a Few Minutes with "Paper Moon"

1) Let's get to it, what brought about the break up of B'ehl?  It was amiable, in what way? What is the truth, inquiring minds want to know.

I wish I could give you "the dirt", as they say, but it truly was a simple parting of ways. B'ehl had been active for a long time, and I think it had started to become stale.  We had gone about as far as we were going to go with that band, and it just wasn't as fun as it used to be.  Rather than have it become a chore, we decided to call it quits.  It was a mutual decision, and one that I personally have never regretted, and I think I can speak for the other former members as well. We enjoyed B'ehl, we had some good times, and then we moved on.

2) As with one band breaking up, from the ashes comes "Paper Moon", what was the inspiration which brought about this new band.

A desire to make music again.  Bob, Allison, and myself had taken a few months off from music, and found that we were getting the "itch" again. It's one thing that gives us all a lot of satisfaction, the kind you can't possibly get from just going to your 9-5 day job all week.  At the same time, Heather had moved out here from Vancouver, and was looking to play as well.  We knew her from her previous bands, and had talked very casually about her plans to move here and the possibility of making music together, so we hooked up and played.  It worked out, musically and aesthetically (see, she's hot, and WE'RE hot, so she fit right in with our hot image). And, since all of her gear was now parked in the practise space and we were all too lazy to move it out, we decided to keep her.

3) Give me some background to this new band, what is its inspiration and musical direction.

Bob, Alli and I have developed a style from playing together for the last few years, and are trying to push that style a bit further.  We're aiming for more rawk in the sound and are trying to work harder on arrangements. We've all become better musicians over time, and hopefully that will translate into better songs. Heather has added an entirely new angle to the band.  She had a bit of difficulty getting used to playing 4 minute pop songs; they kept ending just as she was getting into the groove.  Her background is based in space-rock epics, so she's had to speed up her musical metabolism, as it were. She's adjusted just fine, though, and has put a wonderful trippy new-wave spin on the sound.

4) I'm interested in the name "Paper Moon", in that was also the name to B'ehl's first CD, which was wonderful by the way.  What does 'paper moon' mean to you and the band.

The search for a new band name is really hard.  We discarded a lot of possibilities for weeks and weeks, but then a couple of different people suggested Paper Moon in reference to the first B'ehl album called Only A Paper Moon.  We realized that it not only sounded nice, but it conjured up all of these really nice images and feelings, like a crescent shape hastily cut out of a piece of construction paper by some kid and stuck up on a window at night, or a glow-in-the-dark cardboard moon hanging from a mobile.  These peaceful feelings provide a counter-point to the ROCK that we deliver.

  5) What is the direction this band will go in musical development. Also, what are your touring plans.
 

We haven't planned out a musical direction.  We're just going to keep writing songs that we like, and see where that takes us.  We'll keep pushing ourselves musically, at least I hope we will, but we haven't decided to head in the "math" direction, or the "emo" direction, or whatever.  I don't think we've ever consciously decided that we're going to write a specific type of song, except for The Pancake Bay Weather Station which came out of a desire to write a waltz.  AS a song progresses, we decide whether or not to tone it down a bit, or to bring the rock, but those are really more arrangement decisions.  I can tell you that it's not going to be metal, which is okay I guess.  I'll just form a metal side- project sometime.  It's also not going to be blues-rock, and there will be NO blues-rock side-projects anywhere in the future.

Touring plans...we just came off of a mid-west US/eastern Canada tour thatwas a lot of fun, and we're contemplating a western Canada/US junket around September. Nothing firm on that yet.

6) Tell me about the new CD?

We're SO proud of this sucker.  We recorded at Studio 11 here in Winnipeg, with Juno-award winning producer Brandon Friesen and assistance from Rob Shallcross and Paul Scinocca.  It was our first time recording with these people at this facility, and it was a real eye-opener. Brandon was chock-full of fantastic ideas, he just seemed tuned in to what we were trying to do, and Rob and Paul were equally great.  The whole process was a lot of fun for the most part, and we ended up with a more polished-sounding record than we've ever created.  Also for the first time, we had more songs than we needed for the album, so we were able to pick and choose which ones we wanted instead of HAVING to use each one.  Not that it would've mattered too much, since every song turned out great, there wasn't a weak one in the bunch.  It's just nice to have the luxury of OPTIONS when laying the album out.
     All in all, we're very satisfied with the final result, and are pushing it as hard as we can to get everyone to hear it.  I think it can speak for itself, as long as people get the chance to listen.
 

