Mildly Self Defeating

Fake Onion Headlines

2010-08-18T22:08:00.000-04:00

1) Arcade Fire Just Played a Secret Show at Your House

Sources close to Montreal indie rockers Arcade Fire confirmed that the band has just finished playing a secret 50 minute set at your house as part of a stealth promotional tour for their upcoming third album, The Suburbs (scheduled for release on August 10th). The show at your house is the most recent of a string of impromptu small-scale performances by the band in cities across the world, and was not publicized in advance on their website or on MySpace. The attendants included 5 neighbours who were passing by and became concerned about the noise, 10 music bloggers including a videographer for the influential music website Pitchfork.com, and your cat. Audience reactions ranged from rapturous awe to mild confusion. Despite their frequently volatile live performances, none of your objects in the living room where the show took place were damaged. "It's great playing in these kinds of spaces," front-man Win Butler said, while glancing at a bass amp stationed on your coffee table; "we could really feel our sonics reflecting off [your] stuff." Richard Reed Perry, Arcade Fire's multi-instrumentalist, commented favourably on the rider available for the band, mentioning that when you return home later today, you should restock your refrigerator with beer and oranges. As well, you should "buy some more of those vegan cupcakes because they're really awesome," Perry added. Arcade Fire expressed willingness to return to your house for another show, possibly when you're out for groceries tomorrow.

2) Scope of Gulf Oil Spill Almost as Grand and Tragic as HBO's The Wire, Obama States

At a press conference on the south lawn of the White House today, President Barack Obama discussed at length the devastating impact of the BP Mexican Gulf oil spill by comparing it to the critically acclaimed HBO show The Wire. "Just as the people of Baltimore were devastated at all levels of society by bureacracy and indifference, from the police force in season 1, to inner city schools in Season 4, to the blue-collar dockworkers in Season 2, the environment in the gulf area was devastated by the impact of the oil spill." Obama continued, "and yet, we must march on in our pursuit to clean up this unprecedented environmental catastrophe, much like the dogged pursuit with which Jimmy McNulty tried to capture the drug organization of Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell by tracking their telephone use on the police wire." Not wishing to divulge any spoilers to the intricately plotted show, Obama concluded his address by stating "Where's Wallace, BP? Where's Wallace?" repeatedly. Neither Wire creator David Simon, nor the Mayor of Baltimore could be reached for comments.

Everytime I Sit Around I Find That I'm Shocked

2010-06-08T00:59:00.016-04:00

This post was totally going to be about dilettantism and the Leeds indie pop band This Many Boyfriends (<3).

The last time I saw the Halifax band The Grass was three years ago. They were very country-rock, with a few Beach Boys-esque psych pop flourishes that were much better than their sub-standard 'we're not really from the South but we really get fiddles and hoe-downs' tunes. I was mostly impressed by how many pretty teenage girls were wearing their stylized t-shirts. I was 20 or so, it was almost okay.

Earlier today, someone told me The [new] Grass were performing in Ottawa again. They were apparently 'math-rock' oriented and much harder. Laughable. Fuck them, as if a bunch of dudes from Halifax who last tried to really get the chord progression of 1,000 Dollar Wedding down could nail the intensity and intricacy of interplaying interlocking guitars bass drums and melodies and play hard. It was safe. It was going to be empty. And that's the kind of music I like, because I'm empty. I was there.

As Chuck Klosterman famously said, rock music (even Rock Music, or ROCK MUSIC) will not save your life. It will definitely not cure cancer. It might not even have an impact on AIDS. What he unfamously didn't mention is that it doesn't need to do that. Rock Music, no, ROCK MUSIC [and really, MUSIC, BOOKS, FILMS, ARTWORKS], do one thing and one thing only. They make you forget that your life needs saving in the firstplace. I haven't thought about you until now, and that's only because I really want to always always remember. It usually doesn't work that way and it's an accomplishment that cannot be belittled. You [and I and everyone else I know] will not die, not tonight and not in my head [can you tell that I've been watching too much Doctor Who recently?].

Here are a few more words: Nova Scotia, loudness, intensity, the grass, rhythm, clicking, losing control, The Grass, progrock FFFW, regaining a notion of control that is not controlled, chugging beers half jumping on the stage, peanut butter, explosions, too tight to register consciously, loud loud loud fast fast loud fast, A A B B up B A, lockdown, heart, THE GRASS. Do you seriously want more?

For the record, I bought a t-shirt tonight.

Breathing In

2010-04-08T19:38:00.011-04:00

After having a bit of a tumultuous March, I've entered a period of zen, punctuated by periods of extreme intoxication [maybe they're the same, who knows?], punctuated by visits to Canada's biggest city that also has my favourite ball team. It's pretty much OK. They're hitting some timely clutch home runs.

There's this website called The Book Depository that is kind of like Amazon only it's based in Britain, is slightly less sinister and slightly cheaper, and it has a free worldwide shipping policy on any item you purchase. It's no independent corner bookstore, but you can find lots of good stuff there.

This site also has this weird option that allows you to see exactly what people all over the world are purchasing at any given moment, in real time. It's pretty amazing, addictive, and transfixing, in a very zen way. I can (and do) watch it for hours. It makes me inappropriately happy seeing someone in New Zealand purchase a book called There Are Cats in This Book. It's also totally worth following for the times the map randomly flashes and drags you somewhere else. Though most of the purchases are from the U.S, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and NZ (I guess free shipping really does its magic there), every once in a while you get a complete outlier. Someone in Iceland purchasing the first volume of All-Star Batman and Robin; someone in South Korea buying a copy of Treasure Island; someone in Cyprus buying a the first book of the Chronicles of the Necromancer - Dark Ladys Chosen; someone in Oman buying a book on SQL. Anyways, you get my point, I hope.

Oh, and listen to this, it helps:

Breathing Out.

a room full of vacuum and a room full of air look the same

2010-03-18T17:37:00.011-04:00

So I've got plans. Big plans. But that's still over a year in the future. What about the now? If I really dislike my life here enough to leave forever in a year and a bit for the sunny orange-y embrace of SoCal and whatever U.S. coast I end up on afterward, the time in between, even with a solid exit strategy in mind, could stretch forever in an anxious quagmire.

Good question, imagination. We need some short term strategic planning, drop our prices while the competition is intense and demand is plentiful. So here's the mildly self defeating plan I came up with: unilateral secession from the Ottawa scene. Hey, it worked for the south.

No more intimate acoustic shows or punk rawkouts. No more disco dance nights. It's all the same people anyways, or at most people who are around the same people. Ottawa is never about walking in a straight line, but always circling around (the same drain). It's exhausting, in that NASCAR way. I'm tired of being cripplingly anxious every time I go out. I hate always anticipating being unhappy and looking over my shoulder. So no more movie nights at the theatre [how the hell do the trailers for Greenberg make a movie that's apparently a uniquely grim and uncompromising existential black comedy look like such a generic film?] and no more trips to the Black Sheep Inn at Wakefield. No more nothing. It will be a sad blow to my poor exercises in concert photography, as well as to my chances to see my beloved Fucked Corpse (or even Caribou). But whatever, there's a fucking pillar in front of every single stage in Ottawa. You can't see shit. It's enough to drive one mad.

So fuck off live music, club nights, and big screen movies in Ottawa. Fuck off scene. You never took me anywhere, and you never once bought me a drink.

I'm going to focus inwards and settle into my comfort zone. Control what and who I experience. Spend some quality alone time with books and drinks and movies on my own. I can read every single issue of Spin magazine online now, and find out about new shit in the outside world that way. I probably hate too much stuff. Besides, couples do it all the time - they settle into a zone where they don't go out much, kind of get used to living/being with each other, and sometimes invite other couples and unfortunate singleton friends for dressy dinner parties. Why can't I do this solo? Well, I can and I will. Also, Bon Iver. Just saying.

Bonus urban fantasy short story idea:

Reincarnation exists. But you're always reincarnated as the same person and experience roughly the same events over and over and over again. There's still lots of room for individual agency and free will and that sort of junk - you can be a Wall Street shark in one life and a hippie communist in another - but people mostly don't exercise it. Mostly, they do the same things and make the same mistakes over and over and over again. But sometimes they don't. Sometimes they actually make good choices and come out happier and 'better' at the end. The other thing that exists are supernatural beings (kind of angels but not really) who watch over people and guide them from one round to the next. They think that the idea is that at the end people should achieve a nirvana like state and just be good and then disappear or be one with the cosmos or whatever, but so far it hasn't happened (as far as the protagonists of the story, two of these beings, are aware) and after watching the same people for pretty much forever they're kind of skeptical that it ever will. In the meantime, watching people do the same shit over and over for millenia and literally make the same mistakes over and over and over again is fucking boring. So boring that most 'angels' have resorted to gambling on the outcomes of every minute event in people's reincarnations - whether Joe Blow will fully butter his toast, or only do half of it, on a specific morning; whether Jane Doe put change in her right pocket or left pocket at the bar at her 30th birthday party at a bar, that kind of stuff. The 'angels' have pretty good recall, so they're aware of the various probabilities at stake. There should be an actual plot and stuff, but I haven't thought of one yet. So yeah, endless near identical reincarnations and gambling addicted angels. Someone must have done it before, but if not - copyrighted here motherfucker!

air

2010-03-14T12:20:00.008-04:00

I am becoming increasingly disenchanted with the internet. You let me down, you know? I thought I could love at least a small part of you, but who the fuck doesn't like The Rock?

I'm tired of pictures of cats and Norwegian supermodels, and people who don't talk seriously or think about anything (you bring out the worst in me), and people who intellectualize everything (you bring out the worst in me), and having money (you bring out the worst in me), and having annoyingly persistent pains on the right side of my body, and not caring enough about new music anymore. It's stupid that I'm 24 and the album that speaks to me the most at the moment is something I should have listened to and internalized years ago. But the XX are still shit - listening to them is like listening to music that doesn't exist. Why did this not sell out? I sound angrier than I intended.

Let me restart: My biggest and most persistent fear is that somewhere in the universe, a random encounter will cause matter and anti-matter to touch, and everything will end instantly without anyone even being aware of what happened. Something, nothing.

What I'm trying to say is that this is the point where we need bold plans (diagrams included) and rousing halftime speeches and sudden illuminating theoretical insights and ninth inning upside-down-inside-out rally caps.

So here's one:

1 - enroll in a Marketing doctoral program on the Best Coast.

2 - focus on some bullshit topic like "internet economy and social networks."

3 - obtain a series of bullshit jobs consulting web 12.0 companies in a medium-to-large U.S. metropolis about stuff like digital commercialization and consumer behaviour.

I am selling out and never looking back.

I really should have thought of this a couple of months ago before Sept. 2010 admissions closed, but even though I won't be doing this for the next little while, it's something to look forward and prepare to. Let me go out on a gurney.

Drugs are boring,* Romance is boring.

--------------------
* Side note - in the spirit of turning lemons into lemonade and all, here is an idea for a young-adult syfy book series: there are tiny particles that comprise the particles that comprise everything in the universe. these particles are so small (even in relation to atoms) that they do not necessarily follow the laws of physics on their own. more specifically, they can freely travel in all four dimensions. normally, they don't make extreme moves in time because it takes a ridiculous amount of energy, but it is possible. since these particles are embedded in everything, including human beings, in some cases (possibly under serious duress?) people can produce flare-ups in these particles that push them forward and backward in time for micro-seconds. this is how deja-vu is created. however, with the proper training and/or technology, some people are actually able to actively use these properties and push and pull themselves through time. of course, they are still unable to go stay there beyond a few seconds, but it's enough for these individuals to gain some very valuable information about the future. oh and an additional thing is that even with these powers, it's kind of unreliable because the future is unstable - so the future you see is the future as it exists right now with your current intentions and the current circumstances, but you could change things all the time and produce very different outcomes. so the idea for the actual book series is that the main character is a young protagonist (male or female, or maybe both in alternating chapters a la The Subtle Knife) who learns that he/she has these powers and then learns to control them and overcome some sort of a large obstacle in a way that is not at all reminiscent of Harry Potter. the clever thing is that the book series will also discuss lots of concepts about physics, the nature of time and space and quantum mechanics, giving it an educational angle of sorts not unlike old Asimov books or LOST. the concept right now is still a bit messy, but i like it. it's almost as good as my idea for a sci-fi TV movie where a descendant of time-travelling Hitler (long story) meets and tries to kill the biblical Abraham and Sarah but ends up falling in love with Sarah.

Sic Transit Gloria...

2010-02-23T00:14:00.002-05:00

but some things are worth it.

Odd Box Records, April.

Razed by Wolves - An Anti-Valentine's Day Mix

2010-02-13T14:00:00.001-05:00

You'd think that after a full year, I'd be slightly better adjusted, less volatile, more hopeful, less given to falling asleep on public lampposts, couches and floors, and less prone to sharing my inane yet embarrassingly revealing personal thoughts. Not so. As a direct consequence (and evidence) of my lack of personal growth, here's the second annual edition of my Anti-Valentine's Day Mix:

DOWNLOAD LINK

Track by track run-through [if it gets tedious, you can just listen to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours instead. The idea is roughly the same, I think.]:

1. Slow Club - It's Christmas and You're Boring Me

Let's start at the beginning. A simple and stately falling out of love song without historionics. Sometimes nothing turns out to be better than something.

2. Ace Bushy Striptease - Iluvya (Hate Version)

The two vocalists singing/talking over each other on this song really grab me. Relationships - two people attempting to come together and reconcile their disparate personalities and idiosyncrasies - rarely take the form of organized discussions and negotiations. More often it's jumbled argumentative cross-talk that belies cross-purposes. Oftentimes, you don't even care what the other says and overlook blemishes and canyons of incompatibility. And then someone always wins at the end.

3. The Field Mice - Canada

It's hard to understand the full extent of your deficiencies as a person until you've been soundly rejected. And by soundly, I mean when you've pretty much decided that this (they) is it, and they didn't (see song #1). Double this when it comes to being rejected for someone else. It literally means that another person (who you've been building up as something incredible) considered you for a while, thought about all of your qualities, and said "not for me, I'll take that instead." Crushing would be the word to describe this, I suppose. For a while it seems pretty ridiculous and almost impossible as well. So in a completely contradictory fashion, however, it also makes you feel totally superior to everyone else - to the person who rejected you (for rejecting everything you have to offer for something less), to the person he/she rejected you for (for being so obviously inferior to you), and to everyone else (for not seeing the extent of the tragedy of the situation).

4. The Exlovers - You Forget So Easily

More than any current working band (and possibly more than any band with the exception of the aforementioned Fleetwood Mac) the Exlovers ARE Anti-Valentine's Day. [To paraphrase Nathan Rabin's description of the emotional impact of the upcoming film Blue Valentine] Every single line/second in this song is designed with precision to unearth and bring forward the most painful romantic memories you've always wanted to forget. Forgetting easily, yeah right.

5. Matt and Kim - Lessons Learned

A song so upbeat, it's almost possible to miss that it's actually pretty bleak. "Thinking about tomorrow won't change how I feel today."

6. Blue Roses - I am Leaving

I always want to leave. I always think that everywhere I'm not is better and I could be happier there. [Leaving also has a particular interest for me right now. There's a measure of discomfort I feel in Ottawa that I can't seem to overcome. It follows me.] I guess you could call me an optimist.

7. Jens Lekman - I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You

Jens always sings about women leaving him / not loving him, so it feels like he's finally getting his due at first by telling the same thing to his significant other. But then you start thinking about how the girl/woman he's involved with actually likes him and how he's [you're] a terrible person for stringing her along for a while and then leaving her (but still talking about kissing her) and it turns out to be a not so empowering downer after all. It's the endless romantic cycle of misery. Everyone is a shit to everyone else who is not their ideal match.

8. New Order - Love Less

This song is a pretty fascinating and unsettling combination of accusatory and defensive tones and weird stalker-y undertones. Yet, it still manages to be affecting because for all of its confusion, the one overriding emotion here is clear and damn near universal: needy desperation. We've all been there, and we all keep coming back for more.

9. Jay Walk Snail - The Boy Gets Lonely

The boundaries between friendships and relationships are thin and porous and leak at the most inopportune moments and eventually break down under the pressure and flood the chambers and lead the boat to sink like a rock to the bottom of the ocean. How's that for a confused and mixed metaphor?

10. The Walkmen - The Rat

This is the Deer Hunter (film, not band) of romantic PTSD. Empty Empty Empty. I don't think that there's anything I can say about this one that will say any more than the actual song does. Let's just go with the visceral reaction then: this song makes me want to pound my head against the wall until I see stars I can walk on. It's the drums, right?

11. Coeur de Pirate - Corbeau

The best part about listening to a foreign song (or even a song that's hard to understand) is that you can kind of gauge its mood and then make up your own lyrics that kind of make sense as you go along. Seriously, try it, it's amazing. The trouble is that when you're in a particular mood, pretty much every song you hear and don't quite understand sounds like it's about breaking up or being alone. Anyways, I'm 80% sure this is a break up song (c'est fini avec toi?). If not, this is the saddest song about any other subject ever.

12. The National - Wasps Nest

For the record, I really hate it when people love a song because "it totally talks about what happened to me and it's like it's written about me!" But some songs can't help but bring back a very particular person when you listen to them. More than any other National song, this is all about being stuck. It perfectly reproduces the conflicting desire to run away and towards something and someone. Bright lights for moths.

13. Gigi - No, My Heart Will Go On

Time doesn't heal, as much as it kills.

14. No Age - My Life's Alright Without You

I love love love how this song seems to be taking breaths between invectives. And then it ends in this massive cathartic ranting explosion. Seems like an apt conclusion.

in which we're going to walk around this city with our headphones on to block the noise

2010-02-01T23:46:00.012-05:00

This is going to be a bit of an homage to/ripoff of This Recording. Deal with it.

"then i'll dig a tunnel / from my window to yours"

'Neighbourhood #1 Tunnels' is probably the best thing Arcade Fire ever recorded, but it's still not one of my top 15 songs of the last decade. It might sneak into the top 50 around number 30 or so because it's a damn good song, but I've never been excessively obsessed with Arcade Fire. I think that they have a couple of amazing singles, and many more songs that turn out to be far too overwhelming by overdramatizing everything in a very obviously melodramatic way.

I do think, however, that the couplet from "Tunnels" quoted at the top of this post is probably the best distillation of the mood and sensibility of last decade as expressed in music, and possibly in any art-form [if you really want me to go allegorical on this shit - this is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in two lines. Think about it. I just blew your mind, right?].

Living in Canada helps. Then you know how it feels like to dread stepping outside, to always want to stay in under the blankets next to the TV and the radiator and books and sleep, and how to counter these urges by wanting to see people and live. Everyone I know who lives in Canada in the winter wishes that there was some sort of a tunnel to take them to a friend's house, their workplace, or the closest bar. It's the only thing you can wish for at -20. Well, that and the ability to hibernate for the winter. It's why there's been a Canadian feature film and countless local legends about people staying indoors for weeks and months that are ingrained in the national psyche as much as the Gordie Howe hat trick.

But that's not all. We're isolated, but we're also close. Everyone is an island, don't tell me they aren't; I spend more than eight hours a day staring into a computer - how could another human being know me or what I think at any given moment? [Hell, that's how I get away with not doing work but pretending that I am. Anyway...] But Facebook, Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter, whatever stereoscopic 3d virtual reality networking platform comes out tomorrow, these are all our windows to each other. There's no point in posting 140 character messages of various degrees of banality and personal revelation unless you're hoping that people will read them and feel like they know you better and respond. It's a shaky enterprise without much foundation in fact. Tunneling through rock and snow and soil to reach someone somewhere.

So we try to dig tunnels, and sometimes (most of the time) these tunnels collapse, and sometimes the windows are closed, but other times, they're open and it's warm.

Pictures are stolen from various Flickrs. Sorry.

Won't This Decade Ever End? Ten Albms from the Last Ten Yrs

2010-01-21T14:12:00.005-05:00

1. Kanye West - "The College Dropout": sped up soul music + awkward rapping about working at the Gap = longevity in my books. Also, it's the album that made hip-hop palpable to me as a genre.

2. Los Campesinos! - "Hold On Now, Youngster"/"We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed": I could make a pretty strong argument that these guys are the new Smiths in terms of musical and lyrical density and creating really engaging melodrama. Plus, you can dance your face off to both. Two nearly flawless albums.

3. The Shins - "Oh, Inverted World": Because Natalie Portman says that it will change your life. Also, because it's the first album that I ever REALLY loved - and in a watershed moment, it introduced me to indie music, as looking up this album online led me to a review in an obscure publication called Pitchforkmedia.com...the rest is history. Plus it's one of the best albums I've heard that works together as a unit (all the way from the packaging to the sticker on the CD to the first song to the last song).

4. Broken Social Scene - "You Forgot It In People": I don't think that anyone crammed quite as much stuff (music/performers/instruments) into a single album before and made it sound as coherent. Every single song sounds completely different, and every single song is a single.

5. Sigur Ros - "Agaetis Byrjun": I've never heard anything else that's even remotely similar to this. Ever. It's also one of the most beautiful and majestic albums I've ever heard. Hard to believe it was made by humans. Sonars can make you cry.

6. Wilco - "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot": Hugely hits the sweet-spot between massive pop tunes and songs that play around with structure and interesting sounds [I think that could probably go as a guideline to music I like in general / from this decade].

7. Bon Iver - "For Emma, Forever Ago": Bon Iver literally changed my idea of what can be done by a singer-songwriter. Now that I've listened to it for more than a year, it sounds a whole lot more familiar and I can take out distinct traditional musical ideas from it, but at first it just sounded like this massive wall of new sounds that blew me away.

8. Bright Eyes - "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning": I've always thought that Connor Oberst is one of the best lyricists of this decade, but I also felt like he's never had enough discipline / was too self indulgent to pull it all together into an album. Except for this one - here he totally nails it. It's personal and vaguely political in a genuine way. It's also the best Ryan Adams album ever made, which makes it the fourth or fifth best Gram Parsons album ever made. And that means a whole lot to me.

9. The Strokes - "Is This It": I've actually thought a lot about whether or not it will go in my top 10 of the decade. Here's why I decided it fits: In 2007, I heard Basia Bulat's cover of "Someday" and was flabbergasted by how good the song is (I actually had to google the lyrics before I remembered who it was by originally). So I decided to listen to the whole "Is This It" album again, but I realized that one of my friends from high school borrowed it right before he left for Winnipeg, way back in 2004. So I downloaded a couple of the songs, and I loved it so much (again) that I decided to buy it (again). It's the only album I've ever bought twice, and I think that if the 2001-me and the 2007-me (who are very different people) loved it that much, it has to be one of my favourite albums from this decade.

10. The Hold Steady - "Boys and Girls in America": This was a really brutal choice, especially because I ALWAYS fast forward one of the songs on this album (#4 - Same Kooks). HOWEVER, (i) this album has been my default driving/walking-home-form-a-big-night-out album for the last three years, and (ii) for whatever reasons, this album made Bruce Springsteen understandable to me, and made me love "Born to Run" and every other band/album that sounded like "Born to Run" (eg. The Gaslight Anthem and The Constantines). That's pretty big - Springsteen-anthem big.

Also,

Ghostface Killah - "Fishscale," LCD Soundsystem's "Sound of Silver," The National's "Boxer," Bloc Party's first album, Wolf Parade's first album, No Age's "Weirdo Rippers."

Disclaimers:

a) I don't listen to Radiohead or Animal Collective for weird personal reasons. So basically, you can take out any two albums off the list (except for Kanye) and replace them with "Kid A" and "Strawberry Jam" or "Feels" or something.

b) I'm not sure about including more recent albums from 2009 because I have no idea how they will age. For example, I love "Bitte Orca" now, but possibly I won't like it as much in the future? It's hard to know about these things [eg. if I made this list a few years ago, Stars would be slam dunk]. So potentially, this one is in as well. But it feels like too big of a list to be this uncertain.

2009 Great Escape to Brighton, Day 2

2010-01-20T22:02:00.006-05:00

because, apparently, this blog still exists on google, and because this will never see the light of day anywhere else (narcissism galore):

Contrary to popular opinion, rum and energy drinks mix well. Especially when yr out to a show so early that the club (Revenge) hasn’t even opened yet and it’s cold and raining in the south of England and you understand why 18th century explorers really wanted to discover places that were different and warmer and southen-er. Anyway, here we are huddling underneath a large steel doorway drinking Jolt, Bolt, Zolt, whatever it’s called it’s making me feel warm. It is going to be a good night.

We go in.

Mystery Bands - 730ish - The first band is somehow just finishing up despite the fact that the place only opened five minutes ago. [maybe it was ten. Time perception is not my strongest asset.] It’s ok though, they’re not that great, a bit too jagged to be likeable and a bit too soft to be loveable. The second band uses mostly keyboards and boy-girl harmonies. They are the right kind of accompaniment to observe that roughly 85% of the girls in Brighton (and maybe 95% of the girls around us) are currently wearing short skirts and leather jackets. They also try to look soft but end up looking a bit scary [I note that I obviously have some women issues]. But the drinks are too expensive and there is something better happening not too far away (isn’t that always the case?) so we get out.

Mystery Jets - 8 - On the one hand, we can’t get any wetter, so waiting in line is sort of okay. On the other hand, we are waiting in a VERY long line. [On the third hand, on the opposite side of the road there’s a really nice park and I think the Brighton Pavilion is somewhere around there as well, so I feel cultured and worldly like George the 3rd, a man who was not daunted by the most gigantic word in the dictionary.] Hector’s House is warmly and invitingly winking at us from the near distance (a mirage?). We saw Calories there last night and they were heart-explodingly good, so a precedent is already set. And besides, the drinks there are famously cheap and the bartenders are famously swift.

We break formation and head over.

Hospital Bombers - 810 - Violin, guitar, bass, and drums = classic rock’n’roll quartet? If it isn’t, It sure as hell should be. The band is enthusiastic and they sing about girls and heartbreak and themselves and how rock music is the devli’s music which is all true you know - fuck the world, fuck Radiohead, just keep telling me how unhappy young people are and I’ll take it hook line and sinker for the next four years or so and then I’ll reconsider. We engage in an involved argument over whether they sound more like Pavement, Los Campesinos!, or The Thermals. No one wins. They sound like all of them. This is good. We are later surprised to learn that they’re from the Netherlands. International Twee(x)core Underground! I purchase a tape, and tell the violin/bass player that I’ll put it right next to my Crooked Rain tape. She is visibly chuffed. Time to go elsewhere.

