Song of the Thin Man...

For the record, I don't think Dashiell Hammett ever wrote such a nonsensical title. First of all, from what I've read, he was more like Sam Spade than Cole Porter, and secondly, I can't imagine he would have got it past Lillian Hellman without an acre of laughter beforehand. Still that was the title of the last Thin Man movie they ever made, and Hammett was alive when they made it. I still can't countenance anybody ever mistaking Myrna Loy for Lillian Hellman however. Nora Charles notwithstanding.

No, I was thinking of me, and the fact, that well, I'm still thin. Not as thin as I was, but I'm still, as we like to say in the parlance of subtlety, slim. I know the difference, because I used to be gaunt. Now, I'm (go ahead, say it) forty-ONE years old and my metabolism has slowed down to the point of other mere mortals. I'm now slim. Oddly enough, my bones are bigger, if my waistline isn't. They broadened. I didn't know they did that. I knew they got longer and eventually stopped, but nobody told me my shoulders and ribcage would start heading east/west the moment my legs and arms gave up on going north/south. (Good thing too, I was worried I'd end up dragging my knuckles on the ground and ruining years of finely tuned manicures...)

Which made me think, the body changes, and you my dear, aren't, or haven't. Inside that is. You're still fighting the same demons you've been fighting since you were twenty-one, and really, isn't it time you gave them up and embraced some new ones? I mean really darling, ring the changes a bit, sweetie.

The question of the millennium of course, that bothered me, was, how? Especially when you don't know what it is that's wrong to begin with? An nebulous greyness, a fogpatch in the will, thwarted love, lack of material success, excessive emotional attachment, loneliness. I mean, hell, it's all there for the asking if you want to label it accurately.

The problem as far as I can see, is one of discipline. My will has never been able to match my emotional storms. Despite my best intentions, my rowboat of positive thinking is forever stuck wafting about in the monsoons of my emotional sturms and drangs. Welcome to Hurricane Trev. Bailing buckets to your left.

But that's beside the point.

I had an unproductive day. My fault. I was depressed and couldn't cope with the disaster that is my apartment. I picked at it, cleaned the kitchen, straightened out a table, dusted a few knicknacks, and then thought, screw it, and went out for an ice cream cone. I came back a few hours later, (I also got a coffee, no ice cream cone lasts that long, even in Siberia. Well, MAYBE Siberia.), and it was still sitting there. The disaster. Looking around at papers and books everywhere, I sighed, and I kept thinking of one of my heroes, my dear demented Tallulah, and how, when her father gave her money to live in New York as a youngster to seek her fortune as an actress, she spent her food allowance on a maid, and ate off the plates of friends who dined at the Algonquin Room instead. Very practical I thought, diet wise if you're trying to lose weight, (she was), but the truth is, I'm far too reserved, and now, too old for such a stunt, although I love the idea of it. Plus, I'm far too thin to get away with it for long. I'd collapse from an anemic spleen and a starved ingrown disposition.

More pointedly, I'm too Canadian and plebeian to even entertain the idea of a maid for an abode this size, (think postage stamp with running water and you'll get the general idea) although the inner fascist diva in me wouldn't blink twice at the thought. But I grew up with generations of farmers and working class people before me who'd spin in their graves at speeds that would make Wonder Woman dizzy if I ever got a cleaning lady, maid, sorry, domestic technician to help me out with this Augean stable I lovingly refer to as home.

If the outer is a reflection of the inner, then I am seriously fucked. Oddly enough, my finances are O.K., usually they're dire, but today they're alright. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm still poor, but at least I'm not mired in debt. All things considered, I'm not doing too badly. I'm not satisfied, but I realized long ago, that I never would be. That I would always be striving for more, or at least wanting a state of being as close to my ideal as I could get. Of course, you never get that in this life, and if you do, you're usually too stupid to realize it when you've got it. I had it as a child, but it's eluded me ever since.

I suppose listening to Annie Lennox's DARK ROAD is hardly helping matters any, beautiful song though it is.

No, I got to worrying and wondering today about what exactly it was I'd done with my life. Nothing so far as I can see. I've made a lot of friends, and been loved by a lot of people and I know that if I got run over by a turnip truck tomorrow, there'd be a lot of devastated people out there, but I mean, what past mourning, have I really got left? What exactly have I DONE? Nothing really. No children. No relationships or partnerships that I can look back at with a rosey hue and think, "them were the days...", a job which barely pays the bills, but it's a job, certainly not a career, and not one I embrace on most days. I've written twelve bad plays, made a half-assed attempt on a novel, and I have a B.A. that I just managed to get by the skin of my teeth.

