Review: Silver Starling - Silver Starling

For The Singing Lamb October 11, 2009.

I must begin my review of the debut album from Silver Starling by complaining about CD packaging companies. I do not know when this trend of sticking a disc in a sleeve inside another sleeve tucked into the side of the overall package, which is then wrapped in air-tight plastic began. But I do not enjoy having to search for the disc – it is impossible to look dignified when you are holding a case upside down and shaking it, hoping the CD will drop to the floor. And it only sets the potential listener up for a great amount of disappointment when, as with this particular disc, you feel that the music was not worth the struggle.

This particular impossible-to-open disc, the self-titled Silver Starling album, was inspired largely by the fight of a man (a close friend of many of the group members) against eventually fatal pancreatic cancer. And while this five-piece band from Montreal captures the sense of mourning and wistful affection very well, they failed to leave out an equal sense of inevitable gloom and depression that weighs down most of their overly similar tracks. In other words, the listener was subjected to the nausea of chemo, as well as the fond remembrance of a departed friend.

Maybe it’s just birthing pains for the group, which is composed solely of excellent musicians and several familiar faces – namely Marcus Paquin, who fronts the group, and his wife Marika Anthony-Shaw, who split her time working with Silver Starling and playing viola with Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible tour. Other members include Liam O’Neil, Gab Lambert and Peter X, all of whom are well known in the world of vaguely indie music.

Listening to the songs, you can certainly hear references to that Arcade Fire-y sound. Happiness is represented by fifth intervals on the glockenspiel, and melancholy by husky voices and hushed drums. Overall, it’s a nice sound – but not one that fans of Stars, Arcade Fire, or The New Pornographers will find particularly groundbreaking.

The other problem with this album, besides predictability in style, is the inability to determine when one song stops and another one begins. Seriously. On my first listen to this album, I labored under the impression that I was listening to one fifteen minute song, one that would likely continue until the end of the disc. It wasn’t until I got up and checked the player that I realized I was five songs in, and hadn’t been surprised, delighted, or hooked in at all yet.

Something of a hook appears around the middle of the album (where, actually, I usually find my favourite songs will end up). The tracks “Ghosts” provided the one, only, singular, solitary song that was not out to depress me, and its jauntiness was a refreshing change. Following on its heels was “Love and a Broken Heart”, and these two songs combined represented to me the only tracks that offered any kind of optimism and warmth.

All things considered, this was not the best album I have listened to in a long time. However, it might be interesting to watch what happens to this group, as they (hopefully) continue to produce albums. It may be that this group of talented musicians just hasn’t found their own sound yet – this is something that comes with time. Or, perhaps, on their next album, they should consider writing about butterflies and rainbows instead of death and despair.

Equal Rights - Not So Equal Yet

For the Ryerson Free Press February issue 2010.

My father was born and brought up in the 1950s – a time when women were kept in the home. He was raised traditionally, with a mother who would have a hot meal on the table every night, a clean home always, and seldom openly disagreed with her husband.

My father grew up, and got married. He considered himself much more open-minded than his father had been, and fully supported the women’s rights movement. He would do a few dishes, perhaps take the garbage out, and then settle down to his paper. My mother famously asked him once, “Do you really think you’re done for the evening?” and my father looked up and said, “But I helped!” My mother was of the opinion that household tasks were to be shared equally – and Dad would soon come to realize that the best way to keep the peace was to help out.

Now, I live with my boyfriend – a truly lovely human being, who believes firmly in equality for all, and supports me in all that I do. When I ask him why it is that I still seem to end up being in charge of keeping our home tidy, he claims to not live up to my cleaning standards. If I have to do the job over again, what is the point in him even attempting it in the first place?

Two generations later, and the reasoning may have changed, but I am still somehow stuck scrubbing our toilet.

The Economist tells me that women are doing better than I think they are – the cover of their first issue this year was Rosie the Riveter doing her familiar flex, with the triumphant “We Did It!” caption. The message is clear – women have made it, have arrived, and are now truly equal. They follow this by saying women now make up 50% of the job market, and by 2011 there will be 2.6 million more female than male university students in America. However, what they leave out is interesting. Are they forgetting that women still only earn 80 cents on the male dollar? And when they say that women are in control of many powerful corporations, they neglect to tell us that only 15 of the Fortune 500 companies are run by women.

In a recent issue of ELLE magazine, Rachel Combe reports on a study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which says that women have experienced a steady erosion of happiness from the 1970s – we are now notably less happy than men (clearly a shady state of affairs). Does the women’s movement have anything to do with our sudden sadness? Consider the 1970s – a time when “girl power” was hitting its stride, when “I am Woman, hear me roar” was an anthem for the hope felt by women who wanted equal rights and equal pay. And it’s been one long bout of not doing as well as we hoped since then. And above and beyond that, we are still doing the double shift of working at work and then coming home to make the dinner, clean the house, and take care of the kids. We are also expected to do it cheerfully, and to rejoice in the fact that, quite literally, we have the opportunity to do twice as much as our mothers did. It’s no wonder we’re feeling depressed.

