Things without the matter.

"You two guys better watch out."

Barb and her friend approached as we entered the room. The museum exhibition was held in a long hall upstairs, and a band was performing at the opposite end while everyone listened or mingled or stood quietly near a window with a glass in their hand. There were tables of wine, and others with platters of cheese and grapes and vegetables. Barb had on a series of gold jewelry and was dressed in dark red, and she balanced her wine while pinning her clutch under her arm. She stepped towards me and took my hand.

"You two," Barb said to me, "but you, you just better watch it. You're the best looking ones in the room. Look at you, my goodness." And she laughed, a way that seemed as though she was laughing at herself. "You're so tall and sharp. I'm here, and I just needed to tell you. My friend and I, we saw you come in and we wanted you to know, you just watch." Barb was standing close now and put her hand on my coat. Her friend was aside, waiting with two glasses of wine. Barb took another sip of hers and tapped one of her gold rings against the rim of her glass. She laughed again.

"It's okay," she said, retaking my hand and and gently shaking it. "I've been married for thirty-seven years, it's okay, so, you know. My husband is sitting right over there. We're out here. I want you to have a great night. Yes, it's nice to meet you too." And as she left, Barb laughed. "My goodness."

Anything that had also fallen.

Once off the phone, he took a slow stand and then took his coat from the rack. He crossed the street. There was an empty lot now where there had once been a long building, one with a purpose that stood for decades, perhaps a hundred years. The lot was marked by the crumbled rocks of ruin. And bits of garbage blown through the sagging fence, to where he had placed a chair in its middle. The chair was stiff and dark, its feet rigid in the broken stones. It was a free arena for thought, though not zoned by the city. When he would walk past though, he would never see anyone else using the lot the way he did, and was likely the only person ever to sit there now. He sat down and looked at the toes of his shoes, dusted by steps through what were once lit halls and tall rooms.

He remembered someone he knows telling him that anger is a thing, maybe the only feeling, which does not go away on its own. A real work is required, some deep dialectic, else it stays. When it stays, it is a mass of untidy burrs that snag all corners. It will catch on skin, and then on all that is touched.

And he held some old anger. When he sat there, it seethed against the ruins. The stones glazed and froze in their place. The scrape of his boots churned the dust to glass. He didn't know it, his want in this coming to repair into ruins. He imagined chariots of camels and horsemen. Sitting quiet in the midst, this ancient thing cast a hot blanket over the tumbled old bricks. Anger looks like a shout, but it feels silent, white. The chair creaked as he rose. He crossed back over the street and hung his coat.

Festal time.

So many year's end lists are evaluative of things produced, ordered into bests and almost bests. I don't think I can do that (aside from saying that Andrew Bird's Break It Yourself is the best album), so I want to use some space here to point towards people I know who are doing amazing things. I find myself so often sitting in my home with a glass in my hand, marveling at the people I know and the creations they offer. I would like for so many more people to know who they are as well.

Musicians:

Lifestory:Monologue retired their band after many successful years, and following the release of their great album Drag Your White Fur, Make It Grey. I miss them already.

Nick Ferrio is an old friend who has played in a million great bands (including The Burning Hell), and he released his full-length country album this year. The man knows how to make a song, I'll say.

Drew Nelles and Derek Lappano have a new band called Debt. But before it, they had a band called Wind-Up People that I hardly found out about before it was over, and I wish I could have seen. Since I met them years ago, I have loved the music these two make.

Ryan Turner, one of my oldest friends, has been playing jazz around Guelph. When you get the chance, go have a look. He is an amazing musician, and I've been lucky to play in a band with him again this past year.

Spencer Burton's band Grey Kingdom released Light, I'll Call Your Name Out "Darkness" this year, and the album is great, particularly the bookend tracks. He's great.

Olenka & The Autumn Lovers are from London, and released their new album, Hard Times. I love the lyrics, and the music always feels good and warm. Like autumn lovers.

Hinindar belongs to my friends Steve Sloane and Jeff Woods, and they released their album Absalom this year. It's been the music I drive to late at night.

Steph Yates, who had previously played in Hinindar, now has a band called Esther Grey. She combines that grit of the garage with some really virtuosic songwriting.

Pchan is a musician and DJ (Wolfh34rt) in Toronto, and I can not believe I have yet to see him perform. When I can, I will.