But. while sitting here staring at these horrible sage walls (I will paint these if it KILLS me) sipping peppermint tea, and looking at an article on kids at Sick Kids Hospital, I felt a burning shame, and thought to myself, "You haven't got cancer or a threatening illness you selfish bastard, you have all of your limbs, you're healthy, and you've seen a lot more of life than these wee angels will likely ever have the chance of seeing, and you're not the parent of one of these darlings who has to stand helplessly by and watch this inconceivable suffering, no, you don't have to go through any of that, and still you have the nerve to whine and complain?" How dare you?

I quite agree. How dare I? Stop it now. Just stop it.

Life is nothing if not relative, and although one cannot begin to compare sufferings as though it were a contest, (nor I think, should one) it does help to remind oneself of what real acute suffering can be, and then put one's life into perspective from that vantage point. I AM lucky. Ridiculously so. Perhaps my life isn't what I want it to be, but whose is, really anyway? I have love in my life, maybe not the romantic fantasy everyone wants, but it's love nonetheless, and I am so much the richer for it, especially in view of those who have so little of it or perhaps none at all. I've had darling, marvellous parents who worshipped the quicksand I walked on from Day One, and a brother who's been a rock for my emotional life from the day he showed up, fat, bald, drooling and grinning from ear to ear. Had I only those three in my life, I could still lie down and breathing my last, call myself blessed.

I've had friends I've loved and lost, and who've loved me, and I have so many still that I've had for years and who still make me laugh to the point of tears....yes, I've been lucky. So I'm not married, or partnered, or rich, or eminently successful or any of those things that society might say marks us as having achieved something. It doesn't matter, not really. I know I'm loved, and maybe that's the one thing I need to remember the most when the skies go grey and the storms start battering the hatches. I'm loved and I don't really need much else.

As for the rest of it, perhaps what they say is true; perhaps it does take a long time to become a person. Longer than they tell you.

What the hell. So I'm a late bloomer. A thin one. Big deal. I just got the important stuff done first.

Now what the hell did I do with those soap pads?

Dusty Springfield: An Appreciation

Dusty Springfield, picture courtesy of the BBC


















I made a new discovery this year; the music of Dusty Springfield. I don't remember just how I came across her, much less how I missed her music all of these years, but there it is. I had heard "Son of a Preacher Man" all of my life, on and off, and of course, The Pet Shop Boys "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" since I was a teenager, and I'd heard her name, but she and her music never really came across my radar as anything significant. I really didn't have any idea who she was, or what her legacy had been. Then again, like my reading of Margaret Atwood, I was too young and callow to appreciate a talent like Springfield's.

Listening to her now at age forty, I realise that her's is not an easy voice. It isn't emotionally soothing and warm. It can be a very joyous sound, like her first hit, "I Only Wanna Be With You," but a lot of the time, the voice is veiled in by a sort of agonized longing. It's ethereal, and almost maddening in a way, as if, for all of it's power as an instrument, it permanently threatens to vanish, or worse yet, wait forever immobilized, never being sure of gaining what it yearns for. The most difficult Springfield song for me to listen to is "The Look of Love", with it's inchoate longing that never seems fulfilled throughout the entire song.

With Springfield's voice, there is a haunting quality to it, as though one is never sure she's quite there. Like lightning, it flashes and in a blink it can be gone. But it's unforgettable once you've heard it. Camille Paglia said it was an androgynous voice, almost masculine, and that it had an almost castrati like quality to it. I think that's true. There IS an almost masculine quality to her singing voice, which is unusually commanding and powerful, in light of the fact that her speaking voice made her sound like a breathy little girl. It was very light and ultra-feminine sounding, almost cartoonish in a way.

Like another gay icon, it's a quality she shared with Judy Garland, whose singing voice was legendary in it's mix of power and vulnerability. Garland also had a girlish speaking voice, frequently punctuated with giggles. The two were very different women, but had an intrinsic passion in their singing, and an almost overwhelming emotional connection to their audiences.

