Broken Book

Everybody needs a little time away. 

After a lengthy self-imposed Broken Social Scene hiatus I’ve recently been listening to a lot of  the collective’s music again. So, to fill the lull before the spring releases I thought I'd revisit Stuart Berman’s book on the band. 

It’s been almost two years since its release and I never did get around to posting anything on the book. Perhaps because the project took on some pretty epic proportions. It was a huge year-long labour but a labour of love. So, for your listening and viewing pleasure here’s the BSS tome (and the project that came close to breaking me a time or two) This Book is Broken.

Hope Burned

From the synopsis of Brent Laporte’s haunting first novel: 

You sit down at the weathered harvest table to write a letter to your son. 

You need to explain the horrific events of the night, the circumstances that stained your hands with so much blood — the horrors that led you to take 

the lives of your own father and grandfather.

You journey back through darkness, deliberately, tentatively, to recover your own childhood. You compose your captivity, your torture, and the 

brutality of the men you’ve just killed. This was life on the farm: the strange and unspeakable things that went on.

And still, hope burned.

I used the combination of my own chicken scratch penmanship knocked out of a dark and dreary photo of the inside of my barn in all it’s creepy glory taken before its slow renovation began last year. I thought it important to use an actual ball point pen (not a brush or quill) to accurately depict the moment in time and mind. The type, although, harkens both the grown man and the childhood being remembered. I carried a hint of the “weathered harvest table” onto the book’s spine. Finally to bring at least a little light of hope to the cover a added a tiny silhouette of a hawk seen soaring in the blue sky above through a missing board in the barn’s hay loft.

Isolation

Proof that any great design is as much about the space in between.

This is Pete Townshend’s isolated guitar track from The Who’s 1978 release Who Are You.