'We live in a city that no longer exists'

Part 2: A few recent live and video discoveries. Also, you must change your life

Keele Life Top 10, July 2025, part 2

The format is borrowed from and in tribute to Greil Marcus’s long-and-still-running “Real Life Rock Top 10.” The title is because I currently live on Keele Street in Toronto. This half is a lighter spirited sequel to yesterday’s troubled Part 1

6. Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Caring Cabin (Criterion Channel)

The great, belatedly recognized Canadian composer-performer Beverly Glenn-Copeland has made a pilot for a kids’ TV program called Caring Cabin, with Toronto producer-creator and puppet maker Sean O’Neill among others.¹ It’s like a serenely surreal meld of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, with the feverish rhythm of the latter supplanted by Glenn’s meditative eco-consciousness and songs. (Back in the 1970s he contributed to shows like Sesame Street and Mr. Dressup.) As his wife Elizabeth explained in the couple’s extraordinarily lovely chat with my friend and colleague Johanna Schneller at The Globe and Mail, “Kids know when what is happening in their world is not right. So we sought to give them a voice for it, to help them develop resilience and joy.”

Sounds like exactly what we need now, no? Sadly I also learned from Johanna’s piece that Glenn has been diagnosed with major cognitive disorder. It seems likely this first episode of Caring Cabin will also be the last. There was a premiere screening last Saturday at TIFF in Toronto,² but you can also watch the show streaming right now on the Criterion Channel. Also if you are in Edinburgh, Dublin, Cardiff, London, Manchester, or Brussels, you can and should see BGC on tour in October; there may not be many chances. Finally if you haven’t seen the BGC documentary Keyboard Fantasies, amend that tout de suite.

7. Something Else! festival (June 19-22, 2025): Susie Ibarra, solo, & Anna Webber’s Simple Trio

A sympathetic vibration runs through the roots systems between Beverly Glenn-Copeland and the veteran creative-music percussionist Susie Ibarra, who last year released the book Rhythm in Nature: An Ecology of Rhythm. At the Something Else! festival in Hamilton last month (as I previewed at the time), she played a 45-minute afternoon solo set that I doubt will be surpassed as the most extraordinary musical experience I’ll have this year.

How did she summon what she did out of her gleamingly pristine drum set, plus sticks, brushes, cymbals, and various kinds of bells and chimes? It was like watching an elegant dance that summoned the voices of clouds and lightning. What was so riveting was the precision of her attention, to every physical gesture and every evolution of the sound, even to taking out implements and then putting them away. It was the miracle of someone being entirely present to the moment. The sounds were like thoughts that rose out of the tide of consciousness and then subsided back into the waves.

It was one of those Rilkean, you must change your life moments, a performance that dared you to exist so fully, to approach whatever you do with such commitment, or what on earth are you doing? I’m fucking grateful to have been there.

Toronto’s Cluttertones (Lina Allemano, Ryan Driver, Tim Posgate, Rob Clutton) had the unenviable task of following Ibarra’s set. Fortunately they were also in the enviable position of playing several of Ibarra’s own compositions, in arrangements she’d done especially for them. It showed off a whole other dimension of her compositional thinking, as well as of the group: Their own material has the meandering, humorous introversion generally characteristic of their Toronto circle for the past 20 years, so it was bracing to hear them snap into the crisper expressive demands of Ibarra’s scores.

The other most notable revelation of the festival—in the more standard musical sense—came from Anna Webber’s Simple Trio. With pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer John Hollenbeck, it’s led by Webber on woodwinds, a musician I was surprised I hadn’t known before: She’s Canadian (albeit based in New York since 2008) and has even won a Guggenheim. (Ben Ratliff was on the case a decade ago.) Webber’s compositions are incredibly dynamic, both technically rigorous and full of an emotional force that reactions indicated was felt by the whole room. I was blown away, and certainly won’t overlook her again.