Our troubles really began with the shift away from matriarchal rule. In prehistoric, so-called primitive societies that operated under a hunter-gatherer method of life, women were in a position of power. And why was this? Essentially, because women can make babies – and as the child bearers, were responsible for making sure a tribe didn’t die out. In many of those societies, the history of the tribe was passed down through the “wise women” who were responsible for remembering the tribe’s history, which could go back for 45 to 50 generations. “Civilized” societies have tended to be male-dominated, and that may have had a lot to do with the fact that men were no longer in danger of being killed by sabre-tooth tigers. It is telling that the first place in the US women got the vote was in the Montana territories. Again, this was a situation where men were in daily danger of being killed – it was a rough life out there in Wild West Montana. And as that was the case, it was natural that women be in a position of more importance in the community. Really, where we went wrong is inviting men to come home reliably at the end of each day.

One of our biggest troubles in the here and now is complacency – this feeling that we have gotten to a certain point, and feel that we no longer have any right to complain about a lack of equality. After all, compared to so many less fortunate women, we are so lucky! We do not have to live in fear of honor killings or genital mutilation, and in theory we are able to do anything we want. What is therefore so sad is that we still seem to find it difficult to really assert our own personal power. I have yet to talk to a female friend who says she would be comfortable earning more than her (future) husband – that things are just so much more natural and easy if women are kept in a lower earning bracket. On our own sliding scale of equality, we are still allowing men to dictate how far we can go.

What we need is to remind ourselves of what we were trying to achieve with women’s rights. It is not a problem that has been dealt with, not something that happened to our mothers but against which we are now immune. Equal Rights for Equal Pay may seem elementary and obvious, but it is still a goal that we have to fight to achieve, and we shouldn’t have to feel unfeminine or apologetic about wanting to be considered just as worthwhile as our male counterparts. Women need to remember what Rosie the Riveter has been telling us all along – “We can do it!” but we haven’t done it yet

Someone needs to teach me how to make my blog have personality. I seem to lack finess in picture choosing.

Who Elected Us To Save The World??