Basement Band at the Ocean Rooms - 845 - They are all from India, and they make some jokes about the British weather [I think]. Understandable. They sound like…who knows…Indie rock? We’re just killing time anyway, and we’re okay with it, and they’re okay with it too, I think, because at least we’re there and not somewhere else, and maybe the way that we half hide them from the group behind us makes them sound better and more epic and more distant and cool (although they’re from India already, so they’re pretty distant and cool) for those people (who could be record executives or eNeMEe writers or Apple ad men for all anyone knows). The bar is selling/giving away shots of sambuca for a pound. Moments later, twin trails of black liquorice are warming their way down throats. This scenario repeats itself.

Joy Formidable - 9ish - We meet up with more of us, so now we (WE) are larger, stronger, and more prepared to push our way through crowds. This is useful, because the Joy Formidable [say it with me now in a French accent: Ju-a Formida-bleu] show is packed/rammed. They operate with a carpet of distortion pedals on the floor, though distortion is an ugly word for something so elemental and pounding and pretty and penetrating. SEX is a sign that flashes to the right of the stage. We are not sure what it means, but Ritzy (that’s the tiny blonde haired singer/guitarist who looks like she should have wings) and Rhydian (that’s the bass player and Ritzy’s husband) have to be it as they move towards each other away from each other towards the audience and back. For weeks afterwards, I want every single song I hear to have high and urgent “ooh-ooh” backing vocals.

WE split up. We (they) want to go see Times New Viking. A very respectable choice, and it would have been a great show to catch, but we (we) go elsewhere.

Vivian Girls (Pavilion Theatre) - Hazy. My head is swimming a little bit at this point and I know that we reach a dividing line: men, boys, women, (Vivian) Grrrls. Fuck divisions, revisions, decisions, indecisions - More drinks! The stage is in a large auditorium and it appropriately resembles a school dance where there are clusters of people milling about and wearing clothes that are too tight/old for them despite the fact that they know better. We don’t know better. The music is thick and viscous and it envelops us and smoothes our hair, pats us on the back and punches us in the stomach, all friendly like [and the girls and the haze make me think of someone that I really shouldn’t be thinking about].

We’re out of cash. I go out. There are no cash machines, or lights, anywhere. Crowds of people with plastic congregate on street corners, lost. I don’t know where to look. Sometime later, I step back inside and I am warm again.

We want to go see Holy Fuck, but it’s too busy, and then we want to see Dananananakroyd but it’s too busy, and is there any place to get a drink in this town? We head back to the theatre, we’ve heard good things about Abe Vigoda but haven’t heard them, the band was always slightly out of reach, part of the next hype cycle.

Abe Vigoda - 11? - What the hell is “tropical punk”? We expect palm trees, but it’s the same space as the Vivian Girls. Closer maybe, there’s a bit less white noise and everyone is closer together, closer to the stage and to the band. There is almost no space at all, suffocating and liberating at the same time. The music is abrasive and it’s welcoming, pushing us into each other in waves; we are all in this together, co-conspirators, co-jumpers, co-dancers. However long the show lasted, at the end, there are more people on stage - the Grrls come out and sing and there are yet more people there, the singer is waving, the band is leaning forward, we see our chance and we rush upwards, upwards, upwards. Somehow, we have a bass. Somehow, we are jumping/standing on top of an amp. Somehow, we fall. Actually, that last one probably doesn’t count under the “somehow” heading - I know exactly why we fall - we’re standing on a tiny fucking amp and trying to dance and play bass even though we can’t dance and we can’t play bass. The landing is soft. We are in an abevivianpeopleusweusgirlsaeronautswevigodameotherpeople pile.

We are waved off the stage by security.

The rest of the night is a bit of a blur. But who cares, you know? It probably wouldn’t have been interesting to read about anyway. All I know is that I wake up the next morning in a bed, which is pretty neat, and that unlike the other times when you go hard and feel very empty afterwards, I feel almost content. Bring on day three. Well done Brighton.

Four Sweaty Boys With Guitars Tell Me Nothing About My Life

2009-07-24T10:12:00.008-04:00

Allie Hanlon

I could talk about the lo-fi hazy josie and the pussycats vivian girls girl group wavves without overloading the monitors aesthetic. Instead, I will tell you to listen to the second song on her MySpace, "Badd News," and will express how good it is via a lengthy and repetitive string of expletives.* Prepare yourselves, gentle readers. It's really really fucking goddamn bloody fucking fucking cocksucking fucking cowshitting bloody fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking bloody goddamn good. It sounds like something sweet that you taste and then slowly realize is not really sweet but actually slightly sour and tangy in a pleasant and interesting way. And vice versa.

Why does she not have a cassingle or something on Bruised Tongue yet?

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* I sure am glad now that I didn't do my initially intended family friendly blog that would focus on christian metal and hardcore. Then I wouldn't be able to swear, and I'd have to somehow respond to this.

While We R Gone (Parting Salvo)

2009-05-13T10:06:00.006-04:00

Don't get too excited, all of the stuff on retirement still holds. However, I figured that it would be reasonable to give you a reading suggestion for while I'm off. So, without further ado: Amiga Power. Oh, and Kristy Nease's The Scene Unseen.

Despite the fact that it's hosted by our friendly local neighbourhood media conglomerate CanWest, and despite being updated nearly as infrequently as this blog, it actually offers a pretty illuminating and in-depth look at the Ottawa art/music scene. It also impressively doesn't automatically fellate every single band that figured how to make music just because they're from the same area code as the writer (quite unlike some other local blogs).

Enjoy, and thanks for all the fish.

Calling It Quits (aka We're Finally Dead Now)

2009-05-10T16:01:00.005-04:00

If you haven't noticed, things have been a bit sparse around here recently, post-wise. They'll be even sparser in the future.

I've announced my retirement from this blog more often that Roger Clemens and Michael Jordan combined. And, like these shining examples of baseball integrity and prowess (respectively), I fully intend to limp off the field in shame.

Please allow me to explain: it's not you, it's me. More specifically, I've recently written two posts [one about the ending of the movie Adventureland, which I didn't like, and the other about the band Evening Magazine, which I did like, and about how they don't sound like the Arcade Fire (listen to them! they don't!)], and somehow, despite the concise summaries presented above, I could not avoid filling them with oblique and not very oblique references to my personal life. Granted, part of the appeal of this (or any blog) blog is/was [hello? anyone out there?] the fact that it's my personal and individual take on things; but, this is becoming dangerously close to the type of personal dirty laundry airing I explicitly wished to avoid. Looking over the last dozen or so of my posts, the trend is definitely apparent.

So as much as I'd like to play out my minor emotional crises over the internet, I think that it's best for all involved (i.e. me) to take some time off blogging. At least for now. I do have a few new ideas for non-self-centered internet related writing projects, so this shouldn't be the last time you hear from me.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Or for googling for pictures of Twilight.

Lemon out!

PROPAGANDA FROM THE FUTURE

2009-03-30T06:15:00.008-04:00

Ace Bushy Striptease are big in Ottawa

[CLICK ON THE PICTURES FOR LARGER AND CRISPER IMAGES]

We Ain't Dead Yet!

2009-03-09T04:49:00.010-04:00

Just hibernating.

To prove that, here are my original thoughts about Pitchfork(media)'s recent redesign:

IT STINKS!

I didn't really like the old pale blue design either, but at least everything was on the same fucking page. News was right there on the left, album reviews were in the middle, and track reviews/features on the right. It was fairly utilitarian, and sometimes the search function didn't work, but it was comprehensible! Especially for people who, like myself, have moved on from obsessively reading and memorizing every scrap of information P4K threw at us in favour of brief scans for interesting things.

Now when you go to Pitchforkmedia.com, or rather, sorry, the new and elegantly renamed Pitchfork.com, you get a boring white on grey background that looks not unlike the Apple website, or an iPhone ad [or the DrownedinSound site]. Which is really confusing because it also includes a giant iPod touch ad banner that automatically interacts/interferes with the rest of the website. And then you start scrolling down and your mind quakes.

Are the designers living in some sort of a bleak futuristic dystopia (I'm specifically thinking of The Island)? Why do they need to divide the screen into so many confusing small indistinguishable boxes? Surely, this is not the most efficient way of disseminating information. There are the record reviews - which are now a very small box showing only one cover and description at a time, and that take up less space than the Best New Music box and the Pitchfork.tv box next to it. Way to build up the brand, but aren't snarky and snooty record reviews are what we originally came here for? Then there are the features, which are divided into "articles," "interviews," and "columns" (which are essentially more interviews). There is also a "spotlight" section on the bottom, which includes MORE interviews. Yep, this is going to be a long...eternity. P4K also now has a new "Track Reviews" section (which is something they used to have way back and that I'd been hoping they'd ressurect), but they also disingeniously kept their old Forkcast section right next to it. Does this mean that some tracks are now going to get two writeups, one positive and one normative? The mind boggles.

To be fair, there are some glimmers of hope in the darkness (or in the bland grey-whiteness). The top banner is nicely organized. They also added some new and fairly useful sections - the aforementioned track reviews, adding "tours" and "charts" sections to their news (so you can make fun of Other Music costumers' tastes in a timely manner), and splitting Best New Music into best new albums, best new tracks, and best new reissues (which would probably be...nearly all of them?).

Overall though, I find the new design to be much less intuitive and much more difficult to navigate and extract information from. Which, on the one hand, is understandable, since it means that people will stay there longer and be exposed to more advertising; but on the other hand, it minimizes the chances of "I scrolled down and saw that the fourth album reviewed today is amazing" type accidents happening, and that was part of the beauty of the old Pitchfork.

5.7/10.0

Loved? An Anti-Valentine's Day Mix

2009-02-12T04:48:00.006-05:00

Barring the outside chance of climactic seismic activity, I will be alone on Valentine's Day this year (i.e. tomorrow). This is nothing new, I've never been with anyone on Valentine's Day ever. Nevertheless, I will feel more alone this year than I've felt in, well, a long time, because, for reasons that are far too personal and involved to properly recount here, I do feel that I'm inherently unable to create or sustain a lasting romantic engagement. So I decided to channel all of my miserablist energies into creating an Anti-Valentine's Day mix. Even made a cover and everything.

HERE'S THE DOWNLOAD LINK

Here's a track by track run-through:

1. I Think I Need a New Heart - The Magnetic Fields

In previous years of being alone on Valentine's Day, the main occupation of my day would be listening all the way through the Magnetic Fields' sprawling 69 Love Songs triple album. It has been said a million times before, but it's pretty much an encyclopedic exploration of relationships or love, or of the lack of existence of the latter. This is one of the more jauntily bleak tracks.

2. No Action - Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello originally named his third album "Emotional Fascism" before changing its name to the more conventional "Armed Forces." I agree. Love and relationships are not unlike war. When you're in a relationship, to a certain extent you subsume your personality in the personality of your partner, and your whole being becomes defined by your relationship. Similarly, as a soldier at war, your whole being is defined by being a soldier at war. And that's why Post Traumatic Stress Disorder exists - when you get out, you feel like there is nothing left to define you, and you just sort of float. Elvis Costello sounds like someone who has been there, and who has come out of the other side of that tunnel.

3. How I Taught Myself To Scream - Los Campesinos!

I could have put in almost any Campesinos! track from their second semi-conceptual album about breaking up, which I've listened to with increasingly obsessive compulsiveness over the last few months. But I feel like this non-album track is best at capturing the bitterness of realizing the transience of relationships.

4. New Romantic - Laura Marling

I've already discussed this one at length here. I still really like the song, in that it helps me get a sense of the fairly alien (for me) perspective of a young girl who makes some pretty tough choices between paramours.

5. The Hymn for the Cigarettes - Hefner

Hefner, similar to Elvis Costello, manage to idiosyncratically dissect the gender wars. This song in particular is an affecting exploration of how the stuff that we like defines what we like in our partners. We always look for our complement, someone who loves all of the stuff that we love, which is both good and bad. It's good in the sense that loving the same things means that there is an inherent sense of connection, mutual understanding and communication; it takes people of a certain temperament to really be into Belle and Sebastian or Wes Anderson, for example. [This is pretty limiting in terms of a choice of partners. To quote another Los Campesinos! song, "it's not what you like, it's what you're like as a person, well I need new hobbies, that's one thing for certain."] It's also bad in the sense that with this connection come unreasonable expectations of stability.

6. Heartless - Kanye West

Kanye managed to pull a pretty remarkable feat in making a double concept album - 808 & Heartbreak. It's a concept album in content and in execution. The concept - breaking up, feeling lost and alone. The execution - chilly 808 drum machines and inhuman autotune singing. It's not a perfect marriage [umm, irony?], but it works. Sometimes. In this song.

7. No One Will Ever Love You - The Magnetic Fields

In this Magnetic Fields song, I really like the line "if you're not here, to make my sad songs more sincere..." It really shows the degree of artifice inherent in any contemporary relationship. I am basically aping Chuck Klosterman's "This is Emo" essay here, but we have all of these expectations of our relationships and significant others from movies (fuck you John Cusack!), TV shows, and books, and these will inevitably be dashed because it's impossible to live the same 90 or so minutes over and over again. We, and by "we" I mean "I," are unprepared for living in the real world and experiencing real emotions and real people.

8. I Will Never Love You More - SoKo

Listening to this song gave me the initial idea of making this mix - all the way back in the distant and mythical 2008.

9. Why Bother - Weezer

I knew I should have listened to Rivers, all the way back in grade 9.

10. If Winter Ends - Bright Eyes

Of all of Connor Oberst's 'I'm sad and broken hearted' songs (and there's probably about a million of these), this is the one that sounds least mannered and most genuine to me.

11. Love Was Dead - Laura Wolf

Tom Whyman's "indie-pop pin-up," Laura Wolf, is notable for the fact that despite having limited solo output (at least based on her MySpace), she's written both a fantastic love song (Happy New Year) and a fantastic anti-love song (Love Was Dead). You can probably guess [or um, know, if you look above] which one is more useful to me at the moment. But the interesting thing about these songs is how similar they sound - both are the products of hazy keyboards and tinny drum machines, tied together with catchy vocal melodies. Playing them straight through sounds like they're a natural progression from the former to the latter; the lovelorn declarations of "I'll follow you wherever you go" of Happy New Year decomposing into the belief that "romance is a myth and love is boring" of Love Was Dead.

12. For Emma - Bon Iver

Bon Iver is a singer, songwriter, and an escapist fantasy. It's really the last line here that makes this song, when he goes "for Emma" and then he pauses for a second, and sings "forever ago" (which actually sounds like he's saying "for Emma" again if you're not listening carefully), before segueing into an instrumental conclusion. It turns a song that could have been a bitter expression of his hang-up on Emma, into an elegaic ode to burying the past and moving on with his life. Coming out of the woods, so to speak.

13. The Ice of Boston - The Dismemberment Plan

More of a New Year's song than a Valentine's Day song. Actually, no, it's much more general than that. It's a song about being alone while you know that a very particular someone else isn't. But regardless, I basically put this one in the mix for one verse towards the end [well, for that and for the general passive aggressive lonely tone, which reminds me of the way I generally tend to conduct all of my relationships.] - "woke up at 3 AM with the radio on/ and this Gladys Knight and the Pips song on/ about how she'd rather live in his world with him than live in her own world alone/ and I lay there, head spinning, trying to fall asleep/ and I thought to myself 'Oh, Gladys girl, I love you but, oh - get a life!'" It's the kind of epiphany of personal worth and self-empowerment that I'm still waiting for.

14. I Don't Love Anyone - Belle and Sebastian

A fitting ending.

UPDATE: Alternate download link - http://www.megaupload.com/?d=FXZIEK1H

I Came, I Saw, I Conquered: Berlin (in Germany, not Kitchener, Ontario in the Past) - Pt. 1

2009-02-10T08:31:00.000-05:00

After watching the Tom Cruise playing a Nazi movie, Valkyrie, over the holidays, I had only one idea in mind. It didn't concern the quality of the film (passable), Mr. Cruise himself,* the horrors of Nazism, how close the conspirators actually came to killing Hitler (SPOILER: close, but no cigar), or anything like that. It entirely concerned how I wanted to see Germany. Luckily, I live only about seven hundred miles away.

So I went, for a weekend [which turned out to be a very long weekend, although more on that later].

I think that if there was one word I'd choose to describe East Berlin (where I've stayed, and where most of the action is. West Berlin is boring), it's strange. Here are a couple of the ways in which East Berlin is strange:

It basically looks and has the outward feel of an East European, post-Communist city. This involves most of the buildings (which are generally large Stalinist ugly apartment blocks, sometimes incongruously painted in cheerful pastel colours) looking bombed out and covered in graffiti, creepy playgrounds that also look like they survived Judgment Day, and so on. It looks fucking bleak. Again, I'm sure that there are parts of London that also look suitably bleak, but where I was staying was incredibly close to the center of the city. Soho or Camden, it ain't.
But then, it's nothing like an Eastern European city. Whereas most crumbling looking Eastenr European cities would have, at best, suitably decrepit stores selling chopped liver populating their decrepit streets, the first store I saw while walking around in East Berlin was a perfectly modern camera store specializing in Holgas and other hipster cameras. The next store over, located in a doorway that seems to have been tagged and retagged by several successive generations of crude graffiti artists, was American Apparel. All of the other stores in the area were similarly either selling some sort of fashionable clothes or accessories, or were art galleries [By the way, on a nearby street, I saw a local hipster kid taking pictures of a broken television lying on the street with an old Zenit camera. I find it to be a vaguely apt metaphor for the city as a whole.]
East Berlin is essentially an East European city that has been scooped out, and repopulated by young professionals and vaguely creative hipsters. It makes for a weird dissociative effect.
Walking around East Berlin is slightly disconcerting for another reason. Namely, the fact that the streets are extremely wide and very empty (I've read somewhere that it has one of the lowest population densities in Western Europe, mostly because of the flight of people to West Germany following reunificiation in 1990). It made me feel like I should have been about six feet taller to get a proper perspective on everything.

To be fair, maybe this isn't all Berlin's fault, but the fault of my inherently skewed sense of perspective (and not just because of my height). It was wintertime, which can make any city look bleak and strange. I have been going through some 'issues' which made me decidedly un-cheerful (and which, in a way, precipitated this moody and grown-up-like trip). Also, it was my first time being completely alone in a place where I didn't understand the language at all - I could probably live on my French, and manage to somehow understand Spanish, but my German skills are absolutely nill. Which meant that even when the Germans were very nice and courteous, conversations (or transactions) were entirely dependent on their ability to express things in English.

And then I did a whole bunch of ethnic related stuff. Berlin has an extremely impressively well-designed (all zigs and zags, with no square rooms) Jewish Museum, which does a fantastic job of avoiding the usual focus of Holocaust museums - the Jews as victims - for the much more poignant approach of showing Jewish history in Germany in general, and focusing on Jewish contributions to German and European culture, politics, science, and society.** But this wasn't the place that affected me the most. It wasn't the enveloping Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, either.

The place that affected me the most in Berlin was the partially reconstructed Neue Synagoge (New Synagogue). The New Synagogue, which used to be the main synagogue of the Berlin Jewish community, was attacked during Kristallnacht in 1938. After that, it fell into disuse during the war, and eventually part of the building (located in East Berlin, i.e. the former Soviet zone) collapsed in the mid 1950s. Only some of the building is successfully restored nowadays, and only some of the original artifacts were recovered. This means that the place is full of plaques saying stuff like: "This is where the main stage used to be. You can see a part of the original stone mosaic below." These plaques (and half reconstructed bits) really got to me, because they are exactly the same kind of exhibits you see in museums that showcase ancient Greek/Egyptian/Chinese/Assyrian art. But this wasn't something that existed 3,000 years ago. This place was fully operational and intact in 1937, 61 years ago. The idea that something had been so thoroughly destroyed 60 years ago that it requires archeological excavations to reconstruct, really brings out the needlessness and scope of the Holocaust for me in a pretty profound way.

TO BE CONTINUED...

* Just to set the record straight, I may be one of few people in the world (save for Mrs. Cruise, Suri Cruise, and various Scientologists) who do not hold a personal grudge against Tom Cruise and his behaviour. This is because I sincerely believe that all actors are egomaniacs and head cases. Is there really any difference between Tom Cruise believing in a clearly made-up anti-psychological religion of self empowerment, Val Kilmer believing in the equally goofy Christian Science, or Scarlett Johansson believing that she can credibly cover Tom Waits and Jeff Buckley songs? I don't think so. All actors, and especially Hollywood superstars, believe that they're the centre of the universe. If anything, Tom Cruise is closer to being sincere about this than anyone else (except maybe John Travolta), until a Hollywood actor/actress actually comes up with an "Well, you see, I am actually God" religion. I tend to judge actors based on their...acting and the roles they choose, and according to that rubric, Tom Cruise has been remarkably consistent, even great. The only thing I resent him for is marrying and impregnating Joey Potter.

** The Jewish Museum also supplied the (arguably) greatest disappointment of my trip. The day I went there, the museum screened three European films that touched on the subject of Jews and the Holocaust in non-conventional and interesting ways. One of those films was the 1976 Alain Delon/Jeanne Moreau movie Monsieur Klein. I've wanted to see this movie for months, and there it was, magically, waiting for me on a random day of a random visit to a random museum in Germany. Needless to say, I was excited. As I went to the screening room, the usher tried to dampen my mood by saying that the movie doesn't have English subtitles. I explained to him that though this was going to make things a bit difficult, I do know some French and I would be willing to try and slug it out. Then he told me that the movie is screened in German. I was fairly incredulous - this is after all a movie with French actors, set in France. He then explained to me that most foreign movies screened in Germany are professionally dubbed into German - apparently it's a very big industry there. As I mentioned above, I don't know any German. So I left feeling incredibly disappointed, though also puzzled at the practices of dubbing. It must be really strange to watch most films and see actors form words and sentences that have nothing to do with what you're actually hearing at the time.

A Peculiar Discovery

2009-01-25T15:10:00.008-05:00

from the back cover

Yesterday, I picked up a random magazine in the bookshop of the Institute of Contemporary Art, which is conveniently located about a minute away from my house, on the Mall leading up to Buckingham Palace (I'm living large, yo!). It had a nice picture of an owl on the cover, and it was called "Smoke: a london peculiar." I've always liked the word peculiar.

This was an excellent choice.

The magazine (issue 13) is compulsively interesting. It features photography, fiction and non-fiction inspired by London - as a whole, by a part of, or by the spirit of. It is as hyper-specific as you'd expect from a quarterly collection of content concerning only 659 square miles of land, people, buildings, and food, and yet, at times, it's also incredibly abstract - I reckon that any non-descriptive five hundred word piece on bus route 521 has to be. It's often funny, with recurring columns such as "London's Campest Statues" [a fey lion statue is discussed in this issue, if you're wondering], or "Bus route of the month" [the aforementioned 521]. Its back cover description of the contents of the issue have zero relation to the actual contents of the issue.

I like it. I like it especially because it's very easy to completely lose interest in your surroundings, whether you live in Ottawa, Canada, or London, England. I'm sure that Londoners use the classic annoying complaint line of "there's nothing to do here, it's such a boring city" much less than Ottawans, but that they could be just as dissociated from anything in the city which doesn't involve the three square miles of their neighbourhood or the five or six bars that they like. Heck, I've only been here for a few months, and I've started to feel this way after getting used to the Home->School->Home->Store->Home routine. Reading Smoke fills me with a sense of certainty that there are interesting things hidden just around the corner, and makes me want to explore and find them.

I Googled the magazine name, and came to this underwhelming site. The site had a link to this blog of the editor of the magazine, a fellow named Matt Haynes. The blog, much like the magazine, is unassuming, well written, and insightful. Almost immediately, I noticed that the blog has a subsection titled "sarah." It starts with "So, way back in the time of mists, I used to run a record label." At this point, things clicked into place.

Matt Haynes was the founder of Sarah Records, one of the most influential indie-pop record labels of all time. They made their bones releasing music that was personal, often bittersweet, and small in execution and scope if not in impact on the listener. They may have not invented aching pop music, but as an army of awkward youngsters in cardigans would attest to [by staring at their shoes and mumbling something while rocking back and forth on the balls of their feet], they sure came close to perfecting it. This was not a small accomplishment. The fact that Haynes followed this with a magazine that is similarly conceptually successful and aesthetically complete is absolutely staggering. This crystallized my idea of Smoke; it's indie-pop translated into writing. An earnest love letter (or love photo) from people who should, by all logical means, be too heartbroken and jaded to write earnestly.

Needless to say, I am in awe. Also, I am cautiously full of hope. Picking up a random magazine, enjoying it greatly, and discovering that it is intimately connected with one of your favourite musical genres (and record labels) is the kind of coincidence that really makes me feel like everything might turn out to be OK after all.

I'll leave you with this, a song from Sarah Records' 24th single release:

After the Thin Kids

2009-01-22T11:34:00.005-05:00

In general, on transatlantic flights, I choose to watch only stupid slapstick comedies, trite romantic comedies, or bad action movies. I don't want to think about complicated plots, worry about sympathetic characters, or generally think very much, while I'm liquored up and worried about the incidence of plane crashes at thirty thousand feet above sea level. Last week, however, I was greatly surprised to realize that the film I saw during the third and fourth hours of the Ottawa-London flight turned out to be one of the best and most underrated movies of 2008: The Michael Cera/Kat Dennings romantic comedy Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist.

Here are the five dumbest and/or most annoying quotes from it (with some comments):

1. Nick: I think we both said some things we didn't mean, like... when you broke up with me... on my b-day.

This is a terrible incident of Cera-sploitation. He might as well just say: "Hello, I'm Michael Cera, an adorable colt."

2. Norah: I will not be a goody bag at your pity party, Nick.

Twee childlike reference? Check. Obnoxiousness level: Orange.

3. Well, you're two penises short of a Shania Twain reimagination band!

Ironically out of touch celebrity reference? Check. The word "penis" to add a touch of risque to this PG-13 movie? Check. Obnoxiousness level: Red.

4. Norah: There's this part of Judaism that I like. Tikun Olam. It said that the world is broken into pieces and everyone has to find them and put them back together.

Nick: Maybe we don't have to find it. Maybe we are the pieces.

A Madonna level discourse on Judaism that is pseudo-profound but doesn't actually make any sense? Check. Read this thing again, and what do you come up with? They are the broken pieces of the world? What? They should be together, obviously? [This post now gets the 'ethnic' tag, by the way.]

5. Norah: You know how some people like to eat at the same places?

Nick: Yeah.

Norah: Well Caroline likes to barf in the same places.

Classy and classic Nick and Norah Charles-style banter? Check. Obnoxiousness level: Through the roof.

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This just screams "sub-Juno teen dramedy," doesn't it? [For the record, this is not Juno's fault. I've read bits and pieces of the 2006 novel that Nick and Norah is based on, and it's terrible in its heavy-handed use of pop-culture infused 'snarky' one liners. The need to slog through infinite unimaginative references to ET and to The Rocky Horror Picture Show turns the book, which should be a light breezy read, into a chore.]

