Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs Page 4
So, just pick the one that’s closest to your heart
And scream for them.
Life is like Canadian football, it’s like
Life is like Canadian football, it’s like life:
There’s a lot of room to move around.
Life is like Canadian football;
It’s not always televised.76
So, take those moments by the hand,
You can’t rewind.
Life is like Canadian football;
We got this thing called the rouge.77
So, unless you take chances sometimes, you’re going to lose.
Life is like Canadian football, you can’t really make any money.
Just make sure you knock someone down and that you protect your buddies.
Life is like Canadian football;
You can either take a hit or you can’t,
And there’s a lot of room to move around.
* * *
Night Herding Song
I have dreamt the following scene, which takes place in a locker room at dusk, players and coaches gone home save one, a second-string middle linebacker. Still wearing his sweat-salted tank top and grass-stained pants, and obviously exhausted, he sits on a long bench strewn with towels and half-full water bottles, odorous kneepads and jockstraps. He diligently tunes a scratched-up guitar while an older man, with sideburns and long hair, sets up a large condenser microphone, a delicate instrument in its own right. After unspooling the cables and positioning the stand, the phonographer stands back by his reel-to-reel tape recorder, propped solidly on a parallel bench, and, after a moment of meditation, inspects his informant. The player halts his restless, shaking knee. And then: A song emerges in the key of G. It is about the essential desire of humanity to create both the world and itself; hence, it is a song about everything that it is possible to sing.78 And it is beautiful. The vibrations move throughout the cavernous space, swelling and surging, expanding and contracting. Converted into analogous electrical waves by the microphone, the signal sears like an endlessly burning cigarette straight onto the humming tape. By the end of the second refrain, the phonographer has begun, silently, to weep.
It remains unclear why Staunton R. Livingston chose to record songs of Canadian football players in the 1970s.79 The most reasonable explanation I have yet invented centres on the fact that Canadian football is both a modernist and a traditional art. On one hand, the language of industrialized warfare saturates the game in terms of both mechanics and strategy. To list only a few examples, one throws the long bomb; one sends the blitz; the line itself—which must be held or advanced—is referred to as the trenches; the division of labour, including the differentiation between manual and intellectual work, precisely mirrors that of the Fordist factory system; and, of course, the muscular players in their shoulder pads and helmets, sprung coils of strength and speed and machinic armor, exactly resemble Unique Forms of Continuity in Space by the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni.80 On the other hand, the reason the Canadian and American games of football are currently so divergent, despite sharing an identical historical origin point, is that the Canadian game’s rules were changed more slowly and conservatively in order to preserve the original source of rugby, whereas the Americans quickly modified their version to suit advertisers and broadcast corporations.81 Perhaps the Canadian Football League in and of itself appealed to Livingston—its mashup of present and past, cutting edge and solid root—insofar as we can piece together his taste and disposition.
A relevant obstruction within the field of Livingston studies, however, is the fact that, after 1966, Staunton R. Livingston did not write anything down. This of course does not mean that he also refrained from thinking, or imparting. He was active in the fields of both ethnomusicology and folklore; although he was an independent, self-taught folklorist, Livingston presented research at major scholarly conferences between 1967 and 1971. Still, representation of Livingston’s philosophy has come to us only through the writings of members of his audiences, the entirety of which has had a vested interest in discounting the integrity, cohesion, and revolutionary power of his ideas. All communication, even communication with one’s self, involves the unavoidable distortions of noise.82 Things get even messier when one’s enemies are the ones writing the story.
I had not yet fully fleshed out these problematics when I first began to listen to the CFL Sessions in the summer of 2008. My internship at Library and Archives Canada had ended in late July, and I was in Toronto, having found a short-term sublet in Little Portugal in order to collect myself before my duties as a teaching assistant and student recommenced in September. I had managed, before leaving Ottawa, to digitize the entirety of the CFL Sessions under the radar of the institution’s panoptic supervisory system, so that the evaluation and distribution of the project’s cultural value could not be slowed by any bureaucratic plots.83 So, every morning as I walked east along College Street, past the ancient shopkeepers sweeping or watering their stretches of sidewalk, the strong summer sun already beating down, I was thus able to listen through headphones to the folk songs of Canadian football players. And I was falling in love.
* * *
Song Written Upon Getting Cut by the Argos
We could walk all night in this city
And still be in this city.
We could talk all night about leaving
And still be in this city.
I could drink all night in this city,
If we had any money.
Would you rather be sober and tired
Or drunk and bankrupt?84>
We could dig all night in this city
And still be in this city.
We could dream of our home
And still be in this city.
I could drink all night in this city,
If we had any money.
Would you rather be sober and tired
Or drunk and bankrupt?
