In a previous life I was managing editor of Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp Press, one of Canada’s leading independent book publishers.

I have much to be thankful for of my experiences there, including the chance to work with many talented writers and artists. I received an e-mail from one of them today.

Wayde Compton was announcing the launch of the first title from Commodore Books: Fred Booker’s Adventures in Debt Collection.

Wayde Compton created three books for Arsenal while I was there: 49th Parallel Psalm, Performance Bond, and the anthology Bluesprint, which collected literature and orature from black writers who had lived in British Columbia.

He’s a brilliant and thoughtful writer who is committed to the conservation of a history that is all but forgotten and ignored in Vancouver and B.C.: the fact that there once was a thriving black community in the city.

Commodore Books is the “first and only black literary press in western Canada.” Wayde has come together with Karina Vernon and David Chariandy (that’s them pictured above; Wayde’s on the left) to create the publishing house. They’ve affiliated with the venerable West Coast Line.

From the Commodore Books Web site: “Our name recalls the Commodore, the paddle steamer which transported thirty-five black migrants from San Francisco to Victoria 147 years ago, during the Gold Rush; this small pioneer committee became the nucleus of British Columbia’s first black community.”

I wish them the best of luck.

I made the switch to Mac years ago. Not long ago enough for it to bring me any cache at all, but long ago enough that I don’t consider myself to be jumping on the bandwagon, y’know?

Safari is my browser of choice, for too many reasons to get into here.

But I’ve just been playing with the new release (2.0) of Mozilla’s Firefox, and there is an add-on that just may convince me to dump Safari: Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer.

Now, I don’t have a .mac account, so this may be something that true Appleheads are already doing, but for me – a guy who uses four different computers and three different operating systems on a daily basis – being able to synchronize my bookmarks between computers and operating systems is a killer feature, and that’s what Foxmarks does.

I’m going to overlook the fact that for this convenience to be granted me, my bookmarks – and all the data they contain – exist on a Firefox server somewhere. I’ll pretend that’s not an issue for me because now I can alter my bookmarks on one computer, and know that with one click I can make that same change on another.

Blame Mike.

It was Mike who not only got me listening to Metallica, but going to their arena concert (Calgary’s Max Bell, of all places) when they were touring the Black Album.

Previous to this, I had always turned my nose up at heavy metal, although to my credit most of the metal I had heard before this point was not true metal. I was right to hate the Mickey-Mouse-metal sounds of Def Leppard.

But Metallica was different, in part because the mix on their albums features the vocals. The heavy percussion and grinding guitars create a wall of sound, sure, but the vocals, which are appropriately angst-ridden, are clear above the chaos.

The concert was my first headbanger show. My last, too, but that’s not because I didn’t enjoy myself. Metal went underground for a long time soon after Metallica’s Black Album. Grunge was on the horizon, and rock music just seemed to disintegrate after that.

It was Mike who got me smoking, too. Bastard. Before that, I was content to be a non-smoker. Now I’m a smoker who doesn’t smoke. Which is more healthy, sure, but there are other tradeoffs.

Anyhow, I had an urge to listen to Metallica a few weeks ago, but I don’t have any of their CDs. Amazon helped me rectify that. Last week, a stack of Metallica CDs (only up to and including the Black Album in chronological terms) arrived. I’m looking forward to writing with some speed metal driving me along.

Anticipating that, it seems, is why Enter Sandman was playing on my internal stereo at six o’clock this morning. Weird sensation to wake up to.

I wrote in the Georgia Straight a couple of weeks ago that my best two Halloween costumes were a five-year-old Superman and a 32-year-old Roy Batty.

I’m not likely to be dressed in anything fancy this year, though. Just not in the spirit for the costuming the way I once was. I’ll likely walk through the office claiming to be dressed as a “haggard writer.” How lame is that?

My colleague Steve – who has this incredibly dry sense of humour, so dry in fact that I’m never sure when he’s joking – said last week that he was going to dress up as the Invisible Man.

That’s how he said it, too: “I might go as the Invisible Man.”

He just said it, and left it there.

It took me a second or two to clue in. When I figured it out and turned to look at him he was wearing the subtlest of smirks.

Tribute albums can, on occasion, be wonderful things. Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited, wherein musical hipsters of all types cover the songs of French troubadour Serge Gainsbourg, is quite interesting.

The Cardigans’ Nina Persson and Nathan Larson close out the CD with their version of Sorry Angel (which they title Angel’s Fall), and the minor-key echo of “sorry, Angel, sorry so, sorry Angel, sorry so” was running through my mind as I set the clocks back this morning.

The album has another curiousity in that Feist appears (with Gonzales and Dani) doing a version of Boomerang, as does Placebo, covering The Ballad of Melody Nelson.

This is interesting because, in the career of Leslie Feist, she once fronted a Calgary post-grunge band called Placebo.

Those were the days. Although I confess to enjoying Leslie’s new style much more.