David J. Widmann

All articles tagged as being “with photos” now have photos.  A radical idea, to be sure, but I think the world is ready for it.

Thanks to my discovery of the Toronto Public Library’s newspaper article database, all of the articles I have published in this century have now been added to this web site.  Cutting and pasting is so much easier than typing.  Today, I completed my archive of articles from The Sudbury Star, Cobour Daily Star, and Port Hope Evening Guide newspapers.  Not only that, but I discovered that while working for those papers, articles I wrote also ran in the North Bay Nugget, Kirkland Lake Northern News, and the Sault Star.

I love the library.

Oh, one other thing I noticed was that some of the articles in my “Articles with Photos” section don’t actually include the photos.  Duh.  I’ll get that fixed.

Today, I entered 9 articles from the month of June, 1995.  This was the month that Arvin Kashyap, editor and publisher of The Spill Magazine, went to India for several weeks and left the magazine in my hands.  Not only did I redesign the whole layout of the magazine (my first experience using QuarkXpress, by the way), but I managed to write my regular column, a feature article, 4 album reviews and get articles published in What’s On Queen and What’s Up Toronto Magazine/Enternet Online.

Looking back, I wonder how I did it.  And I wonder if I could ever do it again.

I’ve had a lot of reading and photo cataloging to do over the past couple of weeks, but today I got a few more articles into the ol’ archives.

Today’s work covered the month of May, 1995. From The Spill Magazine, there are reviews of Cluster, Dark Archies, and Hayden; a feature article on the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, and an installment of my net.buzz column in which I spent far too much time writing about Courtney Love. From What’s Up Toronto Magazine (aka Enternet Online Services), there’s a review from a band that had a bunch of Bourbons in it called Don’t Talk, Dance.

Part of the Bourbons article included a snippet of what their online presence was back in 1995. This included an announcement of a then-upcoming online appearance on the old Prodigy Internet Service. Reading that, I suddenly remembered that I had a hand in that event. I was working for Prodigy, doing my jazz music portal for them, and I contacted the Canadian Prodigy rep, hooked him up with one of the members of the band, and got the Bourbons set up with a Prodigy account.

It’s amazing the things you forget about, eh? That would have been really good resume fodder back in the day. I wonder if I actually used it.

I’ve finally finished entering all my articles and reviews from the April 1995 issue of The Spill Magazine.  Dang, but I was a prolific little so-and-so that month.  Today I typed in reviews of Hazel, Morphine, and a joint review encompassing albums by Sacrilicious and Thin White Rope.

Most amusing to me, though, is my review of local outfit Victims of Luxury.  I thought that band was gonna be huge, and it turns out they broke up less than a year after I wrote my praise of them and their album.  Looking back, I had a really lousy record of picking The Next Big Thing.  What ever happened to Strawman, Goldfish, Rosie O’Shea, Heavy Water and the who-knows-how-many  others?

Ah, well.  Even though those bands are lost to music history, I am enjoying this trip through my old published work.  Lots of memories of lots of fun times… with a few scenes missing here and there, especially at the beer-sponsored events.

My excursion into the mine of forgotten bands of 1995 continues.  Today I added reviews of local indie punk dudes Adventure Playground and bombastic funk soul brothers The Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, as well as a feature article on Brit-pop darlings, Suede.

Yeah, I know that the term is supposed to be “bated breath,” but that’s how it was published.  I’m trying to avoid falling into the trap of self-editing and putting these articles online as close to as they were published as possible, warts and all.

Just one article today: another installment of my old net.buzz column for The Spill.

It’s funny, but part of me looks at that old column and can’t help thinking that at one point in my life, I was somewhat innovative.  Here I was, writing about an internet radio station back when a 56kbps dialup connection to a BBS was the way most people got online, and very few even knew what the “World Wide Web” was.  No one had any idea of what it would become.

And then part of me reads it and thinks that I was just a geek with no life.  The truth, I’m sure, lies somewhere in the middle.

Today I added the “News” feature to the site.  I also added a few articles from The Spill Magazine, circa 1995: reviews of John Gogo, Grim Skunk, and The Mighty, Mighty Bosstones, as well as an article about Rosie O’Shea and the first installment of my net.buzz column.  Ah, the old days of the Internet.  I can’t remember the last time I actually typed the word “Usenet.”