Frozen fisherman

brrr

Muskies and pike circle this hut, waiting for a hand to get too close to the hole ....

"we're after the same rainbow's end ..my huckleberry friend...."

One guy, in a room in North London, makes his own choir.







Jacob Collier won two more Grammys last night, his third and fourth. A musical Michelangelo with a computer. He's 25.

His multi-tracked chords, dischords and harmonies bend your ear, break your heart, then push your spirit skywards.


Best arrangement, instrumental or a cappella

Moon River (Jacob Collier)

Best arrangement instruments and vocals

All Night Long (Jacob Collier, Jules Buckley, Take Six)


For Moon River, he got 150 friends to send him a video of them singing the word "moon" ... in the opening above, you can identify the faces of Quincy Jones, Coldplay, David Crosby, even his mum.

And then ... just see for yourself above. See/hear new colours. The final minute of his four key changes is electric. That last chord? Jeeze...

All the hundreds of individual tracks and images were done in Collier's music room in North London. Audio and video files, perfectly synched in a hellishly complex arrangement.


Johnny Mercer, Henry Mancini and Audrey Hepburn must hear something like this in the great beyond.

Or to see what he's done with Lionel Richie's party anthem, All Night Long, click here ...

https://youtu.be/nspqYGz-Z1s

He plays two dozen instruments.
With loops, he can back-up  himself.
Jacob live at TED, 15 minutes here at...

https://youtu.be/dDZoGcQVjJg 

Odd thoughts

Podcasts?

"It's just radio that's hard to get to."
--Ky Krebs

"Swatted a fly the other day and thought, Outlived you."
--Peter Schjeldahl 

"I changed my password to thisisamassivewasteoftimeandnotthepurposeofyourlifeonearth"
--Dayna Tortorici, on Instagram 

"Podcasts: they are the internet for our ears. Now we can be on the internet all the time"
--n&1

zefrank's puffins be dropping some beats

The new neighbours are nuts

mmm

Ye gods! Are Harry and Meghan mad?

Why would our Non-Royals choose to set up house on what my morning news feed tags as Vancouver Island--"a largely uninhabited" wilderness that "is no luxury retreat"?

More important, why do the rest of us cough up $300 a night to zone out in this wasteland?

Read this yourself:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/meghan-markle-and-prince-harrys-unusual-rustic-island-paradise?ref=scroll 

Astonishing!

Let 'em eat clams.

It snowed last night.

It's winter. It snows here all the time.

But each fresh morning, as sunlight pierces my house like a lightsaber, I pass these two in the dining room. The photo, from an old TV show, is the only thing I took with me to the next gig. Thirty years ago, this photo was already history.

Two stoic faces stare from yard snowdrifts, looking through decades of winters into mine. The photo haunts me. I tell myself the blue light in their upstairs window is Netflix. But it's not.

Their winter is unimaginable. 

And in the viewing, softens mine.

The horizon that marks earth from sky

Mom does not want to be hooked up to no machines  she texts

day after Auntie passes

That's no prolonging life   that's extending death.

--Tommy Pico, in Feed (Tin House Publishing)

Words I had to look up this week ....

numinous ... things that are numinous seem holy, spiritual and mysterious

foustie ... disgusting/putrid/over-ripe/mouldy  scottish dialect (north east), but has found a way into wider british english

dreitch ... bleak, miserable, dismal, cheerless, dreary 

smirr ...  a mist-like precipitation, Scottish ... a soft rain that coats everything

quotidian ... daily, occuring every day, ordinary, mundane 

Life is a portage ...

Northern Scavenger's epic Labrador trip goes up on youtube next month ... here's just a taste. Wow! Click above.

Alex and Noah are two affable guys who share their best Canadian wilderness adventures.

And while you wait, you will not believe the fish in ...

Ready for January ....

Oh my

What are the odds there's a Jeopardy-style game show hosted by Triumph, Insult Comic Dog famous from endless TV appearances? Or that somehow, some way MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, Pete Davidson and Anthony Scaramucci are panelists? Political jokes, media jokes, dick jokes are shouted into a rowdy crowd at a Brooklyn synagogue. There is only one episode so far ... it may be the only. Worth an hour of ear time, just for the Larry King joke.

True Facts: Mating Dance of the Ostrich

This morning, zefrank uploaded his latest triumph to youtube ... one of two dozen nature spoofs he's concocted over two decades.

It's true ear candy.

Can his Ostrich My Neck Out For Ya eclipse previous pitches for mudskippers and marsupials? I think Pete the Ostrich has a hit.

Click play above, and perhaps below ...

Zefrank's marsupials
https://youtu.be/gNqQL-1gZF8

West Vancouver sunset

Winter bossa novas....

