MANGO PUDDING BLUES REGRETS

We regret our long, meandering, unfocused and annoying post of the other day entitled “The Exalted Shall Be Humbled.” You know that old joke about the writer who sent a long letter because he didn’t have time to write a short one? Yeah.

We considered removing that post all together, but you know, we just don’t feel quite right about that. We’re leaning toward a warts-and-all type of blog here. So perhaps just accept our apologies for making you read that shit. Our old pal C was so appalled by it that he actually wrote in to complain. This is what he said:

Dear MPB,

I question whether the Internet has, as a recent MPB entry claims, wiped away the problems of accessibility plaguing frustrated artists. The Internet is far more guilty of information glut than any of the mediums in which your interest has been reduced because of information glut. How does the ability to post one’s Mp3s, create a blog or write an on-line novel solve the problem complementary to, but much more serious than accessibility — that of finding an audience? That everyone who’s ever had a creative whim can now hurl one more faint and often ill-considered contribution to join the billions already lingering in some forlorn section of some forgotten server, seems rather to be complicating, not alleviating, your information overload complaint. Sure, a lot of the gatekeepers were pony-tailed, 3/4 length black leather coat wearing fans of Barney Bentall and Daniel Richler. They stopped thousands of talented writers and songwriters from getting exposure beyond the city limits. But they also spared us billions of idiocies — the rantings, the can.sayish cesspools of mediocrity, of astonishing banality. Could not one already say about blogs as you have said about fashion television, “…a little bit was good, and too much is way too much?” The trouble with opening the floodgates the way the new technologies of communication have is that the trickle of unjustly ignored talent that comes through is followed by endless obliterating tsunamais of hackery. (Granted, of course, MPB is a luxurious island in the effluent.).

He’s right, of course.

’Specially when he calls us a luxurious island!

In parting, here’s a little behind-the-scenes tidbit for you. We don’t really know who might have said that the exalted will be humbled and the humble exalted. We assume it was Jesus or some other biblical person. But we scooped that quote from Linus Van Pelt, who employed it to explain to his sister Lucy why he chose to sit in the very back of a classroom while she sat at the front. This was in a Charlie Brown book I read as a child during the whirlwind infatuation I had with the Peanuts. Oh, man. Those were the days.

Finally, we offer you this quote about Smokey Robinson from the otherwise deeply sad but compelling book about Marvin Gaye we just read. Marvin was talking about forgiving Smokey for refusing to lend him, Marvin, any dough during one of his periodic crises. Marvin said, and we think this is a little poem in itself, “Smokey is a thrifty cat.”

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HE CRACKED ME LIKE A WHIP

One of my earliest memories is of choking on a hard candy in the kitchen of the house where my parents still live. In my memory, the whole kitchen is bathed in a golden sunset light so thick it might be pure liquid honey. That can’t be, but the rest of the memory is true. My mother gave me the candy, I started choking almost immediately, and my father picked me up by my ankles and cracked me like a whip. This was, presumably, before the Heimlich maneuver. It worked though, and after that I would nod my young head wisely when adults denied me certain types of foods.

In New York this last visit, I noticed Heimlich maneuver posters in ever eating establishment, high and low, that I went into. Legislation? Fear of litigation? Or do New Yorkers just choke a lot? Is this normal in the rest of America? I’ve never noticed it elsewhere. Perhaps Americans choke more than Canadians do?

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THE EXALTED SHALL BE HUMBLED

At Mango Pudding Blues lately we’ve been thinking a lot about the recent economic downturn, and wondering whether it mightn’t have a silver lining. We were a little surprised at the burst of schadenfreude we felt over the demise of Tina Brown’s Talk magazine, and we felt the same way about the troubles at all those fat magazines about how fucking fast the digital age of business supposedly is.

We also were unperturbed by recent news of the consolidation of two coffee chains into one here in Canada the other day, feeling as we do that there were too many coffee joints all offering the same damn latte anyway. Further, we failed to shed a tear when we read in the Globe and Mail a week ago that formerly snooty restaurants in Tribeca have been reduced to providing actual warm and friendly service in the wake of the shitty economy and the post-September-11th pal. We will actually snort with laughter, we suspect, when we read in the papers that many of the new digital cable television channels have died.

It’s not that we want people to suffer. No. We love people. And it’s not that we’re against making a buck. We aren’t. But at Mango Pudding Blues our belief is that there were too many magazines in the world, too many television stations, too many pricey restaurants and ridiculous clothiers and bad people in fur stoles riding around in limousines. It became apparent to us, and probably to you too, that there was considerably more froth than espresso in our takeout-coffee cups.

We’re not trying to come off as some kind of working-class heroes here. We dug it when the party was at its headiest. And we would never want to be counted among the rioting unwashed hordes who like to throw stones through windows of the local McDonalds. But we just don’t think the world needs 24-hours of fashion television. We think half an hour a week of that will do.

We used to be avid magazine readers. We enjoyed whiling away a couple of hours on the couch reading snippets of what was going on in the world and who was screwing whom and who had a new book coming out and what everybody was wearing lately. Now there are a hundred magazines screaming too many of those snippets from too many pages, and what once seemed a sweet little diversion has become a fat, leering industry unto itself. Like fashion television, a little bit was good, and too much is way too much. The proliferation of titles and editorial budgets and pages was enough to make our local magazine store’s shelves creak and groan under the weight of it all, but wasn’t any more interesting to read. The amazing boom of stuff in the last ten or fifteen years hasn’t shown an exceptional signal-to-noise ratio, and hence, we welcome a shakedown. Cull the herd!

And while the slick, big-budget world gets knocked down a notch or two, down here in the internet we’ve got all kinds of interesting little voices. At Mango Pudding Blues we’re no longer inclined to bother as much with Vanity Fair or Esquire or whatever, but we never miss our daily doses of the blogs we love. And while we can’t be said to be fans of the Fray, we were touched recently by an interview with one of its founders, Derek Powazek, in which he recounted one of his frustrations with his pre-internet life; that there was no accessible outlet for the writers and musicians and artists and storytellers he hung out with. The internet, of course, wiped that problem away. It’s got its own signal-to-noise ratio problems, true, but on the other hand, a bad economy isn’t going to stop, say, Fireland from publishing, since Fireland isn’t making its creator a dime. The humbled are being exalted while the exalted get humbled.

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It reminds us of our home town, which boomed mightily in the 1970s with oil. Being around in Calgary in during the oil boom was something else, we can tell you, and when it all dried up in the ’80s there was a popular bumper sticker that said, “God, please let there be another boom. I promise not to piss it all away this time.”

And of course, having too many resources can make you foolish. Look at history. Look at the people you know. Maybe you’re not rich because the gods are protecting you from making a fool of yourself.

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Well, big dinosaurs are always outwitted by many small fast dinosaurs, which then grow big and successful only to be outwitted by mammals. Governments and business head offices consolidate power centrally to maintain control and then have it pulled outward to become more flexible and responsive. It’s a continuum.

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We are reading Divided Soul; the life of Marvin Gaye, Girl With Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace and Gone Bamboo by Anthony Bourdain.

We are listening to some original Scott Joplin piano roll recordings, the previously mentioned Chucho Valdez solo recital in New York and David Byrne’s The Catherine Wheel, the mostly-instrumental album he made with Brian Eno ’round about the time of Talking Heads’ Remain In Light. And by the way, we highly recommend This Must Be The Place, the Adventures of the Talking Heads in the 20th Century by David Bowman. It ought to be out in paperback soon and is a rip-snortin’ read for anyone who is even a little bit interested in the band. We are not, however, recommending the latest David Byrne record. Screw that. It blows.

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