Our Shape


Dear Eugene,

“I’m not of a mind to record anymore.  There’s no point… In terms of recorded music, the pact’s been broken—the personal connection between the artist and the listener. [The] MP3 has dismantled the intended shape of an album.  And then everything is leaked, everything is stolen.”

Elvis Costello said that more than a decade ago.  I am glad he was of that mind again and his new album was released last year.  I was listening to it this morning walking to work.

Yes, the shape, it's beautiful.  You take a song out of the context of the whole album and it is impoverished for that.  This is classic Costello, every song a self-sustained chamber piece often with multiple speaking voices that echo beyond its own walls to find resonance in a cathedral of higher calling and deeper longing.  It is a true LP record, like the Bible, a very "long play" that rewards mindful and wholehearted attention and frustrates casual bystanders, distracted tin ears.

Of course we have done the same to the Bible way before the MP3 has had its wicked ways with the music album.  Not many talks about the shape of a book anymore.  Chapters and verses we take out of their context and insist, "But the Bible says..."---a most despicable phrase I know, for whatever comes after that is frequently something profane that speaks about the speaker and not the Bible's speaking.

"South Coast cold snap has many dreaming of warmer destinations," the news tells us.  Then a rhetorical question: "Does the February cold snap have you dreaming of places where you can ditch your parka for a swim suit and sunglasses?  If you answered yes, you’re not alone."  It is not uncommon to find on the same page of such so-called news advertisement that answers to our "dreaming."

How is Vancouver "cold"?  I don't know.  Now if I am homeless I can certainly say that.  But if I have the wherewithal to "dream" of "swim suit and sunglasses" at "warmer destinations" than the chance of me already imprisoning myself in an overheated inferno that I sometimes called home is pretty high.  And how is "cold" defined by a well-warmed Vancouverite in need to justify his/her dreaming, when any and everywhere else in the rest of Canada is almost always colder in winter?

The definition can only be it's cos I feel it so.  I say it is cold cos it is cold to me, like, cold is happening to me right now as we speak, and that is the honest hardcore truth I'm telling you, important for you to know and acknowledge as a very vital piece of truth about...me.  "But my body says so..."

The intended shape of our life is dismantled, a "pact" has been broken, by who and what we need the integrity of a fuller perspective to answer.

Yours, Alex

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