Nevertheless, despite these and other problems (some of which I've mentioned previously, and some of which I will mention later*), this film miraculously works.

There are several reasons why this happens: Nick and Norah both come across as slightly confused, likeable teenagers who also seem to genuinely enjoy each other's company. This is, largely, to the actors' credit, since in the book, the characters come across as obnoxious and unlikeable. I don't think that the 'Michael Cera Character' (with all of its mannerisms, and the aforementioned coltish behaviour) jumped the shark (or um...nuked the fridge) here, but maybe I just haven't seen enough Arrested Development reruns recently.

Anyway, here's the main reason why this formulaic little movie is surprisingly watchable and actually interesting: It portrays the social experience of young people on a night out in the city in as realistic a manner as I've ever seen. Specifically, it allows the viewer to observe a social network in action - people keep calling each other, trying to figure out what all of their friends' friends are doing, triangulating their destinations, deciding who is taking whom where, etc. They split up into smaller groups, into different permutations of groupings of friends, acquaintances, lovers, and random strangers, and then all meet up and recombine again later. It is not unlike watching a real-life version of the Facebook newsfeed.

Moreover, at all times at the edge of the frame, there is an endless stream of random passer-by who comment and react to the interactions of the main characters. If you've ever been out in the busy part of town, you'd know how impossibly accurate this is. People will congregate around any scene and comment on it (since drunk people are always curious and very easy to impress), the private becoming public, and the insular becoming social. Nick and Norah shows this brilliantly.

There's a scene where Caroline (that's the drunk girl who likes to throw up in the same place, remember?) has been placed in Nick's car, and she locked the doors from the inside as a joke. Nick tries to convince her to open the doors to the car, and fails. Then Norah, slowly but surely coaxes her into opening the door by describing what movements Caroline's hand should be making. This is all shot in long, woozy takes from Caroline's point of view on the backseat in the inside of the car, at a 45 degree angle reminiscent of most shots from Battlefield Earth. It is also worth noting that Nick, Norah and Caroline are not alone, but surrounded by a crowd of curious onlookers who shout bits of advice and cheer loudly when the car's doors finally open. My description may make this scene sound hokey, but on film it feels organic, real, and uplifting.

It's a bit of a shame that there aren't many more scenes such as this. It's definitely (to use a lame film studies term) not cinematic enough. It should have been shot in the way that Lost in Translation, Reprise, or most French New Wave films have been - dreamily, like the camera is a curious semi-drunk passerby, instead of a fixed and planned presence. Then, rather than just being insiduously good, it could have been a true generation defining movie in a way that most (supposedly generation defining) mumblecore features [with which Nick and Norah shares some characteristics, including Justin Rice from the band Bishop Allen] are too timid to ever be.

------

*In a complete aside: One of the frequent complaints about this movie is that it skews hip and fails. I don't think that it tries to be a hipster movie for one reason: it makes up a legendary 90s band that all of the hip characters adore. If it was actively trying to be a hipster movie, it would just name-check a real influential 90s band that has since broken up - the Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, or Pavement - all would work. This is more of a movie about hipsters, and about the idea of hipness. It broadly encapsulates contemporary big city experience in the same way that John Hughes movies broadly encapsulate the 1980s. Everyone in this movie tries too hard, except for the really drunk people who don't try at all.

My Proudest Internet Research Moment

2009-01-16T09:10:00.010-05:00

Due to [what passes here for] popular demand: The story of how I ruled the internet. Or of how technology is a powerful thing. Or of how some lawyers should really know better.

One of my close friends (although maybe he's my nemesis, I'm not quite sure) works as an IT tech support guy at a Big Law Group, which will remain nameless here. Of the many un-fulfilling and strenuous tasks that he has to do in that capacity is going through all of the spam-mail that the company gets. This means that he has to scan through and delete about 10,000 e-mails every day. He knows quite a bit about penis enlargement tools and Nigerian business schemes. Some of these e-mails, however, are not exactly spam. Some of them are personal or professional e-mails that get diverted because of repeated use spam-worthy words.* Love letters, letters suggesting/discussing/recounting trysts, and one e-mail that was a little bit more racy.

The incoming e-mail was about how a lawyer (the recipient of the e-mail) has forgotten a suitcase full of important case documents at the sender's apartment. The sender informed the lawyer that she did not look through the suitcase, and proposed to arrange a meeting when the lawyer could get the case back, preferably before the day the case went to trial. That wasn't the part that was caught in the spam filter. The part that was caught was about how the woman was a professional prostitute and dominatrix, and the preceding e-mails discussed (graphically) everything the lawyer intended to do to her, everything he wanted her to do to him, and how much this would cost. It has as an explicit a description of anal insertion as I've ever read.

After having a few drinks, my friends and I naturally decided to try and find said lawyer (whose name we knew from the e-mail), and said dominatrix (whose name we could guess). We started off from Facebook [insert here a paragraph about how Facebook is becoming a more viable way of searching for people, and people related businesses ventures, than Google, possibly with a detour dicussion concerning the new Facebook Connect features which essentially allows users to integrate their Facebook profiles into various websites]. It was largely unsuccessful. The lawyer's name was fairly generic, and this incident occurred well before the time of perosnalized Networks. We proceeded to google.

I'll spare you the (long) list of google search word iterations we used; suffice it to say that most of them included "dominatrix" "redhead" and "vancouver." The point is that, after looking through quite a few deviant forums, we found her! The address (given in fairly general terms in the e-mails, but rather more specifically on the website) matched, the description of her (body) matched, the description of the stuff she enjoyed doing matched, and she even had a MySpace page! Truly an example of social networking at its finest. I have never been more proud of myself, or more scared of the internet.

* For example, the law firm was representing Snoop Dogg when he was denied a Canadian visa due to his criminal convictions. E-mails detailing the case were sent back and forth, and some of them contained the names of Snoop's posse, and the titles of his albums. Doggystile doesn't do well with spam filters.

My Second Proudest Internet Research Moment

2009-01-14T19:12:00.005-05:00

As someone who is well versed in (i.e. reads and re-reads obsessively) Chuck Klosterman's oeuvre, one thing always kept me thinking. Well, many things did, but one thing bothered me in particular. To what extent are his personal anecdotes and stories real? This concern actually applies to most personal pop-culture memoirs, where you only have the word of the author that what happened actually happened. I kind of blame heavily scripted so-called MTV Reality shows for turning me on to this phenomenon (which, for the record, doesn't necessarily detract from their being interesting). I mean, it's not as if Klosterman was talking about getting off of an addiction to multiple drugs cold turkey and then rescuing kittens from a flaming crackhouse; but still, I very much wanted to see an outside perspective of what he was actually like in person, one which leaves the confines of his hyper-literate first-person me-me-me rants.

And now, thanks to my famously impressive internet research skills (i.e. the ability to use google), I found it. Well, I found "him," to be more specific.

If you're unfamiliar with this, in three out of four books (75% of his total non fiction production for those following at home), Klosterman mentions a certain person, known only as his 'nemesis.' In his latest collection of essays, Chuck Klosterman IV, he outlines what a nemesis is, and explains why everyone should have one of those. In this piece, he also happens to mention that his nemesis has a blog.

BINGO.

Here it is.

Here are two posts [READ THEM BOTH] where he comments on Chuck Klosterman's writings regarding their relationship. He's as clever, entertaining, and persuasive as you would expect someone who spent roughly a third of his life arguing with CK to be.

This is my holy grail. This is (arguably) one of the most interesting things that have ever been posted on the internet (celebrity sex tapes aside).

So what has this... Rex Sorgatz [an aside: Rex Sorgatz and Chuck Klosterman? College roommates and nemeses? Who wrote this young adult novel?] been up to since he helped a wasted Cameron Diaz lookalike off of the roof of his house in Minneapolis (if you're interested, do check out the relevant section in Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story)?

Well, he dated people, apparently been a bit of an asshole to some of them, and besides that and his aforementioned blog, did a whole bunch of other net-related stuff, including creepily ~~masterminding~~ filming [and not so creepily producing] this thing: The I'm Just Sayin' Show. Three attractive, intelligent, and, um hip, girls talking about a whole bunch of stuff (i.e. the net, language, fashion, entertainment, life in NYC, life elsewhere, and so on) for arbitrarily determined periods of time. It's a completely pointless conceit, and hence, infinitely interesting to me.

I only say that he is creepily ~~masterminding~~ filming this because he is obviously behind the camera, and sometimes they are at his house [you can see all of his CDs! KISS' collected works? Pavement? They've got to be somewhere in there!], but he is almost never heard from, and they very rarely look or refer to him. I keep imagining him giving them all extremely broad cues behind the scenes (i.e. "DRINK MORE"), or holding giant poster boards with conversation topics (i.e. "KANYE COOL? NO?").

Here are some of the best episodes (don't worry, they're short and addicting):

A Thanksgiving Story (Episode 13) from ImJustSayin on Vimeo.

On Language, Part 1: Like Is The New Um (Episode 14) from ImJustSayin on Vimeo.

Bad Medicine (Episode 37) from ImJustSayin on Vimeo.

Kristen is my favourite [NOOOO! She's apparently dating Sorgatz! Obviously, I have shit for luck, and he has great taste], partly because she is mostly silent so she appears to be really intelligent when she speaks, but also because she looks permanently dissatisfied, vaguely disappointed, and detached from the rest of the show and her co-hosts. With that (and with her nice bangs), she directly hits the epicenter of my ideal girl.

Here is a representative picture of Kristen:

The other two seem too eager. Jackie [apparently the true mastermind behind this thing - see comments below] is too eager to talk, entertain, be the star - sometimes she cuts off the other girls mid-sentence to spew out her latest idea. Alisa is too eager to appear intellectual and net-savvy: We get it. You know the web, social marketing (whatever the fuck that means), and Woody Allen would never pull Marshall McLuhan to tell you that you're full of shit. Fine.

For the record, the story of my proudest internet research moment will have to wait for another time. It involves a redheaded dominatrix from Vancouver.

Ahead of the Curve: Mugshots

2009-01-02T10:02:00.000-05:00

This first came out way back in July, but it's popping up again all over the internet in various "top mugshots" or "funniest pictures" lists.

The recap: This 20 year old kid from Michigan put on a Heath Ledger inspired Joker costume and tried to hustle a giant Dark Knight poster out of a movie theater.

The thing everyone failed to mention: This kid is stupid for a very obvious reason, and for a slightly less obvious (but much more important) one.

The obvious reason is that if you're intending to steal Batman related paraphernalia, the worst possible thing to wear is something so eye-catching, memorable, and loaded with connotations - no one will ever suspect someone dressed as the Joker of doing something wrong, right?

But it's the second reason that rankles me more. Having chosen to dress as a Batman villain in his ill-fated theft attempt, this idiot totally ignored the fact that he 1) looks nothing like Heath Ledger, the actor portraying the Joker in the Dark Knight, but 2) looks remarkably similar to Cillian Murphy, or the actor portraying The Scarecrow in the film Batman Begins. He dressed as the wrong Batman villain! It would be like someone being really really good at basketball, but choosing to only play baseball instead. Completely nonesensical.*

This anecdote could probably be used to illustrate how youngsters today have absolutely no concept of history and are only attracted by new shiny hyped-up things, regardless of the utility or fit of older things.

But anyway, here's a picture of Cillian Murphy for comparison:

Should've worn a sack, kid. It would have also saved you a world of pictorial make-up wearing mugshot embarrassment:

* And kind of boring to boot. The idea of a main villainous character from a movie trying to vaguely sabotage the next (and much more popular, hyped, and critically acclaimed) installment of the film series strikes me as inherently amusing and as an interesting meta-marketing tool.

My Year In...Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #1

2008-12-28T09:14:00.002-05:00

First, a couple of preliminary notes.

For some reason, making this list was very difficult for me. I think that it all comes down to two reasons (prepare for a mini-list within my list):

i. I spent most of the year seriously drifting. It wasn't that I was drifting in a very pronounced physical sense (although I did move away for a bit), or in a way that was particularly noticeable at the time. And it's not like I wasn't doing anything - I graduated on schedule, and went to a pretty posh Grad school - but I still feel like I just spent much of my time fucking about on the internet waiting for THINGS to happen, rather than being engaged in the world. Inevitably, things didn't happen. So the last year feels a little bit like a vacuum that left me drained of energy and optimism.

ii. The counterpoint to i. would be that as I get older, I'm developing a much stronger sense of myself as a person, and of the things that I like as that person. As a result, when I hear/see/read something that really fits with me, it feels like its always been there, rather than that I suddenly discovered it in 2008. For example, I feel like I've been listening to the Weakerthans for years, even though I first heard them in July. So this makes it a little bit difficult to isolate my particular cultural experiences this year (besides the ones that I kept track of on this blog). Maybe I should keep a daily diary or something. I won't.

Bearing that in mind, in no particular order:

Favourite 2008 things from 2008

1. Los Campesinos! - Two fucking albums. + seeing No Age AND Los Campesinos! together on the most improbable tour of not only 2008 but of any year

I've already written about these guys at great and excruciating lengths this year. I liked them quite a bit last year, but now, as I've been listening to their first album for nearly a year, I could safely say that they are my favourite new band, hands down. And that's even without accounting for their second full length album this year, the brittle and damaged "We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed," which for me rivals The Smiths in the depths of misery that it can sink to and the degree of comfort that I can draw from it (not just lyrically but musically too - as a friend pointed out - just listen to the violin line on the title track during the lyric "absence makes the heart grow fonder/fondness makes the absence longer"). [Note: I may regret writing this statement in a few months, because really, it's so fucking cliche to compare miserablist tuneful pop to Morrissey and Marr, but right now I feel that it's really apt.] They're fun and clever and heartbreaking, often at the same time. There's really not much more I can say. Listen to them and you won't regret it.

2. Johnny Foreigner - Waited Up Till It Was Dawn
Is this (and by "this" I also include Los Camps! and other bands like Distophia) the UK version of emo? I've spent a little too much time staying up at night thinking about this. I guess my issue is whether I nominally consider US emo boring but UK 'emo' interesting because of the cultural distance, and consequently whether I should actually stop making fun of Dashboard Confessional and its likes. I've come to the conclusion that more than any contemporary emo references, this is Weezer's Pinkerton. It's loud and full of hooks and messy tunes and messy lyrics and messy sentiments and obsessive pop culture references (i.e. zombies, ghosts, ninjas) - it's the kind of album that you pick up when you're 13 and never forget. Hell, I'm 22 now, and I feel the same. It also has as strong of a sense of place (not necessarily time, because it kind of feels timeless) - but instead of the weirded out Japan of Pinkerton, it has a mid-sized semi-bleak city as a signifier. And because when you're young [ageism!] any city you live in feels mid-sized and semi-bleak, Johnny Foreigner reached universality here the hard way as opposed to the cheap way (i.e. 'I love her, she doesn't love me'-like statements).

3. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
Wes Anderson's upcoming movie grocery list: sibling rivalry, absent parents, saturated colour palette, detailed vaguely 70s decor and/or clothes, long tracking shots, Futura font, Owen Wilson, angst, Bill Murray, depression, eventual triumph or acceptance, Vampire Weekend based soundtrack.

4. Living Alone
Probably the best thing that's happened to me this year. There's something inherently satisfying to living on your own and having to take care of yourself. Regardless of how terrible you feel, or how drunk you got the night before, you know that you still have to go shopping, make your own food, and do all sorts of other things which 1) distracts you, and 2) makes you feel like a remotely functioning adult, despite clear evidence to the contrary.

4.a. Living alone in London
While living alone anywhere would be a good experience, I believe, living in London is nothing short of insane (or rather um...mental). London isn't necessarily inherently different than Ottawa because hipsters and hipster clubs are roughly the same everywhere, but the variety and the depth of choice you get in London is staggering. Whereas in Ottawa you have Mod nights on Sundays at Babylon, 90s nights on Thursdays at Barrymore's and so on, in London you have multiple 80s, 90s, mod, hip-hop, 'any genre you can think of,' themed nights every single night, as well as at least a few interesting live gigs every week. Plus, you can legally drink on the street in London - huzzah road beers!

5. Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
Bon Iver reminds me the most of Damien Rice. Not stylistically or anything, but by how the atmospherics of his music are almost as important as the tunes themselves. There are no songs that are inherently catchy or that have massive hooks, in fact the songs feel barely there at all, but the whole thing works perfectly as a unit. The way the music builds is like when you walk in from the cold, and warmth slowly starts spreading inwards through your body from your fingers and toes. Sad and triumphant.

6. The Gaslight Anthem - 59 Sound
I am obsessed with Bruce Springsteen in general, and "Born to Run" in particular. To me, listening to the Gaslight Anthem's 2008 album is like discovering that instead of a shitty live documentary and a mono-mix version, the 30th Anniversary edition of Born to Run includes 13 completely new bonus tracks that are almost as good as the original nine classics. The best thing about these guys is how simple, direct, and un-selfcounscious they are. This is probably what separates good Boss-inspired music from bad Boss-inspired music (Killers, I'm looking at you).

7. People I know who make very good music [aka nepotism]
I'm mainly talking about blog favourites We Aeronauts, whom I managed to see live (it was great!), and who will hopefully release their first single soon. The songs on their myspace are ace, and their other yet unpublished songs are also great and show how much the band has coalesced into a unit. As well, this would be a good point to recommend their blog - http://weaeronauts.blogspot.com/ - If you've ever wanted to know how the creative songwriting process of a seven member orchestral pop band works, this is as good of an explanation as any. Watching very basic demo tracks (or even ideas for demo tracks) being overdubbed and expanded with different musical ideas to make actual songs (!!!) is one of the more interesting things I've read and heard this year.

Another shoutout goes to Ace Bushy Striptease who are, according to British underground pop guru Tom Whyman, our generation's Beatles. I tentatively agree.

And last but not least, Keyboard Choir. I really should have written something about these guys earlier this year; I guess I'll just try to compensate. On the one hand, Keyboard Choir are exactly what their name implies - four keyboard players playing synthesizers of different tones, together with a conductor, forming one of the more unusual and challenging experimental combos I've had a chance to listen to: Their music mainly consists of loads of layered keyboard loops (obviously, right?), together with some noise, and sampled vocals. On the other hand, Keyboard Choir also make some of the catchiest and most danceable electronica I've heard this year. When they get in the groove, they groove, dare I say it, soulfully, sounding like [borrowing the idea of Flight of the Conchords] the music our future robot overlords will dance and make love to.

8. Nathan Rabin
My second favourite pop-culture scribe (after the estimable Charles Klosterman - see below). Rabin (or Nabin, as the freaks on the AVClub comment threads like to call him), hasn't really broken any new ground, but what he does - as a self-hating, hip-hop loving Jew who spends most of his time digging through the soggy underbelly of pop-culture epherma and failures - he does to perfection. For neophytes, I would recommend the Rabin ur-narrative, My Year of Flops, which often takes hilarious and tenuous digressions from the subject matter - failed films in the vein of Elizabethtown or Delgo - to discuss other things like T-Pain's auto-tune given super-powers (securing half-priced lap dances and banging skanks at will). He's got an actual honest to god print book coming out towards the end of next year - I've already pre-ordered it.

Note: This should actually include the entire AV Club website, which is a brilliant combination of short and consistent reviews of books, movies, music, games, etc, as well as longer columns and epic projects (the aforementioned Flops, Scott Tobias' New Cult Cannon, Keith Phipps' Box of Paperbacks, and more). If you're even remotely interested in popular culture, hell, culture in general, you should read it.

Favourite 2008 things not from 2008

1. The Weakerthans - Reconstruction Site (2003)
The Weakerthans managed to create an album of impressive complexity and density in a genre that is often reviled for being the least musically adventurous - folk rock. Credit the repeating musical themes and cues, the broken down atmospherics that wouldn't sound out of place on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and/or John K. Samson's playful and relentlessly interesting lyrics (which shift thematically from depression to house-cats to Michel Foucault to Winnipeg, and which in one particularly memorable song, are written in the form a sonnet) for that.

2. Talking Heads - 77 (1977)
It's cliche to say that certain albums "blow your mind." It's also cliche to say that it's cliche to say that certain albums "blow your mind but...in this case it's true." It's also...I'll stop. My point is, 77, though not nearly as adventurous or sonically unified as some of the Talking Heads later recordings is my favourite because of how the songs sound. They're all veering between the jagged - martial drum rhythms, rough distorted guitar lines, songs about serial killers and "No Compassion" - and the soft - French, the almost straight forward funk of "Uh-Oh Love Has Come to Town" and "The Book I Read," and the vulnerable point where David Byrne's voice almost breaks from effort. Good debut albums show confident and competent bands that have already managed to master a sound; but truly great debut album show bands that have managed to master a sound, and still sound like they can do absolutely anything and go anywhere and be just as successful. This is one of them.

3. Chuck Klosterman (1990s - present)
2008 was the year when I realized that enough was enough. After reading Chuck's fourth collection of essays "IV" and quoting him like the bible, I concluded that what I've been referring to as my "love-hate thing" with Klosterman is actually more of a "love-love thing." I LOVE CHUCK KLOSTERMAN. That felt satisfying. Yeah, all of the arguments that great fiction/non-fiction should tell us something new that we don't know either about ourselves or about the world still apply sort of, but I feel like Chuck spends most of his time digging out parts of ourselves that we know but don't want to face and exposing them. Rather discovering a completely new country and mapping it, he spends most of his time mapping out an old country to greater and greater detail. Which, I would have to say, is pretty important.

4. The National - Cherry Tree EP and Boxer (2003, 2007)
Again, because of my weird relationship to hype, I actually didn't listen to The National at all last year, and instead happened on them this year. The National write quietly devastating songs about stasis. Their real trick is that these songs about personal stasis and indecision that actually sound static and indecisive - everything about them, the slow piano or guitar chords, the ponderous baritone of Matt Berninger, make you feel like absolutely nothing of importance is happening; and then, there always comes a point when the music intensifies, speeds up, and you realize that you've reached something beautiful and sad and deep without actually knowing how you got there. It's powerful shit.

5. A Matter of Life and Death (1941)
War movies are at their core about the dead and the soon to die, that is to say, about all of us. A Matter of Life and Death is, simply, the most sublime war movie I have ever seen. It's visually awesome - in the traditional sense of the word, awe inspiring - in its depictions of infinity and heaven [I'm not going to fully explain the plot of the movie here, but around 50% of the movie takes place in a heaven-like environment shot in black and white; the other half takes place on Earth, shot in technicolour], it's achingly romantic, intelligent, funny, and it contains one of the best opening sequences ever committed to film. While I sometimes tear up at the end of some movies (because I'm a big sissy), this was the first time I choked up on the very first scene - it is an extremely powerful introduction that makes it impossible for the viewer to not care about the characters afterward. See for yourselves:

6. Brass-Eye (2001)
As far as I can tell, there are two formats for British comedy - the hyper-realistic awkwardness based humour, and broader absurdity based humour. Brass Eye, a pitch perfect parody of alarmist news shows, is a great example of the second type (come to think about it, this show is not unlike Stephen Colbert at his best - completely ignoring what he's supposed to talk about in favour of discussing how he likes to wrestle bears and stuff). If good comedy is one that produces devotion among its fanbase and many memorable lines that induce laughter time after time, Brass Eye passes the test with flying colours [notable 'good ones' include a debate on getting 'good AIDS' vs. getting 'bad AIDS,' a pedophile disguised as a school in Sheffield, and others].

- Others: The film Reprise [ageism!], Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union (which, like most Chabon novels, starts off explosively, spends itself at about the three quarters mark, and crawls to a weak conclusion; nevertheless, it's one of the most touching and bang-on studies of what it means to be Jewish [I guess this post deserves an 'ethnic' tag], as well as a great hardboiled thriller).

My Pretentious Lists of Awesomeness (2007)

2008-12-22T09:04:00.007-05:00

[NOTE: I'm currently working on my 2008 lists, but I figured that this
should be on here as well, for compare'n'contrast purposes. The formatting
is a little bit off since I had to copy this from an e-mail I sent.
Blame Hotmail.]

Top 10 2007 things from 2007:

1.      Flight of the Conchords: In New York, James Blunt
has been recently mistaken for Bret Mackenzie by fans
who started singing "If You're Into It" to him. 'Nuff said.

2.      Skinny Jeans:
"Walking
becomes a Home-Run Swivel
out-of-the-park trendy."

3.
  LCD Soundsystem's "Sound of Silver": Listened to it way back in
January or something and only liked the least dancey singles (
i.e. New York I Love You and North American Scum). Then listened to it
some more and started liking everything. Then listened to it some more
and started loving everything. By extrapolation, in 10 years this will
be my favourite album of all time.

4.      Superbad: If I had seen this movie while I was still in
high-school, I believe my life would have gone in a completely
different direction. When the meek shall inherit the Earth, Michael
Cera shall be worshipped as a demi-god.

5.      Los Campesinos! : I'm becoming way too emotionally
invested in these kids. From listening to their first singles on
Pitchfork's Forkcast (We Throw Parties! You Throw Knives!, Don't Tell
me To  Do The Maths), to buying their EP and really liking its
shambolic juiced up indie pop, to seeing them live doing synchronized
moves while singing about Calvin Johnston and Henry Rollins. It's like
watching a baby take its first steps, learning how to talk, and then
writing superbly clever and engaging and slightly self conscious indie
pop songs.

6.      Kanye West: Yeah, Graduation wasn't quite as good as the
College Dropout, but no more fucking Bernie Mac skits! That calls for a
toast.
7.      The Bees' Listening Man video (
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Opm-qsGxzNY): My Wes Anderson
obsession sez "jackpot!" One hit wonder of the year.
And the girl is really good looking.
8.
  St. Vincent: The soft piano songs bring you in, and then the noisy
guitar shredding songs ensure that the whole thing isn't boring. Like a
Norah Jones that punches you in the gut (or…er… bites your lip or
something) to keep you on your toes.

9.      Sasha Frere Jones controversy: Once in roughly 52 tries
the (awesomely named) guy manages to talk about something interesting
(even if his arguments themselves aren't all that great). Yes, it got a
little bit ridiculous when the New York Times had Stevie Van Zandt
going on about he's going to educate high-school kids about true rock
classics (which would presumably include a certain backing band named
after a street starting with a letter between D and F). It did,
however, feel kind of important and epic to read and talk about the
meaning and direction (soul?) of indie rock (as pointless as it
actually was).

10.     Final Fantasy performing Bloc Party's This Modern Love at
the 2007 Bluesfest. I can't really describe what I felt, except that I
didn't feel the same as before. More open, or something. Had no idea
what it was at the time, so I had to ask one of the asymmetrically
hairstyled kids standing next to me. Yeah, I liked it that much.


