perseverance, etc. But this one is undeniable. Even my mother would admit this one.

Vancouver’s new HMV is useless and I’m upset

Leave a reply

When I first visited Vancouver in the summer of 2011, I spent a solid two hours in the HMV on Robson Street. Maybe more. I used to love these places.

When I moved to Vancouver in the fall of 2012, I searched and searched for the three-floor wonderland that had so entranced me the previous year – to no avail. The space that once held that HMV has been through a spectacular transformation since I set foot in it. As I’m writing this, it houses the world’s second largest Victoria’s Secret. CDs are on their way out, but lingerie is forever.

The British music store chain’s future has been called into question this year. So, when I was walking down Robson the other day, I was shocked to see a brand new HMV, right across the street from where the old one used to be. I stepped inside.

By the time I left, I had realized something that the rest of the world has known for years: it really is over for these kinds of stores.

We’re going to have to take a few steps back if I’m going to properly communicate my disappointment.

Some people think of HMV as the music store equivalent to Tony Roma’s: generic, middle-of-the-road, and the same in every city in the world. I resent this view. I’ve always felt that you can learn something about a city by walking around its largest HMV. Montreal’s, for instance, has the most massive classical section I’ve seen in a chain store – evoking the sense of high culture that pervades that city. The wide variety of obscure prog and psychedelic gems you could find at the dearly departed Vancouver location suggests that if you search the Lower Mainland hard enough, you may come across an old hippie or two.

My memories of childhood in Fort McMurray are peppered with weekend jaunts down to Edmonton with my family, where I would gladly spend hours in the two-storey HMV at the West Edmonton Mall. I have a sentimental attachment to those three big, pink letters that no quirky indie shop could match.

So, my recent trip to Robson Street’s new HMV kind of ruined my day. The store is about the size of a two-chair barber shop. In terms of selection, if you take away the small selection of Criterion DVDs and Blu-Rays, you’re basically looking at a Wal-Mart entertainment section. Amusingly, an employee asked if she could help me find anything three times in the course of my fifteen-minute visit. “I know you mean well,” I thought, “but I could see your whole selection the second I walked in the door.”

A world without HMVs would be rough for those of us who maintain an irrational attachment to music as a physical commodity. HMV has always offered an opportunity to step off the street into a place that’s familiar, but maybe a little bit new as well. It’s a place where you’re likely to find the albums you’ve been reading about but haven’t gotten around to hearing. It is my personal favourite waste of time.

But, His Master’s Voice is fading fast.

I must admit that after a long struggle, my logical brain finally pounded my sentimental side into submission. Nowadays, I’ve more or less gone digital. But, compared to the pleasure of aimlessly wandering the endless aisles of a well-stocked, multi-storey, bricks and mortar music store, shopping on iTunes is just not much fun.