Remembering Piano Pat
“Piano Pat” Spoonheim played the organ at the Sip ‘n Dip Lounge in Great Falls, Montana, four nights a week, for over 50 years. The story goes that the lounge’s regular pianist took a holiday in 1963, and Pat showed up to fill in. He never came back. She never left.
Between 1963 and the lounge’s closure for COVID-19 precautions in 2020, it was pretty much guaranteed that if you made the trip to the Sip ‘n Dip, Pat would be there. She started her tenure the same year Disneyland debuted its Enchanted Tiki Room; Hawaii’s statehood less than five years earlier had kicked off a wave of tiki appreciation that rippled through balmy Orange County and Montanta’s third-largest city alike. She ended her run there at a time when the idea of a lounge singer had become an anachronism—let alone an octogenarian singer in a bar whose other claim to fame is a window that looks into a swimming pool where you can watch mermaids (and the occasional merman) making their rounds.
I only had the pleasure of seeing Pat perform twice—I made the five-hour drive to Great Falls three times, but she was sick the last time and took the night off. Both occasions were magical in a way that’s difficult to describe. She was speaking as much as she was singing, and the microphone often struggled to lift it above the noise of the room. Her sets were an eclectic assortment of covers, from Johnny Cash to Neil Diamond to her semi-official anthem, Toby Keith’s “I Love This Bar.”
The tone of the organ and the hush of her voice could turn her set into a game of “name that tune,” and I’d sit there sipping excessively sugary cocktails, waiting for the chorus to bring the song into focus, grinning the whole time. It didn’t really matter what she was playing, though. The joy she brought to playing, and the warmth the crowd radiated back, justified the trip.
It’s sad to think that I won’t have that experience again.
Even before the pandemic hit, I’ve found it’s increasingly rare for me to have cultural experiences that are really rooted in a place and time. Modern culture is pop culture, and it’s mass culture, and mostly, it’s digital culture. I listen to music that I stream online, or I catch a movie on Netflix, or maybe I push my boundaries and track down some ephemeral TV show or commercial that I saw once as a pre-teen, or to listen in on a legendary musician’s formative moments from decades before I was born. It’s amazing to live at a time when the internet has essentially granted immortality to so much art and culture. But it’s done it to at least some degree by turning it into a more abstract experience. I think we recognize that change when we talk about music and film and writing as “content”, a bland term that implies all those things are on some level interchangeable stimuli to occupy our attention.
A pilgrimage to the Sip ‘n Dip was essentially the opposite of that. It’s the kind of experience that is only possible in a particular place and time—that makes you feel connected to that place and it’s history. When I’m thinking about other examples, I realize I’m often thinking about roadside attractions: an ex-mortician’s house in BC, built out of empty bottles of embalming fluid; a Buddhist temple in the middle of rural Montana, the kinds of people and places catalogued on Atlas Obscura. But I don’t think their defining character is tied to the kitsch of roadside attractions. It’s not about being quaint, or some ironic detachment. But because they’re connected to place and to context, they just become destinations. They’re singular. Singular culture, as opposed to mass culture.
That’s essentially what I’m missing when I’m missing Piano Pat. That feeling of being part of an event that has ben happening for 50 years, where you sense the longevity in the same way that you hear the music or see the mermaids. Singular culture can’t benefit from the internet’s immortality. It can’t be reproduced, or archived, just experienced and remembered. When it’s gone, it’s gone.
Misc. recommendations
Read
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is the best thing I’ve read in ages, a fantasy story that immediately pulled me into its unique world. Stylistically it’s worlds away from Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, although there’s some similar themes around searching for magic in a disenchanted world. It’s a short book but an incredibly rich one and an absolute joy to read.
This London Review of Books article on Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures helped tide me over until my library hold came in. Also, how perfect of a name is Merlin Sheldrake for a mycological missionary?
The Chicago Tribune’s profile of art professor Eileen Favourite’s course “Love the Art, Hate the Artist” is a more thoughtful article on cancel culture than most of what I’ve seen on the subject.
I keep coming back to this December article from music-writing co-op New Feeling on why we should move beyond the terms “do-it-yourself” and “independent” for talking about a kind of culture that’s deeply collaborative, networked and communitarian.
Another reminder that all categories are ultimately imaginary: Eukaryote Writes Blog on how “There’s no such thing as a tree”
And, a pair of physics fixes from Quanta Magazine: one on resolving the “black hole paradox” and one on a new attempt at a fundamental theory.
Watch
Maybe your day needs a ten-minute breakdown of the battle between Hackney and a warehouse/art space over a sculpture of sharks, called SHARKS! Mine certainly did.
Netflix’s Stowaway is a solid sci-fi flick and a sort of feature-length meditation on the trolley problem. It’s not mind-blowing, but it’s the kind of low-key, mid-tier flick that used to be standard at the cinema and seems much harder to find these days.
My Letterboxd watch list has been filling up fast thanks to this list of underappreciated animated features (inspired by this Tumblr comic).
Listen
I loved the latest episode of newly independent podcast Here Be Monsters, Chasing Tardigrades, about “finding some meaning in small things.”
Erased Tapes just released Masayoshi Fujita’s Bird Ambience, a lovely and spacious album built from Fujita’s marimba experimentations.
I’ve been listening a lot to The Miraculous Hump Returns from the Moon, the second album from Sopwith Camel. Offbeat but polished pop that has a bit of a Steely Dan vibe in parts. They were the first San Francisco psychedelic band to get a major label deal, but never hit the heights their peers did.
The A.M.
Last week’s episode of The AM (my weekly radio show on CJSW 90.9FM in Calgary, AB) was well-suited to a rainy Monday morning, with tracks from the 2013 My Bloody Valentine album m b v, new music from the always incredible Mdou Moctar, Swedish shoegaze, Canadian dream-pop, and other many other pleasant sounds—I think it’s musically my favourite episode in a good while.
I also had the chance to talk to Dr. Leslie Kern about her book Feminist City: A Field Guide in advance of her hour-long talk with Calgary city councilor Druh Farrell.
Older episodes of The A.M. are available at https://theam.ca or https://cjsw.com/the-a-m, and are uploaded weekly.
Monday Shorts
Monday Shorts is a blog series I write and curate for the Quickdraw Animation Society, sharing independent animated shorts that deserve a wider audience. There are 150+ entries over on the QAS site (plus a 600+ film animation playlist over at Vimeo), but here are a few of the more recent shorts we’ve shared.
Onohana’s grimly titled 2015 short such a good place to die is beautiful despite the name, depicting a shifting landscape that seems to combine sky, land, water and life into a single plane of existence.
A sequel of sorts to a 2010 collaboration between artist Andrea Dorfman and poet Tanya Davis, How to Be at Home is an honest, reassuring, and ultimately uplifting survival guide for the forced solitude of the COVID pandemic.
Vincent de Boer spent two years animating Stroke before showing it to his friends in jazz(ish) band Ill Considered, and they improvised a score on their first viewing. Two years of work, versus 6.5 minutes of winging it—sounds about right for the life of an animator.
PS: I’m still figuring out what this Substack could/should be. If you’re enjoying it, or even parts of it, let me know. Should I scrap the opening essays and focus on the recommendations? Split them up, and share more things more often? Did one of the posts hit a tone you’d like to see more of? Let me know, if you have a minute.
Your substack format is perfect to me. I look forward to it every time