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

Cruiskeen Lawn

  from El Ron Maltan

  Recorded in Edmundston, New Brunswick150

  Let the farmer praise his grounds as the huntsman does his hounds.

  Let them boast all the deeds they have done.

  But I more blessed than they pass each happy night and day

  On my lovely little Cruiskeen lawn.

  Oh, my grandpa and all his sons took up arms to fight the Huns

  Just to show the devil what side our god was on.

  They returned one happy morn to rest their limbs all scarred and shorn

  On their lovely little Cruiskeen lawn.

  When I gave up the drink they referred me to a shrink

  Just to discover what father and mother might have done wrong.

  Though my desires are sublimated I would never be alienated151

  From my lovely little Cruiskeen lawn.

  While the boys go drink and roam I would rather stay at home

  And roundup the wild oats till they are gone.

  But if they should reappear then they’ll meet my old John Deere152

  On my lovely Cruiskeen lawn.

  My wife she loves her flowers she could weed their beds for hours;

  She works from the moment the dark becomes the dawn.

  But when autumn’s cold winds blow then her pretty flowers go

  While still thriving is my Cruiskeen lawn.

  If life is just a game then tragedy is just a name,

  For the rules you make up as you go along.

  All your winnings and your wealth can be measured by the health

  Of your lovely little Cruiskeen lawn.

  And when grim death appears after few but pleasant years

  I will welcome him as though he was my son

  For I know I shall be blessed, have eternal peace and rest

  In my lovely little Cruiskeen lawn.

  * * *

  Is the Life of a Man Any More Than the Leaves?

  from Andrew Sisk

  Recorded in Montreal, Quebec

  I’ve seen the time pass over me.

  And I am a witness to the flowing of the sea.

  And I know my children will bury me.

  Like my daddy before me, it’ll come eventually.

  So, I say, children, why do you cry?

  Don’t waste your time asking why.

  No one knows what’s on the other side.

  Just like all things around you, it’s the way it has to be.

  I see the cold seasons coming, I hear the funeral bells ring.153

  What is the life of a man any more than the leaves?

  In the town that I call home,

  There is a tree that has weathered storms.154

  Beneath its branches I have grown,

  And all around it the people I have known.

  And, like the seasons, I’ve seen them come and go,

  Dropped away all the ones I love to know.

  What is the life of a man any more than the leaves?

  * * *

  Big Rock Candy Mountains

  I did not yet know it, but I was on the verge of total breakthrough, the dialectically synthetic stage of absolute folk, when I arrived at the Banff Centre in the summer of 2011 as an artist-in-residence.155 My proposed project entailed writing liner notes for a forthcoming anthology album; I thus planned to spend my studio time reading histories of Canadian folk song and sketching analytical impressions inspired by the songs I had gathered to date, with the ultimate aim of producing a text to guide future listeners through my recordings, to situate each song within the surrounding fabrics of history and culture.

  The degree to which tasks of quantitative completion can result instead in qualitative metamorphosis, however, was not yet clear to me.156 Banff would profoundly alter my path.

  It was again Dr. Bronnley who had forwarded the call for applications to the residency, the broader theme of which was art and utopianism.157 “FYI—Hebdige residency in the mountains,” he had written. Dr. Bronnley and I were by this point in relatively open hostility, the student no longer meek or mild, silently scribbling the scholarship or DVD recommendations of the mentor for future use; on the contrary, this student was now constantly bristling at the teacher’s reactionary frameworks. “But why is it this way and not another?” I was constantly asking. “What of the historicity, and ideological dimension, of the very views you are now proposing? What of the ideological dimensions of the hoops through which I am required to jump in this very program?” I more or less demanded multiple times.158 Although Dr. Bronnley had come to accept that Staunton R. Livingston was going to be one of my dissertation’s objects of study, the topic constituting perhaps a single chapter’s worth of material, he was unwilling to budge in his opposition to a Livingstonian approach to the entire project; and on this sticky point we had reached but not yet passed our breaking point. By suggesting a residency that featured, as guest faculty, a canonical popular music scholar in the cultural studies tradition, who might point me toward a discursive-semiotic lens as opposed to an authentic-celebratory one, Dr. Bronnelly was making a final effort to influence my intellectual path in terms of methodology, if only by proxy.

  Little did Dr. Bronnley know that Dick Hebdige had taken a decisively Livingstonian turn in his own thinking since the late 1980s, or so it would appear to me; or that he had abandoned the study of media and culture entirely in favour of ancient Greek and Latin literature; or that he would directly embolden me via positive feedback at the dining hall one evening, toward the end of the residency, when I shared ideas about my dissertation proposal in the buffet line.159 The possibility that I might by then not propose any dissertation at all, as conventionally understood, was under consideration, which I believed would be an implicit embodiment of Livingstonion ontology. “That sounds like an interesting project,” Dick said, while plating a spoonful of the scalloped potatoes.

