Member Since: 22/09/2007
Band Website: www.catkidd.com
Band Members: Catherine Kidd: writer, performer; DJ Jack Beets: he makuh de beets; David Cronkite: music for Dream of Friends; and others have passed through to help also: Georges Kandalaft, Geoff Agombar, Taien Chan...
Influences: In terms of musical influences I should take this question more seriously so let me get back to you on this, my previous entry was just ranting about wretched East Vancouver in the fucking '80s, but further back than that Aretha was the first voice I heard which made the hair stand up on my arms, when I was about nine or ten, before that I liked the soundtrack from The Entertainer. I wanted to sing and dance and act and play piano and gargle Gershwin all at once.
The first time I heard Tom Waits and understood my destiny (well no, not really) I was in Antigua, Guatemala, when I was travelling with an American journalist named Tom Long, having hitchhiked to Central American from Vancouver, B.C. with a trucker named Tom Weeks in about 1985,
Tom waits long weeks?
I was only eighteen too politicized for my own personal safety but there was a march into Ciudad de Guatemala, woman carrying placards with pictures of their husbands and sons and i heard sad sad stories of how much these men were missed. Some feeling is too big to connect to, this is true, but Music is the electrical cable you need to plug the thing in and make it run, even run smoothly and beautifully. .
Dostoyevsky. My friends. Beckett. Iris Murdoch. Joyce. Art & Illusion by E.H.Gombrich. Antjie Krog. Biologist Karl von Frisch. Jungle Capitalism by Peter Chapman. Alice in Wonderland. Edgar Allan Poe. Edward Gorey. Albert Camus. Dracula, by Bram Stoker. Pearl S. Buck. Alice Munro. Grapes of Wrath. bpNichol. Beowulf. Roo Borson. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. Hamlet. Guy de Maupassant. Alligator Pie. Eileen Garrett. Dr.Seuss. The Existentialists. Erich Fromm. D.T.Suzuki. David Suzuki. Blake. Burns. The Romantics. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Daphne duMaurier. Joseph Campbell. Sigmund Freud. Upanisads. Kurt Vonnegut. Madame Bovary. Zora Neale Hurston. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Joseph Conrad. Zen poetry. Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson. The Awakening by Kate Chopin. Margaret Lawrence. Charlotte’s web. J.D Salinger.
zoology, canine telepathy,
theatre, writing, making things with
cut paper, yoga, second-hand
clothing, bands,
voice/beat, any ocean, ginger,
my green dress & pink boa,
re-learning everything, goats,
clean water, strong belief that there's a point to this.
Anything Hitchcock. Also, just saw The Philedelphia Story, starring Kathryn Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart. I thought King Kong was awe-some because I love to watch a giant gorilla who actually looks like a gorilla. I like large animals, when I was a little girl I had a crush on a bull.
did i just watch three wretched crime dramas in a row? i must be depressed or something.
I should try to wash the dishes around 5ish, so i can pretend i'm not watching Dr. Phil and/or Oprah. maybe they can cure me of television.
Come to thing Of it, probably the only reason I ever watch the darn crime dramas
is that i used to love to watch Perry Mason. As a defence attorney, he only ever lost one case,
the Case of the Terrified Typist.
But it was one of those 'Even though he lost the case, he remained the Moral Victor' type situations.
Hamilton Burger, the lawyer for the prosecution, couldn't get a single thing right, on the moral scoreboard.
But how could he? I mean, with a name like Ham Burger?
There's billions served, as they say, but few moral victories are won for their sake.
Anyway I think I had a bit of a crush on the earlier Perry Mason. Not Raymond Burr,
mind you, the character. Decent fellow, nice eyes.
The update is even better though. No television at all. Amazing how many things a person can do instead of watch television, endless really.
Sounds Like: Catherine Kidd’s performance style makes me think of Dr. Seuss meets Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom meets David Suzuki meets Vaudeville meets Patti Smith. Yeah, it is that good. It’s a musical theatre crash course in punk rock zoology.
-- T.L. Cowan for the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival 2006
"Tom Waits dissolved in a lime margarita," Alan Hindle, Only
Record Label: www.conundrumpress.com
Type of Label: Indie