Mango Pudding Blues 3.0

TOO MUCH

Longtime supporters of Mango Pudding Blues have no doubt, we are sure, about our commitment to music as an essential pillar in the temple of life. But man, we are being run off of our feet lately with too much music.

One of our Gamelan pals has lately loaned us an entire fucking library of German art rock outfit Can, which was not just years but decades ahead of its time, along with some missing links in our Talk Talk and Mark Hollis collection and a recording by one of his own jazz bands. Our friends over at Gaijinworld sent us a superb soundtrack loaded with some 70s-sounding funkups, a sentimental Japanese beerhall hit, and a monster new Edwin Collins song. Our old pal C of Montreal has updated us with a compilation of his latest faves, which include beautiful euro-disco and hip-hop Ella Fitzgerald remixes. Then there’s our legendary disc-of-the-month exchange with our brother, who has, this year alone, weighed in with an excellent set of Mexican music and a stunning Bill Evans album called Time Remembered. Our world-famous artist pal in Calgary recently sent up a sweet set of the music that imbued our tragic relationship, including an apocalyptic mix of Erasure’s Oh! L’amour and Thomas Dolby’s The Flat Earth, which we two alone revere as one of the finest songs in the world.

And we are still trying to digest the impact that the scrappy Amato Opera’s Barber of Seville had on us back in New York City just two months ago year. And we are reeling from our Gamelan ensemble’s concert in Vankleek Hill last weekend, which was a rousing, albeit nailbiting, success in spite of hazardous weather blocking half the group from making it. And we have finished learning Vince Guaraldi’s Linus and Lucy on the piano. The notes, that is. We are a long way yet from refining our technique on that one. But we are considering the resumption of our piano lessons as well. And don’t get us started on the new Lou Reed album.

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Wednesday, February 26, 2003

I’M CLEAN

I do my finest thinking in the shower; cascading algorithms, political innovations, poetic compositions, alchemy, historical analysis, chess problems and the like. The result is that I often enter trances of pure thought, transported from the shower to entire universes of trigonometry or particle physics. Then I snap out of it, a bar of soap in one hand and a sponge in the other, certain that I’ve been washing myself on autopilot while calculating the number of electrons in the new chemical compounds I’m inventing, but uncertain as to how much of me I’ve washed. To be safe, I always wash everything again.

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Tuesday, February 25, 2003

WE ARE NOT EXHIBITIONISTS

No. We simply do not own any curtains. We mean to get curtains. We’ve been meaning to get curtains for three years, but somehow, whenever we’ve had time and inclination to go get some, we’ve been unable to find any we like. To our neighbours we say; sorry.

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Sunday, February 23, 2003

GAMELAN DREAMS

I dream in gamelan dreams now, singing songs handed down from the gods at the beginning of time. Scrubbing the floors with the stereo blaring that strange wailing flute with the circular breathing. Turning over fragments of the compositions we’re working on in my mind as I push my cart through the grocery store.

The ensemble is a year old now, give or take a few weeks. Today we will drive through the deep snow to Vankleek Hill, a town halfway between Ottawa and Montreal, to unleash our glorious racket upon the earth. Yes! yes!

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