Mike Contasti-Isaac's project The English Premiership is some studio wizardry. He writes for mood at atmosphere, and accomplishes these things very nicely.

My friends in Teenage Kicks are doing amazing things. They started a Singles Club to release music every month and they released a live album, all in addition to their album Be On My Side.

Writers:

Iris Hodgson writes Bossy Femme, a personal blog about all things good. She also includes important reflections on broader topics that interest her, like styling life, knitting, and a great dog.

Andrew T does everything, and very well. He creates a zine for his writing called Give Up, which you can go and get right away, and he pairs it with a monthly podcast.

Drew Nelles is the Editor-in-Chief of Maisonneuve, a quarterly magazine based in Montreal that you probably already read. The publication is always a great collection of articles on culture and politics. I have always known Drew to be someone who works very hard, and I am always so pleased to see his name on the masthead

I met Cameron Anstee at a conference in Ottawa, and have been excitedly and enviously following his press, Apt. 9, which publishes works of poetry.

My graduate program has created Song, and Sin where a collection of my classmates write about all kinds of things. The primary contributor right now is the eternal Dru Farro, and every day that passes is one that I regret not writing for it. To the new year.

Though I have only met her a few times so far, Misha Bower easily shows herself to be a wonderful person. And she published Music For Uninvited Guests, an excellent collection of short stories that includes a mixtape with songs by your favourite artists.

Photographers:

Cristina Naccarato is a good friend who has been photographing for years, though I have only known her for a little over one of them. She takes a lot of live performance photos, and she also works with Broken City Lab, an important creative collective in Windsor.

Jacklyn Barber takes photos of places and people and the things that furnish them, and there is always something wistful about them. In addition to her Flickr account, you can find her on the Gram.

Nicolette Hoang uses her photos in a really nice way, as a documentation of her surroundings and those she spends her time with. Her blog is a great thing to explore, and she is also on the Gram.

Derek O'Donnell is a good, old friend of mine who largely does portraiture. His manner of composition is great, for me at least, as someone who likes to learn through people's faces.

More:

My friend Jeremy Klaver, in addition to his move into artist management, is an integral part of London's music performance community. He organizes and promotes concerts for both local and touring musicians (and even helped me get my first start in the city, too).

Sara Froese owns All Sorts Press, a custom letterpress studio. The products she makes are versatile and all look lovely, including CD packaging, business cards, and posters.

Kelly Hardcastle-Jones has two radio shows: Pioneer Radio, which explores a new theme per episode, and Books For Breakfast, which, I think, describes itself in a better way than I could. She also had a sweet little baby this year.

The studio that has welcomed a couple of the musicians I mentioned above, both for shows and for recording, is the Sugar Shack, and it is run by Simon Larochette. With any luck, I will be working with him soon as well.

There are so many more that I know, and who I know I must be missing but whose importance is worth a spotlight, and I apologize for my slanting memory. So many more musicians, as well as painters and academics and more photographers and store owners, and people whose careers are to save lives or build homes. Shine on, you crazy diamonds.

--

To the new year.

Clarity in those moments.

At the museum, where the two were looking at paintings. They were passing through rooms, well-lit galleries where you can never actually see the source, the fixtures. The one, trying hard, stood in front of a painting, feet steady but leaning forth and then tilting, even though a few rooms back the other said, "That's not how you should look at paintings. You stand here, then you move here, and then here." The one stood before this painting, leaning and tilting in place, and passed over the figures and the colours. The shy flecks of white and pink coming bright when close to the canvas, and laying hidden when distant. This painting was filled with folds that bloomed as shard and sum together. The one saw how the painting sent along line and mood, to where particulars vanished for the whole. It was dazzling. It reached out from its frame, the mounted texture of painted face and brow, and looked upon a room where the two now circled back to each other in its corner. To the next painting, where the other said, "I don't like the colours." And the one said, "Neither do I."

Nostos / Algos

"But still, what I want to talk about is the rasp of moments that curl my hands. Don't look at me like you don't know, you feel it too. It's the press of your own history, it tightens your fingers together like wet knots.

[...]

