Difficult Music

Smash, Mai, Christian Scum and I went out to the St. James Church last night for the Don Ross guitar clinic. Don puts on a good show, with lots of stories and jokes along with the finest acoustic fingerpicking you're ever going to see. Radio Canada FM and the Aboriginal People's Network were there recording the show.

Before the gig I was happy to be able to give the nerds' old stereo amp to Chris. He hasn't been able to play LPs for a while now, so he was extremely grateful for the donation. (If you're near Middlegate tonight, you might hear some Heep drifting out a low rise window.) It's pretty near impossible to buy an amp with phono inputs these days unless you can afford to splurge on something high end. I hope my Rotel has many more years of service left in it.

Chris never fails to provide a quote any time you hang out with him. A couple minutes after I got picked up, he started talking about a "How to play like Hendrix" feature in some guitar mag. "Turns out it just boiled down to tuning to E flat and trying not to suck."

I'm on my own right now. Fancy's away at a publishing conference/booze-up in Tofino all weekend. I got a bunch of stuff to do anyway, including editing the Unrestrained! album reviews. I really wish they wouldn't review Nazi bands. The writers hide behind their quaint little genre codes (e.g. NSBM—National Socialist Black Metal), but they're talking about Nazis. Ignorant fucking Nazis. It's doubly crazy when the Nazi band being reviewed is Greek. It reminds me of one of Amy Sedaris's lines on Strangers With Candy: "Greeks are just Jews without money." (The only way you might get away with a joke like that is if your family is Greek to begin with.)