Too Many Prayers

Ten thousand prayers fell on deaf ears
Ten thousand more were silent.
A holocaust of pain and fear
of offerings, still burning
of a race to be exterminated, and
while their air was turned to gas,
those prayers are still the same.

Ten thousand prayers fell on deaf ears
Ten thousand more were silent
Upon the sea of oyster blue,
in an island paradise,
skies of blue, changed their hue
as bombs fell from the sky,
those prayers are still the same.

Ten thousand prayers fell on deaf ears
Ten thousand more were silent
An act of god can be explained
then who explains the violence
the world watched as two towers crumble,
now ten thousand hearts, lay in the rubble.
Yes, the prayers are still the same.

Debisa_genius

http://www.postpoems.com/members/debisa_genius/
http://midnightedition.com/fanclub/authorhome.asp?author_id=1002
 
 

SALTWATER WEEPING

The raindrops pane my window
Blurring everything beyond what lies-
If perchance I wandered between the glass and the water sheeting there,
I would catch each drop with my tongue
And taste you kissing me deeply--
An ocean filling me with crashing waves-
The seagulls crying saltwater tears
Gliding gently and smoothly
Into one embrace as if to share in our impassioned liberations.
Conquer me gently my love,
And I will never let you go.
And to the wind,
Wild amoung the seascapes;
Oh,
Let us simply be lovers
For
Wild is the wind.
Wild is the wind.

Aaron LaFlora30 JUNE 2001

Bridges

Sometimes it is just necessary to separate.

Separate myself from the decisions I have made towards this life
Versus those whose opinions far differ enough to think they may
verbalise it
daily.
So I separate from myself
In order to view the whole picture.
And I perch this body tall and lanky
Proudly atop the ledge of a bridge
Where below me scattering about are so many busy people
Too occupied in their ponderings to even notice a presence lurking.
Pain does not care so I have been told.
And I instead turn my view toward the blue sky where my arms open
widely -
Embracing the cool mangy breeze emerging up from the Detroit River,
Wondering whether I should open or close my eyes as I fly out of this
place.
But a Jupiter's Moon appears at my feet and tugs my shoelaces loose,
Chews at my fingers, then finally crawls into my lap where comfort
finds her-
And laughter and unconditional love leave me and lead me
To the simple wisdoms we have shared far beyond this bridge.
And perhaps these virgin feathers have flown free for many years
Without even realising it.

Puss in Boots
 
mickle paramours of leaves
vert and Naples
hast thee thou?
rhapsodies all the course way too long
bless me Sirs and me too always Mesdames
altitudinousness altered all my city
trick o’ th’ sun there is the sea etc.
over the wastrels
hast cummerbund truly?
 
o ratkind singing in the cellar
gentle advertisement
with your gillygaskins round your nilly-noggins
you shall go home
 
the pouncer of his bouncer made her moan
hast ‘ou nae heard?
and the quarrel was ended
 
far away from here far away from here far
away from here
 
the silly girl had a disagreement
yes Sir I would ask you now
with the truth of that
fair on my lips alone it sat
happy
 
and in the second season
no new characters were added
so much as many new ones were taken away
away push push McGee
 
and he was there on the spot
frazzled we became it is sport to you
but we get no action out of
this here
 
 
poet
 
a man of velveteen and inkhorn hardly to be trusted
with my affairs of state long barracks
all my fiddle-faddle
let him raddle
the Scotch mist
let him finagle
the branchwaters
let him finally
let him alone
in the steakhouse with his beer
 
 
trade-off
 
I can see him very plainly
that was his only hope
and the very other thing you thought was
not only that very thing but very
much so rather keen he was on that
 
still I see him oh so clearly
advancing down the avenue
before him what was that to you?
and after after all to him
it wasn’t anything that special

 
times told often
 
meddlers ruled at ABC
all the bar was barratry
champers stood for champerty
The New Yorker told us “Drink your tea!”