* * *
Haul on the Bowline
It was to the St. George Campus at the University of Toronto that I was headed on those late-August mornings. Aside from brief lunches of banh mi and soda pop in Chinatown, I was spending the bulk of my days inside the Robarts Library.85 It was quite symbolically in the belly—or perhaps gizzard—of that peacock-shaped horror that I felt my first glimmers of pride as a folk song collector, for I had found, and I had gathered, something of great cultural and political significance. At least, this was my conclusion after having completed an initial investigation into the life and work of Staunton R. Livingston.
My first lead was an article by Niles J. Paul Stanley in The Encyclopedia of Canadian Folkloristics entitled “Vagabondage,” which is a folklore-specific term describing disciplinary interlopers. Reference to Livingston is made only in a footnote, a mere glancing blow; he appears in a three-item list of folk song collectors who have operated, according to Stanley, in compromising proximity to market imperatives, which is a preposterous claim in Livingston’s case.86 For the record, no real argument is made by Stanley; it appears as though the reader is expected to understand, before even having read the text, where it is that Livingston sits in relation to other so-called legitimate folklorists, a rhetorical operation deplorably not uncommon in the discipline of folklore.87
A citation in Stanley’s piece drew me to a second source, Rachel Alloway’s The Yorkville Scene and Environs, an accessible oral history of various venues and clubs through which Livingston no doubt passed in the late sixties. Over the course of one and a half pages, Alloway sketches a disruptive set by Livingston at the Free Times Café, as well as Livingston’s final scholarly presentation delivered in that same year, 1971, to the Canadian Folkloristics Association, in which he eviscerated the dominant regimes of Canadian folklore before declaring, by way of conclusion, both of his paper and of the scene: “I do not serve.”88 Alloway’s text gives some indication of Livingston’s attractive co
mbination of musculature and grace; she claims he was approximately 250 pounds and yet moved through the world “like a hungry lion.”89 Regrettably, however, Livingston’s radical commitments were intended by Alloway as comic relief within her otherwise competent, if also theoretically naive, monograph.
The deep reaches of the U of T computer databases allowed me to fill in additional events and developments. Livingston was born in 1936 in Windsor, Ontario, to working-class parents who laboured in either the whisky or automobile industries.90 It is noted by Dane Spounge that he took an early interest in mathematics and military theory; it is additionally believed that, into his late teens, Livingston spent summers with a wealthy aunt and uncle on the Bruce Peninsula, where he enjoyed observing fiddling contests.91 A hardworking youth with voracious reading habits, he excelled in scholastics and was accepted to the University of Toronto, where he would study economics and political science on a full scholarship.92
But Livingston’s performance and evolving mindset as an undergraduate become cloudier for the present-day historian. According to David Toogood, Livingston took two courses with Marshall McLuhan in 1954, ten full years before publication of the latter’s landmark work Understanding Media, the central argument of which Toogood claims was strongly influenced by Livingston, though this claim seems intended as an insult toward both figures. “The bohemian long-haired spoken word poet from Windsor that [sic] student who invited McLuhan to soirees and séances [sic] was likely the English professor’s guide into the mystical, hallucinatory delusions of the mid-career work on media,” Toogood writes.93 It is as though both Livingston and McLuhan are guilty by association, a logical fallacy which leads one to question the degree to which Toogood’s narrative could be in any way otherwise accurate.
And the years 1960–67 are a complete blank. It is uncertain why Livingston arrested his studies just short of matriculation, or where he spent the mid-1960s. Fran Laney believes that Livingston went to New York City to immerse himself both in the booming American folk revival and in the interdisciplinary art scenes of Greenwich Village.94 Polk Halkman suggests that Livingston went rather to the northwestern shores of Newfoundland, where he lived for five years in relative solitude.95
It is at least clear that by 1967, now back in Toronto, Livingston had begun to present original work on what he termed “phonographic approaches to folkloristic methodology,” having come to believe that the field-recording artist should (1) invariably wait until the informant has begun their song before pressing record, thus commencing the document in medias res; (2) anticipate the looming conclusion, through meditative listening, of the song in motion; (3) arrest the procedure before the song has ended, musicorum interruptus. 96 Further, it is certain that by 1972 at the latest, Livingston had begun to deploy this novel methodology through the collection of songs sung and perhaps also written by Canadian football players, though his method coupled with his archival practice—not writing anything down—has largely meant that the songs have been de facto signed as anonymous “folk” constructions. Finally, no one disputes that Livingston died in 1977 of heart failure in Trois-Pistoles, although I was unable to find any tributes or memorials in the major Canadian folklore journals.
