Bronwyn the Intern | Being Emme

Tales of Aviation

July 27, 2010 By Bronwyn the Intern Leave a Comment

Most of us have flown in a plane. This is because most of us prefer air travel to driving over oceans, and steamer ships seem to be in short supply these days.

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time in airports. Most recently I saw a friend off on her way to Switzerland for six weeks to learn French. (People do these things!) Before that, I was on six flights in three weeks, four of them over five hours in length. That’s a lot of hours not only in airplanes, but in airports. All those long hours of purposeful, anxiety-fraught sitting that manage to be more exhausting than running a half-marathon have got to be filled with something. I usually choose a steely yet non-threatening expression on my face (ideal message: not a security threat, but not a potential new friend either), the entire Weakerthans discography on my iPod (including John K. Samson’s 1993 Propagandhi-era solo EP “Slips and Tangles,” complete with the bitterly brilliant track “Airport Lounge”) and a new Shitty-Irish-Chick-Lit novel. It passes the time.

Lots to look at. (Photo by myself)

Sometimes I send annoyed emails to friends, reporting the (non-)action. For example, from last month: “So here I am in yet another airport lounge, listening to a blaring television that’s on a loop of death off to the right. Every ten minutes or so a commercial comes on for something that must be sad and child-related (I can’t see the screen) – a woman’s voice plaintively singing “Head and shoulders, knees and toes…” over a subtly swelling string section. Jealous?”

But, you know – those lost hours add up. And sometimes you have one of those moments when you think, “these minutes are as much a part of my life as any other minutes.” Two choices remain here: panic at the impossibility of living a spontaneous, carefree, world-trotting life when so much of that life tends to be spent sitting in relentlessly uncomfortable seats, or…eavesdrop. (Which may also induce panic. But really, if you eavesdrop on a plot to hijack a plane in an airport, rather than fear the ineffectual plotters you should probably move away in all haste so you don’t get knocked over as the plotters get bodily taken down by lumbering security officials.)

Traveling can be tiresome. (Photo by myself)

During one of my recent stretches of time spent in an airport lounge, I turned the tables and eavesdropped on some security officials. Very satisfying. One female official was standing behind a desk, desperately trying to look busy, as another, older male guard regaled her with his best war stories:

“Tell ya, had two tire totals in one day. Both in the same day! Like, two tires were totaled in one day. So I got myself a four-set of 10 ply plymouths, never had a tire problem again. Can you believe that!?”

Then, he unveiled his real corker:

“Got a couple kayaks, down at Jericho…oh yeah, I go there every week. I’m a member. One for someone your size. Well, originally for my daughter. One bigger one. For someone like me. Think fate’s telling us something? Haha…yeah, I’m an atheist too.”

Next time you’re in an airport, don’t close yourself in a bubble of pointless travel-induced-tension. Eavesdrop instead! You’ll be amazed at the intelligence, kindness, and sheer idiocy of the human race. You may also get a few funny looks. Please don’t sue me if you get taken down by security for staring at people and writing down everything they say.

Filed Under: All the Gossip, Bronwyn the Intern, Buds Tagged With: Airport, Airport Lounge, Airports, All the Gossip, Bronwyn Malloy, Bronwyn the Intern, Eavesdropping, Jericho, John K. Samson, Paranoia, stories, Traveling

In Vogue: Dan Mangan’s Glorious Arrival

June 4, 2010 By Bronwyn the Intern 1 Comment

Moments of glory, speaking generally, are few and far between. One has to seize onto these moments when they come, and, if at all possible, immortalize them. Turn them into stories. Mind you, most moments can be turned into stories if one tries hard enough…whether they’re interesting can be judged by the opacity of the glaze over the audience’s eyes.

I have a story to tell – and it’s not just any story. It’s a story about a major moment of glory. The fact that I consider this a glorious moment is, I suppose, a testament to my eccentricity. My moment of glory could easily have been another, more balanced person’s moment of abject mortification. Also, as I can’t see any of you, myriad readers, I will have to trust that the glaze over your eyes isn’t sufficiently viscous to prevent you reading.

Firstly, I suppose it has to be established that I’m a bit creepy/fangirlstalkerish about certain musicians. These include The Weakerthans, The Decemberists, The Mountain Goats, Hey Rosetta!, and…Dan Mangan. I have been lucky enough to see every one of my mild (wild?) obsessions live, most recently The Mountain Goats just last night at The Rickshaw, a show which one of my friends described as the closest to a religious experience he’d ever been. In other words: I’ve been to some fantastic concerts. None of them, however, can quite match Dan Mangan’s show at The Vogue in Vancouver BC, on May 8th 2010.

Photo: Christine McAvoy

It was the third time I’d seen Dan live, the first having been at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival in the summer of 2009, where, after chancing upon him performing with a group of other musicians, I made sure to be there every time he was playing, the whole weekend. I then bought his first album and EP, waited with baited breath for his second album, and have lived and breathed Nice, Nice, Very Nice ever since. Needless to say, I was a little bit excited about Dan’s sold-out show at The Vogue. My group of Dan-loving friends that managed to get tickets got there early, and we set up camp in the third row. From the first note of “Sold,” we were absolutely enraptured.