  So, in the end I was happy to have submitted an application to the Banff Centre, for it matters less what one intends to do—whether one is an artist or a writer or a manipulative dissertation advisor—than it matters what gets done in the end.160

  I must be careful, however. Devoting too much space in the present text to my dogfights with Dr. Bronnley, whether face to face or remote, would not amount to an accurate rendering of the complex transformations rippling across my core during this particular leg of my journey. Enmity can function as an engine of creative destruction.161Yet, there are also the abundant wonders in the world, so often obfuscated by daily regimens, which artist residencies in the mountains can reveal.

  Where to begin? Not counting a brief layover during thatketamine-fueled hitchhiking journey to Vancouver a decade earlier to pursue work in the film industry, for the first time I was in the province of Alberta, surrounded by snow-capped Rockies and by ferocious, noble beasts. For the first time I was considered an artist—with the ID card to prove it—and was being pampered as such, from my roomy studio in the ceramics wing with wall-sized windows, gazing down to the valley below, to meals and bed prepared daily, and the glass-enclosed pool open for night swims among the stars. Furthermore, my fellow travellers were emerging and established artists who ran the gamut of both emerging and established disciplines. Banff was thus very much like utopia proper, as enticingly if fleetingly described by a young Karl Marx in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.162

  Given the immensity of the resources and their adaptability to folkloristic pursuits, it might seem peculiar that I had not heard much about the Banff Centre before I clicked on the hyperlink sent by Dr. Bronnley. But honestly, the Centre had not been on my radar. The extensive holdings at their library and archives in both music and Canadian cultural history had escaped my notice. The sacred backdrop and the degree to which artists, writers, and even rock stars had found inspiration there was also unknown to me. Further, no one had describe
d, for example, the urban legends of appetitive artists attending only to have their salacious urges lead to the destruction of preconceived notions, if not entire lives back home. Later, I would learn that one could fill a book with such tales.163> Thus, communication scholars confident that narratives “about” the world in fact create the very world in question might consider, on the contrary, that I myself was unaware of Banff’s legendary stories even while performing a significant role in one exemplary, archetypal variation. Does not, I dare ask, this datum challenge the foundations of their entire theory?164

  * * *

  Corinna

  I had read about Corinna’s artwork—piles of obsolesced garbage reanimated through comic spoken-word texts, ambient music, and pirate radio transmissions—exploring, according to her interpreters, the mundane delights of life within the technological detritus of late modernity.165 I would later learn that she had read about The CFL Sessions, too, and that we had over sixty Facebook friends in common. We did not formally meet until the early-morning orientation session on the first day of our program in Banff, she with her leather jacket and reusable coffee mug, saucer-sized eyes, and squeaky voice. We chatted for only a couple minutes about the altitude sickness at the coffee break. But as our group trudged jovially up the stairs to the dining hall, I knew I wanted to sit next to Corinna at that lunch, and at every lunch thereafter, until I died.

  Yet, because it was quickly disclosed that Corinna was joined in monogamous union—parts of a common-area telephone conversation with her partner overheard while Elske, Demi, and I shared late-night coffee in the ceramics lounge—our relationship began without ulterior motive, from my point of view. Popping by her studio on my way to the canteen, I would ask whether she needed a coffee, or would inquire regarding the pleasantness of her day’s unfolding if we ran into one another in the hall. Because both of us were involved in music—she also played bass in indie rock bands, back in Winnipeg—we moreover began to share time in one of the piano huts on the edge of the campus, starting around the beginning of week two, and decided to join forces on the construction of a few utopian-themed songs to perform at our residency’s group show.166 All of this was nothing out of the ordinary, considering the collaboration– and professional network–fostering goals enshrined in the public-facing mission copy of the Banff Centre.167

  Additional proof that the platonic limits of the relationship had been accepted is that, on the night that Corinna and I first had sex, in my studio, I had already spent dozens of minutes kissing someone else from the writing program, also in my studio. My roommate Julián had thrown an ironic Victoria Day dance party the same night, making screen-printed posters of the Queen, an arrow-shaped mask superimposed over her eyes. Combined with word-of-mouth buzz, Julián’s advertisement drew dozens of guests to the celebration: modern dancers, musicians, actors, and staff. We busted moves to LCD Soundsystem and various soul hits while Julián, in time with the groove, manically scrubbed with a plume of steel wool through the endless layers of white paint on his studio walls, so that he might “transport” the rowdy gathering, as he put it, “back through the archive, back through time.” The harder Julián scrubbed, down through decades of artist-in-residence sediment, the louder we cheered.

  All of which is mere setup, it turns out, to me encountering Corinna back in the residence foyer in the wee hours of the morning, mentioning that I had lost my glasses. “Did you check your studio?” she asked, surprisingly concerned. She took my hand and we walked together through the night and through the darkly lit halls of the ceramics floor, and, after rehearsing a cappella by the window the cover song we had been working on, devoured each other on my long, narrow workbench.168 Corinna would later laugh upon learning that I had “lost” the glasses earlier that night while entering an embrace with the writer—the glasses were on my studio shelf in the end, which we noticed while cleaning up—because Corinna had a sympathetic sense of humour and was consistently able to think past her own petite-bourgeois positionality, the latter of which is simply irresistible.