Ergo, my growing infatuation with the CFL Sessions was directed to both sides of that delicate condenser microphone, propped between the folk song collector and his folk, carried from cavernous locker room to cavernous locker room across Canada in a dull green (or so I dreamed) duffel bag. Of course, there was the data: the words and tunes left as magnetic dust across those thick spools of tape. I was coming to sympathize with the sensitive singers Livingston had located, out of which he had squeezed such profound expressions and articulations, which now caressed my eardrums. The poetic starkness was like a screen pass to the soul.97 Bodies could be blank slates, solidarity could be diagrammed with X’s and O’s, and teeth could be repaid with teeth in the cosmology of the CFL player. “Life is like Canadian football,” I could not help but agree, wondering already about the political implications of the claim.
And yet, I was additionally pulled by Livingston himself. Here was a researcher who had abandoned any promise of reward, fame, or recompense; here was an artist who had abdicated even their own signature in the act of their final labours. Livingston’s great refusal to write down anyone’s name, including his own, his great refusal of commodities and credits and curriculum vitaes, should be inspiration to anyone interested in participating in the throbbing and the pulsing of real, human life. Is this not authenticity in the flesh, despite Dr. Bronnley’s cynical doctrines? While eating my Vietnamese sandwiches, I wondered to what degree it was possible for me to follow Livingston in his move to acknowledge the irreducibly collaborative nature of creativity. Treating myself in the evenings with trips to the cinema or tavern, I pondered to what degree it might be possible for me also to become what I am.
In sum, this is what was going through my mind and belly as I listened to and edited down Livingston’s hours of recordings, settling ultimately on those texts that best articulated the aesthetic Weltanschauung that I was slowly piecing together via the secondary literature. But also running through my mind (and belly), I must emphasize, was immense and overflowing joy, because it was by now obvious that, just as those dusty tapes had once served as channels for Livingston and his folk, I myself was learning to serve. My hands and voice were plugging into a generations-spanning system of folk song generation and transmission, which reverberated with the capacity to bring about cultural renewal and largescale socio-economic transformation.
As the reader of the present text reads and then rereads the songs contained within this volume, or better yet, embraces singing them, they have the opportunity to become part of this practical miracle as well. Together, we will haul in the most marvelous of Hail Mary passes. To echo the words of Staunton R. Livingston, “Those with ears, let them come here.”98
* * *
On Discipline
You’re so pretty and you’re so young.
I’ll mess around a bit, but I can’t come.
I need my legs and I need my energy.
If that’s superstitious, then superstition is a part of me.
I wish I was an average guy;
I wish I was an average size;
But I’m a big strong man.
And I work to be big and strong; everyone does what they can.
I wish I could just play football
But in the off-season I work at the mall.99
I sell shoes.
If making money’s a game, it’s one I’ll always lose.
I’m a bad lover and I can’t dance
But you should see me down in a three-point stance.100
I’m a terrifying machine.
Know what I mean?
You’re so pretty and you’re so young.
I’ll mess around a bit but I can’t come.
I need my legs and I need my energy.
If that’s superstitious, well, then superstition is a part of me.
* * *
Linebacker Passing Through101
We were higher than the territories,
Put your hands together for me;
I’ll never feel like that again
And I hadn’t before.
We ran hard like two muddy rivers
And then fell on our backs, you called it “practice”;
It was quick and painful,
Like February in the mountains.
When your clothes are dry, you’re going away.
When your clothes are dry, buddy, you’re going away.
I said your clothes are dry, so go away.
We closed our eyes and believed in the rain.
* * *
Madonna with No Divinity
by Jeseka Hickey102
What do I do with the feelings I feel?
With the wounds that I dress, so the wounds they
can heal?
How do I take these feelings away,
To help their minds rest, to live in their play?
But is it a game on the battlefield?
Everybody’s praying for a touchdown.
I score touchdowns.
They are praying to me:
The Madonna with no divinity.
What can I do for these broken-down homes,
For these beaten-up bodies built with now worn-out bones.
I can take these hands, these healing hands
And touch down their bodies like it was the land,
And trick them to think that the strength is their own.
Everybody’s praying for a touchdown.
I score touchdowns.
They are praying to me:
The Madonna with no divinity.103
* * *
“E” is for End Zone104
I’ve crossed my share of lines
And screwed my share of women.
I’m not steady
But don’t you call my crooked.
I haven’t told a lie since my dad died.
I’ve wiped some blood from my hands
But I’ve never needed any bandages.
I’ve been called names
But never “chicken.”
I’ve been fighting since my dad died.105
But you know I’ve held and shook some hands.
Some people love me and some people hate me.
Sometimes I forget why I decided to live this life of mine alone.
But I remember after, when I masturbate.