Very Honourable Mention (basically, #11):
No Age's "Weirdo Rippers" album.

Top 10 2007 things not from 2007:

1.
  Hip Hop: my epiphany that hip-hop is basically an angry
singer-songwriter genre made it completely palatable to me. Jay-Z =
Jackson Browne + lots of existential angst + Rick Rubin production.

2.      Arrested Development: I've made a huge mistake…
in not watching this earlier.
3.
  Vice Magazine: I vaguely recall one of my friends showing this to
me like two years ago, and me going "meh." I hope I'm becoming less of
an idiot. Like reading GQ or Esquire (yeah I've got a lot of free time
at the library) makes you feel richer by at least two income-tax
brackets, reading Vice (even if the quality dropped lately) makes you
feel cooler by at least two scenester brackets. And it's FREE! Plus,
there's always the archived issues and the Do's and Don'ts to peruse
through.

4.      Baseball (RBI and MLB): Maybe 2007 was not the greatest
year for baseball, but fuck the game is awesome. Watching Aaron Hill
steal home was like getting to third base. Maybe this should've been in
the previous list, but I also loved learning the statistics and the
lore and the facial hair. Baseball is a universe of its own, like Krynn
or Azeroth. Lenny Dykstr rulz!!!

5.      Ryan Adams' "Gold": after years (?) of claiming that it
wasn't quite as good as his other stuff, its AM rock pummeled through
my defenses. If it was a little bit shorter (just the 11 first songs –
Nobody's Girl + Harder Now That It's Over), it would be the ultimate
Ryan Adams record. As it is, it's a solid #2 (after Jacksonville City
Nights).

6.      Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: Ultimate book about
hipsters in the 20s. No shitty coming of age stuff either. It's just
waiting for a modern remake where the end takes place at SXSW.
7.
Sufjan Stevens' Christmas songs: I always thought he was a little
bit too bombastic (forest and trees thing, I suppose), but his Xmas
songs have just enough things going on to be affecting without hiding
the melodies. "Come on! Let's Boogey to the Elf Dance!" is just a
monster song.

8.      Idolator: Possibly the greatest blog ever? At least my
favourite for the moment. Snarky, updated often, short posts; perfect
for wasting time at work. Also, the Rock-Critically Correct section
where an anonymous music journalist reviews various music rags (Rolling
Stone, Mojo, Spin, Blender etc.) that I read on a regular basis at the
library is porn to me. I can now read music reviews in the magazines,
and then read the reviews of the reviews; sick.

9.      Bloc Party's "Silent Alarm": 2007 is officially the year I
stopped caring about hype. Sort of. At least I stopped caring about
hype from a couple of years ago. This album is just ridiculous. You
listen to the first couple of tracks, and you're like "oh so these were
the singles, cool." And then it just keeps on pumping more and more and
more great songs.

10.     Old-man clothes: v-neck sweaters and cardigans galore!
There are a whole bunch of old Indian dudes working at my office who
are always dressed really neatly (i.e. ties, or at least collared
shirts and vests or sweaters every day), and I couldn't help thinking
about how if they were 30 years younger and with slightly tighter
trousers, they would basically be hipsters.


Very Honourable Mentions (#11 and 12): The Strokes' "Is This
It" 6th Anniversary, Metal (especially Megadeth's Peace Sells and Rust
in Peace) [I've really discovered complex and melodic angsty music this
year].

Twilight = Wall-E - Robots + Vampires

2008-12-16T15:53:00.000-05:00

The post title says it all. Short and sweet and informative. Yes, I am now going to go into some details as to why I think that Wall-E and Twilight are basically the same thing:

It is a little bit disingenuous to say that one love story is just the same as another love story - all love stories are essentially the same since they are all about the same thing, love. There are, however, some pretty glaring similarities between mega-smash animation movie Wall-E, and mega-smash cardboard acting movie Twilight.

Lets start with the basics:

Wall-E is about a small and powerless (though interesting) robot on a future dystopian earth that was left for dead by human civilization. Through a series of accidents and coincidences he meets EVE, a sleek and much more powerful robot that has a single overriding directive (which has nothing to do with Wall-E). Wall-E naturally falls in love with EVE, and eventually (SPOILERS) EVE also falls in love with Wall-E to the degree that she overrides her original programming. Cue happy ending.

Twilight is about a small and powerless (though introspective) teenager, Bella, who moves to somewhere in Northwestern Oregon. Through a series of accidents and coincidences she meets Edward, a beautiful sexy vampire dude who is much more powerful than her and who has the overriding desire to bite her neck. Bella naturally falls in love with Edward, and Edward (SPOILERS) falls in love with Bella and continually fights against his nature to be with her. Cue happy ending.

And... that's about it. I mean, loads of other stuff happens in both stories, but nothing else really resonates with audiences. Put simply, the ability of people to do seemingly impossible things for love is box office fucking magic. Wow, I really feel like I hit a heretofore undiscovered film-making secret here.

Maybe I'm just frustrated that these movies portray the concept of love as another one of those all overriding directives that appear out of nowhere and stay there in the same way forever, rather than emphasizing how much it is a series of conscious choices that people have to make all the time. "Expose: Hollywood Movies Unrealistically Represent Relationships" - it was probably an Onion headline at one point or another.

Sunday Morning Nerd Jokes

2008-11-23T04:56:00.004-05:00

The above New York Times ad reminded me of an old Soviet joke:

In 1937, for the 100th anniversary for the great poet Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin's death, a competition was announced for the design of a new large statue of Pushkin in central Moscow. The panel judging the entries was to be presided by the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, himself.

Here are the top three entrires, and the panel's judgements:

3. A statue of Stalin reading Pushkin - Judged to be an interesting idea, but not entirely correct ideologically.

2. A statue of Pushkin reading Stalin - Judged to be correct ideologically, but incorrect chronologically.

And the winning entry:

1. A statue of Stalin reading Stalin - Judged to be correct both ideologically and chronologically.

MSc in Cardinology

2008-11-21T12:32:00.005-05:00

The only vaguely interesting thing I can say about the Ryan Adams show I saw last night:

It was really neat how the hipster fans of Ryan Adams represented all stages of the Ryan Adams personal development path. Let me explain. At the show, there were:

a) Vaguely earnest alt-country fans in cowboy boots and flannel shirts:

b) rocker hipsters sporting scuffed up leather jackets and tats:

c) generic urban sophisticates hipsters:

d) preppier hipsters wearing ties:

e) bearded hipsters:

Ryan Adams, ladies and gents: the rosetta stone for hip (male) fashion.

UPDATE: If you're interested to know which type of hispter I was, the answer is: ALL of them. Still am, often in the course of a single day.

Coraline Movie Trailer

2008-11-20T07:41:00.002-05:00

The trailer for the 3D animated movie Coraline is out:

My thoughts? I hope that it'll make loads of money for Neil Gaiman (the author of the "Coraline" novel (and a former favourite writer of mine) who has a history of becoming involved in interesting movie projects that fail miserably, both in the financial and artistic sense), and it looks really nice - in that Nightmare Before Christmas puppet-esque way (Henry Selick is the director of both), but without all of the Tim Burton affectations that we've come to expect from it - which is very good. From the look of the trailer, however, it seems that the movie glazes over what was one of the more interesting things about the book - that for a book geared mainly towards kids, it was really fucking scary. The story created a sense of dislocation and dread, which, when combined with illustrations such as these

made it into an actual horror story, rather than just a light Goosebumps-like adventure.

As you can see from the trailer, this atmosphere doesn't really hold in the movie - it's more of a straight forward young adult adventure story. This might not be coincidental. I remember reading somewhere, perhaps on Neil Gaiman's blog, that the only ones who actually consider Coraline to be a scary book are adults who are trained to be uncertain as to how stories with horror elements end (perhaps she'll die, or be trapped forever, etc.). Kids, when they read Coraline, see it as a pure adventure story which will have the same ending all adventure stories have - the restoration of order and the triumph of good over evil. So perhaps the film-makers wanted to emphasize this perspective of the book, rather than the potential horror elements of it. Anyways, you be the judge.

Low-Unibrow: Sarah Palin T-shirt Idea

2008-11-10T14:37:00.006-05:00

[Picture of Sarah Palin - preferably in the classic propaganda-ish di-chrome white and red, not unlike that Obama 'Hope' poster]
"Sarah Palin 2012 - MILF, GILF, PILF"*

* For the record, I fucking hate 'funny' shirts. "FBI - Federal Breast Inspector" is kind of funny (in a groaning way) the first time you see it, but can you actually imagine someone having it in their closet and wearing it on a weekly basis? Maybe a goldfish would find it consistently amusing. If it was me, I'd probably gouge my eyes out with my rusty third generation iPod. And yet, these poor suckers exist, and are clearly buying these idiotic winking "[Date/Disaster/Epic] Movie" equivalent humour excuses for tees.** So why should you and I not exploit this existing demand a little bit and make some dough in the process? Who's with me?

I just went on a website that actually peddles this sort of stuff, and one of their current top shirts is this abomination [LINK]. My idea is better, but only slightly.

Student Radio Doesn't Understand Me

2008-11-03T10:16:00.007-05:00

A little while ago I had a pretty decent (read: fucking brilliant) idea for a radio show on the student radio station at my university: An hour long themed program where all of the songs relate to a particular topic, not unlike Bob Dylan's "Theme Time Radio Hour"; but, instead of the themes being really banal and/or overdone like "songs about love," "songs about eating," "songs about drinking," and so on, they would be on topics of political or economic current affairs. I thought that this would be a) interesting to compile (and listen to), and b) an excellent fit for a self identified School of Economics and Political Science where most students follow the stock markets like sports scores, and where The Economist, The Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal are sold (and snatched) at hugely discounted prices. I also checked out the radio station listings and noticed that most of the programs were segregated by musical genre - so another crucial part of my nascent program (tentatively titled "The Econo-Mix") became its broad cross-genre appeal; it would combine hip-hop, indie pop, folk, classic rock, electronica, noise, thrash, etc. into one hour of goodness every two weeks or so.

I talked this over with one of my friends and he immediately got on board. This was perfect because his musical knowledge is just as extensive as mine, only complementary, which would be a huge asset when coming up with hour-long coherent playlists on a single theme. Anyways, we quickly put together two pilot hours of music (on the themes of "The Credit Crunch" and "Elections" - topical and very good. Two examples of songs: "I Got Fucked by Liberty Mutual" by Whitey Houston, and "Woman King" by Iron & Wine, respetively.), and met up with the programming manager of the radio station for a pitch meeting (after we already sent her a brief description of the show and the two playlists). Here's how it went:

PROGRAMMING MANAGER: So guys, what's your idea for a radio show?

MY BUDDY: Well, we thought that it would be interesting to do a music show focusing on current affairs...

ME: Yeah, and it would be absolutely brilliant...

[we explain the idea of the show, talking excitedly. The programming manager is smiling politely.]

PM: Sounds interesting. What type of music are you going to play? What genre?

ME: All of them.

MB: Hip-hop, electronica, indie, opera, and really, just about anything we can find that is interesting and that fits the topic.

ME: Yeah! [explains how most of the programs on the station have only one genre, and how we could possible gain a much wider appeal by mixing and matching from multiple genres, not to mention the fact that maybe it would make people who normally don't listen to indie/hip-hop be interested in these genres - educational-like.]

PM: Yeah, but if you had to narrow all of this down to one genre, what would it be?

[my buddy and I stare at each other in disbelief]

MB: Err... indie/alternative?

ME: Mid-tempo?

PM: We're also looking for a world music show. Do you guys do world music?

ME: ....

MB: We do have some Canadian music...

ME: And er... Continental European...

PM: OK. So how long would your program go for?

ME: We were thinking about it being an hour long.

MB: And fortnightly frequency.

PM: OK, how about a weekly two hour show?

[my buddy and I stare at each other in disbelief. I think that my jaw popped open.]

ME: Well, you know it's rather difficult coming up with these thematically tight TWO HOUR playlists.

MB: It would also be quite difficult for us personally devote that much time to this every week, because we're Master's students with other things to do.

PM: Oh, OK.

And that's how my dream of being a radio DJ on student radio (and subsequently on BBC4, BBC1, and CBC radio 3) died.

Introducing: Making Tracks

2008-11-03T08:55:00.005-05:00

I was just listening to the Why? [punctuation is part of the band's name] album Alopecia before heading out to see their gig at Oxford (together with We Aeronauts! [punctuation is not part of the band's name, but rather an expression of my enthusiasm for them]), and I thought about how so many bands put some of their most interesting songs at the number 2 slot in albums. And then I thought that the same argument could also be applied for the opening track, track number 3, track number 7, etc. etc. etc...

...At this point, I was hit with a vision [which came THIS close to being spiritual, enlightening, profound, and not ridiculous]. A collection of 12 mixtapes of 10 songs, with each mix containing only songs with the appropriate track number (i.e. only track 1s for mixtape 1, only track 2s for mixtape 2, and so on). So that's the game plan ladies and gents. I'll try to do a mixtape per week (with mixtape 1 debuting next week). See you on the other side.

Misc Notes:

- I think that 12 is probably the average number of tracks on an album. It will unfortunately constrain my selection of hip-hop (because of those goddamn skits), and other amazing songs like "Mannequin" by Wire (Track 18 on Pink Flag) - but making 18 or so mixtapes really feels a bit excessive, even for me.

- Only full album songs are eligible. Sadly constrains my Voxtrot selections.

- No Greatest Hits collections or soundtracks. Only original album track numbers apply.

Happy Birthday Tom Wade

2008-11-02T07:00:00.001-05:00

Down and Out of It in London (Halloween Edition)

2008-11-01T08:50:00.004-04:00

I'll start from the end - I ended up losing my costume. To elaborate a little bit: I was dressed up as the ghost of a little boy (or of the Toronto Blue Jays' 2008 season) - i.e. I had a sheet over my head with two holes cut out for the eyes and a baseball cap on top of the sheet (basically holding it fastened). It was a pretty solid costume (in that Charlie Brown home-made way), especially considering I only spent about half an hour on it.

Here's my vaguely glamorous vaguely remembered version of losing it: Some random girl really seemed to like it, and said something of the "now lets see what's going on under there..." suggestive variety, at which point I instantly threw it down and...[I actually don't know. For the record, I had quite a bit to drink.] It makes for a good story, but I doubt it actually happened that way. It was probably more of me thinking "fuck, I need to go to the washroom," taking the costume off, going, and then forgetting where I put it originally. This version could be supported by the fact that I still have the baseball cap - I think that if I threw down my costume in heated passion I'd probably lose my cap. Or maybe not, I fucking love that thing, and even being wasted probably wouldn't have changed that.

Anyways, here's one more vaguely entertaining memory from the night (there aren't a whole lot of them - memories I mean, not just entertaining memories): I was walking around the club I was at in my ghost costume, and suddenly I noticed another ghost. Amazing, I thought, we should totally be friends! I tentatively waved. The ghost waved back. I moved closer to the ghost. I think that I said something about how improbable it is that we're both wearing the same costume. And that's when I realized something was a little bit off. The other ghost was wearing a costume that was TOO similar to mine: same sheet, same holes for the eyes, same Toronto Blue Jays cap... yup, I was totally talking to myself in the mirror. I was quite drunk last night.

Bring Out the Real Fun. Turn On the Real Drums.

2008-10-25T17:37:00.005-04:00

Spazzy shambolic indie pop actually seems to become an established genre around these parts. For those of you who think that Los Campesinos! are cool but are bored by their tendencies towards instrumental noodling and post-rocky stuff, I introduce: Johnny Foreigner.

I generally hate making these direct "Band A = Band B + Ingredient X - Ingredient Y" comparisons, but in this case, it feels remarkably apt. Their melodies are just as spazzy and vaguely angular as the best Campesinos! songs, and the yelpy male vocals alternating with calmer and more traditionally melodic female vocals also hit the mark.*

Lyrics-wise, they basically talk about relationships and parties. I'm really tempted to call them "Britain's version of the Hold Steady" (well, I just did) - especially since in an interview the main singer/songwriter of JF (Alexei Berrow) mentioned how some of the lyrics of the JF song "Champagne Girls I Have Known" are a reworked version of Hold Steady lyrics, and how he was going to hold a picture of Craig Finn (the main singer/songwriter dude of the Hold Steady) as a tribute in the video for the above song. Also, like the Hold Steady, Johnny Foreigner have a very strong sense of place in their songs (what Minneapolis/St. Paul is to the Hold Steady, Birmingham is to Johnny Foreigner), and a tendency to make repeated use of the same characters in different songs (those Chamagne girls...)

Now, this blog post has been in the making for about a month now, and this is what I said in the firstplace: Johnny Foreigner aren't quite in the same league as Los Camps! since they don't have all of the added instrumental depth, etc. etc., which makes listening to JF a rather disorienting experience, like taking one small part of a favourite song by your favourite band and listening to it repeatedly. I've got quite a different take on this now: Now I believe that Johnny Foreigner are actually just as good as LC!, at least on average. It's just that when they hit their good tunes (and there's many of those on their album), JF don't fuck about and build and build and build and then switch around to a melodica solo midway - they just hammer on the killer riff, add some synths, drums, and bass, and pound out the tune in three minutes flat. It's really a thing of efficient beauty once you think about it. [That's not to say that said melodica solo is unimportant - it could either complement what the song is all about and reinforce its overall sound and meaning, or conversely, it could completely transform the meaning of the song and turn it into something different - either way, it is not irrelevant.]

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've been listening to the Johnny Foreigner album for about a month now, and it's fucking great - it's literally all you want out of a rock album - excellent Tunes (with a capital T) and cleverly memorable lyrics.

But anyways, without further ado, check this shit out:

While I'm talking about spazzy DIY indie-pop-punk bands I might as well try to shoehorn another band I like into this entry:

Ace Bushy Striptease

are, I won't lie about this, not quite there yet (a little too much of the spazzy and shambolic, a little too little of the pop - it sort of makes me think that they haven't quite figured out what kind of band they want to be yet). But, and this is a big but, their best songs are 1) good, 2) short, and 3) so charmingly idiosyncratic so as to make me think of hush puppies drawing kittens in charcoal, or of Richie Tenenbaum drawing Margot Tenenbaum. Again, I'm running out of words, so just listen to this and you'll know what I mean (hopefully):

Ace Bushy Striptease - Mervin & Isaac Find a CD

They also have an EP called "Michael Kightly is Pretty Rad" which consists of a single 30 second track called, you guessed it, "Michael Kightly is Pretty Rad." It ain't half bad.

------------------
* In a completely unrelated footnote, I would like to show an example of the speed of the indie hype cycle these days: On September 13, 2007, Pitchformedia.com's Forkcast mentioned Johnny Foreigner's song "Our Bi-Polar Friends," mostly referencing their "frenetic melodies," "urgent rhythms," their vague similarity to the Dismemberment Plan, and their complete dissimilarity from the Klaxons. Roughly one year later, while talking about Johnny Foreigner's "Salt, Peppa and Spinderella," Pitchforkmedia's only reference that actually related to the song, with the noted excpetion of the Dismemberment Plan, was Los Campesinos!. It's really amazing what LC! have accomplished in a twelve months.

we are beautiful, we are queued

2008-10-20T19:09:00.011-04:00

Los Campesinos! + No Age =

Arguably, the most cathartic show I've seen in my life.

Sorry Times New Viking, I haven't been able to catch your set because of the giant queue.

Two representative quotes though:

"You he's got his teeth fixed: I'm gonna break them"

"My Life's Alright Without You"

ps. I still can't figure out how two of my favourite, and two of the most tangentially related bands (genre-wise), ended up touring together.

Department of Quips: NME, Pitchfork and Drowned in Sound, for Your Consideration:

2008-10-10T03:27:00.005-04:00

I was talking to a few friends last night about one of my biggest pet peeves with the UK: the almost complete segregation between hip-hop music and indie music - it's actually genuinely incomprehensible to me, but every single person I've talked to here who is really into indie music (and not just the hot as shit stuff of the moment, also weird advanced stuff like Godspeed! and electro and dance music) does that whole "I just don't understand hip-hop, and besides it's all about guns, bitches and bling" thing. This means that you never ever hear any rap outside of highly specified rap clubs or hip-hop nights. Anyways, I was trying to explain to my friends about how rap is essentially a singer-songwriter genre where the rappers are primarily storytellers, and how the content of the story (the aforementioned bitches, guns, and bling) are just the surface, with loads of angst (actual existential angst, not just being angry at shit) and uncertainty percolating (and sometimes exploding) underneath. I summed it up in the following quip (which I will, um, quote):

"When you think about it, Jay-Z is basically Nick Drake, only with better beats."

Preview Askew

2008-10-04T16:10:00.004-04:00

It's really easy for me to get feverishly excited about movies before I actually see them - especially if they have a well done trailer. Movie trailers are probably the most efficient form of advertising and it's absolutely incomprehensible to me how anyone can fuck them up: so many trailers basically try to tell the entire story of the movie in a minute or two, which is stupid, because you either end up with a ridiculous mess, or you end up with something that's too comprehensible and that spoils the movie entirely.

All a trailer has to do is introduce the movie's central concept and pair it up with some nice title graphics and a decent soundtrack. I mean, this is obviously conditional on the movie actually having a decent central concept and stuff, but it shouldn't be that hard to do - it is only a minute long, and almost every movie has at least a few interesting images/moments. And most of the trailers I've been obsessed with in the past, most obviously the ones for Brick [which ended up fulfilling the promise of its amazing trailer] and The Science of Sleep [which didn't fulfill the promise of its amazing trailer], do just that, and it works.

Today I've seen a trailer for a movie called The Pleasure of Being Robbed that absolutely blew me away. It doesn't try too hard to summarize the plot of the movie, but just to set it up. And combined with some really nice jittery handheld camerawork and an appropriately-vague-but-excitingly-yearning track by Haruki as the score, it does a perfect job of selling this movie. That being said, I'd probably be interested in this movie anyways, since it does a nice job of tapping into that nexus of two of my major obsessions - French New-Wave (as it basically seems like a modern and slightly more whimsical and less foreboding version Cleo from 5 to 7), and girls with nice bangs.

I've already seen this about ten times today:

Superficial Differences That Go Deep

2008-10-03T04:52:00.005-04:00

1. Buying Booze After Hours:

"Can I buy that bottle of wine?"

"Sorry sir, we legally can't sell this to you. It's too late."

"Please?"

"OK."

2. Deal or No Deal:

There are no models! And no germaphobic host that looks vaguely like Mr. Clean. But no models! All they have is 22 contestants who each pick a box and sit in a circle, and then one contestant is selected to eliminate the boxes that the other contestants hold. It's like the world's most boring AA meeting - say what you say about the U.S. version, at least it had some glitz. The boxes also only go to 100,000 pounds - not a tiny sum by any amount, but it ain't enough to make you a millionaire anywhere except in Turkey or Japan or something.

Necrophilia

2008-09-26T14:30:00.001-04:00

I generally try to speak truth to power. Or musicians. Granted, I've got a few prejudices (i.e. against mostly instrumental music and the like) and a few biases (i.e. short melodic songs), but I'm generally upfront about them. I've been to quite a few shows in Ottawa, and more specifically, quite a few shows by local bands. When I like the music, I usually tell them, and when I don't, I tell them as well (members of the band Videotape have experienced my particular brand of assholish constructive criticism when I spent thirty minutes explaining to them that they should a) tighten up their songs/set and b) lower the volume of the vocalist's microphone).

Two Ottawa bands made particularly strong impressions on me - Jetplanes of Abraham and Fucked Corpse. Although I have plenty to say about Jetplanes (and about how they're better than the vaguely stylistically similar Arcade Fire), I'm going to focus on Fucked Corpse today because I enjoy typing out their name. [Note: Every time I mention the name of this band from now on, please mentally add an "a" ahead of it; it makes most sentences at least 50% more entertaining.]

Fucked Corpse snuck up on me during my last weekend in Ottawa. I've heard about them a while ago - one of my friends is friends with the girlfriend of one of the guys in the band [parenthetical hearts to "the scene"], but I've never been too keen on checking them out mostly because of...well...their name. It's not that I was offended by it or anything, I just thought that they would be on the screamo-doom metal-thrash punk axis together with Cannibal Corpse and Anal Cunt. And whenever I mentioned this to people who actually heard their stuff and they said that they're not at all like that, I always thought that they were joking (it should be noted here that most of my discussions about Fucked Corpse took place when I was at that particular state of drunkenness that makes one disbelieve and distrust people). Anyways, on the Friday night of my last weekend in Canada, my friend (the aforementioned friend of the girlfriend of the guy from the band) mentioned that she was going to a Fucked Corpse show, and as part of my "fuck it, it's my last week here" mentality, I decided to tag along and at the very least be entertained by the scene (sans quotations). I originally intended to come to the show without hearing any of the band's music, but curiosity got the best of me and I checked out their Myspace page. And holy fucking shit, they were actually good!

Sloppy, sure, a little bit too hazy, maybe, but the two songs posted on their myspace were melodic in a memorable way, short so as to leave the listener wanting more, and they each had a powerful distinct uptempo thrust. I've heard them compared to current noise-punk hipster megastars No Age, but to me, they sounded much more vigorous and energetic (and less cerebral) than No Age; they sounded more like a distorted version of the killer* revival-punk band The Exploding Hearts - they had angst and uncertainty, sure, but they also took it in a definitively joyful way (just listen to those keyboards!). Maybe the band's intention is to make some sort of a profound artistic statement about prostate cancer and the youth of today, but to me it is ultimately fun music to have fun to. I was now pretty excited for the show. And Fucked Corpse didn't disappoint.

Held in the surprisingly large basement of a giant Victorian house, it was a sweaty, loud, drunk and energetic experience; Fucked Corpse played the kind of set that would have necessitated a stage invasion if a) there was actually a stage there, and b) the band wasn't already playing between members of the audience.

I read today that Fucked Corpse just released a split LP and I can't wait to hear it.** I hope it's called "Is Enjoying It."

---------------

* Poor choice of words. I was completely heartbroken when I learned that three of the four Exploding Hearts died in a traffic accident shortly after the release of their fantastic first and only album. I still can't listen to their music. So, no pun intended.