Around 3:30 p.m. each day, the two would make their way from a backroom, where birds perch on makeshift trees and in cages, to the front of the store, where the cash register sits... their talons clicked against the tiles... Everyone knew what was about to happen for the next 20-or-so minutes.
--Washington Post

Music for parrots to spoon by ...

 

Algonquin Park, winter morning

The dog's favorite night

It is the best, it is the worst, it is the last, it is the first night of the year.

It's each dog's favorite adventure.

For shortly past ten each New Year's Eve, we load the red sled with cheese and cold apple wine, a few brittle bits of white birch, tuck a harmonica in my parka and begin the half-mile climb to … the waterfall.

It is New Year's Eve again … that final, perfect, bright white night of the old year.

You come too. Light the lantern.

Christmas is over.

For some of us, Christmas has been over for a long time. Christmas is too often guilt and greed and gluttony. Christmas is family stress and the Yule drool of over-stuffed, bad-tempered consumer children. Visa and MasterCard are the holiday's happiest celebrants.

But New Year's is another matter entirely.

New Year's Eve is a clean, cold, secular holiday which still happily resists drunks and the animators of TV cartoon specials. It's a fine time with none of the electric rat-rag icicles Canadian Tire crazies have hung on houses from here to Halifax and back again.

New Year's isn't rotten brats kept awake until midnight, nor know-nothing relatives hunkered down before the tube for an afternoon of imported football.

It isn't bumping bodies in Nathan Philips Square or blowing car horns up and down Yonge Street. It isn't dropping mortgage payments to throw confetti at bored headwaiters atop the city's higher hotels.

It isn't sitting home feeling sorry for yourself. Or a tear-y, beer-y pub crawl where strangers get sick on your shoes.

Put on your mittens. Follow me. We leave all that behind… the yahoos, the yelling, the shabby old year.

Climbing the high hill, the snow scrunches underfoot like cornstarch. Our breath floats away in icy fogs, like 2019. Don't be sad. It's just the way thing ought to be.

The dog pads along in happy wonder, putting his paws carefully in our footprints.

We leave the road now, to climb the ravine, half-hypnotized by stars overhead and the gurgle of the frozen brook wrapped in ice.

It's very quiet. And cold. Not lonely, but alone.

We are alone in this world. We come that way, we go alone as well. And New Year's Eve is a perfect time to rejoice in your own magical renewal, trapped in your unique travel between beginning and end in the baffling universe.

Catch a snowflake on your tongue.

Do you know the odds of eating that single ice crystal in all the world? The stars shine and we are here at the waterfall--for the what? A tenth, twentieth, thirtieth time?

The dog picks snow clumps from his paws. I light the fire while you make a snow angel. By flickering light, the frozen falls shimmer. High in the tops of distant trees, a stange call floats by on the night breeze. Wolf? Polar owl?

We sit on the buffalo sled robe, the sharp slice of cold apple wine in our throats, looking deep, deep into the fire.

Who knows where Justin or Drake are tonight? Who cares?

We sit in the snowdrift like the wolves, to sing in our souls and bay at the sky. We will be in love and out of love, or somewhere in between, thoughts suspended in flicker and hiss of the fire.

My harmonica notes float away in snow squalls, circling in spirals up til they vanish over the trees.

The fire crackles and over the hill the icebound lake crackles back.

The snowdrifts shifts … a hiss … a whisper … a lover turning in bed … the sound of rabbit whiskers when a nose crinkles … snow crystals tumble into drifts … drifts building, moving into one another … the drifts, the years, the sifting, shifting snow.

A crisp, northern New Year's Eve in a Zen forest, where trees crack in the cold, but no human can hear them.

We're here! We see it!

You remember a half-forgotten song. The dog digs a hole. The apple wine cuts our breath like an icicle.

And sometime between the lighting of the birch logs and the last ember,  it is 2020. And it begins to snow.

Hey, friend. I really like ya.

Thanks for being here. Thanks for being. Thanks.

The bottle is empty.

Our toes go cold and noses drip.

There is nothing left to connect us to the old year. So without a whimper or a bang, we put out the fire … and let it slip away.

The waterfall vibrates, ice spiders weave invisible webs in the dark and we walk, arm in arm, back to the road. The dog soils a snowdrift in celebration.

Hey! Got on the sled! With a plush you are off, hurtling downhill into the blackness. The dog disappears after you.

The sounds of sled and shout fall away, far below me. The sky shines, alive with stars. And four lines come as always from the depths of memory…

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide.
Above the earth is stretched the sky,
No higher than the heart is high ….

Yes.
Happy New Year.
See ya.