Good Friday

I’ve been lying low lately. I’m reading and thinking and applying for jobs. Today is Good Friday, the harshest day of the Christian calendar.

There is a green hill far away
Outside a city wall
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.

We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains he had to bear
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffered there.

-Cecil Alexander (1818-1895)

A strange Good Friday service today, with a chilling announcement that due to SARS, the clergy wouldn’t be shaking hands anymore with the congregation, as well as a reassurance that the elements for our Communion service “have been prepared with the utmost care.”

We also watched Wit (2001) last night, which is about a fiercely intelligent (but emotionally chilly) professor of literature who is dying from ovarian cancer. Emma Thompson, who also co-wrote the screenplay, gives a heart-wrenching performance, and there is a strong current of Christian faith throughout the film, making it oddly appropriate for our Easter. Her character had made the study of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets her life work, but it took her a long time to understand this:

One short sleep past, we wake eternally
and death shall be no more, death thou shalt die.

Much crying ensued in our household at the inevitable conclusion, but it was cathartic. I was choked up the same way today when we were singing, both the above hymn as well as my perennial favourite, “When I Survey The Wondrous Cross.”

Sweeney Todd

From punk rock to Broadway show tunes, we cover it all here at Consolation Champs…

Brooke took me to see the Canadian Stage production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I’m definitely not a musicals guy, and this is about as Broadway as a musical can be. The story tells the tale of a murderous barber, the pie-making woman who loves him, and the novel way in which they dispose of the bodies. While I enjoyed a few of the numbers, namely the ones played for laughs (The Contest, A Little Priest), overall I found the music grating. As with most musicals, I found the “love story” terribly contrived, and the second act was insanely rushed. I missed a huge portion of the lyrics since many of the songs had several people singing over each other. The singers’ attempts to affect Cockney accents surely didn’t help my comprehension much, either. I’m not sure if I’ll ever “get” musicals. Do you?

Nuggets

Great nuggets from Azerrad’s book. This from the chapter on the Butthole Surfers:

Often the whole band would rip apart stuffed animals onstage, like a frenzied pack of psychotic cannibals.

Hmmm. I think somebody from The Dismemberment Plan must have been to one of these shows…

And a tasty Minutemen anecdote:

In Florida, [Mike] Watt got food poisoning and suffered from chronic diarrhea for days afterward. “It got useless to keep changing my pants,” Watt wrote in the tour story anthology Hell on Wheels, “so I tied a shirt around my waist and rags around the bottoms of my pant legs and just said fuck it. After three days my pants were full to the knees. Luckily, my condition improved.”

Yet more Butthole Surfers fun:

Once, they had pulled up to the City Gardens club in Trenton, New Jersey, and were told their show had been cancelled in favor of the Replacements. (“We were replaced by the Replacements!” Coffey notes.) But the Buttholes pleaded poverty and successfully lobbied to open the show as Playtex Butt Agamemnons.

Best. Band. Name. Ever.

Our Band Could Be Your Life

If you’ve noticed that I’ve been listening to a lot of Minutemen, Black Flag, Mission of Burma, and Minor Threat recently, blame Andre Torrez. On his recommendation, I’ve started reading Michael Azerrad’s book, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991. Though I’ve been a Mission of Burma fan for a while, all of the other bands profiled in the book are fairly new to me. You see, I must confess that being a shameless Anglophile, I had discounted a lot of American music from the punk and new wave period until pretty recently. When I read Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s amazing Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, it restored my respect for New York bands of the period, and I think this book will do it for the American ’80s punk scene I had previously dismissed.

Incidentally, did you know that the criminally overlooked Mission of Burma have been playing together again since last year? There’s even a documentary being made about the reunion shows. Moby played guitar with them when they played in New York, too. Neat.