Like Garland, and seemingly, like all the great divas, Springfield had her demons, and was notorious for her perfectionism in the studio. The fact that she pretty much single handedly found, produced and marketed her greatest hits of the sixties (at a time when women didn't do such things, and if they did, were never given credit for it) has never been properly credited to her. She couldn't read or write music, and yet she possessed an innate musicality that helped transform British pop. It was she who was credited for bringing the sounds of Motown to Britain. Likewise, when she went to the States in one of her earliest tours, she was the only white performer to sing with the likes of Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, and other Motown stars.

That she was heavily influenced by the Motown sound was well known. What was not so well known was the furore she caused in the early sixties, by refusing to play to a segregated audience in Capetown, South Africa. Cannily, she had agreed to do the concerts under the proviso (actually stipulated by her in her contract) that the audiences she would be playing to, would be mixed. When she arrived, and the audience turned out to be all white, she refused, and was eventually asked to leave the country.

She wasn't just a white woman doing cover songs that black performers had made popular,(unlike a lot of the white cover artists of the segregated music scene of the 1950's) she was a woman who sang with soul, a sound that up to then, had been previously been seen solely as the province of singers like Aretha Franklin. The fact that the singer was a tiny blond Irish/Englishwoman, and quite young at that (her hits were all basically done before she was thirty years old) startled more than a few listeners. Check out her version of Nowhere to Run, or her duet with Jimi Hendrix on youtube if you don't believe me. She was an unusual singer in that she didn't like her voice to stand out from the background music, she liked to think of it as just another instrument in a wall of sound. Recording engineers would be awestruck by the fact that she would turn the music track up as high as she could and sing to it, when they knew she couldn't possibly hear what she sounded like. Amazingly enough, she would be in key, and the tracks would be brilliant.

She lost her musical direction after the sixties and spent a good ten years or so in exile in the United States, where she battled a host of demons and addictions before she returned to Britain to be reinvigorated by her success with the Pet Shop Boys. She was on the crest of a full-fledged comeback when she was struck by breast cancer in her late fifties. After a long battle of several years, she succumbed to the disease a month before her sixtieth birthday.

In an age of being inundated by the ersatz Britneys and the dried up Madonnas, I find a great solace in the music of Dusty Springfield. There's soul aplenty in that woman.

Sunday Scrabble......and other Delights....

I've been on my couch for most of the afternoon, playing two online scrabble games with two friends of mine, both of whom are kicking my sorry ass, but that's O.K., as I am rapidly becoming addicted. I've also been watching a documentary on what makes gays gay, and I cleaned my kitchen. I HAD planned on cleaning the rest of my apartment today, but again, I got distracted. I sorta straightened it out, but there's more to do, and it's already ACK!! 8:20, and I haven't done nearly what I wanted to do.

Oh well, I'll get a bit more done and then I'll finish up tomorrow.

THE 40TH YEAR IS ALMOST UP!!!

Me at the infamous 40th Birthday Party shenanigans, counting all of my loot...

Well, not quite. Not just yet. Not until April anyway. But, it HAS been a busy year possums, and more than a little overwhelming. I did the PWA Bike Rally again, and had a wonderful time, and we managed to raise over a million bucks this year, so that was really rewarding. All that biking managed to reduce my 185 lb. form down to a manageable 170 lbs, so I was RAATHER pleased about THAT. Well, actually I lost that excess poundage from biking and swimming I must say. Felt much better too.

So what happened you ask? What was I up to that made me disappear for so long? (HA! As if any of you noticed!) Well, I made some important decisions, one of which I can't talk about yet as it's still too early, and I'm far too secretive. (HA! Right!) Suffice it to say, it's the most important one, and you'll find out in the new year.

Secondly, I fell in love for the first time in seventeen years, and I kind of got swept away by it. It didn't work out, nobody's fault, it's just one of those things. He's brilliant and funny and sweet and kind, and drop dead gorgeous, but.......it wasn't to be. Sad, but one moves on, and I am. Still and all, we've managed to do the impossible, and that's to stay friends, which is saying something. Actually, it says a helluva lot. I don't think I could have managed that even five years ago, it would have hurt too much. Now, I don't know, I can sort of put things in perspective, and try and at least take the best out of these situations instead of the worst. I said I "try", I don't always succeed. But for the most part, it's succeeding, and I know I've always got him as a great friend, and I'm old enough (and smart enough)to know that you don't discard THOSE very quickly. You're lucky if you get five real friends in this life, and I've definitely had more than my share. Greedy guts that I am, I'm keeping them. Him too. Most especially him.

