Another Ride on the GREAT BIG SEA

Although I'm passionate about an eclectic mix of music, bands and artists, one of the groups I am most passionate about is Great Big Sea. GBS hails from St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada and performs their own unique blend of rock, folk, and Celtic. They just released a new CD, "The Hard and the Easy" which is kind of a departure from their usual formula. The new CD is composed of traditional Newfie songs, done with GBS tuneful spin.

Because Newfoundland is a coastal community, many of its song have to do with sailing, boats and sealore. This theme is present on all GBS albums, but never moreso than on "The Hard and the Easy" with tracks like "The River Driver," "The Mermaid," "Captain Kidd," "Harbour Lecou," and "French Shore." Smaller bodies of water are also represented in "Concerning Charlie Horse" and "Tickle Cove Pond."

The first single from the new CD, "Captain Kidd" features Alan's usual smooth vocals and the band's signature pop-flavored Celtic arrangement. Sean McCann also handles lead vocals on several songs and his bodhran (a handheld Celtic drum) spices many of the songs. (Although I'm wild about all members of the band, past and present, Sean has always been my favorite.)

GBS also has their own tradition of including comedic songs on their albums and track 4, "The Mermaid" more than fits that description. It also explains the images on the CD's front and back.

I picked up my copy of "The Hard and the Easy" the day it came out in the U.S. Check out their website, listen to clips from the new CD and then do the same. I defy you to sit still through one of their rollicking, good-time CD's. Attending a GBS concert is an orgy of jumping , sing-alonging (is that a word?) F-U-N. I have never been more exhilarated (and ultimately, exhausted) than after a GBS show.

And I have my friend Missie to thank for all of this. She introduced me to the band, let me borrow a couple of their CD's and took me to my first GBS show at the Odean in Cleveland on St. Patrick's Day a few years ago. It was at this show I first met another Celtic band I'm devoted to: Carbon Leaf. But that's a blog for another day.

Check out Great Big Sea. Now. I mean it!

I Am a Leaf In the Wind... Watch How I Soar

I'm coming to this particular party late, but I've been kind of distracted lately, y'know. (Start from the bottom if you have no idea what I'm talking about.)

The Firefly movie "Serenity" opened last weekend. I saw it opening night and have sat through three screenings in the intervening week. I will probably go again today.


As a rabid fan of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and, to a lesser extent, "Angel," I remember anxiously awaiting the arrival of Joss Whedon's third TV series, "Firefly" several years back. After watching the premiere, I came away somewhat confused and not terribly impressed. The show just didn't "click" with me and fell off my radar pretty quickly. (Actually, the same thing happened with Buffy; when I realized my mistake, I played catch-up seeing all the episodes I'd missed.)

I heard that the show was cancelled and didn't give it much more thought. Then, when the DVD set of the entire series came out, I kept reading raves about the show on the ViewAskew Message Board. Curious, I bought the set and spent a weekend watching every episode.

The show was amazing! The special effects were pretty much standard TV fare, but, like Buffy, the characters were completely three dimensional, the acting was superb and the dialogue was full of wit and intelligence. How could I have missed this?

I knew from Joss' appearance at the 2004 Chicago Wizard World Comic Convention that a Firefly movie was in the works. And the waiting began.

Online bits and pieces kept me up-to-date and the Sci-Fi channel's recent run of the original series helped slake my thirst for more Firefly. And then, finally, the movie appeared at my local Regal theater.

I won't review the movie here and now -- I wouldn't want to spoil it for anyone. Suffice to say, I haven't been this enthusiastic about a movie since Kevin Smith's "Dogma," which also inspired multiple viewings. The SFX are motion picture quality and the story is phenomenal. I took a friend to my third showing who never saw the TV series and he loved it, so I feel reasonable confident in saying that you don't need to know the source material to enjoy this movie.

If you want two hours of pure enjoyment -- if you want to leave a theater having laughed and gasped and felt like your entertainment dollars were genuinely well spent -- go see "Serenity."

Normalcy... Tedium... These Are Just Words

My mother's death still hits me at odd moments, occasionally with a surprising ferocity. Yesterday, I read the date of a conference set for May 1-3, 2006 and immediately thought, "Mom's birthday," and then remembered that Mom isn't having any more birthdays. That one made me sad for a moment, but it passed. Later, I was talking to a friend about Mom's death and out of the clear blue I felt tears welling up. Egad.

But it's getting better. I've settled comfortably back into my old routine: work, Jake, home, friends. My brother, Tom, and I talk every few days, which is more than we've talked in years. Mostly, we share some new detail we had to manage related to our mother's death.