And why is it no longer socially acceptable, or practically possible to lie in bed and pull the covers over my head and pretend the problems don’t exist?
I don’t know, folks. It seems to me that this generation is being simultaneously criticized for being lazy and unproductive while being expected to save the environment, stop poverty, support small businesses, end racism and misogynistic behavior, and find some way to make everyone happy all the time.
Really, I’m okay with most of that stuff. I shop locally, give money to charity whenever I have anything to spare, am not racist, and do feel that I am treated (as a woman) as an equal most of the time. It’s that fixing the hole in the ozone layer and stopping the icebergs from melting that really makes me whimper.
My awareness of environmental issues is something that started back in high school, during a government simulation activity. I was the Environment Minister for Saskatchewan, and butting heads with the guy from Alberta forced me into some real, in-depth research of what his province was doing wrong. (Turns out? A LOT) One of my best friends of the time was the Finance Minister, and also the brunt for some of my big rantings and ravings about how giving us a certain amount of money to make what changes we could on a province-by-province basis was simply NOT GOOD ENOUGH. This friend went on to become one of the most environmentally conscious geography students I have ever met. She is the type of person who stopped eating meat because it is just about the most wasteful thing you can ingest, and is now trying to start to eat it again because she sees her family throwing out meat, and figures that is an even bigger waste – she is the very practical type of vegetarian.
From that high school project through to my first year of university, I was quite well informed about the environment, and did my part in terms of recycling, using fluorescent bulbs, doing a hundred mile diet whenever it was convenient – that kind of thing. But somehow, the reality of the fact that our temperatures are increasing, our oceans are warming - in other words, that climate change was a real and terrible thing – never really imbedded itself into my consciousness. I was walking instead of driving because it made sense for the environment and for my personal health, but hadn’t yet had panic attacks about, well, we’ll get to what I have panic attacks about.
This attitude of mine changed last year, and it changed for one of the silliest reasons I can think of. My roommate at the time was something of a conspiracy lover. Whether I thought most of the stuff she was talking about was real or true or worthy of thought is beside the point – she seemed to enjoy just thinking about these things, in a pretty purely academic sense, and didn’t ask me to share any of her beliefs, which was fine. We ran into problems when she first starting looking into the multitude of myths surrounding December 20, 2012. And she chose to tell me about all of this stuff at around 2 in the morning on a night when I was already stressed about things that were happening in my personal life. And as she was telling me about how the earth’s polarity is changing, and how the Mayan people really were tremendously intelligent, and how Nostradamus kind of predicted it, I had a full-blown panic attack. I really did. I started hyperventilating, and sobbing, and as sh
e very solemnly told me that the scariest part about this whole inevitable situation for her personally was the fact that she had always wanted kids, well, I just about lost it. And I mean lost it in the scary sense, where I momentarily considered suicide as a preferable option to being stuck here when the Earth imploded, and picturing my boyfriend coming to try to find me in some sort of Homeward Bound epic that would end in his death and my heartbreak and I have to tell you, typing this is still getting me a little panicked. Woosh.
Of course, I have since looked into all the insanity myself, and have found things like the Cracked article on how ridiculous it all is (see here) And while I have discovered that the earth’s polarity is always changing, and has in fact switched itself several times without imploding, and while I realized that calendars have to end sometime, really, they do, and the date itself has no real importance, it was how I chose to comfort myself that has led to real panic about our environmental situation.
The way that I seek comfort is by asking other people what they think. Anyone who was at all close to me at that time can attest to the fact - they were asked several times a day, “But do you REALLY think it won’t end?” and it wasn’t until they got annoyed with my pestering that I was really comforted. Everyone told me that, of course, this was complete bullshit of the worst kind. But I ran into trouble when I consulted people who reminded me that, while the 2012 theory was bullshit, the Earth itself is, naturally, in a whole lot of trouble. My biggest BIGGEST mistake was in talking to that environmentally-conscious friend from back in the fourth paragraph. She offered the opinion that the world was in more trouble than anyone was really aware of, that steps being taken were not at all adequate, and that, while the world would most probably not end in 2012, we should probably resign ourselves to major natural disasters and the inevitable end of our lives being spent in log c
abins (if there were any trees left) with no electricity, heat, or anything else that would have to be run by gas.
Well. That was NOT COMFORTING.
And nor was the book that she brought with her when next she came to visit. Actually, it is a pretty wonderful book, called Gorgeously Green by Sophie Uliano. You can visit her most helpful website at www.gorgeouslygreen.com , where you will find lots of helpful hints on how to not only help the environment, but to help yourself at the same time. She recommends everything from cleaning products to furniture, all of which are great for your personal health, as well as the poor, battered Earth.
Now, mind you. This is an attitude that I have created in the past year since being introduced to Sophie and her helpful hints. Unfortunately, the only thing that I was able to gleam from it in my then frantic headspace was that my makeup was full of carcinogens, as were all the products I had ever used for cleaning my home, my body, and my life in general. I learned that all the smells of baby products I had learned to love were actually sickening and full of harmful chemicals, and that I was flushing a whole other kind of toxic waste down the toilet (above and beyond the kind that I already knew about!) For the next month or so, my poor little self vibrated between fear of one specific deadline for the end of humanity, and the inevitable changes that MUST be made NOW if a person wants to avoid a really really real deadline that humanity is just racing towards.
Now, dear people who are reading this, my aim in this entry is not to frighten you as badly as I was frightened. But I do sort of wish in spite of myself that everyone in the world could go through the same kind of panic attacks that I went through. Because it has helped to push me over the edge into being as green as I am able, given the number of things that are currently out of my control (things like not being able to lower the heat in my centrally heated apartment). Because if our generation is going to save the world, we need to do it, like, you know, yesterday. And there are so many things, big and small, that everyone can do. This is one of the reasons that I support the decision to give Obama the Nobel Prize – because anyone who can get America to be Green and stop people from throwing bombs at each other is aces in my book, and should be greatly encouraged. But that is another subject for another day. The subject for today, my friends, is my advising you to go have your own panic attacks, and then turn around and do something good for the Earth and yourself, while it is still at all worth it to do so.
Plus, I have to tell you, eco-friendly paint doesn’t require all your windows be opened, eco-friendly beauty products are making my skin glow more than it ever has, and shopping organic at my local farmer’s market is just good clean snobby fun.

