Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs Read online

  But when the last herbaceous drops were swallowed and the night seemed finally to have floundered to an end, there was a sudden explosion of singing. Peter and Josef. We could hear the two rowdy boys belting out ancient anthems from maybe a mile away, drunk on slivovice and perhaps also the irrepressible joy of life, their voices carried like smoke signals by the thick, summery night.40 I interpreted a pang of disappointment behind the tired smiles of our hosts. I understood they had wanted such exuberance and exoticism out of the evening, but had instead gotten stuck with the shy band member and, worse, the Canadian.

  In any case, it was my responsibility to convey to the band when certain sequences, like meals, were about to happen. I took this role seriously. For in the field of commercial folk song presentation, as on the field of Canadian football, there are no small positions; there are only small players.

  * * *

  Le Vrai Tambour41

  Nous marchons,

  Nous marchons,

  Nous marchons ensemble !

  Nos adversaires,

  Adversaires,

  Nos adversaires tremblent !

  Nous mangeons,

  Nous mangeons,

  Nous mangeons ensemble !

  Nos adversaires,

  Adversaires,

  Nos adversaires tremblent !

  Et mon amour,

  Mon amour,

  Mon amour, elle me donnera…

  Un gros bisou !

  Parce que…

  Nous avons le vrai tambour !

  * * *

  Hurrah, Lie!

  While it contributed to my development as a responsible citizen of the world, my time in Gannat can also be scoured for direct impressions related to my emerging critical conceptualization of folk song. First, I was fascinated by the festival’s promotional campaign, which promised world music connoisseurs a veritable smorgasbord of sounds, dances, and costumes. The real things. Introductory speeches by MCs or artistic directors—in the gigantic mainstage tent, or in the smaller venues, such as the church or gazebo—highlighted the authenticity of the performers. “Ce groupe de musiciens camerounais n’avait jamais pris l’avion la semaine dernière,” a tall man with a moustache declared as he paced in pensive amazement. Or, as a local DJ between acts exclaimed, “Ce groupe norvégien n’a jamais été payé pour ses performances, jusqu’à maintenant!” Delicately munching on savory snacks, the names of which have escaped me, the mostly white bourgeois audience would gasp rapturously, ready to receive sounds uncorrupted by technology or “time-space compression”; uncorrupted, in other words, by postmodernity.42

  I want to make clear that the festival’s primitivist articulation of authentic folk song was not the one that I was coming to adopt—then, or ever.43 What intrigued me was the marked tension between the world of “the folk” according to Les Cultures du Monde, and the world as shared by the actual artists themselves. For every night, after the final concerts had sounded out, I would stop by the after-hours party organized as a perk for the performers and volunteers, where there was drinking, dancing, and merriment. This was happening in a backstage area, which meant that here one could acquire a sense of the interests and proclivities of the diverse labourers gathered for the festival without the demands of their public-facing, external masks.44 Accordingly, conversations between musicians about geopolitical manouveurings and pop stars, about cinema and fashion, could be overheard; exhausted dancers arriving with Discman devices, or taking synthetic drugs in the restrooms, could be seen; and the early signals of extramarital sexual encounters could faintly be detected.45 This is to say that the festival’s authentic folk were not outside of postmodernity, but rather on the vanguard, looking both backward and forward simultaneously.46

  Hence, when the festival director and co-founder Jean, in his trademark leather fedora, a veritable petit Indiana Jones, asked all translators and guides to inform their bands that artists were no longer permitted to smoke on festival grounds while still in costume, so that the sanctity of the simulacrum on offer might be better preserved, I refused to pass on the message.47 “They want you to smoke more!” I in fact said, to which the members of Politran only laughed and shrugged their shoulders. They too were beginning to tire of the peculiar paranoia of the French.

  I'ze the Bye

  In terms of technique, I was not a good translator of French to Slovak, or Slovak to French, it must be admitted. Consequently, I was responsible for some comic scenarios. For example, in one tiny hamlet, perhaps Le Mayet-d’École, the villagers and their mayor had gathered in the town square to present to Politran a copy of the key to their clock tower. A lovely gesture, and a well-attended ceremony. I was asked to translate, to convey to Politran the gist of the mayor’s warm yet succinct gratitude, but when Pavel offered his response, which I was required to convey to both the mayor and the entire village, the linguistic mechanism in my mind all but seized.48 Pavel’s words were like slippery, Slovakian logs, bobbing and floating down a cold black stream, as I struggled to keep my head above water.49 At a certain point, I must admit, I stopped even trying to follow his meaning.

  What else could I have done? Not wanting to dampen or disrupt the festivities, when Pavel passed the microphone back, I simply reimagined the rules of the situation. I took a meditative beat and became homo faber, offering a detail-rich anecdote about the group’s origins in the ghettoes of Bratislava; an excursion about how two of the band members had fallen in love—against their parents’ wishes—as they first began, together, to explore the performance of traditional music; and the climax of my monologue, which was that, through all their days of study and rehearsal, Politran had only ever had one dream, that being to come to France to share their traditional music and lore. I imagined these statements as oak logs in a cabin that I was both making and subsequently inhabiting. When I finally knotted it together with a joke about how all of Canada is a frozen wasteland, there was a standing ovation.

