Thursday, October 12, 2017

My Friends Carry Me Home

In a recent post, I said "Celebrate the things your friends care about and champion the things they make", so I figured that I should make good on my promise. I have many talented friends who are all pursuing the things they are passionate about and excelling, so I'd like to highlight a few of them below. It's so great to take a moment to think about how many wonderful things you're friends are doing and what they're capable of doing.

THE OFFICIAL I, MUSICAL GENIUS "BACKED HARD" LIST

I've never been shy about my disdain for the boom in craft brewing. To me, it reeks of pretension and consumerism and I find that almost everything the industry produces is terrible. Give me a 50 or a Miller Lite instead. That being said, one of my oldest and very best friends Pat brews for a local company in Toronto called Blood Brothers. I've been drinking Pat's beers since he started brewing in our shitty rented university house and it's been great watching him get better and better. His mindset in the industry is refreshing and down-to-earth and I like knowing that there some non-jabronis out there. And hey, even a guy who spent 10 years drinking PBR almost exclusively likes their beer to boot. You should visit their home base to try some stuff and listen to classic rock. Pat is very good at brewing beer.

While I was in university, another one of my best friends dropped out of his English degree to start cooking at a local Indian restaurant. Matt then enrolled in George Brown's cooking school and has been on a steady trajectory upwards since then. He's already cooked in a variety of Toronto's upper-echelon restaurants, but settled into Actinolite this past year, which he's described to me as his dream job. Just like Pat, I find Matt's approach to cooking very unpretentious and level-headed, which seems rare to me in food. You should eat there if you can.

Duff, another one of my best friends, who I played in Beat Noir with for five years, currently plays in two wonderful bands. One is Wayfarer, who are absolutely on the shortlist of "Best Ever Ontario Bands", and the other is School Shooter, a super fast/super heavy D-Beat project. Both are absolutely worth your time.

I am fortunate that a lot of my friends play in great bands. Nick, yet another of one of my best friends, plays in the band Dog Cops. I saw some clips of them recording this past weekend, so make sure to give that release a listen when it drops.

While I was doing my Master's at Guelph, my PIC Vanja and I had offices connected to each other and both commuted from Kitchener, which basically meant that we spent most of our time awake together. A quick thing we bonded over was a love of good coffee, though knew way more about it than I from being a barista on the side. After we finished our degrees, Vanja kept pursuing coffee and eventually got into the roasting game, leading to his current gig at Propeller Coffee in Toronto. They make fabulous coffee and I recommend grabbing a bag. My favourite coffee I've had in the last little while!

My friend Tyler builds acoustic guitars with robots at Taylor. Consider buying an acoustic from Taylor because Tyler is so so great!

Two of my former colleagues at the gallery, Maddie and Katie, have a new show on at Y+ Contemporary in Scarborough. Good on them for this show! It even has a partner exhibition in friggin' Iceland! Go see this show to support good artists from Toronto. If you read this before the 14th, you can even go to the opening.

One of the best parts of my year for the last two years has been working at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival as a Head Volunteer. The team is super dedicated and hard-working and bring in such awesome programming for the weekend that I feel a little embarrassed by what I do in my job. Great stuff. Great welcoming atmosphere. A wide variety of perspectives and backgrounds represented. A vital queer voice in a realm that can be dominated by lame-os with a rolled up Image issue up their ass. The festival is friggin' free every year! Support it!

My other PIC from my Master's, Coni, is currently doing her PhD at Cornell in Post-Human Art History. She's a fucking research machine and clear and concise writer, but don't let her complicated and difficult theories distract you from the fact that she's a hilarious and warm person as well. She mops the floor with me in pretty much every facet of being an academic. I'm happy to see her do well!

My friends are sick. Love yours too.

Thursday, October 5, 2017

Let's Leave and Be Runaways Tonight

I decided to take a break from social media this week, mostly Twitter, because I felt like I was spending too much time on it and it was adversely affecting my mood (did my last post give you a hint?). A great side effect of this is that small thoughts I would have maybe turned into a tweet are now turning into a slightly bigger IMU post. This makes me think that social media breaks are an extremely good thing that I should do more, because it makes me write more and that's way better than wasting time reading things that I don't even find interesting.

I can't believe that humanity spends most of its time doing that now! It's actually really Mest up when you think about it!


I put on an old favourite, the album Good For Me by The Swellers, and it immediately took me back to the place I was at in my life while I was super into it in 2011. The album came at exactly the right time and hit me in exactly the right spot and I listened to it constantly in the summer of 2011. I even put it on my End of Year List that year. I had kind written the band off after not enjoying their previous effort, but then they blind-sided me with this mother fucker and I was in love all over again. It somehow walks the tightrope of mixing skate punk, pop-punk, and alt rock and then sticks the landing masterfully. The songs all go to exactly right place songwriting-wise and then all of a sudden you're on the last song before you even realize it. The band should be really proud of creating a super tight and interesting album.

Even though music is always the first place I turn, it's important to remember that when you feel crummy, revisiting an old friend like this can be comforting and exactly what you need.

