Author: James McNally

Redesign Contest!

I’m ready to unleash my next contest on all of you. In my capacity as Book Reviews Editor for Digital Web, I’ve amassed a quantity of books that I either can’t read (no time) or can’t use (no ability) or have already read or used. I’m eager to give them away and Brooke is eager to pitch them out one way or another, so here’s what I’m going to do. I’m hoping to redesign this site in the near future, and I’m calling on all of your design and coding skills. Submissions can be anything, small or large, from logos to illustrations to Movable Type templates. Even colour suggestions wouldn’t be unwelcome.
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I Am A DJ

In cleaning up our storage locker, I came across some old cassettes I made of my short-lived career as a radio DJ. In 1992, I attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to get my teacher certification, and I decided to get as involved as I could, so I worked as a copy editor on the newspaper and DJ’ed a two-hour slot each week on WCAL, the campus radio station.

If I recall correctly, it was only a cable broadcast, so I might have had 20 listeners on a good night, but I taped my shows for posterity anyway. Listening to my inane banter now is downright embarrassing, but I am still proud of the music I played. I hope I might have succeeded in raising the bar musically for at least a few of the mostly-conservative students. I’m sure that my show was the only place you could have heard Sloan in Western Michigan at that time. And though I didn’t particularly like them, the Goo Goo Dolls were strictly a regional act at that time, and I played one of their songs to promote an upcoming show. I also mixed in things like poetry readings (Dylan Thomas, Rainer Maria Rilke) and even a “Backwards Masking Satanic Message of the Week” contest!

For anyone whose musical memory stretches back that far, whatever happened to bands like Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Daisy Chainsaw, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, The Darling Buds, and Chapterhouse?

By the way, my show was called “Where the Wild Things Are” (after the classic Maurice Sendak children’s book), and I began each week by playing a record of someone reading the story. The lead-in to my first track was always when the guy read: “And now, cried Max, Let the wild rumpus start…”

Obviously, I’d love to do this all again…

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?