8. Mix Tape (mini-series, Screen Ireland/Screen Australia/Binge, 2025)

It was after a Popular Music Books in Process session about the history of the cassette last year that I put it together: When my friends and I were making mixtapes for our friends and crushes in high school, we weren’t just doing what kids had always done. Our cohort of early-to-mid-1980s adolescents was more or less the first ever to do this. The necessary consumer-market tech had only recently become widely available. It was a distinct folk art of a narrow window of time. (Anyone out there know if kids still make streaming playlists for each other, or do they share way more song-by-song?) Still, it was a crucial practice for me. I doubt if I’d be a critic now if I hadn’t been an obsessive maker of C90-comps-as-intimate-correspondence then.

The ultimate work on the subject might always be Rob Sheffield’s swoon-worthy and heartbreaking 2007 memoir of his first marriage, Love is a Mix Tape. The rules-of-mix-making scene in High Fidelity (both book and film) is classic too. But I proved that I remain a sucker for more variations on the theme last week by watching Mix Tape. It’s a rom-without-the-com miniseries based on Jane Sanderson’s 2020 book. It flashes back and forth between the present and the high-school love of two teens in Sheffield, 1989. (Was the city perchance selected in tribute to Rob? Well, no.) The sweet, subtly played courtship is of course conducted via cassettes slipped into backpacks and locker doors and a Walkman with shared earphones. But there are silences and gaps in their relationship the boy cannot decode, and everything cuts off abruptly as if in mid-song. Finally thanks to present-day tech—Facebook, of course—the pair, now each married and living on opposite sides of the world, reconnect to address those long unresolved questions.

Oh and btw, the boy has grown up to be a music journalist, and the girl to be a novelist.

It’s soapy but pretty to look at and as smart as one could reasonably ask, seldom straining coincidence so much as to become unbearable. There are some wrenching moments on themes of class, family, and sexuality in the eighties (and now). And if most of the new-wave/alt-rock cuts on the titular mixes are way obvious—Cure, V.U., New Order, Jesus & Mary Chain, Psychedelic Furs—or else off-kilter (no high schoolers knew who Nick Drake was in 1989), there are at least a couple of nice surprises like Kitchens of Distinction’s “Prize.” My chief complaint is that the grownup actors are too young, nearly a whole generation off (in 1989 Teresa Palmer would have been three years old). It subtracts gravity from the midlife crises that drive the two to seek each other out again.

Formulaic for sure, but if you’re a Gen X/older millennial in the mood for quietly, wistfully weeping on your couch for a few short hours, it’s the audiovisual equivalent of a beach read. (You’ll need some streaming grey-market fu or at least a VPN to find it most places; not to be confused with various other shows and docs of more or less the same name.)

9. Fievel is Glauque, the Dance Cave, Toronto (July 4, 2025)

I put Flaming Swords—the first album by this unlikely intersection of Brussels and New York, or of Stereolab and a grad-school jazz-fusion ensemble—on my best-albums list of 2022. But last week was the first opportunity I’ve had to see them live. I was worried they’d be so hipper-than-thou as to be grating; turns out they are much more geeky and goofy. It was six dudes (the configuration varies from gig to gig) actually wearing headphones on stage (I assume in lieu of other kinds of monitors, though one could also believe they’d simply forgotten to take them off), ripping riffs in complex time signatures on keys and guitars and saxes and flutes … with one chic French woman (Ma Clément) up front providing enough charisma to make sense of the entire exercise. It would be prog were most of the songs not kept to concise statements, bringing a dash of wit, though sometimes not enough improvisational space to explore wider dynamics. One senses they’d never be so inconsiderate as to play actually loud.

I didn’t know their 2024 album Rong Weicknes well enough to recognize those cuts, but composer-keyboardist Zach Phillips said they were mostly trying out new material—another whole record’s worth, by the sounds of it. There was also at least one incongruous cover, “Every Day’s the Same” by former Squeeze bassist Harry Kakoulli, which I was glad to be introduced to. The half-full room clapped and cheered with the strength of a three-quarters-full room, mostly people in their 20s plus a handful of fellow oldsters I should have talked to, were I a talking-to-strangers person.

