mr. hansen, meet david berkowitz.

Conscious self	Overall self

Take Free Enneagram Test

Check out the “Overall Self” part. Why do I feel like this personality test just called me a borderline psychopath?

“my mind is filled with radio cures”

As I mentioned, K. and I saw Neko Case and Wilco at Metropolis last night. It was a solid show, not one for the record books, there were no “I was there when..” moments. It was a good crowd too. The whole venue was filled with an army of Rob Gordons and lots of other indie boys and girls.

Neko Case was the opening act, although Sonic Youth are sharing the bill on the rest of the tour (which would have been a high point of my summer, nay, life to hear Kim Gordon sing “Kool Thing”). Neko was great and pretty much what I expected. She does sparse, country balladeering as solo artist when she’s not doing 50′s style pin-up shots. The sound was kept fairly low and it was difficult to hear her over the din of the crowd. She’s a great singer but huge, sprawling Metropolis wasn’t the right venue for her. Her other outfit, The New Pornographers probably would have been a more ideal opener.

Wilco were great. I’ve always compared them to Radiohead except that Wilco tend to lean toward more straight ahead pop songs. I probably would have liked to have heard more stuff off their 1999 album “Summerteeth” but since the last one was “yankee hotel foxtrot” we got that stuff, which tends to darker, moodier, more experimental than the other albums. I think the next album is going to be a lot louder. Toward the end of the show, Jeff Tweedy picked up a flying V guitar and started up a tune that had a riff sounding suspiciously like KISS’s “Rock n’ Roll All Night.”

Oh yeah, and I think that Ethan Hawke was there last night. He was at the bar, fumbling with his Canadian money and ordering a Sex on the Beach for his not-Uma Thurman female companion. Who the fuck over the age of 19 drinks a Sex on the Beach? And he still has the creative facial hair. Keep writin’ those novels, Ethan.

oh! gimme! gimme!

Africafunk: The Sound of 1970′s Funky Africa

obsession (and a passing reference) pays off

For people looking for Marie Josée Croze in “La Florida”, I’m number one. I would start a fan page but that might border on pathetic, sad, and weird.

“i don’t have an accent. you have the accent.”

I’ve always been fascinated by accents and dialects. I think it’s interesting in Britain, such a small island can be home to so many different ways of speaking. It’s also interesting that over there you can tell how much money a person makes as soon as he opens his mouth. At least that’s what I was told by university professors and E.M. Forster novels. My first trip over there isn’t for another month so I’ll have to verify this information first hand:

Me: “Hey you! Say ‘clerk’ for me.”

British Guy: “Clahhk.”

Me: “I see…”

While I’m over there, I’ll do my best to avoid adopting the local accent of wherever I am. It annoys me when people do this (*cough* students! *cough* *cough*Madonna*cough*). I mention this because I’m a Maritimer living in part of Canada that has a slightly different way of speaking. The Maritimes is, like Britain and Ireland, home to several different accents and dialects which, to an outsiders ear sound the same but if you listen for subtleties, you’ll hear the differences. Cape Breton’s accents differ from the rest of Nova Scotia and in Newfoundland, accents may alter from county to county or cove to cove. New Brunswick is a bit of an oddball in that regard. The accent isn’t as pronounced across the board (listen to Premier Bernard Lord speak sometime – it’s a hard one to get hold of). Listen to someone from the East Coast say “Bar” and “Car” and you’ll hear the R’s roll in a sort of Irish way. I was once told by a man from Belfast that we should stop imitating their accents and find our own.

Once I started listening for those differences, I began to notice it elsewhere in Canada. Among people from the southern Ontario area, I noticed a very distinct emphasis on A’s and O’s. The “Degrassi” TV shows were textbook examples of this. I guess Train 48 is another place to see it in action (if you can stomach watching the show, that is). Montreal’s anglo accents are an even stranger breed. There’s a kind of clipped, rapid fire delivery that I hear from Greeks and Italians which seems to influence the speech of more garden variety Anglos, from what I hear. For the most part Quebec, Ontario and the rest of non-Atlantic Canada have a mostly flat accent in common with certain regional variations.

I write all this because I’m beginning to notice that my speech is very slightly changing. “Bar” and “Car” remained unchanged but words like Dad are coming out differently. In extreme Saint John cases -particularly on the West Side- the word sounds like “Dee-yad.” Joe once remarked that he noticed the word “good” had two syllables (“goo-id”) A friend at the office in SJ did this perfectly:

“My Dee-yad was really mee-yad at my brother Chee-yad. It was really see-yad.”

Now, I hear myself saying, “Dahd.” Cripes I’ve only been here six months.