Happiness + Kindness by Agi Gutkowska on April 19th, 2009

“With The Happiness Project, Spearin blurs the line between speaking and singing — life and art — and writes music based on accidental melodies. With the help of some of his musician friends, Charles plays the instruments to match these natural neighbourhood melodies inspired by interviews with his own downtown city neighbours, all on their thoughts of happiness. He then arranges them as though they were songs. As Charles says, “All of the melodies on this album are the melodies of every day life.” This technique recalls the work of 20th century composers such as Harry Partch and Steve Reich (“Different Trains”).” ~ excerpt  from the Music Gallery’s show description. Happiness Project was preformed in Toronto on March 11 and 12, 09 at the Music Gallery.

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~this quote is dedicated to a close friend of mine … who needs to believe that people are still kind.

“there was once many kind people, and even unkind ones pretended to be good because that was the thing to do. Such pretense was the source of the hypocrisy and dishonesty so much exposed in the realist literature at the end of the last century. The unexpected result of this kind of critical writing was that kind people disappeared. Kindness is not, after all, an inborn quality - it has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. For our generation, kindness was an old-fashioned, vanished quality, and its exponents were as extinct as the mammoth. Everything we have seen in our times - the … class warfare, the constant “unmasking” of people, the search for an ulterior motive behind every action - all this has taught us to be anything you like except kind.” from hope against hope: a memoir by nadezhda mandelstam.

nadezhda mandelstam In her memoirs, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, gives an epic analysis of her life and criticizes the moral and cultural degradation of the Soviet Union of the 1920s and later. The titles of her memoirs are puns, Nadezhda in Russian meaning ‘hope’.

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