I have a folder of pictures from the last Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville from this past May. It's a New Music festival that I go to with Marc LeBlanc every year... and this time I managed to get ahold of the standard press package that goes out to all the journals and magazines that review the event (which I do actually do for Exclaim!, but they usually only run 2, 1 or none of the photos to save space). My idea was that I'd do a full show by show review of the festival over on the Surgery blog, but now it's November and it seems a little past prime time to proceed.
The shot above is of Norwegian duo Fe-Mail who make a fiercely loud and varied racket with their voices, french horn and a table-load of homemade/modified electronic apparatuses. Tear your head off they will, and look damn good doing it, too.
The Third annual UNB Poetry Weekend is over. It was a fun time seeing old friends visiting to read, like Matt Tierney and Adam Dickinson, Michael Debeyer and some recent and new acquaintances to boot (not that I booted them). The semi-official kickoff was a Friday night launch of QWERTY's tenth anniversary anthology at Alden Nowlan house. The anthology has an introduction of sorts by me, some captions for images and a poem. Since I'm a local, surviving old-timer I was invited to read. Although the other readers were current MAs reading from works in the anthology I decided to present a non-reading/reading. Having been to more than a few readings in my time I've developed a mild allergy to the standard process... often finding that the introductions and descriptions of the works about to be read more compelling than the works themselves. To that end I prepared an introduction for the reading of a chapter of a book I haven't written, nor have any plan of writing. The "book" was titled The Coefficiency of Friction and it involved, centrally, irritations. I'll leave the rest to your imaginations.
This morning it had snowed, so the walk to work was a little gunky... but still I was in pretty high spirits; mentally energized by the better segments of work I'd heard over the previous two days. At the store there were a few milk crates of vinyl and CDs to reshelve after a record show in Moncton. I grabbed an armload of records out of the very first crate and a few slipped out of my arms so I pivoted and bend to grab them and my lower back wrenched or pinched or buckled or some shit. Anyhow now I have to walk around like I have a load in my pants, wince like a beaten puppy each step I climb and in the interim sit in this chair while my spine locks up into a new interesting shape.
Of course tonight is the night where printers get jammed, polycoms break down and need replacement parts, posters are picked up and multimedia stations need setting up... everyone is very sympathetic and ask if I'm o.k., which is nice, but it'd be nicer if they just went and built snowmen and left me alone... oh well.
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