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How wonderful

“...while flying back from Europe...we were over northern Iceland and Greenland.  Flight is conducive to fantasy.  I saw those great, white, unblemished fields.  Huge snow fields ten miles wide and ten miles high.  And the animator came out in me and got greedy.  I thought, if I could only take a giant pencil, a burnt tree or something, and draw on that great cold piece of paper… how wonderful, how wonderful.”

--Chuck Jones

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And a bicycle on the boy’s birthday…

Today, Declan McManus, the original Napoleon Dynamite, God’s Comic, Howard Coward, the Imposter, the Little Hands of Concrete himself, Elvis Costello turns 52.  Happy birthday!  No other performer has tackled punk rock, new wave, country, blues, pop, soul, folk, jazz, and even classical music, and done it as deftly and with such wit.  By far, he is my favourite songwriter, as anyone who has been forced an Elvis mix CD upon them knows.  So today, I’ll be a fanboy.

My first memory of Elvis Costello was seeing the video for “Radio, Radio” which remains one of my favourite songs.  I was just a kid surfing channels, and I came upon this music video.  MuchMusic, the Canadian MTV, was not allowed in our household, because my father believed rock music was only about sex and violence (ironic that I ended up working here, I suppose).  But there was something about this video that I couldn’t turn away from, and knowing that it was forbidden, only made it more alluring.  What if my father walked in on me?  But I couldn’t turn away…

Here was this skinny, nerdy punk.  He wore glasses, seemed angry at his radio for some reason, and he had a strange way of standing and moving about, with his feet pointed towards each other, pigeon-toed.  Who was this guy?  And where were the half-naked women I was supposed to not be looking at?

The image of this anti-rockstar stayed with me, and it wasn’t until highschool that I finally sought him out.  I took out “Trust” and “Live from the El Mocambo” from the local library.  One album was an angry live punk show, and the other was this upbeat, new-wave pop music (with a picture of an old-timey big band on the back).  The complete contradiction in style and attitude was enough to keep me hooked, and before long I made sure to own his entire contradictory discography (which was a lot, considering he’s so prolific, I had about 20 or so albums to catch up on at the time).

I finally got to meet the man briefly after a concert a few summers ago, and although I look like a complete tool in this picture, it’s only because I think I was legitimately starstuck at the realization that this weird, intriguing, and frenetic musician I saw on TV when I was 10 years old, was now standing beside me.

Happy birthday, Elvis!

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