Thursday, November 2nd at the Centrepointe Theatre in Nepean / Ottawa, internationally renowned “Texas blues” * guitarist Sue Foley fronted a show called Guitar Women. The show was partly a chance for her to plug her latest album and her upcoming book about women guitarists, and partly a fundraiser for the Ottawa Folklore Centre’s new bursary for a deserving, would-be scholar of the guitar, under 18 years old (the student that is, not the instrument), whether the student be boy or girl.
* “Texas blues” is a reference more to a style than to geography. In fact, Ms Foley now hails from Perth, Ontario and made a point of thanking “folks” in Perth for bussing a local contingent to this show (! Second Perth citation in a row here.). I could rabbit on about what make some blues “Texas”, but not surprisingly, someone has (or some several have) done a much better job of it on the Wikipedia web site.
I’ve been a big fan of Ms Foley’s for years. She has a clear nasal voice that seems tailor-made for singing girl blues but it is her electric (in every sense of the word!) guitar playing that has always wowed me. Her trademarked instrument of most frequent choice is a pink Fender Telecaster that has been custom painted to give it a vaguely paisley appearance. It (and she) is pictured here.
But a bonus for me was knowing in advance that also on the bill was a slide guitar player I had last seen around about 1972 in a small pub at Carleton University’s Unicentre – Ellen McIlwaine. As it turned out, on this night she was clearly the anchor around whom the concert was framed. Sue Foley was officially introduced as the host, on a bill that would also feature some stunning guitar work by another blues guitarist named Roxanne Potvin and a slide guitar whiz named Rachelle Van Zanten. But when Ellen McIlwaine was onstage, it was clear that she was the grande dame of the guitar to whom the others deferred. She was introduced by Rachelle Van Zanten in what was probably intended to be a deeply moving story about driving across the northern US very late one night and being reduced to tears when the McIlwaine tune, “Say a Single Word”, came up on her mp3 player. As she looked across at Ms McIlwaine, sitting patiently but clearly uncomfortably while a young woman about a third her age lionized her, Van Zanten must have seen the unspoken, “Oh c’mon!” radiating from her idol, because she paused and said, “OK, shut up and play the guitar, right?” It brought the house down and immediately yanked the stage back to the “Let’s have some fun!” atmosphere it would prove to be from beginning to end.
I already own just about everything Sue Foley ever recorded, so I came home with “Mystic Bridge”, Ellen McIlwaine's most recent CD, that is a weirdly hypnotic blend of east and west that she described to us as “an album whose heart is in India, but whose soul is in the south”. And she didn’t mean Bangalore.
The evening’s format allowed for lots of opportunity for each of the women to showcase in turn her incredible abilities on the fret board. And as an added bonus, there were also several style mergers. After telling her story, for example, Ms Van Zanten sang the small, sad “Say a Single Word”, while its writer sat a few feet away providing her own guitar counterpoint.
And Sue Foley let it be known that she and Ms Potvin were in the process of finalizing the assembly of a band to unite for a coming tour and to produce a new album together. The two then united for a blazing preview of just what a show that is going to be! At one point, standing face to face, they traded electric blues licks at a pace that had the audience just bouncing along, erupting in applause when the two guitarists finally backed away from each other.
The finale – and you just knew this was coming – was an onstage showcase of how well four guitar masters can work together, even though the music they played was authored by just one of them – fittingly, a brace of Ellen McIlwaine tunes. (In introducing the numbers, she was hilarious. She had already told the audience she is coming back from two hip replacements and has only recently recovered the ability to be able to do a simple thing like take a shower standing up. So she made a point of saying, “Look, we have an official ‘finale’, but you know the drill. We play it. Then we’re supposed to say good bye, walk off stage while you scream for a while, and then come back on to play our real last song, OK? But I’m getting too old for this walk-off-the-stage-touch-the-back-wall-chat-for-30-seconds-then-come-back-on-after-you’ve-screamed-for-a-bit crap. So I’ll just hang around, let the girls do that thing, and then we’ll do our second finale. Got all that?”)