But it comes from all the things that collect around you, too, in a table you shared, the notes you keep. The decor you prop about your house. A shirt with a button missing from being pulled open too quickly. It can live on in the whole of a city, it can be so large. There are things everywhere, but it can come from the smallest of them, too. That's what I'm really talking about. Once a thing has been shared, it does not become merely yours, not ever. Shirts and tables. Everything participates in the flowing accumulation of who you are, and nothing ebbs. All of it can be contained in a dish, you know. This dish, and you can break it, you can break it, break it
like this,
and this one too,
and this one,
and this one. You can break them all, okay, alright, but you can't get rid of anything, no matter how much you try to spit it out. This is such a fury, and isn't it funny how you can stand and watch yourself and your tight fists lose it just trying to unleash everything else. But still it all stays so close, and because of that it heightens, frenzied. You can't kick off who you have been. No matter the gloss you spread, who you have been with someone, it is there, in the sheets of your bed, on your walked streets, the films you have watched. It's in your outlook. No matter what, it spirals in and about.

[...]

Yes, that, maybe it is why people throw things away. Sweaters and glittering collections, pictures, letters. But doesn't that ignore the actual moments and the way they persist, the one right now and those ones coming? There is no such thing as forgetting. Not when you try to build your forgetting with such purpose. You can get rid of things, or you can break them, but there will always be your moments. They are always seeping, no matter the wish to refresh.

[...]

It does. It does. But when you learn enough, you learn you can allow it to meet you, because anyway it is coming at you, it's spinning about you, dust kicked up at every step. That's what's in the approach of a moment, you know, the steel of its weight and feel. It's always there, and what it requests--and what I think people recede from--is to allow it, to take it and turn it to warmth. When the moments live in you, you can live with them, and each could be a point of celebration, you know? No thing as forgetting, but there is a choice in the way a moment is recalled. When you have scars, you can think to when they came, or you can brush them over or deride them for what you feel to be a defect. But I love scars, the little ones on hands or as a fleck near someone's eye. They punctuate your skin, they're what give you your body. That's what we can talk about, the way it could be good. Someone said once that the past blooms because our emotions regarding a moment don't arrive until the moment has gone, or like that anyway. And, I think, with the reach of each moment into every other, they bloom and bloom again to become more and more real. Those moments, they are your deepest wealth, and they stay on."

Scratch on walls somewhere.

That was the summer of rage. Months of swirling inconclusiveness spent dizzy and veering and hushed. It was a swell of days into which my body pushed. Rage, not as a buckling state of frantic and wild living, but leaping into bewilderment and its turns, keeping a lean against its hold. The delirious shout down during a long dive to pools that brim with the surprise of memory and the known folds of future. Draw it as a knot where rage is an activity that courses along the bends, always pushing, always pulling.

The long mess of those days were sketched as a heaving affirmation, one that would writhe within the cracks that cover oneself, and would make an account of living only as a series of affairs that seek to edge past a shadow. And that was a summer spent alone, sometimes, and sometimes not alone. I look now at the paint left by some voices here in this house, rings on my tables and ghost flecks on my couch. And a slow growing water stain on the ceiling in the corner of a room. These are the strands left to pick out now and tuck into a coming autumn. Some strange feet on my floors, steps that pressed sometimes once, sometimes enough to make paths that might still be soon swept over. All of these a rage in its moving parts. Phrased into the mold of skin and the tic of hands dragging through new and lengthening hair.

Rage is always with--it is always with whatever is its lack. It is a relation, and in spite of itself, in its burst and reach for reassurance, it is always only kept in relation. Its reach is a drag through vapor. It is where everything is a remains of possibility. Nothing else but the fleet of its moment, not fear nor regret, only the pine of its activity. Existence. And those were months of wooded quiet.

That was a summer which turned out a joyful rage and all its costs of aches in the morning and slow sips of recovery. Rage does not make you strange to yourself, I think, but it is yourself finding what is already there and strange within. It is a foamy realization and fulfillment of absence. You can clench its taste on your back teeth. And at its end, when the summer calms into the cool, it lets loose the swell. This summer I made kinds of music in hot rooms, drove past the night and drank into the sunrise, wrote passages in the breeze of a porch. I held a familiar fur, and I thought and threw. That was the summer, one which wanted nothing, except, and what did it get, but.

To harbour for the rest.

(I feel apology for my coffee grip.)