My dad’s birthday came up, he would have been close to a hundred years old by now. Coincidentally this morning someone approached me from the universe of the internet and said they knew him when they were a kid and appreciated how he treated them. He gave off good vibes, it’s true. He was the only one in our family of 6 who did not play an instrument except the radio and CDs. A fan of Saint-Sa\u00ebns. I tried getting into it but it never took. He didn’t understand what I was doing musically but he was never discouraging or judgemental like other parents I knew. Sometimes, those other parents created permanent no fly zones between them and their children, sometimes the rest of their lives. I’m glad he gave off good vibes. I don’t know for sure but he always said his mother said she was cousins with Jascha Heifetz, they were from the same place, Vilnius. I played there fifteen years ago, in Riga, Klaipeda and Kaunus too – the pogrom tour. An awesome experience, I wondered especially when I got to Vilnius if anything in the cellular structure of my being was experiencing deja vu, walking around these icy streets. It was winter and sidewalks were totally impassable for elderly people or disabled people. I wondered how they could be missing money or policies for the adequate treatment of citizens, after all they are a winter country. I thought in this transitional period they’ve been conned but on the other hand I played a concert in a building constructed for mechanics and it felt pretty royal. Under communism they made different performance spaces that celebrated working class livelihoods, it was even an old B\u00f6sendorfer. The opportunity came from an exchange with Elizabeth Fischer, she befriended the promoter and put us in touch. She had one of the greatest bands ever, Animal Slaves. Instant amazement. The last time I saw her was in Vancouver, in that beautiful old building with the wide halls on the third floor and her big black dog, I’m afraid it might have been a poodle. And telling me horrible stories about the death of her mother or maybe her father, in Montreal, about elder abuse. She knew she wasn’t going to go out like that, exploited by supposed caretakers and she got her wish. The promoter also was from Vilnius, he had long hair and knew lots of artists and all the shortcuts, he smiled a lot and made the tour easy. Gave off good vibes. It was a few years after my dad died that I went there, where his mother was from, that country and that city that probably would have been a curiosity to him as well, maybe like me he would wonder about it on a cellular level. In high school I read about Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, instantly thought I understood what he meant and that humanity shares part of one mind. I never studied Jung, I don’t know if that was the correct interpretation and as life went on I discarded it, but recently, I came upon essays addressing that sort of thing exactly like that. Language equating cellular activity behind thought. Some of the examples were compelling, about different ideas taking root in different parts of the world, in each instance people believing they are making it up and it is happening only in this place and that these views are their original thoughts but in fact you could view it as a collective phenomena. Uncanny, how people demonstrate the same dynamics of propping up or tearing down, whether in China or Thunder Bay or Lima. If it’s true it’s invisible, you can’t see it with ordinary eyes, only inner ones, like you can’t see whatever guides the hand that correctly executes the crossing without a net of stride piano.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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