Which of course was exactly how this fantastic show ended.
I was sufficiently taken with the show that I was moved to seek out the means to contact Ellen McIlwaine and tell her so. The miracle of the Internet led me to her website, a “Contact Ellen” option and, within two days, a reply. I mentioned to her the last time I saw her, and my recollection of a guitar-heavy tune that I remembered as “40 Guitar Band”.
During the concert, she had also mentioned that her most recent CD had been released, for the first time in her long musical career, on her own personal label. She had expressed to the audience that she was motivated to take this enormous step because of her long-standing consternation over having to buy a large number of her own CDs from the label with whom she had been contracted, and then turn around and sell them at her concerts in order to extricate herself from the debt of having had to purchase them in the first place. In this, she told me she was not alone, adding that, in fact, precisely the same requirement is presently constraining two of her three co-performers at the concert. So here’s a thoughtful little plug to buy indie where possible:
“hello! that was 'roosters' at carleton university i think and the song is called '30-piece band'. thanks for all the years! so glad you all enjoyed the show...we did too! i am so proud of the new cd and of finally starting my own label...we did two other dates in ontario (sue, rachelle and i) and i heard that they are both in debt to a label (yet another!) in germany which financed recordings for them and sold them back to them to sell at shows and now they owe big bucks to the company! no more! i will own all my own recordings from now on. i hope they will do the same! thanks again for coming to the show and for all your wonderful kind words!... it keeps me going! i will put you on my concert dates email list and keep you posted if i/we come through again. take good care. ellen”
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The spam game…
After literally years of my complaining to my Internet Service provider – Rogers – about how much “unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail” (that’d be yer “spam”) was landing in my in-box, they finally came up with a not-too-bad filtering system that traps probably 99% of it in an easily-set-up “Bulk” basket that sits on their server’s memory, before it ever gets to my computer.
So spammers have to come up with more creative ways to try to get around it. But Rogers, to their everlasting credit, flags spam not by its subject line, but rather by how many addresses are in a message’s “To” Field. (That could be bad news for anyone who has me on a many-address “family” or “friends” mailing list, because your messages go first to this “Bulk” basket, rather than to my “In” basket. However, it takes me no time at all to scan the “From” field in these messages and exercise my “Move to” option to transfer such messages to my “In” basket before downloading them to my home PC.)
But as I quickly scan the messages flagged as “Bulk” to ensure I don’t miss one that isn’t spam, I can’t help but chuckle over the often sad ways spammers will try to circumvent spam-blockers. A lot of people, for example, have spam-blocking that begins and ends with an embedded instruction to their e-mail program to automatically dump anything into their “Trash” if it contains in its subject line a word like, for example, “penis”, or “bigger penis” (because as any regular receiver of e-mail knows all too well, a sizeable number of spam messages offer the recipient the opportunity to acquire a bigger one). So a spammer will send out a subject line like “Get a biger peni$”. See how that works? If your only spam filter is a command to block a specific, correctly spelled text, you’re still gonna get the “biger peni$” e-mail.
And that’s why I like Rogers’ filtering. They ignore the subject line and dump “biger peni$” automatically because it was sent to hundreds of “To” addresses at the same time. And that suits me just fine.
All of which is a very long-winded introduction to the observation that, when an e-mail message landed in my spam-trap recently under the Subject heading, “Small pen is?”, I chose to fill it in mentally with “… mightier than the letter-opener?”
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Bug o’ de Blog
For the past few years, I have worked myself up to the point where I am now religiously reading the white “Nutritional Information” boxes on the groceries I buy. (By “religiously” I mean of course that halfway through the list of ingredients and the column of numbers, I invariably will have muttered “Jesus H Christ!” to myself at least once, more likely several times.)