Tom is taking care of her bills and, it appears, anything related to her money -- what little there is -- and keeping all of it. He told me this week that our Aunt gave him a check to help with funeral expenses and he's getting refunds from most of her utilities and from the deposit on her apartment. The apartment manager said her apartment was the cleanest he had ever seen. And thanks, Tim, for doing most of the actual cleaning. My Mom had some money in her lock box, I have no idea how much (and it could not have been much) but Tom snatched that up the day the paramedics wheeled her out of the apartment.

That all sounds kind of bitter and snarky. I don't mean for it to come off that way. I really don't begrudge him whatever meager moneys result from Mom's death. He certainly was more involved with her in the last several years. More power to him.

The cemetery called me this week. They want me to come in for a "follow-up visit," whatever that means, to get copies of paperwork and talk about a headstone. I'll probably do that next week.

On a completely unrelated note: last night I had a dream that aliens had invaded and were rounding up the population. They weren't interested in Earth's natural resources; apparently, we hadn't left them enough to bother with. They were taking people and turning them into a liquid slurry (I don't remember the process, but the results were pretty horrific) and using that biological soup to create new bodies for themselves.

I'm a lucid dreamer, able to control the direction and outcome of most of my dreams. This whole scenario was being observed in third person, so its unfolding fascinated more than frightened me. Then, I discovered that my company's HR Manager was in league with the aliens and was firing people so the aliens could take them away. At that point, I decided it was time to wake up.

Draw your own conclusions...

How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth

Where was I? Oh yes, a working, emancipated minor in high school.

Freed from the constant worrying about my mother’s mental and emotional condition, I began to distance myself from her. She got better, got the marriage to Harold annulled and went back to what passed for her "normal" life: living on Social Security Disability and food stamps in public housing, taking city buses for transportation, visiting my grandmother from time to time. I saw her on holidays, but I seldom sought her out.

Over the next several years, she had many more schizophrenic breaks, usually accompanied by paranoid delusions. She attempted suicide several times. (I often wonder if my inability to understand these acts motivated me to volunteer for a decade at the local suicide prevention hotline.) Most often, some religious zealot would convince her that drugs were bad and God was the answer to her problems. So, fierce in her faith, she would stop taking her meds and jump headlong into the abyss. Oddly, the zealots were never around to clean up the mess, to her Mom back into a treatment program, to get her stabilized on meds while making sure her bills were paid. No, they were always off praying while my brother and I cleaned up their mess.

I can’t say I ever stopped loving my mother. But, as my own career developed and I traveled the world and established a life of my own, it just became easier to put even more distance between us. (Perceived distance, not physical distance – we still lived in the same area.)

Then, a couple of years ago, my Mom called me in the middle of the night and wanted me to take her to the hospital because she thought she had ruptured a bladder repair operation she had earlier that year. She said she was bleeding. In my dazed state, I suggested it might be better for her to call an ambulance, rather than wait for me to get dressed and drive over to pick her up. She hung up on me.

When I was a kid, my mother and grandmother would play the “hang-up” game. One would call the other, start an argument and hang up on the other. They would then repeatedly call, scream and hang up. Sometimes it went on for hours. I still get a knot in my stomach, thinking about it.

Within minutes of my mother’s hang-up, my brother called (she had obviously called him after slamming the receiver down on me) asking me what was going on. I told him that I thought she should get an ambulance, but I would go over to her place if she refused. Tom shouted, “Don’t bother!” and hung up on me. A little switch flipped in my head. I was done with this game.

For the next several years, I stopped taking calls from either my Mom or my brother. They could both rot as far as I was concerned. I simply refused to be a part of their manipulative passive-aggressive game. It hurt me to miss my nephews’ birthdays and Christmas, but ultimately, I think it contributed to my own sanity.

Then, about a year ago, I started to soften to the idea of reestablishing contact with my family. My mother would leave these long, tearful pleas on my answering machine, begging me to call her. Eventually, I did, although I was always guarded in my conversations with her. Work and life kept me busy, so we communicated infrequently. In the spring of this year, there were several long messages on my machine from her, raving and delusional and clearly in the midst of another breakdown. I stopped answering my phone again.
Recently, she seemed better and we had a few decent conversations. Then, I got the call from my brother’s dispatcher last Tuesday, saying that Tom needed me to call me right away. I knew the truth immediately.

So, here I am. I’m conflicted because I know that in recent years, I wasn’t a particularly good son. I never stopped loving my mother, but I can’t honestly say I liked her very much. I hurt with her loss, but I’m not sure if it is because I know she’s gone and our relationship will never be repaired or because I’m deeply hurt that she never gave me the kind of childhood most of my friends had.

And I feel guilty. I feel guilty because amidst the shock and sadness at learning of her death, a small part of me felt… relieved.