  Thus, I learned many lessons in Gannat related to folk song theory and praxis. Nonetheless, what I remember most of all from that time is the music, which remains glorious. There was one afternoon gig at a pizza parlour in particular. Because the place was empty, the owner had suggested the orchestra assemble outside the restaurant, on the street, so that passersby at least could enjoy the music; but ominous clouds meant that I was, even then, the only auditor in attendance. As the soft mists fell from the darkening sky onto our medieval alleyway, as the winds began warmly to gust—and as I ate with my hands the delicious morceau of blueberry flan purchased across the street, a new-world barbarian, practically swimming in my faded cords and frayed button-down—Politran played with an intensity I had not yet heard. It was as though their flesh and mine were glowing, fire. At one point, the heavy cimbalom, plunking and planking in its characteristically mournful manner, began to take on the contours of a powder keg.50

  I can grasp now that these Slovakian folk virtuosos were not playing for me. However, I was there. And although I did not yet have the tools with which I might have captured Politran’s eternal, incandescent cries, it is possible that I have been chasing them ever since.

  * * *

  The Bold Roughrider51

  They smelled like perfume, sweat ’n’ ketchup.

  They felt like a diner feels after the bar.

  I’m so far from my home.

  But no one needs to be alone.

  And my body feels like hurting and bleeding,

  And chopping,52

  And getting knocked down.

  My life has not been easy.

  But these legs will carry me.

  As I go down this road,

  I’ll leave you some signposts.

  They’ll tell you where I’ve loved and been,

  And what I’ve seen.

  Please see they’re kept clean.

  * * *

  Chug All Night

  While my acquain
tances from undergrad moved to Montreal to spend their nights doing bumps of powdery drugs at the corner tables of Saint Laurent dives, I chose to feast on the psychotropic buffet of propositions known as graduate school in the humanities. Within a few short weeks, after my late-August return from Europe, I had already added to my lexicon such terms as abjection, affect, capital, desiring-machine, diaspora, Orientalism, subculture, phallus, and hegemony.53

  However, whereas some of my new colleagues and mentors saw education as a single school of thought—there was the ritual marriage (the thesis defense), and the endless production of identical offspring (research paper after research paper, with slight tweaks to the basic insights in light of new texts or trends)—I would instead come to see myself as a conceptual circuit bender, connecting and soldering, rewiring, and modulating.54 There would be no marriage, at least not right away, because it was not one idea after which I was questing. It was every one of them.

  The only reason I applied to the University of Western Ontario in the first place was that I had a place to stay in town: a psychology clinic—the Institute—in a building owned by my father, where an unoccupied and rent-free apartment lay dormant in the basement. In some respects, this was not ideal. Stained, dusty carpets, low ceilings, no light. The upper levels of the old Victorian house were clean and bright, but the basement—the only part to which I had access—was a vestige of the building’s former years as a fraternity residence and had not been inhabited, updated, or cleaned for at least two decades.55 But the University of Western Ontario offered funding packages for graduate students in the Communication Studies program, which meant that, if I stayed at the Institute, I could drink and eat well for a man in his twenties, take the train to Toronto sometimes on the weekends, and devote myself completely to my studies. I could walk the path along the verdant Thames river floodplain to campus. I could score the odd free lunch from my father. Indeed, in several respects I expected this to be a happy, peaceful, and productive time in my life, at least at the start.

  It would be fascinating from a scholarly perspective to re-watch my first meeting with Dr. Cameron Bronnley. I recall a grey flannel suit playfully deconstructed by light blue sneakers, a bottle of Scotch on his bookshelf, and his bald head; I was likely dressed as a farmer, in shapeless dark-brown chinos and a faded flannel shirt, an untrimmed beard.56 But what was on my mind? My initial thesis proposal focused on paradigms of labour and self-presentation in American method acting; Dr. Bronnley, given his area of expertise, had thus been a logical choice to serve as mentor.57 But how did I see myself, my situation? How did Dr. Bronnley see me, and how did his gaze affect the intellectual path on which I was about to embark? An analysis of both my words and body language in that first meeting, in comparison to my words and body language now, might indicate the degree to which academic professionalization can seep into one’s synapses.

  By even posing these questions, however, I reveal the degree to which it is difficult to refrain from forcing contemporary ways of thinking, acquired through gradual processes of sedimentation, onto past actions and experiences.58 Techniques and modes acquired from Dr. Bronnley have no doubt inflected (infected?) even the manners by which I might try to analyze these very influences. This is evident in the structure, in the syntax, and in the citations of the present text. It is tough to become free, as G. F. W. Hegel was perhaps the first to observe.59

  Epistemological quandaries aside, I do know that the early stages of my research conducted under Dr. Bronnley’s guidance were fruitful. As a younger man, I had entertained ideals of art as autonomous, yet my new teacher was pressing me to consider how taste could be both historical and, in certain cultural fields, a complex weapon of distinct class strata.60 Authenticity, for example, which is the ultimate goal of the method actor who draws on their individual wounds and traumas in the service of theatrical art, was not natural or self-evident; the concept was rather a complex hallucination emanating from particular petit bourgeois worldviews within modern mass societies, something about which I had already formed suspicions in Gannat.61> It followed that in order to study rigorously authentic art or performance, one was required not only to behold the artworks or performances themselves through close reading techniques, but also to examine the processes of legitimation—involving practices of concepts such as criticism, celebrity, authorship, ownership, publicity, promotion, nationalism, scholarship, and so on—that enveloped the aesthetic object in question.62 I am not sure that I would have been able to arrive at the present text without having been guided through these initial, heavy discoveries by Dr. Bronnley.