 
Ode to Cassandra
 
Sweetheart, let's go see if the rose
That this morning did disclose
Its dress of purple to the sun
Has not lost at all this vespers
The folds of its empurpled dress,
And its tint to yours akin.
 
Alas! see how in a little space,
Sweetheart, it has upon the place
Alas, alas, let drop its beauties!
O truly wicked stepmother Nature,
Since such a flower lasts no more
Than from morning unto eve!
 
Thus, sweetheart, if you believe me,
While the bloom is on your years
In its freshest novelty,
Gather, gather your young age:
As upon this flower, old age
Will come to tarnish all your beauty.
 
 
Pierre de Ronsard
tr. C.M.

                                                                    Christopher Mulrooney is the author of notebook and sheaves.
 

Short Story
 
 

        The brain tissue like some kind of subterranean larvae stuck to his fingers as he dipped into the open cavity of the skull. The external layers came away in sticky filaments as Strang pulled his fingertips away. The experience was a vague form of eating, of tasting, of sensing as the images seemed to travel up through his arms into the main trunk line of his  spine and them spill into his brain. Part of him sensed back in time to the chemical jacking-in process at the Campbell Center while the rest of him floated in the sea of another's mind, the mind of the gray-haired,  bearded street person he'd seen seated in a wheelchair across from him in the laboratory when the first of the tests had begun.
    Strang heard the familiar voice of Dr. Craven speaking into a microphone.
    " Subject 107, code name "stuntman', Julian Strang, August 15, 2008
     Five  minutes have elapsed, injection complete. Subjects are responding as expected. Image patterns consistent with previous data."
       In the chemical world of altered states, Strang cupped his hands into  the  bowl of an old man's skull and scooped out the contents. He held them in the air like a trophy, both hands extended in a victory challenge and kissed their contents to his lips. The tissues stuck to him, became a part of him, grafted to his mouth, and became coated onto his palms and wrists.  Dr. Craven and his assistant Lucan Roberts watched the images fromStrang's brain reveal themselves on the monitor.
     "These are more graphic than all the rest," said Lucan
     The Campbell Center fronted as a clinic for the pharmaceutical company  of the same name. The company's breakthrough technology in audio and video chemical transmission of brainwaves and brain images had brought Julian most desperate moment had seen the tiny rectangular advertisement in The Examiner offering payment for a day of tests at the clinic.
    "What do you make of it, Lucan?"
     " It's a construct; he's entering the subjects brain, internalizing  it, as we expected, by imaging the eating of his brain; it's a metaphor for him."Strang to this point in his life, the point of a volunteer who in his
    " Julian, can you hear me? It's Dr. Craven."
     "I can hear you Dr. Craven. This is weird. It's as if I'm inside his head,looking out, as if I'm him. It's making me dizzy, like I want to hurl."
    " Just hold on, stay calm, it's normal. Now we need you to take us where we haven't gone before. We need you to talk us through this, tell us everything that's going on, your feelings, what you are seeing,  hearing,   everything. We can see the images and we need your help to confirm them. Stay calm and talk to us."
  " There are hearts beating; I'm floating in a sack, tied into a mother ship, a space drifter, lifeline umbilical cord holding me, darkness, layers on layers of translucent glass, shattering as I pass through, then  reforming behind me, more layers, hundreds, thin filaments, past lives,  layered memories of many individuals, all compacted, superimposed,  darkness, smell of urine, cold, loneliness, closet door opening, light,  cold eyes, fiery, 'You little shit, get the hell outta there!' Pain  across the face, the side of the head, the ears, cut mouth, backside burning,  no,  no, not across the trunk!"