** A vaguely interesting related anecdote: I purchased the Fucked Corpse "Apple Meat" single at their show for 5 bucks, along with an awful live CD (consisting of a 20 minute cover of a Velvet Underground song) and a neat little pin. After a couple of days I actually decided to play the single for the first time on my record player. But when I put the single on the turntable and it started playing, the music was absolutely abysmal. It had none of Fucked Corpse previously heard energetic hazy keyboard riffs, and instead it was all dirge-like atmospherics and strangely muted, growling vocals - in short, it basically sounded like what I originally expected Fucked Corpse to sound like. I was disappointed to say the least. To wash off the terrible aftertaste of the A-side, I turned to the already proven B-side "Rising Tide" (which I already listened to on their Myspace page). And holy fuck, it sounded as awful - slow, muted... boring. I sat through the first minute of the song before I realized that something was fundamentally wrong here - After spending about five minutes thinking about this, I clicked the 33/45 rpm button on my record player. And thank god, everything went back to normal - a burst of musical energy hit me like a well-timed Red-Bull (or like a poor simile). So I guess the moral of this story is: if something sounds terrible, just speed it up by 15% and it will sound amazing.

Chap (Manifest)o

2008-09-21T05:17:00.004-04:00

I've recently discovered that there is a small but dedicated group of British retro-ists who, instead of emulating a boring decade like the 1980s (which would basically entail dressing in American Apparel-esque neon coloured clothes and doing lots of coke), have decided to bring back the dress-sense of the Edwardian British gentleman: tweed three-piece suits, pocket watches, pipes, caps, and most importantly, luxurious moustaches. They're called "chaps," and they have meetings, picnics, olympic games, and even a magazine which covers all sorts of chap related issues such as moustache grooming, sartorial conundrums, brandy, and the like.

Actually, scratch that - they are fiercely committed to bringing back the WAYS of the Edwardian British gentleman and scaling back the creeping vulgarity and informality of modern life. As such, they engage in some public activism: a group of chaps have gone to some poor neighbourhoods around England and gave out tweed suits to kids, three chaps planted the British flag on top of an art installation (a mountain of cardboard boxes) as a protest against modern art, and about two dozen chaps gathered together for a "civilizing" protest in London where they doffed their hats to passerby and offered to walk old ladies across busy intersections.

Needless to say, due to my previously recorded love of facial hair, I am wholly enamoured with these guys. I am also very thankful that I brought my three piece suit to London.

Tally ho!

Here and There and Everywhere: Two Inefficiencies to be Corrected

2008-09-07T12:25:00.006-04:00

1) UK bars don't serve pitchers of beer.

2) T-Pain is entirely unknown in the UK.

T-Pain.net has the best poll of all time

Continuity Boy

2008-09-04T11:37:00.003-04:00

[Fuck I wanted to save this title for a better post. Whatever.]

This is going to be less than a full-fledged post and more of another vaguely idiosyncratic observation of one of the differences between London (and England, I suppose) and N. America.

Newspaper Vendors:

London newspaper kiosks don't actually display any of their papers, not even above the fold (where you can usually see the main headline, a photograph and the start of the article). Instead, they have boards on which shocking headlines (TRIPLE MURDER UNCOVERED, ENGLISH FOOTBALL COACH QUITS, etc.) are prominently written in large font, teasing you to buy the (unseen) paper.

This, to me, was pretty amazing. I thought that this whole newsboy shouting "EXTRA EXTRA: TITANIC SUNK!!!" thing has died out around the reign of George V - especially nowadays, when you can see a shocking headline and immediately check your Blackberry/iPhone about the news, this strategy is especially pointless. If you show the newspaper above the fold, you can at least entice potential readers with some nice large colour photos - which are really the one genuine way in which physical newspapers are better than their virtual equivalents.

But maybe the British aren't quite ready to transition from the real and the physical to the virtual. I should really check circulation figures of the major British daily newspapers in the last ten years to confirm or deny that statement, but I don't quite feel like it. So, homework assignment...

UPDATE: Apparently, London papers still come out in several editions every day... so I guess the headlines exist to signal that there's a new edition out there.

London Fall-ing - Shoe Shiner Edition

2008-09-01T15:41:00.015-04:00

It may be kind of sad, but one of the first unique things I noticed about London weren't the intricate Victorian architecture, or the many statues of generals/admirals from the Napoleonic Wars randomly plopped around the city, or the fact that nearly every single building is named "______ House." It was shoes. And let me tell you people, there's two words I can use to describe shoes in London:

"Silent Velcro"

Maybe I'm exaggerating, but about 50% of Londoners wear these ridiculous Stan Smith shoes that have velcro instead of laces. You know, like the ones that kids wear when they're not capable of tying their shoelaces yet? Or the ones that old people wear when they can't bend down anymore? Apparently, in England at least, the velcro trend is sweeping from the edges of the population pyramid to the ever lucrative middle.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this: Are British people/ Londoners becoming really lazy? Do Pete Doherty and/or Amy Winehouse advertise them? Is the switch from laces to velcro part of a general cultural and political shift towards conservatism - the same trend that helped to elect the equally goofy looking Boris Johnson as the new Mayor of London?

If you're STILL curious about currently popular British footwear, the other 50% of Londoners wear these white canvas Keds that do have laces, meaning that every second Londoner doesn't want to look like a kid who belongs on the short yellow school-bus. On the other hand, while I used to think that those white canvas sneakers were totally badass (in a hipster sort of way), after seeing them on 16 year old boys wearing complicated jeans and polo shirts with popped up collars, I'm starting to change my mind [Hipsterism! Call Adbusters magazine this instant!].

Postscript: This was mainly about dude-shoes. For any girls reading this blog, I actually don't have all that much expertise in noticing women's footwear trends - it all looks like the usual combo of ballet slip-ons, flats, fancy high-heels, and the aforementioned white canvas sneakers.

The Arrival: London

2008-08-31T16:17:00.004-04:00

Hollaz. Made it here in one piece.

Stray Observations:

It's foggy and raining all the time (as advertised).
Cars driving on the wrong side of the road are unspeakably distressing and disorienting, especially when they're coming out of a tight curve.
There's about a pub per square centimeter around where I live.
My room is basically a closet, although it's got a pretty good view.
Gin is cheap around here. It's the good life.
Thank god I'm not in Canada while the Jays are kind of blowing the end of their season.

I'll try to sleep off my jet-lag and then come up with some more insightful observations.

UPDATE: Jays won six in a row since I've been away. I guess we all know what went wrong this season then.

For the Love of God, Please Stop: Showing Novelty Relationship Items in Movies

2008-08-25T16:48:00.019-04:00

For the record, I love Judd Apatow. Being an emotionally arrested man-child myself, I can't help but relate to most of his male protagonists. Sometimes, however, it feels like his mildly formulaic stories (or at least elements of said stories) are starting to cannibalize themselves - and because of Apatow's ubiquity - corrode popular culture.

Case in point: relationship novelty items.

It all started from Apatow's second kick at the TV series can, Undeclared. On that show, the actor Jason Segel portrayed his signature character - the slightly obsessed and eventually jilted boyfriend. This particular incarnation of the character, Eric, owned a print shop, and could thereby print multiple novelty items bearing his and his girlfriend's faces. These novelty items ranged from the banal - a calendar with different pictures of the smiling couple on them - to the inspired - a pillow with Eric's face that his girlfriend uses in her dorm-room. Point is, there were lots of them, and they were generally funny.

Then, seven years later, the novelty items resurfaced within the first twenty minutes of the Jason Segel vehicle Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Segel's character, Peter, who is essentially a slightly more well adjusted Eric, is unceremoniously dumped by his attractive and successful celebrity girlfriend (the titular Sarah Marshall) for someone else. He then proceeds to mope around his apartment and try to get over his ex. This proves to be difficult, however, since everywhere he turns he sees images of himself and his ex happy together - and these images are found on often incongruous items (novelty!).

Now, I know what you're thinking, this are just two examples, six years apart. But wait! Within the first thirty seconds of the trailer for the new movie Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, the girlfriend of Michael Cera (the titular Nick, and a peripheral Apatow actor) dumps him; you see him on the phone, trying to get her back while starting at... you got it, multiple novelty items bearing their grinning visages.

It's not like I don't get it, using these things is so easy. They show the absolute commitment of the guy to the relationship (based on the sheer volume and obsessive creepiness of the items), the guy's naivete and vulnerability (who else would make and keep these things?), and the lost paradise of the relationship itself (they BOTH look so happy in those pictures). Character, plot and scenery, all set up in one shot.

But seriously, isn't it getting a little bit stale? Doesn't this feel like the comedic equivalent of seeing that a joke works once, and then reusing it over and over and over, without adapting it to new contexts in the slightest? And besides, this might be a slightly weird thing to say about straight-forward comedies, but the lack of realism of the whole thing is actually starting to grate on me. I mean, in Undeclared, Siegel's character was so obviously meant to be a wacky obsessive caricature that it worked well (for laughs) [He also owned a printing shop, so it would make sense that he would be able and willing to spend the time and effort required to make these items]. In the other two instances, where the dumped person is meant to be much more of an everyman and the prevalence towards making multiple novelty items chronicling a relationship works against that notion. Judd and the rest of the gang, aren't there better and less lazy ways to efficiently characterize the mind-set of the prototypical recently dumped young slightly obsessive male?

Live Cricket > Live Baseball

2008-08-24T20:41:00.010-04:00

Laying down a bunt?

One of the (many) things I've been interested in doing following my imminent move to England, is to attend a live Cricket match. Why Cricket, you ask? Long lasting love of Douglas Adams aside, my logic was of the following sort:

Baseball is the most relaxing and entertaining thing to watch live -> There is no baseball in England -> Cricket is almost like baseball, only it lasts even longer -> I should go and watch a Cricket game. QED.

My plan was to go to Lord's Cricket Ground in London, because I figured that if I was going to see my first match (err... fixture), it might as well be at the place where the first-ever organized Cricket match was played close to 200 years ago. A sense of history and grandeur and so on. Unfortunately, what I didn't quite realize was that the Cricket season roughly parallels the Baseball season in North America, with the last matches of the 2008 season played in early September, and tickets for said matches being a hot commodity. This gross failure in planning has an obvious reason: After looking up British weather and seeing that the average low temperature in December is about 5 degrees celsius (aka, the average April temperature at the Rogers Stadium or any North-Eastern ball-park), I immediately concluded that there would be some sort of a Caribbean-esque Winter Cricket League. Alas, that was just a pipe dream. Oh well, there's always the 2009 season.

But this whole sob story isn't really the point of my post. While trying to find where I can actually purchase tickets on Lord's website, I decided to check out the section called "General Ground Regulations" to see whether I would need to wear a full tuxedo or only a smoking jacket and tie to be admitted to a match. No fancy dress regulations were found, but I did see the following intriguing rule:

e. Small quantities of alcohol may be brought into the Ground, under the supervision of MCC who reserve the right to confiscate any quantity of alcohol from any spectator, and return it to such spectator at the end of the day’s play. The MCC Committee has set a limit of two pints of beer or one 75cl bottle of wine per spectator. Amounts of alcohol in excess of the limit will be confiscated. Under no circumstances will any spectator be re-admitted to the Ground at any time during the day if he or she is in possession of any alcohol.

Yup, that's right, Cricket is a BYOB sport. How fucking awesome is that? Can you imagine the same at North American ball-games? No more sneaking crotch-flasks or having to get bombed at the Steamwhistle brewery before the game! [Although you would still probably want to do the latter.] I know that the limits they put on the booze seem pretty lame and arbitrary, but I think that once you're actually allowed to bring drinks in, the unspoken rule is that as long as you don't pass out and/or vomit, two pints can turn into three pints and four pints and so on. Really, how would they know? You could chug a beer quickly and then throw it under some random seat, all the while pretending to double-fist (and sip) the two original pints you brought in. It's not the classiest way to handle it, but I'm more than willing to give it (and this whole Cricket business) a shot.

Romantic 2.0

2008-08-18T21:24:00.000-04:00

If you've ever read my blog to catch up on the latest hott musical acts, please stop and go anywhere but here. With the exception of my constant hyping of We Aeronauts (watch this!) and Los Campesinos! (new album and in October!), I don't try too hard to post about new music here. When I do actually talk about music, it's usually to give my personal perspective on something that's been already chewed to death about in the blogosphere (and oftentimes in print). So lets keep this ball rolling and talk a little bit about a UK singer-songwriter - Laura Marling.

Marling plays acoustic folk music of a particularly melancholy and twang-less English strain, and she has already received a fair bit of coverage [even getting a small write-up in the New Yorker courtesy of the ever relevant Sasha Frere-Jones (in like fucking June)]. Her main attributes? She's an albino 18 year old waif who consistently writes and sings like a 50 year old triple divorcee.

Personally, I never gave two shits about her until I saw her in a completely unrelated video for a song that was good enough to get into Volume 1 of the MildlySelfDefeating mix series - "Five Years Time" by Noah and the Whale. This video is notable for several reasons: 1) It has absolutely and utterly appropriated Wes Anderson's cinematic style to a degree that (somehow) charmingly borders on sycophantic plagiarism,* and 2) Besides (arguably) G'n'R's "November Rain," it's one of the most literal videos of all time - everything that is said in the song is acted out on screen.

Miss Marling performs in this video, and her aforementioned albino waifishness seems particularly attractive when filmed on shaky Super8. Besides that, I was also intrigued by the affiliation of this supposedly morose singer-songwriter with one of the twee-est and most upbeat new bands around (she contributes backing vocals to the song, and one of the members of Noah and the Whale produced her album). This definitely made her at least somewhat interesting, and I decided to listen to a couple of her songs. I didn't really get past the first one I listened to yet - "New Romantic":

This is exactly the kind of morose plunky folk song that I generally stay away from nowadays, but due to a series of topsy-turvy events that I would rather not expand on, I can personally relate to this song (I'll leave you to decide for yourselves about the perspective to which I relate). But regardless of this personal connection, this song interested me because it's the first time that I've ever heard anyone directly reference Ryan Adams in music that is not his own. It's really neat (and rare) to see beloved bands and musicians become canon in front of you,** and the way that she refers to him is pitch perfect: "he put Ryan Adams on/ I think he thinks it makes me weak/ it only ever makes me strong." For much of his career, Adams wrote breakup songs that were not only tragic and melancholy but vicious as well, and using his music as an weapon in a relationship struggle seems very fitting.

Other than the Ry-Ry reference, this song reminds me most of all of a song I wrote about a couple of months ago - SoKo's "I Will Never Love You More" [sorry for referring to my own posts]. Though Marling is distinctly less mentally retarded/ESL and can actually express herself in full sentences, both young women show a keen sense of disillusionment in romantic relationships and portray the sheer inability of their narrators to become earnestly engaged in these relationships. There are probably reams of papers/novels/livejournal entries to be [that have been] written on how younger people expect too much of relationships too early (because of movies/music/television/growing up too fast etc.) and inevitably end up disappointed and hardened and bitterly cynical in the prospect of love, but for me, all it means is that my anti-Valentine's Day muxtape has just expanded with another solid song.

--------------

* For further examples of said reverence, check out their website (linked to above) with its cross-cutting diagrams of a whale-boat.

** Although, to be fair, in his eight years of solo activity, Ryan Adams released nine albums (and this includes a double album), which, when you think about it, would be somewhere around the average output for a twenty year old band. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it almost feels as though Ryan Adams has the sheer mass of a canon musician behind him (including the requisite "early," "experimental," and "late revisionist" stages).

What We Talk About When We Talk About Muxtapes

2008-08-15T14:10:00.002-04:00

"Rumours?"

"Nope, all true."

The One Where I Got Into Oxford

2008-08-15T11:20:00.002-04:00

An acceptance letter from Oxford arrived in my e-mail box today IN MAY.* My immediate response was a sense of unrestrained delight - I mean, fuck, I got into the University of Oxford - an exclusive establishment with a millennium of history, the alumni of which include...well, look through this yourselves, my head starts spinning as soon as I try to pick out a few names (actually, here's a not-really-random random draw: Evelyn Waugh, Richard Dawkins, John Donne, Bill Clinton, 48 Nobel Prize winners, and possibly Jesus).

My subsequent feelings were of a more mixed type. Not only did this e-mail arrive way too late, after I had already arranged for a place and residence at the London School of Economics, but it also didn't exactly come from the University of Oxford. Rather, it came from a newly found relative of mine in Nigeria who also promised me a full scholarship and an inheritance of ten million dollars if I could help him by immediately making a wholly plausible (and temporary) loan of a about one thousand pounds through a wire service.

Well, not quite.

It (actually) came from St. Hilda's College. Which is funny, because I didn't remember applying to any St. Hilda's College. In fact, I distinctly remember applying to Nuffield College (based on its tradition of graduate research in the Social Sciences) and Balliol College (based on the irrelevant factoid that Robertson Davies, the most inessential of "important" Canadian authors, went there). So I was slightly disappointed, but still intrigued by this strange little college that accepted me.***

I clicked on the link to its official home-page and browsed for a bit. One thing was immediately apparent - this place had some good looking ladies. Good looking ladies studying at the library, good looking ladies at alumni events, good looking ladies playing soccer, good looking ladies strolling the commons... upon further research I came to a startling realization - there were no dudes ANYWHERE in any of the photos (also, instead of alumni, it said alumnae). "Jackpot!" I thought, "I've just been accepted at a Women's College." I mean, there are even UNICORNS on its crest:

Extrapolating from this crest, here's an artist's depiction of what life at St. Hilda's College is really like:

Well, not quite.

Apparently, from the Michaelmas term 2008 (that's Fall 2008), St. Hilda's will admit men, and thus relinquish its status as the last Women's only College at Oxford. I was invited to be one of these select few (there's roughly 500 graduates and undergraduates at St. Hilda's at any given year, so there will probably be about 10 newcomers in the forthcoming Fall term). Naturally this caused me to pause and make a Pros and Cons list:

PROS:

A maximum of 10 dudes and 490 girls? That's not a bad ratio at all.
The above ratio will allow me to try and accomplish what every single middle-class man going into an exclusive environment hopes to accomplish - marry rich and not work again for a single day in my life (unless work is defined as throwing charity luncheons). This possibility is particularly alluring at St. Hilda's since richer families are more likely to send their daughters to what is perceived to be a secure (read: male free) environment.
It's Oxford, the name and reputation of which will probably wet the pantaloons of many prospective employers.

CONS

This College mostly specializes in English and History, which are not very close to what I hope to do - it would also reduce opportunities for networking in the discipline and the like.
Politics: 1) Based on many of the comments to the BBC article I liked to above, there is a widespread and rather virulent opposition to the integration of St. Hilda's College. As a result, the first year of this experiment will probably be a complete circus. And since this is the only year I'll be attending the school for, I'm fairly wary. [This would also probably make it difficult to get along with some of the girls at the College, which will counter two of my PRO points above.] 2) I was clearly not good enough for the two Colleges I actually applied to, and the move to shift me to St. Hilda's smacks of the "we need some warm bodies to go there because no one applied" mentality.
I was already accepted and offered a place+residence at another exclusive English school.

So yeah, I guess the CONS overpowered the PROS on this one and I sent them a respectful letter declining their offer. Nevertheless, while I'm in England I'll definitely keep an eye out for any news of massive gender riots (or orgies) at St. Hilda's College, Oxford.

-------------

* I get it, I haven't written here for a while. Shame on me, etc etc. But you know what, sometimes there are more important and satisfying things in life than having strangers and friends read your half-coherent thoughts online. And sometimes these things come to an abrupt and rather painful end. So there, deal with it.**

** Recently I've been reading some [fantastic] David Foster Wallace essays (from his book of essays, Consider the Lobster), meaning that I have an insatiable urge to include every tangential thought as a footnote. You will probably have to deal with this as well.

*** I didn't really delve too deeply into the governance and organization of Oxford, but it's basically separated into about 40 semi-autonomous units, or Colleges. It's where you live, socialize, and study (though graduate studies are more dispersed, apparently). Different Colleges have different Fellows, or Dons, and some are highly famous for having many Dons who are very specialized in a particular discipline (i.e. Physics).

Summing Up: Bluesfest 2008

2008-07-13T00:30:00.005-04:00

There's still another day left to the festival, but I'm probably not going to go because I'm absolutely burned out by eight straight nights of live music. So here's a quick summarizing list of the things I enjoyed the most at Bluesfest this year:

The B-movie Roots-y supergroup version of Broken Social Scene, Six Shooter Records band, performing "The Weight."
Attending the Black Crows show and for a couple of moments, when the alcohol going through my system and the classic rock chops of the band combined in a particular way, being able to imagine seeing Led Zeppelin live.
Rediscovery of the Stars - I've been to a couple of Stars shows before, but this is the first time I feel that I've seen them in the appropriate context [and with the right person] - not feeling cynical or bitter or angry, but rather earnest and hopeful and receptive. The Smiths' "Charming Man" cover topped it all off.
Snoop Dogg borrowing from the audience the biggest blunt ever seen outside of a documentary on Rastafarianism.
The Weakerthans show. I've only heard one song of theirs before, (Manifest), and I usually don't like to see bands I'm completely unfamiliar with; even if they put on a good show, I end up being bored and distracted because all of the distinctive mannerisms of the band begin to melt together after the first 30 minutes. The Weakerthans were sort of an exception to this rule. I only stayed for an hour, but the songs proved to be memorable and interesting enough for me to get their last two albums. I was amazed at how well I remembered the songs from the show (especially from 2003's Reconstruction Site), making the band my official 2008 Bluesfest discovery. [As a complete side-note, the thing that I always loved about The Weakerthans is that the main singer-songwriter guy used to be in the hardcore political punk band Propagandhi - not because I liked the band or anything, but because my knowledge of Propagandhi saved me from getting my ass kicked by hardcore kids in high-school.]
Brian Wilson making it through his set despite the sound cutting out twice for extended periods of time. He was relatively catatonic for most of the show, and I was really afraid that he was going to snap once the sound cut out for the second time. "Sound Out and Lights Out for Wilson; Band has to Carry Catatonic Brian Wilson Offstage" Ottawa Sun headlines flashed in my head.

BAIT - Bloggers Against Intoxicated Typing

2008-07-10T07:09:00.006-04:00

I apologize to the internets.

Sunday Night Dick Jokes: Bruce Cocksteen

2008-07-06T23:12:00.003-04:00

Over the past few weeks, in the time I haven't spent sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire that is my personal life, I've really gotten into Bruce Springsteen - mostly Born to Run, which is such an intense personal album about being young and unhappy that I can't not relate [ageism!], but I also really like the more upbeat and synth-y Born in the USA. The second song on that album is called "Cover Me." But listen to it...

Doesn't it kind of sound like something else? Something...slightly sexier?

Maybe I'm the only one who hears it, so to be more explicit [pun pun pun], here's your homework assignment for this week - replace all "Cover me"s in this song by "Cum on me"s:

The times are tough now, just getting tougher
This old world is rough, it's just getting rougher
Cover me, come on baby, cover me
Well I'm looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me
Promise me baby you won't let them find us
Hold me in your arms, let's let our love blind us
Cover me, shut the door and cover me
Well I'm looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me

Outside's the rain, the driving snow
I can hear the wild wind blowing
Turn out the light, bolt the door
I ain't going out there no more

This whole world is out there just trying to score
I've seen enough I don't want to see any more,
Cover me, come on and cover me
I'm looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me

The song still makes total sense! Albeit in a slightly different way...maybe Bruce will come out of the closet soon and all of his work will be completely re-interpreted according to his sexuality. In that case, you've heard it here first.

I've Got 100 Problems but Writing a Blog Post Ain't One

2008-07-05T23:46:00.007-04:00

OK, maybe it is. 101 problems then?

Sorry guys and gals, this was a bit of a lengthy hiatus. I've just been distracted lately, to say the least. This post is probably going to be pretty short, as I'm trying to get back into the swing of things:

It's that magical time of the year in Ottawa, Bluesfest time, when people (and by people I mean the olds [Ageism!]) bring their enormous lawn chairs and folding seats and take up the prime front and center stage real estate, meaning that for everyone else the two choices are either a) stand far away and watch small YouTube-window sized figures play music or b) stand under one of the speakers at the corners of the stage and go deaf. I know that it's boring bitching about this stuff because people have done it for years, but I'd seriously rather face off an army of dirty hippies at Bonnaroo than this.

Besides that, I've been mostly keeping to my itinerary so far. Here are a couple of stray observations:

At the Feist show, my friends and I smoked a joint. Almost immediately, they became really really stoned: one of them turned paranoid and stared at the stars a lot, another kept talking about how the white toes of our Converse shoes are like bolts of lightening, and a third lost all ability to concentrate on anything for more than one second at a time. Me? Besides the slight tingling of my fingers and face and the deepening of the sounds I was hearing, I was perfectly fine. I was kind of jealous of their 'genuine' pot experience. Fuck, I can't do anything right.
The sound engineering (and sound in general) at the festival this year has been extraordinarily awful. To give two examples from today: the instruments of Lucinda Williams' band were mixed up so weirdly and cranked up so loud that it sounded like she was singing for the Jesus and Mary Chain. And when I went to check out Richard Thompson on the tiny Roots Stage (because I just wanted to listen to something I could ignore), sound-bleeding was so bad that at times you literally could only hear Dweezil Zappa's guitar solos instead. But the weirdest sound moment came at last night's the Feist show. She played a few songs (nice, mostly slowed down and low key, which was neat) and then she moved into her super-smash-iPod-hit "1,2,3,4": During the chorus of the song, two things happened; first, everyone in the crowd sang along, and second, the volume of Feist and her band was actually turned way up relative to the rest of her set. The optimist in me sees this as an attempt by Feist to actually play her music and accommodate for interruptions, but the paranoid cynic in me (who is currently beating the optimist in me down with an aluminum baseball bat) sees this as a sinister and nakedly commercial attempt by festival organizers to make sure people hear the popular songs and ignore the rest of the output of the artist. The potential slippery slope from that is pretty frightening.
After the Richard Thompson show ended fairly early, I decided to check out the Blacksheep Stage which mostly features the 'alternative' artists. It was a pretty good choice. On stage were around 15 musicians, kids and puppies, playing together on a variety of instruments or singing harmonies. As soon as I walk on the premises, the guitars (and banjos) start playing a very familiar riff...and singer #1 started singing about how he pulled into Nazareth and wasn't feeling too great... I now truly believe that Robbie Robertson travelled into the future and foresaw that supergroups WILL NEED an epic song that can showcase the individual talents of about a dozen musicians while also being a feel-good sing along. And he (and the people I was watching) fucking nailed it. I was standing there with a huge smile on my face the whole time. Who the hell were these guys? Apparently all are members of the Six Shooter Records label that monopolized the Blacksheep stage for the entire day. They included some semi-familiar faces like Justin Rutledge, a pretty decent roots-y musician, and members of Elliott Brood, a self described "doom country" band. Everyone else there was also from a similar singer-songwriter/alt-country mould. All in all, I don't think that I'm actually interested enough in any of them to start buying their records, but it was a perfect festival moment that snuck up on me at just the right time.

Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul a.k.a. the Black Post

2008-06-19T22:30:00.005-04:00

In my earnest first post, I wrote that I never want this blog to become a teary-eyed confessional. Being a narcissist, it would be fairly easy for me to write hyper-specific daily rants about my personal life (in fact, I've written a couple over the last weekend); but this sort of stuff will inevitably become laughably embarrassing, not to mention dated and unreadable to anyone but myself, in about two weeks. Instead, I wanted to write about a wider range of topics (i.e. not just me whining about girls), which would make this blog more interesting to read and let individual posts have longer shelf-lives (of, say, a month).

Unfortunately, I'm running into a wall about forty posts in. Last night, I posted something so under-written and under-thought that it shouldn't have been published until the next fiscal year at the earliest. That fiasco felt like the bottoming out of my post ideas (besides the aforementioned personal laundry clearing), so I think that I'm going to take a little bit of time off. This doesn't mean that I'll stop posting here completely, but that the frequency of my missives will be limited to about once or twice a week. Hopefully, after a couple of weeks of rest I'll be burning to overshare my [fascinating] opinions on the internet on a daily basis again.

Anyway, thanks for sticking out with this thus far. If I ever manage to land a six digit book-deal, all ten of you are getting complimentary t-shirts.

In the immortal words of J-Hova -

"They say 'they never really miss you til you dead or you gone' /so on that note I'm leaving"

Chuck Klosterman Shares My Dreams

2008-06-18T23:57:00.003-04:00

I never remember any of my dreams except for one recursive dream where my teeth are falling out. It's a gradual and process that starts when one of them (usually a molar) feels a bit shaky. I gently start rocking it back and forth with my tongue as it gets looser and looser, and then there's this sound like scotch tape opening and it falls out. I feel the tooth disconnected in the back of my mouth (sometimes I spit it out), but I can't dwell on it for too long because other teeth are now starting to feel loose as well...I usually wake up in cold sweat after the first couple are gone. The worst thing about these dreams is that I remember the physical sensation perfectly. I don't remember where I was when my teeth started falling, who I was talking to, what I was wearing or anything like the stuff you usually remember from dreams; all I remember is the feeling of of my teeth falling out and then of being toothless. Once I wake up I usually spend about ten minutes making sure none of my teeth are actually gone. It's not too pleasant. Naturally, I consulted dream dictionaries and some crap like that (maybe I just googled it), and I found that these dreams of losing teeth are symbolic of my fear of change and death. Fair enough, I thought, I am particularly worried about both of these thing.

And then I read this:

"Growing up, I used to have lots of dreams where I lost my teeth. Sometimes they would get knocked out in these dreams, but usually they just fell out...It was basically the only "nightmare" (if you can call it that) I ever had as a teenager" (Chuck Klosterman, Fargo Rock City 136).

Whoa[, I thought]...Chuckles had the same dreams as me! He goes on to say that he stopped having these dreams in College and provides an appropriate explanation (I don't know how he found this out, maybe they have different dream dictionaries in the midwest): these dreams are the product of sexual frustration. All of you who know me are probably nodding in agreement right now. Whatever.

At least now I know on which side of the "Chuck Klosterman, voice of our generation or a sporadically funny but marginal blowhard?" debate I fall on. I might as well join the "Only Chuck Klosterman Understands Me" and "If Chuck Klosterman Spit on My Face, I'd Stop Taking Showers" Facebook groups. In fact, it's too bad they removed the old fan-group - "I'd Take it up the Ass for Chuck Klosterman" [maybe it was 'from' instead of 'for' though].

"I'll bet twelve floppy disks..."

2008-06-16T22:50:00.004-04:00

There's a really weird bit at the beginning of the John Hughes movie Sixteen Candles (1984). I don't know if you've seen it, but here's a short summary: Molly Ringwald is a girl whose family completely forgot about her birthday. She goes to a dance and tries to get on with the hot guy, while a horny nerd played by Anthony Michael Hall tries to get on with her. She ends up getting it on with the hot guy. It's a happy ending. The End.

As I've said, the weird bit comes at the beginning of the movie. Ringwald arrives at her high-school, and the movie shifts into a montage of 80s culture. You see 80s shoes (really colourful chucks, ballet shoes, actually, fuck, all of the stuff that you see nowadays too), 80s pins, bright polyester looking clothes, overalls, feathered hair, tight track pants, tights, the whole shebang; it lasts for about two minutes, and pays fetishistic attention the tiniest details of the style of the time. On the surface, this seems perfectly normal; we're accustomed to 80s style montages because we've been exposed to them countless times. But when you think about it, all of these montages we've been exposed to were in retro 80s movies.

The most recent example I've seen would be in the movie Son of Rambow, but there's usually a scene in every movie set in the 1980s that consists of nothing but a nostalgic showcase to the youth culture of the era (preferably scored to Duran Duran or Madness). It's easy enough for someone to make such a montage now, because they would know exactly which trends are worth presenting and which are too pointless to showcase. The thing is, though, that John Hughes was making the movie WHILE this cultural moment was still happening - this makes the montage in Sixteen Candles appear eerily prescient. It's as if he managed to travel to the future, see what people nostalgically miss about the 80s, then go back to the past, and take stock of it for the sake of future generations. But that's a whole other movie. On the other hand, maybe he was just a very perceptive person who realized the inherent transitory nature of cultural zeitgeist moments and decided to record this particular one for posterity. Or maybe it didn't take a genius to realize that all of these fashions weren't going to last very long. Or maybe they were just THAT popular, that if you wanted to make a movie set in the present, you had to include them. Or maybe he was nostalgic for the moment while actually living it. I can relate to that.

Some Nights, I Think Sal Paradise Was Wrong

2008-06-15T01:37:00.008-04:00

For someone like me who, lacking any sort of coherent creed or ideology, defines himself by the ephemeral grid of pop culture that he likes - A1 [Rogue Wave and Chuck Klosterman] to T40 [NAS and Monty Python] - it's always kind of a downer when your friends dislike something that you're really into. Indifference is even worse.

Case in point: I've tried, many times, to introduce the Hold Steady to my friends and I was met with indifferent shrugs every single time. These were extremely frustrating experiences for me, and they usually happened in the following way:

I'm driving my Toyota Corolla to or from somewhere with 1-4 of my friends. They're kind of drunk. I'm usually not, but it doesn't matter, we're all pumped. Naturally, we need music to reflect our state of mind, something to let us roll down the windows and drive fast and yell. I suggest the Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America, which I tend introduce by talking about its Springsteen-esque riffs. I put it on and crank up the volume for "Stuck Between Stations," the first song. Apathy ensues. [By contrast, if I were to put on, say, "99 Problems" or Ryan Adams' Gold, ceiling banging singing at the top of the lungs chaos would ensue.]

I was (still am, actually) especially frustrated not only because I really like band and I want my friends to enjoy the music I like, but because on the surface, my friends and the Hold Steady would make a perfect match. The Hold Steady talk almost exclusively about getting wasted and partying, but in really clever ways and with solid riffing. My friends are smart people, and they drink a lot [which makes them extremely non-judgmental, which is why I love them. I think that it's probably the most important quality to have in a friend. That's not to say that if I were to kill a goat or a hooker while blackout drunk they wouldn't care, but anyone who seriously drinks on a semi-regular basis gets into all kinds of (mostly harmless though embarrassing) misadventures. So while they tend to remember my foibles (as funny stories), they don't remind me of them constantly (because lets face it, they get into scrapes as well), and being an obsessively self conscious person, I'm grateful for that. End of sentimental digression.] and love classic rock.

The obvious thing to blame is the singer Craig Finn's vocals, which are raspy, entirely atonal, and therefore very alienating. But that's only part of the problem. Last night I finally realized the crux of it: The vocals are placed so high in the mix that riffing and the melodies of the music are all but inaudible when you crank up the volume on a car stereo. When you listen to something like Springsteen's "Born to Run" (to name one really obvious antecedent to the Hold Steady), the vocals sound like they are behind the melody, and it's the melody that drives the song forward. In the Hold Steady's equally anthemic (I would argue) "Chips Ahoy," the situation is the opposite. The riffs and the melody are there, but it's really the vocal inflections that propel the song. And Finn's vocals, as I mentioned above, are alienating. You would have to listen to the song several times and get past the imperfect vocals (or just hear it on a really good system with separate channels or whatever) to really get its melodic thrust. This would make the Hold Steady, quite unlike the bar-rock and classic-rock bands to which they are constantly compared in the music press, a headphones band. The closest musical comparison I can come up with is the Smiths, where Morrissey's idiosyncratic vocals often go in a completely different direction than Johnny Marr's guitar work (and often drive the songs as well). But the Smiths' music was basically made to be listened to alone, while the Hold Steady make their music explicitly about social situations; it kind of sucks that it can't be appreciated in the same context.

Dick Loves His Johnson

2008-06-13T17:51:00.011-04:00

The Toronto Star's top baseball story today is a piece of writing where our favourite drunk uncle Richard Griffin "masterbated all over the page to Reed Johnson's return" (as one of my friends accurately described it). I've waited all day for one of the pros to write a big fat kick in the gonads in response, but in vain. I guess everyone is watching soccer or listening to Mike Toth or something. So it's open mic night here, and I'm willing to step up to the bat [at the Mixed Metaphor Comedy Club]. Buckle up kids, this is a juicy one.

[Quick Recap: The Jays released Reed Johnson, a scrappy and gritty but underperforming outfielder, and picked up Shannon Stewart instead for perfectly solid baseball reasons. Griff wasn't happy.]

I won't go through it line by line, but my favourite quote comes early, fast and crazy:

"But this time [Alfonso Soriano's injury] may be a blessing in disguise for Toronto fans because it will allow more playing time for former Jay Reed Johnson. The ovation for the fan favourite's first at-bat will be huge."

Love it. It's a blessing in disguise not because Soriano's injury means that the Jays have a better chance to win the series, but because Jays' fans (i.e. Griff) will be able to get huge (HUGE) boners from seeing their favourite scrappy outfielder play. This is exactly like that scene in the Hobo with a Shotgun trailer where Santa Claus is spying on a kindergarden playground through binoculars and masturbating.

AND THEN the article (???) becomes a whole Costco-sized bag of nuts. I don't want to quote the whole thing because it depresses me more than African children with bloated bellies covered with flies, but he basically says that the Cubs are going to make it to the playoffs because whenever the Jays release a player, the team that picks him up makes the playoffs next year. And he's got a list of ten names from the past six years to prove it!

I'm convinced. I now wish that the Jays kept Eric Hinske and Reed Johnson and Miguel Batista for their magical powers of taking teams to the playoffs despite not being very good baseball players. Fuck, they should totally include this statistic on the back of baseball cards, right next to the player's Heart quotient and Grit factor. My only hope for the rest of this season (because the Jays are a .500 club and their season is over!) is that Colorado comes back from being 9.5 games behind in the NL West to win the Pennant and the World Series so that ex-Jay Josh Towers can join this illustrious list. It's gonna happen!

But the Griff wasn't quite done yet.

"If welcoming Reed Johnson back isn't enough of an incentive, fans on Sunday will get a chance to watch Cubs starter Ted Lilly..."

Here I was, thinking that Blue Jays fans came to see the Toronto Blue Jays play baseball (and hopefully win), but the Griff taught me right. Fans come to see pitchers with ERA+ of 86 and WHIP of 1.35.

This whole thing would have been totally redeemed in my eyes had the Griff (who has been known to enjoy the hippity-hop and who secretly goes by the name Big Daddy G) ended it with a Jay-Z quote - preferably something from Reasonable Doubt. But alas.

UPDATE:

Game 1: Reed Johnson didn't start the game. Came in as a pinch hitter in the 9th, swung on BJ Ryan's first pitch and grounded out. I didn't watch the game, but I'm sure the applause was huge. He might have even tipped his cap.

FURTHER UPDATES:

Apparently the fans did give Johnson a standing ovation in the Friday game. And then on Saturday, he hit a three run homer. Fuck. I am currently eating my vintage Jays hat.

Eulogy: Sal Fasano's Moustache

2008-06-11T22:51:00.003-04:00

Sal's Pals, countrymen, lend me your ears (and eyes, and facial hair).

Recent photographic evidence revealed the following at the Richmond Braves' AAA team:

Salvatore Frank Fasano

Do my eyes deceive me?

Where have you gone, Sal's moustachio

A nation holds its' lonely eyes to you

I hereby request an annual weeklong mourning period, when all able-faced men, women, children and felines are required to grow a full moustache that extends downward past the mouth on either side of the chin.

R.I.P.

Kicking It Old School

2008-06-10T22:26:00.002-04:00

Here's a movie trailer that's set my loins on fire:

Holy shit right?

This seems like the perfect timing to unveil a pitch I was working on for quite a while:

"So you loved playing Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, right? [yeah, I've been working on this shit since the mid 1990s!] Loved the guts, the glory, the action! You tried to watch boxing, professional wrestling and even mixed martial arts, but these 'entertainment sports' just didn't cut it...the participants didn't seem to want to win, or the fights looked staged and playacted, right?

Well, we've got the perfect answer for you:

On the Street Fighter.

Fifty homeless men and women (some on methadone, some alcoholics, some just schizophrenic) from across the globe are selected each year to participate in the greatest homeless street fighting championship in the world. It's a no holds barred event where ANYTHING could happen. First prize is 400 dollars and three hot meals, so you know the contestants are eager for victory, whatever the cost may be. But it is crowd participation that makes this competition a true event - audience members heartily cheer their favourite fighters, make signs and houses out of cardboard for them, and sometimes even throw them scraps of food and old sandwiches (if they execute a move that's particularly pleasing). It's a family celebration.

The road to glory is bloody and difficult, and there is only one winner. The bums will have to use all of their street survival skills, crack induced strength, and animal cunning to defeat their opponents. The fights will therefore be inspirational reservoirs of passion, courage, heartbreak, and hunger. Absolute hunger.

In a world where nothing is authentic, there is only one refuge for truth:

On the Street Fighter!"

Mildly Self Defeating Mix Vol. 1

2008-06-09T22:00:00.002-04:00

Temperatures in Ottawa are slowly rising towards the inevitable point when my brain is going to leak through my ears. For this reason I decided to preemptively share some musical stuff that I've been recently been really into, before I'll be reduced to listening to Fraggle Rock and the sound of the thermometer exploding.

I put it all on Megaupload, so if you're not averse to going on a wild internet ride by making a couple of clicks and downloading about 50Mbytes, take a listen (please) [THIS IS A LINK]. I didn't put too too much effort into this, but it's still pretty damn good [because I have such great taste].

Anyways, here's a listing of all the tracks:

1. Primal Scream - Velocity Girl

Old shit from the C86 mixtape. Also probably the song least associated with both that mixtape (that essentially defined indie-pop) and Primal Scream itself. But it's short, forlorn, slightly angsty, and a solid intro.

2. Thao with the Get Down Stay Down - Bag of Hammers

A highly caffeinated 'Mushaboom.' Also, when she sings "the harder I sting" in the chorus, it kind of sounds like "and on Shabbos I sing." I guess this post is going to get an 'ethnic' tag now.

3. Ghostface Killah (Feat. Raekwon) - Kilo

I love educational music, and anyone who tries to teach people about the metric system while flanked by horns and a beat that produces involuntary grinning and nodding has my vote.

4. Le Tigre - Deceptacon

This song plays during a raucous party scene in the movie Reprise, and if it won't resurface in your head the next time you enter the sweet spot you're probably not in the sweet spot.

5. Wire - Kidney Bingos

Arguably (by me) the prettiest 80s song of all time. Also the best Smiths song not recorded by the Smiths.I was absolutely blown away when I heard it for the first time, not in the least because I always thought Wire were an angular 70s post-punk band. And they kind of are, so this song is not all that representative. Regardless, about two months after first encounter I still find myself humming it. Just fucking listen to that opening guitar line, and then the way the drums come in. A Gold Star will go to whoever can make sense of the lyrics.

6. Pacific Division - Women Problems

The answer to Jay-Z's "99 Problems"? I sure seem to think so. The quality of this one is a little bit off, but do give it a chance.

7. The Prayers & Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers - Concerning Lessons Learned from Aliens

Despite describing the experience of listening to their music as being akin to "listening to two Weezer albums at the same time," this song is basically all about space. And not just because it talks about aliens and shit. I adore the slow build of this song. The lyrics might be some sort of a grand Christian allegory; if it is, I don't understand it at all, but regardless of that, the last line gets me every time.

8. Noah & The Whale - Five Years Time

Twee twee twee. This is a great song though, if only because it manages to couple a traditionally 'scandinavian' indie pop and vocals (you know, deep baritone like Jens Lekman, Suburban Kids With Biblical Names, etc. etc.) with lyrics that don't sound like ESL scribbling.

9. We Aeronauts - Chalon Valley House Band

I don't really have anything to add to what I've said about these guys before. Sit on your porch (or in your backyard or on your patio, or anywhere outdoors really) and just go with it.

10. Wire - Mannequin

After hearing Kidney Bingos, I downloaded a couple of Wire album and learned just how non-representative that song was. On the other hand, before I listened to them I always thought they would be 'difficult' to listen to, and that basically blew in my face. This shit's anthemic.

11. T.I. - Why You Wanna

He may be under house arrest for making up a terrible alter-ego (and buying semi-automatic weapons), but this is one hell of a dope song. I'm too lazy to say more. Extrapolate from here.

12. Talking Heads - Life During Wartime

Post-apocalyptic dance-rock that's less of a song than an insurgent training camp in the Talking Heads' awesomeness. If you listen to it and still don't feel intensity of it all, watch the video from the concert movie Stop Making Sense where David Byrne stops singing and starts doing jumping jacks and running laps around the stage.

Drunkenly Talking to Indie Rock Stars - Vol. 3

2008-06-08T10:47:00.009-04:00

You seriously can't go out in Ottawa without bumping into someone from the Arcade Fire. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but I did see Richard Reed Perry (aka Napoleon Dynamite Sr.) on the 95 bus once. More pertinently, I went out to the Dominion Pub last night, and between hanging out with Lance the bouncer and the dude who sold me my $25 Value Village blue pinstripe suit (which is pimpin' btw), I met a bone-fide indie rockrr from the Belle Orchestre and the Arcade Fire touring band - Pietro something - this guy. Here's how I learned this fact:

Dude: "We're from Montreal for the weekend."

Me: "Are you by any chance in one of those 'indie rocking' [air quotes] bands?"

Dude: "Well actually..."

The night was a little bit hazy (thanks PBR!), but I was definitely coherent enough to slip a note that said "We Aeronauts" to him. He may have been bewildered. I also taught him and his entourage how to play the drinking game "Kings" and casually slipped them my 'business card' - a piece of paper with my name on it. Pabst in my glass, that's how I got class.

A little bit earlier, I saw one of the scariest things ever. We were at the Parliament Ultra-Super-VIP-MembersOnly-Exclusive-HighRollers club - and they have this big step there between the dance floor and the slightly raised area where the bar is. Anyways, a girl (good looking, really short pink dress, really high heels) was walking with her friends from the dance floor, and she absolutely tripped backwards over that step and hit her head with a fairly sickening thud. It wasn't even like a small trip, she just flat out landed on her back and her head banged against the floor like an accidentally dropped clementine. I helped her up and tried to make sure she wasn't seriously concussed and shit - and all she said was "I'm really drunk" and her friends laughed. Which kind of made me wonder if there was anything there worth concussing in the first place. Definitely not my scene.

This is Emo?

2008-06-05T07:30:00.012-04:00

For once, this isn't going to be all about me me me. This is a book review, more or less.

My favourite entertainment critic, with the exception of Chuckles Klosterman, is AVClub's Nathan Rabin. Running features like "My Year of Flops," "Direct to DVD Fridays," "My Silly Little Showbiz Book Club" and others, Rabin writes extremely long articles filled with personal and cultural references and sometimes very lame (but sometimes actually funny) jokes. I hope you can see the affinity. Anyways, one of the semi-regular columns that he has is called "Ephermareviews" where he looks at books or movies that are so of the moment (read: three months ago) that they have no cultural relevance whatsoever. In the spirit of latching on to the work of your betters, I think I'll try to do one of those myself.

I recently came across a book called Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide to Emo Culture at the library. I've never been particularly enamored with emo music (because it's "just a phase/all been downhill since Sunny Day Real Estate's/first reco-ord") with the exception of Conor Oberst, but the book looked like it was going to give a 360 cultural coverage to the movement, which seemed neat (especially as a sort-of response to the recent spate of alarmist news coverage on emo, not to mention the anti-emo violence in Mexico and stuff). So on the strength of this and the back-cover blurb of Rachel Harris, Actress, stating that "Everybody Hurts is the Wikipedia of all things emo," I decided to give Leslie Simon's and Trevor Kelley's book a read.

Well, it sure was 360 coverage, 360 degrees of absolute superficiality. Where do I start?

Here's how reading the book feels like:

emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo emo

Yeah, you better have a pretty high tolerance for the repetition of this word.

Besides that, I think that my biggest problem with this book is that it fails to accomplish what it sets out to do - be an ESSENTIAL guide of emo culture. This is because the authors systematically fail to draw a line of demarcation between the specific "emo" and the generic "hispter" or "scenester" cultures. It's most glaring when they reference Pitchforkmedia as a "popular emo website." Hold on now, youngsters...is it really? Pitchfork traditionally doesn't cover emo. Well, maybe a little bit, but they're mostly derisive (more derisive than usual, that is). The most important thing is that it wouldn't enhance anyone's understanding of emo culture to read Pitchfork, unlike say, the Alternative Press. In the same way in the section covering emo TV shows, while I can see My So-Called Life being emo-ish, how the hell does the Gilmore Girls' "rapidfire dialogue and [Doogie Howser]-worthy bloglike musings on life, love and pop culture" make it an 'emo' show? To give one last (and extremely ridiculous) example, there's a section near the beginning of the book where the authors go through the types of emo-fans out there. One of these types is referred to as the "alt-country emo" who is described as listening to Limbeck, Ryan Adams, Drive-by Truckers and Wilco. How the fuck is this guy/girl different than a 'regular' alt-country fan? Is all alt-country considered to be emo? That would be a pretty interesting argument, but one that is sadly not raised by the authors. Anyways, stuff like this is all over the place. I know that the book would be about 30 pages long if they only talked about Dashboard Confessional and Fall-out Boy, but what's the point of having another generic hipster guide?

I also have some issues with the tone of the book. It's aggressively tongue-in-cheek, continuously doing the whole "emo kids are weepy losers who are semi-illiterate poseurs and who never get laid and then write about it on their blogs" shtick. It's amusing at first, but when the same descriptors pop up on every single page it starts feeling overbearing, not to mention condescending. The book is less of a factual "Dummy's Guide to Emo" that I expected it to be (and that the title makes it sound like), than an insider-y joke book which haphazardly and irregularly gives basic information about emo bands. It's telling that the sections actually talking about music total to about 15 pages of 200 and mostly consist of a grocery list of albums.

I did learn one important thing from this book, though - crazy fan girls actually stalk Conor Obserst, lurk outside his parents' house in Omaha and go through his garbage! I once had a theory that Oberst is going to get killed onstage by a rebuffed fan-girl at one of his shows (in the process becoming a cross between John Lennon and Pantera's Dimebag Darrell), and I'm semi-horrified to learn how possible this seems.

postscript: Everybody Hurts also includes a postscript e-mail from Pete Wentz that's basically written for the sake of a single Lil' Wayne reference (meant to show cultural range or relevance or something); lamez!

The Edge of Reading: Poetry

2008-06-04T23:59:00.001-04:00

I was going to write about Canadian author and provocateur Nathaniel G. Moore today. Then I realized that I don't really have anything to say about him, mostly because I haven't read anything by him (with the exception of a couple of poems excerpted from his Let's Pretend We Never Have Met, two bookslut articles, and his blog). From all of that I can tell that Moore is the Canadian equivalent of Jim Behrle, my favourite public intellectual - he's all about bravado, provocation, and distrust if not outright hatred of the CanLit establishment. He's also into wrestling. In short, here's what I like about Moore: his attitude. Here's what I don't know about Moore: how well he writes.

This isn't an isolated problem - you may recall that I said the same thing about Behrle way back in the day. I believe that it stems from a terrible root cause that I'm really ashamed of - I can't process poetry [Moore also writes fiction, but please humour me on this one]. I've got a couple hundred books in my room, but only three of them are poetry collections or chapbooks; one of those is a poetry book by Jim Morrisson. Another one of those is Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Elliot. This often dismays me and I find it largely inexplicable, because I listen to a lot of music, and I'm a huge lyrics guy; I find it hard to understand how it fails to translate into liking words arranged on a page on their own. Maybe it's because lyrics are generally more simplistic, more narrative, and less lyrical than poetry. Whatever.

That's not to say that I don't read ANY poetry. I read (and liked) Dylan Thomas and E.E. Cummings; I also enjoyed some Phillip Larkin poems. I read lots of Leonard Cohen's poetry for a class last semester, and some of Irving Layton's. Reading over this list, I see that there's one thing that connects all of these writers; they all had an 'attitude,' either in the way they wrote, or in their biographies, which sometimes overwhelmed their output. Like anyone who only dabbles in something, I fail to recognize quality and go straight for the 'cool' attitude as a substitute [a perfect comparison would be the fact that I didn't realize how awkward Kanye West's flow was until I listened to other rappers]. And the thing is, I don't really care to learn more and read Howl or The Wasteland and so on. The weighty lyrical stuff just doesn't do it for me. So I end up basically treating poetry as something that should be clever and punchy rather than affecting and intellectually stimulating - a poem that I consider 'good' should produce at least one solid line, something quotable and preferably funny (Irving Layton's "you went behind the bush to piss/imagine Wordsworth telling this" is a case study). Forget about layers of imagery and subtly suggested visual/sound motifs and all of that junk. I sacrifice depth for instant gratification and superficiality.

So I really don't know about Moore. Here's my favourite thing of Moore that I read so far:

XCIII: Conservative Party

Stephen Harper, I am not particularly

obsessed to side with you,

or know the colour of your silk tie.

You see? It's short, it's extremely clever and it's instantly quotable, but when I look at it from a certain angle it's a 100% disposable jingle. I don't mean to say that everything that Moore writes is like this, not even in the littlest bit - the book this is excerpted from is a re-telling of the life of the Roman poet Catullus, weighty shit - but the fact that this is basically the only stuff I care about makes me a little bit, well, uninteresting. So um, any suggestions for improving myself w.r.t. reading poetry? Is it even wrong to not care about lyrical poetry and stuff beyond looking for punch-lines? Am I just feeling inadequate because the modernists were cerebral assholes who ruined poetry forever?

