Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Catching Up With (Happiness)

Sometimes you get an hour of total bliss, when everything comes together. You're finished work, you're looking forward to the year's first snowstorm, you have a DVD you're looking forward to watching (episodes of "Monty Python's Flying Circus") and a book you're enjoying (John Barth's "Once Upon a Time"). As if that wasn't enough, the songs you're working on are -- in your opinion -- the best things you've ever done (tentatively titled "Road to Avondale" and "Little Bit Out") and somebody just positively reviewed your latest CD collaboration with Infant Cycle:
St.Bernard’s four tracks give instead the idea of a mini-movie, as instruments, field recordings and pre-existent voices lead our brain towards the nowhere of significance. At one point, I was so mesmerized by the apparent nonsense of certain repetitions, I couldn’t decide if what I was hearing was too simple to accept a description or just nullifying my thoughts; one’s left even more anguished in the final minutes of the disc. Music that is intense and uninviting at one and the same time but, this notwithstanding, we all know that - aesthetic pleasures or not - if something stimulates a reaction, then it means that it’s good enough.
I am oddly complimented.

An additional "catching up" point: if you like the "Daily Muffy" episodes (or you didn't know they existed), another oldie (from 2003) is getting underway. St. Mark and I try to defeat SARS in Toronto's Chinatown, and then tackle West Nile and Mad Cow as an afterthought.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, cheers to you for being 'good enough'.

I was good enough, once...sigh.

Adam Thornton said...

*I* choose to be complimented. :)

The writer is very competent but (I think) natively Italian, so I think his point gets bungled a bit.