It was a thoroughly congenial experience that I wished had threatened to get more consciousness expanding. The closest it came was local artist Peter Venuto’s Electric Rainbow Machine spinning polychromatically at the back of the stage. Near the end Phillips told the whole audience what neighbourhood bar they were heading to, a pub they were excited about because “we’ve been told it’s pretty bad.” I hope some people kept them company.

10. David Thomas tribute on Perfect Sound Forever; DT & 2 Pale Boys live on MTV Europe, 1997

Two and a half months later, some of us are still very much mourning David Thomas.

Jason Gross’s Perfect Sound Forever site did a terrific tribute, speaking to many past and present members of Pere Ubu and circle. Synthesizer wizard Allen Ravenstine, who’s often been cranky about his years with Ubu in other interviews, was generous and eloquent: “[David] was trying to make something of consequence, something substantial, not just something for profit, and he was driven to do it by a force beyond his control. He thought about things in a way that no one I ever met thought about them. He was seeking something that was a mystery to most of us.”

I was struck especially by how people talked about David’s insistence on total immediacy on stage, living in the furnace of the moment, just as I was describing above with Susie Ibarra. To David that was everything.

You certainly see it in the above clip of David Thomas and the Two Pale Boys (Keith Moliné on guitar, Andy Diagram on processed trumpet) from MTV Europe in 1997. After a typically wry intro, and despite some very 90s camera work, it offers one of the better sustained documents of David in performance I’ve ever seen. (Once upon a time the cable music channels actually had to find music to put on TV all day long, and it led to some unpredictable fortuities.) With his plastic red butcher’s apron on under his suit jacket, David digs into a range of recent Ubu and solo songs, wrenching them to pieces to find the heart and guts, which he then turns inside out for inspection, giving every ounce of sweat even with no audience except the film crew. It’s hard to believe he’s younger here than I am now, but I also think I have never a day in my life been as young as David Thomas in performance, nor will I ever be as old and crotchety as he was when he was 22. It’s beautiful.

And then, in the chat portion afterwards, when the interviewer is so incautious as to ask David what the trio’s new album, Erewhon, is “about”—he heaves a sigh, and as if impelled by regrettable but inexorable duty, he lets loose with the following monologue:

“Well, it’s about places that don’t exist, and the people that live there. Increasingly, culture is being reduced to pleasantly interactive push-button lifestyle boutique choices. There used to be a place called the Aeronautical Shot Peening Company on Old River Road and it was all pastel-space-cowboy facade, and it would shoot sonic fireworks into the night, and you would go down there and you would just listen to that. It was something special. And a few years ago they tore it down and built a puke palace in its place for kids to go drink cheap beer and throw up in the streets at four o’clock in the morning. Now, did they ask you if they could do that? Did they ask me? No. So what kind of a city, what kind of people, what kind of a world, tears down the Aeronautical Shot Peening Company, and puts up a puke palace in its place? … So what are you gonna do, you can’t do anything about it, they’ve taken—the culture is being co-opted and bulldozed, there’s nothing you can do about it, you can’t fight it. So a number of people, particularly of our generation, of the Pere Ubu group of people, have all reached the same conclusion, that we simply refuse to acknowledge these things. So increasingly we discover that we live in a city that no longer exists, we live in a ghost town, and it’s a better place. In our city, the Aeronautical Shot Peening Company still exists. In our city, Universal Vibration still exists. And this place still exists and that place still exists, and it’s a better city to live in. It only gets tricky when you have to go buy a loaf of bread from a shop that no longer exists. But these are tricks that you manage to learn. I think that’s what it’s about.”

Genial interviewer, impressively unfazed: “Well, that seems to sum it up nicely. I don’t really know how to follow that—except we could go to Captain Beefheart.”

David: “Ice Cream for Crow.”

1. O’Neill was not one of those who built the puppets. Confusion on my part.

2. Note: An earlier version of this newsletter misstated that the event was July 12, when it was really July 5. My apologies.