Far And Near , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Neil Peart

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251 pages

English

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Whether navigating the backroads of Louisiana or Thuringia, exploring the snowy Quebec woods or performing onstage at Rush concerts, Neil Peart has stories to tell. Neil Peart's first volume in this series, Far and Away (ECW, 2011, available from Turnaround), combined words and images to form an intimate, insightful narrative that won over many readers. Now Far and Near brings together reflections from another three years of an artist's life as he travels on his tours. With passionate insight, wry humour and an adventurous spirit, once again Peart offers a delightful read.

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	20 novembre 2014
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781770906730
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	7 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0650€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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To Andrew and Steven
Every day is Memorial Day
To those who live on
Every day is Thanksgiving Day

ON DAYS LIKE THESE

INTRO
LIKE THE FIRST VOLUME in this series, Far and Away: A Prize Every Time , these stories grew over three years of my life, work, and travels. Likewise, the manner of relating them, the voice, still aims at the feeling that someone you know took the time and care to write the best letter he could—to share his life, work, and travels.
Several thoughts along those lines have come my way recently. One was the inventive short-story writer George Saunders, who defined the difference between all the informal writing that fills our world (and its ether) and what he could only call “literary” writing. His was a one-word distinction: “Revision.”
An avant-garde fictionist from an earlier generation, David Markson, never owned a computer, right up to his death in 2010, at age eighty-two. As reported in the New York Times , during a late-life correspondence with a younger poet, Laura Sims, she printed out and mailed him some of the online comments about his work. Though they all intended admiration, Mr. Markson was not impressed.
“‘Hey, thank you for all that blog stuff, but forgive me if after a nine-minute glance I have torn it all up,’ he wrote back. ‘I bless your furry little heart, but please don’t send any more. In spite of the lost conveniences, I am all the more glad I don’t have a computer. HOW CAN PEOPLE LIVE IN THAT FIRST-DRAFT WORLD?’ Later he wrote: ‘I have just taken the sheets out of the trash basket and torn them into even smaller pieces.’”
Both authors were talking about the simple act of taking care, of offering any potential reader plain courtesy . Judging from the online chatter they both decried (this reporter’s number one rule: “Don’t Read the Comments!”), many people find sloppy writing genuinely offensive, an assault on one’s eyes and brain while trying so hard to absorb meaning .
Carelessness is obvious, but care is better if it’s not, as per the Roman poet Ovid: “If the art is concealed, it succeeds.” When I am asked about the technical aspects of drumming or lyric writing, it is possible to get analytical, but only for professional, academic purposes. For the real audience, the listeners and readers who find pleasure in my music, lyrics, and stories, they don’t need to be aware of flams and paradiddles, intricate rhyming schemes, and elaborate metaphors. The underlying quality I would like them to sense in a Rush song, a concert, or one of my stories is simply that “Care has been taken here.”
That could be a decent metaphor for life—investing your time with care, selectively, to the work, play, and people sharing your life. Also investing that time with care emotionally —doing those things, living those things, as well as you can, for yourself or for others.
In helping me to take care, I am greatly indebted to my brother Danny for editing feedback and encouragement (“symbiotic nepotism,” I call it) on most of these stories. Jen Knoch at ECW also shared editorial qualities I define as “devoted” and “trustworthy,” and I will always benefit from the earlier guidance of Paul McCarthy.
A notable upgrade in this second volume is that my motorcycling partners Michael and Brutus both stepped up to SLR cameras during this period. I continued to learn what made a good photo setup, taking note of scenery, light, traffic, the absence of ugly intrusions like powerlines and guardrails, that sort of thing, and “directed” them. (There was some grumbling about always having to climb hills for the overview I wanted, but they eventually appreciated the results.) Together we ended up with a much richer choice of images to illustrate these tales, and in another form of revision, friend Craiggie helped fine-tune them in his digital darkroom.
My drive to write and revise with such care is always based on a wish to share as deeply as possible what it was like to live “on days like these”—these places, these experiences, these people. Few activities in my life seem more important than finding a way to put life into words and pictures. Sharing all that in a letter to a friend as well as I can gives me a clear vision of where I’m aiming—at you , dear reader.
After publishing Roadshow in 2006, I received a letter from a motorcyclist in Georgia who was inspired by my quest for the national park passport stamps. He wasn’t able to roam that far himself, but he was creative—over a series of weekend trips, he and his riding buddy decided to collect all of the state parks in Georgia. He wrote humorously about tracking down bemused staff members in each park to give them some kind of documentation—even a check-canceling stamp.
If any readers are inspired that way, to set out on their own little shunpikers’ quests, that is high praise indeed. I hope you will enjoy these stories half as much as I enjoyed the journeys, and will treasure your own even more.