     Dr. Craven and Lucan Roberts watched the monitor. The images jumped   quickly. The eyes were the camera. Julian, inside the old man, stared  down at the cellar floor, face almost pressed into the dusty concrete. The image rocked forward; the audio squawked out the pain as the upper chest and torso of a young boy jolted forward and back, pounded and pulled from  behind as he lay across the trunk.
        "Sodomy."
     " Poor bugger; sorry, " responded Lucan. "Sorry."
    " I'm driving a hatchet into a large man's chest. I think it's my father. I'm running as he lumbers after me pulling away the hatchet, clutching at his chest weeping blood. I'm waking up to warm pee cooling on the sheets; I'm under the bed listening to their snoring; I'm pouring a clear liquid from a plastic cottage cheese container; I can smell it soaking into the pile of my underwear heaped up in the darkness below the bed, the springs squeak and sag. I crawl out backward on my elbows, fully dressed. I strike a match reaching in under the bed; a flash and flames curl up like hands around the mattress, curving over them. I'm smiling, watching the rest of the room ignite, and now I'm running, hiding, slumping in alleys, begging on the street, crashing in empty rooms with glass scattered across the floor. Darkness, alleys, strange bedrooms, dark parking lots, male torsos, the lower half, a penis, every penis blending into the same, money, a dinner, a place to stay. I feel an emptiness, a sense of never really being, of being trapped in a cell, a membrane, an illusion."
     Dr. Craven spoke." This one's gone further. If we could only get him back to the glass layers that he mentioned. Those are the layers that belong to all the others. Let's hope it doesn't happen again."
    " Maybe we should pull him back a little, turn him around, get him  back tothose layers. We need to unlock them or we are jammed again, " said Lucan
    " Let's leave him a little longer; let him get closer to the present. That's the key, I think."
        The screen of the monitor turned pitch black, not the black of a failed transmission, but a pure absence of color.
    " I feel lonely, totally alone, abandoned in a sea of humanity. I feel I am a beast among beasts."
     Small droplets of red splashed across the dark background on the  monitor;sprays of blood from cut arteries.
     " I'm wading through a river of blood, narrow streets, clay and plaster buildings, mosques, temples, churches, shops and homes, full of screaming women and children being slaughtered by ugly men, men like me. My hand and arm in front of my face is lacquered rust red, a commingling of fresh and dried blood. I'm slashing and cutting at anything that moves through the narrow streets. Bodies float past me in the crimson current of an alley."
     The monitor would not display the images. The black and the red, the rouge et noir remained. Only the weeping voice of Strang communicated thedepths of the penetration into the old man's brain.
    " I need out. Let me out! This is a labyrinth. Skulls piled into pyramids,  bodies dried to leather. I'm stuffing jewels into the baked wounds of slaughtered babies. I'm sewing them up and carrying them like luggage across the back of my horse. I am among Mongols, as before I was among  armored soldiers of the cross. A legion of one-armed men stares at me from the shadows. I am a conqueror. I climb out of a wooden horse and open  the gates of a large city. I leave no one breathing in the city and in other cities like Baghdad, Troy, Jerusalem, Dresden, Auschwitz, little villages in Tasmania, the Little BigHorn, Newfoundland, Armenia, Bosnia, Rwanda or anywhere. I sit alone clad in armor and leather, my sword and automatic weapon beside me, all parts of me anointed in blood and I see the monumental piles of human rubble and hear the low pitched moans of the dead. I'm so, so lonely. I'm at the center. I've found the horrendous essence of us all. I'm taking my sword. I'm positioning it to my  throat."