So I'll be back on this thing. I don't know what I'll write about, but I'm sure something will come up. Something always does....

THE PWA FRIENDS FOR LIFE 10TH ANNIVERSARY BIKE RALLY!!!

Hey Folks!

Yup. The rumours are true. I'm back on two wheels again! I'm doing the Friends for Life Bike Rally for my second year, a six day bike ride from Toronto to Montreal to raise money for people living with HIV and AIDS, and we really, really need your support! Hit click, or control click onto the link below to check out this fantastic event and find out how your donation (even a little bit!) can make the lives of so many people living with HIV and AIDS so much easier....

thanks so much,

Trev

http://my.e2rm.com/personalPage.aspx?registrationID=403467&LangPref=en-CA

Ye Gods, But it's BEEN Awhile....

Not really any excuses except that I've been busy writing, I mean, REALLY writing, not this ceaseless wanking on a computer that I've been calling writing, but which has really been just hearing myself talk. Onscreen. No, I've actually been working at something tangible, God help me, but I'm not going to tell you what it is until I'm actually done it, because I always talk about what I'm doing before I finish anything, and then I don't, and then I wonder why nobody takes me seriously anymore. Please believe me, it's better than that last sentence.

Anyhoo, that's what I've been up to, aside from injuring myself (pinched nerve in neck, causing sciatic like agony in upper torso and down right arm, for which I've been under doc's treatment and it seems to be finally working) from cricking my neck on my couch by reading Brideshead Revisited twisted around the wrong way, (not unlike how Waugh wrote it, so I don't see why I should suffer and he shouldn't. Oh wait. He's dead. But anyway, I digress...) which is obviously against the rules, and therefore I will never attempt to read ever again. Not on that couch anyway.

This is my slothful year, when I now have a paunch, pot-belly, spare-tire, whatever you want to call it, and can't fit into half of my clothes because I finally got too fat to wear them. I weigh 185 lbs., I sneaked a peek on Stephanie's hyper-alert-aware scale that doesn't lie, and it said that's what I was. I much prefer metric. It said I was only 23 kilos, which is much kinder on the dillusionary mind. Now I realize my life has taken a turn for the unexpected. My once fabled ferret-like metabolism has all but failed me, I can tear jeans open with my ass and I'm starting to sound like Bridget Jones, by complaining about said ass. And to think I used to laugh at people who fretted about their weight. "Poor narcissistic little drips, " I would sneer, "Always fussing about their weight." How blind I was, how thoughtless. How was I to know that my 6'2", 145 lbs., figure and 28" waist would one day take off to Reno for a permanent divorce never to be heard from again, and leave me with something resembling an extra from CHEERS?

Oh, yes, I apologize now. The Karmic Jenny Craig has leaped up from the pits of Cellulite Hell and literally bitten me in the ass. And now I look like Lainie Kazan in drag. My own fault I agree. And I am paying penance now. Next month I am back to the gym. This week I got back on my bike, and I am writing again. Not however, at the same time. I am riding on my bike and I am writing, oh forget it. Don't be so pedantic. You know what I mean. The point is, I'm trying to get back in shape, mentally and physically. I'm finishing this damnable project, I'm going back to the gym (AGAIN!!) and I'm doing the Friends for Life Bike Rally again next year.

Oh yes, I've learned my lesson. I will be toned, taut, and in no (bad) pain at all. I will be, (as the kids say) hot. You see, I turn 40 next April 12th. That's right kids, 40. FOUR-OH. You heard it here first. And as God is my witness, by the time that dark day comes, even I'M going to want to fuck me.

So speaking of speaking optimistically.....wish me luck, kids.

I know, I know, I know, I KNOW!!

Honest, I will put a new blog entry down soon. Not that you're all going insane wondering what I'm doing I know. It's just that a) I've been busy, b) I had a boyfriend, c) I got a cellphone, d) I've been on Facebook, and e) I've started a new play. Add to that a few weddings, spring is here finally, and I've been outside, and you can see why I've not been glued to my blog.

However, I have not "forgotten thee Cynara, gone with the wind" to quote Dowson, and will be back to catch up fairly soon....

Bear with me....

T.