  The reader of the present text can likely see where this is going, which is that Corinna had much to do with my looming epiphanies, described in greater detail below.Although conclusions often seem easy or self-evident once written down or sent to the printer, however, these revelations came only through difficult intellectual and emotional labour. More specifically, the closer I moved to Corinna, the farther away she sounded, as though we were playing tug-of-war and Whac-A-Mole simultaneously.169 We shared times of vulnerability and tenderness, such as the ponderously passionate morning during our overnight trip to Calgary, where Corinna had business with an art dealer. Sucking and licking on the bed, squeezing and penetrating in the shower, holding and caressing on the bed once more, both now freshened and robed, and therefore again with the fucking. Not only was I growing attached, but this was the first time that I had felt attachment as such, having never slept with the same person more than once. But Corinna, at least until our teary farewell on that early summer morning of the residency’s end, responded to any emotional advances with various sorts of stiff-armed tactics, which would lead to me ignoring her completely, which would lead to her advancing once again. And perhaps it was not so easy to tell who had started any given iteration of the cycle. Is there a word or phrase that better connects love, art, war, folklore, and football than avant-garde?

  This roller coaster ride could even be played and replayed again over the span of a single night. One time, for example, my independence was conveyed at a wine and cheese event—I believe this was following Dick’s public lecture—by heavy flirtation with the beautiful Dutch sculptor,Lotte.170 Yet, only two hours later, in the Centre’s corporatized airport-style lounge, I found myself interrupting Corinna’s close conversation with a handsome jazz instructor from the States, imploring her, when the jazzman left for a cigarette, to come by my room at 3:15 a.m. Goaded on by a gathering of fellow performance artists in the corner, Julián had just drunkenly agreed to dress himself in all of the articles of clothing that he had packed for Banff simultaneously, and thus attired to hike Sulphur Mountain—the highest of surrounding summits—with a group of hearty alpinists. They were departing at three to watch the sun rise.171 A rare opportunity, I explained, for us to have a bedroom to ourselves. “Okay,” Corinna said, I can now hear, with exasperation.

  I was soon lying under my sheets in covert anticipation while Julián slowly, clumsily stretched shirt after shirt, sock after sock, and pant leg after pant leg onto his stiffening, expanding figure. But Corinna never arrived. “That was fucking pointless,” Julián gasped, exhausted, when he returned around seven, me still in bed, softly crying. Later that morning, however, Corinna entered my studio without knocking, and took me into her mouth, and between her bountiful breasts, without saying a word, and we were both forgiven.

  * * *

  Saturday Morning Cartoons

  from Klaas Dyck

  Recorded in Leamington, Ontario172

  Every day I rise at a quarter to seven;

  ’Bout an hour or two after you.

  The crops are in and the crops are a-growing,

  And there’s very so much work to do.

  You’re down in the barn and I’m over in the orchard.

  Then you’re out in the field and I’m headed to town

  For business at the bank and a beer in the tavern.

  ’Cause we’re heavy with debts and I’m ready to drown.

  But this is how it goes when the rain is a-blowing.

  This is what we do when a storm comes through.

  We lay by the fire, our faces a-glowing,

  Like Saturday morning cartoons.173

  After noon we’ll head out later;

  But only if the sun comes through.

  The pepper patch could use some hoeing.

  Tonight, maybe a BBQ.

  But this is how it goes when the rain is a-blowing.


  This is what we do when a storm comes through.

  We lay by the fire, our faces a-glowing,

  Like Saturday morning cartoons.

  * * *

  Stones in My Passway

  (Or, Notes Toward a Dissertation Proposal)

  A professor—or stockbroker or CEO—sits at their desk behind a networked personal computer. Pointing and clicking, typing and sipping from a takeout coffee cup, they input symbols that are instantly converted to electrical impulses and transmitted, through wires and lines, protocols and packet switches, across a global web of informational exchange. And yet, the user sees only the screen, a window—or goalposts—through which inner thoughts or impulses can be directly dropkicked, end over end. Whether trading commodities or viewing pornography, the material substance of the networked personal computer thus seems to disappear over the course of the sending and receiving, leaving only the stockbroker, CEO, or professor—and their mind.

  Authentic folk song is a spear crashing through the centre of this solipsistic, bourgeois diagram, which is an ideological model that has been promoted for roughly three hundred years, from the birth of Romanticism to Apple advertisements.174 Not only has it been revealed that the human subject is not technically a discrete individual,175 but the line between active author and passive medium does not even exist from the point of view of the Livingstonian folk song collector. The user is merely one component among a broader assemblage of creativity cross-wiring humans and non-humans, plants and animals, digits and indexes, beings and becomings, soils and skies.176In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, not coincidentally inscribed around the same time Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace swiftly opened the floodgates of computation with their invention, the Analytical Engine: “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.”177