Copyrighted High-Unibrow: Book Proposal

2008-06-03T23:50:00.001-04:00

A little while ago two of my friends and I came up with an idea for a book while casually sipping Ye Olde English from scotch glasses. It was a Choose Your Own Adventure book called The Blackout Caper. Like in any classic work of the genre, the reader would not go through the book linearly, but start at page 1 and then react to events by choosing which page to go to depending on the action he/she wants to take. There would have been several possible endings, some better than others. It would have differed from traditional CYOA books in content and purpose.

Instead of becoming a ninja or a soldier, or traveling through time and space, your character (to whom I'll just refer to in the second person as "you" from now on) arrives to a house-party with a whole load of booze. Like any conscientious and experienced party-goer, you hide your alcohol in the washing machine. You walk around for a bit, take a couple of drinks, and then come back to your stash only to discover that it is all gone. This is where the adventure begins. From then on you basically walk around the party, try to collect clues and solve the mystery of the stolen alcohol, encounter all sorts of wacky party situations (loud boyfriend-girlfriend squabbles, hippies, drunk fights, disco dancing, tango dancing, etc.). There's a (fairly rigid) constraint in that you only have a set number of choices to make before you black out, so you have to pick which clues to follow. The punch-line is that in the "best ending" you never quite realize who stole your booze, black out, wake up (next to someone) the next morning, go to meet your friends at the local greasy spoon, hear about how you drank all of your alcohol in the first hour of the party and then progressed to drunkenly accusing everyone of stealing it, and decide that it was a pretty good night after all. However, if you don't get this ending, you may never find out what happened to your alcohol. Also, in the course of the book you would have met people who (bewilderingly) talk to you about stuff that you allegedly did at the party but wasn't necessarily part of the book - moments where you browned out and lost track of what you're doing.

The overall point, besides representing parties/fast moving 20s and so on, was to look at the construction of narratives, the way the choices you take influence outcomes, memory, and all sorts of other potentially pretentious subjects. We even thought of an event where ten people are handed copies The Blackout Caper and are asked to go through it and record which choices they make, and then the narratives that they choose are collected as 'variations' or possibilities of the same story.

It (the book) was a fantastic and very original idea, which is why I was heartbroken to learn that someone already thought of the same thing. Neither Either Nor Or by Joey Dubuc, a Montreal artist, pulls off (in a very clever albeit slightly more pretentious way) the exact same concept of an art project in the guise of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. And he did that shit way back in 2003. That's when I dropped constructing narrative flow-charts and stopped thinking about our CYOA book. Until I had the following idea last week:

What if, instead of reading a paragraph or two about the situation you're facing before making an informed choice, you are forced to make completely uninformed choices based on single line scenarios? Wouldn't this be an interesting (and fairly accurate) way of representing your responses to situations where you are pretty drunk and are basically operating on short-term memory, making choices that are inconsistent and improbable relative to the larger situation? I believe so.

The structure that I'm proposing is as follows: on page 1 of the book, you are faced with ten single line scenarios - as completely banal examples, how about "you are kissing a girl," or "you are fighting a large mustachioed man" - and have the choice of three responses to these situations. After you make all of the choices and record them (i.e. 1a, 2c, 3b), you move to page 2, where you match each choice that you make with a page number (i.e. 1a = p.12, 2c = p.3). Then, you start going through the pages that match your selections, and you reconstruct the story behind the scenarios - a story that involves you being really drunk at a party. So for example, if in the "you are kissing a girl" scenario you choose to "keep on kissing her" without knowing anything about the situation, you later go on to p.3 and learn that this was not your girlfriend, and that your girlfriend ends up catching you kissing her, etc etc etc. [As a side-note, I kind of realized that this whole concept will make much more sense as a computer program than an actual physical book, where you input your choices for the scenarios at the beginning, and then the program prints off a continuous story based on those choices that you can read.]

So I've got the structure of the thing down pat; I even found this really weird book that was released by the New York Review of Books which collects the work of a guy (Felix Feneon) who used to write one-line stories in French newspapers at the turn of the 20th century - a perfect source for learning how to write one-line scenarios. My problem is that I'm not really sure what I want to say through this story. Talking about someone just getting blackout drunk and doing stupid stuff will be kind of funny (at first), but it will also be insignificant and obnoxious. And in a work that relies on the narrative being pretty tight (by accounting for all possible choices that the reader makes and creating different interlocking scenarios), there has to be some central idea/theme that holds everything together. Preferably a theme that's not lame like "wasted [pun pun] youth." Otherwise, it will just be another Slacker - all form, no content.

Here Be Spoilers: Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?

2008-06-02T23:25:00.001-04:00

In my last undergraduate semester I had to take several elective courses to complete the requirements of my degree. One of these courses was called "Mystery Fiction," and it was almost unbearably disappointing. I generally tend to read a lot of detective fiction and I thought that this course would add additional layers of insight and, dare I say, theoretical interpretation to my future readings of the genre. That didn't happen. Instead, painfully and methodically, the professor went line by line on the who/when/why/where/how aspects of the plot in all of the books that we read. It must have been great for those people who didn't actually read the books, but for me it felt like pouring cyanide in my ear canal. Only one piece of literary criticism, Raymond Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder," was read. It showed tantalizingly and very briefly how much potential the genre has for interesting and insightful analysis.

That experience made me pretty excited when I recently learned about a work by triple threat Pierre Bayard (who is French, a psychoanalyst and a literary theorist) that focused entirely on one of the books that I read in my class, Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Having read the book, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? I would have to say that it further shows the value of detective fiction - supposedly a genre that requires you to stop thinking.

In case you haven't read Christie's Ackroyd and you intend to do so in the future, please stop reading this. If you do not intend to do so, here's the high concept twist that makes the novel: the narrator, Dr. Shephard, who helps the detective Poirot with his investigation, reveals himself by the end of the narrative to be the killer (as well as an unreliable narrator).

Bayard talks about many things in his book, but his main big idea is that up to their final solutions, mystery fiction offers the reader to construct their own answers based on the multiple clues presented, all with varying degrees of plausibility. Then the author's (and the detective's) job is to systematically eliminate all of the possibilities, leaving a single solution and a single meaning (which the reader should then see as having been in plain sight the whole time - the Van Dine principle). However, sometimes it is inherently difficult to accept the solution of the author, just because some other possible solutions look so credible. Room for multiple meanings and for the reader's interpretation remains. This is doubly, triply, and quadruply important in the case where the narrator is unreliable and the whole text is punctuated with invisible ellipses. All fascinating stuff.

Bayard then uses these principles, as well as multiple inconsistencies that he finds in the text (i.e. the fact that Shephard had to steal Ralph Paton's shoes from the inn, use them to frame Paton, and then return them to the inn, all in the same night; the fact that Shephard carried said shoes, a dictaphone, a dagger, and presumably other stuff in what has to be the biggest doctor's bag ever sewn; the fact that Shephard had to rig together the dictaphone and a complex time-delay apparatus in less than a day, and so on), to reject the idea that Shephard is the killer (in the process, he calls Poirot delusional for focusing much of his attention on "unimportant" clues while discarding more substantial ones), and to propose and alternative murderer: SPOILERS - Shephard's sister, Caroline - END SPOILERS.

I really enjoyed Bayard's book and recommend you to read it if you have even a passing interest in the genre (believe it or not, it's actually a fucking page-turner), but I did have several problems with his hypotheses and structure. In the middle of the book he slips into a theoretical psychoanalytical argument about the affinity between paranoid delusion and theoretical thinking, that though being kind of interesting (and setting up the background to some later analysis), goes on for about 20 pages too long (big problem in a 140 page book). There is also one insurmountable problem with his alternative hypothesis of the identity of the murderer. After Shephard receives the (fake) phone call in the beginning of the book, he yells to Caroline "Roger Ackroyd has been murdered" and then rushes off to Fernly - there is absolutely no logical explanation for this unless he is the murderer or is connected to the murderer (who is obviously not Caroline, otherwise why would he yell it to her?). Bayard's failure to coherently explain this - he concocts a bizarre and complex explanation that the LACK of a phone call from Ackroyd about the blackmailing business leads Shephard to believe that Ackroyd is dead - invalidates the rest of his excellent analysis that deftly combines an extremely close reading of the book (and of Christie's entire oeuvre) with psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo that kind of makes sense.

Finally, Bayard dismisses someone who is in my eyes one of the more interesting (and suspicious) characters in the book: Geoffrey Raymond, Ackroyd's secretary. Everyone, including Shephard, refers to him as an upstanding and capable young man. This alone would make him the least likely suspect and therefore somewhat suspicious, but there is also his alleged involvement with Flora Ackroyd, and his privileged and intimate position as the personal secretary of an extremely wealthy man. Moreover, he is the only one who is actually aware of Ackroyd's purchase of a dictaphone AND the only one who heard the 'recording' of Ackroyd. Bayard rejects him as a suspect very quickly because he apparently lacks the "psychological elements" of the murderer - "someone deliberate, implacable, and sure of himself." I call a big sack of bullshit on that assertion. As a young and dapper man, he is definitely confident; he is also referred to as being "capable" by Shephard, and seems to react with equanimity and good humour to everything that goes on (including the murder of his employer). I don't have a fully developed theory as to the motive, but in terms of opportunity and ability, he is definitely one of the top suspects.

STOP THE PRESSES: A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

2008-05-29T19:59:00.004-04:00

I think that my obsession with the blog DrunkJaysFans is well documented in these parts. They swear, they love ball, and they reference the Hold Steady from time to time. Now they also have an awesome weekly podcast (which mostly consists of them swearing at each other) that makes me squirt milk liquor out of my nose on Monday mornings (because I'm 12 awesome). What's not to like? If you're as interested (in dark and twisted ways) in the enigmatic cult personalities of Stoeten, Parkes, Bergkamp and Ringo as I am, check this shit out:

ANDREW STOETEN'S BAND: ACTION MAKES

I'm absolutely unwilling to comment on their music; suffice to say that it's garage-y and sounds a little bit like the Stooges playing underwater. Make up your own fucking minds about it. But here's the deal: I will pay each one of you five bucks to go to the Silver Dollar in Toronto on June 13th to see Action Makes and do one of the following two things:

1) Yell "PLAYOFFS!!!" at the end of every song.

2) Dress up in full Blue Jays uniform and offer to play drums for the band.

Actually, fuck, let's cut these kids' games: I will give you half of my kingdom and seventy two virgins (of undetermined gender) if you bring this guy and get him to play drums for the band:

Visions and Revisions: Younger Than That Now

2008-05-28T23:50:00.000-04:00

[This one may be a bit messy. I'm tired. I'll clean it up tomorrow.]
I'm going to do something new today, something that I haven't done yet; soberly reflect on what I wrote yesterday. I generally stand behind everything I write here, but two sentences in yesterday's post kind of rankle me in retrospect.

"Navel-gazing as it may be, I can't not relate to this. And recklessly generalizing from my experience, I think that anyone who reads (and enjoys?) this blog should relate to it to a certain extent as well."

It feels like I'm mainly recommending the movie based on my ability to identify with the protagonists or whatever, which is not cool. I would have to say that in general I absolutely hate it when personal emotional identification defines your enjoyment of something for a very good reason. This personal connection feels incredibly deep for a very short time and then it fizzles out, leaving you cold towards whatever thing you enjoyed before.

At our age, hell, at any age, you change so much from year to year and from month to month that the person you were in the Summer of 2007 is a foreign and distant being to your 2008 self, and you fail to understand his/her motivations, his likes and his/her dislikes. So naturally, all of the things that you identified with in the past are foreign to the current you, and you can't listen/watch/read them without inwardly cringing at the type of person you were back then, the person who defined him/her self by those things. This is really tragic, because you end up missing on the longevity of some of some genuinely good artworks by failing to take them at their own standards. You just can't take any long term enjoyment in them because they're tied too tightly to a specific period in your life and can't leave that context.

Two works define this experience for me: The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, and the album Pinkerton, by Weezer. When you first pick up Catcher when you're thirteen or something (it has to be when Holden is older than you), you really feel that it's the greatest book anyone has ever written because it describes your burgeoning adolescent angst to a t. You might not identify with Holden by 100%, but even 90% is enough if it's the right 90%. You hate phonies (i.e. all adults), sit around pretending that someone shot you in the gut, and appreciate how Holden couldn't get laid (or couldn't even interact with girls all that well). You want to escape, just like Holden. You think that you're deep and sensitive and slightly tragic, all because you just totally get this book. Then you grow up. You realize that your former self was basically a loser and a spoiled whiner; and surprise surprise, re-reading the book you identified with the most, the character you identify with the most, is also a rich spoiled whiner, and as big of a phony as the adult phonies he was calling out. It doesn't reflect well on your early-teenaged self, to say the least. This is why I can't stand Catcher in the Rye anymore, and my hands-down favourite Salinger book is Franny and Zooey (although maybe I just haven't grown out of that stage yet).

The same thing applies to Weezer's second album, which is essentially a more sexualized aural version of Catcher. In 9th grade, when you listen to Pinkerton for the first time you believe that Weezer made the perfect album that speaks directly to your experiences. It has loud guitars to reflect your angst! It has sensitive lyrics to reflect your emotional side! It's all about the failure of Rivers Cuomo to connect to girls! And then you grow up and move away from that mindset. Once you do, this album (and any other album like it) becomes remarkably difficult to listen to unless you're in a drunk, sad and nostalgic mood; listening to it feels as uncomfortable as it is for a snake to put on an old shed skin. You might not think that it's bad per-se, but the fact that you find it hard to understand just how much you loved it back then clouds your current ability to like it in the present.

So the whole point of this post was to essentially say that I really don't want it to seem like Reprise, the movie I was talking about yesterday, is not one of those cases. At least I hope not. We'll see in a couple of years.

But I don't know, maybe the process of growing up is actually the process of gaining the ability to accept all aspects of your past selves and appreciate how you changed over time to arrive at your current self. And that will help you to adjust your perception of stuff that you used to passionately love and regain some of your lost appreciation in a new and more objective (and long term) form.

When You're Young You Get Sad and You Get High

2008-05-27T21:27:00.003-04:00

Fuck the movie Slacker. It's pretentious and absolutely unwatchable shit. If I wanted to hear non-professional actors awkwardly rant about random crazy crap for ten minutes at a time I'd go to the local Mission. Here's what you should watch instead: Reprise.

Like Slacker, it's about a hipster scene and the form of the movie is important. But Slacker is all form and no content (besides the silly rants mentioned above), which makes it just about as fun as being stone cold sober and watching your friends hit the sweet spot, through a telescope, while suffering from appendicitis, with your left leg broken. A write-off. Sure, Reprise's content sounds kind of lame and cliche - young writers, hipsters, mental breakdowns and the rest, I mean shit, look at that goddamn poster, they're all so preposterously handsome, wear skinny jeans and chucks, and that girl is so pixieish she looks like a Disney character - but the way that it's presented (the form bit that I'm talking about - flashbacks, flash-forwards, glances at possible plot developments that don't actually happen, etc.) makes it seem like it is less than a movie about being young, than it is being young.* Its characters spend most of their time either living in the past or daydreaming about the future or partying and hanging out. Possibility and fear and regret. Navel-gazing as it may be, I can't not relate to this. And recklessly generalizing from my experience, I think that anyone who reads (and enjoys?) this blog should relate to it to a certain extent as well. So go to your local video store, or even to your local library, and get it. The Ottawa Public Library has about 10 copies, so I just might grab you one if you dawdle for too long, but it'll cost you. Oh, and it's also a pretty funny movie.

*I liberally ripped this line off the TinyMixTapes review of Godard's Masculin Feminin, an appropriate touchpoint.

I Came, I Saw, I Conquered: Toronto

2008-05-26T22:34:00.002-04:00

A couple of days ago I learned about the dangers of over-sharing personal information via blogging. But fuck that shit; I went to Toronto over the weekend, and here are some stray thoughts:

- I shouldn't be allowed to talk to indie-rock stars drunk: On Friday night I saw Los Campesinos! at Lee's Palace, and their being my favourite new band ever, I brought my "We Throw Parties! You Throw Knives!" EP for them to sign it. It was nominally a success; like in a good game of Pokemon Gold, I got 'em all. However, in three cases I did manage to embarrass myself completely:

When chatting to the Campesinos' rhythm guitar player, ME: So, I don't remember seeing you in Ottawa last fall with the band, were you there on that leg of the tour? Who are you anyways? HIM: I'm in the band.
When talking to (and trying to impress) the lead singer, Gareth, I asked him why they don't perform "the Heavenly cover, 'Heavenly in the Key of C'," at which point he cooly went "actually, the name of the song is 'C is the Heavenly Option'."
In the liner notes for their album, I noticed that part of Aleksandra Campesinos!' thank yous were in Russian, which I happen to speak. So on Friday, I started talking to her in Russian. She was fairly excited, and we chatted for a little bit about how Russian people usually aren't receptive to Indie-pop and other stuff. Well, when I say 'chatted,' I'm kind of embellishing since I mostly babbled incoherently. I couldn't even pull off that whole "I speak Russian" thing. I kept switching back and forth between Russian and English making an absolute mess of both languages. Alexander Perchov would have been proud. At least this one is not without precedent:

- I stayed over at a friend's place, a Victorian house in Little Portugal. Not sure if it was the area or Toronto in general, but I noticed a ridiculous concentration of awesome old men on the streets. You know the ones: they wear three piece suits and fedoras in 30 degree weather and still look absolutely cool (in both senses of the word), they gather together at cafes and fruit stands early in the morning and chat and ogle pretty girls, they ran moonshine during Prohibition.

- One of the things that absolutely struck me about Toronto, except for the old men thing, is how there's a) quite a few bicycles around and b) every single one of said bikes is idiosyncraticly vintage. Even accounting for the disproportionate representation of vintage obsessed scenesters, poor strudents and hippies, this is pretty incredible. I haven't paid much attention to this in Ottawa (yet), but I'll bet that at least half of the bikes here are regular modern sports-bikes. In any case, a "Bikes of Toronto" photoessay is in order.

- I really love Toronto. It's a shame I'm not going there next year. Not only is it inviting, but it also feels really lived-in. There's a sense of history and community (or communities) everywhere. Ottawa is home, but it very rarely has a similar feel.

- On Saturday night, I defeated sleep. Around 11 p.m. I was drinking beer and crashing at Sneaky Dees. Usually, I'd just give in and go home, but that night I decided to fight this wall. Five hours later, I was still rearing to go. Nails!

- Later, we caught the tail-end of a Bob Dylan tribute show. We stayed at the bar and I proceeded to tenaciously and drunkenly harass the waiters at that bar to serve me alcohol after hours (unsuccessfully). Among my other shenanigans, at one point when no one was looking I stepped behind the bar and...poured myself a glass of water. Yeah, I don't follow that either. I also offered to hire one of the waiters to work at my friend's hypothetical bar. He showed some interest.

- After seeing two live Toronto Blue Jays games (one from the nosebleeds and one from ridiculously good 100s 3rd baseline seats), returning to the Sportsnet broadcasts will feel like immersing myself in a sensory deprivation tank.

- Watching Jesse 'the Body' Litsch throw a complete game shutout on Saturday afternoon was like watching Denis the Menace elected as Mayor on the strength of his promise to leave a flaming bag of poop on Mr. Wilson's doorstep every morning. Not quite sure what I wanted to do with that simile - I meant to say that it was cathartic and unlikely.

- On the bus home, I was so exhausted that I sat sprawled on my seat, lethargically watching oncoming traffic with never-ending fascination for five hours straight.

Sasha Frere-Jones, Six Months Later

2008-05-22T22:34:00.000-04:00

Roughly six months ago (Oct.22, 2007), Sasha Frere-Jones, a young upstart pop music journalist at a small rag called The New Yorker, wrote an expose on indie rock. "It's not black enough! There's not enough space!" shrilly cried (the awesomely named) Frere-Jones [I'm kind of paraphrasing], while disingenuously spending much of the article talking about his own failed experimental band, Ui . This naturally sparked the kind of apathetic furor that only a discussion about the merits of indie rock can. It's probably the only New Yorker article that inspired a Latin music mix by a prominent indie rocker, a David Brooks New York Times op-ed where Stevie Van Zandt declares that he wants to teach kids real rock, and its own score.

I disagree with Jones' analysis, think that it's really reductive by basically considering the Arcade Fire as the be-all end-all of indie rock, and so on. But this sort of a chin scratcher would make for a boring post. So instead, I'm going to do a little bit of research. Starting from the point of view that SFJ thinks that there's not enough 'black sounds' or 'miscegenation between genres' in indie rock and that he wants this imbalance corrected, how have his articles since addressed the issue? Maybe he looked really hard and found at least a couple of bands that are classified as indie-rock and yet have "swing" or "space" or whatever else he was looking for? Let's go through the subjects of his articles since that fateful day and find out:

Oct. 29, 2007: Animal Collective. Avant-garde electronic indie-pop? Whatever it is, it ain't really miscegenated as much as it's organically grown. On Mars.

Nov. 19, 2007: No Age. Fuzzy and crowded indie punk-rock that's whiter and grittier than famous albino David Eckstein.

Dec. 10, 2007: Cat Power. OK, so she basically plays soul music nowadays, but it's more of a wholesale borrowing of shtick rather than some new adaptation and permutation of the style.

Dec. 24, 2007: Led Zeppelin. I guess I should concede that one to him too. Blues and stuff. But they're old!

Jan. 14, 2008: Kate Nash. That's more like it, weightless piano pop. Might be slightly soulful, but I'd have to remember it to know for sure.

Feb. 11, 2008: Mary J. Blige. An actual black musician making hip-hop music.

Mar. 3, 2008: Amy Winehouse. Another wholesale white adaptation of soul/R'n'B music.

Mar. 31, 2008: Erykah Badu. Another contemporary black musician making hip-hop music.

Apr. 21, 2008: Portishead. Trip hop. Music that white people fall asleep to. I guess trip-hop is basically the definition of miscegenation between genres and space, but it did happen way back in the young and innocent 1990s.

May 19, 2008: American Idol. Er...yeah. Splitting the difference between Mariah Carey, Dolly Parton and Nickelback?

Well, at least he's ideologically consistent with his batshit argument that because people listen to too many types of music on the internet they don't incorporate all of them into their own sound. According to the Frere-Jones gospel, there are three categories of interesting/good musicians: Black women making new urban music, white people making music that sounds exactly like old urban music, and white people making independent music that sounds nothing like urban music in any way. Thanks for explaining this whole "modern music genres" thing to me. I knew The New Yorker was good for something besides perplexing cartoons. See you in six months for another update? Spoiler: It will probably be identical to this one.

For the Love of God, Please Stop: Alcatel-Lucent Teensploitation Ad

2008-05-21T23:59:00.005-04:00

The Economist, which I read on a weekly basis (you know, because I'm just pretentious enough to get all of my weekly news in anonymous British phrasing), generally has pretty good ads. The best ones ask the high powered businessmen who read the magazine to invest in a particular country or region; like Craigslist casual encounter ads, they reek of desperation - a typical example would be something like: "Come invest in Absurdistan: we have low interest rates, no taxes, and relatively clean prostitutes who offer executive discounts! Please come here, we're poor!"

But then I saw this abomination from French telecom giant Alcatel-Lucent in the latest issue:

[Click to enlarge. Sorry about the quality. There's also an online version of this ad, although it's slightly less terrible.]

I know that critiquing ads is kind of pointless, but fuck it, this barrel of fat fish is worth shooting (or upending). It's consistently terrible enough to go through line by line [man, the Fire Joe Morgan shtick is so versatile!]:

Fifteen-year-old Olga is a Parisian high school student.

Solid factual start. Also gives a nice context to the vaguely sexualized picture of the girl sitting on her bed and coyly looking up from her laptop.

She has five best friends she can't get enough of, and not enough time in a day to share and discuss everything they've got going on. In order to stay connected to her peeps 24/7, Olga is ALWAYS ON.

Disregarding the ridiculous structure of the last sentence, the thing that really caught my eye about this ad was the use of the word "peeps." It's clearly a sign that this was written by a 45 year old copy-guy who thought that 'teen-speak lingo' would make the ad seem authentic and somewhat edgy. Sorry Stiffy McOldster, you just don't cut it. If you had done your research and watched Gossip Girl like you should have, you'd have used a more appropriate word like 'gang' or 'BFFs.'

She has created a blog where she sends tons of snapshots, videos, hip new URLs and info about the latest gadgets.

'snapshots,' 'hip.' You fucking nailed it again McOldster - this is exactly how kids speak these days, like cool cats from the 1950s. That last bit about gadgets is a bit of a question mark...I keep imagining 15 year old Olga coming back from whatever cool Paris party she went to, and writing a breathlessly excited review of a new USB key. Although maybe her blog is Gizmodo! Just checked, no dice.

Through her smart phone and laptop she is linked to all her friends, their friends, and their friends' friends.

So, she can connect to Facebook?

Her blog has grown and morphed into a fascinating teenager's guide to Paris which had over 40,000 visitors last month alone!

Fascinating for old pervs like you, Stiffy buddy! Besides, doesn't this whole ad completely confuse process with product? it's not like Olga's (alleged) insights of a teenager's life in Paris would be any less fascinating if she was using a dialup connection from a different internet provider. But I guess this is how all ads work - use Bauer skates to play hockey like Wayne Gretzky, a Moleskin notebook to drink like Hemingway, and an Apple computer to prevent a dystopian future from ever becoming a reality.

We at Alcatel-Lucent are thrilled that Olga and her friends are having so much fun.

Man, Olga and her friends are fucking lucky. If Alcatel-Lucent ever become displeased with their teenage ways, it's off to the snake pit for them.

...And we can't wait to see how people like Olga use these innovations to be ALWAYS ON.

Maybe something is lost in the translation here, but it really sounds like Alcatel-Lucent is selling some kind of a new designer drug. Do you think their backup slogan was "Alcatel-Lucent: putting the E in e-mail"?

Perhaps I'm just jealous. After all, I would love it if a major telecommunications firm ever finds this blog and decides to promote it as the shining example of what their technologies can do. Rogers? [Please ignore the fact that a large part of my bandwidth is dedicated to downloading midget porn.]

Favourite Genre: Fictive Non-Fiction

2008-05-20T23:59:00.001-04:00

No, I'm not talking about James Frey here, not really. All autobiographies are fictive to a certain extent, and conceptually they're written in the exact same way as fiction; they tell a story, a narrative, with (a generally) distinct plot, characters, atmosphere, and all other things you learn about in Grade 9 English. The genre that I'm referring produces works that are ostensibly written in academic non-narrative form; a biographical sketch, a scientific essay, a dictionary, or commentary on a document. However, unlike academic scholarship that aims to solely convey information (or an argument), these works aim to convey emotions or express catharsis just like regular narrative fiction. Often, the author character (as opposed to the actual author, although sometimes the lines are blurred) is the central or only character. A representative example of the genre would be Nabokov's Pale Fire, which is ostensibly an annotated lyric poem of 999 lines. If you gave the book to a friend who loved poetry but hated reading annotations without telling him/her what it was, he/she would probably think that the whole book is just a poem. It is in the annotations, however, and in the relationship between the annotations and the poem itself that the story is told - a fragmented story which nonetheless provides as strong of a commentary on Nabokov's usual motifs of madness, intelligence, and obsession as any of his other more straight forward works of fiction.

