– • david ross macdonald • extras and journal

Umalali, Alejandro Escovedo, Luluc and Jah Youssouf are impossible to spell on your mobile phone using predictive text and so probably make them TWITTER hostile and thus consequently perfect for my tastes, IMHO.

The substance of these seemingly anagrammatically named artists that I gloriously witnessed (in person, actually there, youtubeless, surrounded by other humans) performing at the Calgary Folk Festival last week is as indisputable as is your probable unawareness of their existence. Go figure, how could such beautiful and substantive music slip under our collectively networked full time online radars?

I mean, I am constantly being reminded on my travels during after-party-small-talk and by the self-digesting media that “the world is a small place”. With all these networks of TWITTER, GoogleCHAT,Myspace, Facebook, Skype, email and the worldwide web keeping us informed and safe aren’t we all being brought “closer together”? If the glossy backlit airport terminal advertising panels are anything to go by all I need (providing I have high speed broadband) for a fulfilling, meaningful and connected life is some quasi motivational guru catch phrase that distils the essence of a Tiger Woods 3 iron swing and the sleek black reflective lines of a Lexus Hybrid. But I digress. I am guilty of the same geographically ignorant and glib remark during a conversation I shared with the unforgettable songwriter and blues guitarist Chris Smither.

The conversation went along the lines of us making some random connection resulting in our having a friend in common to which I goofily(*) remarked “huh, the world is such a small place” to which the insight-ready Smither instantly retorted in eloquent southern drawl “but as my daddy used to say ‘I wouldn’t want to have to paint it!’”.

So here’s my hunch. Drawing upon the wisdom of Chris Smither’s father, a George Bernard Shaw quote “The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong” and my own mothers observation that “The more something is advertised the less it is needed” I commit Disney sacrilege and propose that “it’s not such a small world after all”.

Maybe the world just appears small because this is what the communication medium of our age brings to bear upon our elite psyche and the fact that the minority of humanity with broadband aren’t dodging bullets or going hungry nor are they hanging out with the majority of humanity that is. If George Bernard Shaw was around today maybe he would tweak his own quote along the lines of “The minority is sometimes self righteous; the majority always wronged”.

TWITTER me that as I could do with a distraction from the irony that George Orwell tipped off the capitalist think-tanks who then reverse engineered his ‘1984′ so that instead of the state allowing no privacy for its citizens, we subjects now willingly surrender it as a seemingly harmless and entertaining adjunct to consumer convenience and it’s nemesis, terrorism.

Our society would be consumed by irony if it didn’t have such an appetite for it.

But I digress, the reason for this post is for some fun, tasty, free and brisk picking and irish whistling that I recorded with Ormond Waters to one of my tunes “Tammys Jig” .. please enjoy and share with impunity as no one is watching you, I hope.

tammys-jig-duet-1

(*)Goofy is the subordinate lapdog to the Disney Inc. icon Mickey Mouse who in turn is the cute and innocent mousy personification of the western consumer capitalism ideal, IMHO.