Being the slightly-creepy-fangirl-stalker that I am, I had read some reviews of Dan’s other shows from his nation-wide tour. Many of them mentioned a magical moment during “The Indie Queens Are Waiting,” which is a duet between Dan and the fantastic Veda Hille, when, in the absence of a female vocalist on the stage, the girls in the audience took up Veda’s part. This being a hometown show for Dan, combined with the obvious rapt attention of the audience, led me to believe that the same magical moment would organically occur when Dan played “Indie Queens” at The Vogue. However, and this was an interesting, perhaps even revelatory moment for me – moments have to start somewhere, or in this case, with someone.

The moment of truth arrived: Dan’s wonderful ten-piece(!) band left the stage, leaving him alone with all 1150 audience members. He began playing the quietly mournful “The Indie Queens Are Waiting,” and, the first time that Veda Hille would have sung alone, there was a conspicuous, and total, silence. I swear Dan looked a little surprised, and, with a wry smile, he said, “I couldn’t find Veda Hille, to sing those parts. I don’t know where she went.” Honestly, what’s a girl to do? The next time Veda’s part came around, I was sure that everyone would sing along. So, right on cue, I belted out, “Are we cool now?”

ALONE.

And I was LOUD.

Photo: Christine McAvoy

Dan looked over, straight at the area that I was sitting, and, despite my heart beating about seventeen times its normal rate, I kept singing. This was one of those marvelous moments that teeter on the edge of complete humiliation and endless glory. The girls in the section around me joined in on the “aaaaahhs,” and Dan said, “Perfect pitch!” and “I don’t even need a band!” Each time the group of us sang the next bit of Hille’s part, the rest of the audience laughed, but I swear it was a joyful (not mocking!) laughter. (Really. Someone filmed this and it’s on Youtube, so I’ve had time to assess it whilst my heart is beating closer to a healthy pace.)

Oh, alright…

One of the many reasons that I think the show was so fantastic was the aura of love and support that simply radiated from the audience toward Dan. When they laughed along with us Indie Queens that knew every note of Veda Hille’s harmonies, I knew I wasn’t alone in being proud that Dan is a Vancouverite, and a humble, charming, incredibly talented one at that. The entire concert was a moment of affirmation that I came close to finding in the Olympics, but never truly did until Dan Mangan took the stage, smiled, and began to sing. By the time he played “Robots,” the entire plaid-clad audience was on its feet, singing along, buoyed by the joy of being in a crowd that, for once, wanted only to sing “Robots need love too!” and bask in an atmosphere of what I can only call complicit, reciprocal…well, love.

“Tina’s Glorious Comeback”-level-glorious? Definitely.

Photo: Christine McAvoy

Filed Under: All the Gossip, Bronwyn the Intern, Events, Music Scene, The Tube, Vancouver Events Tagged With: Christine McAvoy, Dan Mangan, Hey Rosetta!, love, May 2010, Moments of Glory, Robots, Sold, The Decemberists, The Indie Queens Are Waiting, The Mountain Goats, The Rickshaw, The Vogue, The Weakerthans, Tina's Glorious Comeback, Vancouver, Veda Hille

Hi, My Name Is:

June 1, 2010 By Bronwyn the Intern 3 Comments

There are certain things, I’m discovering, that if you cut them up the right way, can always be put together again. Like humans. And, I’m discovering, emotions. Also oranges. There are others, however, that can’t be reconstructed. My theory is that these weren’t made well in the first place.

Of course, blenders, incinerators, and steam-rollers are a different story…or, at least, they give the story a different ending. But it seems to me that if you cut up true love, hell, even if you liquefy true love, it’s always possible to put it back together again. Like a starfish. Not like Humpty-Dumpty.

There are certain people, places, and things (I suppose just nouns in general) that I will always be in love with in an alternate universe, or maybe just on masochistic days in this one. There are songs I will always come back to, there are expressions I will always associate with one person, there are foods that I swear, despite alleged taste-bud-evolution (more like degeneration) I will always hate. For the most part, people don’t change much. Only waistlines…and hairlines.

We usually think of ourselves as blank canvases, with no predictable habits or personality traits or discernible accent. We’re just…US. Me. Everyone else is a character, with a name and that particular way of eating grapes. We, the individuals, just react to these grape-peelers.

photo by Jon Chiang

But in reality, I’m Bronwyn. I like music and poetry and owls. I read a lot of serious looking books and a lot of Shitty-Irish-Chick-Lit (a genre all unto itself, in my estimation). I collect albums and I hate boy-short underwear. I am twenty years old, I just got what I’ve always referred to as “Creative Writing Bangs,” and I do a particularly good velociraptor impression. I’m also a lot of things that I will never know that people say about me. Most of them are probably true.

So: this is how I’ve chosen to begin to present myself to you, the masses of faces bathed in blue light from computer screens that I will very likely never meet. This is the character I’m putting forward.

Who are you?