I hope you can see what I mean then, because I'm slowly coming to the realization that it's one of my favourite genres ever (and I know that the definition of the word genre is fairly loose). I think that the gist of my interest is the feeling that it's easier to carve out a story from emotions than it is to carve out emotions from a story. Sure, you could make a reader feel kind of sad by writing the story about a homeless kitten from the kitten's point of view, but it takes something else to make a reader feel sad (or even poignant) from reading an account of feline physiology or something. Which is what makes the fictive non-fiction genre so fascinating and deep. There is always another level to the supposedly straight-forward academic report.

Also, all of this genre's post modernist bullshit is very appealing to someone who basically writes papers for a living (i.e. me). It acknowledges the extent to which in actual non-fiction narratives are often constructed out of the mess that life is. If you're trying to make the point that Germany was doomed to fail in WWI in a paper, you will probably ignore (or be extremely dismissive of) much serious evidence to the contrary. The deconstruction of what it means to write a narrative, as well as of what it means to read a narrative (since the reader is often expected to reassemble piecemeal narratives and construct meaning out of the ostensibly dry texts), is endlessly fascinating.

A Selected Annotated Genre Reading List:

Jorge Luis Borges - "Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote"

Just fucking read it. I might write something longer about Borges later, so right now I'll just say that I love him with the passion reserved for Wham! and Duran Duran in the 1980s. Besides that, all you need to know is that he invented, and perfected, the genre I'm currently trying to discuss. The story mentioned above is, in my opinion, the absolute pinnacle of his work, but he has loads and loads of other stories that are within micro-millimeters of it.

Jeff Vandermeer - "King Squid," "The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris"

Owes everything to Borges, but basically stretches the style into pure fantasy. The "Guide" is a work of fictional history of the (magical) city of Ambergris where most of Vandermeer's fiction takes place. It's written (well, told) in the voice of notable historian Duncan Shriek (based on actual historian John Julius Norwich), whose ideas on just about everything (and especially about one young and beautiful former student and current rival historian) fill lengthy footnotes. "King Squid" uses roughly the same idea - a story told through footnotes - thought it is much more narratively straight forward and takes place in the context of a zoological study.

Roberto Bolano - Nazi Literature in the Americas

Another Borges-ist. Although that's not saying much, since fictive non-fiction is directly indebted to Borges to the same extent that stories about delusional intellectual immigrants are indebted to Nabokov [Ed. Note: what do you think his new and previously unpublished book is about?], and low key stories about desperate people are indebted to Chekov. This book consists of biographical sketches of various (fictional) right wing Latin-American authors and poets in the 20th Century, combined with exhaustive descriptions of their works. Still in the middle of it, but what strikes me so far is how sympathetic Bolano, who was one of the more radical lefty authors of the past 50 years, makes the right-wing figures in the book.

Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire

This is my favourite of Nabokov's works because of its unbelievable re-readability value. I've read it twice over the past year, and I saw the story from a new perspective each time. I also felt that I read it 'wrong' each time and didn't get as much out of it as I should have. The subtelty in the interplay between the poem part of the book and the annotations part will do it for you. Nevertheless, it was still really satisfying - like playing with a kaleidoscope, only after shaking it, instead of seeing randomized geometric shapes and colour patterns, you see a randomized new naked chick (or dude, for the sake of gender/orientation equality).

Milorad Pavic - Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel

Like its title says, it's a dictionary. It's also a fictionalized history of a (real life) nomadic tribe, the Khazars. The pivotal historical event in the book (and in real history) is the decision of one of the Khazar kings in the 8th century to convert his people wholesale from shamanism to one of the Abrahamic religions. Not being sure which of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was best, he received emissaries from all three and decided to convert to the religion whose emissary was most convincing. Appropriately, this book is divided into three sections, one for each religion, and each dictionary entry is cross referenced with respect to its association with the religions. What I find best about the Dictionary is its way of slowly building up a web of references to places and people, and revealing more and more information while always leaving just enough unsolved mysteries to motivate the reader to keep reading. This last bit actually sounds pretty mundane since every Z-grade Agatha Christie imitator does something similar in any mystery book; but when you account for the fact that there's no linear plot in the Dictionary and that you can start reading at any point/entry, it becomes much more impressive.

The Politics of Ballin'

2008-05-18T10:28:00.001-04:00

[Ed. Note: I spent way too much time time writing and re-writing this. If I ever made my own food, I'd probably call it 'over-cooked.']

I don't know if you've read this already, but here's an excerpt from an interview with George W. Bush:

Q: Mr. President, I know you're going to hate this, but I'm hoping that we may twist your arm and talk about baseball for just a moment. (Laughter.) Mr. President, you're a Major League Baseball team owner again. Everyone is a free agent. You have a Yankees-like wallet. Who is your first position player? Who's your pitcher?

Bush: That's a great question. I like Ottley [sic] from the Philadelphia Phillies. He's a middle infielder, which is always — you know, they say you have strength up the middle — there's nothing better than having a good person up the middle that can hit. And Roy Halladay from the Toronto Blue Jays is a great pitcher. He's a steady guy, he burns up innings. And I'm sure I'm leaving some other good ones out, but those _ [AP via DJF]

Finally, someone who is smart enough to recognize Halladay for the rock solid pitcher that he is. Oh wait a minute...this someone is deemed by most people to be preposterously incompetent, if not outright evil and borderline retarded.

You know what, though? I predict that George W. Bush is going to be one of the best ex-presidents ever.

Why? Two reasons: 1) Bush Jr. is a smart and affable guy who can connect to the majority of Americans. 2) The position of an ex-prez is generally apolitical and only requires affability.

Let's start with 1) I disagree with many of Bush's policies, but I never really bought the argument that he's stupid; if he really had the IQ of a watermelon, his career trajectory (four time governor and two time president) would basically be as improbable as Forest Gump's. He's had his share of public flubs (just google Bushisms), but any politician who is in the spotlight 24/7 has off moments; there are videos of Obama speeches where he speaks complete nonsense and then apologizes for being exhausted. The press just ran with Bush's malapropisms because they played perfectly to his personal narrative of being the no-good black sheep of his family and of the political establishment (almost flunked out of Yale, had a drinking problem, etc.) - and to a certain extent, that was the narrative he himself wanted because it represented him as a common man and as an underdog.

The interview excerpt above is the perfect anecdotal evidence of Bush's smarts. I mean, he didn't go for the obvious A-Rod and Josh Beckett pairing. We all know Roy Halladay, the Man With No Bullpen, but Chase Utley? I had to look him up on baseball-reference.com; he's good (.301/.376/.532), but also so fucking obscure. So the President either gets CIA briefing on the Phillies, or he has a fairly solid grasp of facts and data and the ability to analyze them. For the sake of the argument, I'll go with the second explanation.

[A whole other question is whether Bush SHOULD know this much about baseball. It's like he's operating on a level befitting nerds living in their mothers' basements, but not the President of the United States of America. As Deadspin said after Bush spent about three innings in the broadcasting booth during the Nationals' home opener, doesn't he have a country at war to run? Sure, it's kind of understandable because he was an owner of the Texas Rangers for several years, but it's hard to imagine the same thing happening with most other presidents: Say, FDR sneaking out of the Yalta conference to catch up on the 1945 Indians (I can see JFK shuffling meetings around to fuck Marylin Monroe though).]

Moreover, away from politics, he seems like a pretty congenial guy. His charm comes across as smugness or bluster when he's talking about heavy shit like Iran or the economy, but it carries through beautifully and genuinely when he's talking about cool stuff like baseball. It's actually really impressive how despite being a member of one of the most blue-blooded American families, he comes through as an ordinary sort of guy.

2) There's also the inherent characteristics of the ex-presidential role which are a perfect match for Bush's populist persona and likability. Besides secretly fighting crime, ex-presidents really only have a ceremonial role. Having failed to solve global issues such as poverty and war while they were in control of the most powerful country on Earth, everyone knows that they won't solve these problems in retirement. They're almost equivalent to the Heads of State of a country - travel around, meet people, hang out (while ostensibly contributing money to a charity that tries to solve a problem they failed to fix in office), and sometimes entertain visiting dignitaries. This is just what the doctor ordered for W. I can already see his tour of the nation's ballparks and his hosting dignitaries on the ranch. He's also pretty great at interviews (see above), another crucial part of the ex-presidency. And unless Laura Bush or the twins decide to run for president in 2016 against Chelsea and/or Hillary Clinton, I can't really see W being too involved in partisan affairs (mostly because the Republican party will repudiate his presidency after he leaves office).

Because of 1) and 2) - that is because of his success as an ex-president due to the populist and apolitical demands of the role - in about 10 years when the partisan/sectarian political furor will die down (though that kind of depends on the Iraq war [CAVEAT]), there will be a major revisionist re-evaluation of the Bush presidency. Bush Jr. will personally move from being thought of as the worst (and dumbest) president in history to being thought of as a tragic figure, a "good guy" who accidentally unleashed destructive partisan forces beyond his control and was held hostage to them. And when I say 'forces,' I mean Karl Rove and Cheney; it'll all be about the usurpation of the powers of the office of the President by other parts of the administration (and particularly by the office of the Vice-President). Point is, Bush's personal reputation will probably be somewhat restored. I predict this with the conviction of the ignorant.

In any case, when Roy Halladay gets inevitably passed over the Cy Young award for someone who has lots of wins (which are everything, y'know?), he should just say "fuck you" and wait for his Presidential Medal of Freedom for throwing a ridiculous number of complete games.

Also, my seeing-eye bitch is named William F. Buckley Jr. Jr.

Anatomy of a Drunk

2008-05-15T23:17:00.007-04:00

Great writers have written extensively about the impact of drinking on the human body and psyche - nearly every Evelyn Waugh book, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (and who am I kidding, anything else Papa wrote that wasn't about fishing or hunting), and Douglas Adams' work are encyclopaedias of the subject. Specifically, there's a part Waugh's Vile Bodies (I think) where he talks about very well defined and specific stages of drunkeness. However, as far as I can remember, he only mentions three stages, which to me, is a little bit too simplistic. Anyways, without further ado, and largely based on the considerable personal experience of yours truly, here are the stages of drunkeness, redux:

1) Near Sobriety - first coupe of drinks, no big deal. You can still drive, operate heavy machinery machinery and get it up. Congrats, you're a "social drinker." You can either stop now and go to bed early, or continue on to a...

2) Buzz - Now you're getting somewhere. If you're hitting the heavy stuff, your tummy starts feeling real warm right now. If you're drinking beer, you become a bit more sociable and boisterous, although you may want to take a piss. If you're drinking home-made mead, it tastes a little bit less like nachos. This is the point where you feel like your brain is starting to work faster than the rest of your body can keep up with. Sometimes you're satisfied with just having a buzz, but at other times you feel like you're not making the most of the night if you don't keep on going, so you pound back a couple more.

4) The Sweet Spot - this is the Holy Grail of drinking, the reason you start drinking in the first-place, and the reason you drink more than once in your life. You feel absolutely invulnerable, superhuman. You can talk to anyone about anything, and you will be brilliant, slightly dissociated and loud, but always entertaining. When you're in the sweet spot, all music sounds like a combination of The Creation's "Making Time" and Jackson 5's "ABC." You make things happen. It's the perfect point when your motor skills and cognitive ability is still relatively unaffected by alcohol, but your social inhibitions are gone. You can (sort of) dance, and you WANT to dance. You love everyone except for the people you hate; you want to fight those people, but you won't, because it's a waste of time when you have so many great ideas and impulses. You achieve a mind-meld with a collective unconscious and retrieve the memory of all Spice Girls and Night Ranger song lyrics. If you've ever seriously drank for a night, I think you know what I'm getting at by now.

Some people argue that the sweet spot changes as you become older and become more used to drinking. Originally, as the theory goes, all drinking sweet spot, but then it slowly starts shrinking and becomes harder and harder to hit with accuracy, until you reach the dialectic stage of being stone cold sober, or blackout drunk (see 6 below). Scary thought.

5) The come-down - Once the sweet spot (which is elusive, right?) begins to fade, you move to the denouement part of the night. There almost invariably comes a point when everyone else around you (who are mostly still at the rising stage of drunkeness, or at the sweet spot) suddenly appear to behave like extremely loud and obnoxious buffoons. Not that they didn't behave this way before, or that you yourself didn't behave the same way, but this is the moment when the fact that alcohol is a depressant hits you. You don't want to dance, don't want to talk, don't want to do anything. You feel dispirited - all of the seemingly awesome connections you've made with people in the upswing of your drunkenness appear superficial and ultimately meaningless. Man, it's a downer. There are two possible avenues from here on: a) You could keep on drinking by pure inertia and go black-out or b) go to bed pissed off and wake up with a big hangover the next day.

"First you have a drink, then your drink has a drink, then your drink has you."

6) Black-out - Game Over. You know you blacked out when you're partying hard and then you suddently wake up somewhere strange and new (even though it might just be your bed). You have no idea how you got there or why you're there. When you look back on the last night, you manage to perfectly remember things up to a certain point when everything goes blank. But don't worry, your friends will fill you in on your yelling, fighting, romantic trysting, gratuitous nudity, stumbling, crawling, throwing up, and other adventures. Blackouts are like the great defense mechanism of drinking, because you only black out when the alcohol really hits you, and that's also when you do all of the really stupid and/or unsympathetic stuff (vomiting, yelling at people, etc.). You don't remember this part though, so in the back of your mind, regardless of what people told you (or of the pictorial evidence they present), you doubt that it ever happened. What you do remember is the good part, the upswing of the night. Which leaves you much more likely to excessively drink again later. Alcohol, you've thought of everything!

Blackouts are actually a very interesting phenomenon, neurologically speaking [we're moving to the educational portion of the post here]. Based on a little bit of reading on the subject (thanks Wikipedia!), I found out that when you drink that much, your long term memory stops working. That's why you don't remember anything from that point onwards in the morning. However, your short term memory is still going strong - which is why you can still function while blacked out, though not necessarily coherently. Basically you're like Guy Pearce in Memento, where every 10 minutes or so you completely forget what you're doing there, who you're talking to, and why.

7) Post-Blackout morning - I'm not talking about the hangover or anything, because that's kind of boring to discuss (your head hurts, loss of appetite, throwing up - just read any expose on bulimia or supermodels or something to get the feel). I'm talking about a moment after the hangover, after you've slept for 14 hours or so and the toxins have slowly (or um...quickly) largely made their way out of your body. It's late afternoon and everything comes into a deep focus. Colours look intense and over-saturated, as if you've wandered into old Kodak film stock. You want to accomplish something, lots of somethings, everything. It's a moment of existential clarity that is all the more effective and startling since you've tried to annihilate yourself the night before.

PS: Since today is apparently the official 'reference a Shane Black movie' day, here's the greatest cinematic morning-after conversation of all time (from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang):

Recapping: Vice Global Fashion Trend

2008-05-14T22:48:00.002-04:00

Only my second year reading the project, but it feels like this year Vice's intrepid international fashion trend-spotters are just phoning in their 08 trends while getting blackout drunk at local hipster bars. Well, I suppose that's part of the charm of Vice in general, but this particular series of articles just seems boring. If you're unaware of the concept, they basically take ten to fourteen cities around the world, and pick a couple of guy styles and girl styles to represent what they think are the year's fashion trends there. It would help, however, if they didn't fucking repeat repeat repeat themselves almost word for word in different articles. Christ. Maybe globalization is to blame, but it's more satisfying (for me) to blame people (i.e. the authors of the pieces and their editors) than abstract universal tendencies. J'accuse. Anyways, to spare you from reading twelve identical snarky reports on how to look cool in different corners of the globe, I've compiled a quick crib note summary of the 2008 dressing trends of the world hipster population. It'll serve you anywhere!

Boys:

Two looks: 1) Grandpa-wear - y'know, cardigans and top-siders and Woody Allen glasses and etc. etc. etc. 2) New LA Skater/Punk style - fitted flannel, fitted hoodies, generally aim to look like the guys from No Age (or anyone in their Smell collective). In either case, really skinny pants/slacks/jeans are key. Also, shun colourful sneakers. If you've ever met me, it's not hard to tell which of the two alternatives I support, ideologically speaking. If you haven't met me, I'm sure you can find at least one post on here mentioning that I like Vampire Weekend. But enough about that.

The guys' descriptions are the hackiest. You can find roughly five mentions per paragraph of flannel, the absence of colour, leather shoes, and the death of Nu-Rave. It's like the world's most boring drinking game checklist.

Girls:

Pile as much shit as you can. Vintage. Scarves. Shit. Sexy librarians. Sexy septuagenarians. Big heels. Or alternatively, just pick a decade (50s, 80s, 1730s) and GO. Additional general guideline - look tough. tats tough.

Stylish Lady [Yeah, swinging for the cheap seats here, but as one of my friends once said: "it's depressing how all of the bums in Montreal have cooler shoes than me."]

Both Sexes:

You can look 'weird' by wearing huge pants! Buck the trend!

Digging Through the Archives

2008-05-12T23:33:00.008-04:00

Due to sheer laziness I don't feel like writing anything new today. However, in the spirit of trying to post every day, here's something (kind of dated) I wrote a while ago (last June): most of you have probably read this already, but if you haven't, let me present you with a bunch of [sic]s beforehand. Use them wisely: [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic] [sic]. Don't worry, soon I'll get to posting my high-school poetry.

On May 7, 2007, the New York Yankees announced the return of Roger Clemens (44) from retirement, to join their starting pitching roster. Earlier this year, venerable hall of fame pitcher Sandy Koufax (71) was drafted by the Modi'in Miracle of the Israel Baseball League. Today, the Toronto Blue Jays have stunned the baseball world by announcing that they were signing, for an undisclosed amount, the Cuban right handed pitcher Fidel Castro (80), now serving as the President of the Council of State and President of the Council of Ministers of Cuba.

"It was quite a steal," John Gibbons, the Blue Jays manager, said at the press conference. "Fidel is thrilled to get back into baseball, and we've had several setbacks with injuries to our starting pitchers," Gibbons added, "he's got a great curveball, and with him we're looking forward to a very strong finish." Several scouts have been sent to see Castro play in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and were it not for the start of a period of social and political upheaval in Cuba ending with him becoming the head of state in 1959, it was widely believed that he would have made it to the majors with the Pittsburgh Pirates. During his rule, Castro continued to pay very close interest to professional baseball, often peppering his speeches with exclamations such as "together, we can defeat the Yankees!" Castro's other statements, such as calling the Yankees "terrorists" have generated considerable controversy, although the Blue Jays shrug it off. "He's a pitcher, and as a pitcher you have to get under the skin of the other team," Blue Jays right fielder Alex Rios said, "besides, everyone saw what Rodriguez did to Howie [Clarke, Blue Jays short stop] at that game." Toronto coaches also hope that Castro, nicknamed El Commandante in Cuba (and also holding the rank of a Commander in Chief of the armed forces), will provide leadership and inspiration to talented young pitchers, including Dustin McGowan and Sean Marcum.

Instrumental to the signing, the press conference revealed, was Blue Jays back up catcher Sal Fasano, who, despite having been recently demoted to the minors, is still influential in the organization. "It's actually extremely lucky on our part," general manager J.P. Ricciardi disclosed in an exclusive interview; "Fidel was watching one of our games earlier this season, either against the Red Sox or the Yankees, and he noticed, believe it or not, Sal's moustache. Well, he used to think that Major League teams frowned on that sort of creative facial hair, but after seeing Sal he immediately called us up." Also revealed was that Castro's recent mysterious illness was not pancreatic cancer as most intelligence insiders and political scientists speculated, but in fact was the infamous 'Tommy Johns' elbow surgery. Toronto's pitching coach and physiotherapist stated that Castro was nearly ready to play, and the team released several photographs of Castro firing ball after ball in practice. "He's in a great shape," was all Toronto's pitching coach, Brad Arnsberg, would divulge.

Lastly, the Blue Jays stated that they were looking to trade starting pitcher Josh Towers (2-5). Those close to the organization mentioned that the initial goal was to trade Towers to Cuba in return for Castro, but that was only by the direct intervention of Castro himself, banning Towers from the island under threat of extradition to the Guantanamo Bay military base. No teams have, thus far, expressed interest in the 30 year old right hander.

Transpo Tales, Vol. 1

2008-05-09T18:51:00.007-04:00

Come gather round ladies and gentlemen, for the first entry in what I hope will be a lengthy (though irregular) project where I will regale you with stories that I overheard on the bus. It's what happens when you're too hypochondriac to really crank up the iPod volume for fear of hearing loss. This one was told by a sassy girl in her late 20s to her equally sassy girlfriend:

A mutual friend of the two sassy ladies once dated a girl who worked at one of those piercing shops on Rideau Street, let's call her Nina. This was actually pretty surprising to his friends (i.e. sassy girls) because he was absolutely one hundred per-cent the young professional type, wearing suits and sports-coats and ergonomic Puma shoes and the like. They broke up, well, he broke up with her, and she was reportedly pretty upset about that for a while. Anyways, some time later they meet by accident and hit it off pretty well, decide to let bygones be bygones and all that jazz. It's Friday night so they go out to a bar. They're drinking beer for a while, then take a few shots, and then order more pitchers. He's getting pretty drunk. Nina then tells him that she's got a couple of tabs of acid. He's all for the idea. A couple of minutes later he blacks out. So the next morning he wakes up in his bed (alone) and is not quite sure how he got there, feeling very uncomfortable, way more uncomfortable than he usually feels after a night out. He starts moving around a little bit, feeling his body just to locate the source of discomfort, and looks down. He's got a brand new Prince Albert piercing.

My immediate first thought was: at least Nina wasn't a tattoo artist.

Why I Don't Watch TV Anymore

2008-05-08T23:59:00.002-04:00

I was talking to one of my friends not too long ago when I came to the sudden and strange realization that I really don't like watching television shows anymore. I mean sure, I am a busy kind of guy (with lots of blogging to do), but I felt that I was busy in high-school too and I was absolutely addicted to television then. So I spent a couple of sleepless nights wondering why, and decided to break down the types of TV shows on air these days and the reasons I can't get myself to care about them on a weekly basis:

Sitcoms: The Office, Scrubs, and 30 Rock. I used to love the Office, constantly quoting Michael Scott and Schrutisms, and making Jim's silly facial expressions. But by the start of the fourth season, any desire to watch it has completely disappeared. Like in any situational comedy, after a while the dynamic just becomes extremely stale. Most of the episodes seem to center on the identical premise of "Something happens. Michael does/says something incredibly inappropriate and stupid. Dwight does something ridiculous and references Battlestar Galactica. Jim shrugs." The original British series, though being not nearly as watchable as the US one, was at least wise in only having 14 episodes. Scrubs faces the identical problem of having only so many ways in which to entertainingly and humourously show the professional and personal travails of doctors working at a hospital. The two episodes I've seen of 30 Rock made it seem too broad and only sporadically funny (but maybe that's actually a clever SNL reference?).

Multi-season-plot-arch Dramas: Lost, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica. The plot in most of these shows moves like molasses, and the general multiplicity of stories means that even if you really care about what's happening to one of the characters, you will only see it once every three weeks (at least). Another classic push factor in these shows is the nearly obsessive-compulsive attention the script-writers pay to the smallest details; so, for example, if you somehow don't remember the character that appeared for three seconds five episodes ago, the twist in the current episode will be absolutely meaningless. It's almost as if they want you to just wait for the DVDs so you can mainline it in a marathon viewing. I'll admit to watching Battlestar Galactica because it's the most batshit insane show on TV (except for A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila 2) and because it's on a definite time-schedule (the current fourth season is going to be its last), so quite unlike Lost or Heroes it feels like the writers/producers actually don't make everything up as they go along. I did, however, totally skip over the second half of the third season of Galactica (about ten episodes), because absolutely nothing interesting was happening for those of us who don't have a degree in space-law. Besides, the 'previouslies' at the start of the fourth season show the crucial stuff anyways.

Procedural Dramas: Law and Orders, CSIs, House. I won't even go there. I think that most sitcoms are stale and procedural enough already. You can extrapolate from there.

Unclassifiable Comedy/Drama: Pushing Daisies. It's made by some of the greatest minds in TV (who made the middling though conceptually brilliant Dead Like Me, the shorter and just plain brilliant high-concept Wonderfalls, and the amazing Amazing Screw-On Head cartoon), so I guess my expectations were kind of high. After watching three episodes, they sure were dashed, though not in the way I was expecting. You can read much better descriptions of what the show's all about elsewhere, but its central idea of "pie-maker who brings people back to life and solves crimes by using his ability, while also being in love with a dead girl he brought back to life" is the Mount Everest of high-concepts; an oxygen tank is needed to survive it. To me, the whole thing feels like a decent show that fell in a giant vat of quirk and emerged as a mutation of a cute puppy with Zoe Deschandel's saucer eyes that speaks (or sings!) in quippy one-liners and genre-references and that glows with the brightest primary colours. While it may be fun to play with for five minutes, forty minutes week after week move you to cute cute and oh-so-endearing misery.

Reality TV: This is the only type of TV show that I don't mind watching nowadays (well, that and Juan's Basement on Pitchfork.tv). Actually, let's just qualify that to MTV reality shows. I love how MTV took the basic concept of a reality show (guy/girl gets to pick between a few suitors) and stretched it to absurd extents - hence creating the whole "guy going out with the suitors' grandmothers while rifling through their rooms and having to perform a triple bypass surgery while speaking only in rhyming couplets" sub-genre which I find highly entertaining.

Sports: OK, maybe it's not that I don't watch TV period, but that I don't like watching scripted shows. Instead, I spend most of my time watching baseball. For procedural drama, I have the ongoing tragedy (or existential black comedy) of the Toronto Blue Jays' 2008 MLB season. It's on almost every night and it's always familiar (dudes playing ball), but each time it is performed in a new and compelling iteration (for example: the Jays losing to Tampa Bay because of a Grand Slam at the top of the 13th inning). With 162 games in the season, you can miss a game or two, catch up with the results the next day, and easily get back in the swing of things; no pressure. Although once you start identifying with a team, you feel the need to watch the game every night just to see with your own eyes how the team and the players are doing. Addictive, what can I say.