  In terms of the rhythms and patterns of daily life, on the other hand, the first two years at Western were relatively friction-free sailing. A round of beers after class, often at my instigation, could turn into several, and then into cab rides downtown, where I would drink and debate in one of the dimly lit taverns apparently unknown to undergraduates until last call. I enjoyed these spirited sessions with or without my classmates. And there was sometimes cash left over to treat the hangovers at my local greasy spoon, Campus Hi-Fi, the name of which alluded to that technological phylum beginning with Thomas Alva Edison’s phonograph and continuing through to artificially intelligent musical machines.63 I wonder even now: Was proximity to this establishment destiny’s way of foreshadowing?

  I must confess that I was additionally settling into the gothic grandeur of London. This was actually, aside from a past spring when I had hitchhiked to Vancouver to work as a motion picture background performer, my first time living in a proper city, a genre of civilizational assembly about which I had formerly been somewhat suspicious, on aesthetic if not ethical or political grounds. Whether it was the particular stop-and-go of traffic or the general hum of observable decay, or the incessant deception and theatricality of all social life, most urban settings made me, from an early age, especially anxious.64 And yet, apparently one’s sensorium can be transformed. Indeed, despite the constant noise, or maybe because of it, I was to my surprise becoming enamoured with the long, broad thoroughfares, the arboreous parks and lawns, and the obviously haunted mansions of the city.65

  Time off campus was spent downtown, where I had my rituals. I would buy a latte and butter tart, work upstairs in the Covent Garden Market, and wander on breaks through the urban blight of dilapidated Dundas Street to absorb the aura of the very same Lumpenproletariat about which I had been reading so much.66 Finally, the long walk home: up along the meandering Thames, past vast fields of geese and shit, through wooded stretches and flourishing floral groves. They called London the Forest City, in part because of this unique collapsing of margin and centre.67 And, in my view, it is now indeed the most beautiful city in Southwestern Ontario, if not the entire world.

  There was at first not much dating or sex, however, perhaps because of the decrepitude of my living situation. There had been, in addition to the deficiencies sketched above, a flood at the end of my first autumn at the Institute, from which the greyish-brown basement carpet never quite recovered. It is also worth pointing out that I was, at this time, missing my two bottom-front incisors.68 However, in those days it was as though all carnal propulsions had been transposed or translated, if not entirely neutered. I was cruising, not the shopping mall or boardwalk, but the library stacks, a horny bibliographer thirsting after all germane graphic materials.69 Hard or soft, damaged or clean, print or DVD—no matter. At one point, I had more than 120 items on loan from the university library, for which I was eventually shamed at the circulation desk, one supposes justifiably.70

  Therefore, when I first read the call for applications to spend part of the summer working at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa as an intern, I found the prospect titillating. I did not see myself surrounded by new or interesting people—all other people were either dead or very far away in this fantasy—but by long rows of rich, voluptuous documents. Ensconced by smoldering letters and spirits. Primary responsibilities included the apprais
al, description, and arrangement of donations to the sound and video recording fonds. Thus, I wrote a short letter of interest highlighting the social significance of audio-visual cultural memory, secured a letter of recommendation from Dr. Bronnley, and landed the gig.71 My first professional triumph.

  In fact, it was Dr. Bronnley who had sent me the advertisement for the internship in the first place. He had gotten into the habit of forwarding peer-reviewed articles or opportunities that he thought related to my research interests, which I can see now was intended as a subtle form of domination. “FYI,” these short missives would read, followed by several links. From Bronnley’s point of view, such an internship would have helped me to build my resumé, which would have helped me to land a competitive postdoctoral fellowship, which would have helped me to join the professoriate and, ultimately, to publish articles in which I would cite my supervisors, including one Dr. C. Bronnley. It was a pseudo-Ponzi scheme propped up by the malleability of young minds.

  Of course, Dr. Bronnley could not have known that this opportunity would, on the contrary, lead to a severing of our relationship, due to the inevitable personal paradigm shift resulting from my discovery of Staunton R. Livingston’s epic masterpiece, the CFL Sessions, the authentic work of art I uncovered in the basement of Library and Archives Canada.72 Which is exactly what was about to happen.

  * * *

  Life Is Like Canadian Football

  Life is like Canadian football, you don’t get many chances.73

  But there’s a lot of room to move around.74

  Life’s like Canadian football, there aren’t too many teams.75