I’ve come to reluctant terms with the startling – and disappointing – discovery of just how much salt is packed into processed foods (Powdered and cubed soup base, for example, is just evil. Ingredients in this country have to be listed in descending order of their respective presence in the product, and in at least two of the popular brands of soup stock, salt is the very first ingredient. Soup stock powders, in other words, are essentially just flavoured salt. A single Bovril cube or one of its clones can shoot fully 1/3 the recommended adult daily maximum intake of sodium into your system. But I digress.)
But my main beef (haw haw) with such information is the necessity of determining just what constitutes a “serving”, even on what seems at first glance already to be a simple, single serving portion. Reading that line on a product is a real education in just how much smoke and mirrors a “food” – and don’t think I’m not using that word very, very loosely – producer employs to minimize the visible coronary risks associated with consuming a particular product.
Take, for example, what looks for all the world like a single serving of a bottled beverage – “Minute Maid Pink Grapefruit Cocktail”. It is “single-serving”, as it turns out, in name only. In most convenience stores and supermarkets, it typically is sold in a 473 mL bottle. Now just how in hell anyone decided the fluid in the bottle should total 473 mL was at one time way beyond my rational thinking. But now I understand it to be a sop to the vastly larger markets south of the border, where the imperial measure is still the standard order of the day. And 473 mL converts precisely to 15.994 US fluid ounces. Or to flip the conversion, a 16 US fluid ounce drink converts to 473.176 mL – rounded down to (surprise!) – 473 mL, an amount that for absolutely everyone who buys it and drinks it is a single serving!
But check the “nutritional information”. And note the fluid measure that someone has decided will be a “single serving” – 250 mL (!?). That number, and the percentage daily intake of each of the ingredients, seems to have been based on some God-only-knows-how-it’s-arrived-at portion of the liquid volume of the contents. And the “single serving” is never a simple fraction like “one half” or “one third”. 250mL, for example, works out to 8.453 (plus five more decimal places) fluid ounces. Which doesn’t matter anyway, because no one who has passed his or her fourth birthday is going to drink less than the bottler’s entire danged two cups’ worth at a sitting.
So what can we learn from this? Obviously that the labeled bottle’s size is governed by the vastly larger US market demands, but the label’s information in this country is determined by Government of Canada regulation. The combination offers the consumer all the helpful use of receiving a VHS instruction manual with your new DVD recorder.
But for a real laugh, if you’re given to occasionally snacking on something with “Frito-Lay” or “Humpty Dumpty” on its label, or a sugar-rich breakfast cereal, take a look at what they consider to be a “serving” (usually an odd derivation like “approximately 15 chips” or about 1/3 cup of cereal). Well sure, if you’re a friggin’ anemic squirrel, I guess. But for most humans, it’s maybe a trio of bites, if that much! Try limiting your “serving” of Lay’s potato chips to the label’s guideline. Their marketing types didn’t come up with “Betcha can’t eat just one!” for no reason.
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And finally, from the “Why in heaven’s name do we put up with crap like this?” folder, I really can’t say it much better than did columnist and author Paul Wells in a blog entry he made on Monday, November 6:
From Question Period today:
Bill Graham: How can the Prime Minister pull out of the Canada-EU summit? How can he justify this decision when he will already be in Europe for a meeting of NATO and in the region anyway?
Jason Kenney: First of all, Mr. Speaker, I would note that the last Liberal prime minister cancelled two EU-Canada summits.
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True. I may have been the only press gallery member with so much time on my hands that I noticed Martin's two cancellations. Still, it's probably not great when your excuse is that you're no lamer than your predecessor.
Vote for us – we’re no lamer than the previous crooks. Now there’s an epitaph for the leaders of the New Millennium.
… But to end on a political news o’ the day upside, as this issue was gong to press, the media coverage of the day was reporting the recapturing of Congress by the Democrats in the US. Anyone interested in starting a pool on the date of the first Presidential veto of House-approved law? For bonus points – name the first new piece of Democrat-driven House of Representatives law that’ll earn the Presidential thumbs-down. (Minimum wage? Structured troop withdrawals from Iraq?) Our lines are open.
Until next time…
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