“Pavane” is going to Chicago!!
February 5, 2009
BookShorts honcho Judith Keenan (I’m using Variety magazine lingo here, seeing as we’re discussing movies) and writer/helmer Paul Quarrington are pleased to announce that their short film “Pavane” has been accepted into the Chicago International Movies and Music Festival (CIMMfest.) Mike Phillips, the programing director, was very complimentary: he called our film “a great demonstration of how much life and backstory one can fit in a short running time. I think it has more to say than most feature-length films.” Now THAT’S what we like to hear!
Oh, and here’s a little update. We ourselves are going to Chicago, and whilst there, I am going to be part of the CIMMfest All-Star Blues Jam Band, which will feature legendary bassist Robban Hagnas from the Finnish group “The Wentus Blues Band.” Porkbelly Futures have shared the stage with this fine band before, at last years Canadian Music Week. Robban is an excellent high-energy musician, so I better start practising and bolting back the Red Bull.
This is going to take place at the Awards ceremony at the Chicago Cultural Centre, Sunday March 8th.?
John Martyn dies, age 60
February 1, 2009
John Martyn was a wonderful singer, guitarist and songwriter, and a very big influence on me, musically-speaking. Martyn was a troubadour and a scop, a seer and a mystic, and he sang with a soulful slur that made men want to weep. Of course women, always more at home with their emotions, did weep. I had the good fortune to meet Martyn. When he played Toronto in the late seventies (I’m guessing it was the late seventies),? Joe Hall and the Continental Drift opened for him. We were doing our sound check when the doors at the back of the hall flew open and a fellow with a beard (actually it was more like organized scruff) and the flinty glint of a mad man came stamping down the aisle, yelling “Stop! Stop!” When we did so, he leaned over the apron of the stage and scolded us, “You lads were having too much fun. There’ll be none of that.” John Martyn put on a wonderful show, and I became a fan. “May You Never,” one of his more famous songs, is a kind of a drunkard’s benediction: “May you never lay your head down without a hand to hold./May you never make your bed out in the cold./May you never lose your temper and get hit in a barroom fight./May you never lose your woman overnight.”