So I officially live in Toronto now! I have the lease sucking my soul out through my wallet every month to prove it, even! And I have my teeny-but-adorable apartment, and a boy living in it who remembers to put the toilet seat down and does dishes voluntarily. I am back in a program I am at least 95% sure I enjoy, and there is a bowl on my dining table that is full of fresh apples and tomatoes and red peppers. Oh my.
It's an interesting thing, living in this city that I have chosen to make my home. There is (or, at least, I have found there to be) a sort of interesting reverse snobbery going on here. Living in small town Alberta during the summer, I made sure to tell people that, oh, no, don't live here! Live in Toronto, thank you! Ever so much cooler than you could ever hope to be, Okotokians! (It really is a very nice part of the world, as long as you don't interact with too many people in cowboy hats, I don't want you to get the wrong idea there). But now that I am back in Toronto, it seems that part of belonging here is making sure you do not participate in certain events that would seem to define a lot of Toronto's appeal. Maybe this is just me, but I swear it's a real and true thing!
Take, for example, the Toronto International Film Festival. I refuse to call it TIFF, because I do not like to equate in my mind a major Canadian event with anyone who would carry pom-poms.
You will note that I did indeed call it a major Canadian event, because that is what it is. For the duration of the festival, Toronto premieres some very exciting movies, and plays host to some very important people. But I feel, somehow, and get the impression from others I've talked to, that the festival is to be treated as nothing more than a method of crowding up the sidewalks. To actually be one of the people who stands on either side of the velvet rope, waiting for the stars to come through, puts you immediately in the bracket of "tourist", and is to be avoided at all costs. (I think that if you simply go to the movie, and pretend not to notice your favourite star, this is still okay?).
I remember the first time I heard about the festival. I was getting my hair cut, and the stylist was telling me about her daughter, who lived in Toronto, and attended some of the films. This girl called her mother and said something along the lines of, "Mom! O-M-G you have to watch the coverage of the festival, I was standing literally two feet away from Elijah Wood!!!!!" So, of course, the mother did, and she saw her daughter looking as bored and disdainful and snobby as it was possible to look while surrounded by screaming teeny boppers. Apparently, the daughter said that of course she had to look as if she didn't care, because to actually show any interest in this very famous person would make her, in some way, less cool.
And I have found myself feeling the same sort of way. Although, to be fair, with it being the first full week of classes, there's little enough sidewalk room as it is, and some of these people are wearing scrunchies whilst hoping to catch a glimpse of Megan Fox. This is the fear. I do not want to appear to have any interest in Megan Fox. But maybe next year I will drag my tired ass out of off this couch and saunter on down to my campus in time to determine for myself whether George Clooney is aging as well as everyone keeps telling me he is.

I apologize for the overly sentimental poem below - blame introspection and late nights. I think I will let it stay, though. I still kinda like it, whether or not I would have posted it if I thought anyone was reading this.
The topic of relationships and break ups and all the messiness that goes along with loving someone has been on my mind a lot lately. It's one of those classic questions - what brings people together, what makes them stay together, and what can tear them apart, when it seems like they suit so well?
A friend of mine got dumped by his girlfriend of over three years recently. I shouldn't say dumped, because I don't like to think of it that way - rather as the probably inevitable parting of people who were about to live a seven hour drive from each other. She will be going to McGill in the fall (and we shouldn't hate her just for that, jealousy is not attractive) and the prospect of a long distance relationship can really make a person question how strong the bond is that holds them to their significant other. I myself, living in a residence environment last year, saw over ten really strong relationships at the beginning of the year turn into two or three. And those two or three, it seems to me, could only survive because of either a ton of hard work, dedication and faith from both parties, or because at least one of them is a doormat.
Even as a person whose boyfriend was only a 40 minute walk away, I definitely felt a strain and an adjustment in our relationship. So much is new, that first year of university. You're thrust into so many new situations, you meet so many new people, and you are faced, as a person in a relationship, with so many new temptations. Late night study parties and late night drinking fests alike can lead to actions you will regret (or not) in the morning, and I have been nothing but thankful that Duncan and I have stayed strong, and, I think, had a little of our "new couple" arrogance beat out of us in the process.
But what, in the end, makes a couple last? I'll let you know as soon as I know for sure, but I think what you need to have is a combination of real friendship, real trust, and, most importantly, a real desire to be in a relationship at such a young age. I know a boy whose parents really thought that, instead of having a girlfriend during his first year of university, he should be single, so that he could properly enjoy being young. So that he had no commitments except the ones put on him by school and work. And there is a lot of sense in that thought! Isn't this the time in our lives when we're supposed to be absolutely selfish? I mean, before we know it, we'll have whole new responsibilites, be it marriage or children or full time jobs and home ownership. Now is the time when we can really play with our lives, experiment, and figure out who we are. Of course, for me, this sounds horribly undesirable, and I would rather discover who I am along with someone who's discovering himself at the same time (two for the price of one?).
But you have to wonder...are we too young to be spending so much of our lives on other people?

Where have you gone from me
O lover mine
What gave you cause to stray
I have searched in all
Your usual
Hiding places.

And when you're gone from me
Oh darling one
Where do you go
What do you find there
That gives you more
Than me.

I look for you
Search for you
Wanting so to be beside you
as I once was
To feel your skin
Against mine

For rooms are darker
Evenings longer
When you do not add
Your light
And life

What can I do
O angel one
To bring you back to me
I change myself
Rearrange my life
Asking only
to be with you.

You've gone from me
O one I want
I feel
And fear
You'll not return.