" Quick get him out! We're losing him!" shouted Dr. Craven.
    Lucan lunged for the switch that would send the chemical blockers surging into Strang's system. Visibly as the blockers began working,together Strang and the old man jerked spasmodically..I'm falling. The point is piercing my throat. I'm not so lonely any more.I'm with all the other killers, all the other madmen."
    Dr. Craven and Lucan Roberts stood silently staring at both figures. Both men were drooling and gnashing their teeth; both men were staring vacantly at the dead monitor; their eyes dark and splashed with droplets of red.
    "They are lost and useless now, just like the others, said Lucan " We can't get out of the loop. Each one the same. Is it genetic, Lucan? Is there an archetypal cache stored up in each of us that we can't avoid unearthing?"
Dr. Craven visibly upset paused for a moment and began again.
    " This technology could be so beneficial if only we could avoid that nightmare cache of human cruelty. We could take the most brilliant minds and tap into them, draw out their essence and place it into the new subject; we could multiply intelligences, magnify the proper social attributes, and embellish skillful tendencies. We could create gods, Lucan we could be gods, all of us. Instead....."
    " Just take it easy. Rome wasn't built in a day, nor was it destroyed.Let's take them to their cells. We can look at the data later. Let's get acup of tea."
    Each of them unhooked a subject and wheeled them in their chairs through the stainless steel doors and down a long white corridor. On either side were rows and rows of doors with tiny wire-meshed windows. Each door was numbered starting at number one. They wheeled the two men, Strang and  the nameless old man, down to numbers 107 and 106 respectively. The corridor continued. Each cell held the same dark bearded longhaired figures of the street, drooling spittle and staring at the mesh windows with dark eyes splashed with dots of red.
    " Let's go for tea, Dr. Craven. Remember all those rats and rabbits we used to use? Over time they helped to cure us all."
    " I'm not so sure any more, but I think an Earl Gray can cure me for the time being
 

 BIO:
David P. Fraser  1. B. A., B. Ed., M.Ed., C.S.I.A. 2 Professional Educator, Editor, Freelance Writer, Ski Instructor David likes to balance his life among a variety of activities in the areas of writing, education and sports. When he is not formally working as an educator, he is either at the computer writing and researching or involved in one of the following sports: alpine skiing, snowboarding, windsurfing,  tennis, golf, cycling, walking. In addition he likes to garden, listen  to the blues, and search for his way through Taoism. He has built a water   garden which has become his a daily sanctuary. His next learning project is  to learn how to speak Spanish fluently and travel back to Central andSouth  America David Fraser has had poetry published in Mimesis, University of Toronto; In Complete, U of T.; Windings, U of T.; In Writing Group, U. of T. and Ascent  Magazine. Lyrics from one poem have been published and performed through Ex Tenebris. A number of short stories have been published by Ascent Magazine.  In the past David has written a weekly newspaper column in the Beeton Record. David currently is a freelance writer, ski instructor and editor of Ascent Magazine. Recently David has had poetry or short fiction published in KookamongaSquare, Poetry Exchange, Above Ground Testing's "Avant Garde", Outer Rim, and Dream Forge, The Starlight Cafe Recent publications of poetry are in the August 2000 issue of Kookamonga  Square under featured poets, http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Tower/9556/Janet.htmla mythological/Science Fiction short story entitled "Engaged" appearsOuter Rim Mythos, August 2000,  http://www.geocities.com/~outer-rim/frameindex.htmland poetry in Above Ground Testing October 2000  https://www.angelfire.com/on/abovegroundtesting/agt28cover.htm a specualative fiction story " Fun Royale" in Dream Forge December 2000 http://www.pcisys.net/~drmforge

 Up-coming work to be published Summer 2002 in Ygdrasil and The Circle Magazine If you are interested in discussing anything of mutual interest or in giving feedback on the web page and its contents, drop an E-mail. ascent@bcsupernet.com Ascent - Aspirations for Artists/  ascent@interlog.com/ revised Nov. 200Ascent Magazine     www.bcsupernet.com/users/ascent
 
 

Photography

         Ottawa, from the Confederation Bridge
 
 

                  the scene along Sussex Drive
 
 

closing words

    Well, one thing i'm thinking about is revamping the looks of the ezine.  I know this is something all magazines go through, even Wired changed their look, and got rid of references to Marshall McLuhan- bad move by the way.
    Next month, interview with Taylor Graham, a few reviews and more of your poetry, including a new writer to these pages.  Until then, keep well, keep cool, or warm, depending where you are and enjoy your life.  It's the only one you'll have.

Write me at pabear_7@yahoo.com
    I'm also on yahoo messenger, so if i'm online we can always chat.  Look up "Above Ground Testing" in Yahoo Groups.

take care all.

all works are copyrighted by the various authors, please respect this.  My words, you can quote me just mention my name, that's all.

Peace