Kumbaya-style together. I truly despise “Amazing Grace.” People say Christianity is a Slave Religion, but I’d say it’s more like an Overseer’s Religion, and that nasty little ditty is like a manual for the whole Christian Empire — do a ton of horrible shit, grab the goodies, keep ’em, ask God for Forgiveness, and then, you know, just call it even and no hard feelings all around, right? So in a way, it’s a perfect song to sing as the Grand Finale on the mainstage at the end of the Stan Rogers Festival, now that I think of it. But I never spat on Stan Rogers’s widow. He was a phony-baloney manufacturer of fake “Canadian” culture that got overplayed on the national radio station for Imperial purposes. But I never spat on his widow.
Plus there’s a whole shit-ton of stuff Berner got wrong about my exploits during the Siege of Sarajevo, and he probably put some people in grave danger because of that. There’s just a whole shit-ton of stuff that you can check against the historical record, and the chain of events he describes just don’t add up. I’m not going to go into it. It’s just horseshit. That’s all. After a book like that, it’s pretty clear nobody in their right mind ought to trust Geoff Berner, ever again.
Who would have thunk that a book like that would be such a success? Bestseller lists in Europe, sale of film rights, etc. I’m pretty much certain that Berner’s holding out on me for some of the royalties, although I can’t prove it. The man has a lawyer’s mind. And I don’t mean that as a compliment. He’s got a weird way about dough. It was always difficult getting him to pony up front for my grant writing and other services. Yet he never seemed to get evicted or have to pawn his instruments, like a lot of my clients over the years. Frankly, I suspect there’s some sort of family money there. I can smell it. I see him and his soft hands, and his suspicious tendency to never look you in the eye, and I think, There’s a man who’s never had to really work for a living. Now he’s getting all these accolades, he’s getting a big head, but let’s face it, as a prose writer, he’s not much more than a two-bit Canuck Kinky Friedman.
Anyway, as you can see, I have not expired, and I never contemplated throwing myself in the river or whatever. Berner just left the story “open-ended” for the sake of pretentious drama, I’m sure. He’s threatening to become one of those “I don’t provide answers, I just ask questions” Artiste types that I despise. If he hadn’t written one or two decent songs, I would never have dealt with him at all.
I just needed to clear out of Dodge for a little bit, to let things cool down for a while. I called Dugg Simpson, artistic director of the Vancouver Folk Festival before the ungrateful board of directors shitcanned him (don’t get me started about boards of directors). I called Dugg before I left town. I asked him how bad the fallout had been from everything that happened that summer, and he said — I’ll never forget this — “You could not see the sky for smoke from bridges burning.” So, yeah, I figured it was time to give Canada a break from Cam Ouiniette. So people could remember how much they missed me.
In case you people don’t already know, Berner is out there looking for DD. He’s written to me via snail mail here. I can’t say exactly where I am, for several reasons, but I’ll go so far as to reveal that I’m somewhere in the Balkan Peninsula. Berner found me somehow and sent one of his grotesquely twee little missives, full of five-dollar words and hyperbolized mock-politeness, like a Chinese gangster in a 1920s private-eye story.
He wants my help looking for DD, because, in his words, he reckons that I have “the deepest working experience of anyone I know at effectively going to ground.” How do you like that? Cheeky sonofabitch.
Well if he wants my help, he can fucking whistle for it, as far as I’m concerned.
It’s funny, when DD was just another pointy-toothed vagabond rounder, for years she was well and truly lost, but nobody was trying to find her. Like most poor people in this world. Then she writes a hit song by accident, and suddenly she’s a mysterious recluse.
Well fuck that. If she wants to be left alone, I say leave her the fuck alone. And that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
But I will say, if you’re looking for a fiddler, you have to think like a fiddler. Berner knows what that means. Or he ought to.
Erratic. Psychologically wounded. Let’s just say it straight: crazy. They all are, fiddlers. Instruments select for certain personality types. That’s a scientific fact. Violins are tiny wooden boxes stretched by cat guts till they almost break. Then you drag the hair from a horse’s tail back and forth over it, and you’re supposed to make music with that. Beautiful music is expected, and there’s no hiding in the background, like with a bass, which determines the groove of a band, but which no one actively listens to besides bass players and strippers. Here’s a riddle: How many bass players were at the party? Answer: Who cares? The fiddle is the opposite. It keens away in the high mid-frequencies, like a mother’s voice, so everybody who ever had a mother is biologically attuned to listening for it.
And of course there’s no markings on a violin to tell you where the hell the note is supposed to be. No frets. You’re just supposed to feel where your fingers should go. With your ears, mind you. Fuck. If you’re not insane when you take up an instrument like that, you will be soon enough, and history proves me right on that score. Think of Nero, just as a for-instance.
Like the sound of the violin itself, fiddlers’ mental health statuses skidder all over the place on their way up and down and around the intended note. And have you seen how much fucking sugar a fiddler puts in her coffee? Jebus.
So like I say, if you’re looking for a fiddler, think like a fiddler. Which of course Berner can’t do because he’s another breed of fish entirely. Singer-songwriter, which is hardly even a musician at all, mostly. You think Berner could get hired as a sideman accordionist? No way. Not good enough. Singer-songwriters have a whole other type of being. Absent-minded, self-absorbed, sensitive, but not to the right things that might help them get along in this world. Most of them are relatively genial people, unless they’re in the presence of somebody who might help their careers, in which case they all turn into terminally grumpy dickheads, determined to show their fierce independent-mindedness, but just coming off as surprisingly ignorant assholes.
I say most, because of course there are exceptions, like Cole Dixon, still my favourite country guy, who’s a very astute businessman, but Berner’s not one of those. He’s a garden-variety, daydreaming, self-sabotaging singer-songwriter. Good luck catching a fiddler with a screwy mind like that. For all we know, she’s been leaving him clues left, right, and centre and he’s just been too obtuse to notice. That’s a very real possibility.
Of course, DD is not your ordinary fiddler. That’s true.
Anyway, getting to the main subject, the state of folk music festivals in Canada today …
Amy Williams
Her Kitchen, Fernwood Neighbourhood, Victoria, 2014
We spent our twenties ruining each other’s relationships. One of us would get some kind of long-term thing going and then we’d wind up looking in each others’ eyes too long, then we’d just have a little smooch, and sure enough we’d be fucking. Cheating. Repeatedly. Until we got caught. Inevitably. We did that about seven or eight times before we finally tried shacking up together, which, of course, did not work.
I’m not saying she was always the one to blame about the ruining thing. One time somewhere in the middle of those years of ruining, I went over to her house she was renting with this chick in Fernwood in Victoria, I don’t remember who she was with at the time, but I was just so goddamn horny for her. This had been going on for what felt like weeks, where — I just could not stop thinking about her, and I just went over there in these boots