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Hard to Believe

I have a day off of work today, which feels great after two long weeks of overtime at the gallery. Days off in the middle of the week always feel so much nicer and more relaxing than a regular weekend. It feels like you're conning the world because almost everyone else is stuck at work and running through their regular routine while you get to stay home and lay on the couch with the dog and watch and bunch of skateboarding videos on your TV.

Whenever I have a day off like this, I usually try to make it productive because work has turned free time into a precious commodity in my life and I find that I need to make the most of it or else I feel like shit and the apartment gets really dirty and I feel unfulfilled because I have written anything or played guitar and all of a sudden it's 5 PM and there's been a dull ringing in the back of my head telling me I'm disgusting and lazy.

I say this because this feeling is creeping up on me now after I somehow managed to lose my passport in my own apartment and can't do what I planned today, which was go to the office to renew it. It's a small defeat, but definitely the type of situation that eats away at you and turns into "a thing" while you're trying to deal with it. On top of that, any problem is always intensified when Service Canada has to get thrown into the mix, as they are gold medalists in making you wait in line and fill out forms that seem useless.

Any time that I have a day off, I usually try to make putting a post up on here a priority as well. I was half-assedly thinking of topics to write about and settled on some sort of comparison between the reggae album Two Sevens Clash by Culture and something else, but didn't write that idea down and ended forgetting it right away. I guess all I can say on it is that I listened to this album while I was doing the dishes.




I certainly do love me some reggae. Right after that Culture album I put on some Steel Pulse, who I think are the apex of the genre. It's funny to me how many white people my age rip on the genre because all that they know of it is Bob Marley's Legend and Sublime's singles. Why judge a whole genre on the watered-down singles you hear on Q107? That's dumb.

(Marley is good, but to be honest I think that The Wailers' early output and his album deep-cuts lap his singles in quality.)

Me writing some things on reggae here did drum up thoughts I've been ruminating on for a while. I'm sure that you are familiar with the concept of "Throwback Thursday", a fun trend on social media. Among my punk friends, it's popular to post pictures of yourself playing in an old band to point out how trends in punk music and fashion have changed in the last decade or so. For most of my friends, this means posting a picture of you playing in an old hardcore band.

I was then thinking that if I were to post a "#TBT" picture, it would probably be me playing in The Pragmatics and how most of my friends would think that my band was lame because they all hate ska. Fuck that. I know that defending my interest in ska is kind of my signature scent, but Jesus, it's only that way because of how much ska gets brought up to me.

I think about the effect that growing up in Toronto's ska scene and then moving into punk from there had on me a lot. I also think about how my experience differs from my friends who grew up in hardcore scenes. As much as hardcore music is really great and the scenes can accomplish great things, there's also so many super shitty parts to it.

The biggest is that almost every hardcore fan I met has an inherent sense of elitism and give off a vibe of "If you don't listen to 'X' band or were at 'X' show" then you suck, whether they mean to do that or not. There's a wild amount of posturing. On the flip side, I always felt welcomed at ska shows and found it to be an extremely inclusive community, not to mention that I saw far more bands featuring women and people of colour at ska shows, as opposed to hardcore shows which are white guy city.

I've grown really tired of elitism recently and really wish it a swift death. If you don't like something, just don't like and don't care about it and leave it. I'm sick of social media being a constant parade of people giving their hot takes and unpopular opinions just for the sake of stirring people' anger. Let's not build up pedestals by shitting on everyone else. Let's ignore the people who are focused what shirt to wear to the show instead of playing it. Celebrate the things your friends care about and champion the things they make.

With that said, I offer two throwbacks on a Tuesday:

The first is from a Pragmatics show at Sneaky Dee's. I had a lot of fun playing in this band and thought it was cool, challenging, and fulfilling to play bass in a mostly instrumental ska band. The show this photo was taken at was 19+, but they had to let me in as a 17-year-old because I was in the band. That felt cool.


The second is from when I saw the Suicide Machines play at Pouzza Fest in 2012. That's me in the Hawaiian shirt. When I was younger, a lot of people told me that "Everyone goes through a ska phase in high school." and that my interest in it would fade with age. I grew to love a lot of different music, to be sure, and definitely broadened my horizons, but my undying love for the music that first inspired when I was an impressionable teenager never died. The joke is on everyone else for doubting my convictions and I still love that band to this day.


Monday, October 2, 2017

Leave The Air Stuck with This Waiting to Be Born

This past weekend, my work co-produced a huge conference about the intersection of art and social justice. I worked on the project for more than a year, so it felt really good to see it finally come to life. It was also affirming (and a little harrowing) to see people from around the world come a give impassioned, left-wing talks about important issues that the world is facing.

Something I tried and ultimately failed to do was work some punk into the programming of the conference, which is something I almost always do when starting my planning. The day was divided into four sections; Land, Love, Labour, and Liberty; so when each section started I couldn't help but think about which four songs I would use to frame those four sections if I had my way. I'm sure you get where I'm going by now, so here you go:

Land



Love


Labour


Liberty