Rider’s repose, Gardiner, Montana

TALKING DRUMS IN DEATH VALLEY

FEBRUARY 2011
THE SETTING OF THE OPENING PHOTOGRAPH is Death Valley National Park, California, near the site called Natural Bridge. The snow-topped Panamint Mountains form the backdrop, while I am gesticulating and (no doubt) pontificating in the middle, surrounded by the people and cameras of the Hudson Music crew. The subject of my little speech was drumming—specifically, drumming in front of an audience.
So that explains the title, but suggests a number of other questions. Starting with, I suppose, “Um … why?”
Well, it started in 1995, when I made an instructional video about composing drum parts and recording them, called A Work in Progress . My collaborators on that project were Paul Siegel and Rob Wallis, and we had enjoyed working together, sharing our ideas and realizing them on film. Paul and Rob were both drummers who had gravitated to the educational side, founding the Drummer’s Collective in New York City, then later Hudson Music, to make instructional DVDs. They were around the same age as my bandmates and me, and likewise had enjoyed a long, productive partnership of close to the same duration, so we understood one another.
In 2005, the three of us made another instructional video (this time “straight to DVD”), Anatomy of a Drum Solo , which investigated the title subject, based around my solo from the R30 tour. That solo had been filmed and recorded in Frankfurt, Germany, and thus was titled “Der Trommler” (the drummer). (On Rush in Rio , it was “O Baterista!” while the Snakes and Arrows version, filmed in Rotterdam, was “Die Slagwerker.”)
The theme for our next collaboration seemed obvious: live performance, preparing for it and surviving it. In early 2010, we began collecting material, now augmented by a new member of the Hudson Music team, Joe Bergamini. “Jobee” is a drummer well schooled in several fields, as well as an educator and journalist, and has been particularly successful in the orchestra pits of Broadway—first-call drummer for many of the hit shows, including such richly percussive and challenging scores as In the Heights . (I loved that show.) Jobee has a frighteningly detailed knowledge of my work, my methods and influences, and thus his inputs and questions were insightful and inspiring.
In April 2010, the Hudson Music crew joined me at Drum Channel in Oxnard, California, and filmed several days of my rehearsals for the Time Machine tour. In July, they filmed an entire Rush show, in Saratoga Springs, New York, with supplementary “drum-cams” on me. They also captured the soundcheck and pre-show warm-up, when I did a bit of talking to the camera, as I had during the Drum Channel filming in April. However, we would need to shoot some more “talkie bits” to go before each of the songs from the live show, explaining the special problems or challenges in a particular song and noting technical highlights.
So, I thought, why not go somewhere really nice to shoot those?
A Work in Progress had been filmed in May 1996 at Bearsville Studios, in New York’s Catskill Mountains, so we had plenty of nice outdoor settings for the narrations around the neighboring woods and lakes. Same with Anatomy of a Drum Solo , which was shot at nearby Allaire Studios in the summer of 2005.
This filming session was scheduled for January 2011, so we were limited in choices for outdoor shooting. Winter in Quebec might have been pretty, or not—you can never tell about winter weather. We might get bright, clear days with glittering snow mounded all around, or we might get gray skies and gloomy rain. I thought of Big Sur, a rugged stretch of California’s Pacific coast with dramatic ocean views among redwood forests and state parks and beaches. It is one of my favorite parts of the world, but at that time of year we might be interrupted by rain there, too.

So … I suggested Death Valley. Being the driest place in North America, averaging less than two inches of rain a year—and sometimes none—the chances of clear weather were good. I have been enchanted by that region of desolate splendor since my first visit, in the fall of 1996, when Brutus and I rode in under a full moon on what remains one of the great motorcycle rides of my life. (See “December in Death Valley” in Far and Away .)
I returned many times after that, notably on the Ghost Rider journey in 1998 and ’99, and every year or two since, so I had explored the area pretty thoroughly. The better I came to know it, the more I loved it.
It seemed to me that if we could combine such splendid natural backgrounds with the existing rehearsal and stage footage, it would elevate the show enormously. I was glad when the Hudson Music guys agreed. They set about getting the necessary permits (filming in a national park has certain “conditions”) and