This past (American Thanksgiving) weekend, I went to a show: Years/The Happiness Project/Do Make Say Think. It was great. The crowd was unfamiliar with the reason I was there: the happiness project. A conceptual project that makes music of interviews with his neighbours, Charles Spearin’s album has been received well, recently nominated for Canada’s Polaris Prize. So I had hoped we could all sing along with the neighbours’ speech, dance along in a way anticipated – vaguely choreographed, even – by months of listening… And although it wasn’t that, it was genuinely awesome to be in the midst of so many people discovering something so cool for the first time (“and anyway it’s in the Frick/which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time” – O’Hara).
Yesterday it occurred to me in a daydream how great it would be to organize a flash mob around Mrs. Morris (listening to her song is a prerequisite for understanding this and – in my humble – for life in general). On her birthday, which she would celebrate in some restaurant, with Mr. Gowrie. When it came time for cake, instead of waiters singing Happy Birthday, it would be us parading in, singing (well: saying, but in singsongy voices) Happiness is Love! ‘Us’ in this daydream means us as musicians or anyone else (waiters, eg) who have had her cadence stuck in their head and could help boomerang her words back.
Not, crucially, in any way that would border on taunting, which parroting necessarily risks; the singing would require the sensitivity of therapists who repeat back their patients’ sentiments: as an extension of listening and without condescension. Except that here we would be wanting to show her the worth, and not the flaw, in her phrases.
Accordingly, the aesthetic of this daydream is low-budget, afterschool-special, pseudo-surrealist. Tacky: the camera pans out to reveal an infinitely proliferating crowd all saying things together like And the love…is right there!. When the cake is set down a close-up cuts to badly patched animation of the candles as still more people; candles because their faces are beaming, giddy to return her lesson, straining to show their solidarity, their gratitude like children thrusting out their clean palms before dinner, clean teeth before bed.
